Speaker 1: We all love the perfect conditions, but if you wait
Speaker 1: for them, you will wait and wait and wait, and
Speaker 1: pretty soon it'll be over.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers
Speaker 2: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
Speaker 2: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
Speaker 2: think ring true. And yet for many of us, our
Speaker 2: thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 2: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 2: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 2: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 2: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
Speaker 2: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 2: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 2: the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 3: Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is
Speaker 3: Austin Kleon, a writer, artist, and speaker. Austin also speaks
Speaker 3: about creativity for organizations such as Pixar, Google, south By Southwest,
Speaker 3: and many more. He's the author of the well known
Speaker 3: books Steal Like an Artist and newspaper Blackout, amongst others,
Speaker 3: including the one we discuss here. Keep Going Ten Ways
Speaker 3: to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad.
Speaker 4: Hi Austin, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Hi, thanks for having me.
Speaker 4: It's a real pleasure to have you on. I've admired
Speaker 4: your work for a long time. But your latest book
Speaker 4: is called Keep Going, Ten Ways to Stay Creative in
Speaker 4: Good Times and Bad And we'll get to that in
Speaker 4: just a second, but we'll start like we always do,
Speaker 4: with the parable. In the parable, there is a grandfather
Speaker 4: talking with his grandson. He says, in life there are
Speaker 4: two wolves inside it of us that are always at battle.
Speaker 4: What is a good wolf which represents things like kindness
Speaker 4: and bravery and love, and the others a bad wolf,
Speaker 4: which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
Speaker 4: the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second.
Speaker 4: He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather,
Speaker 4: which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
Speaker 4: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 4: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 4: the work that you do.
Speaker 1: You know, it's very dualistic, which I like, And you know,
Speaker 1: we have bi camera minds, so it's kind of impossible
Speaker 1: not to think in dualities, but for me, I think
Speaker 1: the wolves both have their place for me. Well, what
Speaker 1: I try to do is I don't know that I
Speaker 1: starve the dark wolf so much as I sort of
Speaker 1: follow where I'm trying to take the metaphorum. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't know any wolves in my life, but you know,
Speaker 1: I think about the parable. I'm like, where does the
Speaker 1: wolf go at night? Where does he feed? Because well,
Speaker 1: that's kind of a funny parable because you don't really
Speaker 1: feed wolves. They're wild.
Speaker 4: Yes, it's so told as dogs before all.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it's interesting. So if we switch it to dogs,
Speaker 1: it's like dark dogs. You know, dogs track things and
Speaker 1: they run around. And one of the things I feel
Speaker 1: like I try to do is I try to feed
Speaker 1: my light wolf with things from the dark wolf, or
Speaker 1: I try to you know, I try to pay a
Speaker 1: lot of attention to the dark wolf because I think
Speaker 1: the dark wolf gives me information. So I'll put it
Speaker 1: in another if you want to use another metaphor. I
Speaker 1: think a lot about poison and nourishment. So there's a
Speaker 1: lot of poisonous things that I find in my life,
Speaker 1: you know, like something like jealousy. Let's just take jealousy.
Speaker 1: Jealousy is a very poisoning thing, but jealousy is a feeling,
Speaker 1: is also just information. So if you can kind of
Speaker 1: like hold your jealousy and kind of like look at
Speaker 1: it like an object and kind of spin it around
Speaker 1: figure out where it's coming from. Sometimes jealousy shows you
Speaker 1: something that you want or something that you're lacking, so
Speaker 1: then you can kind of think, Okay, well here's the poison,
Speaker 1: what's the nourishment. I'm someone who's driven a lot by
Speaker 1: disgust and anger. I get angry about the world and
Speaker 1: I get disgusted by things I see. But then I
Speaker 1: take that information I think, well, what would be the opposite,
Speaker 1: So what's the antidote to this poison or what's the nourishment?
Speaker 1: And then that's what I try to put in my work.
Speaker 1: And so when people say, you know, your books are
Speaker 1: so helpful or they're so upbeat, or that's what I'm
Speaker 1: going for. But I don't think people understand how dark
Speaker 1: the books begin, Like how all the books come from
Speaker 1: that dark wolf? Right, Yeah, how all the books come
Speaker 1: from the dark wolf? And then the other wolf is
Speaker 1: the one I send into the world to greet people. Well,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so it's I.
Speaker 1: Think that it's about really looking at the wolf, really
Speaker 1: listening to its growl, seeing where it goes when no
Speaker 1: one's looking, yep, yep, and then figuring out how to
Speaker 1: spin it. So that's where, like, you know, it's taken
Speaker 1: me years to figure this out. But a lot of
Speaker 1: my really good work has to come from a deep
Speaker 1: place of agitation. Like I like to think of my
Speaker 1: work as being fairly positive and nourishing for people, but
Speaker 1: it usually has its origins in something very kind of
Speaker 1: dark or ugly or painful.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Well, you say it early on in this book
Speaker 4: that you know you wrote this book because you needed
Speaker 4: to hear it. And my experience is that the people
Speaker 4: often who have the greatest wisdom to offer are the
Speaker 4: people who have earned that wisdom the hard way, usually
Speaker 4: because it's something that we've had to work through. I
Speaker 4: was talking with a coaching client about this earlier, and
Speaker 4: she was like, I just don't feel prepared to teach
Speaker 4: people of out mindfulness because I'm not totally at peace.
Speaker 4: And I was like, the fact that you are applying
Speaker 4: it to the situations this difficult is what's going to
Speaker 4: make you someday a great teacher because you're really practicing
Speaker 4: in real life with this stuff.
Speaker 1: Yes, And I would also say that the best teachers,
Speaker 1: and I'm plagiarizing a writer when I say this, you know,
Speaker 1: some of the best teachers are the ones that need
Speaker 1: to learn the lesson. Yeah, all of my books are
Speaker 1: really the result of me not knowing about something. You know.
Speaker 1: That's the other thing about my books that I think
Speaker 1: people sort of misunderstand is that, you know, the books
Speaker 1: come from me trying to figure something out, and then
Speaker 1: the books are the product of that process of trying
Speaker 1: to learn something. And then the books are really just
Speaker 1: me saying, hey, here's what I've learned. But then the
Speaker 1: other thing I think is really interesting is what you said.
Speaker 1: My mom used to be a guidance counselor, and she
Speaker 1: told me that every counselor she ever met really needed counseling.
Speaker 1: And so you know, we're we's wrong into things in
Speaker 1: our lives that you know, what we need we seek
Speaker 1: out and then we become the kind of pedlars or
Speaker 1: not pedlars, but you know, we dish out what we
Speaker 1: found or what we've looked for. You know, the dualism
Speaker 1: that you're talking about. One of the reasons I love
Speaker 1: this idea about the one you feed is we're in
Speaker 1: a time of a culture right now where you have
Speaker 1: to pick one side, where it's like, it's very like
Speaker 1: we're not really good as a culture right now with ambiguity.
