Malcolm Gladwell: The Art of Self-Reinvention

hey everybody what's up it's your buddy chase welcome to another episode of the show this is the chase jarvis live show here on creative live the show where i sit down with amazing humans and unpack their brains with the goal of helping you live your dreams and today's insanely badass guest is mr malcolm gladwell of course you know his work things like tipping point blank outliers he's an award-winning author multiple new york times bestsellers he's also into some new stuff audio he is got an incredible podcast called revisionist history among a couple of others and he's the president of pushkin industries uh where they are exploring all kinds of audio uh art and today's episode with mr malcolm gladwell features one of those pieces uh a new work that he has collaborated with the one and only mr paul simon incredible piece and it's called miracle and wonder we go deep on all sorts of things his creative process the creative process behind the legendary songwriter paul simon we talk about the ability to choose what you want to be and become in this world how paul simon did it how malcolm gladwell did it and how you can do it um how to know what to pursue where your areas of genius may lie it may be in your background it may be the fact that you have not yet tasted enough things in the world it is a fascinating episode i've wanted to have malcolm on the show for a really really long time and this couldn't be a better time to interact and intersect with his career arc in this new work of genius again miracle and wonder with paul simon i can't wait for you to hear this episode give malcolm a shout out on the internet and yours truly will attempt to answer any questions you have but i know you're going to love the show so i'm going to get out of the way yours truly and malcolm gladwell [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] malcolm gladwell welcome to the show thanks for being here thank you it's my pleasure well uh you've done it again sir we're um i just shared with you before we started recording that for the last several days i it's been i'm operating out of seattle and it's been the typical seattle fall winter lots of rain and i spent the last few days curled up on the couch re-reading a bunch of your material but mostly listening to uh miracle and wonder an incredible collaboration that you've just put out with yourself and one of the greatest songwriters in modern history mr paul simon so uh that is one of the things i want to focus on but before we do for the handful of listeners who've been living under a rock and might not be familiar with you or your work can you take us way back tell us a little bit about yourself mostly interested in your your earliest times and what sort of uh what made you you oh dear that's like yeah let's go way back for the people who might not be familiar with your work that's quite the uh quite quite the question um well i'm a uh you know i'm a i'm a canadian i suppose i should start with that it seems very real very relevant um and i uh i came to this country after graduating from college on a kind of whim i was actually an illegal immigrant for a while um and stuck around worked for the washington post for then i worked at the new yorker sort of got interested in journalism and then started doing a podcast a couple years ago called revisionist history wrote books on the side through much of the last 20 years and now i'm at this audio company called pushkin um which i started with my best friend jacob and uh we just make audio stuff um podcasts audiobooks anything that's got a sound component um and that's been that's the latest iteration on what has been a very unexpected ride didn't think i was gonna this is what i was gonna end up doing in my life but that's where it's been i'm curious why uh the canadian part obviously you opened with your heritage um there seemed to be something in your answer that anchored that um being especially prescient right now like what is it about your well you said you're in seattle yeah and i always have a running i call it south canada just for what it's worth i was gonna say every time i meet someone with seattle i was like dude why don't you just live in vancouver i mean it's you know it's the same weather and it's only was it two hours away but it's like in every other way it's better i mean you you know like there's just no there's just no excuse for putting up with america when you could have canada canada's like right across the border so i thought i would throw that in there just to i'm actually even closer right now i'm operating from we have a little beach house that's an hour and a half north of seattle so borders like 30 minutes away maximum i could send i could send one of those military head helicopters pick up your house fly it over the border just dump it down in an equivalent beach and make on the on the canadian side i i well there's plenty of reasons that that might i might take you up on that um is can you describe a little bit of your upbringing uh yeah obviously you're known for your writing and you you articulated the different places that you'd spent time as a staff writer and you mentioned books and now you're obviously focused a lot on audio but what you know let's go back childhood because most of the people who are listening today are creators entrepreneurs uh folks who um would aspire to a path where it seems like what you've created for yourself is the ability to make a living in a life doing what you love and i'm wondering if if there are things uh you know maybe take a page out of outliers go go back to you know how you were raised what you were what you believed in and um is there any insights for us to to gain from that yeah well i um i grew up in a little tiny farming town in um south western ontario um so an hour and change west of toronto um canadian by ontario bible belt is basically where i grew up everyone i went to school with was pretty much either the child or the grandchild of a farmer and my dad was a professor a math professor at a nearby university and at the kind of canadian science school and my mom was a writer and a therapist and so i grew up with parents who were very kind of independent-minded and who neither had conventional my dad used to always say that he'd never worked for anyone