Embracing the Muse: The Secret to Becoming a Prolific Writer (Episode 196)

Transcript

Jeff Bullas

00:00:08 - 00:01:19

Hi, everyone and welcome to The Jeff Bullas Show. Today, I have with me, Addison Wiggin. Addison is a best-selling writer, publisher and filmmaker with nearly three decades of experience in financial publishing. Addison is an American writer, publisher and filmmaker. He's been covering the financial markets, the economy and politics for three decades and there's a lot of stories in there from the .com crash to the GFC and recently the Cryptocurrency dilemma. He’s an acclaimed New York Times best-selling author. These books include The Demise of the Dollar, just released its third edition covering the dollar from its bailouts to the pandemic and beyond. He's also the co-author, with Bill Bonner, of the best-sellers, Financial Reckoning Day, Empire of Debt. He wrote The Little Book of The Shrinking Dollar in the Wiley Little Book series. He's also a writer and executive producer of the documentary I.O.U.S.A., an expose on the national debt and shortlisted for an Academy Award in 2008. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland with his family and Addison's latest project is The Wiggin Sessions, powered by The Essential Investor, in March 2020. He is filming from his homegrown studio in his basement built just before the pandemic hit. Welcome to the show, Addison, it's an absolute pleasure to have you here.

Addison Wiggin

00:01:20 - 00:01:25

Yeah, Jeff, thank you for having me. It's good to meet you and I'm happy to be here.

Jeff Bullas

00:01:26 - 00:01:56

So Addison, let's wind right back to what your interests were growing up, which I think led to where you are today. And so I noticed that some of your study areas did a masters in philosophy and so on. Where did the interest in sort of like, I suppose the big question, philosophy, writing and so on. Where did that come from as a teenager? What was of interest to you?

Addison Wiggin

00:01:57 - 00:09:51

Yeah, I've thought about that question a lot and I don't know necessarily where it came from and I've tried to answer that question myself just because I'm curious. But I do remember at an early time when I was trying to figure out what to do with my life, even as an early teenager. And I remember thinking, oh, hey, I wanna be a writer. I had no idea at the time what that would entail or why. I was just sort of enamored with the idea of being a writer. And I don't even know where I got that from. I grew up in a rural community in New Hampshire and there were writers in my community. John Irving is a famous writer that was from the area that I grew up in. He wrote one of his famous books called The Hotel New Hampshire. And he wrote another book called The Cider House Rules, which was about an orchard that my dad ran the pick your own apple program for in the summertime. So I used to go there and help out, but I had no idea what being a writer really was or anything. But I just do recall having that idea. And then as I made my way through school, I was really interested in other people's lives, people, writers and performers and stuff. I actually didn't even make it through high school. Like conventional high school. I dropped out and for a period of a couple of years, I followed the Grateful Dead, the band, the hippie band, the Grateful Dead. I was a couple of generations in, by that time, but I followed them around the country and I was just I loved the whole idea of the beat generation and the merry pranksters, Ken Kesey and his whole crew, I read all of the beat poetry and follow The Dead and tried to trace the ideas that went through their lyrics and those kinds of things. I just spent a lot of time reading and doing things that most people would think are unproductive in life. And so I decided that I had to get an education for a while. I was a ski bum and I did a bunch of different things that I learned later are what is referred to by academics as lateral learning. I had a lot of experiences and I was interested in a lot of things, but I did nothing very useful. And then when I finally decided to go to school, I read a lot of American short fiction. So I was really interested in short stories because I was interested in writing and the technique of it and how to put it together. But then I was also interested in the snapshots that the authors were capturing about American life mostly that's what I was mostly interested in. And I spent four years studying that and the only reason I have a degree in it is because I had to pick a degree at some point. I had to leave school and they're like, what do you, what's your major? And I just counted up the number of credits that I had taken. And I just happened to have more credits in American short fiction than anything else. So that's how I ended up there. But then, I realized that there was a lot more to the world than just, you know, stories about sex and drugs and partying and stuff. So I went to graduate school and I studied, I started, I went to a really great program actually, it was called, it's a program run by Saint John's College and it follows the Western Canon. It's from the Greeks until they, when I was going there, finished somewhere around the 1920s. And they, the program, was based on the actual works that make up the Western Canon and the most important ideas and books and writers of the Western tradition. And the way that the program works is that you read the books and the authors of the books are the teachers and the people that are considered, they're not professors, they're considered tutors and they're not allowed to teach in the discipline that they have their PhDs and they teach only to provide guidance to understand the text that you're reading. So I spent a couple of years reading everything from Greek philosophy to the origins of Christian religion and political philosophy, those kinds of seminal texts that lead to a lot of the ideas that we just take for granted in Western society now, I've read the original idea as it was published. And then I just gravitated naturally towards economics because as storytelling and history and religion and philosophy came together for me. It seemed the most natural place that took place on a daily basis for me at least was in the marketplaces where ideas and even the concept of money and what it means and how you take care of your family because I was becoming an adult, I got married and started having kids. Like I was trying to understand how all that fit together. So economics and even the stock market just fascinated me from that perspective. I didn't study finance or anything like that. I wasn't really interested in numbers. I was decent in math, but I didn't care about numbers and I didn't really care about, you know, molecular science or space. I was more interested in human interaction and how people talk to one another and what they do which makes up the better part of the stories that our history and that our politics and our economics are all made up of. And I just happened to be fortunate enough while I was working through that process. In my own head, I met Bill Bonner who had founded The Agora publishing, which is a financial newsletter company that focuses on many of the same ideas, the big ideas of the Western tradition and how they were impacting markets and how people can manage their money in the throes of. He started the company in the 1700s. So they were dealing with inflation, and the dollar had just been taken off the gold standard. So a lot of the things that I was already interested in just became the work that I was doing too. They agreed to pay me to do the work that I had prior, you know, I was paying tuition to learn prior to that. So, that was in the early 1900s and I, that's, I was saying to you before we even started talking today that was, this is really the only job I've ever had. The only thing I've really been interested in is trying to tell good stories about how people interact with one another and how they should interpret things like media messages that we get and how to navigate your own finances and, or start a business and make something of your own productive time in the context of all these other themes that are in our society.

