Walks of Life

About Walks of Life

Conversations with fascinating people on the walk of life. www.sa.life (https://www.sa.life?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Russell Smith

Category

health & fitness · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

8 Oct 2024

Latest episode

30 Jul 2026

Latest episodes

18 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   30 Jul 2026

   Room to be Human

   Welcome to the Walks of Life podcast. This is Russell Smith, and today I’m thrilled to be joined by Michael Cirigliano II (https://substack.com/profile/10695207-michael-cirigliano-ii). Michael studied and trained for decades on the clarinet before embarking on a marketing and writing career. Today, he helps orchestras and other classical music creators reach new audiences (https://www.michaelwriteswords.com/). He also writes a beautiful newsletter called Shades of Blue (https://michaelwriteswords.substack.com/) about the stories behind, and power of, melancholy music. Michael’s approach and philosophy have a lot in common with what I write and talk about; slowness, solitude, internal peace, and seeking outward harmony, and discovering what Michael terms, the beautiful, more perfect world. When I receive Michael’s new missive every other week, I can’t wait to dive in. We enjoyed a wonderful conversation and I know you will enjoy it. You can listen to the podcast or read the transcript below. Thank you, Michael! Russell Smith: I want to talk for a few minutes about your introductory essay, where you announced Shades of Blue (https://michaelwriteswords.substack.com/p/why-im-starting-a-newsletter-devoted). It’s one of the most beautiful pieces of writing that I’ve ever read. It was thoughtful and, in its way, concise, and I want to ask a few questions about it. You wrote: “Growing up in the flat, unremarkable world of suburban Connecticut in the ’90s, classical music became my form of rebellion against the aggressive music my parents enjoyed. At any point in my childhood, you could hear Ozzy Osbourne’s wail on Black Sabbath’s Paranoid erupting from my father’s stereo on one end of our house, while the sweet sighs of Beethoven’s violin concerto wafted through the air outside my bedroom on the other.” I’m wondering: did you take anything positive, uplifting, memorable from the music your parents liked? Michael Cirigliano: Yeah, absolutely. The joke I like to make is that my first musical obsession as a child wasn’t Ludwig van Beethoven, but Eddie Van Halen. So it wasn’t like warring factions in the house. A lot of the music they listened to was definitely formative to me. I use the Black Sabbath example in my essay because it’s about as far as you can get from classical music. But to my parents’ credit, they also introduced me to David Bowie and Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, all of whom still stand among my favorite musical artists. What was really cool is I learned much later they were all inspired in some way by classical music — a full-circle moment. And of course, Bowie, Zeppelin, Floyd — they all wrote songs that live in that same world of melancholy and longing that felt like home as I discovered more and more classical music. “Let’s Dance,” “Stairway to Heaven” — they’re still incredible songs that move me profoundly today. But something happened as I got older. My ear, which is connected to my mind, which is connected to my heart, was increasingly craving the quieter, more intimate moments I had discovered in classical music. That’s where I started to hear the more aggressive music my parents listened to as too aggressive for me. Then, as a teenager, this music — especially the kind my father did not care for — became my act of rebellion. So it wasn’t that I was totally against the music they listened to. It was that I knew the music I listened to wasn’t very well liked, especially on my father’s side, and that became my point of rebellion. As my musical training progressed, I started playing the clarinet in fourth grade and began playing in more and more ensembles. I fell in love with the sound of a symphony orchestra, and that was the rabbit hole that led me to explore more and more classical music. It’s interesting, because people are often surprised how much music I listen to that’s outside the classical realm. I even published one of my melancholy mixtapes on Shades of Blue last summer that was the only one to feature no classical music whatsoever — my favorite songs by Radiohead, Jeff Buckley, Björk, and Lana Del Rey. It was pretty revelatory to certain readers, which is funny to me, because the forms those songwriters use are going to be much different from a Mahler symphony, but the emotional content is exactly the same. Anyone who profoundly loves Britpop or Brit rock — I wouldn’t be surprised if they also love Elgar or Vaughan Williams. But for some reason, when people hear someone is really obsessed with classical music, they think that’s it — that there’s this level of pretension, this difference between classical music and everything else. I don’t subscribe to that in any way, shape, or form. The way I connect to music comes down to emotional content, pure and simple, no matter the form. Smith: Did you attach to anything in that “flat, unremarkable world of suburban Connecticut in the ’90s”? What lessons about how you wanted to live came from that? Cirigliano: It’s so interesting — looking back on that essay, the words I used to describe it as flat and unremarkable, I could still picture that view outside my bedroom window as a kid. It’s not that there was anything bad about where I lived. We had an amazing school system with a great arts program. But I think why I wanted to point that out is: it’s easy to look out your bedroom window as a kid and believe that’s all there is — that the world is small, that the paths you could take are limited. On the street where I grew up, everybody worked a job, most of which they disliked. They had their half-acre or acre of land. They were married, had a family, two cars. Even as a kid, it seemed so prescriptive to me. But the arts — music was a great passion, but visual art too. I loved drawing and painting as a kid. The arts as a whole sphere could serve as a passport outside that bubble. They launch you into the wider world — not just geographically but historically. That’s what I love about classical music and painting especially. We’ve only had rock, rap, and metal music for sixty years or so. But classical music as we know it today has been around for four or five hundred years, so you get an incredible sense of how human creativity, how expression through music, has evolved over time. Every album I got, I would devour the liner notes. That was my first introduction to program notes, which I write today for the country’s biggest orchestras. But it was the stories in there that fascinated me and put the music into context. Learning all that, I realized there was so much I wanted to explore in the world. But I grew up working class. Money was always tight. My family didn’t take trips to Paris so I could walk in the footsteps of Ravel, or go to Vienna to walk in the footsteps of Beethoven or Brahms or Schubert. So until I became an adult and could make that kind of travel a reality, getting to know the world involved a lot of adventures of the imagination. I’ve always had a vivid imagination, and I think a lot of that came from having it fed and fueled by art and music as a small child. So to go from that one view outside my bedroom window to everything I’ve been able to explore, and all the places music has brought me — that’s the most remarkable thing to come out of growing up with an unremarkable view outside your window. Smith: Your first essay on your newsletter looked at Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. You called that essay a manifesto. Do you still stand behind it? Has your thinking evolved? If you rewrote it today, what would you add, cut, or keep the same? Cirigliano: I’m sure I’d find several unnecessary adverbs I could cut — that tends to be my style. But as far as the manifesto of it all, I still stand proudly behind it. I believe classical music has a huge marketing and PR problem, one that’s sadly perpetuated by the industry itself. The reason I even transitioned from being a performer in an orchestra to becoming a marketer for symphony orchestras and classical music presenters is because it drives me nuts how classical music is marketed — advocating for an art form purely because you call it important, or because it has a storied legacy. I feel that’s so misguided today, especially when music education isn’t as prevalent in schools, and classical music isn’t as prevalent in popular culture as it used to be. Leaning on historical legacy and importance is misguided, because nobody is attracted to exploring new art because it’s important. Advocating for an art form by telling someone about the transcendental experience they can have, how they can focus all their senses on the sound as it moves through them — I know firsthand, from the work I do, that this connects with a lot more people. Here’s the example that was one of my first sparks toward making this my platform as an arts marketer: if I came up to you, Russell, and said, “Are you interested in hearing Johannes Brahms’s First Symphony? It’s about forty-five minutes of music for a full orchestra, written in the late nineteenth century, and I think it’s really great” — you’d probably say no. Maybe you’d say yes because we’re friends. But if a stranger said, “Listen to this because it’s important,” you’d say no. Yes, it’s a famous piece, but what’s the incentive to spend forty-five minutes of our busy world on it? But if I said, “This music will make you feel like time stands still,” or “Watch it performed on YouTube — take in the sound of fifty or sixty string players playing as one, moving their bodies as one, phrasing as one. It’s going to remind you of the trust you can place in other people, the importance of friendship and collaboration” — or if I told you about the genesis of the piece, about Brahms himself. He was a super sensitive, super insecure artist, just like we all are, trying to make a name for himself in Vienna in the second half of the nineteenth century, in a very crowded field. Any German, Austrian, or Bohemian composer who wanted to make a name for himself had to go and find his way in Vienna. It took Brahms nearly twenty-five years to write that first symphony. He was so overwhelmed with anxiety about how the music would be received — worried everyone would compare it to Beethoven, who was the be-all, end-all of German music in Brahms’s lifetime. If you were going to write a first symphony, people expected it to be a continuation of Beethoven’s style. So Brahms wrote and wrote for years, then put most of the manuscript pages into a fire and burned them. He was notorious for burning his music. He wrote more, wasn’t happy with it as a first symphony, took the scraps he liked, and created a completely different piece from them. By the time he finally finished the score, it had been more than two decades. He was in his forties — talk about a late bloomer. It’s magnificent to behold. But you can hear that frustration, that anxiety, right at the beginning. There’s this roar of sound, this pulse throbbing in the drums. It doesn’t relent — it drives the beat forward, and the strings rise up in a melody that’s painstakingly rising note by note, while the woodwinds behind them play a falling melody, like a waterfall of tears. Are those tears of frustration? Relief? Joy? Pride? All of the above. That’s how you sell someone on listening to Brahms’s First Symphony for the first time. Who wouldn’t want to experience that kind of emotion, seeing themselves mirrored in it? That’s the kind of storytelling, the kind of marketing, the kind of experience people should know they could have when they devote time to music like this. Smith: That answer is exactly what I love about your newsletter. You talk about a piece, and I want to go listen to it right then. I wrote down in my notes as we were talking: “Listen to Brahms’s First Symphony right after this.” Cirigliano: I love it. Please follow up — send me an email after you listen. What moved you in that roar of sound at the opening? Smith: What, if anything, has changed or evolved about your approach to the newsletter in the three years since you began writing it? Cirigliano: It’s been wild that I’ve been at it for three years. It took me probably three years of cultivating confidence just to get it started, so the fact that there’s this body of work now is really incredible to me. From day one, I’ve considered writing this newsletter an act of service. I want to share music that could bring people relief, respite, a few minutes where they can shut out the world and turn inward — to connect with beautiful, moving, human expressions of joy and loss and love and ecstasy. Things we don’t make much time for anymore. Over the first year, I realized I could do that through a couple of different formats to meet readers where they are. I’m a content marketer by day, so I know not every reader reads the same way. I have full-length essays that go deep into one piece, and then things in between — the melancholy mixtapes, where there isn’t much storytelling. I’ll give a sentence or two to introduce the work, and people can take it on the go, listen without any commentary, or listen with it the first time and then make it their own. What’s changed most in my mindset is realizing this newsletter isn’t just an act of service for readers — it’s an act of service to myself. Writing about the music I want to write about, in the way I feel will connect with others, is a gift I don’t get in my day job. I’m hired by orchestras to write about the music they’re performing. Sometimes there’s great overlap and I get an assignment about a piece I love, or a piece I don’t know, and in researching it I realize it’s incredible. Other times the piece is just okay, and I try to find the human story that will excite people to listen. But sitting down with music of my choosing — some works I’ve known for decades. I just published my third-anniversary post, about Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony, which I’ve known since high school — thirty-two years now. Other times it’s a work I just discovered and can’t stop listening to, with an incredible story behind it. Writing this newsletter, I’ve never had more opportunity to follow my curiosity and make connections I wouldn’t otherwise have had space to consider. One of my favorite quotes, which relates to being a writer in charge of what you write, is from Marcus Aurelius: “The soul becomes dyed with the color of the mind’s thoughts.” Watch what you think, because your soul will become dyed with those thoughts. If you live your life from a place of anger, resentment, hostility, that will infect you. But if you choose to live from a place of calm and connection and inspiration, healing yourself and healing others, that will transform your soul too. Living in this world of melancholy music for three years now, especially with the cataclysmic ups and downs of the outside world, I know my soul has been dyed the most beautiful shade of blue from spending time with this music, and with everyone who engages in the comments, who writes to me. That’s probably the most profound shift — realizing I’m giving a gift to others and to myself through this creative venture. Smith: Michael, where is your line of demarcation between melancholy as insight and embodied experience versus melancholy as indulgence? Cirigliano: That’s such a great question, because I don’t consider embracing the melancholy aspects of life an indulgence at all. Maybe more people feel this way than I think, but I think certain people picture melancholy as Proust lying in bed for decades, sleeping all day and writing his epic at night, thinking only about tea and cookies. But that’s not truly engaging with the melancholy aspects of life. Our society today is out of touch with what humans need to flourish, to fully embody our place in the world. We make so little room for expressions of emotion — they’re even demonized. Nonsense like “boys don’t cry.” What is that supposed to mean? Even empathy has become a dirty word in certain corners of the world. I don’t consider it indulgence at all — I consider it an aspect of truly embracing our humanity and our place in the world. I love that you put it as melancholy as insight, because I think that is what melancholy offers us when we choose to explore and embrace it. It becomes a point of perspective from which to observe the world. That’s how we improve our lives — by observing the world, realizing our place in it, and realizing what we can do to make it a better, more loving, more beautiful place. We can only do that, we can only truly live the totality of our experience, if we realize that joy has to dance with sorrow, that life is precious because it’s fleeting, that love fuels the universe. I don’t think anyone who spends their days exploring that kind of perspective would ever harm someone or call someone a slur in public. Maybe it’s the budding Buddhist in me, but if you take the time to experience the profound beauty of the world, you will not want to harm it. In those terms, melancholy transcends discussions of aesthetics and mood and vibe — it becomes a philosophy to practice, to get better at moving through the world, to be less surprised by the sorrow and the challenges everyone will face. It teaches us to embody every aspect of our lived experience with grace and gratitude. I think we need so much more of that in this world. Smith: You talked about this earlier, but I want to hear an elaboration. Can other types of music take us on the same internal journey toward what you wrote as “the beautiful more perfect world”? I think a lot about jazz and blues, but can other music besides classical take us on these inward journeys? Cirigliano: Absolutely. First, I want to make sure that phrase — the beautiful, more perfect world — gets its proper credit. It’s actually a quote from Susan Cain (https://substack.com/profile/7341100-susan-cain), an incredible writer. She wrote a book about a decade ago called Quiet, on the power of introverts, and then, four or five years ago, a second book called Bittersweet, on how longing and sadness help us connect more with the world. That proved a catalyst for me writing Shades of Blue, because I’d been throwing around the idea of a newsletter about classical music but didn’t have my angle. Reading her book, I realized so much of the classical music I listen to lives in this world of melancholy, this bittersweetness — and when I sit down and listen to it, it transports me to that beautiful, more perfect world. So I want to make sure Susan Cain gets credit for that. But to answer your question — absolutely. I touched on it earlier with Radiohead, Portishead, Björk, Lana Del Rey. There are plenty of musicians outside the classical realm whose sense of the bittersweet resonates with me profoundly. I wish I were better versed in jazz or blues, honestly. A few artists hit that melancholy sweet spot for me — Chet Baker, Billy Strayhorn, Bill Evans. But I don’t know that much jazz or blues, and it’s interesting you bring it up, because when people come to me wanting to get into classical music and don’t know where to start, I respond to that so much, because jazz and blues is also this huge body of music and artists, and I don’t know where to start either. I hope at some point to find someone doing the Shades of Blue of jazz — someone bringing that kind of perspective to that music, because I know there’s a lot I’m missing out on. I see the same kind of overwhelm in trying to get into jazz and blues. That said, I think this sound world can live in every type of music, because again, it’s not the form, the structure, or the instruments — it’s the content. What’s the expression being made? One thing that gives me a deeper sense of why classical music speaks to people in this way is the time involved. You could meditate for five minutes and get some sense of calming clarity out of it. But if you meditate for thirty minutes twice a day, you’re digging deeper into that inner ocean of feeling. I feel the same way about music. I can listen to a five-minute song that immediately brings me into the emotional world I’m craving. But if I sit down with Mahler’s Third Symphony, which is eighty-five minutes, and find the focus and flow that comes with a work of longer duration, it gives me more time to dive deep into that emotional world and come out refreshed. Sometimes certain pieces change you on a cellular level. With the length of a lot of classical works, that pool of emotion you’re swimming in is there for longer, and it moves through you on a much deeper level. Smith: What are you listening to now? What’s on your playlist these days? Cirigliano: Definitely stuff for Shades of Blue. But I think what’s getting the most play on my Tidal account these days — I was obsessed with it when it came out about a year and a half ago, and I’ve recently become re-obsessed — is a recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations by the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson. The piece is one of the most miraculous things written for the keyboard, and every pianist who wants to make their name in recording has recorded it. But there’s something very specific about the way Ólafsson performs it — and a lot of his music. If you’ve read Shades of Blue for a while, you’ve seen his name and his performances come up several times. There’s something about the way he approaches the music that creates a state of mind that’s meditative and calm, where you’re just positioned to absorb what the music is doing as it moves through you. His technical abilities are incredible. The Goldberg Variations open with a simple little theme Bach called the aria, then thirty variations of different levels of complexity, speed, and emotion, and then the aria returns at the end. In terms of structure and technical prowess, it’s astounding. But two of the thirty variations are slow and melancholy, and those are the ones that fascinate me most. I’ll find time at some point to dive into them on Shades of Blue. These two movements are instances where it feels like time stands still — like there’s poetry being spoken through the piano, through the touch he brings to the keyboard, the range of colors he creates, the emotions coursing through him as he performs. It’s such poetry, and there’s not a single word to it. This was an assignment Bach received. The legend goes he composed it for a keyboard player employed by a count who had insomnia — the count wanted music to listen to as he tried to fall asleep. So it’s eighty or ninety minutes, mostly in the same key, all these variations, so the mind can keep following what’s going on but also essentially tune out at any moment, because it’s all one idea being thrown through. The most uninspiring of commissions, and yet fascinating to think there was a time when rich people commissioned music to fall asleep to. Ólafsson finds some way to transcend all of that and just provide poetry for us to experience. That’s what’s filling my ears these days. Smith: I can just picture this count trying to fall asleep in bed with people actually playing the instruments in his bedroom. Cirigliano: Exactly. And it’s interesting — the two slow variations, one is about halfway through, one about two-thirds of the way through. I think it might be the golden mean position. I like to think those slow sections were put in to make sure the count fell asleep, and maybe the pianist could call it quits a little earlier than usual — picturing him peeking over: “Is he asleep? Is he asleep?” Smith: Do you like to listen to music alone or with others? Or does it depend? Cirigliano: It definitely depends. For sitting and discovering music, for researching, for sitting with the music I’m going to write about, I like to be alone, especially since listening to music can be a form of meditation for me. I practice transcendental meditation twice a day, but if I can find twenty or thirty minutes to sit with one work and really dive into it, feel the music moving through my body, note how my mind and my heart are responding — there’s such power in listening alone. But there’s an equal power in listening with others. I love sharing music. Part of the fun of going to a music conservatory is that all your friends are as into music as you are, and the body of classical music is so large you can spend lifetimes exploring it and not know everything. Especially at eighteen, nineteen, twenty, when someone says, “I just heard this for the first time, you’ve got to listen to it,” and you’re sitting across from someone with a huge smile on their face pointing out, “Isn’t this part great?” — there’s nothing quite like that spark of excitement when people share music that’s meaningful to them. If it were a more analog world, I’d love nothing more than to start a Shades of Blue listening club, where we all got together, everybody brought one work, about five minutes of music they love, and told us why they connect to it — does it bring back a memory, a certain experience? I can’t think of anything more inspiring than hearing about other people’s experience with music. Just like I want the way I connect with music to be a portal into other people’s experience, I crave that from others too. That’s the entry point. So if we were back in the days of record clubs, I’d absolutely want to do that. It could be just as great to listen alone as in a group, depending on how you want to experience it. Smith: I want to ask you a few questions about your career. What did playing the clarinet for twenty-three years, many of them professionally, teach you about life? I never played music professionally, so I don’t have that reference point. Cirigliano: That’s a great question. As I mentioned earlier, I think the first thing is that music serves as a passport for discovering the world — but that’s true of the arts in general. In terms of playing the clarinet specifically, it was my first entry point into honing a discipline, honing my focus, in a way that not many other experiences can do. Of course, you could get that from sports, from woodworking, from writing. But what I learned most from playing clarinet, specifically from playing in orchestras: the clarinets sit relatively in the center of an orchestra. The cellos are to my right, the drums and horns behind me, the bassoons and violas to the left. Being at the center of the sound of an orchestra is absolutely electric. But being at the center of a group of eighty or ninety people working together gave me an incredible perspective on all the different parts of an orchestra at work. I learned to interpret body language — the woodwinds are guided by the principal flute, whose voice sits at the top of the section. When the whole section needs to enter together, the flute guides everyone in with a shoulder gesture or a lean. It’s a subtle visual cue — not trying to be the conductor, since we still have a conductor on stage, but giving a cue: let’s all do this together. You learn the art of negotiation like very few other experiences can teach you. There are so many people on stage, so of course there are disagreements on matters of style — how long should this note be held, how hard should you attack a note that has an accent, should it be a ping or a thwap. Every one of those matters, even in a forty-five-minute piece where you’re discussing how to attack one note. Every one needs resolution — if not agreement, then at least everyone coming to a point of, “okay, that’s okay with me.” You can’t go it alone in an orchestra. For an orchestra to excel, there has to be an impenetrable sense of harmony created by every part working together. I think there’s a lot of society at large, and governmental bodies in particular, could learn from how an orchestra works. Smith: Did playing the clarinet and working in an orchestra make you a better marketer or a better writer? Cirigliano: As a marketer, I think in terms of the deep knowledge I have of these works — I’m very rarely approaching a piece I’m marketing for the first time, so I already know the story behind it. A big part of my job for part of the year is copywriting the program descriptions for an orchestra season — twenty performances, each with three or four pieces. It’s not just what am I writing about each work, but what’s the thread that unites them, what’s going to make people say, “That’s a mix of ideas and emotions I’d really want to enjoy — that sounds fascinating.” But I think being submerged in music has made me a much better writer than I probably would have been otherwise, because rhythm and melody are the connective tissue between music and speech, or writing. Spending so much of my life playing clarinet, focusing on rhythm, on how rhythm moves a piece along, on melody and the pace a line unfolds — does it blossom slowly, does it drive right through to a pivotal note you’re not expecting, what’s the harmony blossoming underneath — gave me a sense, in writer’s terms, of sentence structure, word choice, essay structure. Being able to think about how my writing hits the reader in terms of melody and rhythm helps me every day. So many stylistic ideas around pacing, cadence, and flow that a writer spends a career thinking about relate directly to rhythm and melody. One of my favorite compliments is when a reader writes and says, “Your writing is so musical,” or, “The structure of this essay felt like moving through a four-part symphony.” Compliments like that always make me smile, because I know the only reason I can make that work is that I devoted the first two decades of my life to performing and studying music. Even though I don’t perform anymore, I’m still thinking constantly about rhythm and line and harmony, and imparting those ideas to others through words. Smith: You’ve written about getting burned out as a professional musician. What was the actual breaking point that moved you from performing into making a shift? Was that burnout specific to the music industry, or have you worried about burnout as a marketer and writer too? Those are both high-performance careers under a lot of external pressure. Cirigliano: Very honestly, I think about burnout every single day. The PTSD of a former life as a performer is very real, and there’s enormous pressure as a writer too, a lot of it self-inflicted. But the difference between the burnout I faced as a performer and what I sometimes feel as a writer is that with writing, I choose how I move through the work, the pacing of it. Depending on my energy level, on how good a night’s sleep I had, I choose which threads of research to follow — is today a research day, a writing day, an editing day. Those trigger different parts of the brain. Because I worked as an editor before becoming a writer, editing has a lot less pressure for me. Once I get past the first draft and the top-down rewrite that follows, the copyediting stage is where I have fun — clarifying every image, finding better words, stronger verbs. Being able to pick and choose how I do my work each day as a writer makes the pressure so much easier to navigate, because you don’t get that in the music world. When you’re in rehearsal, especially as an orchestral player, you have to be one hundred percent on. You could have five hours of rehearsal in a day — usually, with union rules, two and a half hours in the morning, an hour break, then two and a half more. If you’re not feeling well, if your dog was sick all night, you still have to show up and do your part. Same with performances. I get a little misty-eyed thinking about not performing anymore — being part of that roar at the opening of Brahms’s First. But then I think about all the nights where it was the last movement of the last piece on a concert, and there’s a big solo you have to nail, and it could be ten o’clock at night, but you have to nail it. No other choice. If you’ve prepared well enough, you’ll have the muscle memory — you’ve played it hundreds of times, rehearsed it with the orchestra for a week, and you trust your instincts to get through it. But it’s still ten at night, and once I hit my early thirties, my body and mind told me I couldn’t keep performing until ten or ten-thirty at night. As a freelance musician, you might be playing with an orchestra two hours from home — you pack up your instrument, get in the car at eleven, might not be home until one-thirty. That fast-tracked my burnout, because classical musicians are as much athletes as they are artists, and in some ways as much nightlife entertainers — the same way a DJ is working at ten-thirty at night, or a drag queen is getting into her wig to start a show at ten-thirty. A classical musician could be on stage that late, and that’s just not how I work. So even though there’s more self-inflicted pressure as a writer, you learn to work through those challenges and respect your body and mind in a way you just don’t get as a musician. Smith: Your marketing headlines read — let me quote — “Copy that demystifies classical music and inspires a lifetime of engagement,” and, “Grow your fan base with friendly, human-centered storytelling that makes classical music relevant and enjoyable as part of people’s lives.” I love every word of this. Tell us more about your work today — what you do, and who you do it for. Cirigliano: Thanks — as a copywriter, I appreciate that the headline and subhead get a reader excited. When I stopped performing, I got into the editorial world, and the visual arts world was the first to snatch me up. I worked as a writer and editor for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for several years, then the Whitney. Then I realized what I was doing there, I could be doing for classical music — I missed the musical part of my life. For about six years now I’ve been working as a freelance arts marketer, specifically with classical music presenters — orchestras most of all, but also chamber music presenters and recital series, so a wide range of ensembles and music. It’s interesting moving between writing about an orchestral program and a piano recital, because those come together in very different ways. My work falls into two categories. The first is marketing copywriting — everything from season brochures to program descriptions, email marketing, the newsletter space that’s become my forte, and more conversion-based things like digital ads and out-of-home campaigns. The second is longer-form storytelling — program notes. Anytime you go to an orchestral or classical concert, you get a program book with short essays about each work, giving you a sense of who the composer was and what to expect. Both excite me, but I especially love the longer-form storytelling, because I feel program notes are usually abysmal. You’ll open a program book and read, “Beethoven was born in 1770, his father was this, his mother was this, he had two siblings, and at eighteen he moved from Bonn to Vienna, and then he did this.” By paragraph five, before you even get to the piece you’re about to hear, I’m checked out — and if I’m checked out, with a lifetime of interest in this, most people are too. My whole idea is to plunge people right into what was going on when the composer was writing that piece. Take Brahms’s First Symphony — no one cares where he was born, what his father did for work, how many times he moved as a child. What matters is the heat of the moment of composing. What was going on in the composer’s world, and in the world outside his door, as he was writing this? People love Beethoven’s “Emperor Concerto” — magnificent, grand melodies, lots of fanfare. Beethoven wrote it after his hearing loss had started, which is miraculous enough on its own — that’s the point you should open with. But he was also writing most of it holed up in his brother’s basement, because the Napoleonic Wars were happening outside in the streets of Vienna. He was downstairs with a pillow over each ear, trying to protect his hearing, and writing this work. As a human, are you going to feel more inspired by a greater sense of resilience and creativity and the indomitable human spirit hearing that story, or hearing that his father got drunk a lot and made him practice piano as a child? I feel very blessed to do this work. As a child, getting those records and reading the liner notes was so formative to my exploration of music, so to be writing program notes for the Cleveland Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Oregon Symphony — some of the biggest orchestras in the country — and to have fifteen hundred people a night pick up one of those programs, read the essay, and hopefully get inspired, is an absolute blessing. It goes to show your life can take very circuitous routes and still bring you to the thing you dreamed of doing as a child. The ups and downs of a freelance life are very challenging — it’s not for the faint of heart. But building your own business as a writer, in a world where writers are getting less and less value and respect, makes it a lot easier to go through the work knowing that the work is meaningful and important. Smith: I have just a few final questions, and they relate to why I reached out to interview you — I see a lot of confluence between your work and mine, your newsletter and my newsletter, the themes we talk about. Earlier, when you talked about Brahms’s First Symphony taking twenty-five years, that resonated with me about slowness in life, about taking the time things take. There are people who strike gold the first time out, but many more of us take apprenticeship, effort after effort, to do something worthy of note in the world. Do you agree with that? Do you think our two approaches — melancholy music and walking — converge? Where do they converge, and where do they part ways? And do you personally walk as part of your meditative or creative process? Cirigliano: Walking is very important to me. I remember when we first met a couple of years ago, being so excited that someone was writing a newsletter from that perspective — how we become better people, better creatives, cultivate more creativity through walking. It’s the simplest, most human thing we can do. I’m very lucky to live in a walkable city. I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the walks I take around my neighborhood remind me how lucky I am to live there. They help me cultivate a sense of calm, but also make me realize the abundance around me — especially this time of year, when everyone’s gardens are blooming and these mighty trees, some of which have surely been standing for centuries, form these beautiful canopies over the streets. About a fifteen-minute walk from me is Lake Harriet, one of the chain of lakes Minneapolis is famous for. It’s a wonderful way to get out of my head and into the larger world. Like so many writers and composers — Beethoven, Mahler — I know they wrote about going on walks in the country to think through their music, though I don’t actively use walks that way myself. If I go out purposefully to work something out, that puts pressure on me, because then the whole point of the walk is to figure it out. Instead, I just go for a walk and let my mind empty out. I don’t stay attached to any thoughts — I let the subconscious do the work. The biggest revelation I’ve had as a writer is learning to let go and let the subconscious do the work when it’s necessary, and there’s no greater mechanism I’ve found for that, other than meditation, than walking. I love walking on my own, but nothing makes me happier than taking long walks with my husband, or going on a hike. It’s fundamental to me. In fact, we’re having a huge heat wave in Minnesota right now, and nothing makes me sadder than it being too hot for my afternoon walk — I need it, but I can’t deal with a hundred, hundred-and-five-degree heat index and still feel like a creative person afterward. As for where walking and melancholy music converge — I think it’s as simple as this: both invite us to look inward and outward. They call us to observe the world around us, to move through each day knowing we’re part of a larger tapestry. Walking does that externally — seeing everything growing around you, seeing the bees on the flowers. We’re of no more or less value than that bee. Music does it internally — it invites you to realize that emotions a composer felt three or four hundred years ago resonate within our bodies the same way today. They’re invitations to dig deeper into those feelings, that experience of life, and they let us slough off the anger and the rage and the division we encounter in politics, online, and so much of the larger world. It’s really impossible to feel stressed or overwhelmed when you’re in the good flow of a walk — when you realize you meant to turn right five blocks ago but were so enraptured in your thoughts, or in the trees you were admiring. The same is true of music. To take a walk, to sit down and listen to a beautiful piece of melancholy music — it’s a choice. A choice to choose calm over rage. A choice not to let anxiety or despair fester, but to alleviate it, to find a release for it. There’s so much scientific evidence, so much literature, on the physical and mental benefits of both. But I think the most important thing is that musical experience and walking return us to our humanity. I don’t think anything could be more important in a world that’s spiraling out of control. We crave meaningful experiences, beauty, connection — they’re the only way we can truly flourish. Every time we choose a route to walk, or a piece of music to listen to, we’re giving ourselves the chance to experience beauty and connection. We give ourselves room to be human. And when time seems to be collapsing, when life seems to be getting faster and faster, I don’t think there’s any greater gift we can give ourselves than the room to be human. Smith: Michael, I have totally loved this conversation. I’ve learned so much, I’ve had so much fun talking with you. Let me get you out of here on this last question. Besides reading Shades of Blue, which I think everyone listening should — what’s one thing you’d recommend to people who want to, or are open to, learning more about classical music, listening to it, making it part of their lives? Cirigliano: If you don’t know whether it’s for you, or if you’ve self-selected out of classical music, the first thing to do is go experience a concert live. We all listen to a lot of music through earbuds — you get a sense of the music moving through you. But if you can attend an orchestral concert, spend an hour and a half or two hours watching seventy or eighty people create music in unison, thinking and moving as one — if you can sit through that and see the couple next to you hold hands during a tender moment in a slow movement, or see me start crying at a certain point and still think, “This isn’t for me” — well, that’s the only real way to find out it’s not for you. And then I might ask you to sit down and spend more time with your emotions. The first thing to do is go see music performed live, because not only do you get the full, supercharged experience of being in a space where everyone’s energy and focus creates this almost religious, transcendental experience — everyone focused, the music moving through everyone — you understand how visceral that can be. Then it’s just a matter of finding the music that’s right for you, that speaks to you. The great thing about classical music is there are about five hundred years of it. You’re going to find works that speak to you — works I may never have heard myself — and you’re going to be excited to share them with others. There’s nothing I love seeing more than scrolling through the comments on an orchestra’s Instagram post and seeing someone write, “I loved the experience so much, I’m going back next month and bringing a friend.” You want to share that experience with the people you respect and love and care for. Sharing music is a message of love. We all deserve things in our lives that rev us up, that make us excited to be part of the world. Go experience that with fifteen hundred other people in an auditorium, and you’ll be surprised at the change that takes place in you, and how much it inspires you to realize, “I could be experiencing this all the time. Sign me up.” Then reach for Shades of Blue to figure out where to start. If you want to channel the absolute power of a large orchestra, I’d give you a whole different set of recommendations. If you heard a Shostakovich symphony he wrote during World War II, while bombs were flying outside, that power, that aggression — you’ve got a whole world of music to explore. And if you want the melancholy, sentimental, sweet side of it, that’s when you come to Shades of Blue. But either way, you’re going to find something that resonates with you. Smith: I love it, Michael. I loved our conversation. Thank you so much for joining me — I’m very grateful for your time. Cirigliano: Absolutely. Thank you for having me, Russell. If this post was worth your time, two things help most: leaving a comment or forwarding it to one person. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sa.life (https://www.sa.life?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   28 May 2026

   Sarah Landenwich's The Fire Concerto -- Out in Paperback Next Week

   Last year, I interviewed my friend Sarah Landenwich about her newly-published novel, The Fire Concerto (https://amzn.to/4uuEZPZ). She and I enjoyed a lovely conversation about the novel, her writing process, researching Polish history, her next book, and much more. Next week, on Tuesday, June 2nd, the paperback edition of The Fire Concerto (https://amzn.to/4uuEZPZ) becomes available. I've already ordered by copy. To celebrate this moment, I'm re-releasing the podcast interview with Sarah. Below, I share my review of the book, along with some further reflections. Episode links are at the bottom. I hope you enjoy the discussion. Definitely check out Sarah's gorgeous, touching debut novel — in hardcover (https://www.tatteredcover.com/products/9781454956822), e-book (https://amzn.to/3Rv4lik), audiobook (https://amzn.to/3PsU4m6), and soon in paperback (https://amzn.to/4uuEZPZ)! In fact, here's what I wrote about it (https://www.sa.life/p/what-i-read-q2-2025) a few weeks ago: “This will go down as one of my very favorite books this year. I stayed up past 1:00am three nights in a row to finish the book. And let me say, I am no night owl.”The story, masterfully crafted by debut novelist Sarah Landenwich (https://sarahlandenwich.com/), kept me seeking more and my heart racing. What will happen next? And next? And next? “My wife, also powerfully drawn into the story, sprinted through it too. “The novel is about music, mastery, loss and renewal. Mostly, to me, it sang about love. Can we love who we were, and no longer are, and never will be again? And can we love who we are and who we might become? Can we reach out to something — or someone — to walk that tense tightrope, the weaving of past, present and future, with us? Can we love what we find inside of us, and also open our eyes in love to what we discover outside ourselves? “Beyond beautiful, I cannot recommend it highly enough!” After our conversation, a few thoughts kept returning to me: * In the episode, Sarah tells the story of her long journey to getting the book published. It was arduous, but Sarah used it to good effect, learning and improving the steps she was taking. I admire her persistence. It may seem like a simple point, but in the moment, keepin’ on keepin’ on does not always appear as the obvious or correct choice. * I love her sticking to her guns about where she saw her novel fitting in the market. She believed it had a broader appeal than upscale fem lit. She sought to work with an agent who also viewed it more expansively. And I agree — it is a book for a broad audience. Again, Sarah showed remarkable persistence. * In her writing, Sarah uses tools that work for her — a legal pad and pen. I did not take her point as "analog tools are better than digital ones for everyone." I took it as analog works for her — and the lesson is to experiment in finding the right tools that work for you in your specific workflow, with your unique proclivities. * We discuss some forgotten female composers and musicians, such as Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska. (Also read Sarah’s essay about some of them, “What If Your Biography Was Just a Footnote to Somebody Else’s? (https://crimereads.com/what-if-your-biography-was-just-a-footnote-to-somebody-elses/)”) Like Sarah, I found it sad that so many stunningly talented female artists have been lost or nearly faded from history. I also took away another consideration — how beautiful that someone cares about them and their work — enough to write a beautiful story based on them — centuries later! I can’t speaking highly enough about Sarah’s book and this conversation was a total blast for me! Enjoy! Episode Links * The Fire Concerto (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-fire-concerto-sarah-landenwich/1146576142?ean=9781454956822) * Sarah Landenwich’s website (https://sarahlandenwich.com/about/) * Other media coverage (https://sarahlandenwich.com/media/) of The Fire Concerto * A playlist of music (https://sarahlandenwich.com/listen/) that helped inspire The Fire Concerto Information about some forgotten female musicians: * Marie Moke Pleye (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Pleyel) * Maria Szymanowska (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Szymanowska) * Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tekla_B%C4%85darzewska-Baranowska) Thanks for reading Solvitur Ambulando. If you enjoyed this podcast, I’d appreciate it if you would share it! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sa.life (https://www.sa.life?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   5 Mar 2026

   Bryan McGrath on Leadership in the Navy, Writing, Retirement, and His 'Own Walden'

   Welcome to the Walks of Life podcast. Today's guest is Bryan McGrath (https://substack.com/profile/4072737-bryan-mcgrath), a longtime friend who writes The Conservative Wahoo (https://conservativewahoo.substack.com/) blog on Substack. Bryan recently retired after a career as an officer in the United States Navy and then as a naval strategist, consultant and advocate. In the Navy, he served as a surface warfare officer, winning the prestigious Admiral Elmo Zumwalt Award for Inspirational Leadership, and then the ship he commanded, the USS Bulkeley, won the USS Arizona Memorial Trophy as the most combat-ready ship in the Navy. He retired with the rank of Commander and turned his energies to consulting on naval matters, tirelessly advocating for a modern, mighty and ever-ready US Navy. He lives on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. In his writings and in conversation, I always find Bryan a wellspring of clarity and wisdom. I've been eager to interview Bryan for a long time and I know you'll enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Episode Links * Bryan’s blog, The Conservative Wahoo (https://conservativewahoo.substack.com/) * The Quiet Warrior: A Biography of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance (https://amzn.to/4u1VbbO), by Thomas Buell * Wielding the Trident: Admiral Raymond A. Spruance and America’s Victory in the Pacific (https://amzn.to/4ucqe4O), by Andrew K. Blackley (to be released March 17, 2026) * Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment (https://amzn.to/4sdobvw), by David Swensen (This article contains Amazon Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases, which means that by buying from these links, you are supporting Solvitur Ambulando. Thank you!) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sa.life (https://www.sa.life?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

4. 