a day in his life which i thought was a lovely way of describing what he did you know they made their own way in the world which was a really wonderful model for me as a kid they didn't they weren't institutional people they were um they were people who think thought that you should do stuff that you thought was interesting they weren't terribly hung up on how much money they were making they were more interested in whether they were inspired by what they were doing um they were deeply religious which gave them a kind of um strength and stability that maybe they wouldn't have had otherwise yeah it was a kind of um so i i never thought that i never thought the path i chose was in any way a rebellion or a departure from the path of my parents i mean i sort of feel i'm just doing a version of what they did maybe in a different place and with different kind of public consequences but um you know what a professor my dad would get up every morning and sit at his desk and do math it's not that different from what i i get up every morning he was telling stories and numbers and i'm telling stories and words so it's you know it's you can see the link in in between those two i think those two activities what about what about outside influences beyond family beyond household um well especially in that early form of time i had a friend i had a number of friends who you know actually the book we're going to be talking about the paul simon book was done with my friend bruce who i met on the first day of first grade in canada um in 1969 um and he was his family was a lot more kind of culturally um with it than mine and he introduced me to whole a lot of what i know about music i know through bruce my family was not terribly interested in popular music um but i had another friend who had an even bigger impact on me um by total chance a kid is a guy named terry who came from the family of who had a chicken feed business and terry neither if terry's parents went to college or even i think finished high school they later finished high school but he was from this extraordinary family each one of them did something more um incredible than the last terry was and remains just about the smartest person i ever met i met him in 10th grade biology class and he was all he wanted to do he never wanted to do the experiment the way the experiment was supposed to be done which in the beginning struck me as being really disruptive and problematic and then i quickly realized was the right attitude to have and he terry taught me that you should have the confidence to to construct your intellectual life the way you wanted to construct it and he went on to be he's now a very distinguished professor at harvard university this kid from his dad was running a chicken feed business that's really brilliant kind but i happened that was i happened to run into these two extraordinary people bruce went on to be a editor of the new york times so from my little town in canada my little farmington again i had these two friends who i just happened to stumble into this incredibly sophisticated kind of peer network from the very beginning well i did find it fascinating i think it was in the um maybe in the the prologue to the audiobook you talked about oh yeah and i so i called my friend who knows a lot about music and we've been friends since we were seven which six six six yeah that's like that's that's quite quite the friendship and it was an interesting twist to uh introduce um another character in the audiobook but you know speaking of characters the fact that that um bruce uh and and you just you have a little harem of friends from your town that do you feel like there was something that the three of you um reinforced in one another because i i think it's fair to say that if i surveyed you know having i've had hundreds of guests on the show and then uh in parallel having talked to thousands of fans and and readers and listeners and watchers people who are inspired by the guests and there seems to be a divide between the people who pursued the things that they wanted to pursue by hook or crook for whatever you know by whatever reason they managed to make their way in the world and so many folks who have listened have told me that that is one of the things that they love is that they're sort of by osmosis understanding what it takes to overcome what is sort of professed to me and i think is true in popular culture this hurdle of actually doing the thing versus doing the practical or the the the easy or the available or the ready or the within arm's reach and i think it's fascinating that all you know the group of you who have been friends for i mean what are you 29 years old so you've been friends for 22 years i'll let that pass okay this is not journalism by the way uh just that you've been close for a long time is there i'm trying to help provide some ingredients for those people at whatever stage they are whatever station in life that the ability to grab the thing and pursue the thing that you want to do more than anything else in this world is available to you despite differences in privilege and you know geography orientation all the different permutations that humans take well it's funny i've a couple answers that question it's a really good one one is to make reference to that you know there's something in paul simon's story that really resonated with me which is you know he's someone over the course and i'll come back to me in a second but he's someone over the course of his career who has felt that he had the right and freedom as a musician to engage with any with whatever cultural tradition he wanted that to him the definition of being a musician is you get to play music with anyone who takes music seriously music is a common language so he goes to south africa to put to make graceland because to his mind there it's not it's not another culture or a foreign unknown scary group of people it's musicians they're they're just like him or you know he'll go then he went to brazil or early in his career he made he would there's a i talk in the book a lot about there's a time when he went to muscle shoals the famous recording studio muscle shoals alabama and brings up he's doing a you know a calypso themed song with a marching band from new orleans and he imports a gospel singer from new york and he's in at the