Jeff Bullas

00:09:52 - 00:10:00

So, in other words, you had almost like a suitcase full of ideas and interests such as reading, obviously. You obviously sounded like a big reader, were you?

Addison Wiggin

00:10:01 - 00:11:22

Yeah, but that's actually a good way of phrasing. I hadn't thought of it that way as I was interested in a lot of different things. And it's funny that you say it that way too because when I first met my wife, I was living out of a backpack and I had my bed was a sleeping bag and now I think it was maybe 21 or something at the time. And I hadn't been in school for a number of years. And that's when I was first getting into school and trying to I realized that there was some need to have some formal education, but I had spent a while just sort of walking around and talking to people and living out of a bag. But I formulated a lot of the ideas and then I have been fortunate enough to be able to explore those ideas over a fairly successful career. I've had my ups and downs and like any career and I've had some really great times and I've also had some pretty, you know, not so great times, but mostly from my own doing, like I made good decisions and I made bad decisions. But through it all, I've been able to pursue the ideas that I'm most passionate about and I think are most useful for me to try to articulate to other people.

Jeff Bullas

00:11:23 - 00:11:36

So you tell me before we hit the record button here, was that you found a job on a job board or bulletin board at college? Is that correct?

Addison Wiggin

00:11:37 - 00:13:36

Yeah, it's funny because, I'm sure you have an equivalent story in Australia, but it's probably as old as time. But I had the actual quarters in the couch experience where I was trying to get a bus and I didn't have any money in my pocket and my wallet was empty and I had to get on this bus. So my wife and I, we weren't married at the time, but we actually went through the cushions of the couch and found enough money for me to get on a bus. And that's when I realized I really needed a job. So it wasn't good enough just to go to a school and chase ideas. I had to actually do something productive that people were willing to pay me for. So I went to the school bulletin board and I found a three by five business card and on it was an offering to become a writer for a publishing company. And I really didn't know anything about publishing or writing or the way the world works at all at the time. And I just kind of lucked out, I ended up working directly with Bill. And then there was like a team of writers that were training at the time and a couple of people that were like marketers and trying to figure out the business model. And I was right there in the heart of it without knowing anything. It was just a really good sort of trial by fire for me and that the skills and the ideas and stuff that I learned during that time I've relied on ever since, you know, it's just happenstance really because if I didn't need to get on, I can't even remember, I think I had to go get food. That's why I was looking for money to get on the bus. If I didn't do that, I wouldn't have panicked and gone and looked for a job. So, I just happened to luck out and find a good one.