   30 Oct 2025

   A Conversation with Sophia and Sarah Boese of Louisville Tea Company

   Welcome to Solvitur Ambulando, which means “Solve It By Walking.” On this journey, we explore the alchemic potency of walking for sorting through life’s puzzles, exploring our world, and transforming ourselves. Like a good walk, you will encounter distinctive ideas, remarkable people and gorgeous scenery. I hope you will enjoy a beautiful walk today. And if you like what you read and hear, please I love tea. I love the taste, the ritual, the somatic experience of drinking tea. My favorite teas – Keemun Mao Feng Imperial (https://www.louisvilleteacompany.com/shop/keemun-mao-feng-imperial/), Nandi Hills (https://www.louisvilleteacompany.com/shop/nandi-hills/), Russian Caravan (https://www.louisvilleteacompany.com/shop/russian-caravan/), and especially Christmas Morning (https://www.louisvilleteacompany.com/shop/christmas-morning/) (the greatest tea in the history of teas (https://www.sa.life/p/o-christmas-teas-o-christmas-teas) in this universe or any other universe) —  come from Louisville Tea Company (https://www.louisvilleteacompany.com/). Two of the owners, Sophia and Sarah Boese, always greet me warmly and point out new teas I might enjoy. I wanted to learn more about tea, the tea business and what makes tea so special, so I asked them to sit down with me. We enjoyed a lovely conversation over a cup of tea. Throughout the transcript below, Sophia’s words are in italics; Sarah’s words are in plain text; and my words are in bold. This was a fun, spunky, engaging discussion. I loved it and I learned a great deal about one of my passions in life – tea. Enjoy! Photographs by the amazing Megan Resch (https://www.meganresch.com/). Let's hit the most important question first. Give me your honest view: can you really live a good, ethical, worthwhile, decent, law-abiding life without tea? I mean, objectively, yes. I do think my life is better with tea in it, for a lot of reasons. I enjoy tea. I enjoy the way it affects me, caffeine-wise, and the rituals of making it. I don't know, just the cultural experience of having tea. It's a really fun way to interact with other cultures too. I really like learning more about how the Japanese drink tea and how the Chinese drink tea and being able to integrate that into my day-to-day life. And then also bringing some of their practices into my life outside of tea, which is really nice. There are so many different traditions. And there are even contradicting traditions within different countries. For example, if I recall correctly, with tea sets in China, having an odd number is considered good luck, whereas an even number of cups is bad luck. But you'll see different things in different places. You mentioned incorporating tea and non-tea elements from different cultures into your life. Can you share a couple of them? My favorite one is actually the Japanese culture of preparing their tea. They sit down and have a full moment with their tea. And I like to integrate that into other parts of my life – I'm going to fully embrace this one thing for this time period and give it the respect that it deserves. A lot of people who are getting into loose leaf tea for the first time think it's intimidating, so much work and a lot of steps. But that's part of why I like it – having multiple steps to it. You can take your time to breathe and only focus on it and nothing else. I totally agree. Half the fun is the ritual of it. All the steps. Waiting for the water. Waiting for the water. Actually measuring your tea. That's exactly right. Are there any other instances you can point to? I'm not the biggest fan of meditation. I feel like drinking tea and the ritual is my version of meditation. You can actually clear your mind and just focus on it. Yeah, have a think moment of it. I do love the feeling of having a warm cup of tea in your hands. It's very relaxing. Sipping that warm tea, feeling it in your belly before you go to bed. It's very comforting. And I know this is a big thing in Chinese and Japanese culture – whenever you break a teacup, and then you're involved with repairing it, you’re involved with the glass, with the gold. It's kintsugi. An author I enjoy, Tom White, wrote about these sorts of repairs, kintsugi, recently (https://www.whitenoise.email/p/when-things-fall-apart). Mending ceramics with veins of gold. I've also seen it used in jewelry. The idea is that the repair makes the item even more beautiful than it was before. The mentality that something broken can become so much more beautiful. It's a really nice mentality to carry throughout life. But in Korean culture, drinking from a cracked or chipped cup is actually bad luck. It's letting bad spirits into your life and you're not supposed to do that. I've had people ask me before to make sure I don't use anything that might have a crack in it. And I'll say, “Yes, absolutely, we'll respect that. Whatever makes you more comfortable.” Why do you drink tea? It’s always been a big part of my life. My whole family drinks tea. So I was born into it. But why I still drink tea – first of all, the caffeine. It is amazing. I do love caffeine. But also it just gives me something to drink. I like having different drinks all around. Water gets boring sometimes. So having fun beverages around is really good. I would call you a beverage girl. Yeah, absolutely. Growing up, my mom always liked unsweet iced tea with lemon, everywhere we went. As a teenager, Sophia was already into tea. Nicolette [Spears, Sophia’s sister and Sarah’s cousin, and another partial owner of the shop] was already very into tea. They're the ones that first got me to taste it and realize that tea doesn't need to have stuff added to it. Tea can be really tasty on its own. As a teenager, I also drank a lot of coffee and energy drinks. My caffeine tolerance was very different than it is now. Now, as a 25 year old, I cannot have caffeine after 6pm. And honestly, my black tea cut off is around 4pm. Also, I like the wide variety of tea. We normally have 160 to 200 different kinds of tea in the shop. So when people tell me they don’t like tea, with so many different types, I know there's going to be something you enjoy. If you're open to it and willing to give it a try, you'll find something you enjoy, even if it is just a chai latte. It's one thing to enjoy drinking tea, or even appreciate the ritual in making tea, and an entirely different thing  to own and run a tea shop. Tell me how Louisville Tea Company got started and why you are involved. My sister Nicolette used to work at a tea shop in Arizona. When she moved to Louisville, she realized there was no tea shop in this area. And then I would come visit and we would be in desperate need of tea. And we're thinking, “there's no tea here!” Sophia would come from Arizona and be tasked to bring tea from the tea shop Nicolette used to work at. We needed tea here. So then Nicolette and Nick [Spears, Nicolette’s husband and a part owner of the shop] decided to open up a tea business. And I really liked that idea. So after I graduated high school, I decided to come and join them. Then Sarah followed suit soon thereafter. The business has been open for 11 years now. Soph officially moved here seven years ago. I've been here for six years now. Now, all four of us own the shop. I don't know why your answers made me think of this, but tell me about the bubble or baba tea phenomenon. Boba. Boba, baba, bubble, whatever. When you're reading this interview, I totally get you. Do you like it? I love boba. Yeah. I think it's really good. We get boba together a lot. We don’t serve boba because we are not set up to make it here. But I'm a big fan., I was a big fan before I came here. As a little kid, my favorite pudding was tapioca. And it still is, which I realize is the old person pudding, but whatever. I always liked it. Pudding is the old people's pudding. Yeah. Boba is like a milk tea. You'll have a dark tea base with milk and sugar, and large tapioca pearls. Normally with brown sugar or something inside them. My kids tell me, “take us to the boba tea place!” Have you ever had it? I have taken sips of theirs. You’re not a fan of the texture? I think it is the texture that bothers me. Yeah. I know a lot of people who don’t like the texture. It’s  funny because my boba drinks tend to not even contain tea. I get lemonades with fun things in them because they're tasty. Mine tend to be closer to milkshakes. We definitely love boba and like people who like it. We get stuff that is so different from what we serve here. That's a good point. Boba is really different from what you all serve here. This is a bit of a tangent – but when we first opened, we didn’t have all of this retail. We only had a bunch of tables. Oh, okay. So it was more focused on being somewhere to sit and enjoy tea. We had scones and that was about it. We had a couch here at one point. This lower bar wasn't here, if I remember correctly. But it didn't bring in a whole lot of revenue. We were still new. We didn't have a known customer base. We shifted to carrying a lot more retail and teaware items. We realized no one was fulfilling that niche here. If people wanted those items, they had to buy them online. Today, half of what we are is essentially a gift shop. I will see a lot of regulars only around the holidays because they're buying gifts for people. They're not even tea people themselves. What are your all's favorite teas? I am a big traditional person. I used to be a lot more into flavored teas, but nowadays I feel like I'm mostly doing traditional teas. When you say “traditional,” what does that mean? Black tea? Black teas, white teas, any tea that doesn't have anything added into it. So no fruit or flowers? Traditional teas tend to be only the tea leaves from the plant. The way our menu is organized – the first couple pages are traditional teas. These are the straight tea leaf, nothing else. The following pages are the flavored teas, which includes a wide array of teas. They can have spices added or orange peel, for example. Anything with flavor added into it is on the flavor pages. That's what most people get. Again, there's no wrong way to drink tea. The very first tea from here that I dranks was Bourbon Cream (https://www.louisvilleteacompany.com/shop/bourbon-cream/), which is a very rich, cocoa heavy black tea. But nowadays it's a little sweet for my palate. I drink a lot of Peaches n’ Cream (https://www.louisvilleteacompany.com/shop/peaches-n-cream/), which is a peach vanilla black tea, when it's hot, it tastes heavier on the vanilla. And when it's iced, it tastes more peachy; it’s a little more refreshing. I also like Black Pearl (https://www.louisvilleteacompany.com/shop/black-pearl/), which is a traditional dark oolong with undertones of apples and honey. I really like that one because it can be resteeped – you can use the leaves more than once. They're actually a rolled leaf. Each time you brew it, it unrolls a little bit more and you get a slightly different taste. You mentioned oolong. Can you tell me a bit about the different types of tea? Black and oolong and green and so on? So first things first, all tea comes from the exact same plant. Do you want to be fancy? It's the camellia sinensis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camellia_sinensis) plant. All tea comes from the exact same plant. What makes different types of tea is how it's processed after it's picked or when during the season it's picked. White teas are the lightest of the teas. They tend to be the first picked and the least processed of the teas. Black teas tend to be the last picked and go through more oxidation. White tea is picked and almost immediately dried. Whereas black tea goes through almost 100% oxidation. Oxidation refers to its exposure to the air. It can mean roughing up the leaves a little bit. But with black tea, oxidation makes the tea much darker and much more caffeinated. It can also make it more bitter. That's also where the color of the tea comes from. I'm drinking a white tea right now. You can see that it's very light in color when compared to this black tea. One of the easiest ways to explain it is looking on a scale. Black tea is your strongest, darkest and most caffeinated. Below that you have oolong tea. If black tea gets oxidized 100%, then oolong gets oxidized somewhere between 70% and 30%.  You can have dark oolongs with more oxidation versus light oolongs with less. Below oolong tea is green tea, which gets  oxidized at about 20% Finally, at the bottom of the scale, there is white tea, which doesn't get any oxidation. Then Pu-erh (https://www.louisvilleteacompany.com/?s=pu-erh&post_type=product) tea is special. It’s fermented, which is a different process than what happens to other teas. The fermentation makes pu-erh earthy and dark. . The fermentation also makes it really good for your digestive system. If you want something to help with gut health, we recommend pu-erh. It can be a bit of an acquired taste because it is so earthy and so dark, but it's not too heavy in caffeine. What about matcha tea? Matcha is a Japanese green tea that has been ground up into a fine powder. With  most teas, you brew the tea then you strain the leaves out. With matcha, the powder is dissolved into the water and you drink it whole. That's why it's so caffeinated. You're getting all your green tea benefits, but at a higher level. Matcha gets mentioned in a lot of health articles. Are there any other big categories of tea we haven't talked about? Yeah, so there's a lot of different ones. There's like yellow tea, there's purple tea, there's dark tea. But those ones get really niche. We tend not to have those in our shop. We have a purple tea. Most purple and yellow teas can be categorized as a type of green tea. Yellow and purple teas tend to be very rare In our shop, we usually only carry yellow teas with our “Extraordinarily Rare Tea Sampler” around the holidays. Occasionally we’ll carry one in limited quantities. Dark tea is basically a fancy pu-erh. It goes through the fermentation process in a slightly different way than regular pu-erh. Talk to me about different tea growing regions. It’s grown in India, China and Japan, right? Again, all tea comes from the same plant. But the ground, the soil, the climate in which it is grown makes a huge difference in how it tastes. Japanese tea doesn't taste anything like Chinese tea. The same tea grown in different regions is going to taste different. Here are interesting examples of this phenomenon: our Sencha High Grade (https://www.louisvilleteacompany.com/shop/sencha-high-grade/), which is a Japanese green tea, and our Gyokuro (https://www.louisvilleteacompany.com/shop/gyokuro/), which is another Japanese green tea. They are exactly the same, except the Gyokuru is grown on the side of a mountain in the shade. So it has to fight a little harder to survive. Those different conditions make for different tastes. Also, the same tea can vary from year to year based on different weather experienced in that region. One of the funny things we say about tea is the harder the plant has to work, the better the tea normally is. Suffer for us! Exactly. If it's struggling to grow in the shade, it develops a much greater depth of flavor. We had one tea, a purple tea, Purple Wild Buds, named that because it was actually picked wild. It had a really unique nutty flavor. It even had differently shaped leaves, much larger than most tea leaves. Tea is pretty picky about weather. It likes pretty damp weather, but not too damp. Normally if an area can grow rice, it can grow tea. There are a few places in America that grow tea – around Charleston, South Carolina, for instance. We visited Charleston Tea Garden (https://charlestonteagarden.com/) last July, which is their picking season. They have the oldest tea plants in the country – a crossbreed of Indian and Chinese plants. It was also abandoned at one point, so some random crossbreeding happened too. Which actually makes the tea a lot more fun and interesting to taste. It does. If the tea's growing into too much of a controlled biome. You're like, this tastes weird. The amount of harvest you get per year is normally going to be weather dependent. Really dependent on how many inches of rain you get. So like most crops. Yeah, exactly. It is a plant after all. The standard is what, three harvests per year? I think so, yeah. If you've ever heard the term “first flush,” it means the first pick of the season. It tends to have some of the most delicate, highest quality taste. And is that in spring? Yes. Spring. So spring, and there's one in summer, and then there's one in fall? Basically. It’s in late summer rather than fall. You all sell a really cool kind gift pack of teas around the holidays, the “Exceptionally Rare Tea Sampler. (https://www.louisvilleteacompany.com/shop/exceptionally-rare-tea-sampler/)” How do you put that together and choose those teas? We mostly find those teas from a tea convention that’s a worldwide tea expo. It’s very big, there’s a lot of people there, it’s very fancy. And I have not been invited!? You cannot go because it's only a business thing. I'm so sorry. It is exclusive to people in the business. I have an LLC and I'm interviewing people about tea right now! That is my tea business. I'm a writer in the business. How am I not in the business? I don't know what their press stance is. You should look into it. It's the World Tea Expo (https://www.worldteaexpo.com/) and it happens in Las Vegas every year. It is very fun to go. Yeah, go for it. And there's a really big showroom in the arena where you can walk around and taste a bunch of teas and interact with a lot of people. But the expo is focused on getting new teas or new retail products to sellers. There are of course a lot of classes, which focus on topics like tea mixing or tasting notes. I took one class in which a wine sommelier talked about how tea and wine have a lot of the same tasting notes and use a lot of the same tasting language. I do find being here in Louisville, many people know a lot about alcohol and alcohol tasting. So I can say certain words to them and it makes sense to them. With traditional teas, since they are straight teas, you have to describe them based on their undertones. I can say “this tea has a cocoa note to it, there's no chocolate in it, but their undertone is cocoa.” That's how you differentiate it. Someone with experience with alcohol tasting, it’s normally a lot easier to get them on board with that description. One of the reasons we were actually working with a wine person is we were trying to get tea into restaurants. It can be hard to get a restaurant to commit to new teas, especially loose leaf teas, because they’re worried about the process and the time it takes. But if they have a wine sommelier, they normally advocate for good, loose leaf teas. They know the taste and smell and experience benefits of selling fine teas in the restaurant. We currently work with a few different restaurants, coffee shops and breweries in town. TEN20 Brewery (https://www.ten20brewery.com/) is the new one carrying our teas. Okay, so I diverted us from the question about the “Exceptionally Rare Tea Sampler.” Attending the World Tea Expo is normally how we find those teas. Another way is by getting samples from our suppliers. Specifically for the Exceptionally Rare Tea Sampler, we want to get really rare, really high quality teas that we wouldn’t be able to sell otherwise. And putting six of them in one sampler means we can sell them at a more approachable price range than if we sold one of those teas by itself. Back to yellow teas, I think including them in the Sampler is the only way we’ve sold them. Because yellow tea tends to be a very high price point, and it's just not an approachable price point for most people. By putting it in the sampler, people who want to taste these super fancy teas have a way to do that. Going back to the notion of having a wine sommelier – one year I hosted an afternoon tea for some of my Mom’s friends. I came here for the tea. A friend hosted with me. She keeps telling me, “Russell, you need to become a Japanese tea master.” Is there such a thing? Can I become one? No, you can't become one. Technically you can be certified to do certain things, especially in Japan. What does “certain things" mean? We’ve talked about matcha a bit, right? With matcha in Japan, there are actually very particular ceremonies around it. There are different levels of particularity. You can get a certification to be able to perform them traditionally and officially. They can get very fancy. For instance, if you're going to be part of the ceremony, you're not supposed to eat or drink beforehand. You're not supposed to talk during the entire ceremony. These ceremonies take at least an hour. Sometimes they can take seven hours, depending on how many people are participating. There’s no certification for “I know tea really well.”  It’s not like that. But you can be certified for certain practices of tea. It depends on the culture that you're talking about  too. So I cannot become a tea master because I am not Japanese? Non-Japanese people can become certified, but you have to live in Japan. If I remember correctly, I don't think there is an official title of tea master. So you’re saying I can make it up? “I AM A TEA MASTER!” You can absolutely lie to people about this. I don't know how many people will respect that. I've worked here for like seven, seven plus years, honestly, and I would not consider myself a tea master. I know so much about tea. It's a long road to learn about tea. You’d be studying for years and years. I have so much to learn. I have  confidence in saying that  because I'm of the mindset that there is always more to learn. And there is always new information coming out, such as the idea of matcha having all these health benefits. Now you are reading articles about it all the time, but in the West, that is a new thing. And news and insights about tea are constantly coming out. But also, America is not, shall I say, an especially ritualistic society. It's fast-paced. Right – it's not a ceremonial society. The idea of simply sitting down for an hour and only focusing on your tea –  that would blow people's minds. Americans wouldn't know what to do. We noticed that since Covid, there has been a major uptick in people interested in tea sets. Maybe because people were at home more, they got more interested in making it more of a ceremony, more of a process, and taking their time with it. Covid made people slow down and appreciate the small things in life. That being said, at the Expo in 2019, we were looking at stats. Tea, in the U.S., is mostly about ready-made drinks. Bottled pre-made tea, even more than tea bags. Honestly, that was a big trend in China and Japan too – buying your pre-made bottled tea at the convenience or grocery store. In Japan, villages that for generations grew and picked tea, the younger generations are no longer interested in it. They cared more about boba or fun pre-made drinks. Like McDonald’s sweet tea or Lipton Brisk iced tea? Not so much that. Still a little more Japanese. But there is a labor problem too. Villages where tea is grown – those people are starting to age and the younger generations aren’t as interested in that work. That’s a fascinating point. Craig Mod (https://craigmod.com/) is a writer I enjoy a great deal. He's an American, but he lives in Japan. He wrote a book called Kissa by Kissa (https://shop.specialprojects.jp/products/kissa-by-kissa-4th-ed). A kissa is akin to a coffee house. They have limited menus – coffee and usually a few food items. They're all dying out. The owners are all elderly, usually well past retirement age – and none of their kids want to be involved in the kissa. These kissa tend to be on little country roads connecting different towns. Not Tokyo. Yeah – that's the thing. You see it more with the smaller villages because the younger generation is just not staying there. Younger generations always want to rebel against older generations. That's just a fact of life. Speaking of coffee – how do people connect differently with tea than with coffee? There are people who get really into coffee and I am not one of those people. But as a casual enjoyer of coffee, I feel like it's on the same level of how we partake of and enjoy tea. There are a lot of nuances to enjoying coffee. There is an American culture connected to coffee, especially in workplaces. “I need my coffee to get going and to be able to function throughout the day.” Break rooms or cafeterias in office buildings are a lot more likely to have coffee in them than tea. If they do have tea stuff, it's usually only tea bags. I have a lot of regulars who come during their lunch breaks a few times a week. They work in offices which only supply coffee in the break room. In America, I think coffee is much more accessible in the workplace than tea. It's just one of those things that's always there. So it's easy to get into. Whereas with tea, of course you have Southern sweet tea. Or you have people who see tea as something medicinal – “I only drink tea when I'm sick or when I want to fall asleep.” Or – “I only drink matcha because it's super-healthy for me.”  And that is a good reason to drink matcha. One of our biggest clienteles is people looking to get healthier with tea. You should also be drinking matcha because it tastes good! I feel like having that health-only approach with tea can be negative sometimes. Or it can be limiting. People come in with a list of herbs and they say, “I want tea with these herbs because I read that they have health benefits.” You absolutely can do that – we have a medicinal section in our menu. But it’s a bit of a different view of tea, and I don't think people approach coffee in quite the same way. Definitely. I want to come back to the question of connecting with tea. How do you see people connect with tea? A lot of people come in who do like the taste. They love exploring the different flavors. We have a lot of different teas for a reason, even if it can be intimidating. It's such a person-by-person, intimate experience. There are definitely people who only drink it for health benefits. Then there are some people who drink tea every day because it's part of their ritual and it's their favorite thing to drink. I love the experience of people coming in to buy tea for other people. It’s an easy bonding point –” I know they like tea. It's the easiest thing I can get for them that I know they'll enjoy.” It's a safe move. Exactly. My sister-in-law and I – one of our closer bonding points was how much she loves tea and her getting  my brother to start drinking tea finally. For a long time he would only drink tea when he wasn't feeling well.She opened him up to enjoying it. And he's a big coffee drinker, – like four shots of espresso per drink. So that was a big thing. Now when I send her tea, he has requests too. Tea also tends to be a community thing – sharing like a teapot with a friend, for example. Even in that medicinal vein, I'll have people come in and say, “My daughter-in-law is having her first baby. So I want to get her the New Mother's Tea (https://www.louisvilleteacompany.com/shop/new-mothers-tea/).” My wife doesn't love tea, but she loves going to tea. That's one of our favorite things to do as a family over the holidays. One of my favorite memories with family visiting us here – Sophia’s now sister-in-law and my mom were in town. We went to Sister’s Tea in Buckner, Kentucky. They had the three-tiered tea trays. We all dressed up. It was a whole experience and it was lovely. Unfortunately, that place has closed (https://www.yelp.com/biz/sisters-tea-parlor-and-boutique-buckner-2). How many people come in here asking for coffee? A lot. Most are joking. When they’re serious, I will say there is a reason we don't carry coffee. We have some really delicate teas and if they were stored next to coffee, they would start tasting like coffee. So if the options were having a wide range of teas or having teas and coffee, we chose the wide range of teas. There are a lot of amazing local coffee businesses. Tea and coffee, they are so similar. Many people view them as on the same plane. But they are also so vastly different because they involve vastly different brewing processes. I'll enjoy a cup of coffee, but I could not tell you how to properly brew anything fancy. I've never drank coffee in my life. What are some good books or articles about tea? I do have one off the top of my head – 19 Lessons on Tea (https://amzn.to/3KTBe1Y). It’s an easy intro on all the basics, like the different types of tea, what makes them different. Uh, actually, I think Nicolette, my cousin, is quoted or thanked in it. Away from the shop, could you tell me about some of your tea rituals? What does tea mean to you? How do you celebrate it? How do you drink it? On my perfect day off, if I have no obligations, I'm sitting at home and I love to make tea in the Gaiwan (https://journal.rishi-tea.com/how-to-brew-tea-with-a-gaiwan/) style. So it has a full little cup and a little lid. You make a bunch of brews of the same tea over and over again. I like to do this with the Tung Ting Oolong (https://www.louisvilleteacompany.com/shop/tung-ting/) that you can steep multiple times. It goes all day. It's ridiculous. Something about the process of making the same cup of tea over and over again and noticing the small details in it and being able to appreciate this full tea for what it is. It's really good. Tell me more about gaiwan. I have a gaiwan travel set, but I don’t use it much. I have this set (https://teatsy.com/products/-grass-wood-gray---handmade-antique-style-portable-easy-brew-gaiwan-tea-set-with-protective-case-39309). Honestly not trying to push it, but I love carrying this set around. I mean, it’s  just so cute. This is the one I use at my own house too. I love this set. I really like the glaze on it. It's a very satisfying feel. Yeah. It's amazing. Not to be all product placement. It is wonderful. I'm not endorsing it. I'm saying it's good. Gaiwan is a really great way to brew tea. It's the traditional Chinese way to make tea. It opens up the tea leaves for a much different experience than you would have with brewing the tea. Now you're convincing me to take this on my trip. With the Gaiwan, you put the tea directly in and then pour the water on top. Then you gently strain the tea. But most of the tea leaves remain, so you're drinking it with tea leaves still in the cup. That’s the best way to drink tea because you get the full body flavor of it and all the nuances of it. If you ever order a sample cup in the shop, it's made in a Gaiwan. We brew it stronger than we normally recommend brewing tea and you'll get a little bit of the leaf in the cup. So you get the truest flavor. Just hook them with the caffeine. Exactly. You're supposed to use a heaping teaspoon per every eight ounces of water. For our sample cups, we use a heaping teaspoon per every five ounces. So it's not an insane amount! It's a little bit more than you generally would use. You can get the real depth of flavor that way. Do you all drink the Global brands of tea, like Lipton and Bigelow? I'm going to be real. I only drink our tea. The only time I don't drink our tea is if  I’m out at a restaurant and want a cup of tea with my meal. If I'm at a sushi restaurant, I'm going to drink tea. Or, when someone gives me a specialty tea, I will absolutely drink it. Or, when I'm traveling, I like to visit other tea shops and I will drink tea there. But day to day,  I only drink our tea. It is rare that I drink other teas. One of the lovely things about working at a tea shop is people will say, “ I traveled to this country and I brought some tea back. Do you want to try it?” And that is awesome! We also get samples from our suppliers so we can taste a wide range of teas and that is always fun! But it's not like you sit in the back of your shop and pound a McDonald's sweet tea. No. We will have the occasional Arizona Ginseng Tea (https://drinkarizona.com/collections/tallboys/products/green-tea-20oz-tallboy), but that’s almost more of a juice. Besides here and Trader Nicks Tea in Florida (https://www.tradernickstea.com/), what are your favorite tea shops? Sadly, we have not left America. That is something I want to do in my life –  travel and taste teas from outside of the country. Being able to have freshly picked tea from a Japanese tea-growing area would be amazing. Literal dream stuff like that. Within America, if we happen to be traveling to a city, it’s fun to see what’s out there. We’re originally from Phoenix, and when we’re there, we go to the local tea shops to visit family or friends. In Phoenix and all of Arizona, I am a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf (https://www.coffeebean.com/) fan. They are obviously a coffee shop, but they also have a really nice selection of loose leaf teas. If I have a matcha craving it's my go-to, because  they'll give me something good. One of the funny parts about going to different tea shops is that I am so intimately familiar with the wholesalers that sell loose tea. So I'll be looking at other places’s menus and I'm thinking, “I know exactly where you buy your tea from. And I know exactly what tea I'm getting here because I sell it.” Sometimes I go to tea shops, and it doesn't feel like a new experience because I already know all of their teas because we sell the same teas. All right. We're done with the nice questions. Tell me about the tea mafia. The sketchy stuff. The sketchy side of the tea industry. The backdoor deals. Yeah. Sadly, it's not that sketchy or anything. Oh, come on. I hate to disappoint you. I'm not secretly buying tea from someone at the back door. The bricks of thousand dollar bills hidden in tea. I know they exist. Come on. The sketchiest thing we have to do is wire money to people in Japan because we're getting a giant order of  fresh tea from Japan. Generally speaking, we work with about a dozen main suppliers and a few specialty suppliers. All of our Exceptionally Rare Tea Samplers, we only contact those suppliers for those special teas. A lot of the exceptionally rare teas are small batch or they come from companies that only do hand picking. So, they have a limited quantity. That's why if a tea is in the Exceptionally Rare Tea Sampler, it's unlikely we will ever be able to get ahold of it again. One time I was at a tea expo and I had a Colombian white tea. It was the sweetest natural tea I've ever had while still being delicate and light. We can no longer find it. I still think about that tea too, honestly. It's sweet. It was a really good tea. That's awesome. That's great. We had a 2007 Hunan dark tea that had natural buttery caramel notes. I would drink that as often as I felt comfortable doing for it being such an exceptionally special tea. We carried it the first two years I was here. We sold out and we can never get it again. And it is probably my favorite tea I've ever had. Tea is definitely one of those things that gets better with age. Aged tea is a very big thing. If you get something that's aged from a specific year, you're never going to be able to get that tea again. It's aged from that specific year. These logs over here are from 2012. I'll actually open this up for you. I don't think you ever found a way to sell one of those to me. Get out, people! Have you never seen this? No, I’ve never seen it. This is an aged tea from 2012. It's wrapped in bamboo. It gets more expensive with age because it is actively aging in there. The price increases every year. What's the price right now? It's $65 for the little one. We sold a couple of the little ones. We had a customer who was drinking it on the regular and they said it lasted them about a year. Right now, this large one is $285. If you're drinking tea daily, it will last you about three years. If somebody buys that today, will it actually be better at the end, in three years, than it is today? Sophia: Yeah. If you store it properly. Of course, if something happens to it. Mostly, you need to make sure it doesn't get exposed to moisture. We would recommend that you piece off a chunk of it and then seal it back up. Let me ask a different question. One dirty secret in the restaurant business is – everyone says “sea bass” on the menu, but it’s really some much cheaper fish. You know, like bluegill from Kentucky lakes. What is the sea bass of the tea world? It would technically be China Keemun (https://www.louisvilleteacompany.com/shop/china-keemun/), but it doesn't feel like a dirty secret, because we openly tell people about it. We are pretty honest as a company about our dirty secrets. We are pretty straightforward with people about this, but China Keemun is a very standard black tea. On it’s own, it doesn’t have much of a unique flavor. It's our cheapest black tea at the moment. It is the base of a lot of flavored black teas. This isn't a tea that you would want to drink by itself much. If you're a big fan of Kentucky Morning (https://www.louisvilleteacompany.com/shop/kentucky-morning/)? This is what Kentucky Morning is made of. Then the other dirty secret – but again, we are very open about this – is the Milky Oolong (https://www.louisvilleteacompany.com/shop/milky-oolong/) controversy. Milky Oolong is a fake tea. What is it? Milky Oolong and Milk Oolong are two different things. This is a real Milk Oolong. It’s only oolong tea, nothing added. It gets its taste naturally. It has that creaminess. It tastes like milk. When you steep it several times, it gets milkier. It gets better. Milky Oolong is not that. It has things added to it. It's artificial. Milky Oolong has been steamed with milk to give you that milky taste. The first couple steeps have the strongest milk taste, but it goes away with multiple steeps, basically the reverse of a Milky Oolong. People will come in asking for Milky Oolong. We can do that. But I tell them we have a true Milk Oolong too, which currently is our Jin Xuan Jade (https://www.louisvilleteacompany.com/shop/jin-xuan-jade-oolong/). And again, we are open about this. I want to tell people that we are not lying to you. We just have a Milky Oolong and a Milk Oolong. Some last few questions. What’s your favorite thing about being involved in the tea world, having a tea shop and getting to interact with people in a retail environment, but a highly specialized, unique one? I might be reiterating this, but it’s the communal aspect. We get an immediate connection with people because we already have this shared interest. Tea can be such a niche interest. When  you find someone who also really likes tea, you just want to talk about tea. It's a strong connection immediately. Comparing it to coffee, coffee is so broad. You're not going to find similarities with people simply because you both like coffee. Everybody's at Starbucks. Yeah, like, “oh wow, you drank a cup of coffee this morning.” But if you say, “I drank a cup of tea this morning,” another tea lover reacts, “Ooh, a tea!” I love when someone comes in, traveling from out of state and they're so excited to see new tea stuff. And they’re excited that someone cares about tea and is excited to talk about it. There's so much to tea. You could be excited about so many different aspects of it. People come in a lot asking about the right way to brew tea. We have an answer for you. We can tell you how to brew tea. We have our standard. I tell people the general rule of thumb – a heaping teaspoon per eight ounces of water. But there's so many different ways to make tea. It depends on the tea. And it also depends on what culture you're interacting with. Someone born in India will brew their Indian chai in a different way from how I will recommend someone from here brew it. The person from India already knows how to do it. They've done it their whole life. A classic, traditional Indian way of making masala chai is putting the spices and the black tea on the stove with milk and brewing it in milk and then straining it out. But we tell people – letting the black tea sit in hot liquid for that long will actually release a lot of tannins and make the tea really bitter. A lot of our Indian teas are on the much stronger side, because that's more of the palate. In fact, a lot of English tea drinking comes from Indian teas which has a really strong, dark tea base. That's why you'll see people in England putting a lot of milk and sugar in it, to balance out that strength. Then we have some black teas that I would not recommend putting milk and sugar in, because it's going to taste like watery milk and sugar. You're drinking jasmine green tea? You put milk in it – that's not the right way. That's a choice. But with Gongfu style, you brew tea for 10 to 30 seconds. And you do that six times or more. That's such a different method from what we normally tell people. That's why I don't like saying there's any hard or fast, right or wrong, ways of brewing tea. People ask what sweetener we would recommend with teas. And I really think that is personal preference. You're the one drinking it, you should enjoy it. You should make it and enjoy it how you like. Another one people ask about a lot is when to end steep times. Like, don’t ever steep for longer than five minutes or the tea will taste bitter. But some people like bitter tea. If you want to steep it for seven minutes to pull out more astringency, go for it. I probably steep my tea less than three minutes. And there's nothing wrong with that either. Drink it how you enjoy it. I make my tea strong. I make my tea so strong. I'll use a 12 ounce cup and put two teaspoons in it. When we make cups for regular customers, we add two teaspoons in these 16 oz. cups. Every time I make tea for myself, I add three teaspoons because I like my tea strong. I want the added flavor in there. If I'm making a tea for a health benefit, it wouldn't be wild for me to put six teaspoons in there. I have absolutely made a cup this size that has eight teaspoons of tea in it. But I've also made a cup this size that has one teaspoon of tea in it. This is why you can be energetic at the end of the day. Exactly. This is why we have so much energy. When I brew our caffeine free teas, most of them don't over-brew.  Our labels say to steep five-plus minutes on them. But I'll just tie them off and leave the bag in the cup. I have people who come in and ask me to do that with their regular black teas, which I would never personally do for myself, but it's how they prefer it. I'm not gonna tell you how to live your life if you're enjoying tea. You’re the one drinking tea. OK, so I am curious – what’s your favorite book? I'm actually a very big reader. I read books every day. And asking for my favorite book is like asking for my favorite tea. I do not have one. I will just ramble about 70 of them! What's your favorite recent book then? My favorite recent book is either Song of Achilles (https://amzn.to/3QMzvzd) or Iron Widow (https://amzn.to/47BqRcG), because I've read them in the past month. That will change next month. I will have a new favorite book, just like I'll have a new favorite tea next month. But I don't know. It also depends on my mood because my favorite fantasy book is nothing like my favorite romance book. My favorite romance book is nothing like my favorite sci-fi book. Or ones with like childhood nostalgia. So I have a very different answer, because what I consider as my favorite book, I first read in sixth grade. I was about 12 years old. The Giver (https://amzn.to/3KRJOxX) by Lois Lowry (https://amzn.to/3KRJOxX). I read a lot when I was younger, say fourth grade. Then I had a bit of a lull where I didn’t. Then in sixth grade, I picked up The Giver and I was so invested in it, it got me back into the habit of reading. I wrote a book report twice as long as it needed to be because I was so enthusiastic about it. I own a few copies of it because I have some special versions of it. I haven’t read it in years, but it still has a place in my heart. Multiple versions of books –  totally underrated. It’s amazing. I do it too, honestly. I have fancy editions and then I have copies I actually read because I don't want to read my fancy editions. That's exactly right. If I have a signed copy of a book, I have a trash version of it too. I'm not gonna read that signed version. I've got about 10 versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey. I have at least four versions of The Iliad. I want to see different covers and read different translations. Sophia's brother, my cousin, Andrew does bookbinding, with his company Optics Binding. (https://www.opticsbinding.com/) So we've received gifts that are very fancy versions of books. That's awesome. We both love to read. I think together we have over 600 books at our house. I like to read basically everything. I'll read comics, I'll read whatever I can get my hands on. If we are talking about books, I have to give a shout out to Percy Jackson (https://amzn.to/45FWdNK), the children’s series. I read it when I was 12 and I still love it. I have feelings about Percy Jackson the way that a lot of people have feelings about Harry Potter.  It was such a big part of my childhood, part of why I love reading. It got me super into mythology – not only Greek mythology. Sixth grade was when we started studying world history and looking into different mythologies. I still love to look into them. I own mythology textbooks because they're really fun to read. Percy Jackson got me into that. I'm not huge into non-fiction books. But mythology got me a lot more into world history and culture. Well, Sarah and Sophia – this has been so much fun! It’s been awesome! Thank you! This was great –  I'm so happy we did this! This was very enjoyable! (This article contains Amazon Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sa.life (https://www.sa.life?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

5. 

   2 Oct 2025

   A Conversation With Writer and Lay Zen Teacher Sara Campbell

   Welcome to Solvitur Ambulando, which means "Solve It By Walking." On this journey, we explore the alchemic potency of walking for sorting through life's puzzles, exploring our world, and transforming ourselves. Like a good walk, you will encounter distinctive ideas, remarkable people and gorgeous scenery. I hope you will enjoy a beautiful walk today. And if you like what you read and hear, please Today I am joined by one of my favorite writers, one of my favorite people – Sara Campbell (https://www.saracampbell.co/). How to describe Sara? Writer, coach, marketing executive, Zen Buddhist practitioner and now lay teacher, we met through the writing collective called Foster (https://coauthored.co/). Meeting her in person during a Foster retreat highlighted that experience. I view Sara as one of the few people peering deep into the heart of modern society, facing it honestly, and reflecting back something worthy of our attention. Her Substack, Tiny Revolutions (https://www.tinyrevolutions.co/), is on my short list of must-reads as soon as a new issue comes out. To me, most importantly she is a friend. Sara and I enjoyed a far-ranging conversation. We discussed community and whether a vibrant community can exist without some in-person contact; her Mount Rushmore of writers; the fast-evolving world of creative work; her attraction to Zen Buddhism; the passing of her mother and becoming buddies with her father; why we need to stay close to who we are in this hectic, sometimes crazy modern world; and much more. We enjoyed a beautiful, heartfelt discourse. I keep returning to the themes we discussed: * Sara has been a writer her entire life. She has coached and now has become a Zen teacher. The interplay between writing and teaching makes sense, and not only for research-intensive, university-level teachers. In some ways, both teachers and writers seek to leave something of themselves to posterity, to eternity. * The mandate of the Oracle at Delphi to “Know Thyself” always struck me as an urgent calling into introspection. Perhaps. But Sara articulates another side — we know who we are, in part at least, by and through our lives in community. As she says, “I don’t think we can truly become ourselves without other people.” * Sara urges us to keep our Why at the center of our work. As the former Hindu priest Dandapani (https://thebookshopnashville.com/item/ymASTSSKIbY5zV_N1dNA2g) writes, “Discovering your life’s purpose should be your sole focus if you don’t know it. Don’t stop until you discover it. Then you can spend the rest of your life living in alignment with that purpose.” * We find ourselves under perpetual bombardment from people, companies and brands telling us who we should be, how we should spend our time, what we should buy, and what we should aspire to. Sara urges us to preserve time to reflect on and rediscover who we are, what we believe and what we stand for. Whether we engage in zazen, meditation, prayer or another such practice, it is a vital defense against that onslaught. Thank you, Sara, for such a lovely conversation! Episode Links * Sara’s website (https://www.saracampbell.co/) * Sara’s Substack, Tiny Revolutions (https://www.tinyrevolutions.co/) * Angel City Zen Center (https://www.aczc.org/) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sa.life (https://www.sa.life?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

6. 

