Good Life Project - The Myth of the Sole Genius and the Power of Partnerships

Episode Date: October 30, 2014

There’s this legend about the sole creator.That person who goes into their creative cave, cloistered in solitude for days, months or even years, only to emerge with a work of genius. Exploding into the zeitgeist and changing everything.But what if that was story was just a myth? What if the whole of idea sole genius was really a fantasy, obscuring the truth that almost nothing truly profound was created in a vacuum? That’s what we’re talking about on today’s episodeMy guest today is bestselling author and essayist, Joshua Wolf Shenk. He recently published a provocative new book called The Powers of Two that explores both the myth of the sole creative and the complex and often legendary power of creative partnerships. Along the way, we also dive into Shenk’s own creative process, what it’s like to live the writer’s life and spend nearly 5 years working on a single book. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

One of the happiest places for me to be is a writer's conference where it's just the air is filled with language of search and pain and melancholy, but the language itself is quite beautiful and there's just this really very full quality that life is being lived in a really raw way, and I just feel like I can rest there. So there's this ideal about the soul creator, that person who goes into their creative cave kind of cloistered in solitude for days or months or even years, only to emerge with a work of genius

exploding into the zeitgeist and kind of changing everything. But what if that was all just a myth? You know, what if the whole idea of the soul genius was really this fantasy, obscuring the truth that almost nothing truly profound was ever created in a vacuum? Well, that's what we're talking about on today's episode. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. So before we move into today's conversation, you may have noticed that we've been editing the show a bit differently, kind of exploring where we want to go with it and what kind of vibe we want to create as we turn all of our media energies towards the audio experience.

And the truth is, these conversations aren't recorded in a studio. They happen in my living room table, often over a cup of coffee, a glass of water, maybe a little something to nosh. Being in the heart of the city, we're also blessed with all sorts of ambient sounds from sirens to garbage trucks and airplanes to air conditioners. And over the last few months, we've been working like crazy to scrub as much of this out of the audio, to kind of make it as clean and pristine as possible, to sanitize it. And then something happened. In a conversation recorded last week,

I was sharing this whole process with my guest. And she said to me, why on earth would you do that? I love that you can hear those things. It's what makes it real to me, it hit me viscerally. I mean, the very thing we'd been working so hard in post-production to try and strip out in the name of being more, quote, professional, was actually a part of our truth, part of what makes these conversations so real. My choice to invite people over for coffee instead of record in a studio, it's deliberate

because we all know that where you are, it changes the conversation. You do it in a studio. You've got no noise. It's silence. But there's also something stiffer about that setting. And while most higher profile people are used to this, your average person, not so much. It affects you.

It makes you clam up just a bit more, kind of like you're in a fish tank and everyone's listening and watching. Well, that's part of the reason we moved away from video. And I wanted to create a physical and sonic environment that changes the way people respond. Something that lets you just relax, lets people be more themselves, realer, less filtered. Which is why, despite having access to amazing studios all over Manhattan, at least for now, I've decided to keep recording in a place that creates that safer, just more laid-back container for the stories and the conversations we share. A gloriously real, sometimes noisy, sometimes siren-swept, water-pouring, sandwich-noshing, sonic landscape that plays host to the words that come out. And starting with this episode, I've decided to keep all of that in because to strip it from the conversation, in my mind, is kind of to take away part of that conversation, part of the container, part of the context. So as you listen

into today's episode and very likely future episodes, we'll see how this experiment goes. You'll notice something a bit different. We've left it all in because it was there when the conversation happened. It was part of it. And to hold it back would be to hold back a piece of the fuller conversation. Now, some of you may hate that. I'm hoping most of you get it and love it. Either way, it's about a commitment to keeping it not only polished, but real. Because life is real. Life is noisy. Life is alive with energy coming from all directions. And that's what we're here to explore. So onward then to this week's episode. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. look creative and that complex and often legendary power that comes from creative partnerships. Along the way, we'll also dive into Shank's own creative process, what it's like to live that writer's life and spend nearly five years working on a single piece of work. The things I work on take months at least, usually years. Even the magazine pieces I've published have been, you know, often a year of my life. And, uh, I'm only going to be sustained if I'm,

I really want to know. Um, that was definitely the case with Lincoln's melancholy. It's an ongoing theme in my life about the way that, you know, suffering and dejection and, you know, is, is, is wrapped up in what's most meaningful and valuable in life. And it was, it was definitely the case here. And it continues to be the case. I mean, I, creativity is fundamentally elusive. And we should just say at the outset, I say in the outset of the book, in the book that we're not going to, you know, turn this into a formula. You're not going to ever, you know, get love in a bottle. But maybe we can organize our understanding of it in a way that, you know, helps us do better at it. And that's underneath this all for me is wanting to do better, wanting to be more connected, wanting to be, you know, more myself by, you know, by the path of connecting more with other people.

Yeah, it's so interesting. Are you the type of writer where I've heard it said from different writers, you know, who's the famous writer who said this blank on who it was? You know, I never know what I think about a thing until I see what I've written about it. Is that part of your thinking process? Or is that, because it's interesting, when I'm working on something very often,

a lot of it happens inside of my head. By the time I'm actually ready to write, a lot of it is kind of, it flows really quickly. The actual like out of my head and onto a keyboard part is really fast for me but i know most people that are friends with who are writers or authors who write things of substantial length it's the exact opposite i'm always curious about that process for people i have had the experience of learning what i think by writing um a book like this, it's a little different. There's a lot of talking involved.

I spent hundreds of hours on the phone with my editor. There's a lot of getting stuff down and it's not quite right and going back over it and going back over it and going back over it. It's, it's more like the chiseling of a, of a sculptor. You know, you start with this big block and you just try to get it down to some kind of shape or form that, you know, is kind of underneath it all the while and, and, and many drafts.