Jeff Bullas

00:13:36 - 00:13:54

So you said before that you sort of had this dream of being a writer. You don't even know where that came from. And a job offer was to be a writer. So you learned on the job effectively, didn't you?

Addison Wiggin

00:13:54 - 00:16:36

Yeah. And so there's a detail that matters because it was a job to become a copywriter, which I didn't know that job category existed. And I thought copyright at the time meant something to do with, like contract law, intellectual property rights, copyright. Like I was thinking in those terms, but it was copywriter in the sense of advertising where you write a copy to sell products. And I didn't even know what that was when I applied, but it was for a publishing company and it had the word writing in it, even though it was spelled differently than I was conceiving of it. And then they just trained me how to write ad copy to begin with. That's the first thing I learned how to do is write advertising bullets. And it was a long time ago too. That's another thing that's really interesting to me thinking back is that my first day on the job they gave me a legal pad and a pencil and I was, you know, I was taught how to read. There was a group of us who were like in a little seminar and we started writing advertising bullets and that was like the very beginning with a pencil on a piece of paper. Nobody had laptops back then and that was back in the days when in a print, a publishing company would lay all the stuff you would type it in and then print it out and then cut it in little pieces of paper, lay it on a board, take a picture of it. It was like really old school publishing at the time. So I had to learn all of that, like from day one and how to incorporate pictures and express things that would attract people's attention. And the whole art of advertising is a business and a skill set all its own. And that's where I started. But I gravitate more towards the editorial side, which is more explaining economics and history and the markets and whatever the feds up to that kind of stuff. But it took a while to get there. But for a number of years I was trained and worked as an advertising sales copywriter which makes me laugh these days. But, I do think I learned some good skills even just in my own writing. I always want to make sure my headlines are snappy. My leads are good and I have good clothes and a purpose, good body to the copy. But I wanna make sure I have all these things and I learned that from writing sales copy.

Jeff Bullas

00:16:37 - 00:16:56

Yeah. Writing is a very interesting area. And obviously you had this vision of what being a writer was and that must have caught your eye on the job board or the card. So would you call yourself a dreamer? Would that be part of the persona of Addison?

Addison Wiggin

00:16:57 - 00:20:17

Yeah, I would say probably and I say that with a little bit of trepidation, I guess because I think part of me dreaming about things that I want to achieve or things that I think could be are part of the reason that I've had difficulties in my career as well. So there is a practicality to getting stuff done. There's one thing about having the idea. There's another thing of actually getting it on paper as a writer, you gotta get it down and then there's another thing of actually producing it and then having people read it, like each one of those has its own process and it doesn't do much good to dream about people reading your stuff if you can't do all the other parts, getting up to that point. But I would say that I had that kind of dream first without even knowing what the ideas were gonna be, just also a funny way to think about it too. But I do look, looking back in all the American short fiction and even my interest in history stories that relate to history, I think in all those cases, I was interested in the way that human beings interact with one another and moving forward to sales copy. And then the kind of writing that I do today, they're all sort of related to one another. They're all new modes of communication and the more sophisticated you are and the more nuanced, more style you have the easier it is to, you know, build your own niche in the marketplace. So, you know, I've trained a lot of copywriters too. I was a publisher for almost 20 years. And as a publisher, one of your roles is to find good talent and train people to do all the tasks that I've been describing. All the things that go into running a successful publishing company. One of the most important things is teaching people how to communicate well. So teaching different styles and ways that you use word choice and verbs and, you know, that’s another component to mastering writing is understanding how to communicate to other people, how to write it. You know, it doesn't shock me that some of the best sellers that we have in modern times are written by writer Stephen King's On Writing is a remarkable book and it's also a huge best seller because, you know, I don't even know how many fiction books he's written. But On Writing, I think has outpaced all the other books and it's only, you know, most of his books are like 1000 pages long, but his book, On Writing, is a couple 100 pages and it's phenomenal.