greatest r b studio in alabama and like you would i'd outside would look at that and say oh my god like six different cultural traditions you know colliding in one place and he would say no we're all musicians it's one one world and why do i bring it up because the dominant metaphor of my life when i say metaphor maybe not even meant for a real thing of my upbringing was libraries my mom would take me to the local we didn't have enough money for me to have a lot of my own books so everything i read from at a very early age until i went to college came from a library and my mom would take me to the library in town and the library was this incredible thing because it's the same idea that every book in that library belongs to you right you can take out there's no limit on what you can take out like there's thousands and thousands of books and you can take out any one of them you want you have an equal right to every bit of learning in that building which is an incr as a kid i was like that's amazing why would i why would i buy a book i knew i had friends who would read books that were on the shelves in their home and i was like are you nuts why would you limit yourself to the you know the 15 books your parents happen to have bought for you when you could go into town and there's a there's 10 000 books you could choose from and then my dad would take me to the library at the university when i was very young i would i would he would just pull me out of school and i would go with him into into his work in the morning and i he would just plunk me in the library and lead me there and now we have not ten thousand no you know not two thousand volumes but i don't know a hundred thousand or whatever it was a massive library and that was even more of a but it's the same idea that is in paul simon's work which is the world of books or ideas in books belongs to anyone who wants to read the book right you're not limited at all in any way and that was just the primary lesson of my childhood and that you you you get to pick what book you read right which means you get to pick what you think about what you learn about you and i i actually by the time i got to college i had lost interest entirely in learning i never went to um lectures ever i just had no interest in why would i go somewhere and have someone else give me their version i can go to the library and i can read 10 different versions of that history isn't that better that's what i did i was a very very serious student but i just didn't think that a sitting and listening to someone tell me what they thought of something was a useful way to spend my time when i could go to the library and get everything um so anyway paul's like that like sort of the great things about paul simon is like he's not a folk singer who thinks he can only work within that narrow tradition or a pop singer who thinks he can only do or you know he could talk as enthusiastically about doo-wop from the 50s as he does about brazilian rhythms that he discovered in his 50s or about that project is that is there a similarity between you that this is it's interesting to me you're coming from paul's life to explain yours i'm trying to go from your life to explain paul's as overlap in the project because i found from what i know about you and have read and and just the library i think there's an analogy or a metaphor baked into there it is actually your life but there's a bigger bigger i think um inference to draw there but i is is that what drew you to paul's project that i mean you've written across a vast number of subjects and in fact i i loved that the bit in in the book in in miracle and wonder where people have tried to pin folk singer on paul i think it was in the chapter called something about the queen's chapter trying to pin yeah they've tried to pin folksinger and he's like no that was i was an imposter i was from queens how could queens you have to be from minneapolis like dylan or you know some you know some far away place in the sticks to be able to talk about that and i'm i'm from up the street i think he talks about it being i'm a 10-minute train ride from where we're playing tonight and that sort of made him an outsider but yet he was comfortable participating in any one of those through the common language of music as you mentioned and is that why you have chosen this because is there a parallel between you've written you know about high performers and about um pop culture tipping points and about you know that i couldn't help but think that there's this amazing venn diagram of your life there is in a number i think you're right i would say what interests me the most about him and it's not necessarily because i see a commonality with him but i was drawn in because of his longevity because it's so insanely rare in his world to be someone who's musically relevant over the span of 50 years so he's relevant in the 50s 60s 70s 80s 90s and arts and still making music now but i mean he's a central part of the conversation for 50 years um and you know there is almost no other example of that um and that's what drew me because that's something i i would you know in my wildest dreams i would love to be relevant for that long too and so the question of how you stay relevant in that way fascinates me um but also the i've always his his continual desire to reinvent himself is something that i was drawn to because i don't think i'm i'm not nearly as successful at it as he is but i have very consciously tried to reinvent myself i started out as a newspaper writer then i decided you know what i should be a magazine writer and then i was like you know what i should write books and i was like you know what i should be i should have a podcast and i was like you know what i should help start a company those are all conscious steps that i didn't i think it was healthy to do the same thing um over and over again you know never mind i don't know if you're a sports fan but yes when tiger woods was at his peak he would periodically reinvent his swing and there'd always be a transition period of six months where whatever it was where he would look awful and he would lose tournaments and all kinds of people would say you're the greatest golfer of all time why are you monkeying with your swing right why do you go through this painful process of like and you look awful