So it's not, it's not a fluid process at all. There are very few sentences in the book that came out of my mind onto the page and lasted that way. They're mostly, you know, yeah, it's usually much more harder fought in part because I'm drawing in so much material. I'm drawing in disparate stories. I'm drawing in social science. I'm trying to leaven both with my own kind of human sense of what's real and important. And the storytelling was totally bedeviling too, how you not only bring all these things together at any one moment,

but try to create a sustained narrative over time, which was, as a writer, one of my basic ambitions was to create an experience for the reader of moving through something, because that's how we experience's how we experience life is through stories yeah it's so interesting also the you know the um the metaphor you used of sort of chipping away and you know like michelangelo said about the david yeah it was just in there i had to pull away the stuff that was around it which it which also raises my curiosity but how do you know it's done like with that type of process like do you just hit a point where you're like, man,

we can't keep working on this or do you hit a point where you're like, yeah, that's it. When I go over something, you know, the second, the third, the fourth time, and I can't see, you know, um, I'm not cringing. I'm not just like, uh, it doesn't, like, it doesn't kill me to read it. You know, then I'm on my way to having a draft that I can show someone else. And then I see, you know, what they say.

I've done a lot of teaching, and I love, you know, advising people on the creative life. And one of the things I say over and over again is that the real test for a creative life is the capacity to endure humiliation. Because you have to criticize things in your own head over and over again until you get to the place where that critical voice is kind of beaten back

by the quality of what you've done. And then you show it to someone else, and it usually starts all over again because they see problems that you don't see. And that happened between me and my editor over and over again. And then in the end, it's um because i'm out of time yeah there's there's a moment when you know i've spent five years on this book and um you know another um you know another six months or a year was just not available to me either because of the um you know because of the the needs of my publisher and also the need to get this story

into the culture at this moment. There's something happening around our relationship to the social foundations of experience, the social foundations of creativity. It's definitely bubbling up. And a couple years from now, this would not be, it would not have the kind of impact that it would have right now

because lots of people are working on this story in a variety of ways. No, I completely agree. I mean, you see creativity, innovation, ideation being approached from so many different angles right now. But, you know, it's interesting. When you're sharing your process, it was reminded, I heard Neil Strauss talking about when he writes something, he does four manuscripts.

The first one is just the rough one, like does it pass the cringe test? The second one is basically for fact-checking. The third one is for really punching up the voice and getting really good. But the fourth one is for his critics, where he sweeps it and he just tries to identify any potential argument against everything that he said and he said you

know he won't back down from something just because it's a fight or he disagrees but he'll try and anticipate like you know what's the rebuttal here and can i sort of pre-address it in the book and which is which is interesting because when you know you've got a book which is really fascinating it's also also provocative for some people. So like when you came out with, it was a piece, I guess it was an excerpt in The Atlantic and sharing part of the book. And it was interesting because in the comment section,

you know, there's a hundred something comments with this raging battle going on in the comments. And pretty soon it's almost not even about like what you were writing. People are just getting really, you know, like pissy with each other yeah but it's an interesting dynamic you know like spending so much energy coming out with something and knowing you're going to put it into the world and you always knew that some people were going to love it some people were going to just not get it and some people were going to hate it but now it's just when you launch

a book into this like sort of digital ecosystem where everybody has strong voices it's just when you launch a book into this digital ecosystem where everybody has strong voices, it's an interesting thing just as somebody who creates stuff to put out into the world, how that affects you during the process. Yeah. Well, anticipating criticism is totally fundamental to what I do. One of my early mentors, Charlie Peters, who created the Washington Monthly, used to say, play Notre Dame. You don't go play a weak team.

You go play Notre Dame when you're thinking, when you're reporting, when you're working with your editor. You anticipate the hardest charge that someone could come back at you with, and you work that into your argument. And it's one of the reasons why self-critical people are often excellent creators. And it's one reason why within creative partnerships, there's often so much kind of, I'm sitting here at your beautiful table, thrusting my fists against each other. This movement of coming at each other, you know, Watson and Crick would just try to demolish each other's ideas. It was like, you know, this really fierce criticism of each other, trying to knock it down and simultaneously, you know, very aggressive, but joyful because they,

they, they are in this process where, you know, if an idea is left standing, then it's, then that becomes a seed to move on. And if either one of them can knock it down, then it's gotta be, it's gotta be swept away with the rubble and they've got to, they've got to start over. Yeah. Um, so let's kind of dive into the whole exploration of the book also um you know it's called powers of two and um i guess that the starting premise is really that um it's around this concept of the myth of the lone genius the lone creator so tell me a little bit about what this is and where's it come from yeah so i told you about my interest in chemistry that was the foundation and i thought you know if i look at creative pairs like lennon mccartney and watson and crick i could maybe get to it and i had the instinct that from the beginning that i would need to

look at a lot of partnerships um because i i wanted to try to get to the essence of the experience and the convergence. And pretty quickly, you know, within the first few days, I was making these lists and beginning my research. And I thought, what about Vincent Van Gogh and his brother Theo? I knew enough about Van Gogh to know that Theo was a supporter. That's the word you see over and over again. If you look at the MoMA website or you go to a museum show,

he financially supported his brother and virtually every word that you see attributed to Vincent Van Gogh is in a letter to his brother Theo. What was the deal with that relationship? And then I remember that in Martin Luther King's last speech best known for you know I've been to the mountaintop he begins that speech saying thanking his uh his this guy Ralph Abernathy who says he describes as his best friend in the whole world I thought well that is interesting what was the you know is there something there and um And then I started reading about those couple examples.

And over and over again, I started to have the experience of these people that I associate, I think of as these iconic lone geniuses, Sigmund Freud, Emily Dickinson, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, that there's some critical relationship that is behind the scenes. And that became, the project took on a much bigger, you know, cast at that point because it wasn't just about chemistry as this, you know, peculiar phenomenon, but about the experience of chemistry in partnership as it underlies all creative experience,

which is the claim of the book. And I'm going to anticipate the next question and the criticism, which is to say, well, what about solitude? What about the writer in his cave? And what about the fact that the standup comic is on stage alone? Those things are true because collaboration and creative exchange is not just two people sitting in a room doing the same thing. There's a lot of role-taking and distinctions within a partnership. There's a lot of distance within a partnership.