Speaker 1: We're not very good with people who have one foot
Speaker 1: in and one foot out. So, for example, it's very
Speaker 1: hard for people to process the idea that an artist
Speaker 1: might able to make beautiful or useful things and not
Speaker 1: be very beautiful or useful in their everyday life, you know.
Speaker 1: And so we're having like this cultural moment where if
Speaker 1: we get information about the artists that contradicts the art,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, it's supposed to destroy the art.
Speaker 1: Whereas I've always been someone who, you know, the people
Speaker 1: I really looked up to when I was younger had
Speaker 1: came from really dark places, and you know, they were
Speaker 1: not perfect people in their everyday lives, and they did
Speaker 1: cause a lot of suffering maybe or chaos in their
Speaker 1: everyday life. The good thing about the culture now is
Speaker 1: that we don't celebrate that. We were getting away from
Speaker 1: that narrative that you have to be destructive in your
Speaker 1: personal life. In order to be creative in your work.
Speaker 1: But I also think there's a way that that can
Speaker 1: go too far, where we start dismissing the work of
Speaker 1: people that aren't perfect in their everyday lives. And so
Speaker 1: I think it's very tricky and it's a balance right now.
Speaker 1: And again, the reason I love the one you feed
Speaker 1: is that if you think about the culture and you
Speaker 1: think about you know, human civilization throughout time, it's usually
Speaker 1: just balancing back and forth between the forces. You know,
Speaker 1: it's just like things get caught out of whack and
Speaker 1: things swing back and forth, and it's really just the
Speaker 1: pendulum that's right. If you want to think of it
Speaker 1: the other way, it's like the big wheel that turns.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I love what you said there. I mean I
Speaker 4: think almost certainly, anytime we correct something, we almost always overcorrect.
Speaker 4: You know. It's almost inevitable that we swing way over
Speaker 4: to one side, we swing too far back over to
Speaker 4: the other. And then maybe there's a little bit of
Speaker 4: a balance in over timing exactly.
Speaker 1: It's like when you're driving. You know, they tell you
Speaker 1: when you're driving not to swerve too fast because in
Speaker 1: the swerve of it, you get the whiplash and you
Speaker 1: go too far over, you know. So it's like, I'm
Speaker 1: not advocating for any kind of like mushy, you know,
Speaker 1: wishy washy path, but it is interesting to watch these
Speaker 1: forces come in play. And the nice thing about staying alive,
Speaker 1: which I know you and I are.
Speaker 4: Both interested in, yeah, very much.
Speaker 1: The nice thing about staying live is you get to
Speaker 1: see those swings, and that's where the wisdom comes from.
Speaker 1: You know, you start seeing all the swings and you're
Speaker 1: even in your lifetime and you can see a way
Speaker 1: through it.
Speaker 4: It's one of the reasons that I most wish I
Speaker 4: could live to be like, you know, ten thousand years old,
Speaker 4: is just to see how it all goes. You know.
Speaker 4: When people ask that question of like, if you could
Speaker 4: sit down with anybody in history, who would it be,
Speaker 4: I'm always like, can I flip that and sit down
Speaker 4: with somebody ten thousand years from now to tell me
Speaker 4: what has happened the last ten thousand years, because I
Speaker 4: really want to know.
Speaker 1: I'm curious. I mean, like I always loved I think
Speaker 1: it's Seneca, one of those old, you know, thousand year
Speaker 1: old writers who said, you know, when you read old books,
Speaker 1: you get to annex their lifetimes. So that to me
Speaker 1: is always the value of reading, is that if you
Speaker 1: can go back far enough or read enough people, you
Speaker 1: sort of accumulate the ten thousand years. It's just on
Speaker 1: the other side of history. As much progress as we make,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm always shocked at how much life stays
Speaker 1: the same, you know, especially when you're reading about you know,
Speaker 1: people a couple thousand years ago. It's always amazing to
Speaker 1: me how it's still a lot of the same stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah, underline all of it, there is still the very
Speaker 4: basic human tendency to want to be happy and want
Speaker 4: to avoid what makes us unhappy, and to want to
Speaker 4: care for the things that we love and avoid the
Speaker 4: things that we don't love. And in some ways that
Speaker 4: core never really changes.
Speaker 1: Love and death it stayed true, you know, And I
Speaker 1: think that's why whenever I look into the future, I
Speaker 1: think a lot about the pandemic, and how the pandemic,
Speaker 1: rather than changing life, has felt to me a lot
Speaker 1: like it's turned everything up to eleven, you know, like
Speaker 1: they say in Spiral Town. It's just like everything gets
Speaker 1: turned up, you know, everything's just cranked up and amplified,
Speaker 1: and so some of the really good things are even
Speaker 1: better now, and then the badder, annoying things are even worse.
Speaker 1: I feel like the future to me looks a lot
Speaker 1: like the past. Just you know, I think that maybe
Speaker 1: just amplified. I don't know. I'm a long term pessimist
Speaker 1: short term optimist. I really feel like, you know, in
Speaker 1: the end, we're all doomed. But I'm very optimistic about
Speaker 1: the day, optimistic about what you can give with the
Speaker 1: time that's in front of you, that you can sort
Speaker 1: of manipulate.
Speaker 4: I might be a medium term something, but I don't
Speaker 4: know what. Anyway, let's move on to the book. There's
Speaker 4: a part early in it that you say everything got
Speaker 4: better for me when I made peace with the fact
Speaker 4: that it might not ever get easier. You were talking
Speaker 4: about creating art in that sense, but I think we
Speaker 4: can apply it to living. Why is it helpful? Why
Speaker 4: is it good when we make peace with that, when
Speaker 4: we stop waiting for things to get easier?
Speaker 1: You know, I think a lot of this came from
Speaker 1: being a parent, because when my kids were younger, I thought, God,
Speaker 1: if I could just get them out of diapers, yeah,
Speaker 1: then I could just get them walking, you know whatever.
Speaker 1: And suddenly I realized like, oh, it doesn't get better,
Speaker 1: it just changes. Everything changes, you know. And the minute
Speaker 1: I stopped worrying about when it was gonna get better,
Speaker 1: I just like sort of enjoyed the now. Most of
Speaker 1: the great philosophical texts sort of the you know, spiritual
Speaker 1: texts tell us that be here now, you know. But
Speaker 1: I think for art and creativity in particular, it just
Speaker 1: you just harness whatever skills you have, whatever materials. And
Speaker 1: it's very punk rock for me. It's very much like
Speaker 1: what's in front of you, what abilities you have, what
Speaker 1: techniques you have, what tools you have, use them right
Speaker 1: now in the here and now. And I will say
Speaker 1: that I've been extremely influenced recently by this book that
Speaker 1: I read. It's not very well known and it's out
Speaker 1: of print by this guy named Joseph Meeker, and he
Speaker 1: wrote this book called The Comedy of Survival. And Meeker
Speaker 1: studied two things. He studied literature and he studied ecology.