right now and i remember how much abuse he would get for that and i would it's funny i never i always saw the logic of what he was doing to my mind it made perfect sense of course you would reinvent your swing you invent your swing because you're the best if you if you only reinvent your swing when you're terrible when everything has fallen apart then you're acting out of desperation he's he was reinventing his swing because from a position of strength he was like i am the greatest golfer in the world i'm interested in being the greatest golfer in the world for a long time and i understand that the only way i'm going to do that is if i come up with new versions of tiger woods for each new challenge and the tiger woods who cleaned up at 21 cannot bite by definition be the tiger woods who cleans up at 31 right i got to be a different tiger woods i'm gonna and like that made so much sense to me like yes of course try you and who cares if you're if you have six months of transition you've won god knows how many majors right right six years of flourish for six months of transition who cares right so paul simon is that you know he it would have been at any point of his career after simon and garfunkel he could have stopped writing music and just played his old hits and made a kajillion dollars right just to it you could tour forever these days if you're that big at some point tons of people do that and what does he do he continually reinvents himself a great personal cost by the way he makes a movie the movie doesn't do well he just pours his life into a broadway play and is devastated by the reception even though it's a great play right amuse you know um he so he's like that that aspect of his life really did speak to me because it struck me as being um [Music] something that's crucial to uh to to to to to how you continue to flourish as a as a as a as a creative yeah i think on the show we talk a lot about there's creativity with the you know with the small c the arts writing you know podcasting filmmaking photography design and then there's creativity with the capital c which is just creativity with the small sea at a different scale and pointed toward different endeavors and including the creating of one's life that's the major theme of this show creativity with the capital c applied and i personally was fascinated by that same thread in paul's life um i opened our conversation with this sort of nostalgic last few days um listening to again and we're obviously talking very overtly now about your latest project which is called miracle and wonder the audiobiography of paul simon um which was recorded as i understand it over i think nine something four plus hour conversations 40 hours of tape 40 hours a day which i'm telling you it's just it's so cool because there's enough you've you've created enough material that you can really explore some of these tangents and the i love the trifecta you and and and bruce and uh and paul the different locations it's it's just fascinating i i really i highly recommend it for anyone who's who's listening but it to me what was um the thread of invention and reinvention and then when i obvious let's just go tipping point in 2000 blink in 2005 outliers in 2008 uh what the dog saw 2009 david glass 2013 talking to strangers 2019 bomber mafia they're these are you're not really slowing down it seems like if you're looking at the gap between books if anything you're accelerating you malcolm as an artist i found that to be fascinating about paul's world his you know he had success i think i remember a point in the book where he talks about their first hit was when they were in high school yeah yeah he's got a crazy it's a big hit a hundred thousand yeah they were on american bandstand right yeah oh yeah yeah so and then you think of that career accelerating and is there some what i'm getting at is this concept of mastery and when you why i advocate anyone pursuing anything to to master something because then you have an awareness of what mastery feels like and you're more able to then apply the same principles of mastery in one discipline there's an analog in lots of other areas do you feel like mastery has been important to you was it important to paul or and is it important in general in again speaking to our audience of listeners here to pursue the things that interest you you talked about you know you sampled many things you did lot you've read whatever book you wanted in the library how important is going deep on one thing relative to your life or career arc yeah well he's um so one of the things that's fascinating about paul is that he comes you know his father was a professional musician so he's raised in a household where music is a craft a craft and a profession and he begins i think his understanding of music through that lens it was something that you studied and you learned and you mastered that allowed you to do much more creative work on top of that kind of um proficiency and there's nothing you know there are some people when you talk to them about creative work and they use all kinds of kind of of um of uh flowery and ethereal language there's nothing in that with paul i mean you really feel like there's a process and it's all very concrete which is not to say that he doesn't appreciate the magic of creativity but the point is that his he approaches it with a seriousness of purpose the way a professional does and his respect for other musicians is based on he's when he sees someone who shares his seriousness of purpose they win his respect and that all the collaborations that he's done over the course of his life were with other musicians who had that kind of that you know the people he put together for graceland he goes to south africa and he basically auditions the leading musicians of south africa and says okay you you're who i want you're you you don't work you you know he and because he's looking for that same kind of um uh gravitas right that's and i keep saying series has a purpose it really is he's not messing around right he's not you know he gets that sense from the book for sure it's this is his this is his career and he's attending to it and he's and he has enormous respect for the complexity of the job that he's taken i have a similar i also responded to that because you know writing to my mind if you sit around