And looking at all the varieties of the way this manifests helps you see how pervasive it is and helps lay out the series of choices that we have as creative people about how to make these relationships work for our process in our lives yeah i mean it's it's fascinating when i think about it and um the context of all these publicly known people you know because then you're looking at okay we've got the people who are labeled as pairs and you know there are tons of examples that you share yeah and then the you know the not so obvious person behind the scenes which very often actually is playing an equal if not

doing greater role but this is not out there um and then it's funny like as you're talking i'm also thinking about my own creative process and my own background you know there are times where i was a painter or as a writer but also as an entrepreneur as you know through a number of companies and um what i'm thinking as you're talking about my relationships and what you know how those have unfolded because i've had partnerships a number of times. And it's interesting sort of thinking through your process and the things that you extract as like these are the important, like these are the big sort of defining elements. And kind of reflecting on my experience in partnership to try and figure out, you know, what was there, what wasn't there. And how did this contribute to something either really doing exceptionally well or just completely imploding on it so well i'm really glad to hear that because

that that is the way i want people to read the book and it's important to say we're talking about these um unreachably great people i mean you know very few of us are going to do anything like the beatles you know very few business people are going to do anything like the Beatles. Very few business people are going to do anything like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, make scores of billions of dollars. But this is an everyday experience, and it's a part of all of our lives. And all of us, I think, have this potential. I end the book with this image that any ordinary street crossing can become our Abbey Road.

I mean, that's all it was. It's just the hatched crosswalk outside their studio. And it's all in front of us. Very often it's a matter of becoming aware of something that's already operating and very often it's a matter of saying wow you know i i need i need more i need to do better i've become very aware as i'm you know doing this research that i'm i am really really, really good at, at, at some things that seeing broad themes that, uh, uh, kind of getting a sense of story. And I love informing that with tremendous amounts

of research and I'm totally hopeless when it comes to organizing all the things that I take in. I mean, I, I'm constantly losing stuff and, you know, trying to find things like for the fifth or 10th or 50th time. And there's some people who are really good at that. And I'm now preoccupied about coming into relationship with those people at any level. And if I were to do another book like this, the first thing I would look for is some kind of producer, researcher, librarian type who would create a logistical infrastructure to organize all this stuff and to put it in its proper boxes. If you were to open my closets, you would see shit everywhere. It's going to fall over and hit you. There's some people you open their closets it's meticulous yeah and and those kinds of people do well together because

the people who have the really neat closets they're some often a little too tight you know they're a little bit too they're fixated on structure and form and a lot of creativity is like shoving your elbows up against the wall until you tell you know the wall cracks and the room gets bigger um and the you know the guy i call this the liquid container dialectic in the book you know the guy who's associative and you know free-flowing that's that's my my uh natural mo needs to be organized needs to be contained needs to be brought into a form. It's like we can only take medicine into our body if it's in the capsule that we can swallow. The capsule is irrelevant. It's going to get dissolved and it's going to go into our blood, but you can't take those thousand little white dots in a Tylenol capsule and swallow them one by one.

Yeah, and I think also I totally agree with that. And it's been my experience too, that, you know, if you have those two people, you know, that you've got the big idea, the like storytelling, the just pulling all these stuff. And then you have the person very often, like your ability to make that next big aha is almost dependent on having that other person's ability to organize it in a fashion where that like you can see it methodologically enough or sort of like you can see you can it becomes clear just organized enough so that it becomes the the leaping off point it becomes a pattern recognition you know like desktop for you to then take that then you launch into that next phase that's right yourself yeah definitely and and

it's a certain point you don't know you know where things come from there's cause and effect you know which leads to the next cause the next the next effect and very commonly you hear from pairs you know uh you know we don't know who came up with what exactly i mean you could yeah you sometimes have to find a starting point for a story just because you know stories need a beginning i have this beginning point for my story that i told you a few minutes ago that i became preoccupied with this question of chemistry what preceded that was a conversation with my book editor some months before, after like the 16th idea I had pitched him over some years. He said, you know, you keep bringing me topics.

Why don't you think about a question that would fascinate you so much that you could spend years of your life doing it? And that was ringing in my head when i had one of these experiences of chemistry and i was like that uh that's one of these questions um and um so that interlocking process is um is is really crucial yeah so for you your editor plays at least well it sounds like there's still a role that he or she doesn't play. They play a certain production and organization role, but it sounds like you still have one other piece

of the research organizer or spreadsheet. Yeah, well, you know, no one person can be your everything, and looking at dyads, it's not like, um, this, um, you know, dyads exist in a context and often there are multiple dyads in any, you know, creative operation. Uh, I did have someone who helped me with research. I, I also have a literary agent. Most writers do. And she came in at certain

points in the process. I had various friends who would read the manuscript at different times. I have a writer's group. I have colleagues that I share an office with. And so there are a variety of relationships operating. And actually part of what you, I think, have to learn in a seminal relationship is what you do bring to this person and what you either have to do on your own or what you need to turn to other people for support with. There came a point with this book where I was missing deadlines and I was preoccupied with something I wasn't getting from Eamon. And it was gnarly on both sides. I mean, both of us were driven to our very edge emotionally.

And I provoked him, and he lashed out at me. And this is in the book a little bit. And it was very unpleasant. But I was like, okay, well, now I know. The friendly conversations with him are done for now. I need to deliver this manuscript that's basically ready for copy editing. That's a point in a publishing process when some other editor takes it. And until then,

there's not much more he can do for me. We'll be right back. Peloton's got you covered. Summer runs or playoff season meditations, whatever your vibe, Peloton has thousands of classes built to push you. We know how life goes. New father, new routines, new locations. What matters is that you have something there to adapt with you, whether you need a challenge or rest. And Peloton has everything you need, whenever you need it. Find your push.

Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. know what's the difference between me and you you're gonna die don't shoot if we need them y'all need a pilot flight risk lennon and mccartney you know it was the first um i had a picture of them in my head when i was within moments of having this idea. But then I didn't immediately turn to researching them because I thought, those guys have been done, done, done.

But it kept coming up. And the little bits I knew about them just really lit up with these themes that were emerging as, you know, the resonance among the many pairs I was studying. And I read a book by Hunter Davies, who had a very unusual role in the Beatles story. He was a columnist for the Sunday Times. He wrote a little piece about Paul in 1966, I think. So around the time they finished Revolver. And yeahvolver, and he was interested. I mean, it was a really big band, and he thought, maybe I could write a book about these guys. He went to John and Paul, he went to Brian Epstein, and they gave him permission. And he became a fly on the wall for about the next year, including the time they made Sgt. Peppers,

and he would go watch John and Paul work. He spent many nights in the studio. And he wrote, there's this quality of British journalism that I love, where they're just, they really just say what it's like. They're not, it's not overdetermined. And there's lots of details, this kind of free flowing quality. I wrote for The Economist briefly and that style was really encouraged there. And it's amazing as an historical document because it's a primary source. I mean, he is watching this thing happen.