Jeff Bullas

00:20:17 - 00:20:55

Yeah, it's one of my favorite books. I discovered it about seven or eight years ago and the first 100 pages are about his story and how he became a writer. And then the next is his toolbox for writing. And one of my favorite lines is if it is, if you see an adverb kill it, he doesn't. And the other thing he talks about in editing, for example, don't edit your own words because it's like killing your own children because you've brought the words into the world. So you cannot edit your own stuff as much as you think you can, you can't.

Addison Wiggin

00:20:56 - 00:23:13

Yeah, that's one thing I always teach is that everybody needs an editor and you gotta have a fixed scan and, like, hand it over to somebody. I work closely with my oldest son right now and I feel like he is the teacher when I turn things over to him because I'm like, oh, is it good? Like I need that editor to like come in and pick out what's good and help phrase headlines and that kind of thing and everybody needs it. It's like it's just part of the process that you have to embrace it. Actually, you can't just accept it. You have to embrace it because it always makes your stuff better. Even if the comments that, yeah, this is another thing that I have learned the hard way, even if the comments that you get are wrong and you know that they're wrong, they force you to think about whatever it was that you were trying to say or whatever craft you were trying to employ if it doesn't come across, even if the editor is giving you suggestions back that are not as good as what you were thinking, it forces you to rethink it because you didn't convey your idea as well as you should have or thought you could in the first place. So the whole process of editing that's like sometimes the first draft is the easiest thing because you just get it down and it's crap and you know it's crap. You give it to somebody else, they come back with a few ideas and a lot of times what you end up with after the process of editing is way better, but also not what you set out to do in the first place. And that could be anything from a short email all the way to, I think the longest book Bill and I wrote together was 600 pages long. So everyone needs an editor and everyone needs to, like, embrace that process. Your first idea is never your best idea. Even if you think it's just that it's, that is the process that is what you do. You engage in the development of the idea and then you embrace the process that brings it out.

Jeff Bullas

00:23:14 - 00:25:07

Yeah, word wrangling is certainly a term I think about a lot. In other words, you start with this, just a noise cloud in your head. It's just this fluffy idea. You put it down on paper and then the job as a writer is basically to make sense of that complexity and distill it into simplicities. That would make sense to someone to read it and hopefully inspire them so that's for me anyway. But the other thing that we were talking about before is another person we both admire is Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey, the author of The Hero's Journey. And one of his favorite lines that we discussed before was the line or sentence, follow your bliss. Now, it seems to me while listening to your stories that you had a dream of being a writer for some strange reason and you started writing. And I love this term by Steven Spielberg. He says that what you should be doing in life will be a whisper. It will never shout. And in just listening to the story, I'm sort of detecting that possibly that the whisper was this dream of being a writer and then it became louder as you stepped into it. Is that true? Like, how does, how do you see writing? how did you find that you just fell in love with words, making sense of words, getting them out to the world? What happened, once you started the writing, where, what were your, I suppose, thoughts about being a writer. How did that develop?

Addison Wiggin

00:25:08 - 00:25:12

That's a really complex question.

Jeff Bullas

00:25:13 - 00:25:16

I wrangled that. I mangled that maybe.