   29 Aug 2025

   We Play for the Sheer Joy of Play

   Welcome to Solvitur Ambulando, which means "Solve It By Walking." On this journey, we explore the alchemic potency of walking for sorting through life's puzzles, exploring our world, and transforming ourselves. Like a good walk, you will encounter distinctive ideas, remarkable people and gorgeous scenery. I hope you will enjoy a beautiful walk today. And if you like what you read and hear, please In this episode of “Walks of Life,” we have a great treat. Joining me is Katy Bowser Hutson (https://substack.com/profile/93588663-katy-bowser-hutson). Katy has written a book of poetry, Now I Lay Me Down to Fight (https://thebookshopnashville.com/item/eaqIx2KoGEmp7CBCVUSH2A), about her way through cancer. Now she is writing a book called Play Book, about how the notions of play and playfulness weave through Scripture. I recently got to meet Katy in Nashville, along with our amazingly creative friend Alice Smith. It was such a joy and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed following Katy’s progress on Play Book through her Substack, Katy Plays (https://katyplays.substack.com/). And I cannot wait to read the book when it comes out. As I’ve reflected on my discussion with Katy, a few points have struck me: * Katy mentions how Play Book “is the natural consequence of everything I’ve done in my life.” That comment reminded me of a recent “The Narrative” podcast epsiode with Ghost Agency CEO (https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/adam-delehanty-ghost/id1783812920?i=1000702237769) Adam Delehanty (https://substack.com/profile/156425919-adam-delehanty): “Don’t follow your passion; surrender to your destiny.” We hear so often, “follow your passion,” and I’ve found that unhelpful advice. Many of us have many passions, so which one do we follow? Or do we follow some or many or all of them? But the sense that Katy gives us is of a natural progression in life. That makes a of of sense to me. * We talk about play and seriousness — how they seem quite similar and also very different. It reminds me of Roger Federer. Yes, he had serious things at stake as he played tennis — money, rankings, prestige and so on. But he so clearly viewed it and felt tennis as a game, as play. Here we get into tricky advice — such as “you must be desireless.” Well, if I am desiring to be desireless, um, don’t I still have … a desire? True, and yet, the wisdom of the ages speaks clearly — it seems paradoxical and yet that is the aim. So perhaps with play and seriousness — we must run the narrow gamut that seems to separate them, and acknowledge that space is as but a shadow. * Katy tells us she is writing this book for adults. Kids innately intuit play — they are playful beings. As we age, life beats the play from us. In the modern, hyper-scheduled, everything’s rushed world, we adults must rekindle the fire of play inside us. * At one point, Katy says, “play is voluntary and self-forgetting.” At their best, so are prayer and meditation. Back to the relationship of play and seriousness. * As you’ll hear, in this process of writing Play Book, she is exploring ways to infuse play into her life. There is concordance between approach and output. It reminds me of Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (https://www.edwardtufte.com/book/the-visual-display-of-quantitative-information/). If you’re going to write a book about displaying data, you might have a particular approach about … about showing data. I recall him telling us in one of his classes: “I couldn’t find a publisher who would print this book and the data the way they needed to be shown. So I created my own publishing house to show the data the way they need to be shown.” Again — concordance between approach and output matters. I loved this talk with Katy! She is witty, fun, imaginative and supremely attuned to language. I hope you enjoy this conversation too! Episode Notes Katy’s Substack, “Katy Plays” (https://katyplays.substack.com/) Katy’s personal site (https://www.katyhutson.com/) Katy’s poetry book, Now I Lay Me Down to Fight (https://thebookshopnashville.com/item/eaqIx2KoGEmp7CBCVUSH2A) The Practice (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-practice-seth-godin/1137044111?ean=9780593328972) by Seth Godin Troy Cady and Playfull (http://www.playfull.org/) The God Who Plays (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-god-who-plays-brian-edgar/1127913247?ean=9781532607615) by Brian Edgar The Body Keeps the Score (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-body-keeps-the-score-bessel-van-der-kolk-md/1117229987?ean=9780143127741) by Bessel van der Kolk Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (https://a.co/d/4Pgmc6A) by Eugene Peterson On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/on-the-unseriousness-of-human-affairs-james-v-schall/1119440647?ean=9781610170253) by Fr. James V. Schall, SJ Second Act (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/second-act-henry-oliver/1144134328?ean=9781399813327) by Henry Oliver (https://substack.com/profile/2432388-henry-oliver) (and listen to my interview with him here (https://www.sa.life/p/henry-oliver-podcast)) “Kingfishers Catch Fire” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, contained in this edition (https://a.co/d/eQjcb0e) of his works The Spiritual Exercises (https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/ignatian-prayer/the-spiritual-exercises/) of St. Ignatius Loyola Fr. Pedro Arrupe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_Arrupe) Blackwing (https://blackwing602.com/) pencils Sailor (https://www.gouletpens.com/collections/sailor-fountain-pens-1) fountain pens Leuchtturm 1917 notebooks (https://www.leuchtturm1917.us/classic-notebooks-1.html) (Katy uses size A4 with blank pages) Switchyards Neighborhood Work Club (https://switchyards.com/) (Katy’s co-working space) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sa.life (https://www.sa.life?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

7. 

   6 Aug 2025

   A Conversation With Debut Novelist Sarah Landenwich

   Welcome to Solvitur Ambulando, which means "Solve It By Walking." On this journey, we explore the alchemic potency of walking for sorting through life's puzzles, exploring our world, and transforming ourselves. Like a good walk, you will encounter distinctive ideas, remarkable people and gorgeous scenery. I hope you will enjoy a beautiful walk today. And if you like what you read and hear, please On this episode of “Walks of Life,” I am delighted to be joined by Sarah Landenwich, whose debut novel The Fire Concerto (https://www.tatteredcover.com/products/9781454956822?_pos=1&_sid=5c9e707e6&_ss=r) was published earlier this summer. Sarah is a friend and fellow Louisvillian, and I was very excited to have the chance to discuss her novel with her. In fact, here's what I wrote about it (https://www.sa.life/p/what-i-read-q2-2025) a few weeks ago: “This will go down as one of my very favorite books this year. I stayed up past 1:00am three nights in a row to finish the book. And let me say, I am no night owl.”The story, masterfully crafted by debut novelist Sarah Landenwich (https://sarahlandenwich.com/), kept me seeking more and my heart racing. What will happen next? And next? And next? “My wife, also powerfully drawn into the story, sprinted through it too. “The novel is about music, mastery, loss and renewal. Mostly, to me, it sang about love. Can we love who we were, and no longer are, and never will be again? And can we love who we are and who we might become? Can we reach out to something — or someone — to walk that tense tightrope, the weaving of past, present and future, with us? Can we love what we find inside of us, and also open our eyes in love to what we discover outside ourselves? “Beyond beautiful, I cannot recommend it highly enough!” Since our conversation, a few thoughts have kept returning to me: * In the episode, Sarah tells the story of her long journey to getting the book published. It was arduous, but Sarah used it to good effect, learning and improving the steps she was taking. I admire her persistence. It may seem like a simple point, but in the moment, keepin’ on keepin’ on does not always appear as the obvious or correct choice. * I love her sticking to her guns about where she saw her novel fitting in the market. She believed it had a broader appeal than upscale fem lit. She sought to work with an agent who also viewed it more expansively. And I agree — it is a book for a broad audience. Again, Sarah showed remarkable persistence. * In her writing, Sarah uses tools that work for her — a legal pad and pen. I did not take her point as "analog tools are better than digital ones for everyone." I took it as analog works for her — and the lesson is to experiment in finding the right tools that work for you in your specific workflow, with your unique proclivities. * We discuss some forgotten female composers and musicians, such as Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska. (Also read Sarah’s essay about some of them, “What If Your Biography Was Just a Footnote to Somebody Else’s? (https://crimereads.com/what-if-your-biography-was-just-a-footnote-to-somebody-elses/)”) Like Sarah, I found it sad that so many stunningly talented female artists have been lost or nearly faded from history. I also took away another consideration — how beautiful that someone cares about them and their work — enough to write a beautiful story based on them — centuries later! I can’t speaking highly enough about Sarah’s book and this conversation was a total blast for me! Enjoy! Episode Links * The Fire Concerto (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-fire-concerto-sarah-landenwich/1146576142?ean=9781454956822) * Sarah Landenwich’s website (https://sarahlandenwich.com/about/) * Other media coverage (https://sarahlandenwich.com/media/) of The Fire Concerto * A playlist of music (https://sarahlandenwich.com/listen/) that helped inspire The Fire Concerto Information about some forgotten female musicians: * Marie Moke Pleye (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Pleyel) * Maria Szymanowska (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Szymanowska) * Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tekla_B%C4%85darzewska-Baranowska) Thanks for reading Solvitur Ambulando. If you enjoyed this podcast, I’d appreciate it if you would share it! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sa.life (https://www.sa.life?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

8. 

   26 Jun 2025

   Having a Disability Doesn't Mean My Life is Sad

   Geoff Cook shares his experiences navigating job searches and health challenges while maintaining a positive outlook, highlighting his resilience and determination in this interview.

9. 

   19 Jun 2025

   I Want to be the Best Version of Myself

   Geoff Cook discusses his experiences growing up with a disability, navigating different cultural and legal landscapes, and advocating for himself in a world not always designed for him in an interview with host Russell Roberts.

10. 

    5 Jun 2025

    Egyptian-American Author Sherry Shenoda Discusses Her Book of Poetry, Mummy Eaters

    Host Russell Roberts interviews Egyptian-American author Sherry Shenoda about her poetry book, *Mummy Eaters*, exploring themes of identity, heritage, and the desecration of ancient Egyptian culture, revealing the personal connection to her Coptic roots in this interview.

11. 

    10 Apr 2025

    Bonsai is the Most Misunderstood Art

    In 2022, prompted by, well, I don’t know what, I decided to look into getting a bonsai tree. I knew nothing about them, but something in the deep recesses of my mind urged me on. A few years before, my yoga instructor, Laurie LeCompte (https://www.sa.life/p/podcast-laurie-lecompte), had given me an air plant as a holiday gift. So I asked Laurie if she knew where I could find a bonsai. “There’s one guy in town. I only know him as the Bonsai Guy. If you Google ‘Bonsai guy Louisville,’ he should turn up,” she said. Sure enough, that search yielded Russ Stevens of Twisted Nature Bonsai (https://www.twistednaturebonsai.com/). I reached out and set up a class. Russ spent two hours with me, teaching me the (very) basics of bonsai, soil, watering and fertilizer. I bought a small Brazilian Rain Tree. I was hooked. I visit Russ’s nursery often, for education, fun and to give my bonsai some TLC at the “spa” as Russ calls it. Louisville boasts some truly wonderful outdoor spaces and gorgeous nature walks. Walking in Russ’s nursery (https://www.sa.life/p/walk-30) remains one of my very favorite nature walks, in Louisville or anywhere. I visit as often as I can. His nursery and our conversations always inspire me. Last summer, Russ kindly sat down with me to share some of his trees, artistry and wisdom. You will love it! AND, if you live anywhere near Louisville, come check out Bonsai Weekend at Waterfront Botanical Gardens (https://60689a.blackbaudhosting.com/60689a/Bonsai-Weekend-2025), May 30 to June 1, 2025. The shows in 2023 and 2024 were unbelievable. My family and I loved every tree. This year’s Bonsai Weekend is shaping up to be simply unforgettable! Let's start with the basics: what is bonsai? Bonsai simply means a tree grown in a pot. We use Ligneous wood, which is wood that actually grows on itself year after year, and specialty soil to be able to grow in a smaller container. How'd you get into trees? You're an arborist – have you always been interested in trees and nature? Actually it came later in life. I graduated with an IT degree from UK [the University of Kentucky]. I didn't want to do help desk work or work in an office. I had a number of lawn and landscaping clients and I decided to pursue that. I got a truck and equipment and started doing it full-time. That led to me gaining an interest in trees, Japanese maples specifically. My mom's name is Rose. My grandmother always had a rose garden, so that was my first start. But, I don't like roses because they're thorny. They're beautiful. A lot of the good varieties are very fragrant, but they're a lot of work. I worked in my grandma's garden and we had some roses at home. My father's a surgeon, so I needed to do something besides be a lawn guy. That's when I started to specialize in trees. There's a horticultural consultant in town, and we did classes at Cave Hill Cemetery (https://www.cavehillcemetery.com/), which is a National Arboretum Cemetery. Some of the most beautiful trees around. This was back in 2010 or 2011, and we still had lots of the big trees. We've since had big storms that have taken some of the massive ones down. I got in with her and learned about tree identification through all the seasons. Then I started doing a lot more tree plantings. I hired someone from Bob Ray (https://bobrayco.com/). He performed most of their plant healthcare treatments, which would be deep root feeding, root collar excavation, and soil amendments, for example. He taught me about that stuff, which is pretty much the most technologically advanced thing you can do for a tree in the ground. That's when I switched over from cutting up trees to planting and growing them. When I became interested in trees, I got a small bonsai, in Indianapolis at the White River Gardens (https://www.indianapoliszoo.com/visit/white-river-gardens/). The local club had little vendors there. I got a little shimpaku juniper. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juniperus_chinensis_'Shimpaku') The next year I took my first workshop, with Ryan Neil (https://bonsaimirai.com/about), my original teacher, from St. Helens, Oregon, and one of the world's most renowned bonsai professionals these days. It was with Ryan, but it was at Bjorn Bjorholm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjorn_Bjorholm)’s house with Owen Reich (https://www.linkedin.com/in/owen-reich-7890a512/) and Shannon Salyer (https://kusa-farm.com/), and other big names in bonsai today. It was kind of neat to be at his first workshop That was my first workshop with a professional and it was eye-opening, mind-blowing. So, you buy one bonsai in Indianapolis, and then you go study with this famous teacher. Why did you decide to do that? Well, there was an open spot in the workshop. So, I took it. I don't read a lot of books or magazines for education. I really like to practice with people that are currently performing these services. Ryan had just come back from Japan, where bonsai is most popular. He had plenty of good knowledge. The difference with him versus previous professionals who had traveled to Japan is that Ryan was sharing all of his knowledge. He wasn't holding it back. He had been to Europe, Africa, Canada, and other areas that had less strict importation laws. And they had much better trees all across the board. And he’s trying to elevate bonsai in the United States. In fact, he is still one of the top proponents for bonsai educational out there. Super good guy, super intentional. I studied with him consistently for three years, and I went to at least one workshop a year with him, for seven or eight years. I was kind of a groupie and followed him around whenever he was within driving distance. What does studying bonsai mean? There's no college for bonsai. Lots of these teachers offer intensive courses. Bjorn’s class was three years. Ryan’s class was also three years. We would do 12 work days with them each year. I would spend three to four days at a time with them, practicing, learning new techniques. And I’d do that three years in a row. We’d come at different times to work in different seasons. I completed Ryan’s program on junipers. It was a huge commitment. It was out in Portland. Luckily, I had a best friend who lived out there, so I stayed with him and drove to his Mirai nursery. Bjorn had a very similar program. We got a certificate at the end, which doesn't necessarily mean much. In Japan, they've got the NBA, the Nippon Bonsai Association (https://bonsai-kyokai.or.jp/). It’s a certifying body that will make you a legit bonsai professional. And a number of Americans have achieved that certification. Tell me about the difference between caring for big trees, and caring for small trees, for bonsai. I don't mean things like tools and soil. I mean the approach you take, your mindset and goals. Whenever I work on a tree, I'm going for ultimate health. I want to help it get back to where it was. That's the number one goal. How aggressive I am in my treatment program will vary. When I'm working on a big tree, most of our problems are with roots or soil. So sometimes you'll be able to see the root issues, but if you see a fairly good root flare, trunk flare, then it's a soil issue. Meaning: whether the soil is too wet, too compacted, or doesn’t contain enough oxygen. There's an easy way to remediate that: by blowing that soil away and backfilling it with lighter, airier soil. With bonsai, it's a direct correlation. Bonsai are super-pampered and well-cared-for. They get watered way more than yard trees and receive way more fertilizer. If there's a problem up top, then there's a problem in the soil. You can address that immediately with a bonsai. You can take it out of the pot, cut out the exact area of rot. Or you can take out that impervious area where water can’t get to, and then replace it with fresh soil. And the tree will continue to grow just fine. With bonsai, you can make that immediate resolution. Part of bonsai is wanting to make bonsai look like big trees, like you’d see at Cave Hill Cemetery or in a National Park. If you see a big Western Red Cedar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuja_plicata), you can recreate that into bonsai form. We want to provide the same look as a tree on a smaller scale. The pictures in the American Bonsai Society (https://www.americanbonsaisociety.org/) magazine are amazing. Trees are hanging way down and they're coming out of interesting-shaped pots or partial pots or even old shards. Do bonsai artists see that as a challenge? To grow a tree successfully around a particular rock or around a particular pot? We experiment and that’s what we do. Some people will try an air layer. Or you try to grow a root over a rock. They usually aren’t too difficult. But that’s what we do as bonsai artists. What's an air layer? An air layer (https://www.bonsaiempire.com/basics/cultivation/air-layering) is where you put roots into a bag and then cut that off and you'll have a new tree with those roots. You are trying to get a free tree. There's ground layering too, where you can lay them on the ground and put mulch on it. Early on in bonsai, you're trying to do lots of different things to maximize your experiments. When I started in bonsai, I was much more experimental than I am now because now I know what works and I try to stick with that. Most people just struggle to get off the starting blocks and grow a tree. With my students, I focus on helping them learn about plants in general because if you don't have a lot of experience with them, then they can be pretty difficult. How are you pushing your own knowledge of bonsai? Are you still taking seminars with Bjorn or Ryan or anybody? After studying with these professionals for so long, I do have an increased sense of confidence and the abilities to make these trees what I want. Yes, I'm always studying. Yes, I'm always going to seminars. Bjorn, unfortunately, just moved to Japan. He had lived in Nashville, only three hours away. It was a godsend to the southeast. My last class with him was in March. Is he ever coming back to the United States? No. He'll come back to judge shows and stuff like that, but he’s not coming back to live here. We also have teachers that come in for the Greater Louisville Bonsai Society (https://www.louisvillebonsai.org/). We recently hosted a Kusamono workshop with Young Choe (https://www.kusamonochoe.com/kusamono). She was terrific and we had a great turnout for her. Was that awesome? Dude, it was sick. It was amazing. Far, far better than I could have ever anticipated. That's awesome. That's what we're going for. Sometimes we'll have a general teacher who’s good with everything. But we’ll have teachers with a specific focus, like Young Choe on Kusamono. We'll go to one or two other nurseries a year as a club too. Sometimes they'll put on a demonstration. The club also has our annual show at the Waterfront Botanical Gardens (https://waterfrontgardens.org/bonsai/). Which was amazing last year. My daughter and I loved it. It's going to be even better this year. We've got a semi-pro from Chicago coming down. And he's going to do lots of workshops and all kinds of other good stuff. There are great learning opportunities. There's the Pacific Bonsai Expo (https://pacificbonsaiexpo.org/) in California in November this year. I'm going to try to make it out there. I showed a couple trees in St. Louis in May. When I walk through the exhibition hall, I want to see what people are really stopping at. What draws the eye. I am kind of doing market research. I'm not a trained artist. I can't draw a stick figure. This was my first foray into any kind of art. The artistic component of bonsai is still new to me. I was lucky because of my horticultural background. I knew how to grow plants and I was able to grow plants. Art is the other 50%. And I'm only 20% into my 50% learning about my art. It's still constant development. Whenever there is an artist around, I want to learn from that person. How do you think about yourself? Are you an arborist? Are you a horticulturist? Are you an artist? Are you a teacher? How do you view yourself in your work? I've thought about this before. I don't really have a title for myself. I'm definitely a horticulturist and I'm an arborist. With bonsai, I'm a root specialist. In my focus, I can develop a root ball and get the tree off to a very good start. Unfortunately, everybody looks at the canopy, so they don't necessarily understand the benefits of a high-quality root ball. I'm a horticulturist and arborist. Even more so, a plant health care arborist. Whenever you say arborist, people think he's running around with a chainsaw, cutting trees down. Yes, sometimes we have to do that, but I don't do that anymore. In one of our meetings, you mentioned spending 8 to 12 hours one day working on a single tree. I find that so fascinating. Our culture thinks about spending five minutes on this, responding to an email, responding to a text, figuring out kid-logistics with the wife, then going back to the original thing for five more minutes. Keep moving….move, move, move, move. The idea of focusing on one thing in front of you – with no technology around except single use technology, such as your scissors – seems so alien to our culture today. Talk to me about bonsai and focus and attention and being willing to dedicate a lot of time and attention to something for its care. That's an intense question. I'm just trying to figure out how to start that off. So, there's a lot of family neglect to get tree work done. I'm a glutton for pain as far as the extensiveness of my collection. What drives me to it is that we're predominantly an agrarian society. Everybody has gotten a great deal out of growing things. I love when somebody says, “I've got a black thumb, I can't grow anything.” And I tell them, “you have bad information and I can help you grow things.” When I'm educating people, that makes me feel good. If I am going to sell someone a little red pine, I've got to develop one myself to show them what it can be and help guide them in that process. Unless you spend time in Japan, when you walk back in my nursery, you don't know what you're looking at. Yes, you know, there are bonsai of some type, but you've never seen the diversity. You've never seen the styles. Every time I come here, I feel like I'm starting over in my education. I'm so, so, so new, even after two years. That’s part of it. You are always learning, always developing. When I'm walking around, I'm figuring things out. It is hard to stay focused on this stuff. In the rainy spring, cold days that are gray and wet, my bones are achy. I wish I were in Florida. But, I really want to work on trees. That powers me through in the summertime because there's so much work going on right now. It's the growing season. Like I said, I'm a glutton for pain. So, instead of just having deciduous trees or coniferous trees or tropical trees or houseplants or succulents or cacti, I have all of them together. If I eliminated certain categories of those plants, I would eliminate certain work periods throughout the year. But I know that I'm just the holdover person for this plant. I'm going to die someday, hopefully not anytime soon. I'm going to do my damnedest to keep these trees alive and make them the best that they can be for when someone comes in and buys them and wants it as their next project. I’m trying to make sure that I can create a good root ball, create a nice trunk, and create an attractive foliage bed to make the tree attractive to somebody. Oh, man, I'm loving this. This is awesome. Let me ask you about failure. When a bonsai artist fails, what's happened? Bonsai is the most misunderstood art, or the least discussed art, versus any kind of traditional art, like music and or painting. Bonsai is the least talked about. There's no such thing as failing in bonsai unless you kill a tree – and then don't get another one. You only fail when you stop trying. We have failures throughout our process. That's why I grow such a massive collection of trees, because if I lose one or two, that's not that big of a deal. If I lose a couple of smaller trees in between years 1 and 5, that's just part of it. There's definitely failures along the way –insect infestation, fungal infestations. But there's no failing in bonsai as much as there is stopping the practice. Does failure teach new lessons? Or in bonsai do you always fail for certain, specific reasons? There are 6 options. That's it. Not enough sunlight, too much sunlight. Not enough water, too much water. Not enough fertilizer, too much fertilizer. It’s one of those reasons or a combination. In terms of teaching and failure, my teaching has hopefully improved over the years as well. I've been doing this hardcore since COVID, when we had a huge boom. Everybody was staying at home and this was the perfect hobby: grow a tree at home. Luckily I've been able to retain a lot of those customers. I've been doing classes and I’ve refined my teaching process. You mentioned you're an experiential learner. So am I, in part. I'm also a book learner. Are there good bonsai books? The Little Book of Bonsai (https://amzn.to/46LmDix), by Jonas Dupuich. Jonas is a really good guy. He's got a nice blog, Bonsai Tonight (https://bonsaitonight.com/). I would check that out. Most of the books on bonsai came out in the late 70s, early 80s, 90s, and they simply don't have any relevance anymore because we use different materials. We can get the information so much faster via YouTube. Watching Ryan Neil videos (https://www.youtube.com/user/BonsaiMirai) or Bjorn Bjorholm videos (https://www.youtube.com/user/bjorvalabonsai/videos), you can get the proper information immediately and then dive into it. Bonsai Empire (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCph2EzXae_RcWX4tPdoOiWQ) is also very nice. They all have great, great material. They haven't written a lot of books. If you're into quirky books, Mike Hagedorn has written a couple of books: Bonsai Heresy (https://crataegus.com/portfolio/the-bonsai-garden/) and (https://crataegus.com/portfolio/the-bonsai-garden/)Post-Dated (https://crataegus.com/portfolio/the-bonsai-garden/). The second one is about being an apprentice in Japan. He's got a different writing style. It's pretty interesting. But, yeah, so those would be good books that are relevant today. And then, things that are still relevant would be the Kokufu Exhibition Book (https://amzn.to/4dDa7UL) or the Taiken-ten show books, from 1980. Any of them are great. What do you find most rewarding about working with bonsai? I'm not necessarily looking for a deep or profound answer. It can be anything. I'm trying to be deep. It can be anything. I like something that I've created, that I've spent my time on. I like hearing when people walk into the backyard and say, “Wow!” And, not only regular people, but experienced bonsai professionals and practitioners. I like that pat on the back. But, my biggest reward is—when somebody comes back. They've been here before. They come back, they bring their tree, and it's doing well. I was looking for that kind of education when I started, so that’s the kind of education I provide. I've been keeping plants in quantity since at least 2013. This nursery has matured greatly over the last few years. It’s matured to a point where there's not a lot in the area like it. You would have to drive a number of hours to have the selection, the quality of trees, and the number of pots available in one place. Previously there wasn't a whole lot around here for bonsai and bonsai education. That's why I exist. I wish that I had a shop. It's something that I'd like to potentially do in the future, but these trees require constant care. Being able to live on-site with them is the best thing possible. Most other high-quality bonsai nurseries, which I would consider mine to be, they're all live-in as well. Let me ask what may be some woo-woo questions. I love going outside to my bonsai tree and saying, “Good morning, bonsai.” That may sound so dumb, but I love doing it. And I'm just curious: does doing bonsai bring you peace? Do you think the trees feel you or your energy? Do they respond? Do they sense your presence and your emotions? Yeah, yeah, for sure. I don't come out and ask them how they're doing or anything. I just look at them. I just look at them, and they tell me what's going on. As far as relationships, I definitely have grown more fond of certain trees over the number of years of caring for them, seeing them develop, bringing them back from near death or evolving them from a shaggy bush into a beautiful design. It's kind of weird. This is still only a hobby business. I still do this only about 40% of the time. Once it became more of a business, trees are with me, and I can touch them, feel them, all that. If they decide to leave, that's on them. So, I don't get too attached to them. I try to provide the tree with my best care. If you're a tree that's performing for me, I'm going to perform for you. If a tree dies, I'm not that upset about it initially. Obviously, I like to keep my nice trees around. But, I don't like to get that close to them. I've got a few trees that I'm close to, yes. But not as many as you might think. What has bonsai taught you about life, or how has it changed your life? Or maybe another way to think about the question is, what do you know about life because of bonsai that my readers who do not do bonsai, may not know, or may not consider? Kind of touching on what I just mentioned, impermanence. It's taught me quite a bit of patience. With bonsai, you can't really get what you want in one season, two seasons, even three seasons. So, having the perseverance to stick with it and to make sure that these trees are going to get to where you want them to – it takes a lot. That's awesome. The perseverance, impermanence. This is one of the closest connections that we can have to plants. With farmers, they might be close to their fields, plant their annual crops, but then the crops are gone by the next season. But, I've been caring for some trees for over a decade now. Yes, there is a bond that forms. And it's nice knowing that if I do well and I teach somebody else to do well, then these trees will live longer than both of us, than everybody currently alive. That's wonderful. Last question: If someone’s reading this and gets inspired, how can they get involved in bonsai? If you are anywhere near Louisville, you should reach out to Russ (https://www.twistednaturebonsai.com/). But if you’re not near Louisville, what should you do? I would go to Google and check out highly rated bonsai nurseries in your area. You could also contact your local bonsai club. There's usually a bonsai club within 50 miles of most big cities, if not multiple clubs. You could also look at the American Bonsai Society directory, and that directory has lists of nurseries in your area (https://www.americanbonsaisociety.org/bonsai-clubs-usa/). What I'm hearing is: don't go to some random place, buy a tree and start winging it. No, do it right. Invest in some education, invest in a class, invest in teaching yourself how to keep it alive. My mantra is: if you're not going to do something right, why do it at all? These people in the nurseries and clubs have been growing in your area for an extended amount of time. They've probably had the same aspirations and the same experimental aspirations to try to learn this stuff, so they can help you out in your journey. Yes, you might pay some money, but you're going to learn a whole lot more. If there’s no club nearby, they can use Bonsai Mirai Live (https://live.bonsaimirai.com/), and that's a subscription service. Or Bonsai-U (https://www.bjornbjorholm.com/bonsai-u-membership/), also a subscription service. There's also plenty of free YouTube content from both of them. If you don't have anybody close, then those are definitely the best places to go. Yeah, they’re awesome. Don't watch The Karate Kid (https://youtu.be/_jEq4-FhymU?si=t3aCmGplk7lkNhmK). If that's where you were thinking of going for bonsai advice. Don't watch The Karate Kid. Maybe that'll be the title of the newsletter article. “Don't watch The Karate Kid to Learn About Bonsai.” I'm not bashing it at all. I don’t want that. Well, Russ, this has been such an enjoyable conversation. I have loved every minute of it. Thank you! (This article contains Amazon Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sa.life (https://www.sa.life?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

12. 