And there's one scene in particular where he watched John and Paul through one of their writing sessions. They would often get together in the afternoon and work through the time where they go to the studio and then they would go to the studio around seven and be there all night a lot of times and he watched them finish up with a little help from my friends and it just it's electrifying because in all the things that you see and all the details he has and all the things that are unsaid,

you really feel what it's like to be in the room with the two of them. And I had this feeling of intimacy with them, and I just got hooked. And the other cool thing about the Beatles, just as a matter of process, is that there's an enormous body of primary evidence on them. Virtually everyone who was ever around them wrote a memoir. Everything they ever said is available. Oftentimes the original audio is available or transcripts or stuff on youtube and video and so you can you can um you can get get in pretty deep and pretty close um and um it's also amazing because we have this huge body of of of material

on the beatles this huge body of biography on john a huge body of biography on paul but the relationship itself this third thing between them lennon mccartney that slash has had really never been deeply dived into amazing as it as it sounds um and when i started to write about them and i heard from beetle geeks like you're on to something like this is really important this really rings true so beetle geeks yeah there's a big culture of uh oh yeah it's gotta be right oh yeah yeah yeah people who you know read all the books i've read and more um and are just you know fixated and so are you kind of testing the water with them as you're going like it like is this legit or yeah i published something in 2010 that was part of my book proposal

and got a really nice response. And it was very encouraging. And one of the things that's interesting about John and Paul is that when they broke up, when they stopped working together, that's actually when the history of the two of them began. And they started talking a lot about you know who did what and um lennon gave this famous interview uh to jan winter at rolling stone and paul had did this long thing for life and then had a later worked with barry miles who

was a who did the authorized biography of him and they would go through every song or many of the songs and they would they would say i did that um you know he did that and they would go through every song or many of the songs and they would they would say i did that um you know he did that and they would they would even like make it a matter of percentage and um john was especially aggressive and and putting forward this story that though paul and he had worked very closely together in the early days that towards the end they were just doing everything alone and that really took hold and that really persists to this day people have this dramatic misunderstanding that Lennon-McCartney was a fiction towards the end of their partnership and it's just not true at all um the the the there's a very interesting truth around what those guys were trying to do to recover their

sense of individual identity. And we could talk about that some more if you like, because that's the tension between the individual ego and the surrender into the we is fundamental to this whole story. But just to go back to the basic facts, they spent much more time together in the late 60s than most people recognize, number one. Number two, even when they were alone, they were so up in each other's heads. And that's where the critical stuff happens. Of course, being in a room together with someone matters. But if you think about, you know, you might have a relationship with a rival or a partner or someone who goads you or inspires you. And you might not see him for months. In the case of John and Paul, you know, they would often initiate stuff separately.

And then they would come together and finish it off and they would go back. And there are cases where, know for instance john wrote strawberry fields forever they worked on it for weeks they finished a a good cut seven days later paul came in with um penny lane which is like a total mirror image although like a funhouse mirror because it's also so dramatically different of strawberry fields forever you flash forward about a year year and a half john did revolution they worked on it for weeks they had a working cut seven days later you can see from the logs paul brought in blackbird and there it which is also sort of responding to the political you know uh kind of cultural currents of the day in this very different way and answering John's song, trying to top him, trying to do his version of what John had done.

And that quality of being in each other's minds as a kind of inspirational and kind of irritational presence, it doesn't go away even if you stop seeing the guy. So that one of the kind of bedeviling things for me in the book is where do these relationships end? And what I came up with after, I mean, this was a real bear. I mean, it was months and months and months of like, I can't fix it. I can't find it. I don't know how to tell the story. And then I realized that is the story. They never end.

It's not something that's like, it's frustrating for us as storytellers. We want to say like, this is it. You know, where do we, I know where to end the book. I'm going to end the book when John, when, you know, Paul gave his famous interview that was interpreted as the Beatles splitting up. But that's, that was just another move in this chess game. And it went on through the 70s. And it goes on now because Paul is still in relationship to John Lennon and to the ghost of John Lennon and to his memories of John Lennon

all the way through and will be until he dies. Which is so fascinating. What does it take to actually get to a point where somebody is that in your head that they persist there in perpetuity? The pairs that I'm, that are in this book, it's 100%. I mean,

to get to a place where you, you know, are, where it's, you know, appropriate to, to, to study a pair, you know, at this level,

there is some kind of, the metaphor I use is confluence. And when two rivers, when the Ohio River flows into the Mississippi, those waters are blended, and now it's one river. And to some degree, that always happens in these partnerships. It doesn't, it doesn't happen in that moment of like creative love at first sight, that chemistry moment. It often takes months or years. Um, but it, it does eventually happen and it's not, once it happens, it's, it's not reversible and that's kind of exciting if you are, you know, love the romance of union, but it's also tremendously threatening if you're, you know, if you're, and all of us are this way in some way, we want to hang on to a sense of our individual self separate.

And especially in this culture, which is just fixated on the individual and there's a whole legal infrastructure that's like, it's all about individuals, which is which is relatively new historically i mean hundreds of years ago this thing we called the individual hardly existed either as a cultural construct or as a legal financial construct um you were you know embedded in these in these communities but now it's like there's contracts and there's names and there's credit and there's's a lot of pressure to, you know, get what's mine. And success itself is one of the most challenging things for successful pairs.

That's one of the things that really gets in the way because it brings all this stuff to the fore. You know, a band in a garage, it's like it's like yeah man you're doing this and i'm doing this and i don't know if your drum roll kind of came first or my guitar like came first but we've got this great song next thing you know you have a big hit and you're in a conference room you know it's some record label and it's like percentages are being affixed and that drummer is like being cut out entirely when that guitarist you know who you know after that jam wrote down the lyrics has 100 and that shit adds up i mean pete townsend is dramatically more wealthy than roger daltrey daltrey gets paid when they go on tour townsend

gets paid anytime uh a who song gets played on the radio uh and that's uh you know that's an intense thing yeah so it's not just ego it's power it's prestige it's money in the bank oh yeah there's a lot to i mean there's a lot to fight for to say no that was from me yeah i mean um i had a little moment last night that's uh you want to go on? No, no, go ahead. Well, it was just really interesting to me because I am, this is an ongoing experience for me. And I think this is worth reporting. I'm reporting it in near real time

because it just happened last night. I did my first book event. Eamon was there. We were celebrating our exchange. I always call Eamon the co-creator of the book, and I really believe it. And it was very powerful of me to have him by my side. Then afterwards, I went to the table to begin signing.