Speaker 1: And what Meeker sort of did is he talked about
Speaker 1: how much ecology mimics comedy, that if you think about
Speaker 1: animals and the natural world and plants and stuff, there's
Speaker 1: so much adaptation going on. There's so much improvisation that's
Speaker 1: going on that you know, nature almost resembles a comedy
Speaker 1: more than a tragedy. And what Meeker said is that
Speaker 1: Western civilization runs on tragedy, this idea that there's a
Speaker 1: great person, you know, like our dominant narratives are there's
Speaker 1: a great person and they have a vision and they
Speaker 1: mold the world into their vision yep, you know, and
Speaker 1: they change things. And of course, in a tragedy it
Speaker 1: all ends in blood, you know. I mean it's always
Speaker 1: there's always some tragic flaw, something that brings the person
Speaker 1: down in the end. And you know, in a comedy,
Speaker 1: it's usually about normal people that sort of they struggle,
Speaker 1: but they adapt and they stay flexible and they're improvisational
Speaker 1: and at the end there's a wedding or there's a celebration.
Speaker 1: You know, there's strength. And Meeker's point was just that
Speaker 1: if we're to survive as a culture, it's going to
Speaker 1: take a comedic perspective. It's going to take a kind
Speaker 1: of flexible, improvisational approach to life. It's funny because I
Speaker 1: read that book after I finished to Keep Going, Well,
Speaker 1: Keep Going, of course starts with another modern parable, which
Speaker 1: is Groundhog Day. The movie Bill Murray's in where he
Speaker 1: wakes up every day and relives the same day. And
Speaker 1: I thought it was really funny, how here's this book
Speaker 1: that's super influential on me, like two years after I
Speaker 1: read this other book, or a year or whenever. But
Speaker 1: I was already influenced by comedy. I just didn't have somebody, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of showing it to me. And so
Speaker 1: I think, you know, for me, it's just more about
Speaker 1: seeing myself as a comic character, as more of a
Speaker 1: not a Buster Keaton, but Charlie Chaplin, but yeah, more
Speaker 1: just like a guy who's doing what he can with
Speaker 1: what's in front of him, you know, and being flexible
Speaker 1: and not having too lofty you know, just being flexible
Speaker 1: and adaptive and learning. To me, that's just been like
Speaker 1: terrific powerful. And that's when you don't expect things to change.
Speaker 1: And that was Meeker's great point. It's like, if you
Speaker 1: don't expect the world to change, then you work with
Speaker 1: what's there. Yeah, And it doesn't mean that you're complacent.
Speaker 1: It just means that you work with what's in front
Speaker 1: of you and you try to make something out of that.
Speaker 1: You don't wait for the right conditions. This is what
Speaker 1: you've got. And I think that what I just said
Speaker 1: has really been I think the real message of my
Speaker 1: work I hope for readers is that, you know, we
Speaker 1: all love the perfect conditions, but if you wait for them,
Speaker 1: you will wait and wait and wait, and pretty soon
Speaker 1: it'll be over.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there are no perfect conditions. And you know, my
Speaker 4: son just last year graduated college, so I've.
Speaker 1: Been through on the whole other side.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but but I related with everything you said, and
Speaker 4: I got better like you. It going like, let me
Speaker 4: just try and enjoy this scenario and try not to
Speaker 4: worry too much about the next milestone. And looking back now,
Speaker 4: I'm like, well, the worry never totally goes away, or
Speaker 4: the care maybe that's the better word. You know, the
Speaker 4: care is obviously always there. I'm not too much of
Speaker 4: a worrier in general. We had Rain Wilson on the show,
Speaker 4: The Guy from Office, and yeah, he talked about something
Speaker 4: that I don't think he created this, but I love it.
Speaker 4: It's this if then thinking if this then, but in
Speaker 4: the negative sense, if I just had this, then I
Speaker 4: would do this. And you kind of talk about this
Speaker 4: at one point in the book. You know, we think
Speaker 4: if we had the perfect art studio and we ran
Speaker 4: around with the right crowd of people, and we had
Speaker 4: all these things, then we'd be able to be creative.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's like a computer programmer type logic on steroids
Speaker 1: type thing, if than statements. Yeah, that's literally how computers
Speaker 1: are on It's like if this condition should do this,
Speaker 1: and life just doesn't really like that, you know, it's
Speaker 1: not that linear. It's not programmed that way. Now, my
Speaker 1: wife says something beautiful that I love, and there's several
Speaker 1: pieces of fiction that kind of play with this idea.
Speaker 1: But she said, you know, just once in a while,
Speaker 1: I'd like to live my life out of order. You know,
Speaker 1: I'd like to live a day where they were babies,
Speaker 1: and then I'd like to live a day when they
Speaker 1: were in their thirties. Yes, you know, of course, you know,
Speaker 1: the whole meaning of life would deteriorate if you got
Speaker 1: to do that, you know, I mean, it's really the
Speaker 1: fact that you have to live it in order that provides.
Speaker 1: There's a great book about this. Actually, there's a book
Speaker 1: called Some by David Eagleman, and it's Tales of the Afterlife.
Speaker 1: He imagines all these different afterlives, and one of them
Speaker 1: is that you have to live your life in a
Speaker 1: different order. But it's like, Okay, here's nine years of
Speaker 1: you brushing your teeth, there's two years of you brushing
Speaker 1: your teeth, and then here's thirty days of you making love.
Speaker 1: You know, It's just like, what's beautiful about the story
Speaker 1: is it shows you. And this is the thing about parables,
Speaker 1: as you know, is it shows you the meaning in
Speaker 1: your everyday life. You're right, if I did live it
Speaker 1: that way, it wouldn't have the same meaning.
Speaker 4: I wanted to pause for a quick good Wolf reminder.
Speaker 4: This one's about a habit change and a mistake I
Speaker 4: see people making. And that's really that we don't think
Speaker 4: about these new habits that we want to add in
Speaker 4: the context of our entire life. Right, Habits don't happen
Speaker 4: in a vacuum. They have to fit in the life
Speaker 4: that we have. So when we just keep adding I
Speaker 4: should do this, I should do that, I should do this,
Speaker 4: we get discouraged because we haven't I really thought about
Speaker 4: what we're not going to do in order to make
Speaker 4: that happen. So it's really helpful for you to think
Speaker 4: about where is this going to fit and what in
Speaker 4: my life might I need to remove. If you want
Speaker 4: to step by step guide for how you can easily
Speaker 4: build new habits that feed your good Wolf, go to
Speaker 4: good Wolf dot me, slash change and join the free masterclass.