    13 Mar 2025

    The Greatest Soldier Eisenhower Ever Knew

    A short note before we get to the podcast. If you’re enjoying the essays and podcast on Solvitur Ambulando, I invite you to Pledge Your Support (https://www.sa.life/subscribe?utm_source=confirmation_email&just_signed_up=true) of this work and vision. Solvitur Ambulando is free to enjoy and I have no intention of turning on paid subscriptions anytime soon. (If that changes, I will give pledgers plenty of notice.) But knowing you savor the fruits of my efforts — to the tune of being willing to put some of your hard-earned ducats toward it — would mean, well, more than you can possibly know. Thank you for considering, and for reading this labor of profound joy in my life. In 2022, I launched a series of biographies into people I called “Silver Medalists (https://www.sa.life/lessons-from-silver-medalists/).” The idea is that most of us will never become the next Steve Jobs or John D. Rockefeller or Pablo Picasso. But we can still aim high – very high – in work, creativity and the art of living. Given that reach, we should seek to learn more from these Silver Medalists – men and women who achieved greatness, but perhaps not to earth-shaking levels – more than, say, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett or Elizabeth I. The first biography in the series covered Major General Fox Conner (https://www.sa.life/silver-medalist-fox-conner/), one of the pivotal figures in the United States Army during World War I. And after the war, he became the key mentor to Dwight Eisenhower, who would lead the Allied forces in Europe during the Second World War and later become President. Following that essay, I reached out to Steven Rabalais, an attorney in Lafayette, Louisiana (https://rcm-law.com/steven-b-rabalais/), who wrote the most comprehensive biography of Conner (https://amzn.to/3QHBnbi). Steve kindly agreed to speak with me. We enjoyed a wonderful conversation on February 25, 2023. I accidentally invited my Uncle Raymond to the interview with Steve. Imagine my surprise when I logged into Zoom to speak with Steve, and there’s my uncle, chatting away with him! Toward the end of the discussion, Uncle Ray and Steve, both attorneys, spoke for a few minutes. That turned out to be a neat addition to the conversation, so I’ve included it here. I continue to listen to this interview and reflect on it. Here are some of my more recent musings about it: * Every time I listen to this interview, I feel immense gratitude to Steve for researching and writing about Conner. He lived a remarkable life and we’d have far less insight into his character and career if Steve hadn’t. * Conner fought against Germany in the First World War. He trained and mentored many of the American soldiers who would lead the effort against Germany in World War II. Yet he admired and learned from the German way of war throughout his career. He did not let the fact that Germany was an enemy blind him to the lessons he could learn. * Conner may have been an outstanding soldier, mentor and strategist, but he lacked some skills as a father. His son Tommy attended West Point at Conner’s insistence — begrudgingly at best. Tommy did not make the Army his career. Some considerable tension seems to have existed between father and son. This reminded me that however excellent we may be in one role in life, it is truly difficult to be superlative in all facets of life. Maybe with so many hats to wear, it’s simply impossible. Maybe that’s an invitation to wear fewer hats, and to choose those few hats with diligent care. * At the beginning of the interview, Steve talks about how much fun he had researching and writing the book. And when it ceased to be fun, he put it down. That statement taught me more about writing than anything else in the past 5 years. Steve offers much wisdom throughout this conversation – I think you’ll enjoy just as much as I (and my Uncle) did. Steve, I was ecstatic to learn about your book. I learned about it through the Army Historical Foundation (https://armyhistory.org/), which I worked for 25 years ago. I found out about Fox Conner when I was a senior in college from a professor named Edgar Puryear (https://amzn.to/3LaZOvu), who had done a lot of research into military leadership and wrote a couple books about it. I'm curious: when and how did you first learn about Fox Conner? So, I have a good friend, an old college roommate who has made his career in radio broadcasting. And he has a call-in show, and he has to do that every day, and periodically he needs to go on vacation. What he does is call people that he knows to fill in for him. He asked me to fill in for him and the date that he actually had asked me to host for was June 6th, which, as you know, is the Normandy invasion anniversary. So I thought I would try to do something on the topic. I had seen where there was a new book out at the time. The author is named Mark Perry. Fabulous book – it's called Partners in Command (https://amzn.to/41k2mx7). Just like you contacted me, I contacted Mark Perry and I asked, “Would you come on the show?” and he said he’d be delighted to. I thought I would owe Mr. Perry the courtesy of trying to read his book in advance of the interview. Unfortunately, I didn't have a chance to read it all. So, you know, when you do interviews you frequently read through something. You don't read it page for page, word for word. You read through it. You read things to kind of get the gist of it. It's funny, because I would read, and the book was about the Eisenhower – George Marshall relationship. Every time I'd read through it, it was either Eisenhower talking about this guy Fox Conner, or Marshall talking about this guy Fox Conner. And I said, well, Conner looks interesting and I'd like to read a book about him. I got on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble. I didn't see a book about Fox Conner. So I've decided that I always wanted to write a book. He looked like a good place to start, so I started with him. That is so awesome. That's true. So, Mark Perry, I have him to thank for this. If Mark had told me no, and I had gone on to do something else on that radio show, I probably would never have heard of this gentleman, and you and I wouldn't be speaking today. You said you'd always wanted to write a book. Had you considered writing any other book before this? What spoke to you about this specifically. Well. I can't say that I did. I grew up reading. My father was a big reader, and we always grew up around books. It's just been a vague thing that I always wanted to do, and just a dormant desire. This seemed to be an opportunity and I thought I would give it a shot. You're a full time practicing attorney. How did you go from hearing about Fox Conner to saying, “you know I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna undertake this enormous research effort and then write it and then edit it and revise it and publish it.” Tell me about that whole process from thinking about it to tackling it. I started small. I started like anybody else would. I started Googling and I saw what was out there and most of the Googling was to see if I could find a book on this guy. The information came in and honestly, it's not really difficult to do when you're a practicing attorney. The skills are highly complementary, at least in the field that I practice. I’m a litigation attorney. What we do day in, day out – we are confronted with a mass of information and we need to rapidly update things. Sort out what seems useful from what's not. Organize it in some manner for later use. Honestly this was not a chore relative to the practice of law. It was actually very complementary. It became the same fundamental exercise, except it was something that was perhaps more interesting to me personally than the run of the mill legal case. I don't have a very exotic law practice. I deal basically with the defense of truck wrecks. I represent a lot of trucking companies and insurance companies. But the analytical skills of it are essentially the same, really. So it really was not anything more than just taking on the work that I would do during the regular work day, except I would apply it to something that I found very interesting to me personally. Iit all just kind of went from there. So it was really not too hard. How long did it take you from getting going until you submitted the final manuscript, and you knew it was going to get published was it a year two? The interview with Mark Perry, I believe, was in 2007. The germ of the idea started in 2007 and I did a little bit on it. Then I put it aside for a good long while. It was probably around 2010 that I had kind of played with it, as you might play with growing a garden. You work on it then mostly leave it alone. I was born in 1960, so I hit 50 at that time, and it was like, “I’m not getting any younger. Let's try.” At that point in time, I decided to start putting ideas into concrete sentences and paragraphs, and so forth. I would say I wrote it in earnest. Now, bearing in mind, this is something that's always been fun for me. It's not what I do for money. It generates a little bit of income, but trust me not enough to quit my day job. I just had fun with it. Fortunately, I had absolutely no pressure to finish it by any time. That phase took me probably about 5 years. Then I found a publisher and got a contract. Well, at that point there was pressure to get it done. But when I agreed to that timeframe, I figured I could make it. You could say from initial conception to it hitting the shelves took 8 or 9 years. That's amazing. Did writing this biography change your life in any way? If so, how? Well, I had fun. Changed me? Probably not. I can honestly say this whole thing has been fun for me, including our chat today. For some guys fun is playing golf and I used to be a big fisherman. Everybody's got a different definition of “fun.” This whole thing has been a pleasure for me. It's been enjoyable. If there was ever a nanosecond that it felt like work, I just stopped. I put it aside and didn't deal with it until I was ready to do so. I'm very flattered that you reached that to discuss it. But by no means have I achieved any sort of status or stature as a literary figure. Nothing like that. I am still today what I was when I started it: a guy raising a family, practicing law, trying to find something that's fun to do in life that you don't get in trouble for. Other than maybe enhancing it and making life a little bit more fun for me, it has not changed me. Can we talk about a couple of moments in Fox Conner's life? One of which is this: I am so interested in Fox Conner spending 15 years as a Captain. I’m a GenXer. The thought to me of staying in place for 15 years is an anathema. And it seems like Millennials or Gen Zers or subsequent generations would feel the same way. The thought of having the same title, same rough pay, same rough duties for a decade and a half – that boggles my mind. Talk to me about that period in Fox Conner's life, how he kept going, how he persevered, and the worth he saw in the work, even though it seemed like he wasn't advancing. Let's start with that last word, “advancing.” Advancement means you're moving relative to something else, right? Well, everyone else around him was in the same boat. None of his contemporaries moved any faster. He was where everyone else was. The military was not then like it is now. It was a very small, tiny, fraternal thing. The concept was that if you want this as your career, you're going to pay your dues, and you're not going to advance in rank fast – it wasn't unique to him. He was well with his contemporaries. That’s point number one. Point number two – let me ask you, Russell, did you read the book? Or did you do like I did [with Mark Perry’s book] and skim it? Yes, I read it. Three times. I read it for fun a while back. Then I read it deeply to take notes for my essay, Then I did skim it leading up to this interview. So point two – yah, he didn’t advance in rank. But if you think about the period that you're talking about – think about how interesting and enjoyable some of the things he did during that time. He got to go to France, and this is a boy from rural Mississippi. Man, I've been up there. Today that is the boondocks. Can you imagine a century ago? Well, this man got to spend a year living in France, living in Paris. He was sent to and succeeded at these brand-new, cutting edge colleges and schools that the army had set up to train and develop its best and brightest. Ye, he was still a captain, but among the captains again advancement relative to what? I think the guy wanted to be a soldier. He didn't want to be anything else. He wanted to be a soldier. They weren't going to make special rules for him. A lot of his contemporaries didn’t make Captain. It’s like right now in the military. You get to the point where there's a ton of Lieutenant Colonels, and you move up or you move out. I do not think Conner viewed it as something that required perseverance and endurance. I think he would have told you he was advancing very well relative to his peers. Interesting. Fascinating. I’m sure I’m forgetting a few postings here and there, but the man loved horses. A posting to Fort Riley, Kansas, where you had a lot of off time as an artillery officer and you can just ride the prairies out there on horses. Yeah,I think the guy had a great time. I want to ask about another time in Conner's career. This is the end of World War I. He is in the Palace of Versailles. He's at the ceremony signing the treaty to end World War I. You do a really nice job of talking about the aura, the atmosphere, the champagne being popped in that room. The Allies are ecstatic. Finally, after years, all the killing and slaughter have ended. And it's Conner, who, seemingly alone, looks at everything going on, and looks beyond that, and thinks to himself, “the next world war is basically guaranteed at this ceremony.” Later, he mentors Eisenhower and Marshall and George Patton and others to get ready, because the next world war is coming. I remember Edgar Puryear, my teacher, talking about this: “Get ready for the next world war. It is coming.” I'd love to hear from you. How did he have that insight? How did he look beyond that moment of celebration? How did he look ahead 20, 30 years to see that something terrible was going to happen because of what was going on in that ceremonial moment? Well, I can only speculate. What we have on all that comes from people who are relating what Conner told them. In my own research, I did not see a diary entry or a letter or anything first-person from Conner, where it says that. It's second hand. It's coming from what people say he said. Now, I accept that. I think enough people related it and it seems plausible to me. I do have some insight and speculation as to why I think that was the case. There are three primary factors. The first one: The United States fought the Germans in that war, but Conner was an admirer of the German military. If you look back to Conner's formative period, when he's studying at the Staff College, at Leavenworth, Kansas, and at the Army War College, they were studying the Germans. They were studying the successful methods by which the Germans had managed to defeat the French in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. All their map exercises were modeled off of that experience, and I could go on and on. During the war he did not have a hatred for the Germans at all. In fact, because he was in such close quarters with them, I think he probably had as much disdain for the French as he did the Germans. So, he did not have a disdain for the German military and he in fact admired the martial skills of the German Empire. Then number two is Conner, in his heart of hearts, had always thought that the war needed to end on German soil. If you go back to the end of the war, he was busy planning up this big offensive that was going to take place in Lorraine and head toward Metz and capture the coal fields. A lot of Conner's critics thought, “this guy was bummed the war ended when it did. He was having a ball, he was having the time of his life doing all this.” I quoted some of those critics in my book. I think Conner thought: ”the way that the Germans quit is not good. This isn't how it was supposed to have ended. It was supposed to end with the actual military defeat in Germany, where their ability to wage war was removed.” A third factor he had gathered from his time in the French army. When he had served that year with the French army, he had seen how France and Germany had a visceral hatred of each other concerning the Alsace and Lorraine provinces. He thought that just as the French felt humiliated after 1870 and would not forget it, and would motivate them for revenge, the Germans would feel humiliated after World War I and that would motivate them. And they were and they did. So, I think you put those three together to answer your question. That's as close as I can come. This is awesome. This is incredible. What I’m hearing from you is because the war didn't end with a real military victory by the Allies on German soil, the Germans had this psychological sense, that they didn't really lose. I think that's been borne out by history. Hitler used that to great effect – that they were never beaten; that it was Jews and other people who sold them out at Versailles. Their system collapsed, their political system collapsed, their economic system collapsed. A blockade had been on them for years. But on the battlefield, they could have and should have retreated behind the Ardennes Forest, regrouped, waited for the spring, and come back again. I mean, look! They quit in the middle of November. The winter was almost there. Conner was not alone, by the way, in thinking that the war was going to end in 1919. I think he may have been a little bit more disappointed that it didn't end the way he thought it should, and would, have ended. His critics were not at all kind to him on the thought that he was actually sorry that this was over with. If you sort of look at the totality of World War I, the accomplishments of the German war machine are remarkable. When the Americans entered the war in April 1917, look what had happened or was about to happen. The Bolshevik Revolution had taken the Russians out of the war. So the Germans could redeploy all of those troops and material and effort to the Western front. There was great fear among the Americans that they better get there fast, or France is going to collapse before they could do any good. But it was remarkable that the Germans had held up a two-front war for that long. A lot of credit there goes to the French. They really had the good sense to put in a conciliator, a commander like one that Eisenhower later became, rather than someone who would dictate to the British. And that was Marshal Ferdinand Foch. The French and the British both understood that they had to form a combined, actual alliance rather than two independent armies fighting at the same time. It is rather remarkable that the Germans did not succeed in 1918, because the Americans were not there with enough force to stop the German offenses. We can’t say we had no role, but we were not the primary reason the war ended. The Germans had more men, but at the end of the day their farms could only feed so many people, their factories could make only so many artillery shells and bullets. The collapse in Germany came from within. The political system collapsed. The industrial base collapsed. With the blockade, the British strangled them, and it worked. That was as much of a factor in why they just quit. What was your view of General John J. Pershing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_J._Pershing) at the end of your research? Very, very skilled commander in chief. I don't have anything negative to say about Pershing. I think that he was given a massive undertaking with wholly inadequate resources. Very, very vague guidance on how it was he was supposed to accomplish this. Went over there took charge of the situation, assembled a very talented team around him. Conner was by no means the only one. He held his ground. He conceded points to his Allies when he needed to. He held firm when he needed to. As a leader of a military over there, I think he did a fine job. I am sure someone can nitpick. I'm sure minds that are much more attuned to military strategy than mine can find countless things. You can find countless things Napoleon did wrong if you nitpick. But on the whole, if you look at what the man was asked to do, what he was given to work with, and what the ultimate accomplishments were, I give him an A+. Now would I necessarily want him for my father-in-law. Probably not. He was a hard man. But I don't know that you're going to be everybody's best friend, and accomplish the mission that he had. In France, he had to play Secretary of State. He had to be the head of the army. He had to play the American Ambassador. He was all of these roles simultaneously. And he had confusing orders from Congress, and his boss, Peyton C. March (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peyton_C._March), the Army Chief of Staff, hated him. What an awful, terrible role to be in. And I totally understand March’s position. Okay. When a flawed structure is in place, and you are asked to function within the flawed structure, what's more important: accomplishment of what you're asked to do or adherence to the rules and regulations of the structure? A vast majority of the population maybe, including me, would say, “Well, the rules say to do xyz. So, I guess we should do it that way.” What galled March so much was that Pershing just did it. He didn't ask for March’s approval, didn't care what March thought, and as long as they were succeeding no one was going to remove him. Now, had the Germans not collapsed, or if Conner's grand plan to go into Germany and beat them over there not worked after a while, then I’m sure he would have found himself with friends few and far between. One thing I've wondered. It was not like the man we elected as President in 1920 was that outstanding of a figure: Warren G. Harding. I tend to think Pershing would have made a fine president, but he never got off the ground. He wanted it. He was definitely interested in it, but never got off the ground. So, George Washington heads a war. President Andrew Jackson's the leading figure coming out of 1812. President Zachary Taylor is the leading figure coming out of the Mexican War. Ulysses Grant comes out of the Civil War. Teddy Roosevelt comes out of the Spanish-American War. Dwight Eisenhower comes out of Worl War II. All these guys become president. But not Persing, and that’s very interesting. He would have made a good president. I don't think he'd have done any worse than Harding for sure. It's interesting to consider the military leaders that didn't get the chance to be president. Douglas MacArthur got shot down. He was old at that time. Colin Powell got shot down. He sort of floated the idea, then didn't really take off at all. I remember poor Powell out there with a Mexican hat on trying to do the Macarena dance. Ha! He's not cut out for this. You had the right job. You had the right job. Absolutely, and you know what? Powell passed away recently. But I bet you, Powell is sitting in his rocking chair, thank the good Lord above that he did not become president. Was Conner a religious man? I don't think he was. None of that comes through in anything I read. He may have gone to church. But I don't think that he identified with any particular religion. He probably went to whatever chapel was on the base, he would probably go to set an example for his men. But otherwise, not that I know of. Besides Conner himself, who emerged as the most interesting figure or intriguing figure in his life, Was it his wife? Was it Eisenhower? Was it Marshall? Who else steps out of the shadow? Yeah, let's think about that. I don't know that I’m able to boil that down to one person. His father was a massive influence upon him. I don't think there's any doubt, because of the strength of character of his father and Conner's admiration of him, and desire to emulate him. His father was a big influence on him. Beyond that, he definitely was influenced by General Pershing in the same manner that he later influenced Eisenhower. My take on Marshall was that he and Conner were much more friends – there may have been a rank differential between them, but again, in that army, that wasn't as defining as it is right now. But he and Marshall were contemporaries and pals and buddies. With Eisenhower, that was clearly a mentor-protege-type relationship. Conner was very influenced by his wife and wife's family. He had a sincere fondness, maybe love, for his wife. But also army officers tended to make advantageous marriages to women with money, because they were expected to be in a certain lifestyle, fairly or not. Conner and his people had no money. These were dirt farmers, in 1920s Mississippi. I do think he and his wife genuinely liked each other. I think she didn't take anything off of him. He didn't take anything off of her. One thing is pretty revealing – rarely were they apart. A lot of people did not take their spouse with them to postings. But he did. She went with them, and I think they in general genuinely enjoyed each other's company. Those are the figures I think of. I agree. His father-in-law really stood out to me. He was, as you know, wealthy, and that opened up for him a totally different life – an aristocratic New York-based right life. That was very different than his parents. Not morally better, but different. I think he always in his heart of heart viewed himself as a Mississippi boy. He never viewed himself as a New Yorker. He viewed himself as a guy from Mississippi. But when leaves of absence occurred he would head up to the Adirondack Mountains and not head back to the heat and humidity of Mississippi's cotton fields. Hell, I can't blame him. I live in a place very similar. As time went on, particularly once his parents died, he had less and less reason to go down South and he went very infrequently. I don't believe that many of his nephews and nieces from his several brothers and sisters really knew him to any degree. Whereas I'm still in touch with the people in New York – the nephews and nieces on that side of his family. They're still calling their kids “Fox Conner.” He definitely became integrated much more into that New York family. I want to ask a few questions about him as a leader and as a mentor. If I want to be a great mentor, what lessons should I take from Fox Conner? Let me think about that. I would say, number one – be yourself. Don't try to be anything different. I mean you can't. You can't give somebody what you don't have. That's fundamental. You can't give someone any sort of attribute that you don't have yourself. You have to be yourself. If you see some potential in someone, have patience. This is Life 101, but just because you want something doesn't mean it's gonna happen immediately, or happen ever. Be patient. Be clear. What is it that you're trying? What is it that you're trying to convey? Don't bury the message in 20 minutes of anecdotes where it might get lost in what you're trying to tell. If someone is responsive enough to ask you questions, maybe even challenge the way you think, give that the respect of consideration. Perhaps they're right. Perhaps whoever it is that you're trying to teach can teach you something. Those are the things that pop immediately. We hear about Conner’s successes. And there may be an open question – maybe Eisenhower would have turned into Eisenhower even without Fox Conner. Did you find anyone who Fox Conner did really try to mentor but it didn't turn out so well? So, some of the folks that were kind of equivalent to Eisenhower, but they didn't pan out. Yes. For whatever reason, the mentoring didn’t stick or something else happened to thwart Conner’s efforts. Two names come to mind. But first, let's put that in perspective. If the measuring stick is – become Supreme Allied Theatre Commander and President of the United States – then nobody else measured up. I can think of one guy in particular. In the interwar period there was a gentleman, an army officer, named Trimble Brown. Trimble was an aide de camp to the General Conner. And Conner got him sent to the right schools, and did all this with Trimble as well as Eisenhower. So, Trimble is of command age when the Second World War breaks out. He’s a Colonel at that point. I cannot recall if he was the commander of a regiment or a battalion, but it was one of them that was involved in the early combat experiences in North Africa. You know we had a very spotty record up until the Kasserine Pass (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kasserine_Pass). And I can’t recall of it was at Kasserine or an action that led to it, but Trimble Brown’s unit was seriously outmaneuvered and encircled. I think Trimble got away, but a lot of his men were captured. And Trimble didn't see the battlefield again after that. In fact, I could see in Marshall's papers at this point – in late 1942 or early 1943 – and Conner is writing to Marshall on on Trimble Brown's behalf. Conner is, saying, “Look just let him come home.” And you know the saying, “Victory has 1,000 fathers but defeat is an orphan.” Trimble was under much scrutiny and criticism, and Conner intervened to just let him come home. Trimble Brown would be one. The other one that pops to mind – the man's name is so distinctive. His name was Xenophon Price. Price had been one of Conner's right-hand men in the G3, in the operation section of the American Expeditionary Force General Headquarters in World War I. So, Price was one of Conner's boys. Now he got to be a Major. After the war Price was Pershing’s kind of chief assistant on the American Battlefield Monuments Commission. You may recall from the book that Eisenhower served under Price for a little while on this Battle Monuments Commission. I can remember Eisenhower quoting Price as saying that “you mark my word, the men who serve on this Commission are destined for great things.” That was Xenophon Price in 1919. Well, when Eisenhower takes over, he becomes Theater Commander in 1942. He runs across the name of Xenophon Price – who is still a Major at that point. You move up or you move out, and he did neither. They just kept him as a Major for all that time. Eisenhower at least promoted him to Colonel, so that he could get out as a Colonel at least. None of these are household names, but a lot of the people who served with Conner in that G3 section of World War I went on to have positions of prominence in the interwar period, then to hold major field command roles in the Second World War. But poor old Price! He got stuck at Major! Now why was that? I didn't take the time to dig into that. But, as I say, if you try to measure people against the Eisenhower standard, well, then, they were all failures, you know? In his own mind, what do you think was Conner's biggest disappointment or his own sense of failure? If he had any. For an army officer to not command forces in actual military combat was a disappointment to him. I know he felt that acutely in the early stages of his career, where he did not go to Cuban and he did not go to the Philippines. But I do think he reconciled himself, maybe a lot better than, say, George Marshall. Conner was a devotee of the General Staff system – again harkening back to the Germans and the admiration that he had for them. He thought that those people were as good as they were in the field primarily because their General Staff were as good as they were behind the lines. I think he reconciled himself early on to that. I never really saw where he expressed any great disappointment during the First World War that he was not commanding troops then. Others, like James Harbord (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Harbord), did. He pestered Pershing incessantly to get a battlefield command. Conner came to a recognition that he was where he was good; his is what he's good at. Everybody cannot be the quarterback. We need some good solid guards here, we need a good tight end. Pick your sport. Not everybody can be the pitcher. We need a good shortstop here, and so on. I think the man genuinely enjoyed what he did. I think he found the period after World War I hard. You didn’t wear military uniforms anymore, you wore a coat and tie. I think he hated that. He hated the de-emphasis, almost the marginalization, of the military role. He was not good giving testimony. He hated going to Congress. You know he hated the political and Washington, DC part of it. I don't believe the man was disappointed at all that he did not become Chief of Staff, except perhaps in 1930, because Douglas MacArthur got it. He and MacArthur didn't get along. Short of that, he was extremely happy when they put him over those Civilian Conservation Corps camps in the in the 1930s. He could wear his riding boots; he could go out on horseback; he could sit down and eat with the guys; I think he loved all that. Steve, some last few questions. This has been amazing! What lessons do you take away from the life of Fox Conner? I admire his devotion to his particular profession and calling. That sticks out for me. For a lot of those guys, it would have been easy to quit and a lot did. I admire his devotion. It speaks highly of him that he understood his role and did it as best as he could. He wasn't constantly sniping at people who had other roles. He was a great team player. Back to an earlier question – I don't think it's really debatable that without Fox Conner you have no Eisenhower. Without Fox Conner, Eisenhower gets convicted in a court martial of fudging on expense reimbursements. I don't believe he comes back from that. The army at that point had more officers than they needed. This would not have been a slap on the wrist for Eisenhower. The fact that he did take an interest in someone and helped them for no benefit to himself, that speaks well. Those are kind of the things I take from Conner. I find him so intriguing that in his own career he married the callings of his father and his mother. His father was a soldier in the Civil War. His mom was a teacher. He became both of those things in his career. I believe he did. The Conner home in Slate Springs, Mississippi, formed him, but that's probably true for most of us. He was fortunate that he had two very positive factors that coalesced into his upbringing. Not all of us are that lucky. But I don't think there's any doubt about that. His parents were teachers and he was a teacher. I don't think there's any doubt about that. And so, I think that's true. How do you think he evaluated his own life? How did he look back on his own life? How did he evaluate it? If you happen to remember from the book, it ends with Conner fishing on a lake. He's being rowed around by this young guy, Sam Black, who was waiting to be called up in World War II. So, here's Conner and Sam Black, old man and young guy, rowing around in a boat and fishing. I don't know if you fish or not, but I've done a lot of fishing, and when you're fishing, you tend to make it a nice, pleasant conversation. Everything has this nice glow about it. According to Sam, Conner talked about being a soldier and enjoying his military career. I see no evidence that he ever graded himself. I think General Conner would have said – given what I had to work with, I did as well as I could do. Undoubtedly, I made some mistakes. Undoubtedly, I zigged when he should have zagged, and so forth. But I got absolutely no inclination from him that he viewed his career as anything but a success. Another witness to this was Sam’s contemporary, Macpherson Conner, the grandson of Fox Conner. Incidentally I met him, and he turned over a lot of the information which was really the big unlocking of the treasure chest to get this book written. Mac goes to West Point; he wanted to be like his grandpa. And I think that if you had a guy who was not proud of his career, I don't think he'd have been talking about it while being rowed around in a boat with a young guy. And I don't think his grandson would have been motivated to go to West Point too. That's my speculation. That brings up the undercurrent of his relationship with his son Tommy, and then Tommy’s son Mac, was intriguing and interesting, too. Well, I don't think he did a great job on Tommy. Tommy's name was Fox Conner, but there was a reason he called himself Tommy. In fact, I think Tommy really did not want to go to West Point. That’s pretty clear. The military was something that Fox Conner essentially made his son do. Tommy wanted to go to MIT and be an engineer and take over the family business. And that's ultimately what Tommy ended up doing. That’s right. But again, I don't know that if Conner was displeased with his military career, that he would have been as insistent that his own son go there. Let me just say this. I sure hope people don't put a microscope to my own parenting. I'm sure we could all point to shortcomings and all that. I don't think he would have been the only man of his time or any other who wanted one thing for his son with the son wanted something else, and the son ultimately yielded – to everyone's regret. That's a story as old as the hills. I don't think Tommy even made his four years. He got out and went to work, I believe, for RCA, which was a major thing at that time in wireless communications. And the guy he went to work for was James Harbord – probably Pershing’s closest right-hand guy in World War I. That’s who Tommy went to work for. So yeah, Tommy did it. Tommy hated it. From what Mac told me – Tommy's wife, who would be Mac’s Mom, was not nearly as into military life as Bug Conner was Right. I can imagine my wife’s reaction if I said, “Hey Sweetie, I want to work in the Army and we’re going to live in Leavenworth, Kansas.” Last question for you, Steve. What's next? Do you have any more books in you? The truthful answer is this. Back then I just hit 50. Okay? Well, I’m in my sixties now, My law practice is still just as busy as it ever was. In fact, it's busier. We're having trouble finding attorneys and paralegals and secretaries. That’s a dying breed – legal secretaries don’t really exist anymore. So I find myself with less time than I did and certainly, unfortunately, less energy. You know, I wouldn't have thought that, but I find myself with a little bit less energy in my sixties than I did in my fifties! I have been working on another project since 217 or 2018 on another project. I’ve got a wealth of material. But I just don't find that I've got the energy and the juice to come home after a day at the office, or in the courtroom, and come home and work on it. I find myself more just wanting to sit down, and do less cerebral things. And so, that means I’m just getting older. But if I could make it work, I think it would be a fine book. It's about one of Conner's contemporaries. So, you asked the question: who did I come across in the Conner experience that really intrigued me? Well, the guy I am working on now is Malin Craig (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malin_Craig). Absolutely – the Army Chief of Staff right before Marshall. Yes. He's another one with no books on him. Zero books. General Craig's grandchildren are still alive, and just like Mac Conner, they opened the key and turned over all their stuff to me. There's a great story there. I just don't have the energy that I once had, and that's for better or for worse. So, I don't know exactly how much longer I'm gonna work. I have no plans to retire. I still plan to write the Malin Craig book if nobody beats me to it. I know a lot of folks when they ponder retirement, they wonder what will they do with themselves? I really don't think that'll be my problem. I've got the raw material for that book. People contact me on a fairly regular basis about this Fox Conner book and comment favorably upon the degree of facts that are in it. This Craig project is the same. We just have to make it work. The other book I’d like to write, depending on how much time the good Lord gives me, is this. I live down here in Louisiana and down in these parts, one famous thing that all guys my age and older grew up knowing about is something called the Louisiana Maneuvers of 1941 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Maneuvers). The book I'm writing on Craig will end in 1939. It's gonna end when Marshall takes over as Chief of Staff in 1939. But I don't think the Louisiana Maneuvers have been written about properly. So, if I happen to be blessed with a lot of longevity, that would probably be Book Number Three. Right now, I can't get Book Number Two done. When you finish the Craig book, I will definitely read it. It sounds amazing. I would love to learn more about him. I'm quite flattered. That is crazy. You know, guys like Conner and like Craig, the reason there really was no book, and the reason that a guy like me gets to write that book is you can't write that book. If you're writing books for a big publisher… Yeah, right, there's no way. You just cannot write those books, because you can't do the research, and you can't turn it around in time to meet the kind of deadlines they have. Nor do books like that have any sort of mass appeal, They seem to be of great interest to military history aficionados. When you look at people who make a living writing books, they are few and far between. And so, it has to be somebody who takes it on as a project, to get these done. Well, Steve, this has been amazing. I appreciate it so much. Let me say I’m very flattered. This has all been fun for me. I didn't know if anybody would like it, and so it's gratifying to me that you take the time from your weekend to chat with me about it. I got as much out of this call if not more than you did, so I thank you. Yeah. Well, Steve again: thank you so much. I'm so grateful. Uncle Ray, thanks for listening in on us. Uncle Ray: I had muted mine, so I wouldn't do anything to interfere with the interview. I want to tell you I came away with as much as probably both of you all did as well. Steve: Well, I'm glad. So, what area of the law do you practice in Ray? Uncle Ray: Well, I was in litigation for 41 years, and probably the bulk of that was more appellate practice. But the law firm – similar to how you described your practice – we did defense work. We did a significant amount for insurance companies. We did a lot of product liability and things along that line. Some trucking cases, but not nearly of the magnitude that your practice includes. I did it for about 41 or 42 years. Steve: So, you understand, there's really not a major shift to go from the massive intake of disorganized information to put that into a coherent trial, presentation, or an appeal brief presentation, to writing a book. That skill is essentially the same. Uncle Ray: Yeah, I think the tactics, the strategy, there are clearly similarities. Steve: Yeah, absolutely. Well, gentlemen, it was a pleasure meeting, both of you. And thank you. All right. Thanks again, Steve. I appreciate it. (This article contains Amazon Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sa.life (https://www.sa.life?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

13. 

    6 Feb 2025

    An Interview With Famed Clothier Herb Melton of the Tom James Company

    In March 2022, on the cusp of his retirement after 46 years as a clothier, I sat down with Herb Melton (https://www.tomjames.com/contact/clothier-home.aspx?empidn=01201) of the Tom James Company (https://www.tomjames.com/default.aspx). Herb has served as my clothier or tailor for more than 30 years – since my father couldn’t find me an off-the-rack suit that would fit my 5’ 9” and 105-pounds body to wear for college admissions interviews. Since then, Herb – and his Tom James colleagues in Washington, DC and Denver – have made me terrific-looking and comfortable clothes to fit my still-odd-body-shape (https://www.sa.life/p/the-body-issue). A few points to ponder: * R. M. Williams (https://www.rmwilliams.com/), the Australian rancher and leather goods maker, had a dictum that “when men or women move, they carry with them what they are.” Meaning, we reveal ourselves in everything we do. The conversation with Herb reminded me of that adage. * We spoke of the decline of Brooks Brothers (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/business/brooks-brothers-retail-bankruptcy.html), among other brands in the menswear space. It suggested to me that however powerful and unassailable certain companies appear today — Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, Tesla, and the like — the wheel of history always spins. Human efforts are short; time is long. We can’t tell the future, but I wouldn’t bet on them remaining the top companies in, say, 100 years. * Herb worked with my Dad, and still works with my Uncle, my brother and me. He talks about working with three generations within a family. It seems like a rarer type of relationship in these transactional days, but I wouldn’t trade our bond with him for the world. It may have started with business and, to some extent, it remains a business bond. But it has mostly become friends assisting friends, with generosity and a sense of fun. Herb is full of wisdom and wit. Enjoy! One thing that has always interested me: in the 30 years we’ve worked together, you have always called yourself a clothier. What does that mean? It’s really an old, old term. Even before I got into the business, it pretty much had fallen into disuse. A clothier is somebody who provides quality clothing, specifically to men. A clothier is the equivalent of your stock broker, your attorney, your accountant, or your real estate agent. They all provide advice and service in a particular area where men need expertise, but generally don’t have either the inclination to have it or the time to have it. When you say it’s an old term. Your company makes custom clothing and you deliver a particular service. Would you say that in the old days the salespeople at, say, Brooks Brothers or places like that would also view themselves as clothiers? As a rule, I would say yes. The even older term which you still hear occasionally, although I think for me is a little pretentious, is haberdashery. Clothier just seems to fit. In my case, I don’t sew other than being able to sew a button back on for somebody. I really don’t sew, so I’m not a tailor. But I do take the measurements and style the clothing for my clients so that they look the way they want and need to look. Clothier just seems to be most appropriate. At some point, you made the comment that folks coming up behind you -- younger folks getting into the clothing business -- don’t view themselves as clothiers. Now, do you still agree with that and if you do, what do they view themselves as? How do they view their jobs and their roles? Well, it seems to me that today most – now there would be exceptions to this – yes they would want to consider themselves clothiers. But generally, younger people coming into the business seem to be more interested in fashion than style. And, as you know, I’ve always made the distinction that style is what’s right for you and fashion is what some guy in New York wants you to wear. And fashion is driving the clothing business more and more and more and more. There are exceptions to this in Louisville, I would call The Fashion Post (https://thefashionpost.com/) the lone exception to this these days, but the stores are driven by fashion. Even Brooks Brothers has gone a long way to succumbing to the fashionista look rather than doing what made it great. In your view what made Brooks Brothers great? Classic styles and quality pieces that one could invest in and keep with proper care almost literally as long as they wanted to. Investment clothing versus turnover clothing. Would you say that more and more purveyors of clothing today are more and more about that sort of turnover clothing? That’s true in broader society, right? I mean we have these iPhones, computers, TVs and they aren’t meant to last for ten years. They are built to last for two years and then we throw them out and get a new one, right? Disposability dominates our culture and from my perspective is ruining our culture. Let’s take this in a slightly different direction. Right now you and I are wearing blazers, which is somewhat uncommon, right? The world has gone casual. Part of that’s Covid and part of that’s staying home and so on. But a lot of it is a larger trend of the world going more casual. Tell me about your business – how has it evolved? How is it doing in an increasingly casual world? That’s a good question. Early on – during the dot-com phenomenon of the late 90s and early 2000s -- when the casual things first started to appear on the scene, that kind of caught us off guard. Immediately at that point suit sales dropped and sport coat sales zoomed. They went way, way, way up. It put us in the position where we were forced to and were able to get into providing a lot of knit shirts and more casual pants. Eventually, we got into jeans. If you had asked me when I started if Tom James would ever sell jeans, I would have said no. But we sell a lot of jeans. In fact, we have a separate company that partners with us based in Mississippi which sells custom blue jeans that are amazing. The trend today – especially with younger folks – people don’t wear a suit everyday. So they don’t buy three suits. But they may spend the equivalent of three suits for one suit that they will wear when they need one. They will invest more in a nicer cloth and a nicer make of the suit than they might have done previously when they bought three suits at a time because that’s what they had to wear to work. And so if you have to buy only one suit, what’s your recommendation for that one suit? It will never be anything other than a navy or charcoal plain. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean a complete solid, because something like a tick weave or a nail head or even a birds-eye can function in that role and have a little bit more interest. But with a plain charcoal or plain navy suit. I call them “Marrying and Burying suits;” if you accessorize them properly, you can wear them at almost any occasion – from a semi-formal evening like cocktail reception or political reception to just a change of pace day when you wear them with a tattersall shirt or a check shirt and a fun tie or even a solid knit tie or something like that. Are knits a new thing? I read about knits all the time now and I don’t remember that growing up. You’re not old enough to remember. When I was in high school we wore square-bottomed knits rooster ties. And I just happened to be on the J. Press website today. And they had some of the most beautiful striped knit ties I have ever seen (https://jpressonline.com/collections/neckwear/knits). So you know, I’m like wow those are cool. But this is about the third time around for knit ties. The first time around was like the 50’s, 60’s? The first was in the 50s and early 60s. Younger friends of mine used to say you’re channeling your 80s today. I don’t remember it at the time. Because at the time, I probably would not have worn a knit tie. Yeah, I don’t remember knits in the 80s. But I was a little kid. Now I have every color I can get my hands on because I live in sports coats more and more, and knit ties are great with them. And they’re great for wearing with patterned shirts and you can be dressed up because you have an event or meeting that requires dressing up. But if you’ve got a knit tie and a cool shirt on you can just unbutton the collar and loosen the tie a little bit and go in someplace that you need to go that’s much more casual without looking totally out of place. Who are people today and you think, “that guy nails it. That guy’s got his own sense of style he knows who he is”? And he just looks great in whatever setting he’s in. Can you think of anybody? This is this is very limited sample and I’m going to alienate several of your readers, but I think Tucker Carlson dresses great. He’s very dressed up preppy. I saw him at the airport once. He’s a tall guy. And so I recognized him, but he was not wearing his tie so strange to see him without a tie. You know, I think for his role and I’m reasonably certain he doesn’t choose his clothing, but I think Joe Biden always looks great. I don’t think much of him, but I think he looks great. By the way, he always has a perfectly tied tie with a nice dimple in it. Yes, he does. I noticed that too. That’s one of those little things that for lack of a better way to put it, separates the men from the boys and the well-dressed from the not so well-dressed I have never been able to get the dimple right. We can have a practice session. What are some trends in men’s style today you do actually like, that you applaud? I like the continuation of wearing a jacket. One of the things that I enjoy doing more and more myself as I transition in my career, is wearing a jacket with jeans. I have jokingly said for a long time that if you’re traveling you either have to wear a jacket or bring a man-bag. And I am not a man-bag kind of person. I never get on an airplane without a blazer – it may be the oldest blue blazer in my closet, but I never get on an airplane without a jacket. That is so rare. I remember the first time I flew on a plane. I wore khakis, a blue shirt and my tiny little blue blazer. Now, it’s probably been 12 years since I’ve worn a blazer on a flight. Habits are hard to break and it’s not one I want to break. For lack of a better way to say it, wearing a blazer on a plane is a way of life for me. It depends whether I’ll actually put a tie on and if I do, it’ll probably be a knit. But I always wear a blazer when I fly. Here’s your chance to pull the arrows out of the quiver. What are the things in men’s style today that you don’t like? Just the general sloppiness. Anytime I go out to dinner, it’s impossible to go to a restaurant anymore – like the English Grill – and see people dressed properly. It’s most illustrated in two things. One, it’s very frustrating to go to the ballet or the orchestra and see people show up in blue jeans – and I’m talking about the 8 o’clock show. Likewise, I mention this going into a restaurant and I’m not talking about a 5-star, white-tablecloth situation. I’m talking about just a semi-casual, nice place. And invariably, the lady in the couple has taken the time to dress up in an appropriate way. It may be dressy casual but nevertheless, she looks nice. Regrettably, more often than not these days, the man with her looks like she picked him up on the corner on the way. Or she was backing out of the driveway and he turned off the lawnmower and hopped in the car with her. I have been in places where it has taken all my willpower not to go ask her where she picked him up because he does not look like he belongs with her. I think it’s totally disrespectful both to her and to the people in the kitchen cooking the food. When I go to a musical or theatrical performance, the people putting on the performance have worked hard to give me their best. I feel like the least I can do is give them my best in return. That doesn’t necessarily mean black tie – although sometimes that’s kinda fun too – but to look like you belong there. These two writers I read – Michael Williams in Los Angeles (https://www.acl.news/) and David Coggins in New York (https://thecontender.substack.com/) – have this sense about style. Their view is that style is about making an effort. I think what you said echoes some of the things they have written about. A lot of men today, especially men, are not trying. Not trying to put forth the effort. My partner, Dougal Munro, operates the U.S. division of our company, Holland & Sherry (https://www.hollandandsherry.com/). Dougal says this: the way I dress for an occasion is a reflection of the esteem and the affection in which I hold the event and the people in attendance. Yeah, that’s well said. That has become my iconic statement on that. Put another way: when I dress up, I dress up for others. I don’t mean that I’m trying to impress them. I dress up so that they see that they matter to me. It’s just like table manners are virtually non-existent these days. The things in our society that expressed interest in and respect for others are being whittled away little by little. To me, dressing properly and helping others do so is one of the ways I can fight back. Let me move to a different set of questions so. I’m a pretty oddball body type. Very narrow legs, thin arms, narrow hips, no butt, very narrow shoulders, average height. For somebody like that, what are some styles you can offer that person to look his best? I’m going to say this and then work my way back into that. Okay? I think that one of the most important things any gentleman can do – and this is equally true for women but that’s not my area of expertise – is find someone who understands your sense of style and is willing to take the time to understand your life where you go, who you see, what you do, and knows enough about colors and patterns and styles to take you where you are and help you look the way you want to look and need to look for whatever you do. So, my answer is: find an expert and then let that expert try to get clothing on you that isn’t so tight that it makes you look like a scrawny waif, but also doesn’t like you’re wearing your big brother’s clothes. It seems like that same advice would be true for the opposite of me too. He should find an expert who understands him, his life, his life situation, where he goes and what he does – and help him dress accordingly. Simple little things matter. My caveat is you can always say I don’t care what is going to look best on me – I like it this way or that way. For instance, you and I are about the same height. I really like cuffs on trousers. Most guys these days don’t wear cuffs. A cuff, in the sense, can be a small hitch that can make you look slightly shorter, but I just like the way a cuff finishes a pair of trousers. You know, on you, a two-button coat looks much better than a three-button coat because it allows you a little longer opening. We make three-button coats for you but we rolled it through the middle button so it has the appearance of a two-button coat. It’s a classic traditional style. But by placing the button at the ideal point, we help to make you look as tall as possible, to make your shoulders look as wide as possible, and to make your waist look as slender as possible. Those kinds of things. Another example is the height of the shirt collar. Depending on the height of a neck and how large a neck someone has, the proper shirt collar both in height and in spread makes a difference. Again, this is one of those places where fashion seems to have run amuck over against what really looks good on people – because everybody wants to wear big wide spread collars. My family used to laugh at me. During presidential debates I would literally be sitting there during the debate, saying “That guy looks like a clown. Somebody who doesn’t know what they’re doing put a shirt collar on him that’s three times too big for him.” In fact, I remember one time when Mitt Romney was running for president, I actually sent an email to his campaign. “You people are screwing up. Those collars are too big for him, you know he looks like a fast-moving fat cat.” And the next time I saw him in a debate they had changed his collar and it was just right. Now whether that had anything to do with it or not, I have no idea. I make no claim, but it was really funny that it happened that way. That’s amazing. That’s so good. Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, wore these big huge collars and he had a small neck and he just looked stupid. What is an accessory a man should have that’s heirloom quality and that he could pass on to his son or son-in-law? He uses it during his life, but that isn’t the point Really, the point is it carries on in the family beyond that. Maybe that’s an outdated idea. No, I don’t think it’s an outdated idea. I’m not a watch guy, but in many cases that would be something that would be a legitimate item to fall in that category. I’d be more inclined to say a nice pen. If I didn’t destroy my briefcases so much and be so attached to them I would say a nice briefcase. But my 35-year-old Atlas is about destroyed and it’s just hanging on to finish my career with me. I’ve had some amazing briefcases that my father gave me. I had one from Levinger that I loved, and I was crushed when a piece of it got stuck on a rental car shuttle at LAX and tore. It ruined the briefcase. I had one from Coach that I loved. And now I’ve got one from Colonel Littleton (https://www.colonellittleton.com/) that I love. But 10 years with a briefcase puts a lot of wear and tear on it. I agree, a briefcase is a tough item to hand down to the next generation. I’m going to put a twist on it and go back to clothing. One of my now-deceased clients was from Paducah. Both sons are clients of mine and now the three grandsons are clients of mine so it’s a third-generation legacy kind of thing. One of the grandsons called me up and he said his dad had outgrown his tuxedo and he’s giving it to me. Well, my original client, the grandfather, was in the Army Air Corp and was stationed in England in the 50s. He had a dinner coat made on Saville Row. Absolutely one of the most beautiful pieces of clothing I’ve ever seen in my life. He had passed it on to his son who happened to be the same size. So we did some small alterations and he wore it. And then when he quit having any interest in dressing up for black tie events gave it to his son. So now the third generation is wearing this absolutely gorgeous dinner coat. To replace it on Saville Row today would cost $7,000 or $8,000. My favorite thing at this point in my life is when I get a legacy client, especially third generation. Pretty much all my third generations, and a lot of my second-generation clients, are in Paducah. The grandfather was a friend of my dad’s. I knew him as a little kid. The kids were more my contemporaries and now their kids are also my clients. I think that’s great. That’s wonderful. Same thing for me. Both of my sons are relatively close to my size and so we can interchange clothing back and forth. When John’s getting rid of stuff, he’ll send it over to the house, mostly casual stuff. And I’ll go yeah, I could use those khakis. And then Aaron’s whole closet, except for a couple of things I’ve made for him, is recycled clothing of mine that’s 18 or 20 years old. I have stolen this idea from a podcast I listen to called Conversations with Tyler (https://conversationswithtyler.com/), hosted by Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University. Its called “Underrated or Overrated.” I’m going to say something and you’re going to tell me whether it's overrated or underrated. OK? OK. Allen Edmonds shoes? Regrettably, currently becoming overrated. The company has changed hands numerous times since we started selling them. I’ve just watched the quality slip and perhaps as importantly the shoe designs just go off the rails. It’s very hard for me now to find shoes that I would really like to buy on the Allen Edmonds website. Alden (http://www.aldenshoe.com/#&panel1-1) is a shoe company that hasn’t changed what they do. Alden is it’s probably rated correctly – it’s just far too unknown. Alden is a great shoe company, as is a certain company called Crockett & Jones (https://us.crockettandjones.com/?us=yes). Ralph Lauren’s impact on American style. Overrated or underrated? I don’t know how to answer that way, but he has had such an amazing impact on the prep world mostly. You know the Purple Label (https://www.ralphlauren.com/brands-purple-label-men-shop-all-cg)sort of gets into the fashion world, but for a guy that started out as a tie salesman, he has really, really had what I think is generally speaking a positive impact on dress culture in America. So would you say underrated or overrated? It seems like he is so pervasive. He does the Olympics, he does sports teams. He’s so out there in the culture. That’s why I was having — I’m struggling to answer. I’ll say underrated, but that’s just because I think his impact is so extensive, that it may not be fully appreciated. How about online clothes shopping? Definitely overrated. If you go back to what I said earlier, the single most important choice you can make about your appearance is putting yourself in the hands of someone with whom you can have a good relationship where he knows you or she knows you well and therefore you can work together to build what you want. Overrated or underrated, fountain pens? Definitely underrated. Well, I’m 72. I grew up in grade school writing with a fountain pen and I still think there’s nothing in the world that’s as enjoyable an experience. Well, I mean in the realm of communication, there’s nothing like sitting down with a nice piece of paper – maybe to write a thank you note or something like that – and a good pen and just writing the note. I never got good grades in penmanship. I had to spend summers sitting at the kitchen table practicing my writing because it was so bad. But I love writing with a pen. Alright, overrated or underrated, LSU football coach Bryan Kelly? In his own mind, he’s the most underrated. In my mind, he may be the most overrated. And I think within the next two years, we’ll know that. Overrated or underrated, baseball hats when you’re not at the ballpark? Well now, I have to ask you a qualifying question. Bill forward or backward? I usually wear mine with the bill forward, but not always. If you’re not catching the baseball game you don’t need your cap on backward. What about a cap on at all? Well, I love wearing baseball caps. I need to cover my head from the sun and sometimes I’m just too casual to wear my lovely straw hat. But I hate flat brims with a passion and the old caps that you could curl and shape are getting virtually impossible to find. Especially the ones that I would like to wear. So wait, let’s go back to Allen Edmonds and Alden. What’s another great shoe brand, American or otherwise, besides Alden and Crockett & Jones? And I’m talking men’s shoes here. Something I haven’t heard of. The iconic is John Lobb (https://www.johnlobb.com/en_us/). The shoes, if I’m not mistaken, are made in Northampton. Interestingly enough, the British shoe-making industry, at least at one time, was centered in Northampton, because they raised cows and there were lots of oak forests. You have the oak bark to use in the tanning and you have the leather right there. Most American shoes, Alden may be an exception, but I don’t think so. But most shoes these days are chromium-tanned. It’s a much faster process, but it doesn’t build the durability and quality into the shoe. Again, it’s sort of like we were talking about: have something for 2 years and throw it away. My shoe repairman went out of business. One of the reasons he closed down after being in business for 25 or 30 years is that the shoes are no longer made to keep and repair. They’re made to wear and dispose of. So the number of shoes he was getting just wasn’t worth keeping the doors open you know. But for instance, the Crockett & Jones shoes, I didn’t change the sole on any of them until they were between 15 and 20 years old – because the oak-tanned leather, especially in the soles, is durable. This talk about shoes reminds me of another example of the decline in men’s care about their appearance. It seems no one shines their shoes anymore, especially, younger guys. Some of that may be tied to the quality factor we just addressed. It also may be due to their never being taught how by their fathers.It is a daily occurrence, when I’m out seeing clients, to see a man, often with a suit on, and shoes, that in all likelihood, have never been shined. It totally destroys any attempt to look professional they made in putting on the suit. It seems particularly bad when the shoes are the lighter shades of tan and brown that are so in vogue today. What about Church’s (https://www.church-footwear.com/us/en.html) shoes? I heard they were sold. Surprise, surprise — quality has declined. That’s what I have heard, at least. I haven’t dealt much with Church’s for a while. Alright, Herb, a couple of last questions. So, I’m curious: you’re entering this phase of semi-retirement, and working only three days a week. How long have you been a clothier? Forty-six years. What have you learned about the world or human nature because you’re a clothier, that I or others who are not in that role haven’t learned? I’m going to put a slightly different twist on it. Because of what I sell, my relationship is different. In some respects, it’s a more personal or more intimate relationship than the fellow who sells them their car or whatever. And I’ve been in a lot of guys’s closets; I’ve been in a lot of people’s homes. I’ve always been an observer and try to watch and try to learn. The lesson that I feel like has been most important to me is this. Because I sell expensive clothes, I deal with people who have some money – maybe some have new money but a lot of generational money folks. I always watch and see over time what happens. I watch and try to get a view of how they raise their children. Then I try to watch and see what happens with those children. And whether the values that made me respect the parents so much get properly passed on, or sadly, sometimes the values that I observed serving them, aren’t necessarily passed on. Kids don’t necessarily turn out well. I’ve seen all the different things. I see families where the second and third generations are great people. I have intense respect for that and have tried to learn from them what I could. The other thing is just watching people and just seeing how they care about how they look. I loved seeing people who care about others – who are givers and not takers – and obviously in this business and in the various circles in which I move I’ve seen it all. Last question. So, 46 years and now going into semi-retirement – what are you looking forward to most? I would be not telling you the truth if I didn’t say hanging out with Ian, my grandson. Yesterday was the first day I really didn’t work. Barb texted me and asked if I wanted to go to the zoo today and I said heck yeah. We met at the zoo at about noon and stayed until about 2:00 pm. And I had a blast. But I have a lot of things that I would like to read and many cases re-read. There are a lot of books I read in college that I dipped too hard into the cliff notes and need to go back and actually read the book cover to cover carefully. What’s one that comes to mind? I don’t know if this is because of the whole Russian-Ukraine thing or because I actually heard a gentleman talk about it at a classical school conference, but The Brothers Karamazov (https://amzn.to/3PVUuOu). It’s going to take me a while. Also The Name of the Rose (https://amzn.to/3X0JRxR) by Umberto Eco. He writes it from the perspective of being a young 13th-century monk. It’s a weird book but it’s fascinating. I had always wanted to read it. When I got Covid I pulled it off my son’s shelf because I was sleeping in his room to stay away from Barb. I pulled it off the shelf and started reading it. It took me two months to finish it, given the amount of time I had. You know the old joke is education is wasted on youth. Well, I was blessed to have the education that I had, particularly, in retrospect, to be in the Program of Liberal Studies, which is a humanities major at Notre Dame. And it gave me the desire to be a lifelong learner. I want to go back and start digging back into books but I also have a lot of things I would like to get down on paper too. We helped start our school 26 years ago and have been an emeritus director for three years now. I don’t want them to have to reinvent the wheel and I want to give it all the time and effort and money I put into that I want what moved us to start it in the first place. I want that to be known and hopefully at least attempted to be lived out. I want to have fun. That’s awesome. You should. Forty-six years. You should. It will be a little easier to go to Notre Dame football games. Wait wait. Is semi-retirement going to make it easier to go to Notre Dame football games? Or is the fact that Brian Kelly’s not the coach going to make it easier? That never stopped me, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as I hoped I would enjoy it. However, I am planning to meet Aaron at Auburn the first weekend in October when LSU comes to Auburn so we can cheer against him. I know that’s a lot of trouble to go to, but I’m really looking forward to it. Alright Herb, thank you so much. It was awesome. Great. (This article contains Amazon Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sa.life (https://www.sa.life?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

14. 