Addison Wiggin

00:25:17 - 00:29:23

But I get where you're going like almost an awareness of okay, now I'm a writer. I don't think that ever happens. I guess that's why I say it's a complex question because every time, like you sit down to do anything, any piece of writing or any kind of creative process, you have like that kernel of an idea, the whisper of an idea and you have to go find it. And so then there's the process of going to find it. It might be research, it might be something you're trying to prove or it might be a or like a, not a vision, like an image that you wanna get, right? And then you like, along the way you learn the tricks and tools that you use. Like, you know, I love Hemingway's suggestion that you engage all five senses on every page. And it doesn't matter what type of writing you're doing, it could be advertising, it could be a short story, it could be a historical novel or a script for a movie. Like you should always be engaging in the senses because that's another way of all the senses of the way that we communicate together. So you have like whatever that kernel of an idea is and then you go and you try to use the tools that you've amassed over time, to get there, but you're never there. That's the thing. It's like you're never at the point where it's good. At least I have never read even most of the stuff that I've written that gets published because there was a deadline and I had to get it done and I, at some point I had to step away and say, that's enough. I'm actually putting the onus on somebody else because I'm, you know, I'm late on my deadline or I know that if I tinker with this too long, I'm thinking right now of a daily deadline. If I tinker with it too long, then we're gonna miss all the other deadlines. Like I don't ever feel like I, whatever I'm working on whatever idea I am is complete. And then as soon as it's published, I find stuff that would make it better immediately like it happens. It's kind of like that phenomenon where you buy a new car. And then like we bought, I remember this vividly, we bought a Range Rover one time and then suddenly the exact model of Range Rover was like around every corner. And I was like, what? I've never even seen these cars before. I think that's what happens. Like you're not on an idea and you're so buried in it and then you publish it and then like two minutes later, somebody else had the same idea, but it's way better. And I'm like, it happens, it seems to happen all the time. So I don't know if there's like this grand moment where I even said I'm a writer although I do recognize that I've been doing it long enough now, when people ask me what I do, instead of trying to explain what I do, I just say I'm a writer. So I don't know if that is anywhere near the idea that I had, you know, whatever, 30 years ago, 40 years ago. But, I do recognize pieces and I also think there's a huge amount of value and experience like having gone through the paces and learning from other people, studying the art and the craft of itself is important and that's not something that anyone can teach. You have to be willing and interested in doing it yourself because you don't know, nobody can tell you what is gonna be an important tool for you or an idea to follow, like you have to go and do that yourself and it's like the, I don't know what adage that is probably a proverb by now, but there's always gonna be better people than you and there's always gonna be worse people than you. So anytime I am really excited about an idea and I get it done, I always find that there are a bunch of other people that already have that idea and some do it better, some don't do it as well. And that's just part of it.

Jeff Bullas

00:29:24 - 00:30:25

You describe, you start, part of your writing is going look about just, you need to get it out there and you are never perfect with your writing. And that's, of course, that's true. But as a writer or creator, writers are creators is that you gotta get to a point where you hit the publish button. It's, and then release it into the world. That's really important. And that reminds me of the quote, I can't remember who said it, but perfection is the enemy of the good. And we really need to get our art out into the world. And there's three sorts of steps to that. Number one idea, the ideas first, creating is second. But then you've got to share it, publish it and then you've got to share it with the world because you don't know whether that idea is good, bad or ugly and it could be all of the above. So and so do you have the struggle with perfection still today?