Speaker 4: There's such a common genre of writing, which is, you know,
Speaker 4: sort of letters to your younger self what I wish
Speaker 4: I could tell my younger self, because that's exactly it. It's
Speaker 4: the sense of like, well, I just sure wish at
Speaker 4: that age I could have the wisdom that I had then,
Speaker 4: but it simply doesn't work that way. You know. I
Speaker 4: do think there are ways to help people as we're
Speaker 4: younger to be wiser, but a certain amount of it
Speaker 4: is you've got to figure out your own life and
Speaker 4: it's going to have its own twists and turns, and
Speaker 4: that's part of the game.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So I went through this weird thing recently where
Speaker 1: my book Steal Like an Artist came out in twenty twelve,
Speaker 1: so it has its tenth anniversary next year. So we've
Speaker 1: been working on the tenth anniversary edition. It's going to
Speaker 1: be like a hardcover and I wrote a new afterword
Speaker 1: for it, and you know, I had to really reflect
Speaker 1: on you know the thing I wrote and afterward is
Speaker 1: more time has passed in between the me now and
Speaker 1: the me who wrote that book than the me who
Speaker 1: wrote that book and the person he was writing it for,
Speaker 1: because I was writing it for my nineteen year old self, Like, Oh,
Speaker 1: what I wish I had known when Yeah, I was
Speaker 1: the young age of nineteen, when I was like twenty
Speaker 1: seven or whatever it was when I wrote that book.
Speaker 1: But then there was this really interesting thing that happened.
Speaker 1: When I was rereading the book. I thought I couldn't
Speaker 1: write this now. And this is another thing people have
Speaker 1: a hard time believing if you're a writer, is that
Speaker 1: if you say that, you say I couldn't write this now.
Speaker 1: They said, what do you mean? You were you when
Speaker 1: you wrote this? And I'm like, but I'm not that
Speaker 1: guy anymore. You know, I'm not this person. And I
Speaker 1: love his energy. I don't know where he's getting it from.
Speaker 4: He didn't have kids.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I like his certainty. You know. I read the
Speaker 1: book like, yeah, this sounds great, you know, let me
Speaker 1: do this, but it's not me, like I couldn't do
Speaker 1: it again. You know something I always try to tell
Speaker 1: young writers in particular is you know they want wisdom,
Speaker 1: and I'm always like, you know, sometimes it's really the
Speaker 1: idiot or the fool, or the amateur or the beginner
Speaker 1: that really makes the leaps. You know, when you're younger,
Speaker 1: you should use your raw, nascent, gooey state to really
Speaker 1: play and figure things out, because you know, the amateur
Speaker 1: has just so many advantages over the professional really and
Speaker 1: the expert. You know, a lot of my work as
Speaker 1: a creative person is trying to get back to that
Speaker 1: fool state. Yeah, you know, especially in the self help genre,
Speaker 1: everyone's like, oh, mastery, you have to achieve mastery, like
Speaker 1: that's what you need to go after and everything. And
Speaker 1: as a creative person, you know, of course I'm trying
Speaker 1: to attempt mastery and like I'm trying to put a
Speaker 1: sentence together, I'm trying to get really good at the
Speaker 1: craft and things like that. But it's really being able
Speaker 1: to go back to that fool state, that beginner's mind
Speaker 1: where I don't know anything. That's where the really good
Speaker 1: ideas come from. And again this is very influenced by
Speaker 1: being a parent. I have this idea of the curious
Speaker 1: elder because I'm approaching forty and I'm starting to think
Speaker 1: about you know, middle age and how I'm gonna do
Speaker 1: this and the relationship I'm gonna have with my kids,
Speaker 1: and instead of thinking myself as like the wise elder,
Speaker 1: I think of myself as the curious elder. Yes, I'm
Speaker 1: very much like you showed me what you're into. You know,
Speaker 1: you're gonna get the model of how I live from
Speaker 1: just seeing me and what I do and everything. But
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be more.
Speaker 4: Interested in you, yes, than the beautiful.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm gonna be the curious elder, and you're
Speaker 1: going to show me things you're gonna teach me. And
Speaker 1: that's sort of been my mo you know, for a
Speaker 1: few years now with my kids. And I'm trying to
Speaker 1: like continuing, I'm like what you just said. But what
Speaker 1: I love is that you know, you can read all
Speaker 1: the books in the world you can. I love, you know, reading.
Speaker 1: That's what I've like staked my life on, you know,
Speaker 1: like books and reading and wisdom and stuff. But at
Speaker 1: the end of the day, you've got to live your life.
Speaker 1: The experience is really what's going to drill it into
Speaker 1: I love it, But for me, it's like professionally, the
Speaker 1: thing to do in my position is to be like,
Speaker 1: I know these things. I'm the expert, and today I'm
Speaker 1: going to teach you about creativity or you know, I'm
Speaker 1: going to sell you my whatever. And I really try
Speaker 1: to be honest with my audience that you know, I can.
Speaker 1: I can tell you what I know, which is I
Speaker 1: feel like a decent amount. But I would tell you
Speaker 1: that the things that are the most valuable to me
Speaker 1: are the things you have available to you right now,
Speaker 1: you know, like the things that are the most raw
Speaker 1: and pure and available you could get tomorrow, you know.
Speaker 1: And so that's part of the wisdom too, I suppose totally.
Speaker 4: I mean, so much of what you were saying in
Speaker 4: there reminded me of why I have been so drawn
Speaker 4: to Zen practice for big parts of my life, you know,
Speaker 4: that idea of beginner's mind, and the sense that not knowing.
Speaker 4: You know, there's a phrase from Zen not knowing is
Speaker 4: most intimate. It's the best state to have. And that
Speaker 4: same thing that you said there at the end, too,
Speaker 4: which is that every bit of our life is the path.
Speaker 4: There's a thing I repeat. I don't know what it is,
Speaker 4: whether it's the four body stop for vows, it doesn't matter,
Speaker 4: but I say it and it's Darmagates are countless. I
Speaker 4: vowed awaken to them. It basically means everything is a dharmagate,
Speaker 4: meaning a path to freedom, a path to insight, a
Speaker 4: path to awakening, every little thing. Yes, you know. One
Speaker 4: translation of it says I vowed to experience them, which
Speaker 4: is a beautiful idea that you know, Like you're saying,
Speaker 4: whether it's creativity or growing wise or whatever it is,
Speaker 4: we do have what we need here, I.
Speaker 1: Say in the book, it's like ordinary life plus extra attention. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's how you get the extraordinary. Yeah, everything that feels ordinary,
Speaker 1: if you can just pay the right attention to it,
Speaker 1: it becomes extraordinary. And that's what all the great texts
Speaker 1: teach us is that there's a different level of attention. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there are different vibrations, there are different visions that we
Speaker 1: can have just kind of have to poke beyond the
Speaker 1: surface of what's presented to you.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I loved that chapter of the book very much.