waiting for inspiration you will wait for your entire life it's not what you do you you you go and you have to put in the work you have to master all aspects of storytelling you have to be one of my favorite thing i used to do i haven't done this in years is i whenever i found a read something i really loved i would ask the person who wrote it how many drafts did you do because what you would discover is the stuff that you like the most that you think is of the highest quality has the most drafts so when the person who wrote it says oh i did 15 drafts then you're like oh okay that makes sense to me and by the way they're not shy about admitting that because some people would say if i did 15 drafts it makes it sound like i'm you know they they think it's much more romantic and um self-congratulatory to say yeah i mean i just wonder it just poured out of me it was perfect over a weekend no serious writer ever says that they say the opposite they understand that when you say you did 30 drafts what you are telling the person you're talking to is that you're serious writer take this seriously and you understand how hard writing is right so that like i do i'm in the middle of writing a new thing now and i do new drafts even when i'm not sure there's anything wrong with the draft you have to do a draft you have to you got to go back and rewrite it even if you think there's something wrong with it there is something wrong with it you just haven't seen it yet so you have to like commit to taking the time you sit with it and read it and think about it and you'll figure out what's wrong with it right if you go by your intuition that oh it seems right to me no you know that's not the way it works it's like there trust me there's something wrong with it right because writing is hard and i think that's true of any high achiever in any field i've ever talked to shares that attitude they there is a kind of relentless perfectionism below the surface that forces them to go back over and over and over what they're doing until they get it right is that contribute uh let's go to your your uh audiobook about paul is that tenacity the thing that is that the soul thing that has kept him relevant as you said for more than 50 years is there some is it is it a is it a science and art alchemy like what are the ingredients that have gone into his relevance given that that was one of the things that originally attracted you to him yeah clearly you've you've peeled the onion you spent 40 hours talking to the man what what are the ingredients that you think has gone into this is it an insatiability for relevance or is it just a focus on the craft and like what's what's the alchemy of it's some combination i did a whole chapter in the book um uh about memory because i thought memory i wonder i've come to believe that memory is a kind of under plays an under theorized underappreciated role in creativity um i was struck by this fact i'm just so people know you know the way the book works is we sat down with him had conversations with him took those conversations edited them and then added commentary so it's this combination of us bruce and i talking with bruce and me talking with paul um uh and or bruce and i talking with paul and then sort of analysis arguments you know there are moments where i kind of try and interpret what we're listening to so it's sort of it's an unusual kind of book it's this um but uh one of the things that struck me from the beginning was he has this uncanny memory for sound so he can here he is at 78 he can recreate for you the experience he had listening to a piece of music when he was 12. and he can tell you about that song even if he hasn't listened to that song in 70 years he can say okay there's a point in that song where this happens and then we play it and sure enough exactly what he remembered was true and i was reminded of i've come to believe this is a common occurrence in very creative people i did a you know the director ron howard who's very similar to paul simon in many ways in that he's maintained he has been relevant in popular film for almost not quite as for almost as long as paul has been relevant in popular music that you know directors do not have long shelf lives they they have a moment and then they're they're often they're making projects that no one lives ron howard's making commercially you know for 30 years now it's been going on and i say he had a book came out and i interviewed him and his brother about this book that they just wrote and what i discovered was that they had the same thing particularly ron ron isn't but it's not for sound or music it's a memory for character and conversation that he can recreate his childhood in a way that astonished me i don't remember anything in my childhood he remembers everything he wrote a book that is full of this book that he wrote with his uh brother it's a recreation of their childhood and it's as if these are two guys in her 60s and they're writing about it like it happened yesterday and then i was reminded and we use this a little bit in the book we quote this little bit from lebron james being interviewed after a game and someone someone brings up some moment in the basketball game and lebron recreates not just that moment but everything around it just off the top of his head he says okay and he just he does like five minutes on absolutely everything that happened on the court in that little two-minute window of a game that just happened like and you realize there's a reason why all those three people at the top of their game and it has in part part only in part to do with their memory that when you have that kind of precise memory then you have a kind of archive in your head that you can draw from you know in lebron's case it's almost easiest to describe there because same thing was true by the way of larry bird all these great players can do this and what it means is it's like a chess player can look at a board and they can they can summon that exact position from memory from some other game and remember what happened next in that previous game right it's a name that's called chunking is that so lebron could be in a situation in a basketball where everyone on the court is in a certain position and because he has perfect memory he can say okay i've been in this exact position on a basketball court 