There was a flattering line, and I was doing my thing. And then five or six people in, someone came in, and they said they want Eamon to sign it too. And I thought, what is he going to do? And he picked up a pen, and he grabbed the book. And I was like, it threatened me. It did. It was like just this little thing of like, wait a second, wait a second.

That's my name on the cover of this book. And I want to tell on myself because I think that that's part of it, you know, and watching that and keeping that in proportion. Now, I'm in partnership with a guy who, for the most part, likes to be behind the scenes. Eamon didn't wake up this morning and say, oh, I want to get involved in Josh's podcast that's scheduled for one o'clock today. He's on to other things. He has many books. This is my whole life. But that tension of ego versus the I versus the we,

that's always there. It's always there fascinating right because it's like you're the guy who just wrote about this and then and and so it should be you're like hyper aware of the phenomenon like yeah you get it from every possible angle because you've lived it and breathed it and studied it and researched it and then you sit there but and and this bubbles up inside you like it's just baked into the fiber of, of who we are. But you also, which is interesting because you also said that this is a relatively new phenomenon though. So, I mean, like, you know, generations ago, if it was much more about, you know, the plural and the singular, what changed? I mean, is it, is it really wired into us or is it just wired into the culture and the culture has changed?

When I say it's relatively new, I mean, it's hundreds of years now. So it's very, very deeply bound up in who we are. To some extent, this sort of tension between the collective and the individual, you know, it sort of swings back and forth. And we may actually be swinging right now a little bit more towards the collective than is appropriate. And Susan Cain wrote a book called Quiet. It's been a New York Times bestseller for years now, I think.

And, you know, she, on her website, invites people to join the Quiet Revolution. People are really being affected by this. And she says, you know, if you have a tech company and you eliminate all private workspaces, you've got a lot of introverts on your payrolls and a lot of them are going to be your best people.

A lot of engineers are introverts and that is not the way they work best. And it's like these companies have heard, oh, well, collaboration is good. It's like hearing, oh, well, a plant needs water, so let's throw it in a lake. A plant needs some water, but not too much. It needs some sunlight, but not too much. It needs to be in the right environment.

And there is a right balance between connection, immersion in a social context, and privacy and a sense of individual identity. And all great creative pairs and romantic pairs and friends, they give each other the right amount of space and they have the right amount of time together and they negotiate that over time. Yeah, and it's so fascinating. It's interesting you brought up Susan also,

and that book, which really gave voice to a third of the population who largely assumed that there was something wrong with them, and they had to change to succeed by modern standards. But it's interesting how, especially in the creative, the hyper-innovative world, which most people would probably say these days is led by the tech industry,

that the guiding ethic is open offices, like everybody is all sort of running around in the same room. But at the same time, the legendary stories of the starters usually starts in a house somewhere, you know, with a couple of guys with hoodies and headphones, you know, and dark lights just floating 24-7, either individually or what's interesting is that increasingly I've been talking to people who, they code in pairs.

And there's some companies that literally, they'll take on huge development projects and all the coders code in pairs. Yeah. Because they find that the quality of the output and the speed of the output is just so much better. Yeah. Well, there's something very special about the dyad it's a very unusual social unit if you look at what happens when a third

person comes into a room with two people i mean room metaphorically or literally but you know two people are doing something together and it's this very fluid flexible thing it's social and we're social creatures so we we that our reality is always social and it's there between them but they can switch roles one can be the the initiator and the other person could be the critic one person could be dominant one moment the other person could be dominant the next moment and they can do this dance. I mean, you can imagine dancers, you know, moving across a floor, dipping and bobbing and weaving. The moment a third person comes in, those rolls begin to harden somewhat. And it's like adding a third leg underneath the table. It creates some solidity and some structure what can be which can be valuable but it makes the thing uh more rigid um so the the dyad is a very unusual and that's one of the reasons why i'm i'm paying such special attention to it and it's also a place where this dance

between the individual and the collective really you know it's like dude i need to take a breather you know i'm not like if there is a group here i'm like that's like a thing, I need to take a breather. You know, I'm not like if there is a group here, I'm like. That's like a thing, you know, I've got to, you know, it's like, am I going to interrupt the group because I and like just go off? Probably not. But if it's just you and me, it's like, OK, well, that's you. We're attending to each other's needs individually and collectively. And my favorite metaphor for so many things in life is like, is the guitar string that's out of tune? I did an interview this morning and someone said, well, what happens when a partnership is kind of breaking down?

How do you deal with it? Well, you have to know the particulars. Because it's like you would never say, you never call someone up on the phone and say, my guitar is out of tune. My E string is out of tune. How do I get it in tune? They would say, well, is it sharp or is it flat? And is the guitar properly adjusted? I mean, is that the problem? Are your strings bad? Are they so loose from overplay that you need new strings? But even that, take it back to that basic question, is it

sharp or is it flat? You've got to listen to it. Some people are not spending nearly enough time with other people they're really really undercooked some people do need more space uh and they do need more solitude and the same person might need different things at different times i mean there are moments when it's like i gotta call amin i'm not gonna fix this problem without him i gotta send this to my you know my friend jillian or my friend, Matthew, um, and get their response. I got to talk this out. You know, I would, I had someone I paid and one of her jobs was just to take notes as I rambled for hours. Um, and other times it's like, I literally checked myself into a hotel room, you know,

for 10 days to finish the final draft, and I had no plans. It was like, this is it, man. This is down to me. I've got to do this. I was on the phone at various times, but I wasn't having major conferences or whatever. I needed to generate an enormous amount of material.

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Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. I want to shift gears a little bit. It's not really shifting gears,

but just something that you've written about and that you've talked a little bit about, but I want to talk a little bit more about is the idea of the dyad is not necessarily the the designated diet like these are these are partners like here are two people who are clearly front and center in partnership you know that in fact there are some from the outside world there may be people that the world considers absolute enemies or rivals yeah of and not rivals within like you know kind of rival kind of collaborator like you

know john and paul within the same unit working together to co-create one collective output but people doing their own thing in their own world but clearly you know like they're trying to one up each other the whole time yeah definitely you're saying that that actually counts as a unit. Yeah, so the progression I move through in my own mind is first look at people who are just trying to beat the crap out of each other. Look at Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. It's very clear. One of them is going to win and the other is going to lose, period. And they're fiercely competitive.