Speaker 4: It's called the ordinary plus extra attention equals the extraordinary,
Speaker 4: and I just think that's so great and it's so
Speaker 4: in line with in the Spiritual Habits program I do.
Speaker 4: We have a module it's called no Ordinary moments. That's
Speaker 4: the basic idea, Like, you know, the way you make
Speaker 4: a moment non ordinary is you pay closer and closer
Speaker 4: attention to it. And you and I both quote John
Speaker 4: I don't know if you say it terrant, I think
Speaker 4: it is you say attention is the most basic form
Speaker 4: of love that he wrote. And I've got another quote
Speaker 4: of his that I use, which is to learn to
Speaker 4: attend is a beginning. To learn to attend more and
Speaker 4: more deeply is the path itself.
Speaker 1: I love that, you know, attention is one of those
Speaker 1: things that the greats kind of get around to read
Speaker 1: a really great biography of William James, who of course
Speaker 1: said the famous you know, my experience is what I
Speaker 1: choose to attend to. Yeah, I just feel like, you know,
Speaker 1: the reason to read old books too, is that, you know,
Speaker 1: people think that there's some sort of like truth or
Speaker 1: progress that's like set in stone. And I'm always like
Speaker 1: fascinated when I realized just how much deep wisdom there
Speaker 1: is and in ancient stuff like for example, you know,
Speaker 1: in the old days, people thought that your eyes actually
Speaker 1: shot beams out, that the way that you saw things
Speaker 1: was that your eyes actually projected. It wasn't that light
Speaker 1: came and hit your eyes. It's that your eyes actually
Speaker 1: shone out into the universe, and yeah, like a spotlight.
Speaker 1: That's fascinating, and you know you think, oh haha, how funny.
Speaker 1: But I'm very interested in useful fictions, very interested in
Speaker 1: things that like, I guess this is kind of a
Speaker 1: pragmatic thing, but it's like, okay, what would be the
Speaker 1: behavioral result of that belief? And the result would be, well,
Speaker 1: you would feel that you had control over where you
Speaker 1: put your eyeballs, your eye beams, where you shoot your
Speaker 1: eye beams is in your control, right. You know, if
Speaker 1: you think about light just hitting your eyes and that's
Speaker 1: how you see, that's a very passive idea, it's scientifically true.
Speaker 1: But if you think about your eyeballs as something that
Speaker 1: shoot out beams and you know, you look around, then
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, it makes you active.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know.
Speaker 1: So I'm very interested in when it comes to ideas.
Speaker 1: And this is why metaphor is so beautiful and history
Speaker 1: so beautiful. It gives us these examples of images we
Speaker 1: can keep in our mind or stories we can keep
Speaker 1: in our minds that influence our behavior and how we're
Speaker 1: supposed to act.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I love that. What are some of your favorite
Speaker 4: ways for deepening attention?
Speaker 1: I like that. You know, I'm a writer and an
Speaker 1: artist and a musician, so a lot of the ways
Speaker 1: that I pay deeper attention are about just practicing my craft. So,
Speaker 1: for example, drawing. There's nothing easier in an artist tool
Speaker 1: belt than drawing. It's cheap, it's something you can practice
Speaker 1: with almost anything, and it's something you can do your
Speaker 1: whole life. And the minute you sort of really look
Speaker 1: at something to draw it, then you really see it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because you know, you think you know what a lamp
Speaker 1: looks like, but then really, when you're trying to trace
Speaker 1: it with your eyeballs, you know those ibeams again, you're like,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, this is much stranger and even more
Speaker 1: beautiful than I thought it was. You know, my friend
Speaker 1: Wendy McNaughton just gave a really good TED talk about drawing,
Speaker 1: and specifically she practices a kind of drawing that's blind
Speaker 1: contour portraits, where you draw without looking down at your paper,
Speaker 1: and she practices that a lot, and that's something that
Speaker 1: I do a lot too. It really becomes a looking activity.
Speaker 1: So there's that, and then, like it depends on what
Speaker 1: I want to pay deeper attention to. If there's a
Speaker 1: piece of writing that I really want to pick apart,
Speaker 1: I will copy it by hand, or I'll type it
Speaker 1: out and then I'll go line by line and circle
Speaker 1: it and look up words. You know, poems I was
Speaker 1: going to mention before. The poets are the people who
Speaker 1: are really good at taking ordinary life and making an extraordinary. Yes. Like,
Speaker 1: so if you don't read a lot of poetry, I
Speaker 1: recommend it, you know, just start like reading. Go to
Speaker 1: like poets dot org or some online poetry website. They
Speaker 1: all have like daily poems or like daily poem newsletters
Speaker 1: and stuff. People who don't read poetry, just you know,
Speaker 1: start reading poetry every day. Just take five minutes. And
Speaker 1: that's a different kind of that if you're just you know,
Speaker 1: if you're just going to work or doing your communing,
Speaker 1: so you're not paying that kind of attention that the
Speaker 1: poets do. So that's something close reading copying. I do
Speaker 1: that a lot. And if you think about drawing as
Speaker 1: a form of trying to copy, you know what's in
Speaker 1: front of you that's copying too. Most recently, I've been
Speaker 1: pulling in my piano back here. I have been blown
Speaker 1: away lately by how I can take a song that
Speaker 1: I've heard for twenty years, that I've listened to over
Speaker 1: and over again, and if I sit down and learn
Speaker 1: to play it on the piano, all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: it's a new song. Yeah, Like I know how it
Speaker 1: works in a way that I never knew before. Some
Speaker 1: more practical things, taking a walk, taking a daily walk
Speaker 1: as a way of paying attention to your neighborhood. Like
Speaker 1: if you drive somewhere all the time and then you
Speaker 1: walk it on foot, that is a revelation. If you
Speaker 1: walk away that you normally drive, and if you drive
Speaker 1: away you normally walk, you realize how much you're missing
Speaker 1: or not missing. And so I love taking a daily walk. Yeah,
Speaker 1: i'd say walking, Drawing, writing, Yeah, yeah, that's pretty much
Speaker 1: my ways of paying attention. I practiced meditation for a
Speaker 1: little bit, and I like the way I feel, But
Speaker 1: drawing and walking are very meditative for me, as is copying.
Speaker 1: I think the most important part of my practice is
Speaker 1: every morning, I keep a diary that's sort of like
Speaker 1: half sketch book, half writing notebook, and I just fell
Speaker 1: like three pages, you know, like the Julia Cameron Morning pages.