12 times 10 of those instances i did you know i did 10 different things over those 12 instances nine of those 10 things didn't work but one of them worked brilliantly okay i'm going to do the one that worked brilliantly right so he's got this kind of encyclopedic i think a great great entrepreneurs do this without realizing they're doing it yep that mental maps and models they had these models they've built up over time that are incredibly specific and incredibly useful okay this is this is what i'm what i'm in right now looks really scary and new but in fact i've been here before i've been in an analogous situation and here's what i did or here's what someone i was observing did and that gives me a guide to how to decipher my current situation well simon's doing that with sound i'm in the studio i have a challenge how do i bring certain this certain moment of this particular music to life well i i go to my memory and i have a hundred analogous moments to draw on and i can take those hundred bits and recreate them and make something totally new out of my memories now if you don't have that memory if you only have 10 things in memory you're you can't do it you're not a genius you're digging you're making something familiar and derivative and but if you have 10 times the musical memories in your head then you could do something that sounds wholly new is that something that's we can cultivate or is that a natural gift i think it i think it's a combination i think the reason these people have all described have this precise memory is that they value their experiences so on some level when they go through an experience as opposed to dismissing it they're storing it so they're mindful of their so when paul listens to a song he doesn't listen to a song the way we listen to a song we listen to a song and say oh that's great let me go on with her life he listens to a song and says okay what did i just hear and i think the you know the entrepreneur who has an experience they have the same thing they're like well what did what just happened and they they they go through the experience and break it down and store it deliberately in their kind of memory banks that's the difference they understand they're not playing around and they're not trivializing their experiences they're understanding their experiences are the source of their creativity if you i'm going to try and extend this concept a little bit so i have found i've learned from so many different people different types of people any and number of lessons right you can learn from anything anybody and if there is you know paul has this genius in music you have it in writing um is it a matter then for those listeners who want to tap into this very important part of themselves is it more than about understanding your genius and discovering your genius or is it just some people are better at x and should do why for a profession and this i'm trying to find this interrelationship between you being willing and able to read any book whatever interests you and the path that most people choose again what we're talking about is greatness lebron james malcolm gladwell paul simon you're there you're giving me the the i'm [Laughter] i'm really trying to solve problems for the listeners right now they are going to go and they're going to listen to to the book they're gonna they're gonna buy miracle and wonder and they are going to get to taste this i am trying to incent them if anyone's on the on on the the cusp of like um i don't know what i found so freaking compelling about that book about the other works that you have created is there is a certain genius and when you hear genius when you're close to genius you hear what it sounds like i believe that that's in everyone in some capacity and what where we stumble is in the discovery phase you are willing to read every book most people are shown a book and their household of shelf and like choose from these five books so help us connect the dots between the work that you've done with paul simon in in recording this miracle and wonder and the relevance to the audience like what you're hearing is genius on display and yeah is that is that another thing that attracted it to you and is that possible for others to tap into i mean i do think there is i mean is it possible and don't sugarcoat it by the way sorry to interrupt but like if you don't believe it's true i don't like i'm not asking you to yeah assuage my question no i mean is it possible for an ordinary musician to be paul simon no i mean he is a once in a million but that doesn't mean it's not useful or you can't greatly improve your performance by studying people like that um so to talk about this memory thing for a moment what is what is at the root of that with someone like him or lebron or ron howard or whatever um [Music] it is their willingness to be introspective about their own experiences to start so it's this understanding that in order to move forward and do something new i have to understand what i've already done so you can't there i'm this is i mean this is a fascinating point that i used to think that the really creative person is someone who was relentlessly focused on what was ahead on the next thing that is true but it misses this crucial element which is in order to be sophisticated and smart and open to new experiences you have to really understand where you've been and you've got to understand what you have learned and the only way to for example the only way to learn from a mistake is to dwell on the mistake really dwell on the mistake all right so what like and be willing to to it's painful and but it's necessary you you have to actually think about okay well why did that go wrong um what does that tell me about myself and the way i approach a problem and you know it's that kind of and so what we're what we were revealing in miracle and wonder with paul simon is we we caught someone at in in middle age who has done a lifetime of this kind of reflection right it's been a he's been reflecting on his career from the beginning of his career right because he understood how essential that kind of reflection was to evolving as an artist so now he's got 70 years of reflections and we were just on we were just like running the tape recorder as it came out but he's as thoughtful about a record he would have made in 