    23 Jan 2025

    Ornithologist Sophie Osborn on the Joys, Trials, Trails, and Tears of Saving Endangered Birds

    Last spring, my friend Bryan McGrath (https://conservativewahoo.substack.com/) mentioned a new book he felt eager to read – Feather Trails: A Journey of Discovery Among Endangered Birds (https://amzn.to/40eE3kT), by Sophie Osborn. Earlier, Bryan wrote about the Merlin Bird ID (https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/) app from Cornell University, which had transformed my walks in nature. Suddenly, rather than merely hearing a bird singing nearby, I could quickly and easily identify it – and usually numerous other birds picked up by the app that I, too, could enjoy if I listened with a touch more attention. So when Bryan mentioned Sophie’s book, and her companion Substack, Words for Birds (https://wordsforbirds.substack.com/), I felt drawn to check them out. I subscribed to her Substack and ordered the book. They were two of the best decisions I made in 2024. Sophie beautifully weaves together her story with lovely nature writing with the science of bird decline and the potential, along with the immense work required, for population renewal. To say I loved Feather Trails massively undersells it. Of the 50 books I read last year, it was one of my top 3 reads. I’m not alone: the Birding Book Club of the American Birding Association named it one of the Best Books of 2024 (https://www.aba.org/08-49-birding-book-club-best-of-2024/). At my request, Bryan kindly introduced Sophie and me late last year. We enjoyed a couple expansive and splendid conversations. Finally, I asked Sophie if I could interview her for “Walks of Life,” and she generously agreed. A few points stood out during our talk, and my subsequent reflections. * We think of human individuals, but less so about animals. Rather, we have a concept of “tigers” or “sharks” or even larger groups like “birds. Sophie’s book and our talk brought home how different and distinct individual animals are. The individual California Condors she worked with exhibited very distinct and unique personalities. On my walks now, I find myself wondering about the singular characteristics of a squirrel I see, for example. I likely will never know, but because of Sophie, I know that squirrel is, in some ways, a true original. * Sophie also noted the profound instinct to play among the birds she worked with. For some reason, I see that instinct in my dogs, Olivia and Otis, every day. But I had never considered that other, less domesticated, animals might possess a similar yearning for playfulness. The world seemed a brighter place for Sophie highlighting that revelation in her work. * At one point in our talk, Sophie indicated that occasionally she mis-identifies birds she hears or sees. Not often, but it does happen. It reminded me that we make mistakes even in our areas of profound expertise. It was a refreshing, and human, admission – and a useful reminder for me to have patience with myself when, I, too, make mistakes in my (supposed) areas of “mastery.” Enjoy! And, again, thank you, Sophie! Sophie, thank you so much for joining me. This is awesome. It's a thrill to be here. Thanks, Russell. I loved your book, Feather Trails. It was one of my top books of the year. Top two or three books of the entire year. I loved it, and I just can't wait to talk about it. I'm thrilled that you liked it. I think that's amazing. I really am excited about that. The book and your newsletter have inspired me to care more about birds and bird watch a little bit and certainly as I go for my walks in nature, pay more attention to birds and the sounds and the sights I see as I go about those walks. That's fantastic. That was one of my major hopes in writing this book – to see if I could interest more people in the world of birds by writing about my adventures with birds and my dealings with them. So that's exactly what I had hoped would happen. Let's kick off my questions. I'd love to just hear you talk about your career with birds and what your favorite role with birds has been. I've been lucky to have a lot of years in the field with birds, researching them, conserving them and reintroducing endangered birds to the wild. Reintroducing birds to the wild has been the real highlight. Whenever I was out there helping these really rare endangered birds get back out in the wild and make it, I always felt like I was doing something of value and something important. Every day I was out there, it felt meaningful and important. And I really loved that. It felt like I was doing a critical thing to help the planet to help our bird life. And to help all those who care about birds by getting these birds back there in the wild. And I also loved it because when you are working with endangered species, there's often very few individuals left, so I came to know the individuals that I was working with really well. When you get to know individual birds, a lot of them have really unique and different personalities. It was so much fun to get to know them. I, of course, became very attached to them. I try to convey some of the stories of my experiences with these different individuals in Feather Trails. So why do you think we humans are attracted to birds? Why do we feel this connection to birds that we don't feel for any other animal except maybe our dogs and our cats? Exactly. A lot of people say that it's because we're drawn to their ability to fly. But for me, it's their color and their sound. Birds are beautiful. They fill our world with music. They're these fragile, delicate creatures, and yet they do these amazing feats – like migrate over hundreds of miles of water. They connect us to different parts of the world through the magic of their migration. One of the things that really attracted me to the bird world was that their whole lives are often on display for us. I first was interested in mammals, and I wasn't a big bird person initially. I especially like small cats. But I realized that if I ever wanted to work with small cats they're usually nocturnal or they're hidden. They're cryptic. A lot of mammals, their lives are hidden from us. They're in the dark or we just don't see them. But with birds, you get to see them feeding their young and fighting over territories and singing to proclaim their territories. They're so visible and they live all around us. It's much easier for us to see them and appreciate them and experience their lives alongside ours. So for me that's a big one. What do most people get wrong about birds? What do they not understand about birds? What do they miss about birds? A lot of people aren't aware of how many birds are around us. And the variety and the diversity. Until I really started getting into birds and studying them, I had no idea how many different birds there were around living their lives around us. We also take for granted that they'll always be there, no matter what we do, because they're pretty resilient, but we could push them to a certain point where a lot of their populations are declining. A lot of them are not doing well. It behooves us to take notice of them and help them out when we can. You mentioned some of the bird personalities, Sophie, and there were some moments in your book that I laughed out loud, cracking up when you saw a bird do this or that or you had an interaction. Tell us about the funniest thing that's happened to you as an ornithologist. Some of these birds are very charismatic. I used to laugh working with California condors so often. You wouldn't think that a big ugly vulture would be that appealing. But when you work with them, you discover that they're really playful. They were often playing tug of war with things. Anytime they saw an empty water bottle on the beach, they would have to punt it like a soccer ball, and they would just chase after it. They'd fight over these fun toys, and I always knew that if there was a collection of condors in an area, they'd either found some food — a carcass — or else they'd found a bunch of really fun toys. Once at the Grand Canyon, this garbage can had blown over and the contents had blown over the canyon. I went to the edge of the cliff rim and looked down. It was just a play fest of condors. One of them was standing on the lid, and the other was trying to drag the lid, another was punting a water bottle down the slope and leaping over bushes to get to it. It was crazy, it was a total play fest. The times I've laughed the most is when they're doing these incredible weird interactions and just playing, which is amazing. It sounds like we should have them over and like open presents under the Christmas tree. It'd be like, it'd be like having more kids. They would love it. They are so into playing with anything that they can get their beaks on. That's just a fascinating aspect of birds. Also, birds allow you to laugh at yourself and not be too overconfident – I remember having some funny moments in my life with just incredibly bad calls that I've made. I remember once being all excited going to a wildlife refuge. I was with a friend and I said, “Oh, an incoming flock of ducks.” And he looked at me and said, “Sophie, those are blue Jays.” In my enthusiasm at the moment, I just completely blew it. But we all often do when we're watching birds, there's challenges out there. We get overenthusiastic or we don't see something the right way. We can all make mistakes and remain humble while doing it. So I've laughed at myself at times. I have to ask a kind of snarky question. You love birds so much. That is evident in our conversation already. It was very evident in your book. I'm just curious. Are there any birds you can't stand? Any birds you hate? I guess hate might be a slightly strong word, but I do have to confess that there are some birds that I don't love very much at all. It's not even their fault, but I have to say that one of my least favorite birds is the House Sparrow (https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/house_sparrow), which is one of our most common birds in cities and towns. I'm not a fan because it was introduced from Europe, and it's really aggressive about getting nest cavities from our birds. Nest cavities are very limited, and Swallows and Bluebirds nest in them. House Sparrows will go into those cavities, and if there's already Swallows or Bluebirds nesting in there, they'll sometimes kill the young nestlings and build their nest right on top, and take over the nest. So I don't like them. They are making it much harder for our native birds. Same with European Starlings (https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/European_Starling/overview). That's another introduced bird. As far as the native birds go, I love them all. Some of the introduced birds, I don't love them because they put so much pressure on our native birds. It's not their fault. European Starlings do the same thing as House Sparrows. They compete for these cavities that are limited. Starlings are at least very smart and they're amazing mimics. So they have those sort of things going for them. Whereas House Sparrows just make me cranky when they come around and try to take over my Bluebird nest boxes. I chase them off and scream at them. Wow. Sparrows, starlings – you have earned Sophie's ire. I'm afraid they have. It's not their fault. It's us messing with the world a little bit. Let's turn to the book for a few questions, Sophie. Can you update us since the events of the book? Tell us what's going on with the preservation efforts for the Peregrine Falcon (https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Peregrine_Falcon), the Hawaiian Crow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_crow), and the California Condor (https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/California_Condor). How are they doing today? The Peregrines are doing really well, by and large. They were taken off the endangered species list in 1999, and they're one of our biggest conservation success stories. Unfortunately, biologists right now are really concerned because we're starting to get a lot of reports of Peregrines dying because of avian flu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avian_influenza). The avian flu is really wreaking havoc on our bird life right now and apparently Peregrines are getting hard hit by that. So I'm a little worried about them from that perspective. I'm also a bit worried because we're having a catastrophic disappearance of our insects and Peregrines rely on birds to raise their young. Many birds feed on insects. And so if there are fewer insects, the birds that feed on them are going to be struggling and there'll be fewer of them. So I'm a little worried about the long term, but so far the Peregrine has really been a remarkable success story, where people got behind it and helped return it to the wild. California Condors are doing really well. They went down to 22 at one point, and now there are over 500 of them. There are over 300 in the wild, so that's also a very good success story, but they still require intensive management. Without our help to save them from lead poisoning, they would go back toward extinction. So they're doing really well, but they're very dependent on our management. And the Hawaiian Crow – their situation has turned around recently, and it's very hopeful. In my book they were one of the sort of saddest stories. They've really struggled and had a lot of pressures that they've been up against. Five of them were just released onto the island of Maui. So it's the first reintroductions that have taken place in a couple of years. And they put them on Maui, which is not their native island. They are native to Hawaii, the Big Island. But the Hawaiian Hawk (https://www.fws.gov/story/species-spotlight-hawaiian-hawk-io), which has exacted a lot of pressure on reintroduced birds, doesn't occur on Maui. They want to give these birds the best shot they can in the wild. They've just reintroduced some birds and so that's really exciting to finally have Crows back out in the wild. That's exciting. They're also trying a biocontrol to reduce numbers of mosquitoes in Hawaii. Mosquitoes have been a big problem transmitting diseases to the native birds. So there's some good news on all fronts, which is exciting. It just goes to show when we have targeted conservation efforts and really try to help these animals, we are often very successful. That leads to my next question. Something that came out of your book and especially with the story of the Peregrine Falcon – when a bird becomes endangered, it sure seems like the 80-20 rule is in effect. Eighty percent of the problem is caused by 20 percent of factors. With the Peregrine Falcon, it seemed even more dramatic. 90-10 or 95-5 The overwhelming problem with Peregrine Falcons was the introduction of DDT and related chemicals into the environment. The solutions also seem to follow a similar distribution. Twenty percent of the solutions get at 80 percent of the conservation effort. Again, with the Peregrine, getting DDT nixed from the market significantly improved population health. And yet, something that came out of your book is that ornithologists kept pushing on all fronts. You kept hammering on the 80 percent of the solutions that contributed only 20 percent of the solution. I found that fascinating and I'd love to hear from you: Why keep pushing on all fronts, even ones that won't seem to contribute that much to the general result? You're absolutely right. One thing I did try to convey in my book is when there's a bird like the Peregrine that is basically declining for one reason, if we don't deal with that primary problem, we're not going to be successful in recovering this species. So we were able to get rid of DDT and that helped the Peregrine. If we could get rid of lead ammunition and replace it with non-lead ammunition, we would take care of the Condor. But a lot of the time, those big threats are so difficult for the general public to deal with. It takes agencies, it takes biologists, it takes non-profit organizations, it takes a lot of entities to work on some of these larger problems like pesticides, like climate change. Right now we're in an all hands on deck moment with bird declines. We've lost about three billion birds in the last 50 years. A lot of us in the general public feel overwhelmed trying to think, how can we help? I can't stop agriculture from using too many pesticides, but I can keep my cat indoors and put decals on my windows to try to protect birds. A lot of what I was trying to do was inspire people to take care of those other factors that we can deal with. A lot of birds are disappearing and dying – a death by a thousand cuts. There's a lot of different pressures on them. The more of us that can help with some of those pressures, then hopefully the agencies and the bigger conservation groups can deal with the bigger problems. If the rest of us chip in and help with the smaller problems, then we have a better chance of helping out more birds. That's an enormous number. You just said 3,000,000,000 lost in 50 years. Basically, my lifetime. It's really staggering. Something else I tried to convey in my book – we often look back to our childhoods as this time when there was more wildlife, less development, and it was a wilder time. But children today are growing up in an environment with far fewer birds and much less wildlife than we grew up with. And we had less than the generation before us. There's this disappearing wildlife that we adjust to. In this book I wanted to show, especially in Hawaii, what it was like so that children today know what we should try to work to save, what we should work to try to get back to, to recover some of these lost birds and lost species, lost habitats. That leads to a tough question. Can we have our proverbial cake and eat it too? Can we have the benefits of a modern industrialized society and can we also have a thriving natural earth ecosystem, where wild animals can live in some reasonable equilibrium with the human-created industrial society? I think we can. It's important that we're clear-eyed about our impacts, that we learn about them, and we recognize and we make changes that help minimize our pressures on other organisms. But I learned with endangered species – by helping birds, we often tackle problems that harm us too. Getting rid of DDT doesn’t just help peregrines. It was very beneficial to the environment and to us too. So we definitely benefit by reducing threats to birds. An amazing conservationist said that when we take care of birds, we take care of most of the environmental problems in the world. A lot of those things are threatening us too. We can have development. We can have our modern industrial society. But it's valuable to recognize that we are sharing the planet with other organisms. By sustaining them, we sustain ourselves too. Some of that is more nebulous – in addition to birds pollinating our crops or keeping our insects to a safe number, birds do all kinds of things to contribute to ecosystems. Also – being in nature is restorative for us. It's healthy for us. There have been a lot of studies that show that getting out and walking in nature makes us happier, makes us less stressed out, and makes us less anxious. I think we can find a balance there where we can continue to live the lives that we want, but also nurture and sustain the wildlife that enriches our own lives and that shares some of the problems that we face, too. In the world of bird protection, what's the frontier? It undoubtedly involves technology in some way, shape or form. What's that look like? Tell us about the frontiers, the leading edge of your world. There's so many of them. There's so much research on birds because they are so visible and vocal. There's always a lot of research on them because they're easier to study. But people are focusing more on their entire life cycle, not just the summer or spring. Many of them migrate huge distances and winter in the tropics. People are starting to look more and more into their wintering habitat. And also what's happening to the habitats where they stop over and refuel when they migrate. There's been some amazing new research, and technology is key. For example, there's a new thing called the Motus Tracking System (https://motus.org/). They put tiny little radio tags on birds and insects, and towers track the animals as they pass by. They're able to find out a lot more about tiny organisms like birds and insects as they're migrating. That's one of the really amazing new kinds of frontiers of wildlife tracking. Then there's a lot of technological advances that are more subtle, but are really important. They're constantly trying to study how to make glass safer for birds. A lot of birds crash into buildings during migration. Now there are different studies to try to make glass more visible to birds to help protect them. There's some things that are less technological, but have made a huge difference over the years. For instance, when you see radio and communication towers that have red lights on them to warn planes. They discovered years ago that birds were getting drawn to these red lights and circling the towers until they were exhausted or hitting the guy wires and dying. They made a simple switch – from the steady red light to a blinking light. That really improved the problem. There's a lot of research going on in how birds are impacted by all sorts of things. There are a lot of people chipping away at these different pressures on birds. You were talking about the Motus Tracking System. It sounds like every bird is going to get its own Apple Air Tag. I know! Exactly! It is a lot like that. It is amazing what these technologies reveal about these migratory journeys, and where these birds are traveling. It's just incredible. Let's look at the flip side of this coin. What're going to be the hardest challenges in protecting birds over the next 50 years? I think it's our ever-growing population and the pressures that we exact on wildlife in its habitat. We need so many resources to feed and house and clothe ourselves. There's often either an unwillingness or an obliviousness about the wildlife and the habitats around us. Becoming more aware that there is wildlife around us, that they are trying to make a living is really valuable. But I think it is our ever growing population and trying to come up with creative ways to sustain wildlife and wildlife habitats as our numbers increase. In your book, you mentioned so many people, researchers, scientists, ornithologists, and organizations. Tell us about one unsung hero in bird preservation – a person, an organization, anybody unsung who's doing heroic efforts to contribute to the effort to save birds now. I couldn't really think of one person or one organization necessarily because it does take a village. There're so many people involved, as you suggest and I tried to convey in my book. But for me as a group, one group of unsung heroes are often the field biologists – the people who are out there in the field day to day, working to research these birds, conserve these birds, reintroduce the endangered birds to the wild. It's often the higher ups that are doing the administrative stuff and the policy work that get a lot of the attention. But people on the ground are often dealing with terrible weather and unbelievably long days; birds don't take off Christmas and New Year, so the field people work through weekends and holidays and everything else. And I tried to give a thank you in my dedication to the field people because I think they're often our unsung heroes in keeping our bird life healthy and happy. That also very clearly came out in your book. You talk about some of the walks you took – enormous distances to try to find a bird's nesting place or, unfortunately, to try to find the carcass of a bird. Tell us a little bit about those walks. My newsletter is about walking and I'm fascinated with those walks that you took as a field biologist. What were you thinking about? what were you feeling? What were those walks like? Sometimes the walks had a purpose. If I was looking for a bird that I suspected had died, I was of course anxious – I was hoping I wouldn't find a dead bird. When I was looking to try to find if the birds were nesting, that was very hopeful. So I was often thinking about what I might find at the end of my destination. But I never lost sight of how much I loved the moment and being in nature and experiencing the natural world around me, because it is really just amazing to be out there in the wild. It's often quiet. I did take some very long journeys. One thing I really ended up doing a lot at the Grand Canyon, which I had never expected, was hiking at night. It was so hot down in the canyon during the day so we had to do our hikes in at night. I had never hiked alone, at night, for 12 miles. I would hear the echolocating noise the bats were making. It was peaceful and beautiful. It was just a magical time to be hiking with very few people around – whereas in the Grand Canyon, the daytime was crowded with tourists. Mostly it was just being out there with nature and really enjoying the moment, while also sometimes worrying about what I was going to find when I completed my journey. I love that. Tell me about your favorite place to take a walk, period. My favorite place really is mountain country. I spent my early years in Switzerland and then moved to Vermont. I just love mountains. My favorite walks are always along mountain streams or through woods that get me up to a mountain lake. I love those. I love the rushing, tumbling mountain streams. I love having jagged peaks around me. I love mountain country. That's probably my favorite. That's amazing. This may be a similar answer, but I'm curious – I've started to ask a few people in life this question, and I'm always fascinated by their answers. Where do you encounter beauty in life? A lot of it is mountain country. I ended up working with condors in Arizona and canyon country is beautiful, but it wasn't the same for me. So I spent years trying to get back to the mountains. Looking out at a mountain range and the alpenglow, the different light on it at night, is something that I love. I love so much seeing the ever-changing light in the sky around mountains. But almost wherever I am in wild places, I end up seeing beauty – big and small – small flowers in the forest floor or a Tanager (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanager) perched up in a tree. There's so much beauty around and I really enjoy that. There's also beauty in our relationships with other people and our pets. It's not a visible beauty, but our important relationships with animals and people are a beautiful thing too. That's wonderful. I love it. Let me ask you a few last questions here, Sophie. For beginners, and I'm definitely a beginner, what's a good resource to learn more about birds, birdwatching, identifying birds, or the state of birds period? What are good resources for people to turn to? There's more and more online. Maybe it's because I started out years ago, I'm more old fashioned: I think it's really nice to have a field guide to be able to look at just how the birds are laid out, and compare birds in an easier format. There are some really wonderful field guides. The Sibley Guide to Birds (https://amzn.to/3W9NO2M) is a great one. He has beautiful pictures of birds that are really helpful for identification. I grew up using the Peterson guides, so there are Peterson's Eastern (https://amzn.to/40tPXZF) and Western (https://amzn.to/403wM7u) guides. Those are amazing. And Kenn Kaufman has a book of bird photographs if people prefer to identify birds with photographs instead of drawn pictures. His Birds of North America (https://amzn.to/4jcou5P) is great. As far as apps go, Cornell University has just done a brilliant job with its Merlin (https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/) app. They've transformed the bird world and made it so much more accessible for beginners through that app. I haven't used the identification portion of it because I usually know what I'm seeing, but I do use their bird songs and calls part of it. You can hear a bird song that you're unfamiliar with and hold up your phone, record it, and the app will tell you what you're hearing. That's amazing! Even for somebody like me, there's a lot of places where I'm not familiar with the birds or I'm rusty or I'm confused. It really is an amazing app as far as telling us what's around us all the time. For new people, sometimes you think, “Oh, there's probably three or four birds around.” And you hold up your phone and suddenly, you're hearing birds singing that you didn't even know existed. It can be a lot of fun. Those are my favorites. That app is incredible. Our mutual friend, Bryan (https://conservativewahoo.substack.com/), mentioned it in one of his newsletters and I got it. It has transformed my walks in nature. It is the coolest app. It's awesome. Yeah, it's a free app and it's phenomenal. Very occasionally it will have a mistake, but for the most part, it is wildly accurate and it's tremendous. It really does open up the world. One of the things as an ornithologist that I loved was learning bird songs because suddenly, you realized how much is around you that you didn't even know was there. And Merlin does that for you. You mentioned a few books. Besides, of course, your book, what are your favorite books about birds? It's funny. I don't have that many favorite books about birds. It's just crazy. Some of them are quite a lot older – my favorites are the ones that sort of started getting me into birds. But one of my favorites is Wings for My Flight: The Peregrine Falcons of Chimney Rock (https://amzn.to/4fSXZQd) by Marcy Houle. It was about her work with wild Peregrines. It came out a couple of years before I did my Peregrine work. That really resonated with me. I love the stories of biologists being out there, doing the work. Not surprisingly that resonated with me. There was another book – this wasn't about birds – called Cry of the Kalahari (https://amzn.to/3WCdsNV)about biologists working in Africa. It had a similar kind of impact on me. I must've been drawn to these stories about biologists working with birds. An amazing bird person named Pete Dunne (https://amzn.to/4hb4Sxm), who actually wrote the introduction to my book, which was a huge honor, has a bunch of wonderful bird books. He has a new one (https://amzn.to/3BSwPLt) out that I haven't read yet, but one of his older ones was called The Feather Quest (https://amzn.to/3Wa0ir5). He and his wife went all over the country looking for birds. It was the first time I realized you could travel and see new birds in new places, and that was a revelation at the time. You could get to know the birds in your neighborhood, but then you travel and there's a whole other contingent of birds to experience and learn about and discover. He really made that clear for me. So I love The Feather Quest. I love it. You mentioned a couple of ideas about how we private citizens can help birds. My daughters, who are 10 and 12, saw me reading your book and they asked me about it. Then I mentioned that I was going to interview you and they were all excited. Maybe they'll listen to this or read this. They had a question, which is: how can they – again, they're not experts and I'm not an expert – but what can they do to help protect and save birds? It's hard to think of just one thing that people can do, because a lot of my philosophy is that there are many small things that we can do. But the number one thing is to open our eyes and be aware of birds – to notice birds and to learn about them. A lot of us don't realize how much diversity there is around us– how different these birds are. They all make a living in a different way. If you see birds in your yard, look them up, try to figure out what they are, learn a little bit about them. As we learn about birds and we observe them, we often come to care more about them, especially when we see them and they're familiar in our backyards. When they become familiar and we know about them, we can share our stories about them. I think that makes us want to help them. That's a critical first step. There are a lot of things that we as individuals could do. Wildlife likes dark places. We can keep our lighting outside darker. You could tell your daughters to turn their lights out when they leave a room. It keeps the house darker for the birds. Or they can put decals on the windows, because birds often strike windows. Keeping our cats inside is a really big one. The biggest pressure on birds is cats – keep your cats indoors. Other things are plastic beverage containers. There's a circle there that birds could get trapped and tangled in – cut them so animals don’t get caught. And cut the rubber bands that you take off of fruit or broccoli. Just be aware that there's a wild world around us that could be impacted by our lights, by our cats, by our trash. Try to take care of some of those things. It's small stuff, but if there are 96 million birdwatchers in the U.S., even if 20 million do some small thing, that’s a lot. Huge difference, yes. This has been awesome, Sophie. Let me get you out of here on this last question. After your book, what's next for you? What's your next project? Right now, I'm working right now with a fellow biologist to create an anthology of stories by and about women biologists who are doing work all over the country – amazing work with wolves or crayfish or other animals. It's all their various adventures in the wild – crashing in helicopters, getting bitten by a bear in Yellowstone, dealing with poachers in Panama, dealing with a flood in Alaska. We finalized that book, so I'm working on getting that published. It will hopefully show young girls and women that working with nature and wild animals can be an amazing experience and amazing career, and people really thrive at it. I love it. I can't wait to read it. This has been an amazing conversation, Sophie. I loved your book and talking with you. They really have been highlights of my year. I've loved every minute of it and I can't thank you enough for your willingness to come and chat with me. It's such a great pleasure. I love sharing birds with people and it's just so exciting when people are starting to get captivated by that world. There's nothing better for me. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Sophie. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Russell. Great to talk to you. (This article contains Amazon Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sa.life (https://www.sa.life?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

15. 