Speaker 1: I just do three pages in the morning, and I
Speaker 1: find that keeping a daily diary, if I do it right,
Speaker 1: And what I mean by wright is if you just
Speaker 1: hold a pen and kind of start moving it and
Speaker 1: let things come out. You aren't just like, oh what
Speaker 1: I do yesterday? I did this. One of my biggest
Speaker 1: teachers is a woman named Linda Barry, and she believes
Speaker 1: really powerful and this idea that you just kind of
Speaker 1: start making letters and things come. And She's taught me
Speaker 1: a lot about, you know, just kind of channel what
Speaker 1: you're trying to do with those morning pages or with
Speaker 1: your diaries. You're not trying to recount life as much
Speaker 1: as you're trying to like figure out what's actually going on.
Speaker 1: You know, not what went on, but what's actually going on.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know.
Speaker 1: And I find that that morning practice helps me pay
Speaker 1: attention to my own life. It helps me pay attention
Speaker 1: to what I've paid attention to too.
Speaker 5: Which is I think is really important.
Speaker 4: I'm an abysmal drawer. I mean, it's hard to like
Speaker 4: really look too closely at life when you're like, well,
Speaker 4: I've got a stick figure, but no, I sometimes try
Speaker 4: and look like an artist would look like where are
Speaker 4: the shadows, Where are the lines? Where are the shapes?
Speaker 4: Because it all of a sudden gets your mind to
Speaker 4: go from as you said earlier, sort of passively taking
Speaker 4: into sort of shining your light beams, you know, on
Speaker 4: something all of a sudden. I'm like, oh, because I
Speaker 4: think that's what artists are so good at doing, is saying,
Speaker 4: all right, off autopilot, study this thing. Another that is
Speaker 4: good is taking pictures.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: There's a great book out there called Zen Camera by
Speaker 4: this guy, and it's all about you know, photography is
Speaker 4: a contemplative practice, and it's the same thing. And when
Speaker 4: I'm sort of doing the practices in that book, it's like,
Speaker 4: as I'm out and about, my brain is engaging in
Speaker 4: a different way. I am paying closer attention. So I
Speaker 4: think art is so good for that.
Speaker 1: Well, you mentioned like how you try to look at
Speaker 1: the world like an artist might like seeing the shadows,
Speaker 1: And that's such a great point, is that. You know,
Speaker 1: my friend Rob Walker has a book called The Art
Speaker 1: of Noticing, and one of the exercises Rob suggests people
Speaker 1: practice is take a photo walk without a camera, So
Speaker 1: like you walk around and you look for good shots
Speaker 1: without actually having the camera there and then what happens. Well,
Speaker 1: of course you see a million things that you'd love
Speaker 1: to take a picture of it. That's only you had
Speaker 1: your camera. You know. It's funny when I carry a
Speaker 1: pocket notebook, I have more ideas. And I don't think
Speaker 1: it's because I have more ideas than I do when
Speaker 1: I'm not carrying the pocket notebook. It's just that, well,
Speaker 1: now that's not true. I think actually having this in
Speaker 1: my pocket sort of rubbing against my leg all day,
Speaker 1: the same way your phone you get that phantom weird
Speaker 1: thing from your phone being in your pocket. I think
Speaker 1: having this in my pocket all day just invites things.
Speaker 1: You know. Thoreau said that, you know, your diary was
Speaker 1: like a nest egg, and we think of nest eggs
Speaker 1: now it's like like saving up for the future. No,
Speaker 1: there's like a thing called a nest egg, which is
Speaker 1: it is a fake egg that you put in a
Speaker 1: nest to get a bird to lay another egg next
Speaker 1: to him.
Speaker 4: Huh.
Speaker 1: So he thought thoughts were nest eggs. If you write
Speaker 1: one thought down in a notebook, it'll invite other thoughts
Speaker 1: to come down. It's interesting how much when you read,
Speaker 1: because I love reading old books, so much. You have
Speaker 1: to really understand what they're talking about, you know, because
Speaker 1: nest eggs like who has a farmer or a chicken coop?
Speaker 1: I mean more people than they're used to, yes, some ways,
Speaker 1: but like what's a nest egg? You know? You know,
Speaker 1: So it's like stuff like that, And it's funny like
Speaker 1: some of my friends because I have a lot of
Speaker 1: artist friends and people who are drawers, and they talk
Speaker 1: all the time about how drawing is a different kind
Speaker 1: of attention than taking pictures. And I think it is
Speaker 1: a different kind of attention, but I don't think it's
Speaker 1: a better kind. I mean, it might be a slower
Speaker 1: or whatever, but I think there's something about taking pictures
Speaker 1: because I love to take a lot of pictures too.
Speaker 1: I think what's fun is to just have like an arsenal,
Speaker 1: just a tool belt, just all these different ways of
Speaker 1: paying attention. And if you can ask yourself what am
Speaker 1: I not getting? You know, like what am I deficient
Speaker 1: in right now? Or like it's kind of like when
Speaker 1: you're hungry, if you think about what sounds really good,
Speaker 1: it's usually that's what you need in your diet. You know.
Speaker 1: If you really kind of think about you're like oh, salads. Sure. Really,
Speaker 1: you know, like if you ask yourself, like spiritually or mentally,
Speaker 1: like what am I kind of missing here? Then you
Speaker 1: can kind of look at your tool belt and say, well,
Speaker 1: maybe I should do you know, maybe I should take
Speaker 1: a walk or something. With all that said is like
Speaker 1: so much of this stuff is subconscious. You know. You
Speaker 1: got to kind of train yourself and then you do
Speaker 1: a lot of it on an autopilot. It's not like I
Speaker 1: sit around in my office like, oh, I think I
Speaker 1: think it's walk time. It's like this doesn't really happen.
Speaker 4: Yep, yep. Somewhere in the book and remember which chapter,
Speaker 4: but you quote Kurt Vonneguet saying, you know, just write
Speaker 4: a poem and tear it up. And something in what
Speaker 4: you just said reminded me of that line.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And Vonnagat's daughter was really funny. She was kind
Speaker 1: of like, yeah, you first, Dad, you go first, you know,
Speaker 1: because she was kind of goofing on his ideas. And
Speaker 1: I use it because I do think it's true. If
Speaker 1: you could write a poem knowing that you were going
Speaker 1: to tear it up, that'd be great, except vonnag Gave
Speaker 1: would have torn up his poem that was what his
Speaker 1: daughter was joking about, which I love. But I do
Speaker 1: feel like if you can do things for the doing,
Speaker 1: it's so hard now because it's so easy to share things. Yes,
Speaker 1: And I think, you know, one of the problems that
Speaker 1: young writers and artists and creative people in general have
Speaker 1: is that they haven't really known. I mean, if you're
Speaker 1: under a certain age, you don't really know a world
Speaker 1: in which making and sharing were separate, you know, because
Speaker 1: now it's like, if you make something, you can take
Speaker 1: a picture of it putting on your Instagram immediately, and
Speaker 1: so you know, there's a kind of merging of making
Speaker 1: and sharing where it can get very heavy if you're
Speaker 1: trying to make while thinking about sharing. Yes, you know,
Speaker 1: there's something about you need to be in the making
Speaker 1: state and not thinking about the sharing state. Well, we've
Speaker 1: all been under surveillance so much, and self impose surveillance.