1964 as is about the music he's writing now you know there's no difference in his mind if if he's if he has done it it's worth him thinking about it and trying to learn from it you know um you know he he was hilarious on he doesn't like the song sound of silence which is everyone always considers that to be one of his classic songs yeah he doesn't he's just he does not like it just thinks it's juvenile but like it still he still thinks about it you know it's like it's been he wrote that in when did he write that 1963 or something it's now 2021. it's still he's still willing to go back there and say okay well why does that song not work for me right that's a question he that's a conversation he will have with himself um and that's like that's to me the that's the crucial lesson here is maybe we need to spend more time on this kind of of self-reflection um on in our chosen um uh field well know thyself right that's the uh it goes i think it goes pretty far back in history uh i think it's pretty relevant uh i i wanted to ask you experientially what was it like i know you were recorded in a number of different locations i think not all nine recordings were in different locations but everything from like in i think paul's backyard was one you can hear the pitbull barking in the background you know there's all these different hawaii we were in this hilarious little basement studio in hawaii where it's only claimed a thing was that mick fleetwood had recorded something there once i found that fascinating way yeah and but um how did the various locations manifest themselves in the material that you were able to grasp and was that something that you would do again or would you change and or constrain that or was it the unconstrained she's paul we'll record anywhere we can get you for five hours we'll come to you like yeah you know just i was fascinated by what role that may have played in the creative process well his studio his studio in his backyard and that one's he's used for years and is full of a lot of his pictures and instruments and so he would often at the beginning of our conversations just walk around the room and pick up things and that would trigger memories and things so that was one very distinct experience and then when he was when we were in hawaii and we were just in this random studio up in the hills he had none of those kind of props and which is not a better or worse it's just different so there he was almost forced out of his comfort zone and i found that some of the most emotional emotional stuff we got was from the hawaii sessions when he's he's just alone and he was it was an hour from his house um oh more than an hour and he would drive himself in his new he had a a new tesla he was very very happy with and he was driving first of all what rock star drives himself an hour to meet in the studio in the middle of nowhere like i was like paul did you miss rockstar training school like anyway he would show up and i think he was so he'd show up in this strange place he'd never been to before after an hour driving and it just made them more kind of reflective and so i think you're right i mean if i was doing again you can't do this for logistical reasons but i would love to do one of these where it was 10 different sessions in 10 different places because i do think it does make a difference as the listener i i was fascinated i could feel the different energy and of course you're crafting the narrative with the sound bites and editing but there was definitely very distinct emotional arcs uh from the different locations the first one you guys meet he's wearing a you know a sweatshirt and a yankees baseball hat and then you go to you know hawaii and then you're in his backyard and the you know the pitbull is barking in the background and like it just it i know obviously you're a master storyteller but it just created um this really interesting emotional resonance with me and where i'm going with this line of questioning is now to audio specifically you have shifted as you mentioned earlier this concept of invention and reinvention it's popular on the show i'm interested in it personally talked about uh being a newspaper writer then a magazine rather than a book writer than a podcaster and now an audiobook creator and this new what is a fascinating um i don't know if i would call it genre but with pushkin now you're the president of pushkin um what is are are we perhaps are you trying to in your own way create a is it a tipping point to reference your own book with audio because i was just it felt like you know again sitting i was sitting largely in a dark room with the fire just listening to this amazing story unfold is that part is that what are you trying to do that or is this just an exploration of our medium okay we're trying to push we think there's so much kind of room for reinvention and creativity and audio um you know i'm doing a book right now um and a new a new audiobook it'll be both a print book and an audio book but i'm sort of thinking about the audiobook first and without going into the details of what the book's about there's a moment in the book where several of the key characters in the book are all gathered at a church in south central and in los angeles and we got tape so if you're writing the book for a print you just the place where they are is not is important you'll describe it but you're interested in what is said if you have the audio then all of a sudden your entire understanding of that scene changes because i i looked and hunted and finally got tape of that evening it's in the evening and one of the tapes and you're listening to somebody speak and of course it's a black church so there's there's a kind of vibe right and as the person is talking the organists of course as you do in those in that tradition the organist accompanies you as you talk right and when you pause and you learn the rhythms exactly and all of a sudden i was listening to this tape and i was like oh god this is amazing this is amazing and my understanding of and i realized the audio experience of listening to this is totally different from the print experience of reading about it not better necessarily but different you can do something different i can i can communicate the emotionality of that moment in this whole different way and when you hear the crowd