    9 Jan 2025

    A Beautiful Conversation With Author and Pediatrician Sherry Shenoda

    After meeting Sherry Shenoda (http://www.sherryshenoda.com/) at a wedding in the summer of 2022, I interviewed her about her book, The Lightkeeper (https://amzn.to/3BOXIzU), later that year. To say I love the book is a massive understatement. I found it so full of rich and beautiful themes: longing and loss; free will and its limits; and finding, coming and returning home; among many others. In our discussion, we cover fine and fertile ground: how her work as a pediatrician has affected her writing; her writing retreats with a dear friend; books on writing which have influenced her; and we delve deep into The Lightkeeper. I loved this conversation and hope you do too! Definitely check out her fantastic novel! Some Points to Ponder * At one point, Sherry uses a lovely phrase: “that generous magic that kids are able to create.” I really love that phrase. * Sherry notes how fiction, especially fantasy, writing, and music and song, can explore difficult situations without lecturing or sermonizing. I think she’s right, which may be one reason that, since reading The Lightkeeper, I have read far more fiction than at any other time in my life. It’s one reason I felt so drawn to the life and music of June Carter Cash (https://www.sa.life/p/silver-medalist-june-carter-cash) — in some ways even more than Johnny Cash, her far more popular husband. Johnny at times veered into preachiness and pontificating, which felt odd given his life and some life choices. June never did. * The Lightkeeper addresses a fundamental problem of human existence — why there is suffering. The answers from the novel center on choice and the fact we are loved. Sherry has really made me think about this question. * I love the fact that I loved this novel and so did my wife. That happens a time or two a year, but not often. We both loved this book! Sherry, it is wonderful to see you and hear your voice again. Likewise Russell. I loved our conversation on the Sunday of the wedding. It was really eye-opening and enlightening to me. I appreciate your willingness to chat with me further. It was really eye-opening for me too. You asked me questions that I had not even considered when I was writing the book. So it was wonderful to speak to someone who had read it so generously. I really appreciate that. As I told you, over the past many years, I have read a few fiction books, but not many and nothing we could call literature. The Lightkeeper has reawakened the power of literature to me. I’ve been on a big fiction kick since our first conversation. I love it. I’m so glad to hear that. You are a physician by training, you’re a writer, you’re a poet, you’re a mother, you’re a wife. I’m curious. How do you describe what you do? That’s a good definition. That list that you just gave, and the pediatrician, and writer, and mother: I’m not sure which one I would put first. Maybe mother, then writer and then pediatrician. I would put them in that order.  I was a writer before I was a doctor. I’ve been writing stories since I was really little. As readers read your writing, what’s your hope for them? What do you want for them in that act? So I was kind of a shy, introverted kid and maybe a shy introverted adult now. Books have been some of my best companions. When people read my writing, I hope that they find a good companion in my stories for at least a time on their journey. Books can keep us company and they can get us through hard times. If my writing can do that for someone, I will be really pleased. Companions. I love that word. It’s such a beautiful concept, and that brings to mind something you mentioned in a podcast you did last year (https://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/everydayorthodox/meet_sherry_shenoda). You noted a special birthday tradition you have with your friend Veronica, who is one of the people you dedicated The Lightkeeper to. Can you tell us more about that tradition with Veronica? How did it come about and what is it? We don’t make it every year, but we try to take a writing retreat once a year. Her family has a cabin in the mountains. It’s quiet. We just sit and it’s creatively recharging for me. We catch up and we write. We try to do it every year. Sometimes we go twice a year. Sometimes there are years we can’t make it at all. But, we do our best to try to make it. To the extent you feel comfortable sharing any details about how it goes or what you all work on, I’d be fascinated to hear it. It’s the opposite of exciting! We wake up. It’s very Hobbit (https://amzn.to/3TRlNJF)-ish, for lack of a better word. It’s a very Hobbit aesthetic. We have on our cozy sweaters and cozy socks. And we get a fire going. We have candles and we eat cozy breakfasts and put pots of soup on the stove while we’re writing and we stay up at night with a glass of wine. It’s just very cozy and quiet. Then we chat. Whenever one of us gets stuck in a plot tangle, we sometimes talk it out. Sometimes I try to get up in the mornings and go for walks too. It’s a beautiful area. So, a little bit of walking with writing and a lot of sitting and being, just quiet. It’s very low-key, companionable, and peaceful. That peace and the stillness – what a great gift to each other. Yeah. It’s beautiful. She’s been a wonderful presence in my life. We’ve been friends for almost 35 years. A long time. Can you tell me more about your friendship with Veronica? Again, in the same podcast, the host mentioned you had “forged a friendship without language”. Tell us about that. We met before either of us could speak English. She’s Cuban and only spoke Spanish, and I only spoke Arabic. We met in a sandbox and it didn’t really matter that we couldn’t speak the same language. Initially, it was just play. It was that generous magic that kids are able to create. We made a friendship without words. And then words became a large part of our friendship later on. We’ve spent countless hours talking about good stories since then. Actually, a friend told me recently that in the Waldorf Education tradition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education) for really young kids, the thought is that they’re in a dream state until they’re about 7 years old and the job of the parent is not to wake them. That really struck a chord with me. I feel like we were in that kind of dream childhood state and we didn’t need words. We communicated in a way that kids do. How has your work with children as a pediatrician impacted your fiction? That’s a tough question for me to answer. I’ve worked with a lot of children who have or are experiencing trauma and my fiction is a way to deal with some of what I’ve experienced secondhand through patients. I don’t write at all about medicine. It’s not something that I’m interested in doing. But I find that fantasy, in particular, is a really powerful way to talk about truth. If you look at Tolkien for example. I’m not an expert on Tolkien (https://amzn.to/3SAlOAF), but The Lord of the Rings (https://amzn.to/3TzDZaX), in many ways, was his way of processing what he had seen during the First World War. I deal with my own fiction in the same way. It’s not intentional necessarily. It’s not that I saw this trauma and I need to write in a way to get it out of my system. That’s not what I’m trying to say. It’s more of a way of dealing with the trauma by telling truth in a way that’s universal. Fantasy is universal in a way that music or mythology are universal. It transcends language and culture in many ways. But you can use fiction, and fantasy in particular, as a way to carry heavy truth without writing a sermon or a lecture or an essay. Those formats are other ways to do it, but for me, fiction and fantasy are the ways that it comes out most naturally. Let me address the same topic but in a different way. On your website, you say you want to help create a “kinder, simpler sandbox.” Why do you use those adjectives? I think it’s speaking to that kind of magic. Not to romanticize childhood – there are a lot of things that are really difficult about being a kid, especially when you’re pre-verbal. It can be frustrating to express yourself. But, there is a magic quality in childhood – children don’t see the same complications that adults do. My son, for instance – he’s almost three. He’ll walk up to strangers in the store, and say “Hi, what’s your name?” “How’s your day?” Regardless of how that person looks. He approaches people regardless of age, gender, or race. It’s really beautiful. That’s the image of the sandbox I have – when you can simply sit beside someone and play together. You’re unselfconscious about it. Can I ask a totally different question – something I am curious about? Do you read professional books? Books like how to become a better doctor, writer or poet? Or books on productivity? I do actually. I try to be selective about them. But, I do love to. I think they sharpen our skill set. But, not so much about medicine. I read to keep up to date on medical topics that are relevant to my practice. I do read productivity books like Atomic Habits (https://amzn.to/3TXIgEG) and Deep Work (https://amzn.to/3VZXqeu). They were both great. Yes, Deep Work was excellent. Attention is the currency of our current economy. It’s a deadly thing for creative work if you’re not able to go deep. If we’re not able to regain our attention, it’s hard to do really good creative work. That book really helped. Also, I do read books on the craft of writing. A couple of really good writing books have been helpful for me. One is Steven King’s book, (https://amzn.to/3TE6Mev)On Writing (https://amzn.to/3TE6Mev). Another one was Big Magic (https://amzn.to/3U3cdU9) by Elizabeth Gilbert (https://amzn.to/3U3cdU9). And then there are a couple by Ursula K. Le Guin (https://amzn.to/3W92Gge) and Madeline L’Engle (https://amzn.to/3DyYa2Z) that have been really helpful. And then there’s a poetry kind of manual by Mary Oliver (https://amzn.to/3FkHmOH). It’s a technical book, but it’s done in a very Mary Oliver poetic way and that’s been helpful. People ask, “what is poetry?” A lot of things can pass for poetry, but the limitation of form is still important and helpful. We can talk about limitations later. But, I think that limitations are still really useful, even in free verse. And so, I like to keep up with writing on the craft of writing. But, once you know the rules, you can either break them deliberately or work within their confines. That can be really creatively freeing  – actually to have limitations. To say to yourself: “I am going to write a sonnet” and then force yourself into the limitation of that form. Sherry, let’s get into your novel, The Lightkeeper. And, as I’ve already mentioned, your novel has sparked a return to reading fiction, and literature for me. I found the book so compelling for many reasons. Since I read it, back in August, there hasn’t been a day where I haven’t reflected on something about it and some lesson it’s brought to the fore for me. Let’s start with a basic question: you hinted a little bit at this earlier, but why did you write this book? Thank you so much, Russell, for those kind words. I really appreciate it. I wrote it mostly to deal with the secondary trauma of my medical training. It’s the beginning of my conversation with God about why there’s suffering in the world. In particular, why there’s suffering directed at children, though there is no trauma directed at children in the book. It’s a time travel story about a lightkeeper who’s pulled through time against her will. She doesn’t have free will. She’s kind of this ageless, nameless entity. And her work is to keep lighthouses lit and she travels through time to do it. She’s called to different places where the need is greatest at the time. Sometimes she’s there to save a drowning sailor or for some other task. That’s the premise of the novel. It has nothing discernible to do with childhood trauma. But for me, that’s what it was about. It was about dealing with some of the helplessness in medicine. A lot of physicians and medical professionals feel this sort of anonymity that we have to take on to help. We also often don’t know what happened after we helped, what the outcome was. You see a patient. You try to be there for them in their time of need. Then their life is no longer intersecting with yours. Their life moves on and your life moves on, and you have no idea if you’ve helped or not. So I was trying to work out a lot of that. Really it’s a story about this lightkeeper and her time travels. And it tells the story of how she ultimately finds a home and finds love, and what happens then. Can you tell us about the process of writing it? What was the process? How long did it take? What were the steps and how did you know you had something really cool on your hands? In the beginning, it was actually a dream about a woman who was burying a man who had just died. It was a really awful, tense scene where it was difficult to bury him and she doesn’t know why. I had no idea about the characters: I didn’t know who they were, their names or their relationship to each other. The characters revealed themselves to me over time. Once the characters told me who they were, a lot of it was written in these scenes. Then came the slog of turning it into a coherent novel. Moving portions around so that it made sense and then some of those scenes were eventually removed. I’ve never built a house. But I imagine you build the foundation and a supporting wall and as the rest of the house comes up, that wall may have to come down. It’s a little bit like that. Then there were a couple of years to publication. The publisher is deciding if they want the novel. It’s a lot of hurrying up and waiting. Then there’s a lot of editing. But in the very beginning, the novel started as a dream. You mentioned a minute ago this theme of free will. Reading the book, free will is such an ambiguous concept. Early on, it seems the lightkeeper has very limited free will. She can’t choose where she is taken, but she does choose whether to give assistance once she gets there. Later, there’s a dramatic moment when the lightkeeper and Ronan have a moment of decision and they can express free will. Can you talk us through this theme? This book was me grappling with the concept of free will. Initially, you’re right. She’s pulled through time to the place where the need is greatest and she feels like she doesn’t have free will. But you’re right in that she still can choose. For instance, she could decide, “I’m not going to intervene and save these sailors. I’m just going to let them drown.” There is one flashback that keeps replaying in her mind – she didn’t intervene and the guilt of it gnaws at her for a long time, because she’s been around for a long time. Then, like you said, there’s a very specific scene where she clearly takes on the burden of free will. Sometimes we think having more options is easier and better, but sometimes more options can be a burden. I was trying to illustrate both sides of that question as best I could. That both options are hard. I think it’s so beautifully done because it just revealed the power of free will, but as you just said, the burden of free will and the emotional toll we take when we have free will and we don’t choose what we really think we should choose. Yeah. Another theme from the book, and I think it’s a modern theme, is home. The lightkeeper doesn’t have a home initially, either in place or time. But she finds a home, although in some sense she felt strangely when she got there. She had a sense that the place was different than the places she had been before. The modern take on “home” has evolved with Covid, and people moving and working in different places than their companies are located. How do we know we have come home when we’ve never been there before? Tell us more about this theme of home and place. I don’t know how modern an idea it is. I completely understand what you’re saying. But, I wonder, as humans, if there’s something in us that wants variations on the same thing. To me, the idea of home is the place where we’re seen and known. Where people recognize us. Even after the main transition in the lightkeeper’s life, there’s a sense that people can’t remember her. Her memory is ephemeral. Once she leaves a place, people forget who she is. I wanted her to be that way because a lot of us feel that way. Often, we feel like people don’t really see us. It was this idea that she’s longing for a place. She’s never been there, but she’s longing for a place where people see her, remember her and know her. In the Orthodox tradition, when someone passes away, we tell their family members, “May their memory be eternal.” And in Arabic, in the Coptic Church, we say: “May you live and remember.” This idea of remembering the dead to keep them alive is something that I’ve grown up with. The place where we find a home is the place where people remember us. They bring us to memory. They know us. They know us deeply. They see the true version of us. I don’t know, but it feels universal to me. It feels like every human wants a place to belong. Maybe with some exceptions, but it feels like most people want that. You get that sense in the novel. The lightkeeper, she – “rebelled” isn’t quite the right word, but she doesn’t always love this life in constant movement, what you call her “translations.” She doesn’t like being forced to go from place to place. She doesn’t like the transitory nature of the relationships she has. She has no idea when she’ll leave next. She can be walking in mid-step and, bam! she’s in a totally new place and time. That becomes deeply disturbing to her. She yearns for a home and a place and a place where people do know her. Yes, she does. She’s never had the constancy and the steadiness that most people experience in a family. And she doesn’t know what it’s called. But I think it’s very human to want that. This gets us to a different topic. Let me go back to the beginning of our conversation. I asked you how you see yourself, how you see your identity. You chose your identity as a writer, pediatrician and mother, at least to some extent. Your mother is a doctor, so maybe nature or nurture pulled you in that direction. But you had a choice, to some extent. In the book, the lightkeeper does not choose her work. Share with us your thoughts on calling, having a calling and stepping away from your calling. The idea of individualism is a really Western concept, at least in my understanding. Recently, listening to the mythologist Martin Shaw (https://drmartinshaw.com/), talking about finding the story that we are meant to tell in the world (https://amzn.to/3DxxyiW). He said that sometimes we have to realize that the story that we are going to tell may not be the one we want to tell; it may not be one we even choose to tell. Sometimes the path finds us, and our decision point is whether we’re going to walk on it or not. That struck a chord with me because the idea of boundlessness and lack of any sort of limitation is very Western. I think there is another path. It’s not all about us and what we want to do with our lives. I think we’re meant to do things with our lives, and the suffering that comes to us illustrates this point well. People don’t choose to have a family member who’s sick or even illness for themselves. We’ve had a lot of illness and accidents in the family. Nobody chooses that. But, individualism doesn’t have a good response to that, I think. The only response to that is the willing acceptance of it, or at least finding a path to work through that. I don’t know that choice has a lot to do with it. I think the choice is how we decide to respond to it. I don’t think choosing the path is always an option for us. That is so intriguing. We danced around this notion of limits and limitations. The 20th-century British novelist, essayist, and Christian apologist G. K. Chesterton (https://amzn.to/3N7cyD0) has a line: “all of life is limitation.” We can never do all of the things we want to do. We can never read all the books we want to. We can never go to all the places we want to go. Every decision, in some sense, eliminates every other decision we could possibly make for that moment. Talk to us about this notion of limits and limitations. Maybe it goes back to what you said earlier about limitation – in some sense, it can be freeing. Sometimes younger women ask me, “how do you do it all?” And I always quickly answer that I don’t. My time and energy are limited. If I’m parenting, I’m not in clinic. If I’m in clinic, I’m not writing. I’m unable to do something else at the same time. Even though it’s uncomfortable to hear, it’s really true. And I’m not interested in telling people empty platitudes. A difficult truth is much preferable to a pretty, dressed-up untruth. My opinion and my belief –  limitations are essential for humans to thrive. We need the boundaries of a limited life and limited time. Things begin to lose their value if they’re not outlined for me, with limitations. You could potentially trace back many of our failings to a lack of limitations. Things like climate change, for instance. We don’t like the idea of being limited in our options, or capacity, or consumption, especially in the West. But that’s the truth of it. The writer Paul Kingsnorth (https://amzn.to/3DA2fnA) talks about limitations with respect specifically to climate change, if anyone is interested in that (https://nori.com/podcasts/reversing-climate-change/S2E53-Paul-Kingsnorth-on-the-shared-roots-of-climate-crisis--transhumanism---immortality-era5om). But I think that it extends to many aspects of our lives and I think limitations help. They’re uncomfortable, but they help. I like that. Limitations are essential. Let me shift gears in talking about the book. Ronan and the lightkeeper become friends, then they fall in love, then they get married. You give us, I think, a beautiful, touching look into their home life, their domestic life. It’s not Instagram-worthy, glamorous, or fast-paced. Talk to us about the beauty of ordinariness. There’s plenty out there to glamorize the exciting. The lightkeeper goes on these amazing adventures and she travels through time. She goes back to ancient times to tend ancient lighthouses. She goes into the future. There’s plenty in her work life that’s exciting and it needed to be balanced with an ordinary, plain home life, a small life with someone that loves her. I also wanted to subtly communicate, especially to women, who are told that our work should define us, that we need to be educated, and that we need to be working in the marketplace and contributing to society. But, there’s a whole lot of society at home too. To give women all of their options, both need to be treated with equal respect and dignity. There’s a lot of dignity in making a small, comfortable, and noble existence at home. And I wanted to show both. The lightkeeper enjoys both; she has fulfillment in her work but she always wants to go home. That is the limitation she chose in her own life. Her work life was her entire life and she freely chose to have a home, and a life with one person in one place. She seems happy with that choice and happy with what they have together. Yeah. The lightkeeper says her favorite translation is to 1743 Japan to assist a blind lightkeeper whose wife has passed away. The lightkeeper is not saving him and she’s not repairing a lighthouse to help a ship to safety. These scenes in Japan don’t contain intense action. They are scenes of intense heart. I find it intriguing that the lightkeeper favors these moments more than anything she gets to do. Tell us more about that. In that particular scene, she doesn’t tend to an actual light, which is her usual task. She’s there to be present for this lonely lightkeeper on the most difficult night of the year. It’s an anniversary for him. Sometimes the sacrament is in our presence with someone. Simply being there when someone needs a compassionate presence and support. There’s not much that really can be said, but we can show up for each other. It doesn’t look like she’s doing much, but sometimes the best we can do is show up and sit with someone. There’s this beautiful scene in one of my favorite movies. It’s called Lars and the Real Girl (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0805564/). There’s a tragedy in the family. The women of the town come and they bring their knitting. They’re just sitting around. At one point, one of them says “That’s what you do when something happens. You come and sit.” That’s an indescribable gift when someone is in the thick of it. You know, to show up and be there for them. Let’s expand on this theme a bit. What you’re getting at is the idea of community. Community is clearly a theme in The Lightkeeper too. You come from an immigrant community and so I’m curious to know your thoughts about community. Today it seems like community is weakening. Online communities are trying to take the place or partial place of roles that have traditionally been taken on by “the community.” Talk to us a little about the theme of community in the book, Sherry. Anyone who hasn’t had a home, when you get a little bit of it, you latch onto it. She eventually becomes nostalgic for this place that she’s never been to or she’s been to once. We want similar things. Even for people who have been transplanted, as my family has been from one place to another, a lot of things are the same. Being around people that love you, eating good food, and having a place to go where you can let your guard down. A common language is helpful. One of my favorite writers, Wendell Berry (https://amzn.to/3NbB1H2), talks about arriving to America. He says: in some ways we’re still arriving to this country. I can’t speak to what we call the immigrant experience because every immigrant experience is very different. But even people that have been in this country for a long time, we are still arriving to this place. It takes a long time, to settle your roots into a place. Having people around you who see you, remember you and know you – that helps us put our roots down. I think anyone who’s ever chosen a family understands this. I have family members who feel that their friends are really, really close. Veronica’s really, really close. She’s family. We’ve decided to be family. This idea of creating community, even as immigrants coming to a new place: often it has a lot to do with choosing the people who make you feel seen and at home. And then creating a loving space between yourselves. People can create a community almost anywhere. You can see it in small neighborhoods. You can see it in religious communities. I have found and made really good friends online. I think online friendships are helpful when they lead to in-person friendships. Yeah. That’s the main utility for online forums like social media. Community is a place where we can find each other and be seen. You made my heart sing, Sherry, when you mentioned my fellow Kentuckian, Wendell Berry. And you mentioned him in the book. You’re a Wendell Berry fan. I’m a Wendell Berry fan. In some sense, we’ve been talking about Wendell Berry themes this whole conversation. I mean, the notion of limitation. Berry argues that we can’t have a hyper-charged consumer industrial culture and environmental health. We have to be concerned about place and community in our world and the bonds that bring us together. Those are all themes that Wendell Berry has written about for 60 years. You mentioned him as one of your favorite writers. Tell us a little bit about his impact on you and your writing. His themes of place really speak to me, even as an immigrant. His idea of staying in the same place for a long time in order to become a part of that place, and then allowing the place to impact the writing, really speaks to me as a writer and as a mom who is trying to build a community for my children. There’s something to be said about putting down roots in a place and not just consuming the place. Learning the rhythms and patterns of the place and then being a part of it. Sometimes we think of the non-human world as a prop in our own lives. And it’s here. It’s here before us, it’s going to be here after us. We have to find a way to live in the same place and to build community. Once we become of a place and not just from a place, we can take responsibility for any sins that have been committed there. There are many sins that have been committed in the United States. You know, chief among which is slavery. Berry talks about that. Once we stop saying the people that lived here did this, and start maybe taking responsibility for the things that have happened to the land and to the people that lived on the land before us, we can start to become from the place. There’s a concept in Orthodox Christianity that we are responsible for everyone and everything; once we make ourselves responsible, the whole of creation can be saved, redeemed and enlightened. There is power in saying “I may not have done something with my own hands, but I’m still responsible for it because I see it.” The lightkeeper does this. She’s not responsible for a ship about to sink, a light that’s gone out, or someone who’s not doing his job. But because she’s there and because she sees it, it actually is her responsibility. And like you were asking earlier, sometimes she chooses not to do it. But then there are consequences to all her decisions. If we see a wrong, being present and part of the human race, once we see something wrong, it becomes our responsibility. So Wendell Berry has taught me a lot of that. It has a lot to do with staying in the same place. There’s this concept also among the desert fathers in Egypt where they would go out into the desert to escape the annoyances of other people. People can be annoying. One monk is so annoyed by the community that he goes into the inner desert by himself. There’s nothing around him except palm trees. Then the wind through the palm trees starts to annoy him. I think we’re like this. We think that if a situation were perfect, the things that are inside of us would settle themselves. But we don’t always want to take responsibility for the thing that’s inside of us that’s unsettled to begin with. For me, Wendell Berry articulates that with his fiction and with his poetry in particular. He isn’t saying any of that necessarily, but that’s the truth of what he’s portraying. For instance, in Hannah Coulter, (https://amzn.to/3Fl20yb) which is one of my favorite novels, he tells the story of a woman’s life in very plain terms. It’s a beautiful story and it carries so much truth about human nature. He doesn’t have to say it directly. He shows it. You’ve given me another 20 questions to think about. That was amazing. Sherry, do you mind if I share one of my favorite passages from The Lightkeeper, for us to end the interview on? This is later in the book. This is in Ogaki, Japan, 1743. He took a long, trembling breath and drew back from her so that she could see his strong, smoothly shaven jaw, his dark straight hair combed back neatly from his pale skin, and his lips curved into a slight smile. Gently, and slowly enough to give her time to pull back had she wanted to, he bent his head and reverently kissed her forehead, before opening his arms and drawing away. She stood, frozen to the ground, while he walked back to his seat and held out a hand to her, inviting her to sit across from him. “Welcome home, dear one,” he said softly. Her feet carried her forward and she ungracefully knelt across from him at the low table, relieved that she didn’t immediately knock over the bowl in front of her. To see that look in another’s eyes, she thought. She thought she had seen it the night before, when Ronan named her. It was a look that focused all the whirling planets and bright stars in the cosmos into a single person, and crowned her queen. She steadied her breath and watched him fold back his sleeve from a strong, pale wrist to pour the green-gold tea. It steamed fragrantly between them, and she breathed deeply of it, heady with the scent and the bittersweet joy he emanated. I choose to be here with you, she thought, her eyes smiling at the man across from her. They sipped their tea slowly, taking their time with the ritual, and Aine’s eyes caught again on the keeper’s face when he lifted his tear-filled eyes to her, honoring his beloved with his tears. This time, her shoulders relaxed, her brow unfurrowed, the knot in her middle loosened, and—glory be—she wept with him. Oh, I love it. Oh, it’s so good. Thanks so much Russell. I’m so glad that speaks to you. Thank you. Well Sherry, can I ask you just one last question? Of course. You have just been long-listed for the National Book Award in Poetry for your new book, your new volume of poetry, Mummy Eaters. What is next for you? I don’t know Russell, but I’m excited for it. I’m trying to serve the work when it knocks on my door. There’s a really beautiful poem by Rabindranath Tagore in the book (https://amzn.to/3gNbms7)Gitanjali (https://amzn.to/3gNbms7). Tagore writes, My poet's vanity dies in shame before thy sight. O master poet, I have sat down at thy feet. Only let me make my life simple and straight, like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music. I think of my creative work in this way –  I’m just the reed, and whatever music comes out, I hope that I’m able to serve it properly. I just get out of the way, so the characters can speak, so that the words can take shape and end up where they’re supposed to. I do the best I can to separate myself from the outcome of the work. I try to just do the work, if possible. Do the work (https://srsmith3.substack.com/p/do-todays-job-well). I love that. I love that. Well, Sherry, that’s an appropriate place for us to end. You’ve been so kind and so generous with your time. I’m so excited to read Mummy Eaters. My copy just arrived. Will you come back again in a few months and talk with us about Mummy Eaters? Oh, I’d love to. That would be so amazing. That would make my year. Thank you so much for this. I really appreciate you and the generosity of your reading. Your questions are so deep and thoughtful. They’ve actually helped me see my writing in a new light. So, thank you so much for that. Sherry, it’s been such a great pleasure. It’s been such a great pleasure getting to know you a little bit, Andrew [her husband] a little bit and your family, and having Kara [my sister-in-law]  join your family. Thank you for joining me today. — (Amazon Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sa.life (https://www.sa.life?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

16. 

    21 Nov 2024

    A Conversation With Henry Oliver About Late Bloomers

    A few months ago, I interviewed Henry Oliver (https://open.substack.com/users/2432388-henry-oliver?utm_source=mentions) about his book, Second Act (https://amzn.to/4cCPqry), which is my book of the year. Second Act offers wonderful in-depth biographies and analyses of late blooming luminaries like Katharine Graham, Maya Angelou, Chris Gardner, Samuel Johnson, Ray Kroc, Margaret Thatcher, Frank Lloyd Wright and others. He also delves into less-heralded but no less instructive personalities, such as Audrey Sutherland, who began her solo kayaking adventures of the Arctic after age 60. It also includes shorter, snippet-like lessons from Grandma Moses, Dwight Eisenhower, Winston Churchill, Vera Wang, Norman Maclean, and many others. (Alas, Henry had to cut a chapter on Dwight Eisenhower. Here it is (https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/waiting-your-way-to-the-top-dwight). Pair it with my biography of General Fox Conner (https://www.sa.life/p/silver-medalist-fox-conner), Eisenhower’s great mentor, and my interview with Steven Rabalais (https://www.sa.life/p/be-yourself-be-patient-be-clear), who wrote the best biography of Conner.) During our interview, Henry’s revelations about the commonalities among the late bloomers and features unique to one fascinated me. Like the book, I learned so much from Henry’s wisdom during our discussion. Some Points to Ponder * I appreciated Henry’s research into people who found success later in life. In the modern age, we have such a fascination with and devotion to youth and achievements of the young. I’m glad Henry has finally given this topic the research and treatment it deserves. * I came away with a much deeper appreciation of how we might view “success.” Audrey Sutherland fulfilling her dream of solo canoeing the waters of the Arctic, after age 60, counts as a remarkable success. Even if she’d never written about her adventures, doing them marks such a massive success. Henry David Thoreau died not having sold half the copies of Walden he paid to have printed. Was he a failure? * We seem to struggle mightily to learn from people we disagree with or dislike. In my case, I’ve never read a biography of Napoleon because, well, he was a despicable human being. Margaret Thatcher seems woefully under-appreciated in today’s liberal European milieu. Henry’s book suggests we would do well to take a look at people we disagree with or dislike. They might have valuable lessons to tell. * Henry notes the importance of The Club to Samuel Johnson’s success. Do you have a group of peers cheering you on? Helping you become better at whatever challenges you face? If you don’t, finding such people would make a huge difference in your work and life. * I simply loved the conversation. Henry has so much knowledge, thoughtfulness, and wisdom about so many topics — old and new. I’ve gone back to listen to our talk several times — new joys pop out every time. Tell me about the origin of the book? How did you come up with the idea for this book? Also, how did you meet Tyler Cowen and get connected with the Emergent Ventures (https://www.mercatus.org/emergent-ventures) grants? My day job was in marketing, but we did not do advertising for chocolate bars or trainers or white goods. We did advertising for employment. All major companies, organizations, even mid-level places, have an advertising agency for their products and services. And then another one for their jobs. You have to go out to market and appeal to candidates and explain to people: “Why is this a good culture? Why is this a good place to work?” I was the research guy thinking about “Where is the talent? Where's the audience for these jobs? What's going on in the labor market?” And I was increasingly seeing people in the 50-plus bracket being available, but not being chased by corporations. Then I got ill, and I took some time off work. I was doing a lot of reading of Penelope Fitzgerald (https://amzn.to/3RIjzgV), who is a novelist I really love. I was just thinking about her and her life. I read the biography (https://amzn.to/4eMAYz8) and the letters (https://amzn.to/4eDaeB6), all of it. This started bouncing backwards and forwards with going back to work. I was thinking about the changing structure of the labor market and the idea that actually you don't always know how much potential someone has. Fitzgerald wrote her first serious novel when she was 60, and no one really expected it, right? I became really interested in this topic. And I realized that my clients were not interested in it. The idea of a late bloomer was simply not on the radar for these organizations. You can come back to the labor force if you're a mother and you've been out of the labor force for five or six years. Organizations are desperate to appeal to you, and to reform their recruitment process for you. Because this is obvious talent that is finding it really difficult to come back into the labor force. But if you're a 55-year-old, and I'm saying, “hey, this person could have a whole new career,” organizations are not open to that. Then I heard Tyler Cowan on a podcast (https://conversationswithtyler.com/) say the phrase, “people who haven't done anything yet, but maybe they will.” And I was like, “Oh, that's it.” That's what I've been noodling on. I started blogging about it. One of my friends said to me, “this is a real thing that you're blogging about.” Then separately, it got to the point where I wanted to quit my job. And I thought, “to hell with it, I'll apply for an Emergent Ventures grant and see what happens.” And I got it. And I wrote the book. It's a long story, but I do think ideas often come out of there being a light bulb moment after a whole load of murky, fuzzy kind of stuff. You say in the book it's difficult to spot late bloomers before they emerge. Why is that? Is there anything that can be done to spot them in advance? And do they detect themselves? Do they feel they have something inside themselves? Well, I'm going to start with that last question. I don't think they always do. Some of them do, for sure. I don't know even if what I'm about to say is true. I think to some extent the poet always knows that they are a poet. Now that's obviously not literally true, because there are poets like Edward Thomas (https://amzn.to/4eznJBE), who had to be told by Robert Frost (https://amzn.to/3xl9IqF): “you must write poetry.” But some people know that they have something in them, I think. But there are lots of late bloomers for whom that's not true, depending on their circumstances. Katharine Graham, who I start the book with, had lost her confidence through years of her mother, and then her husband, essentially bullying her. That really did get in the way of how she thought about herself and what she was going to do. But it's very notable that at the crucial moment her husband killed himself, and she inherited the paper – which had been her father's paper, her family's paper – everyone said, “Well you should sell it. You should not run it.” And she said, “To hell with that. I'm not going to be the one who sells the family paper.” She had this great reserve of courage. When she wrote her autobiography (https://amzn.to/4cfhb9B), she looked back and she realized that her father had believed in her and supported her. Now, he was long dead by this point, so it was kind of there, but her courage had been squashed down by her mother and husband for years and years. Even the fact that she was quite patrician and privileged – even all that had been knocked out of her. So, I think it varies a lot depending on your circumstances and what's happening in your life. We have this problem with the books in the nonfiction section called “Smart Thinking.” They present some great rule as if “This Is The Way Things Are. This Is Some Solution.” Psychology tells you that “This Is True,” right? But sometimes what actually happens would be a more accurate way of describing this phenomenon. With late bloomers, I didn’t want to sell you some grand theory that they're all the same. There are some core connections between them, such as having a secret life, or they’re quietly very persistent about their work. Or, often the trigger point for them becoming a late bloomer is some change in their circumstances: a midlife crisis or some opportunity comes through their network. But they are individuals. We should spend more time thinking, not just about the averages we see when we measure them. Those averages are important and indicative. But we should also be thinking about the deviation from the average. And my contention is, basically, I don't think we pay any attention to these late bloomers who deviate from the average. We really don’t know how many there are or could be. Why don't we try to find more of these people? Because if we got, say, two more of Katalin Kariko (https://www.pennmedicine.org/providers/profile/katalin-kariko) – the woman who did so much mRNA research that was so crucial during Covid – what would the world be like? Great. Fantastic. So, I'm always reluctant to average answers about late bloomers. Yes, they do have secret lives. Yes, it’s instructive to examine what they persist at. Don't think about what persistently happens to them, because that is the wrong indicator. Rather, look at: “What do they persist at? Do they have it?” When you say, “Look at what they persist at,” what do you mean? Let’s look at Margaret Thatcher. If you take an external view of her career, which is what most of her political colleagues were doing,  you would see a woman who got elected to Parliament, held a couple of junior ministerial roles and then was put into the Cabinet because they had to have a woman, because otherwise they would look sexist.  They thought: “We have to have a woman; it’s statutory. We’ll give her the education post, because that’s a feminine post.” They did not respect her. They did not. They were not interested in her. They thought she was a real pain in the ass and she was going to be difficult. So, the external view of Margaret Thatcher’s career is: she's done great. She's one of a kind – one of the small number of women that's been elected in Parliament. But really no one is thinking that. No one is saying, “Oh, my goodness, Margaret Thatcher's going places.” No, no one is thinking she'd be Prime Minister. Now, a couple people did get behind that appearance, and were not bound up with her being screechy and irritating and right-wing. And they’re saying, “Actually, you know what? She's energetic. She's decisive. She's got integrity.” A few people are actually seeing these kinds of leadership qualities. Someone from the American Embassy arranged for her to go to Washington and meet people. He believed she had talent, was the new talent in the House of Commons, and that the Americans should make a note of her. It's notable to me that the one person who truly saw her abilities was outside of the English system. He was not blinkered. He was going around meeting people and thought she had a lot of energy compared to some others in Parliament. “What a decisive woman this is, my goodness!” And that's the real clue to what Margaret Thatcher was capable of. Whether people love or hate her, they always say she is indefatigable, she is relentless. She could do 10 hours a day of paperwork and not be tired. She does 10 years of that. She’s constantly scuttling around Whitehall trying to change things. This guy from the Embassy, he got a little glimpse into the secret life of Margaret Thatcher. He didn't know the whole story, but she was there. She was sitting up at night obsessed with politics – reading, making notes. There's a wonderful story that she was reading the official biography of Winston Churchill (https://amzn.to/3Lib5d3). I'm sure many of your listeners-readers will know about it – it’s huge. Many volumes. Each time a new volume was issued, it had a companion volume of supporting documents. You have the narrative book, and the companion volume of government papers. Obviously, most people read only the narrative. Most people are not leafing through 800 pages of documents. But, Margaret Thatcher wrote to the biographer saying, “I found this footnote in the documents volume that mentions a speech Churchill was drafting. Do you have a copy of the draft?” With Margaret Thatcher, that's who you're dealing with: a woman who goes home in the evening, and she's deep in the footnotes of the documents volume of this biography. It’s difficult for her colleagues to know that she's like that, because they're predisposed to see her as the irritating woman or the right-wing woman. You're never going to make a proper assessment of her capability. To spot late bloomers, you need the ability to be the outsider and see someone and their qualities, rather than overfitting what you know about them into the patterns you're already used to seeing. This is amazing, Henry, thank you. In your introduction, you talk about characteristics of late bloomers – Persistence, Earnestness, Quiet. You just talked about being persistent. And you hit on earnestness too. Tell me more about those three characteristics, and how they show up in late bloomers: Persistence, Earnestness, Quiet. Let's look at Penelope Fitzgerald, the novelist. She was born into the upper class establishment in England. Both grandfathers were bishops. She was born in the middle of the First World War, so it still means something that they’re bishops. She was born in the Bishop’s Palace in Lincoln (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Medieval_Bishop%27s_Palace). She's born into this kind of significant family and they're a very intellectual family. Her father edited Punch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punch_(magazine)), which was one of the major magazines. Her uncles are the Knox Brothers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penelope_Fitzgerald#): one is code breaking at Bletchley Park in the war, another is a famous detective novelist, one is a Bible scholar, and one is a biographer. They're all writers. And you know what I mean: she’s born into this kind of cultural milieu, the last of the great Victorian tradition.  That and the family are feminists. Her mother studied at Somerville College, Oxford, for instance. So she's born into a family of very high expectations. Fitzgerald goes to Oxford, and she does very, very well. Then she goes to London and writes  reviews for the Times Literary Supplement (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/). Then she works at the BBC. But then she doesn't become a writer. Now there's this whole debate about why that is. Let’s put that to one side and look at the question of people coming from intellectual families. They get great education, they go to big cities like London. They’re among journalists and writers and all the right sort of people. And they do great. And Penelope Fitzgerald does great – but not initially. Not for a long time. Why? What’s the difference with her? The first difference is that she lived an extraordinarily difficult life.  Her houseboat sank. Her husband was an alcoholic. They had to leave London because of their creditors. Obviously, nobody wants this to happen to them, but she’s given the material to write. She had stories. The second thing is all through her life she's learning. She’s learning languages, she’s traveling, she’s going to the opera, getting very cheap tickets, she’s reading. When she becomes a teacher, she really rereads the whole of the European tradition. She goes into really close detail. How does Jane Austen do it? Not: “What is she doing? What are the themes?” Or this kind of rubbish. She is taking a very detailed look: “How does Austen do it? What are the techniques?” She spends years doing this. Her novels are very historical. They're very much rooted in fact – both of her own life and of historical research. They're very European. In a funny way, she is the most European of the 20th century English novelists. She set her novels in Russia and Germany, these kinds of places. And one critic, I really love this phrase, talked about “the Russianness and the Germanness” of her novels. How does she make it so German? It’s because she spent 30 years learning German, traveling to Germany, watching operas and reading German novels in German. She possesses an amazing dedication to the intellectual life and to the life of the mind, while she is living on a houseboat,  while she is homeless, while she is scrambling around trying to get a council flat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_house), while she's got children, while she has a husband out of work, while she has a teaching job. And that is amazing persistence. Now persistence might suggest she kept trying really hard. I don't know whether it's that or whether she's an obsessive, and she couldn't live any other way. I don't think it matters very much. It'll change for people. Same with Katharine Graham. Even at her lowest point, she's obsessed with the news. She's a real news hound, you know, the newspaper is in her blood. Oh, my goodness, this woman is constantly sniffing out newspaper ink, right? But I think that's really important. We rate that persistence or obsessiveness very highly in young talent, as we should. But we forget that it is still an important indicator about someone later in life. Maybe it's a more important indicator, because the fact that it hasn't worn off is actually quite telling. This is a bit speculative, but I think these late bloomers take things a bit more seriously than other people. Not to the point of being humorless, but to the point where they may come across as a bit humorous, because oftentimes by middle age people are a bit like, “things are what they are. I am where I am.” Ray Kroc, who turned McDonald's into a global business, always had business ideas. It got to the point where his friends would joke that “Oh, Ray's had another idea.” But he was simply more earnest than the rest of his peer group. And again, I think that's very significant. Persistence and earnestness. And then quiet. It's like what I said about Margaret Thatcher.  She's keeping her work to herself. She's doing it in the background. Ray Kroc, too. He's quietly persisting. He's quietly getting on with it. You can work in public. I don't think that's a bad thing, but I saw most of these late bloomers quietly working in private. Now, some people have said my book is about hardworking people and that’s it. Maybe that's a legitimate criticism. And there are other sorts of late bloomers. But these were the things that stood out to me. As far as I'm aware, we haven't got another book that really goes into this topic in appropriate depth. Those were the main characteristics as I viewed them. But I'm very open to people coming along and saying they’ve looked at it in a different way too. When I was reading your book, a word kept coming to mind: obsessed. These late bloomers were following their interests, and if something came of it, great. But if nothing ever came of it, they were alright following their obsession. That was what lit them up, made them feel alive, or what they couldn't get out of their heads and their hearts in some sense. I would caution about that a little bit. In a sense, you're absolutely right. They were doing what they wanted to do. But I think they did feel the want of success. Very often, I think obsession and ambition are twins. I believe the psychologist Frederick Herzberg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-factor_theory) came up with the theory that your internal motivation means you’re happy doing your work, even while you are very unhappy about the conditions in which you are doing it. That dynamic was often true for these people before they found success. I think the other word that comes to mind is prepared. You note Margaret Thatcher: “chance favors the prepared mind.” You and I corresponded to set up this interview. I mentioned General Fox Conner, who I wrote a short biography about (https://www.sa.life/p/silver-medalist-fox-conner). He was a huge mentor of Dwight Eisenhower, who you also call out in your book. Before World War I, Conner remained a Major in the Army for 15 years.  That whole time he was preparing; he was attending the right Army schools. He was becoming an expert in this, becoming an expert in that. He didn't know whether a war would come, whether his chance would ever come. But he acted as if it would. He prepared. That leads me to a question: how do we know we're preparing and not simply following our crazy interests or our obsessions? Or we're not just treading water in a stale pond? A lot of the time you might not know. Maybe I'm too cynical. There's lots to say about Eisenhower on this. I actually cut a whole chapter about him, but I'm probably going to put it on my blog (https://www.commonreader.co.uk/), because it's fascinating. He wrote to his son, saying. “Oh, it's a shame I'm going to retire before the war, but it's been a good life.” I find that amazing. I wrote an article recently where I noted a famous quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald: “There are no second acts in American lives.”  That’s from The Last Tycoon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Tycoon), which was published in the same year that World War II came to America. And Eisenhower began his second act, which must be one of the great second acts in American history. He actually thought, “Yeah, okay, well, I missed that. They're going to retire me and I missed out on the next war.”  But he was fine with it because, as you say, he wanted to be in the Army. All his friends left the Army to make money, but he wasn't interested. That's important. But, again, it's notable that he's a man in the mid-century. It's easier for him to be happy with a choice like that. And with Eisenhower it was much more obvious. Everyone believed that there would be another war. When he was thinking, “Should I leave the army?”, his wife was saying to him, “Don't be crazy. There's no way you would ever be happy outside of the Army.” And his senior officers were saying to him, “There's going to be another war. It's just a question of when.”  They thought his chance would come – it seemed quite predictable to them in between the two World Wars.  Whereas for a lot of people, it may not be so predictable. So no, you don't really know. Let's say you want to be something artistic, or something entrepreneurial – there's a lot more you can do. You don't have to wait, right? You can do a lot more and get your work out there. That obviously does not guarantee success. I think it'll vary a lot. I almost wonder if you shouldn't worry too much about that. If you've made the wrong choice about what path you're on, how easy is it for you to change, anyway? I don't know. That's a very deep and difficult question. And I would think that talented people are good at intuitive imagination. They're good at thinking about whether they’re on the right path. Something you just said sparked another question. You mentioned  “you can get your work out there.” Late bloomers, like Penelope Fitzgerald – she’s writing and doing her work. You also mention the Paul Graham quote of expanding their chance of a lucky strike hitting them. Make your target for luck big. On the one hand you write, “If you decline to participate, the world will decline to pay attention to you.” The other hand, there's a limit to the groups, the networking, the selling yourself. In the modern world, that means social media, meetups, networking, all that stuff. And I really like this quote from psychologist Richard Wiseman, that you put in the book: “the lucky are relaxed, not anxious. They don't spend their life searching for their magic moment.” Can you talk about this dynamic of working the work, but also expanding your chance of getting the lucky strike? And yet, not being anxious about it? There's a great difference between networking and self-promoting as a means to an end, and doing those things for their own sake. The more you can reach a kind of overlap between the work being self-promotion, presumably the less anxious you will be. While I'm not an expert on this, I do think a lot of people who are anxious are too focused on the foam on the wave of networking and self-promotion – as opposed to doing work and putting it out there. Obviously, it's good to push your work, particularly for writers. You see a lot of people saying how it's difficult and demoralizing to have to do so much self-promotion these days. But it depends what you're benchmarking yourself against. If there's a particular type of success you want, and you're not getting it, you probably will be anxious about networking and self-promotion. This will cause you to do it for its own sake, and I think that makes it much less effective. There's an interesting story in the book about Maya Angelou (https://amzn.to/3XBdbMc). She's done writing programs. She’s been around writers. She's written stuff. She's sent her work to writers and so forth. It's not going very well. She's in New York and not very happy. Her friend James Baldwin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baldwin) tells her to come out to a dinner party. She doesn't want to go. She’s demoralized by a lack of success. And he tells her “to just shut up and come to the dinner party. Let's just go.” So, she goes and there are publishers there. She's chatting, and she’s telling the story of her life, basically. These publishers, not being idiots, tell her immediately they will buy her memoir. Of course, it became I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (https://amzn.to/4cAnowJ). That’s not anxious networking and self-promotion. She didn’t moan, “Oh, God, I've got to go out and do it.” No – she has done loads of work and is ready to tell this story. I think this illustrates the difference rather well. Obviously, people will counter this point by arguing that not everyone gets to go to those dinner parties. But that's a slightly separate thing. Getting the lucky strike, it does involve a lot of work. The Wiseman quote. I mean, is the lack of anxiety genetic? Is it inherent temperament? Who knows? I would say, maybe don't worry about these things too much. But it's an interesting point. You can work on your work. And when potentially interesting opportunities come your way, you can consider them. But you can’t determine who you meet. You can’t absolutely determine the circles you run in. I know of really good work that is overlooked right now. I try to write about it on my blog. It’s a small example, because my blog is not that big. But I know it makes a difference to those writers whose work is getting overlooked. So, there are two responses to “my work is getting overlooked.” I like the Samuel Johnson quote from the book: “Many have complained of neglect who have never tried to attract the world's regard.” You have to keep going. I'm not saying that it's going to work. I'm not going to promote some theory that this is the secret to success. But is there another method? I don't know. I don't think so. What's the alternative here? I don't know what it is. It seems like a lot of people quit. Yeah. And maybe that's the right choice for them, right? But it's an important point. Thomas Edison said, “People don't know how close they were to success before they quit.” Again, that obviously is not going to be true of everyone. But when we're looking at late bloomers, I do think it's significant. They kept going. By and large, you look at superlative performers that the world knows, or a significant niche knows about. A late bloomer in a local setting could have a terrific inflection point and a massive impact in a“smaller way,” but it still matters enormously in their corner of the world. That's a really cool message of your book. It's not that you become Katharine Graham or Samuel Johnson. It's that in your corner of the world, you can have a different impact tomorrow than you had today. I was careful in the opening of the book to say: we learn from the best. That's why these people are here. We're interested in great talent. It matters very, very much that we find and put to use the great talents. But this is a more applicable idea.  I am interested more generally in the phenomenon of late bloomers. A lot of people confuse the idea of success with doing what they want to do. People write to me, and they've done great work, and it is pretty much overlooked. Even though it would never make them globally famous, this book should change the way you think about things. Maybe you're just trying to do your thing, you're never going to be on the news about it, and that's cool. This is amazing. I want to explore your idea of the “switch,” or as you put it, “an important type of late bloomer is someone who successfully changes the balance of their life.” Tell us more. So, I think these are two slightly different points. Changing the balance of your life is like what I was just saying. You don't have to be Samuel Johnson, Ray Kroc, Margaret Thatcher, or Vera Wang to be a late bloomer. You can simply live differently. I think a lot of people do want to live differently in some way, and they don't quite know how to do it, or they're not quite sure if they want to make the series of tradeoffs involved. The point about making the switch: I read this wonderful paper out of Northwestern (https://www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/news/articles/2021/09/what-was-really-the-secret-behind-van-goghs-success/). The question was, why do people have a hot streak? Artists, scientists, sportspeople. Why do they suddenly get this 10 or 15 year period where everything they touch is on fire, right? Everything turns to gold? The paper argued: it's an explore-exploit dynamic. So, people have a period in their career where they're looking around, trying new things, new ideas, exploring different options. Then at some point they go into the exploit phase. They say, “I've discovered the most interesting things from my explorations. I'm really going to work on them and deliver stuff based on them.” For example, if you're a scientist, maybe you've worked in an academic setting or a research lab. You've been exploring there. When you go into exploiting, you're probably going to a more commercial organization. Maybe now you'll have a team and you'll be a project manager. So these hot performers are really set up to exploit. The Northwestern paper said these hot people have both phases. But what's really important is that they choose to switch. The particular factor that makes the difference for a hot streak is deciding to move from explore to exploit. That's really important. My argument is it happens to different degrees of intentionality with late bloomers. And it happens through networks, circumstances, all that kind of midlife crisis type things. My favorite example is Audrey Sutherland. She looked in the mirror at age 61 and said, “Come on, lady, you're getting old. If you want to do this, you've got to go now.” And she did. She quit her job, and she went solo kayaking in Alaska in the Arctic Circle. She had bear encounters, and it was phenomenal. She kept doing it for 20 years. The woman is a total hero. Everyone should read her books Paddling My Own Canoe (https://amzn.to/4cBgreG) and Paddling North (https://amzn.to/3xBhkoT). They're very well written. And she was her own interruption. She knew that she had to make that switch. She knew that no one was going to make her. So sometimes the switch happens in a very intentional way. Other times it's like Maya Angelou: James Baldwin takes you to dinner and you have an opportunity. You choose to switch into the exploit mode here. Interesting. I love that explanation, Henry. You also write about late bloomers finding a peer group. You quote Paul Graham, “Nothing is more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems.” You give the example of the Inklings of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and friends, and also The Club of Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke and others. I found that so intriguing. How do people go about finding a peer set that they fit in with, that will support them, and that they can support. Very difficult question. I don't know. Do they find their peer group or does their peer group find them? I don't know. That's a great question. I don't know. I think this is linked to the idea that if you decline to participate, the world will decline to pay attention. While you're doing your work and networking, you're trying to find your peer group. Some late bloomers don't realize they should do that. Not all of them have an important peer group, right? This is just one way it happens. There's a quote from Henry James (https://amzn.to/3zi38Si), talking about Nathaniel Hawthorne (https://amzn.to/3XyTvsv). He says something like, “Hawthorne's obviously brilliant. He taught himself to be a genius writer. But it's such a shame he didn't have a group of peers to work with, because he would have learned it all so much quicker.” It is not necessarily the only way. But once people find that group, it becomes very important. I mean, obviously, just you have to be looking. But it's very difficult to know. What group will be right for each person, because it'll change so much? Where are the people who you find interesting? Go to them. Email them, find them on social media. There are lots of these options now. It does seem to be the case a lot of the time. Doing the work is one thing. Associating with people – it's not just for promotional reasons. It makes your ideas better. It changes how you work. There’s a wonderful Ralph Waldo Emerson (https://amzn.to/4ckXrl5) quote: “Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul.” I love that. And I think that's true. That's a great quote. As a Kentuckian, probably our most famous writer right now is Wendell Berry (https://amzn.to/3VD6iaE).  He is an environmental writer. Very famously, he knew he was onto something in his writing career. He moved to New York to  be in that milieu. And he rejected it. He said, this is not home. This is not where I need to be. The things I'm writing about require me to go home to the family farm in Henry County, Kentucky. He left New York and moved back to Kentucky (https://calnewport.com/on-wendell-berrys-move-from-nyu-to-a-riverside-cabin/). He did have support: Wallace Stegner (https://amzn.to/4bhWXLg) and others. It’s so interesting to me that some people find their peer group is a place, an environment. They feel the need to go to a particular place and be surrounded by that place. They have to live a particular way in order to flourish. That came to mind as you were talking. The two are connected, right? Whenever you read a Paul Graham quote, he's talking about startups. If you want to be Wendell Berry, walking around in the woods is probably a much better idea than hanging out in New York. If you want to do a startup, succeed in business somehow. For that person, walking in the woods is for weekends. This is what I mean. It varies a lot. Depending on what you want to do and by temperament, some artists will flourish in a group. Other artists will do it on their own and it will happen in its own way. There's a kind of wisdom in knowing which one you are. What is the correct balance for you? One of the reasons I love this book is you wrote so many biographies of fascinating people. Even the little sketches of two or three sentences are fascinating. One person you wrote extensively about is Samuel Johnson. You and I corresponded about him as we set up this call. Until then, I'd almost forgotten I took a class in Samuel Johnson. I loved it. I have a bunch of his essays and books and James Boswell’s famous biography (https://amzn.to/4cAhL1x). Now I want to revisit all of that. I’d forgotten how wonderful a writer and moralist and philosopher he was. I would love to hear you riff on Samuel Johnson, his life, and why you love him so much. Well, that's a very Johnsonian experience, because, of course, Samuel Johnson famously said, “Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.” I have a great love of Samuel Johnson, and have since I was 18 – well no, earlier than that. But when I was 18 or 19, I sat down to read him properly in university. He's one of those writers that some people just aren't going to love and some people are. I have a great love of Samuel Johnson because of several things. First, he has this huge appetite for knowledge. We have a very myopic sense of the literary, a very narrow sense of what literature is. But of course, literature is a very, very broad thing. And if you look at the great traditions of novel and poetry and drama writing – it's about everything. Everything. In John Milton (https://amzn.to/4bhiy6E) and in the romantic poets (https://amzn.to/3Xz0DoI), you have many references to the most up-to-date scientific discoveries and ideas. Many of the newest political ideas, the newest philosophies – they're all being written about in poetry. Poetry is a real vehicle for ideas. Johnson is one of the broadest of writers – economics, science, morals, philosophy, the nature of language. Johnson could write anything. We think of him as writing these great essays, the Dictionary (https://amzn.to/3VLRhmP), the essays. He also wrote books, advertisements, sermons, and legal opinions. Oh, my goodness, anything you can think of. In some ways, that's the mark of a true writer. He's also personally a very fascinating individual. Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson is one of the greatest books. Johnson is alive and rambunctious on every page. He's argumentative, provocative, usually knowledgeable and entertaining. He's a candle that never goes out. At the time, people complained about the same things they complain about now. People would read the Rambler essays and complain about the hard words in it. So it’s maybe an acquired taste. I don't know. But Shakespeare is the most important imaginative writer in English, and Johnson is the most important nonfiction writer. I see them as kind of twin pillars of English literature. If you're going to make a tripod, I think you'd add the King James Bible. Well, maybe John Wickliffe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wycliffe). But yeah. Can you tell us a little bit more about someone who you uncovered as part of your research that you didn't get to include in the book, or only very briefly. Yes, the Ray Kroc chapter was initially a double story. In that chapter I take David Galenson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Galenson)’s theory of late blooming in artists and I apply it to the life of Ray Kroc, who worked in fast food. I'm trying to show that this is a pattern that's not only for writers and painters. It also applies to people who fry burgers. It was initially a double chapter on Ray Kroc and David Ogilvy (https://amzn.to/3KXMsC4). In advertising, words like tycoon, kingpin and mogul don't seem appropriate. Whatever you call him, he was the big guy on Madison Avenue. I cut the whole part about Ogilvy. He has this fascinating life. He worked as a chef in a French hotel. He sold AGA Cooking Stoves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGA_cooker). He'd worked in market research with George Gallup (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gallup). He worked in advertising for a couple of years, but in the business side of it, not the creative side. He'd never written an advert before he started his agency. He worked in intelligence during World War II. The year before he opened his agency –  when he was 38 or 39 –  he was living on an Amish farm and he was play-acting being an Amish farmer. I don't think he was a very good farmer. So he’s kind of just a guy setting up an advertising agency. But he'd been obsessed with advertising for his whole life. From his time with Gallup, he had this idea of bringing market research into advertising. At night on the farm, he would study the history of advertising. By the time he opened his agency, he really knew everything there was to know about advertising. He demonstrated that kind of quiet persistence. I took him out of the book. Maybe I'll publish that chapter on my blog, because he's a very interesting figure. That's great. I would love to read the chapter about Ogilvy. As we age and if we haven't caught the success we think we are capable of, what are we hampered more by? Are we hampered more by our diminished sense of ourselves through frustration and failure? Or are we more hampered by other people's disappointment in our lack of success? I think that will change a lot depending on the individual. I think that's a question of personality and temperament. Maybe some people don't feel that disappointment at all. I don't think that's a thing we should generalize about. It's a great question, and I think people should give it some attention. But I don't know that I've got a good answer. Thinking about the people in the book, we’d have different answers for all of them. Katharine Graham very clearly felt a low sense of herself because of the treatment from her mother and from her husband. Well, but it's both, isn't it? And it's both. Yeah. By the end, she clearly felt poorly inside and from people’s treatment of her. That's my point. I think the answer is often quite complicated. If you're someone reading this interview, or reading the book, and you feel deep inside that you have some contribution to make to the world, but you haven't yet: How would you say that you can improve the odds of making that impact? Well, I don't know, because again it would vary so much by the person. Some of the main messages of the book come through: do the work right, and then get it out. Yes. Think about: where is the gap in your opportunity? Are you in the right circumstances? Changing the culture that you're operating in and living in is very significant. Do you have the right peer group? All these things we've been discussing. Do you need to look at yourself in the mirror, like Audrey Sutherland, and say, “Come on, if not now, when?” I think all of these things are there. The particular combination is down to the individual. A lot of books would tell you what the answer is. But I think that's a lie. What I'm trying to do in this book is give you all these different bits, and then your answer will be some version of it for you. Yes, right! But I can’t tell you the answer.  You are not an average line on the graph. You are who you are. Like I said at the beginning, Henry, I love, love, love your book. You’ve made such a valuable contribution to our appreciation of an underutilized source of talent – late bloomers. I'm curious. Coming out of publishing the book, what are the next set of questions related to late bloomers that fascinate you? I don't know if I have any more questions about late bloomers now. I'm interested to note that there are so many of them in public life. There's a wonderful article, I think, in the New York Times, that shows many charts of when Taylor Swift's most successful songs and albums were launched. To me, she very clearly seems to be a late bloomer. I was fascinated by that. The debate, if that's the right word that you're having in America about Joe Biden's age, it’s remarkable that you have a President doing the job at that age. It's symptomatic of what's happening in the wider workforce. There are many, many more people in work above retirement age than there used to be, both in America and here in Britain. There's a big trend there. We've also got older actresses winning Oscars; Larry David is doing the final season of Curb Your Enthusiasm (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0264235/) in his seventies. There are a lot of late bloomers in the culture. There was a big video shared somewhere of a woman who became a park ranger in her 80s and now she’s 100 years old (https://www.npr.org/2021/09/22/1039721368/100-year-old-national-park-ranger-betty-soskin). These late bloomers seem to be a real phenomenon more and more in the news. Let me ask you a couple of questions about your work and you. What were the big takeaways you took from writing the book? It could be lessons from the book, or just the process of writing the book, or the research, or working with Tyler. What do you take away from the last year or year and a half of your life? A lot of things. Oh, my goodness! In the book, there are a lot of topics that I either hadn't considered properly, or I changed my mind about. I was most fascinated by network theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_theory). I came to take that idea much more seriously than I had – the importance of peer groups and networks. I'm very pleased to be part of the Emergent Ventures group, which is where I got my grant to write the book. The people in that group – endlessly interesting. I came to both a theoretical and a practical appreciation of networks and peer groups in a way that I had not. That's the biggest thing for me. Interesting! How has writing the book changed your work, or your life, or your approach to life? Well, I quit my job. So that was quite a big change. And my wife chose not to work when we had children, and she's homeschooling. So that has also been quite a big change. In many ways you would look at it and say, “This is not a sensible arrangement financially and professionally.” I’m trying very hard to make a go of doing exactly what I want to do. And Seinfeld! Jerry Seinfeld gave an interview recently (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-mJLwQE8u0). When he got the opportunity to do the pilot for Seinfeld, someone who was then a very significant comedian, said to him, “Don't let them change it. All the suits are going to tell you you've got to do it this way, you’ve got to do it that way.” He said, “Do it exactly how you want, and then when you fail, you won't care because you'll have failed, but you'd have done your thing. Whereas if you fail, because you took all this advice and did what they made you, you’ll resent it.” That's a really good. I like that, and that's kind of where I am. What's the next work you want to do? I've been thinking a lot about patronage and the question of patronage. Writers used to have patrons who gave them money, right? We think of it in politics – politicians give their associates jobs and so forth. In some ways, this is a bad thing. It's favoritism. It's nepotism. Economists would say it's not very efficient. If you allocate positions based on who you know rather than based on meritocracy, you're obviously going to get inferior performance. And yet, if you look around, there is a lot of patronage in the world. Through grants and schemes like them. But also, in a corporate environment, you have to have a mentor to rise above a certain level. Now that's not exactly patronage. But you want your mentor to become your patron, and say to the other bigwigs, “This person is great and we should be encouraging and promoting them.” Why does a profit-driven corporate environment use the supposedly inefficient mechanism of patronage? This is a question that I'm working on right now. I also have written a series of articles about talent for a firm called Entrepreneur First (https://www.joinef.com/posts/). I wrote a piece about Rene Girard and his theory of mimesis (https://www.joinef.com/posts/nurture-your-imagination-to-cultivate-anti-mimesis/), which a lot of people think explains the world. I really enjoyed writing those pieces as well. Would your ideas around patronage extend to sports too? It seems like so many sons and daughters of sports figures are becoming well-known and successful athletes themselves. They've lived that life since they were two years old. Yeah, that's interesting. I haven't seen any studies about patronage in sports, but I'm gonna go and look that up. But I've been reading the studies and trying to work it out. Because patronage obviously works in some way. It's honestly not totally rigged. I'm not a very sports-oriented person, but that's a great hint. I'm gonna go and look that up. But I'm actually more interested in this question of patronage as a selection mechanism. Why is patronage being used in highly meritocratic environments, when the economic research suggests that it should be counterproductive? I wonder how that relates to Boards of Directors, too. Going back to some of my early work, typically the CEO selects or has a heavy influence on new board members. There's something like patronage there. Does that lead to better outcomes? This is my point, right? It's a question of talent selection. Patronage is still a very live issue in modern society, and I think it should get some more attention. Well, I can't wait to read whatever comes out of your research and analysis of the topic. Great. Henry, this has been amazing! I’ve loved this conversation. I'm so grateful for your willingness to speak with me and all your time. This has been a highlight of the year! Well, you had really good questions and you made me think. And now I'm worried that I'm going to have to change some bits of the book. Haha! So that was a good interview for you. Haha! (Amazon Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sa.life (https://www.sa.life?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