Speaker 1: I mean we all have, like so many people have
Speaker 1: Instagram accounts. And I wrote a book called Show Your Work,
Speaker 1: So it's not like I'm you know, I've contributed to
Speaker 1: this this idea that if you want people to know
Speaker 1: about your work, you have to show it to them.
Speaker 1: You have to share with them and in a regular frequency,
Speaker 1: in a certain way. But you can't really do a
Speaker 1: lot of really good, raw, new, scary, interesting creative work
Speaker 1: if you feel like you're under surveillance. And I think
Speaker 1: part of the problem with having an Instagram or a Twitter,
Speaker 1: or blog or newsletter, all these things that we have.
Speaker 1: There's such wonderful tools to build audience and connect with
Speaker 1: audience and get our stuff out there and run our
Speaker 1: lit you know, you kind of have to forget all
Speaker 1: that stuff or be able to tune that out in
Speaker 1: order to get to that raw kind of creative state.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 1: I am a completely amateur piano player. I have tried
Speaker 1: to do Instagram lives before as like just fun, just
Speaker 1: like I jump on Instagram Live and play some debuty
Speaker 1: just just as like a fun thing. And every time
Speaker 1: I do it, I can't believe how much worse I am,
Speaker 1: because I'm so like, yeah, told, you know, even though
Speaker 1: there's like forty people on there, all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh my god, you know, because I'm not
Speaker 1: a performer, and performance is a whole different thing than
Speaker 1: like writing in the studio or composing. Yes, you know,
Speaker 1: performance is a whole different thing, and so I think
Speaker 1: about that all the time. How it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: if you think all the time about if I'm drawing.
Speaker 5: I'm like, what's this going to look like on Instagram?
Speaker 1: You know, that's very limiting, But it's so easy to
Speaker 1: have happened to you, you know, So to try like
Speaker 1: get away from the surveillance mindset, to try to get away,
Speaker 1: to disconnect from the world so you can connect with
Speaker 1: your work. That's something that every creative person, and I
Speaker 1: would argue any human living today, yes, really needs to
Speaker 1: figure out, you know, how can you disconnect so you
Speaker 1: can connect with yourself?
Speaker 4: Agreed? I think that is so true, and I feel
Speaker 4: really fortunate that I don't know how long it's been
Speaker 4: now a decade maybe, yeah, maybe not quite that long
Speaker 4: ago that I sort of with music went you know what, like,
Speaker 4: nothing's gonna happen with this. This isn't going anywhere, and
Speaker 4: I'm just not going to care about it going anywhere.
Speaker 4: And it's easy to say that sounds like I just
Speaker 4: did it and it was over right. I'm talking about
Speaker 4: a process here, right, But when I re emerged on
Speaker 4: the other side of it, and I just played the
Speaker 4: guitar and you know, I don't even anymore very often
Speaker 4: even record like a good idea I have. You've got
Speaker 4: a chapter called Forget the Now and do the verb right.
Speaker 4: It's forgetting about being a guitar player and just playing
Speaker 4: the guitar. But it's turned that into a true source
Speaker 4: of solace and joy in my life because I really
Speaker 4: have no agenda on it except that, like, it's very satisfying.
Speaker 4: Now in our show, we do all the music break,
Speaker 4: so the music shows up in there. But I mean
Speaker 4: that is like the lowest form of like who cares?
Speaker 4: No one cares, you know, I mean, and most of
Speaker 4: what I playing guitar never does. But it's just nice
Speaker 4: to have something like that in life. And I loved
Speaker 4: something you said in your book. I've been talking a
Speaker 4: minute here, I'm gonna shut up and let you talk
Speaker 4: in a second. But you talked about making gifts. You know.
Speaker 4: You said, we're now trained to heat praise on our
Speaker 4: loved ones by using market terminology. The minute anybody shows
Speaker 4: any talent for anything, we suggest they turned into a profession.
Speaker 4: And boy, that really hit me as so true because
Speaker 4: when I let go of the guitar as something that
Speaker 4: might get me something it became a solace. But that's
Speaker 4: not the way we are oriented in today's world at all.
Speaker 4: We are all if you're good at something, do more
Speaker 4: of it and sell it.
Speaker 1: Anything worth doing is worth doing well or you know,
Speaker 1: or professionally or on stage. Yeah, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: this is something I learned too late. I think, you know,
Speaker 1: like I was lucky in that I sort of knew
Speaker 1: that the musician's life wasn't going to be for me.
Speaker 1: Like it's funny because I used to say, like I
Speaker 1: don't know, getting up in front of an audience every
Speaker 1: night and trying to bear you know, that sounds too hard,
Speaker 1: And now, of course, you know, like a big part
Speaker 1: of my job is like getting up on stage and
Speaker 1: talking to people. But for me, it was like I
Speaker 1: got lucky because I kind of like knew music wasn't
Speaker 1: going to be thinking. So it happened to me like
Speaker 1: that's suddenly became the hobby. And hobby has become such
Speaker 1: a pejorative term now, Oh it's just a hobby. He's
Speaker 1: just a hobbyist, you know, And at different points in
Speaker 1: time and in different cultures, I mean, hobbies are what
Speaker 1: make life kind of worth, you know, I mean, the
Speaker 1: English have a much different approach to hobbies. For example,
Speaker 1: there's a really wonderful essay by George Orwell that he
Speaker 1: wrote during the war, and he said that one of
Speaker 1: the reasons he felt that the English had resisted fascism
Speaker 1: was that they were very fond of personal hobbies, things
Speaker 1: like gardening or puttering around or tinkering. Orwell really thought
Speaker 1: that one of the reasons that the English people were
Speaker 1: good at resisting fascism was because they practiced hobbies. If
Speaker 1: you think about America right now, I mean everyone's trying
Speaker 1: to professionalize. Everything's a side hustle or you know whatever.