And they not only, especially Larry Bird, not only wanted to win and the other's going to lose period and they're fiercely competitive and they not only especially larry bird not only wanted to win he enjoyed his opponent's suffering um and they came in and be at the same time and they they drove each other and they goaded each other and they're just absolutely rivals stephen douglas and abraham lincoln had a similar we should just throw out for those who are not basketball fans, they're also separate teams. They're not competitors on the same team. That's right. Larry Bird with the Celtics, Magic Johnson with the Lakers. They're both the leaders of the teams. They're both MVPs. They're both taking their championships. It's this rivalry that goes all the way through. It's a big story in hip-hop you know it's like these guys battling each other and at a certain point you have to say this is actually an

adversarial collaboration because they're being defined and made and made much better by the presence of the other then you can look at a case where you know it where that's happening and it has a quality of kind of hip hop is like with Picasso and Matisse, trying to outdo each other, trying to be better than the other, picking up on what the other has done and imitating it and absorbing it. And over time, they were very clear that, you know, Picasso said, in essence, Matisse is the only one who matters to me. And Matisse said virtually the same thing. And then that same quality you can look at happening inside known partners like John and Paul. It's a very similar dynamic within Lennon slash McCartney that they had a sense of shared purpose and a sense of trying to top the other. So you wonder what happens when, did you look at this at all,

when you had that nature of relationship and then one of them either stopped doing the work, died, like what happened to the surviving one who was maybe was still around and still involved in producing creative work for a period of time? Yeah. Well, you know, it's just, it's devastating.

I mean, when someone you're involved with that intimately goes away, to an extent that we're really not aware of, and we probably shouldn't be because it, you know, there's some things in life that you just that you need to count on. You don't want to be thinking about the many layers of concrete beams and wood floors holding us up way above the Upper West Side of Manhattan right now. You want to just count on that floor. All you've got to do is walk. You don't even want to think about walking. You want to think about where you're headed. We don't think about the way that other

people make us who we are. We just, we kind of just do it, um, the same way that, you know, a child shouldn't have to think about when's bedtime. You know, someone else is setting that rule for them. They may cry and scream, but someone else is going to set that, set that. And, um, when that other person goes away, it's, um, it can be, um, I mean, it just, it, it, it can be devastating in the case of Vincent Van Gogh and Theo Van Gogh was literally deadly. Theo had always been the sane one, the clear headed one. He had it together. He earned the money. He went to an office. He put up with the daily indignities of life. And Vincent was, you know, for both of them, the mad one and the irascible one and nothing's good enough. And I'm going to make beauty, you know, damn,

you know, damn the exigencies of everyday life. vincent died almost immediately theo um unraveled and he he took on these qualities this frenetic manic quality and started doing these very unreasonable things and within months he was in an asylum and within months after that he also was dead the circumstances are mysterious and uh so it was, you know, literally deadly. Another really haunting story for me is Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King. King assassinated, we all know. And Ralph Abernathy, who, you know, for 13 years, they had just done everything together. They shared hotel rooms together. But no one really knew that. No one really knew what happened in there except for the

two of them and now you have this guy who was already the onstage partner already much better known and now he's become the saint the smarter and and so anything that ralph abernathy could claim in relationship to him is kind of suspect and anything he did to try to narrate their story it just didn't look good it didn't look right and he he and and he was not a particularly politic guy in that way and he and he made some mistakes the critical thing was that he he wrote a memoir and he he talked some about his uh about king's infidelities and people just just, people in the movement went at him and brutalized him. And he was just a totally broken man.

And I think that, you know, I think that the, you look at Paul McCartney, you know, over the last 10 or 20 years and the way that he's constantly moving from partner to partner and different producers and different collaborators and constantly returning to this thing that he had when he was you know in his teens and 20s and he just made a video for his most recent single which is like this kind of retelling of the time he met john it's like it's uh it's such a strong presence in his imagination,

and yet this guy's not there. You know, you can't, and it's one reason why, to the extent that we're able, when there's a big relationship, we should try to keep engaging with it, you know, while we can, while we can talk to the other person,

while we can deal with the other person, while we can deal with the other person. Because the moment they become inaccessible to us, they don't go away. It becomes ethereal. It becomes almost ghostly. Which is interesting also in the context of Apple right now. Because you've got, well, I guess there were a couple of sets of dyads in there. There was Steve Inwas, but there was also Steve and Johnny Ive. Yeah, definitely.

And now Johnny is the surviving guy who's in the company, and now everybody's kind of looking and saying, okay, is this even possible now? Is Steve enough in Johnny's head? And will the new guy that can, it's so interesting because I think a lot of people are just sitting and waiting and watching now to see. Yeah. Now, I'm super curious about that, too.

And Apple is famously secretive. You know, fortunately, Jobs let Walter Isaacson in and he wrote this magnificent book. So we have a lot of great primary material on the last days of Steve Jobs. But we don't know much about what's happening there now. And I would be really curious to learn about it. And yeah, I mean, you wonder if Johnny ever kicks back in his chair in his office, you know, and just said, you know, what would Steve do? Well, you know, that is that is something that happens. And, you know, one of the pairs that I interviewed, Daniel Gilbert, yeah, very eminent research psychologist at Harvard. And he has a partner in Timothy Wilson, who

has a separate posting. He's at University of Virginia. They both have published separately, but they, all of their basic research was together and they still regard themselves as collaborators. And they take turns and allocate credit in ways that work for both of them. basic research was together and they, they still regard themselves as collaborators and they, they take turns and allocate credit in ways that work for both of them. But they really, they spend much less time together than they used to because they can anticipate each other. They have each other in each other's heads.

And that is, you know, that that's actually highly adaptive. I was talking about having the other person in your head. Is this, you know, that's actually highly adaptive. I was talking about having the other person in your head as this, you know, really challenging phenomenon. But it's quite positive a lot of times. Like, you know, we're talking about the internal critic and anticipating, you know, challenges and playing Notre Dame.