17. 

    7 Nov 2024

    An Interview With Yoga Miracle Worker Laurie LeCompte

    In 2017, coming off a health scare, I needed to become more active physically. My nutritionist suggested I reach out to Laurie LeCompte (http://laurielecompteyoga.com/) about yoga. At the time, she was offering private lessons at the Meridian Center (http://www.meridianlouisville.com/home) on Wallace Avenue in Louisville. Laurie took great efforts to understand my health background – my congenital heart defect, sloped shoulders, near-scoliosis, and weak left arm. She created a yoga practice around my needs and with my aims in mind. For example, it’s good if I can improve my strength and posture – but it’s imperative that they don’t degenerate. Now Laurie owns Yoga Baum (https://www.yogabaum.com/), a thriving yoga studio, still in the Meridian Center. I’ve worked with her for more than seven years. My weekly yoga class is a bedrock of my health and strength routine. They’re critical for me. In 2022, I sat down for a conversation with Laurie. We delve into her journey into yoga and becoming a business owner, how you should evaluate your yoga and fitness “progress,” her interest in ferrets, what “self care” really should mean, reading horror books, and much more! How did you first get attracted to yoga? What got you interested in yoga? I was always into physical things and physical fitness. Really, I was looking for something as cross-training for running. I was running a lot of half-marathons. I needed more flexibility, mobility, those kinds of things. And I was having the typical runner-type pains, in my knees and hips, and I wanted to work them out. I'd only ever done endurance sports. I ran cross country in high school. I rowed in college. So I didn't have any experience with anything else. And I was curious about it. Also, it was a time when I was feeling a lot more stressed and anxious. So the idea of a more relaxing and meditative practice was appealing to me, as well as focusing on myself and not having to talk to anybody. Having that time for myself was really attractive. How did you get started? Did you find a yoga instructor? There was a studio that I would always pass. They had a 30-day deal and I went there. I had tried yoga a couple of times before that – with friends in college for a couple of classes. But nothing much. So doing yoga was pretty intimidating. How did things develop from there? You started trying to solve a physical problem, and you became a teacher and then a yoga business owner. That’s quite a progression. Tell me more about that. I always tend to make my hobbies into jobs somehow. I don't know if that's the perfectionist in me, but I always want to know more about what I’m doing. I had this desire to know more so I completed yoga teacher training. I didn't plan on actually being a yoga teacher. I already had jobs teaching German as an adjunct around town. So I took the teacher training because I wanted to know more, I liked it a lot, and it was fun. But of course, a lot of teachers will tell you that it starts that way. Then as soon as people know that you're a yoga teacher, you're called on to be a substitute teacher in classes. So literally the week I returned from teacher training, I had my first classes to teach. It took no time to find a job. The fact you found a teaching role immediately – it speaks to the explosion of interest in yoga across the country over the past 20 or 30 years. What explains that astounding growth? There was a big yoga boom when people in Hollywood started getting into yoga and looking into different types of fitness and spiritual practices. Some teachers would go to India to study and bring back what they taught, and some places started hosting famous yoga teachers for workshops. So a lot more people had exposure to yoga through these visiting teachers, and through what they were seeing celebrities doing. Here's a terminology question I struggle with. I have a strength “trainer” and a physical “therapist.” When it comes to you and yoga, I struggle to describe what you do. What do you call yourself? How do you describe what you do? The terms “teacher” and “instructor” are mostly interchangeable to me. If I want to get picky, teacher has a better ring to it, maybe more clout. I am actually teaching something and instructor sounds more like a fitness instructor simply leading people through the motions. And yoga is more than fitness. You can definitely get fit doing yoga, but since it's more, I prefer the term teacher. But please don’t call me your “guru”! How do you think about a student's progress? Is “progress” even the right way to think about it? How do you evaluate how a student is doing and what they need to do going forward? That's a really interesting question because people come in with certain goals, and oftentimes just by practicing yoga, their goals will change. They may start wanting to achieve something physically impressive. But then the more they practice yoga, that becomes less necessary for them – they just want to feel good. So it really depends. When my clients start out, I have them fill out an intake form. It gives me a lot of information about why they're seeing me in the first place. I want to understand what progress looks like for them. A lot of people's goals are oriented around pain relief. When they come to see me for private lessons, the most common reason they come is because they're in pain. And it's a pretty easy thing to measure: how much pain were you in when we started? And how much pain do you feel today? So for private lessons, most people see you because of pain. What is it? Acute pain? Chronic pain? Back pain is the main reason. But there are also injuries and people who are recovering from surgery, like a knee replacement. Some people feel terrified to move after a surgery like that. They think if they move a certain way, it’ll hurt really badly. And that sort of perpetuates the cycle of those areas becoming super-sensitive. So they come to yoga to learn a different way to move that hopefully feels better. What’s the right timescale to be thinking about progress when you start a yoga practice? Looking back, I could tell a huge difference after about a year. I think it depends on why they're here. For some of the pain issues, I would say a couple of sessions can make a difference. That doesn’t mean the pain will be gone. But they can tell a difference – in pain level and in their movement. Your goals were long-term, and so it took you longer to become aware of the progress. I plan to keep doing this for life because I want to postpone regression as far as long as possible. Again, getting stronger is great, but I do yoga with you to help prevent deterioration. We also have to be realistic with goals. People who want to get stronger – at some point they’re going to reach a limit, either because of age or just physical capacity for those things. So yes, there are reasonable goals and sometimes we have to have those conversations too, about what’s realistic. People might come in wanting to learn how to do a handstand. If they can't hold a plank for 15 seconds, we're pretty far off from the handstand. We've gotten me up to where last year I held a five-minute plank. But my desire to go to a six-minute plank is virtually zero. It doesn't matter. But being able to maintain a plank for four of five minutes, that’s somewhat indicative that I’ve maintained strength, which is what I want to do. Let’s move to a different subject. Tell me about the mental shift you made when you moved from being a yoga student to a yoga teacher. And how do you think about being a teacher today? Even now, there’s more and more to learn – absolutely a universe to explore. Continuing education is super important to me and at the studio. If you teach here, there's actually an annual continuing education requirement. So it’s very important to me that we all remain students and we all remain fresh. And I think that we should change as teachers throughout our careers.  When I started teaching yoga, I was already teaching German. There was definitely an advantage there – I knew about teaching and about being in front of people. Coming into teaching yoga, a lot of people take a lot longer to get over their fear of public speaking before they can successfully get through a 60-minute class. And that was easy because I had already been doing it. How about the mental shift in moving from being a yoga teacher to being a studio owner? Tell me about that. I was very ready to be a business owner and to work for myself. I was getting pretty fed up with the bureaucracy at the university level and working in that environment. And like I said, I was an adjunct, so I had zero power. I needed more say in what was going to happen. I think that most yoga teachers probably already see themselves as business owners because they are independent contractors. And even if they're teaching all over town, that is their business. That's their brand. The dramatic shift for me was owning the physical space. But earlier, I already was running my own business and I was building my own brand. It might not have been called Yoga Baum yet but it was always building to that. There is a natural progression with yoga teaching. You keep learning more. That lends itself to leading workshops. And that leads to teacher training. And then you need a space for teacher training. So now you have a space and you might as well also offer group classes. So it builds in that way. But having my private clients led me to want a location, and that's when I started renting space at Meridian. At some point, I needed more space. As you got into teaching and then owning the business, what's something you spent a ton of time and energy on that you could've skipped entirely? I trained in Ashtanga Vinyasa yoga initially. And there's hardly any verbal instruction, as far as how to do the postures, when leading in that style in a group class. You memorize the Sanskrit name of the pose, and the Sanskrit count because there's a number in Sanskrit for each movement. So it's literally like:  you say “one” in Sanskrit and “inhale” and that is the cue to lift your arms. Then you say “two” in Sanskrit and “ exhale” and that’s the cue to fold forward. It’s very formatted. I trained in that style, but I never ended up teaching that style. It wasn’t a waste because I learned a lot of Sanskrit and that first training I completed went way beyond that simple memorization. But I never taught in a traditional Ashtanga Vinyasa class. I teach the postures from that series all the time, but not in that strict method. Since I teach private yoga, none of my sessions with clients are ever the same and everybody's different. So the Ashtanga Vinyasa approach didn't really have a lot of practical application in what I am doing. So as far as my teaching goes, that memorization of the series with Sanskrit counting was not useful. How do you find or recruit or select new Yoga Baum teachers? That's a great question. It's actually a question that we go over in our teacher training when we talk about the business of yoga. When we talk about finding jobs, we discuss how to reach out to studios. For me, it's really important that potential teachers know us and that they know the vibe of our community. I get a lot of emails that say, “Hey, I'm a yoga teacher. I live in Louisville. Here's my experience. Can I teach for you?” And they've literally never stepped foot in the door. They've never met me. And it bothers me that they've never been here. It feels like they don’t care much, right? Most of our teachers have come from our teacher training classes. Teachers don’t have to have graduated from Yoga Baum’s teacher training, but it often works out that way because those people end up being part of our community. I want to see that teachers are dedicated – to their students, to what we’re building here. Our community has a certain energy and I want to keep it that way. Tell me about the community you're trying to build. I think it's honestly about the approach that we have to teaching yoga. I think we attract certain students because of our approach. We’re really trying to help people build a sustainable and empowering yoga practice. That’s part of our mission statement. We're not prioritizing really extreme postures or postures that are really popular because of Instagram or because they look cool. We’re really trying to help people feel good. We might do some postures that are harder to do, but it's always in a way that’s approachable and accessible for all levels. So that's a really big part of who we are. We want everybody to be able to practice yoga. We offer a mixture of practices. We have flow yoga, we have restorative yoga. We think that balance is really important. We offer challenging practices, but we also have much softer practices. We think that they're both important. Our philosophy centers around the idea of accessibility, and making movement feel good and empowering. Let’s go back to something you said earlier. You run, you row, you weightlift. You do yoga. Tell us about this multi-pronged approach to fitness. How do you think holistically about fitness or strength? I don't think that there's one way necessarily that it should be, but I do think that people should enjoy what they're doing. One of the things that can happen when people get really into yoga, and one of the reasons that they don't stay with it is they put all of their eggs in one basket. They expect yoga to be everything – their cardio, their strength training, the way they gain flexibility, they want to feel relaxed – everything. And they come once a week – and we can't do it. It’s not going to work and it doesn’t work that way. Yoga can give you all of those things, but you're going to have to practice a lot. But it also doesn't have to be everything. When we put so much pressure on yoga to be all of that, it's not successful. In order to enjoy my practice, I also don’t expect everything from it, and I do different things. I can lean on the different parts of yoga depending on what I need in that moment, but realistically, I know that I’m not getting fit while I’m laying on bolsters in a restorative yoga class and I also know I’m not resting and recovering as much as I need to if I’m doing flow classes every day. So I do different styles of yoga for balance, and I do other activities because I enjoy them and they have benefits outside of what the type of yoga I’m practicing can give me. How'd you get into like weightlifting? You have an entire Instagram page just dedicated to your lifting (https://www.instagram.com/laurieliftsheavy). I've weight lifted on and off for a long time because of other sports. We had to lift in college for rowing. I started up a more serious strength-training routine because one of my friends wanted me to go with her. Then I figured out that I was pretty decent at deadlifting, so I focused on that. I've always been attracted to intensity. That's part of why I need yoga.  I need to chill out. I need to be still, I need some time for myself. And yoga gives me that. There's something about the intensity of strength training and always challenging myself to get stronger that I love. And strength training practices have helped me a lot as a yoga teacher. Getting ideas for how I want to approach my classes, getting ideas for new movements. There are certain aspects of the movement or the training that translate into me being a better teacher. All of that crosses over in a really powerful way that helps me to be a more interesting teacher. On Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/lauriekeet/), you describe yourself as a “self care curator.” What does that mean? I want to help people figure out what they would have the most success in as far as keeping up their self care practices. And if they don't even know what self care is, that's a good place to start. So what's that mean to you? Self care, self compassion. We see those terms a lot in today’s world.  How do we do that in the modern world? I'm glad you're asking this because this is actually something I've thought about changing the wording of because it's so overused now. It barely means anything anymore. But for me, self care is like a dedicated activity or something you're doing for yourself simply to do it for yourself to feel better or to feel good about it. It could be a lot of different things, but it doesn’t need to be educational. It doesn't need to be anything other than enjoyable for you. Setting aside the time to actually have that opportunity is I think the hardest part for a lot of people. I think where they get stuck is they don't know what it looks like for them. We could and do have a conversation about it. What do you like? What’s your schedule like? We could talk about yoga, or meditation or mindfulness or things like journaling. When I say that I'm a self care curator, I want to help them choose practices that make sense for their schedule, budget, and life. And if I can help them, maybe we work together. Maybe it has nothing to do with me. Maybe their self care comes through fishing. I don’t do that and I can’t help with that. But maybe I can help them discover that as a path for self care. Let’s shift gears. You are a vegetarian and you probably get asked a lot: “What's the hardest thing about being a vegetarian?” I want to ask you: What's the easiest thing about being a vegetarian? I've been a vegetarian for so long –  since 2008. Fourteen years. So it is just easy now.  I'm what they call a “Bambi vegetarian.” I love animals so much that I can't stand the idea of eating an animal. The question that made me switch was: could I slaughter this animal? Because I want to be connected with the whole process. This food I am consuming – what is happening in order to put it on my plate? And I realized that I couldn't do it – not even for fish. I couldn’t eat animals, knowing what it takes to get them onto my plate. That's a very Michael Polian or Anthony Bourdain point. We are so removed in our current food cycle from the processes it takes to feed us animal meats and products. I agree. I don't have problems with people who aren't vegetarians, but I do wish that we were all a little bit more connected to the process and understanding what really goes on. Here's a question I want to ask because I will learn from this myself. You give the best gifts. Your gifts come across as personalized and sincere. But from what I can gather, they’re not super-customized or super-expensive. One year you gave us an air plant, one year was an eye mask, a couple were coffee mugs, and last year you gave a terrific tote bag. How do you approach client gift-giving? It’s really hard. It’s a hard mix because I have a lot of clients. I start with our budget for this: how much per person? That plays a big role. Then I look at possible options. Then I try to think about items that either I would like or make sense for what we enjoy together. Something that’s universally appreciated – tea or coffee or something. But then it’s not only about getting a cup. How can we personalize it to make it a bit more special? I try to not select items that will clutter up people’s spaces or that they’ll just throw away. It has to hit that sweet spot. I will ask my husband for input or reaction to items. He has definitely shot down ideas! When do you start thinking about this year’s gift? How long does this process take? I probably start thinking about it pretty seriously in October and I try to buy it in November. Last year it was still late, despite having planned so far ahead, because of COVID supply chain issues. This section of the interview comes from an economics podcast that I listen to (https://conversationswithtyler.com/). It's called “Overrated or Underrated.” I will say something. And you're going to tell me whether it’s overrated or underrated. First one: Thich Nhat Nanh’s influence on the world? This is hard, right? He was so amazing, but I don't know what other people think. He’s probably underrated. Stephen King's novels? I mean, he's so popular. Well, let's say underrated because I like him a lot. You know what a lot of people haven't read? When he was writing as Richard Bachman – (https://amzn.to/3HtWFDG)The Long Walk (https://amzn.to/3HtWFDG)? That is so underrated. I don't even think anybody knows about it. All right – a few fitness ones. The corpse pose? Underrated. People will leave sometimes and they won't even do it. They're like, “I'm not here for that.” They don't even know what they're missing. Underrated, for sure. The deadlift? Underrated. Everybody thinks it's a back killer. But if you do it right, it's going to make your back into steel. What about the squat? I mean, I hate squats. So I would say overrated. But I will admit squats are great. Everybody should squat, but there doesn't need to be as much hype. Why don't we talk that much about the deadlift? There's too much hype, so it's overrated. The plank? People are down with the plank now. I think they appreciate it. So it's appreciated appropriately. Ferrets as pets? I will say it's underrated, but I am not saying that people should go get ferrets as pets. I don't really think most people can handle it. I have actually ended up with ferrets because people have gotten them because they liked my ferrets, and then they couldn’t take care of them properly. People think that they're easy – they think ferrets are like a hamster that you keep in a cage. But ferrets want their space. You have to get them out and they're super hyper and they want to play with you. Also, if you have dogs or cats or other pets, it's problematic. And ferrets do things like put their heads through the small open spaces in open doors, and you have to watch out for that. Most people don’t want to be that vigilant.  If you have kids, they're great with kids, but kids might not be great for the ferrets. So I think that they're underrated, but most people shouldn’t get them as a pet. Social media for business? Everybody's using it now, right? But people aren’t using it to its maximum capability. So, maybe it's underrated. Social media for personal use? Overrated. It's such a time suck. Social media is a necessary evil in a lot of ways. I think that it can get really negative and I've read studies that say 30 minutes is all we can handle before it starts getting depressing. I think we can do a lot less on social media. Margaritas? Underrated always. I mean, they're still coming up with all these great flavor concoctions! You read a lot – what books or thinkers have impacted you the most, however you define impact? I read a lot of fiction. I don't read a ton of nonfiction unless it's for my yoga work. Reading is my self care, my way to decompress. I think I am more creative because of it – seeing all of the stories and characters. When you watch a movie, you get some sense for the characters. But in a book, you get to know them more intimately and you open your mind and imagination in new ways. Reading fiction has been shown to help with emotional intelligence (https://hbr.org/2020/03/the-case-for-reading-fiction). I feel like I can relate to the world better when I'm in a good reading space. I find you really interesting because you combine these different things. You are American, but you know and have taught German. You attended a Catholic high school. Then you have this yoga-Buddhist-Asian influence too. You have this intriguing multi-faceted piecing together of your life. What’s a lesson you've learned about life that you think you've learned because of that multi-faceted approach to your life that I don’t have because my life isn’t that combination of influences? My life has given me a lot of opportunities to experience different cultures on a pretty deep level. And that's helped me relate to people better and become more empathetic. I think that's something that we should see more of in business owners and especially a client-facing business like this one. In my day-to-day, I'm not just behind the scenes — I'm working with real people all the time and seeing a variety of personalities and cultural influences. If I can see things better from their point of view – it helps me understand what's important to them, how important it is, and how they can reach their goals better. Having a better read on people, and what truly matters to them, is the main thing. Last question. Where do you see Yoga Baum in 10 to 20 years? Do you consider it your life’s work? Oh yeah, totally. Absolutely. I've made jokes about this: now that I have my own business, I feel like I'm unhireable. I can't go back. It’s amazing to have a vision and then see it come to fruition like this. We definitely have long-term plans. We want to keep building this special community. I'm not talking about opening more locations, but expanding our offerings to different kinds of yoga that maybe aren’t on the schedule now. We started as a private client business. Group classes came later. So we're still working to build the group classes. We'd love to see growth and build our community. But we have lots of plans. Laurie, thank you so much! I’ve truly enjoyed our conversation! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sa.life (https://www.sa.life?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

18. 