Speaker 1: And I particularly with creative people, it's like most of
Speaker 1: us have tried to turn our hobbies into professions. And
Speaker 1: so then it becomes very, very very important that you
Speaker 1: find another hobby, that you find something outside, whether it's
Speaker 1: gardening or you know, like whittling, I don't know, whatever,
Speaker 1: it is the thing that you can do for no reason. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you said something so beautiful. It's like, once I stopped
Speaker 1: looking at my guitar as something that could get me something,
Speaker 1: you know, get me something. Oh, that's it, really, you know,
Speaker 1: like that, that's it. Once you stop looking at the
Speaker 1: thing as something. They'll get you something, then something can happen, right, Like,
Speaker 1: then you can really make something happen. And I do, though,
Speaker 1: I think the way out of that market mentality is
Speaker 1: to make gifts. You know, like if you're a painter
Speaker 1: and you're really feeling I think like painting something for
Speaker 1: your mother or something, or you make something for a
Speaker 1: hero of yours who's been dead for two hundred years,
Speaker 1: or you know, just getting into that idea of the
Speaker 1: I'm going to make something for someone else and I
Speaker 1: don't expect anything in return. I'm gonna take the gifts
Speaker 1: they've been giving me and the'm going to you know,
Speaker 1: pass them on, because that's really what the gift is about.
Speaker 1: And there's a great book about that called The Gift
Speaker 1: by Lewis Hyde, where he talks about like all really
Speaker 1: great art has a gift element and that someone's brought
Speaker 1: to their gifts from the gifts of others and then
Speaker 1: they pass on that gift through their work. So if
Speaker 1: you can kind of like just pull yourself out of
Speaker 1: that market thing for a while long enough to get
Speaker 1: in touch with that gift again and to kind of
Speaker 1: grow it, then you can kind of like get back
Speaker 1: in the game, or you can just pull it out completely.
Speaker 1: You know, you can just say I'm not doing this
Speaker 1: for work anymore. I mean, if you have that luxury,
Speaker 1: you know, and there have been multiple artists throughout history
Speaker 1: who have said, no, I'm gonna work at the post
Speaker 1: office and write at night, or I'm gonna you know,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna become an insurance vice president of this insurance
Speaker 1: company and then I'm going to write these wild poems
Speaker 1: and you know, poets. It was very helpful to me
Speaker 1: as a young man to look up to so many
Speaker 1: poets because they all had day jobs.
Speaker 4: That's right, poets.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's never been any market in poetry, and so
Speaker 1: they've been able to kind of stay pure in a sense.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well I really related to that, not that creating
Speaker 4: a podcast is exactly a deep art, but it was
Speaker 4: my love. And you know, when it became something that
Speaker 4: went from something I just did because I loved doing
Speaker 4: it to something that pays the bills, there is a
Speaker 4: real change there, and I consistently have to sort of
Speaker 4: do what you're talking about, which is like, how do
Speaker 4: I get back to what started this? What was the
Speaker 4: fire that was here?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 4: You know, like it takes work to get back to
Speaker 4: that place.
Speaker 1: You know. I mean, I've been thinking a lot. My
Speaker 1: kids went back to school, and I've been thinking a
Speaker 1: lot about teachers and just how many teachers. I talked
Speaker 1: to a lot of teachers, and they all, you know,
Speaker 1: you have to be passionate to do that, because you
Speaker 1: are not going to get rewarded in a way that
Speaker 1: is commensarate with what you do. Especially in this economy.
Speaker 1: There are so many professions that that happens. You know,
Speaker 1: you're brought to it because you love something and then
Speaker 1: it becomes your bread winning and like, how do you
Speaker 1: get through that? That's a big part of the job
Speaker 1: in some ways, and very few of our jobs train
Speaker 1: us in that, you know, how to recover some of
Speaker 1: that joy, how to recover some of that early energy,
Speaker 1: some of that rawness. You know, you're obviously a musician.
Speaker 1: I'm a musician. So it's it's fun to think about
Speaker 1: how musicians do it. Mick Jagger jumping on stage at
Speaker 1: a bar. It's like a musician, you know, jamming. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Prince used to when he was on tour. You know,
Speaker 1: he'd just show up somewhere and play, you know, he'd
Speaker 1: do his big show at the arena, but then he'd
Speaker 1: show up somewhere, you know, do a set, and then
Speaker 1: leave immediately, you know, because he just wanted to play.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Can you imagine sitting in a bar and Prince
Speaker 4: walk in and climb up on stage and just blow
Speaker 4: the roof off the place. I mean, it would be unbelievab.
Speaker 4: Guy was so talented. I just think about, like, it
Speaker 4: would be mind melting to see that.
Speaker 1: My friend's name is Matt Thomas, and he was a
Speaker 1: Prince fan long before I was. And Matt saw him
Speaker 1: on his piano and a microphone tour, and I just
Speaker 1: think like, oh man, that's that's a that's a big
Speaker 1: regret of my life not going to see prints when
Speaker 1: he was when he was here on the planet. So yeah,
Speaker 1: but I mean, you know, it's finding those things in
Speaker 1: your life. How can you just practice? You know, it
Speaker 1: would be like if Lebron did a pickup game and
Speaker 1: a print or something, you know, whatever it was that,
Speaker 1: you know, you try to go back to that and
Speaker 1: to recapture that. I just think a lot about energy
Speaker 1: these days. Like one of the things I love about
Speaker 1: art and books is that I feel like the good stuff.
Speaker 1: It's embodied energy. There's some sort of energy that's been
Speaker 1: like locked in the piece the reader. Like with books,
Speaker 1: really good books have a kind of energy to them
Speaker 1: that is activated once the reader comes and opens it up.
Speaker 1: It's like the reader has to breathe life into it
Speaker 1: and then all of a sudden it like works again,
Speaker 1: and all that energy that the writer put into it,
Speaker 1: it'll be there forever. Yeah, Like when you pick up
Speaker 1: Moby Dick whatever we're dark crazy energy Melville channeled into that.
Speaker 1: Whoever picks up Moby Dick and opens the page like
Speaker 1: it's there for them. Yeah, And that I think is
Speaker 1: part of the magic of art, and it's what really
Speaker 1: sustains me in my rougher days is trying to find
Speaker 1: you know, I've got books around here where it's like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I need some of that. I need some of that
Speaker 1: Linda energy, you know, I need someone that the Row energy.
Speaker 1: I need some of the Hockney energy. You know. It's like,
Speaker 1: go to it and it's there for you.
Speaker 4: Yep. Well, I think that's a great place to wrap
Speaker 4: up with thinking about the energy that's embodied in great
Speaker 4: works of art. Austin, thank you so much for coming
Speaker 4: on the show. You and I are going to continue
Speaker 4: in the post show conversation, and what I really want
Speaker 4: to talk about is a chapter title called Demons Hate
Speaker 4: Fresh Air, which is such a such a great idea.
Speaker 4: We'll talk about that in the post show conversation. Listeners,
Speaker 4: if you'd like access to that, as well as a
Speaker 4: special episode I do each week called Teaching Song and
Speaker 4: a Poem, and all the other benefits of being in
Speaker 4: aer go to one you Feed dot net slash join Austin.
Speaker 4: Thanks so much for being here. We'll have links to
Speaker 4: all your work in our show notes. And I've really
Speaker 4: enjoyed this.
Speaker 1: Thank you, it was really fun.
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