Like, that's something a good editor does for a writer is you start thinking well how's he going to react to that he you know what he's going to say this is an anecdote that doesn't really have a point there's no theme here all right well you know I guess I better deal with that before I show it to him right although there's a risk in that too which is that you start just having both sides of the conversation in your head all the time yeah that's right and that you're wrong yeah and sides of the conversation in your head all the time. Yeah, that's right. And that you're wrong. Yeah.

And then you don't benefit from the genuine contribution of that other person too. And I know a lot of people in that place. Yeah, like what's an example? I know a lot of entrepreneurs who will, they're in partnership, but maybe they feel less secure about the partnership. So before they actually show anything to the other person who they really, they're concerned about being judged by, they'll dance back and forth with,

you know, like a million different arguments. Well, they're going to say this, they're going to say this and try and, which, you know, so to a certain extent,

um, it's good because you're trying to make your idea better by doing it. But to a certain extent, also they may not say that. And they may say something which is actually going to unlock something that would have stopped you in your internal process far earlier and led you both on a much better purchasing path. Yeah, definitely. a sense of safety in coming to the other, regardless of what the outcome will be, a sense of vulnerability that's hard to sustain. And people treat each other in a way that works.

I mean, it's a very hard balance. It's another thing that I struggle with in this book. There were times when Eamon was hard on me in ways that felt counterproductive. And that's my side of this kind of crisis I had towards the end of the book. And maybe I'll see it differently over time. Um, but, uh, I, I, I felt, you know, extremely fragile and like I needed a lot more encouragement than I got. Um, and, um, but at the same time, I always knew, I never doubted that, you know, he and I were in this for basically the same reasons that we wanted to, we cared about the question and we wanted to reach people and make people's lives better by,

you know, delivering a kind of engagement with the question in a, in a, in a informed way. Yeah, no, I think that's, I think having that baseline assumption that we're both working towards the same end, our process is enough to get through these really grueling, tense interactions and times

that are necessary long enough to get through it. And then it's like, bam, that's the place. And I think there's a lot of those. if you talk about people in crisis, that's, that's one very strong move to go back to the, you know, to the, to the, um, oasis of your shared vision, your shared assumptions, your mutual regard, your mutual respect. Sometimes there's conflict that actually needs to be engaged directly and you need to clarify the differences and disagreements. And maybe you do those two things simultaneously, But yeah, if you lose that sense of shared ground, it's it's that's where things start.

And very often people say, well, how do I find a partner like this? You know, most of the pairs that I talk about in the book, if you look at how they first meet, there's some kind of similarity or rapport, shared interest, that's the first thing. You know, they're both in a faculty meeting together because they're both scholars of English, like Lewis and Tolkien. They're both, you know, working on electronics and, you know, doing pranks like Jobs and Wozniak and a mutual friend was like, you guys should meet each other. But then on top of that, once you have that shared interest,

you want to find the person who challenges you the most. So at any point in the partnership, you may need to lean in one direction or another. You may need to lean towards the commonality or lean towards the challenge. And this brings to mind something that Paul McCartney tells the same stories over and over again. And you're like, wow, that's a big deal for him, clearly. And one of the things he tells is that he and John were having some big fight. And John, who wore glasses, we all know, lifted up his glasses, or I think maybe he kind of dipped down his glasses and like looked at him in the eye, lifted up his glasses, or I think maybe he kind of dipped down his glasses

and looked at him in the eye, like over his glasses, and he said, it's only me. And then he picked his head back up and kept going. And I think for Paul, it was like, it's that moment of like, you know, we're still pals. You know, we've had all these years together and and and there was much more that even in the times of like ferocious enmity like that was their default like you know pay attention to all the shit that happened in

late 60s early 70s but like it was 72 or 73 or something john was on tv and and uh someone at the interview asked him about paul and he said well you can't have a fight with your best friend who can you fight with uh and you know a couple years later he was talking openly about how much he loved him you know he's like a brother um that's the the affection ran so deep yeah i mean it's really powerful so um so of course brothers are the ones who drive you the most crazy, too. Right. You've got both energies there. I guess to a certain extent, you have to have that for the best possible creative output.

Yeah. Well, the guy who doesn't challenge you, I mean, it just becomes maddening. You might as well be working alone at that point. Or it's better because because you can challenge yourself in your own mind right you know as opposed to you know no one there's nothing more maddening than a toady you know because you have this like conversation happening that's totally not not advancing it's not creative it'll totally fix you and if you could at least get into a room alone you could initiate this internal conversation which we haven't gotten into but that's a that's a huge

part of the story is the way that the conversation like you and I are having a conversation but it's got a vibe it's got a quality it's mutual respect and you clearly have many more stories than we've even scratched the surface on and that's this feeling of mutual interest and kind of curiosity and you know um and comfort i'm going to walk out and i'm going to have that quality in my mind a little bit and if we were to spend hundreds of hours in these kinds of conversations it would get deeper and deeper and deeper and if you know the kinds of people spend you know years in in relationship with someone else it becomes a quality of mind and that quality of mind that quality of conducive

exchange that is what creative thinking is and if you listen to people describe the creative process in their minds they always will talk about the sense of kind of there's a initiator and a receiver in the mind. And that's what the muse, the myth of the muse was trying to represent that. And Elizabeth Gilbert gave this great TED talk. And she said, you know, I'm not saying we should literally believe that there are fairies like rubbing, you know, their juices over our creative projects but the myth of the muse is a really great metaphor for how this happens and it really takes the burden off the you know the kind of the the the idea of the tortured individual that there's some kind of give and take in the mind and um that's something that is really to be kind of cultivated.

We should cultivate our relationships and getting the balance right. But we should also really cultivate this quality of curiosity. I mean, it resonates with what I've learned in mindfulness, you know, uh, in the mindfulness world, um, that it's, there's all kinds of shit going on and you're, you're watching it and you're relating to it, you know, with some gentleness and some curiosity and some investigation. And, and, and having that kind of respectful, engaged conversation. Well, there's a quality of being awake and like really seeing somebody and not just seeing your mental image of them. Like, you know, I need, I came in here and I told you I'm doing interviews this morning

and yesterday I'm going to another one after this. And so I need to open my eyes, though, and see, you know, you are not some interviewer. You are, you know, this dude. And be awake to it. And I mean, I'm also, obviously, I'm telling you stories. and be awake to it. Obviously, I'm telling you stories I've been working on for many years too, so I'm drawing on experience, but I need to come into this moment. It makes me think of this thing that's been ringing in my head for weeks. I heard it from a teacher named Matthew Brensilver,

a teacher I love in California. And he was quoting a teaching of the Buddha that, you know, if you, the four ways to react to suffering, one is to blame yourself. The other, the second is to blame others. The third is to despair. And the fourth is to blame others, the third is to despair, and the fourth is to investigate.