    8 Oct 2024

    A Conversation with Publishing Maverick Ellen Fishbein

    Over the past three years, I’ve interviewed some fascinating and accomplished people. I’ve learned much from each person. I’ve felt delighted to share their loves, laughs, trials and feats with Solvitur Ambulando readers through the edited transcripts of the conversations. But look, podcasts reign supreme in the world. Over the past 10 years, people have become accustomed to engaging with the interview format through audio or video recordings of conversations. They have less interest in reading a lengthy transcript, even when edited for readability. The time has come for me to, er, catch up to the times. Today, I launch the podcast companion to the written Solvitur Ambulando newsletter, “Walks of Life.” The podcast will carry my interviews with these terrific writers, thinkers, artists and businesspeople. Each episode will include the audio interview and a lightly edited transcript. It will also include my analysis of the interview – what especially stood out to me, my key takeaways, and how the conversation has impacted me since it occurred. I hope my short after-action-analysis gets you as excited to listen to the interview as I was to converse with the interviewee. Without further ado, let me introduce the first conversation of this podcast! To paraphrase Mark Twain, the death of the physical book has been greatly exaggerated. Amid the two-decade assault by online writing and e-books, and the ascendancy of new media formats, the paper codex takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’. And yet, keen observers have pondered a malaise among book publishers. New books seem increasingly alike. Up-and-coming authors engaging in weighty research and analysis, like Ron Chernow, John McPhee and John Keegan, seem virtually non-existent because the new economics of publishing don’t allow for extended deep toil on a subject unless it’s absolutely guaranteed to become a hit. In the next half-century, when we look back at book publishing, the name Ellen Fishbein (https://ellenrhymes.com/) and her company, Altamira Studio (https://altamira.studio/), will loom large. Currently frenemies with the legacy book publishers – not from ill will, but simply more attuned to the illnesses affecting the patient than the patient is – Ellen and Altamira are blazing a new trail for book publishing. From unique ways of marketing to the purposeful architecture of their books, Ellen and team love books, and want to create a publisher known for loving readers too. They also do excellent work as writing coaches. In this fascinating talk, Ellen and I discuss in detail the dysfunctions of the book publishing industry; the future of online writing and associated businesses; her “personal bible” and what books it includes; and what she learned from studying with the Jesuits at Fordham University. Some Points to Ponder * Ellen gives voice to the frustration I’ve felt for a couple years with Amazon. Its recommendations, well, suck. For all its logistical prowess and Prime Big Deal Days, Amazon has not been able to unlock for us a supremely human emotion: serendipity. * I truly enjoy writing Solvitur Ambulando and I relish reading many newsletters. And yet, and yet, reading them does not replace reading books. In a book, an author has spent months, maybe years or decades or a lifetime digging deep into a topic. There is something powerful about learning from a thinker who has wrestled, mulled over, mused, re-thought, and struggled with a topic for a long period of time. Even with authors of both books and newsletters, increasingly I find myself gravitating back toward the books. I’d rather read Martin Shaw’s books (https://amzn.to/3NbLsv5) than his Substack. Ellen and I did not directly discuss this aspect of content consumption, but in reviewing our interview, this idea kept coming back to me. * What books do you read again and again and again? Why do you continue to invest time and energy in them? What did they teach you differently this year than five years ago? I explore that question with my annual reading of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (https://amzn.to/3YflU6A). (2023 (https://www.sa.life/p/ebenezer-scrooge-on-forgiving-the), 2022 (https://www.sa.life/p/my-spirit-never-walked-beyond-our) – two of the 28 years I have read it).) Ellen offers a beautiful answer as we talked about her “personal bible” and the 10 books she includes in it. Such a highlight of our talk. * Our conversation has prompted a lot of thinking around the ephemeral nature of modern yearnings contrasted with longings for permanence and immortality by our ancestors. * Very clearly, Ellen absorbed so many lessons from her philosophy classes in college. Those lessons come out in her answers and her approach to life and work. Her love for and learnings from poetry – beautiful, lyrical writing – also sing throughout this conversation. One of the age-old questions in Western philosophy is whether we as a civilization fundamentally side with the philosophers or the poets. Ellen makes me wonder whether we need to find a way to give them equal footing, and commensurate honor. Again, I love love loved this talk with Ellen. Whether you listen to the audio, or read the transcript below, you will too! Thank you, Ellen! Let's start with the basics, Ellen. I've known you for a while through a writing group we're a part of called Foster (https://www.foster.co/). But your main day job is helping to lead Altamira Studio. What is it and what are you trying to do? Our business has two components: the Writing.coach (https://writing.coach/) service and Altamira Studio, our publishing branch. It began in late 2019 with just writing coaching. I started offering this service on a friend's advice, and it quickly took off. I immediately needed to build a team to meet demand, partly due to coinciding with COVID. The writing coaching service primarily caters to people with business-related writing needs, including software company CEOs, investors, and entrepreneurs focused on writing. Through this business, we became involved in projects within the legacy publishing industry that produces mainstream books for retailers like Barnes & Noble. We learned a great deal about the book pipeline and the industry. It answered questions I'd had for years. Given our position as a respected editorial team that had worked on several high-profile projects, we decided to start our own publishing experiment: Altamira Studio. It's an independent, highly experimental publishing company. We've produced six books for sale, experimented with a subscription model involving printing and publishing, and created an audiobook and some eBooks. We're forging our own path within the larger publishing world, operating at the frontier of what might be possible in modern publishing. That's what Altamira Studio is. You use the phrase “what might be possible at the frontier of publishing.” What are your hopes for the frontier? What do you think could be possible at the frontier? There are some really basic, nuts and bolts, extremely ground-floor-level things covered by bureaucratic bloat in the industry. Let me step back to the origin story I like to share, which is true, but it took me a while to put the pieces together. Growing up, reading was a huge thing for me. I was always reading –  a huge bookworm. Books were really inspirational and important to me. Then somehow, 20-ish years passed, and I found myself feeling like I'd lost my love of reading. I'd walk into bookstores, look at all the new books, and typically walk out with nothing. Something similar happened with Amazon giving book recommendations. I'd consistently find that new books didn't interest me, or when I did get them, I wouldn't finish them. I'd get about 40 pages in and just get bored – especially with nonfiction. This happened gradually over years. For a long time, I blamed myself. I thought, "I must've become a shitty person. I must've lost my attention span. I guess I've just been 'interneted' into not being interested in books anymore." Eventually, as a result of insights from experiences with the publishing industry, I realized, "Oh, here's a sausage-making factory. No wonder I don't like these sausages. The factory's all messed up. All the machines are broken. All the processes are messed up. The distribution is messed up. The ingredients are a disaster. Everything's a mess." Coming back to the question of what's possible at the frontier, a basic example is that publishing companies are locked into a minimum length of 300 pages for most books, or at least 250. They have these minimum word counts built into authors' contracts. It partly makes sense, because if you pay someone to write a book and they give you 2,000 words, that's not good. But the publishers’ minimum word counts are very high, often resulting in nonfiction authors adding fluff to books just to meet the publisher's word count. The publisher doesn't cut it; in fact, they encourage this fluff-adding. I've had experiences where I've advised people on putting together an airtight 180-page book with nothing inessential and everything essential. Then it went to a legacy press, and a year and a half later, it came out 250 pages long. Looking at what they added, it's just all fluff. This is totally standard practice, partly due to the status quo and partly due to weird internal bureaucratic pricing models. They don't believe they can charge as much for a shorter book. To me, that's ridiculous. Look at Common Sense (https://amzn.to/4dqMT3z) by Thomas Paine – it's about 24,000 words, 100 pages, and it changed the world. The next level up, in terms of frontiers, also speaks to the bureaucratic bloat, because of how publishing companies have collided with the internet without really adapting. What used to be distinct media – books, magazines, radio, TV – are now all ways of consuming information on the internet. The book market started to change, and publishers wondered how to continue selling 10,000 to 50,000 copies of a book. That’s how many they need to sell to avoid losing money. They created a process based on social media followings. Authors who can build a big following on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or newsletters – as long as the numbers are big enough – are attractive to publishers. If you have 500,000 newsletter subscribers you can potentially push your book to, the publisher knows probably 20,000 of those people will buy the book. The problem is, there's a whole skillset and a lot of overhead, money, time, and effort that goes into building such a following online. The people who are good at that, or more importantly, inclined to build a following of that scale, are very rarely the kind of people who really have a book to write. You end up in this weird situation where publishers have a long roster of ghostwriters. The recipe is: find somebody with a big social media following and pair them up with a writer who's going to write the book. Sometimes that person gets paid pretty well, keeps the lights on for their family. But often they're generating the ideas and someone else is taking credit, or they're diluting the ideas. This collaboration is distorting the content and creating a pipeline of content that I think is generally inferior to what would happen if we got back to first principles and focused on people who are really good writers and whose stuff might resonate with readers. Originally, I was very adversarial against the publishers and even the ghostwriters for this. I took a very combative stance, but I'm revising my stance somewhat. I think one of the biggest things that really needs to be fixed – and this goes to maybe the most complex part of the frontier thing – is Amazon and the book discovery world. Amazon is doing a lot to push the same kind of book again and again to people and regress everything to the mean in ways that aren't serving authors, publishers, readers, or anybody in the whole thing. You're shaking your head. Yeah, it's a big mess. Yeah. I can't remember the last time I bought a book on Amazon from their recommendations because of exactly the phenomenon you're talking about. Amazon recommends a ton of books  that are 90% of the book I just read. When I'm looking up books on Amazon now, I put in weird search terms and I see what comes up. That usually gives me better suggestions than Amazon suggestions. It's tough because Amazon owns Goodreads, which basically reinforces that same pattern they're doing on Amazon. Verbal recommendations from friends aren’t much better, because everybody's so connected to the internet. There's so much homogenization of what people are getting served up to them because of how the internet works. That's the furthest – maybe the most abstract and complex – problem on the frontier of publishing. Even beyond that, there's AI, which is interesting as well. I actually have a number of friends in publishing, and I told one of them what ChatGPT was when it was going viral. They hadn’t even heard of it! And really, they should really be with the program on AI. Do you think AI is going to take over book writing? It's like my daughter taking tennis lessons. I give it a year until she can beat me and my wife. She's just getting that good, that fast. How soon until AI can write a novel that you and I can't tell wasn't written by a human being? There is a fiction–nonfiction divide there. In certain ways, I think AI will be better at "independently" writing fiction, but only according to very strict formulas. If you look at all those pulp sci-fi and mystery novels, I'm pretty sure that similar to how Midjourney (https://www.midjourney.com/home) can generate images that look so much like DeviantArt (https://www.deviantart.com/) images, it's analogous. If you feed in all these pulp mystery, sci-fi, and true crime type of writing, I think AI is going to get really good at matching that pattern and swapping the names, mysteries, and names of planets, and so on. With nonfiction, there's a really interesting opportunity. What we have found so far – and I'm putting out an article about this in the next few days –  is that LLMs are not as good at the nonfiction book architecture process. Let's say you have a subject matter expert, like a rocket scientist, and you're trying to work with that person to put a book together. My team and I have done this a bunch of times, helping people take their subject matter expertise and systematize the idea, put it into the orderg in which it should be encountered and understood in a book by a reader. We call it book blueprinting. We've done experiments with AI where we've tried to get an LLM to do that job, where it interviews a subject matter expert, or at least takes inputs from them and turns that into an actual functional book architecture that can be followed. It doesn't seem to be so good at that task, because there's a relevance filtering issue. In a nutshell, when people talk about their area of expertise, they'll say a bunch of stuff. Some of it is redundant, some is irrelevant, and the LLMs don't seem to be catching up very quickly. They're a little too agreeable; they kind of accept everything. We're very interested in talking to people who want to experiment further and train some models in more sophisticated ways around that. There's a big opportunity to take that blueprinting architectural skillset and take subject matter experts who might have never written a book otherwise, use the transcription of what they say about their subject matter, engage in that relevance filtering exercise, and produce some really interesting books. It does shorten the amount of hands-at-the-keyboard time it actually takes to get people's expertise down. Does that make sense? It does. As you were talking, I had in mind Tommy Caldwell's book, The Push (https://amzn.to/3TRBEdL). He’s the guy who free soloed The Dawn Wall on El Capitan in Yosemite. I read the book, which had a ghostwriter named Kelly Cordes (https://kellycordes.com/writings/). I kept thinking about The Autobiography of Malcolm X (https://amzn.to/47O6QQB) as told to Alex Haley. Malcolm X would go to Alex Haley's apartment at 2:00 in the morning, crash on his couch, and then riff for the next four hours. Alex Haley would record it, digest that, and then the next time Malcolm X came over, they'd talk about it and he'd riff some more. With Alex Haley, you got one of the great autobiographies of the 20th century. Tommy Caldwell's was good, but there was something weird where there was too much filtering – and not enough filtering, if that makes sense. There was so much Tommy Caldwell that it almost seemed unreal, and in another sense, there was too little of him. It was too polished, too ghostwritten, and that kind of turned me off too. Anyway, that dichotomy between those two books kept coming to mind as you were talking. There's a place for books that are more heavily transcription-based than that, because what happens there is there's too much hands-at-the-keyboard ghostwriting where somebody's changing how somebody talks and just straight-up making stuff up. I think a better process, which we've already applied to create some drafts in production that are going to be pretty awesome, is where we create a very detailed step-by-step blueprint outline of the book. Then we get together for an intensive, three days with somebody. We ask each of our questions from the blueprint, and we have the writer speak to each point. Then we transcribe all those paragraphs and put them where they belong. Then the only kind of "ghostwriting" is writing connecting sentences. Because we've so meticulously mapped out what we want to say, we're just giving them a container and saying, "Okay, pour that substance into this container." And then, "Okay, here's the next one. Here's the next one. Here's the next one." But you have to have the right process. Honestly, this is my co-founder Bill Jaworski’s superpower. I asked him, "Do you think you could teach me how to be as good at this as you are at this book blueprinting job? Being able to exactly identify what these containers are? This ability to hold the architecture of a book in your head?" He replied, "It would take a long time." He's really, really good at it. He's very skilled at it. He advised on a lot of dissertations, he's advised on a lot of books, he's written a bunch of books. So it's a talent as well as a practiced skill. You have to have that human component. Then the AI component is more of a transcription and cleanup job. That could be an interesting category of books where that El Capitan book could have been done better if they’d had better architects involved. That's how I see it. I want to go back for a moment. You keep saying “we,” and then you just mentioned your co-founder, Bill. Tell us about the team at Altamira Studio. One of them is actually my partner in life as well as business. We've been together for a very long time. We met online dating back in 2011 and we've been together ever since. His name is Sam. We moved to Texas from New York, thinking we were going to start a business together. It ended up taking us a long time to figure out how to do that. He was previously at Palantir (https://www.palantir.com/), which is a big software company that's involved in AI. At some point, he was done being at Palantir - it was very high pressure and crazy. He wanted to do something else and I wanted to be involved in entrepreneurship. We ended up coming to Texas with these vague notions of entrepreneurship. It took a long time before this writing coaching opportunity emerged. The first person I really needed to call was actually not Sam, but Bill. Bill was a professor at Fordham University where I got my bachelor's degree. We met in New York when he was teaching analytic philosophy and symbolic logic. He got up in front of a group of about 120 students and basically said, "Most academic writing is terrible writing. It's really bad. We're not going to do any of that in this class. We're going to prioritize clarity." I knew at that moment that he wasn't long for the world of academia. I just knew. This was my freshman year, a couple of weeks before I incorporated my first company, which was also an editing and writing business. That was around 2013. I kept in touch with him for years after I graduated. Circa 2018, he was having thoughts of leaving academia. In 2019, we started working together on these writing coaching projects. Now we've been doing this together for years. We've got a bunch of bestsellers under our belt and we started this publishing company. His expertise is really phenomenal in terms of knowing the architecture of a great book, having this ridiculously rigorous, logical approach to mapping out concepts. Sam has been tremendously helpful as well. The three of us started this effort and became equal co-founders. Sam is going to be moving on to doing something else full-time. This was always the plan - Sam wanted to go in a direction involving film and fixing some of the same problems in the film and cinema world that I wanted to fix in the book world. If you talk to movie buffs - maybe you are one, I don't know that about you - but if you talk to movie buffs, they have a lot of the same comments that I was having about books. They watch all the new movies and they complain, "This stuff is so cookie-cutter. Why don't we have anything like The Matrix or Pulp Fiction anymore?" You're nodding. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, absolutely. Now there's a big opportunity involving AI and film and visual AI. And Sam, as an engineer who really knows computers, AI and film, is perfectly suited to be in that space. He continues to be a co-owner of the business. He did some really important things, including underwriting the very early unstable phases of our work. "Hey, I got your back if you miss payroll." That kind of stuff. Also setting up a lot of technology and processes for us. And helping us work through our initial strategy. Ultimately his heart is in the cinema and TV world. So, he's going in that direction. Bill and I are continuing to be full-time on Writing Coach and Altamira Studio. All of us are very unified in this cultural mission around making a difference. We have a lot of optimism around cultural assets. We have other people who are really important to the business. A few contractors who we work with are really important. An illustrator who is incredible and who did a bunch of the cover illustrations. We have a very savvy social media guy who found me because he was looking for a writing coach for his self-published book. And now I pay him to work with me on social media and staying organized and all that kind of stuff. We have a print shop that we found after calling a bunch of places. And so, these various pieces have all come together over the years as necessity has brought them into the fold. That's awesome. Let me go back to our conversation about publishing. I want to look at publishing in a few different ways. You and I share a skepticism about what's called the production economy – the sheer number of products out there. How many travel blazers do we need to sell on Huckberry, people? We see it with intellectual assets, too. Think of online platforms like Substack. I'm on it, somewhat reluctantly. I don't hate it, but I don't love it. But it basically exists as a tool for blasting more email out to people – constantly sending more and more emails out there to people. Do people really need more emails in their lives? Dig into your critique of the production economy. Yeah, so my point of view upsets a lot of people, but it's hard for me to not hold this point of view. I think that the dogma or the message that “if you're a creative person, if you're a writer, in this day and age, then your art form is emails” - you should be focused on writing the best emails and getting all these people to buy access to your emails – I think that's a very unimaginative, very cynical fad. I don't think that's something that's going to stand the test of time. Now, I'm not a technophobe at all. I think all these platforms are really interesting, including Substack. They all have a place in the evolution of things. After I came to Texas, I worked for about three years at a consumer media company comparable to Business Insider (https://www.businessinsider.com/). I was hired to be an editor. And there was a 700 article per month quota. That is actually truly insane. We had about 20 writers and that quota meant every writer publishing more than one article per day. We also knew that there was this crazy power law or tail-of-the-dragon effect. One of those 700 articles was actually driving 80% of the traffic for the month. That one article was keeping the lights on. I showed up and saw this situation. I didn't even get hired full time at first. I was on a contract getting $2,500 a month. And I said, "This is not how we're going to run things." Because writers were just taking a YouTube video that was going viral, putting a headline and three sentences on it, and embedding the video in an article. And that would actually work, which is ridiculous, right? We had this incredibly low-quality content. We had a two-person editorial team that had to read all these articles. We would go home and our heads would hurt. I went to the CEO, who was, to his credit, incredibly receptive to me being extremely unfiltered about the whole thing. I told him, "This 700 article quota is completely insane. You have to look at the audience and think about what they're interested in. We could do 100 articles a month, which is still a lot. We can publish three times a day. We can have an article in the morning, an article at lunch, and an article in the evening. Each of the 20 writers can write about five articles a month." I said, "We're going to look at what the audience has responded to." Fortunately, the website had been operational for a little while. It was a small number of topics. There were clear patterns that you could identify even from the crap that they had been publishing. I said, "OK, we're going to try this for the next quarter." The publication was related to the outdoors – hunting, fishing, hiking, National Parks and so on. I said, "It's fall. It's deer season. We're going to do all these deer articles. And here's a good blueprint for the kind of deer articles we're going to do." Within a couple months, everyone at the company was saying I had changed the whole company, which was really nice. We went down to a sane quota. When I came in, the editorial team was working seven days a week. It was completely insane.  We took it down. Traffic didn't suffer at all from going from 700 articles to 100 articles. As a matter of fact, traffic did fine and even better than before on many days. And it kept growing. That was the first clue I had that there was some misguided behavior in this world where content is technically free. It doesn't cost money to put the article on the website. Not in the concrete way it costs money to put an article on a piece of paper. This was my first clue that something was not quite right in that whole mindset. I think that the dogma around a lot of the Substack and similar writing mirrors what that company was doing when I showed up. There's a lot of "do more and more and more, ship more and more, screw quality, go for volume." I think that is a fad. People are wising up to that. Now that approach is more undifferentiated from AI than anything else. Let me mention something else. And I really don't want this to be misunderstood because I don't have any ill will toward these people whatsoever. In fact, I think they've done some really great things. There's another writing company that has recently and famously announced they’re doing their last writing cohort ever, then they are shutting down. I'm friends with the CEO. We know each other really well. That company started around the same time as mine. Their original idea was "We have a five-week writing boot camp where we're gonna write five articles in five weeks." At the same time, I was doing a six-week writing coaching program where I was saying, "Write one article with me over six weeks." And so, people would constantly come to me and go, "Why would I come to you and get one article in six weeks when I can go to that guy and get five articles in five weeks?" And I replied, "Because we're going to do something that you're really proud of. We're going to do something that's high quality. We're going to do something that's gonna have a shelf life. It's going to stand the test of time. It's gonna differentiate you. If that doesn't make sense to you, then you should probably go to that guy." I had a lot of people not work with me because they decided to do the other writing approach. But two years into that program, the other company changed their approach. When AI started to get big, they changed to a program of writing one core article over five weeks. My response was, "That's what I've been doing the whole time." Except by the time they got there, I was already somewhere further. We had been producing physical books for months by then. We figured out how to create books because it was the next step. When you've realized that one good article is better than five crappy ones, one good book that stands the test of time is better than online articles. We were already moving in this analog direction – "Write one book." We worked Brian Gitt, who works in business development in the nuclear energy space.  He wrote a short book with us (https://altamira.studio/store/p/itd). And he has used it to get speaking engagements and podcast appearances and a lot of recognition.  And writing with us helped him land a really great job in exactly the space that he wanted to be in. Before he had the book, he was writing articles at a very slow pace. But he was really betting on quality. And in particular, he was really hammering home one core idea, one high-quality thing. And he had been working with us since 2020. And so, I think that all that stuff is very much a fad. I think AI now makes it even less relevant in terms of staying power than it ever was. I think it's just not a good use of time. What are your thoughts? As you were talking, I went up and I got my handy copy of Thucydides (https://altamira.studio/store/p/itd) from my bookshelf. Thucydides wrote one book, after he was ousted as a general of the Athenians. It took him an enormous amount of time and effort and thought to write that book. It takes the reader an enormous amount of time and thought and effort to digest that book. Today, it is not that hard to publish something. But it's actually a non-trivial amount of effort to digest it, for a reader even to determine whether to continue reading. That production versus consumer effort and time imbalance is a real danger for consumers, for readers. I have to read this from Book I of Thucydides. “The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, distract somewhat from its interest. But if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things, must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.” How many people today are writing something for all time? “A possession for all time,” yes. Altamira Studio – we picked that because of the caves of Altamira (https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/310/), which I'm sure you're familiar with, in northern Spain. I really want to go there on a weird business pilgrimage. The caves contain gorgeous paintings from 20,000 years before writing was invented. Those paintings were created for the people around the caves – and also to stand the test of time. The fact that they're still there from these cave-dwelling, tiny tribes from 25,000 years ago, says so much about our shared humanity. The internet and the last 10 years of "best practices" – the idea that we know what the "best practices" are with something that was invented in the last few decades. On this grand timeline of human history, it's completely brand new. No idea. We're still totally at the beginning of learning how to use these tools. People think, "The best practice is to do high-volume writing." I think that's a trap. And I think it's very cynical to treat the creative spirit in that way. Let me keep going with the theme of slowing down and different publishing modes. You’ve begun experimenting with good old-fashioned snail mail, actually sending items to people through the mail. It's called Muse by Mail (https://altamira.studio/muse). Tell us a little bit about it and tell us why you're embracing slow communication, slow mail. We've just shipped out the first one. So it’s still experimental, like a lot of things at Altamira. This kind of goes back to the problems with Amazon and book discovery and content curation that you and I were talking about. In your questions that you sent me before the call, you asked about what the next 20 years in book publishing will look like. It's already been proven that there's going to be an analog book market that is not going to get deleted by all the digital options. It can get changed, but there are people who like physical books. In fact, there are a lot of people who are digitally native and who still like physical books very much. That's going to continue to be a thing. But there are opportunities to shape it in new and different and interesting ways. Again, we have a book discovery / reading material discovery issue. It's a burden on readers to find new things coming out. That's part of why you have these massive marketing machines that publishers and authors are building for each individual book. People have said this to me and I feel really proud to repeat it - if Altamira published a book, chances are you will find it valuable. We are starting to have a brand that has earned the trust of readers. We are so anti-fluff – readers know we will not waste their time. And we are interested in presenting them with something that might be off the beaten path and that would appeal to them. So the concept of Muse by Mail is that every quarter, every season, I'm going to send you a package. What's in the package? It’ll have a pocket inspiration book – called The Muse and edited by me. It’s all about creative topics - fiction and nonfiction. This one includes a nonfiction piece called “The Forbidden Course” and a fiction one called “The Messenger.” And it includes seven writing prompts from me. It’s an inspirational, cool, creative thing, from me. You will also receive a book – curated for you by me. Maybe a book we published, maybe not. Right now, I'm having a good time with the fact that this is not at scale. For example, I sent a subscriber a copy of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (https://amzn.to/3zJFXkh) because he hadn't read anything by Ray Bradbury. He was interested in classic sci-fi and I knew he had to read it. You just have to. Over time it's probably going to get streamlined into people receiving one of the two latest things that we think are interesting. And always also getting The Muse. So far so good. The 30-ish people who are subscribing to Muse by Mail are really into it. Again, it takes the burden of content discovery off of them. They know the items we send will be well-chosen and inspirational. Over time, I'm also hoping our strong connection with readers will get us to a virtuous cycle. They give us great feedback and we use that to deliver books that delight them. Why physical items? Why am I attracted to that? Just today, there’s a change going viral about a big lawsuit concerning Internet Archive (https://archive.org/). Some publishers have some copyright issues and are trying to delete 500,000 books from the digital lending library. The trouble is, many of these books on Internet Archive – which has 500,000 books – are out of print. You can’t find them anywhere else. So you see how ephemeral the digital world is. Things can get changed, things can get deleted. There's a permanence to the analog format that is really not symbolic, but really powerful. You can take my physical book from me when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. Exactly, exactly. It's a cold, dead hands thing. And something else. I will read on my phone, but it is really nice to have a single-purpose object – one that is not also calling to you to answer various messages and get on the internet and do all sorts of other stuff. I think there's going to  continue to be interest in single-use objects, like a physical book. I have an interest in that. Finally, we have an amazing connection with an American print shop that does all its manufacturing 35 minutes away from where I live. We love their work. We love showcasing their work. That is awesome. Let me go back. You mentioned briefly your prognosis for the next 20 years of book publishing. Talk to us also about the next 20 years of online publishing. You already mentioned a massive shift in emphasis from another online coaching / content creation company. What's the next 20 years of online publishing look like? Will Substack reign supreme? Will 9 out of 10 creators go away because they can't make a living? It's a really good question. One place I landed – the book format will continue to be a format that people are into. As far as online publishing, articles and content, I think that two-way networks like Twitter and TikTok and YouTube – where you can post items and people can comment and have dialogue –  are here to stay. The idea of people being able to talk to each other with all these other people who are also online on the same platform is ridiculously powerful. With online publications, you've seen some really successful people, like Ben Thompson (https://stratechery.com/) and Lenny Rachitsky (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/), who have taken a lot of eyeballs away from legacy publications like The New York Times and The Atlantic. A lot of people will go and read their newsletters or other solo writer. They're opting to engage with them over institutional journal-type media. As a source of red hot information – and maybe better than you might get from the “mainstream” – I think that pattern will probably continue. But I also think that, by and large, those people will not be monetizing their writing exclusively. I think that especially over the long term. In the near term, it's less clear. Over the long term, this idea of subscriptions and you're going to only write and people will pay you for your blog posts and that's your business – I don't really think that will last. More likely, it’ll be like Paul Graham, the Y Combinator founder. He writes and has written a ton of essays. All of it is in service of attracting attention to Y Combinator. That’s how he actually makes money. In the book world, a lot of best-selling authors, for example Nir Eyal, who wrote Hooked (https://amzn.to/4erGUwC), don’t make their money off of book sales. Even though he's done a lot of book sales, he probably makes more money off of speaking engagements. This idea of making money as an online writer blogging is tricky. Some people will make money writing in service of business ventures, either their own or for their employers. Companies will continue to put out writing. Public companies will continue to put out articles and reports to manage their stock prices. There will be jobs for writers for quite some time. People will do what I do – I write free articles, then people work with me as their coach. That’s how I make money. That will be a continuing trend. But the idea of monetizing the writing specifically –  I'm not sure about that. There are opportunities for writers to write for all the media –  TV and movies and speeches. The number of writers who will do the Lenny Rachitsky thing – will be a very small number of people. Most of whom have already done it. Even he has other components to his business model. More people will monetize online communities or courses, coaching, other virtual products or services. Or retreats, shows and performances. Things like that. So that's what I think. I don't really think that that archetype of a writer who's making money only on blog posts and newsletters is a real thing. This is awesome insight, Ellen. I want to ask a few questions about your personal approach to life. For instance, you have shared your notion of a “personal Bible.” What is that? What's included in your personal Bible and why? I'm super grateful for that question because back when I was working at that consumer media company, I realized I was not long for that company. Not because of any ill will, but just because I'm ultimately unemployable on some level. I realized that. I started participating in a forum that Shane Parrish started, the Farnam Street Learning Community (https://fs.blog/welcome-to-prime/). This was around 2018. At that time, there were around 1,000 people – all people who were interested in books and reading. And I thought, this is cool,  super cool. I'm an editor at this weird media company and I'm going to eventually move on to doing other things. So, I better check these people out. At the time, I had some downtime at the office every day. So, I was posting stuff on this Farnam Street Learning Community. I decided to challenge myself to start some forum topics and see what people got excited about. The topic of books people re-read kept coming up. So, I started a conversation about books that are like the Bible. People who are very religious, they'll read and reread and reread the Bible or any of the sacred texts. So I wrote a post called, "Have you found your Bible?" And I said, there are people who have pointed to a book they've read and reread, and that they love as much as scripture. For example, at his funeral Steve Jobs gave everybody copies of Autobiography of a Yogi (https://amzn.to/4dy9vPR). Yeah, great book. Great book. And I've noticed that a lot. Bob Dylan had that with Jack Kerouac. There were other examples. And, I have my own. I came up with four books that I had read multiple times that were biblical for me. And this was a viral post. People loved it. Over time it became something that people would ask me about. It's really funny. Because you are curious about it, I decided to revise the Bible. I made it 10 books. Wait, wait, are we hearing this first on this newsletter? Are we hearing this? This is the very first time I'm sharing this. Breaking news, everybody. Breaking news, Ellen's new Bible. Let's hear it. I'm cracking up. This is so great. These are 10 books that I have read and reread quite a few times. I’ll share a one sentence explanation of why I'm so into it. Oh, this makes my day. The first one on the list is Brave New World (https://amzn.to/4eqkcVD) by Aldous Huxley. The reason I love it so much is that what this book taught me about writing and life is that Shakespeare really matters. Shakespeare is absolutely super powerful. Brave New World was my gateway drug to reading Shakespeare. And the book itself is absolutely brilliant. The way that Aldous Huxley shows his devotion to Shakespeare is really one of a kind. Love, love that. The second book on the list is Shakespeare's Sonnets (https://amzn.to/4euW5FE). I've read and reread Shakespeare's Sonnets a million times, all of them. The big lesson that I learned from them was that Shakespeare put in the reps. You can see him learning how to write and getting better by wrestling with the sonnet constraint. If you read the Sonnets, you start to understand it as the training ground or the whetstone for his writing skills. It's fascinating to see how he's teaching himself how to write by dealing with this constraint of the sonnet form. Third book on my list is Atlas Shrugged (https://amzn.to/3Bu7RBm) by Ayn Rand. What that taught me is that success in terms of writing, what is going to be successful, what kind of book is going to be successful can surprise the author – and everyone. It can be very unexpected. There's a lot of things I have to say about Atlas Shrugged and about Ayn Rand in general, which are all super controversial and polarizing. The fourth one on the list is Metaphors We Live By (https://amzn.to/3zG5VVY). Incredible book. And what I learned from it was that language is metaphor. The book completely changes your paradigm on writing and it's amazing. Fifth book is Zero to One (https://amzn.to/3N9Dwe4) by Peter Thiel. That book taught me that business writing is actually an art form in itself and can be really beautiful and timeless and doesn't have to be whitewashed and crappy the way that it normally is. The sixth book is one I know you love a lot, The Glass Bead Game (https://amzn.to/4gLEwmb). Love that book very, very much. I've read it many times. It's a great book. I've read it many times. I go back to it when I'm lost. What that book taught me about writing is that people are smart. The fact that the book has had as much uptake as it has, and the fact that he actually won the Nobel Prize (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1946/hesse/speech/) for it... the book is super complicated and very abstract and crazy, but it is beloved by many people. It's a reminder to not underestimate people. If a book like that can surface the way it did, then there's hope for pretty much anything, I think. Next – Five Dialogues (https://amzn.to/3Y4TWdV) by Plato. I have a particular collection of five of the dialogues, especially Plato's Apology and a couple other dialogues that I've read a million times. That's where I learned about the idea of peaceful disagreeableness. You can be non-combative and you can challenge the status quo. The whole Socratic thing is incredibly valuable. That's biblical for me. The eighth book is a collection of William Butler Yeats poems (https://amzn.to/3zL9f1X) that I really love. Pretty much any collection I think counts, but basically all of his poems. I'm obsessed with William Butler Yeats. I think he's incredible. After Shakespeare, and Bob Dylan, he's my favorite poet. He's really great. And what I learned about writing from him was that it's a long game. My edition of this book has the dates of when all the poems were written. You see a very slow evolution of William Butler Yeats learning one thing at a time and getting better. When he was in his 50s, he wrote a lot of his very best stuff. When you compare that to some of his earlier stuff, you see what happens when you do this day in and day out. He even refers to the practice of writing as an "accustomed toil," which I love. That's totally right. It’s a long game. Whenever I start to get impatient, I go to Yeats. The ninth book on the list is the screenplay for this movie, Network (https://amzn.to/3BCmItq), which Paddy Chayefsky wrote. I think Paddy Chayefsky is the only person who's won best writer three times without a co-writer –  something like that. He's really great at screenwriting. In particular, the screenplay for Network is totally genius. It's got some monologues that are on Shakespeare's level, to my mind. So, what I learned is, you can still do something that's as good as a Shakespearean monologue in more modern dramatic English. That’s great – I love that. The last one is the Tao Te Ching (https://amzn.to/3TRaVhc), which I have read many times in many translations. I took many lessons from it. One was the idea of letting the rivers flow into you. There's a metaphor in one of the Tao Te Ching’s chapters: the ocean is the master of all the waterways, because all the rivers flow into the ocean. There's something very profound about this idea of placing yourself beneath the rivers and letting them flow into you. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but it means something very profound about writing and life. Yeah, that's amazing. That is an amazing list of books, Ellen. I've got to ask you a question about #7, Plato’s Dialogues, specifically The Apology. Here's my question: do you agree with Plato and the philosophers or do you agree with the poets? Plato using Socrates is basically accusing the poets of lying. And the poets are saying, put Socrates to death - he’s the one damaging the place. Who do you agree with? I have to side with Socrates. I think that there are a lot of people who can be lyrical and who can be poetic, but can still be wrong. There are a lot of times when people simply want to avoid the truth. It's painful to be challenged. It's painful to have people's fakery challenged. We have a lot of people now who are like the Sophists of that time period. We have a lot of people who are ruining everything by teaching stuff that doesn't help anybody. So yeah, I have to side with Socrates. At the end of the day, I think that's part of why I picked a philosopher as my co-founder. Being able to take a stand for what is fundamentally philosophically right and being able to stand for the truth supersedes pretty much everything. Nice. I love this list. It includes books I know and love, and books I disagree with, and ones I haven’t read and want to read now. I love this list. This is awesome. I figured it might be a little spicy. Oh, it's so good. I love it. I have a couple of points of curiosity. I'm ready. How do you think about bringing beauty and nobility into your life? It's interesting. One of the things I'm really grateful for is Sam. Even though he has an engineering and technology background, in many ways, he's an artist at heart, even more so than I am. And I am definitely an artist, in terms of writing poetry and all this kind of stuff. He has a sense for beauty being an end in itself. He has a deeper connection to that idea than I even normally have in my day-to-day life. I have a little bit of a pragmatic, business-minded, day-to-day posture. Sam sees the world and he emphasizes truth and beauty. He says, civilization could collapse just because people stop telling each other true, beautiful stories. And he's totally right about that. Having people in your life who have an internal compass oriented toward beauty on a fundamental level is really good. That compass is very strong. When my own internal compass is going haywire and getting distracted, Sam and other artists in my life are able to clear that away. They remind me that what actually matters is beauty. That this is worth doing because of a kind of reverence for beauty. I actually count on people around me who have a really strong orientation toward beauty. I think we have those people who are born like that among us, right? A friend of mine is very  business-minded and his wife is very much the artist in the relationship. We talked about that – what if we could protect and serve our artists better? Also –  you are a contributor to this answer – a lot of people in my life take a lot of walks. Yeah, totally. The people I know who religiously take a walk every day are some of the most creative and wonderful people. When I'm in the practice of walking, it helps a lot. I live in a place with beautiful trees and animals and stuff. That is very nice. Seeing six baby birds all fly out of the nest at the same time – as cliche as it sounds, putting yourself in situations where you will encounter small, beautiful things. It’s not a matter of bringing it into your life. It’s theer’s It’s a matter of showing up for it. I'm curious about your answer to that question about beauty in life. My family is a big answer. My daughters and my wife. The growth of something beyond me is really beautiful. When you were talking about Metaphors We Live By, I find language beautiful. I'll read a story or a novel and I’ll encounter a brilliant, beautiful way of constructing language. I listen to a podcast, The Emerald (https://open.spotify.com/show/1OwFblqZ7FIkLSW4rvbJEF) by Josh Schrei. He is such a beautiful storyteller – interweaving different modes of communication – music, singing, incantation, the inflection of his voice. It all reinforces what he's trying to get at. I find that fascinating. Nature, too. I find my office beautiful. I've constructed this space the way I want it. That beauty reflects back to me. I love my picture of Wendell Berry thinking (https://www.sa.life/p/a-unified-life). I love my cacti and my bonsai here. I’ve got my crazy cactus office jungle here. I get so much joy from it. I find it beautiful. And I’m trying to contribute to its beautiful growth. I love my totally goofball, Lego Zodiac figures that I put together every February. Maybe it’s weird – because I was born with this heart problem, I find beauty in a lot of things. I find beauty in something almost every day. I find beauty in all these things. Sometimes I simply look up. Or in my daily cup of tea, I find beauty in that ritual. I find it beautiful that long ago, a human thought, “I'm going to steep this leaf in hot water and see what happens.” And another human then created a beautiful ritual and ceremony around steeping that leaf. I find that really wondrous and amazing and beautiful. I totally love that. I have a friend named Cam who is like that too. I asked him if he meditated. He's said, no, but I do another thing that's very reminiscent of what you described. I love that. I find not giving up beautiful. Like a lot of cities right now, in Louisville, there's a real struggle with homelessness – with finding adequate housing for people who are on the fringe of society and really struggling. I find it beautiful that there is a non-trivial portion of our population that is willing to dedicate themselves to trying to solve that problem for other humans. That’s a really special, beautiful thing. Appreciating people who are taking initiative to do good things for other people. That's one of the best things that can happen. A hundred percent. Let me ask you a couple of last questions, Ellen. Yeah. Back on Altamira Studio: When somebody comes to you and says, “hey Ellen, I have a great book idea.” What filters do you put up? What screens do you put up? Is it the famous venture capital screens where you really care more about the person than the idea? Or is it more nuanced than that? I thought about this and I talked to Bill about it too. If we meet somebody who wants to write a book, we want them to tell us what's on their mind. We both kind of have an attitude of openness to anybody who feels like they are being pulled in the direction of writing a book. We start openly. Then typically people will say a few things and we can hear that there's like a book thing in there or there's not. It's really hard to pin down what the characteristics are. But it has something to do with the depth of the potential implications of the idea. Someone recently came our way with a book idea. I was really unsure at first. Bill and I kind of both started asking questions. As it turned out, there is something there. But a lot of times when people talk about their idea, they don't have the perspective to exactly identify where the book is. It's a strange thing that way, actually for both fiction and nonfiction. If we find that we think has a book in it – that someone could read in a 100 to 200 page format – and it would potentially cause them to restructure some element of their life or their worldview, or the way in which they think, feel, or change some aspect of life – we pay attention.  If you think about it – how many conversations have you had where someone's actually changed your mind? It's rare, right? With fiction, we're still trying to figure out how to publish fiction, honestly. Fiction, I'm looking for someone who has the fundamentals of dramatic structure figured out. That's very, very rare. With nonfiction, again, it's determining whether this person has something to say that would cause anybody to live their life differently moving forward. Is there a transformative experience somewhere in there? The person I was talking about was saying there needs to be a new management style for this new day and age. And I can’t think of anything less interesting than that. Then we started to uncover what he was actually talking about. He was actually talking about a way to have a team of people, with every single person able to do deep work.  Every person has to be able to focus in a safe way on the pursuit of their craft. We started to go deeper and we saw some powerful anecdotes here. The guy has stories and experiences that coalesce around an idea that could lead people to change something about how they see the world, how they operate, and act differently. That's not a very concrete answer, but we talked about it as a team. We tried to find a concrete answer. We landed with the notion that we’re willing to listen with wonder about whether a book is inside that idea. Would someone change because of reading that idea in a book format. Does that make sense? It does. It's a beautiful answer. And I think it relates back to the 10 books in your Bible. As you were going through your one liners, I was taking a few notes. As you were just speaking, I was looking back on my notes. So much of what you said, you were reflecting to me how the book changed your worldview or your actions. Shakespeare's Sonnets – putting in the reps. That book helped you see the importance of you putting in the reps. The Tao Te Ching, the letting the rivers flow into you – you don't exactly understand what that means in your world, but you know that it's a poetic thing. The words  influenced you, that image has influenced you, in a profound way. We talked earlier about fleeting, ephemeral (by the way, one of my favorite words) online writing. The books you talked about have changed generations and will change generations. They contain profound distillations of reality and lessons about truth. So much of online writing is groping, seeking, and not in an elegant way. It doesn't even have much to teach the writer. Not literally nothing, but it's online diary writing. That’s fine, but don't elevate it beyond its real station in the world. Diary writing / casual conversations with people online. We have this concept on our team called rehearsing. Anytime you're talking with anybody about some of your ideas and anytime you're drafting something, that's a rehearsal. And this is a rehearsal for which I'm very grateful. Definitely. People appreciate being able to get on a podcast, because they like to rehearse what they're trying to say. And we help writers do that – through conversation and through writing. Social media and online publishing are good opportunities for rehearsal. All right, last question for you. We've talked a lot about what you've learned – business, publishing, writing, and books. You went to a great Jesuit institution of America, Fordham University in New York. I also attended a great Jesuit university, Georgetown University in Washington, DC. What did you learn from the Jesuits? What did you learn from it being a Jesuit school that was a unique contribution to your learning? Except that Bill was not long for academia? First of all, if he fit in anywhere, it was within the Jesuit setting. He is a rigorous political philosopher. Compared to other universities, the philosophy department at Fordham is huge. So, there's something to be said for the fact that meeting Bill there was actually very fortuitous. The opportunity to take that much philosophy and also, I would say the opportunity to take that much philosophy as part of my degree, which was not in philosophy, definitely stands out. I took a philosophy class in high school. Everybody who took it had a great time and really liked it. Philosophy is this guilty pleasure. Most people who did it in college, maybe they took one philosophy course. I took something like four of them, you know? And theology too – I overlap them a bit. I think it is really cool that it was built so I didn't have to feel like it was a guilty pleasure. It was required and that was cool. It was a setting with more room for reflection than the typical four-year degree is supposed to allow. That was really huge for me. Like the fact that philosophy was not only allowed and available, but required. There was so much robust infrastructure for it. The logic courses were ridiculously valuable to me. To this day, a huge amount of what I do  is asking people about premises. About counter arguments. It’s incredibly valuable. It would be cool if more universities took that stance instead of treating it like a guilty pleasure. I do think there was a lot of value. Some of the most valuable stuff that I learned was definitely in the philosophy department. That's awesome. Do you feel that way? So much of what you said resonated. I studied political philosophy. I started out in the School of Foreign Service and then I realized I like the theory of politics more than the reality of politics. Oh, I did not know that about you, but that makes perfect sense. I took enough classes to like minor in philosophy, theology, Spanish, English, Shakespeare, history, English. I was just too lazy to fill out the paperwork. I loved it, you know? I got my teeth kicked in by logic. It was so hard. It's very hard, but it's really good. I loved the presence of the Jesuits. A number of my friends later became Jesuits. That was really special. I attended some of their ceremonies, which was very moving. Georgetown’s motto is Utraque Unum – “both are one.” There are different meanings, but one is traditionally understood as: faith and reason are one. Georgetown was the first place that I encountered the notion that maybe matters of the heart and matters of the mind bring us to a common place. People try to draw a hard line and the line's not real. This has been amazing, as I knew it would be, Ellen. I'm so grateful for your time. It's been so much fun to talk with you. I loved every minute. Thank you for having me. This has been crazy fun and very helpful and extremely thoughtful on your end with all the questions. I'm beyond honored. This article contains Amazon Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sa.life (https://www.sa.life?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

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