going uh-huh and then the organ playing and then the person responding to those rhythms and you're getting into and you're realizing that they're about to say something that's very very emotional and painful and difficult and man that's different that's just like you know i spent my life telling stories the print way where what you were interested in is in communicating the ideas and now all of a sudden i'm in a form that allows me to communicate the emotion that's exciting i've been a visual artist my whole life and i'm fascinated by audio because our eyeballs are now taken up with so many screens in the world and there's this opportunity to um i guess communicate in audio that allows people to move through the world and and it's sort of there's less competition and there's more room for innovation it feels like it feels rich which is i think just the the essence behind my question so it doesn't come out of left field for you i was just fascinated again tipping point you know referring to your own work and audio like of all the things that you could pursue presumably you could be doing films pals with ron howard you could be making the next movie written you know based on one of your books or whatever but you're choosing audio i found that really interesting one of the last areas i'd like to press on a little bit it's a little bit it's a little bit selfish but i would say the [Music] i think they're in chapter 10 of the book about 10 minutes in there's a phrase that echoes a phrase that's also very popular with our listenership and and one that i've championed for a long time and i want to get your take on it and it's this concept of different not just better i'm wondering if you a recall the moment in the book again chapter 10 about 10 minutes in um and chapter 10 is the chapter on uh the cameo with aaron lindsay bridge ever troubled watching oh yeah yeah um and i'm wondering if i say that phrase being different not just better what does that mean and uh just off the cuff you know how does it resonate with you if so how uh is if if memory serves is that in this is that a description of the aretha franklin version of bridge over trouble water that it's it's different not just better than yeah i just made a note here because it's a phrase that i'm constantly throwing out into the world and it seemed yeah it's just this the originality the fingerprint of the individual being unique and taking these unique the unique lens that we all have on the world and you know our version of it is more important than a better version or something and you know that's sort of the the i like that idea a lot that particularly with art that what is crucial is your relationship to the work and not just the work's kind of objective value um which is not to say the objective value is not important it is crucially important but there has to be truly powerful art is work that connects on both those levels that has some that reaches some standard of underst of of understandable excellence at the same time touches your heart in this very specific way you know i'm reminded in and that those two components in combination are what create something that's memorable for uh you know we would have these discussions periodically with paul in the book about you know what were his favorite songs and what were our favorite songs and what's striking of course is that you know you don't everyone has a different list of favorite paul simon songs to our point that and it's not that no one would claim i'm not going to claim that my list of what my favorite paul simon songs uh is is a better list than yours it's diff it's a different list than yours these are the ones that speak to me and part of the reason i would have great pleasure in sharing that list with you is that i'm genuinely curious to find out how your list differs from mine not not resembles mine there are cases yeah where we do we do look for concordance in our lists where it's really important to know you know if i'm asking you what the best baby seat is i don't want some what the baby see you have an emotional reaction to i want to objectively i want to know which baby seat is the you know easiest to install the safest right i got yeah but art's different hearts not that and in the beauty of it is i in that case when it comes to art i genuinely want to know why your list is different than mine and why you why and and the reasons for it why did that song touch you you know and and i'd love to explain to you why this other song touched me in a way that you know that's where the conversation starts to get really wonderful speaking of wonderful conversation this has been an amazing conversation grateful for your time congratulations on another work of genius miracle and wonder you and bruce and the legendary paul simon it was uh i don't say this often it was one of the things that i didn't want to end i just i listened to a couple of things a number of times and uh thanks for setting me up with an advanced copy it was it was an absolute treat i absolutely recommend it to everybody and uh i know it's gonna be successful and congratulations on your this journey that you're on with audio it's really fascinating to watching you explore a new uh a new medium and a rigorous re-emerging medium and i know this is going to be super successful i really appreciate you for your time signing off is there anything that you want to uh champion in this particular work of yours that that we out there in the world aren't championing for you is there something that's slipping through the cracks as you're getting interviews and talking about the work all all good all good yeah i i just i mean i i hear the enthusiasm in your voice and that's enough for me awesome well signing off from south canada um i really enjoyed our conversation malcolm thanks again congratulations on the work i know it's going to be a big success and until next time i appreciate it thank you chase yeah cheers [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Chase Jarvis

Views: 80,999

Keywords: advice, artist, business, career, chase jarvis, chasejarvis, creative, creativity, entrepreneur, freelance, gladwell, gladwell malcolm, malcolm gladwell, malcom gladwell, photography, reinvention

Id: 3piJF_zlEfo

Length: 60min 46sec (3646 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 17 2021