And he said, the correct answer is D. It's so interesting because I'm fascinated by that question. Like the question of curating warmth. Having done probably around 120 of these conversations now over the last almost three years, fairly early on because i started i'm keying in myself i'm like what's making for really interesting lives you know is there what are the pattern recognitions yeah engines that great question

one of the big things um that just came up over and over and over was this deep sense of curiosity yeah you know and very often it would manifest in one of two ways, sometimes both. One in a particular, like there's one question or there's one field of study or just life. So we were, one of our early conversations, we were, it was with Dan Ariely actually. And after we wrapped, there was a guy on the crew who has ink all over his body. And Dan was in a rush. He was going to three countries after this. You know, he's going to a whole bunch of shows. And he's just looking at the guy and he's like,'s that he's pointing to his arm and he wants to know

the story behind the tattoo yeah and he's like literally having the guy like roll up his sleeves and he wants him to trace then he's like you're like picking up his shirt because he wants to know the whole story not because it's shtick he really is curious like what makes somebody what's the story and what makes somebody cover his body with ink to tell this story? And, and I've seen that now across so many people. And my deeper curiosity is actually, is, is that teachable? Like, do you have it or not? Yeah, that's a great question too.

I don't have an answer to it. I've started to explore it a little bit more. Well, mindfulness is definitely one, you know, it's one practice that, that leads in that direction. Yeah, no doubt and um you know that and that and and there's also i should say you know there is the problem of being overly curious people who have you know too much kind of um investigatory quality and have a hard time organizing it and that's a lot of what you know um mania is and other kinds of mental illness even is that there's all these inputs are flooding in and you don't have boxes to put them in and a lot of what happens i think in a

in a effective creative mind is the relationship between curiosity and you know pushing against barriers and kind of moving out of you know uh established forms and then a return to form, you know, because everything has to have its form. And we often lionize the, the people who are, you know, it's like the the Apple ad, you know, here's to the crazy ones. And, you know, this romantic image of people who just they're rebels, and they, they're turning their backs on the establishment. That's true, but it misses the other side of the dialectic, which is lucid sanity, a preoccupation with tradition. And creativity only exists in the relationship

of those two qualities. And every single character in that Apple ad was in that dialectic, often with a second person who provided structure and form, you know, so that they could be the wild one. And that can happen in our mind. I'm sure that Dan Ariely, I really imagine he was not just taking that in as a series of images, but you know,

having associations and making connections and kind of, and integrating that into something either in that moment or later on. And it's that dance that we, you know, we'd have, we have to do for ourselves to some extent, but we often really need help from other people, uh, to do it. Yeah. And I totally agree. Solitude matters, but the magic is in the in between. Yeah, definitely. So I want to, I want to come full circle and actually give a wrap-up here. Sure. So the name of this is Good Life Project, and I'd love to explore with each person as we wrap up,

if I offer that term out to you, to live a good life. Does it mean anything to you? If so, what? Yeah, definitely. a good life um does it mean anything to you if so what yeah definitely i probably the piece of writing i'm best known for is a piece i wrote about this harvard happiness study they've got all these um they had this idea that they could study well-being um and that that would be a contribution to medicine, you know, in contrast to all the study of, um, of, uh, debility and disease. And that was the thing that preoccupied me, you it, but there are also a lot of questions. I mean, the idea articulated by Freud, but shows up in lots of traditions of work and love,

connections with others, friends, romance, family, community, and some kind of meaningful work and some kind of purpose that's other-directed, satisfying to oneself but also useful to other people. The thing that I wrestle with the most, though, is that creativity does, I don't want to, I don't subscribe to the myth of, to the romance of the, of the suffering creator. I certainly don't think suffering is necessary in a, in a, in a, in an extended way. Many of the, of the best writers and best creators I know have a lot of joy in their lives and are really good, sane people.

At the same time, I think that a lot of the things that we care about the most did emerge from a lot of pain. And that is really challenging. I mean, and I go to the MoMA and I see a Jackson Pollock and I feel like my life is worth living because I've been able to spend 10 minutes in front of this or a Van Gogh or I read, you know, a Kafka story and I feel like he's just articulated what it feels like to be alive. And I don't know what to do with that in my own life because I don't want to give myself permission to kind of dwell in my misery. But I also, I don't want to be realistic and I would not describe myself as a happy person

and I want to be happier. And I think I could, I could be even more effective creatively if I was, but I don't know how high the bar ought to be because I don't think in the end, that is the index. Uh, I, I, I, and I, I'm, I'm really, I really wrestle with that. I mean, that's, that's funny because that is the question of this book I spent seven years on many years ago, and it's ongoing. And this good life question that I worked on for years for that magazine piece is obviously ongoing. And this question of creative chemistry is ongoing. All these questions are ongoing.

And I have to live with that with all the passion and gentleness I can muster yeah I think it's like it it opens up something that it's very often it you know you become a seeker and the end may be the end yeah definitely I mean I try to bring it to bear as much I can in a loving way to other people I mean um and I, and I, I, you know, I, I get a lot of advice and support and I, I also, you know, I try to, I'm very, I very much believe in the teacher student dialectic and I am a student a lot of the time. And I try to be a teacher, you know, whenever the opportunity arises. And I believe in the creative path and

making beautiful things that, you know, impart some kind of meaning. And that is the, that's the highest end for me. And there's a convergence between, you know, psychology and sort of, you know, these paths and pursuits of, you knowuits towards happiness and well-being and the creative arts that when those two things come together, that's where I feel at home. One of the happiest places for me to be is a writer's conference where

the air is filled with language of search and pain melancholy and but the language itself is quite beautiful and there's just this really uh very full uh you know quality that life is being lived in a really raw way um and I just, I feel like, uh, I can rest there. I think that's probably a great place to bring our conversation. Cool, man. Well, thank you so much. Yeah. It's a great pleasure.

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