Addison Wiggin

00:30:26 - 00:36:07

Yeah. And I, it happens in the weirdest times like, I don't know that it's happening. And I, and I have an idea that I'm trying to convey and then the deadline hits for example. And then I look back at it and I'm like, that's not what I was trying to say at all, but we already published it. So there's, like, something that I was trying to get to that I didn't achieve. So that's just annoying at that point. Like I just didn't nail it. So that's the way I would describe perfection is like you have an idea that you weren't able to achieve. But I do, I think it's important while we're talking about this is just sort of the process of getting stuff out the door. There's two things. One, I really do enjoy the crafting like you were talking about the word jumble and figuring out the right words to put it together. I entertain myself by selecting what I think are the right words. So a lot of times I'm sort of in my own world writing thinking, oh, I would like to read this. I'd like the way this is phrased. And I probably inherited some of that from Bill, who’s my writing partner for a long time. At one time, we were having lunch together. And he said, because he was a successful publisher, he's a world traveler, he's a deep thinker. He's like a lot of people he's known for a lot of things. But he, one time, he just said this one phrase that I just, I think kind of sums it up. And he's like, what people don't realize about me is that I'm really just a crafter of phrases. But in order to get to the crafting of the phrase, you have to have all these other pieces that allow you to phrase in a way that you feel well publishing. I don't know it, that sort of, that was like a weight off my shoulders. Actually, you don't have to be smart, you don't have to have the best idea because you never will, you don't have to be witty or any of those things. You just have to chase the idea that you think is most important at that time and do the best you can and then enjoy the process. So that was the first thing. Enjoying the process is really important to me because I actually entertain myself by doing it. And then when it's painful when I can't do it and I know that I have to get it done. That's when I realized I don't have the idea that I'm like doing the work for somebody else. At that point. I'm either trying to express something that I heard that I thought somebody would wanna hear or I'm trying to meet a deadline that I don't agree with or there's something else going on. If I'm not enjoying the process, then there's something broken in the process that's making it not as enjoyable. But then the other part I think you also raised, which is vital to the entire thing is the definition of a writer is that they have readers. And so you have to get it out in the world and you have to be your own best advocate. Once you get it out there, you have to know how to market yourself. You have to know how to talk to people in a way that interests them in the work that you're doing or the thought process that you have, you have to have all of those things working at the same time because everybody has a brain. We all know how to write. Not everyone knows how to write, but we all use language to communicate with each other. It's important that you understand how all the pieces fit together in order to make it a productive enterprise that people want to engage in. There's like a lot that goes into it and it's a study and it changes too. We were talking about setting up a studio in my basement. I had no interest in podcasting or anything like that until the pandemic hit. And then it was the most efficient way for me to stay in touch with the editors and the thinkers that I got inspiration from. And so I started my own thing, The Wiggan Sessions, where I just interviewed people from my own network of publishers and thinkers and then realized that a lot of the conversations we were having would be useful to other people too readers or people that didn't even know who we were, that we, if we're having this conversation and you were trying to be a writer, this would be a useful conversation to hear. But in order to do a podcast and like, figure it out, there's a whole business of the ball, like learning the camera. Like, I don't even know the camera yet. It's a 4K, I do know that. But all the details that go into actually putting up the studio. I had to learn all that stuff. So and that's just part of the communication process that we live in the era that we live in. But I think it's really important that you embrace that too. Everything changes all the time. There is no perfection. That's probably the best answer to that whole segment we've just talked about is that you might have an idea of how things are gonna go, but it never goes that way and that it, even when you nail it and you feel really good about something the environment into which you're putting your ideas and trying to crack down changes and you have to learn new skills and new ways of communicating.

Jeff Bullas

00:36:07 - 00:37:15

Yeah. I think what intrigues me is the art of communication with words. I'd love the craft of word wrangling, phrase wrangling, whatever you wanna call it. And I don't know where I heard it from but what I'm very cognizant of all the time is the job of the headline is to get people to read the first line. The job of the first line is to get people to read the second line. The job of the second line is to get people to read the third line. And, it, so that, I suppose for me it crystallizes my thinking in that will, if I, once they read that will they want to read the next line? Is it short enough? Is it enough, is it telling them something they don't know? So I don't know if you've heard of, there's a writing philosophy done by Axios, the company started only back in 2018. It's called Smart Brevity. It's a right of writing with brevity that tells people what they know right upfront. Have you come across them at all?

Addison Wiggin

00:37:16 - 00:40:14

I'm aware of them and my own consumption of stuff online. I get articles published by them sent to me frequently. I wasn't aware of what you call Smart Brevity. But that makes sense to me because we would, one of the things that we try to teach people, especially new writers that come in from an academic environment, is to get rid of adverbs like Campbell. I mean, Stephen King would suggest with an LY is immediately a suspect. Adjectives are often not necessary either. I mean that's shocking to most people. You just, you don't need, adjectives should be used strategically not as part of language otherwise it turns flowery. But we try to teach them. Yeah, cliches are awful, which I have debates about cliches all the time. I don't understand why people don't understand why you shouldn't use cliches. We can talk about that separately. But one of the rules that we try to impart on the writers that we train is that your sentences should be between eight and 11 words long. And to tell that to a new writer who thinks that they're pretty good coming out of school and try to get them to write eight to 11 words per sentence. They just don't believe it. They're like, that's impossible, it's not good writing da da da. There's all these reasons why you shouldn't do that. But, that's another reason I brought up Hemingway earlier. He's talking about engaging all the senses. He was a journalist, he started writing more stories on napkins. And brevity was his tool. He's probably the master of it, at least in American fiction. And just the audacity of trying to express, like, very complex ideas with a sparing number of words is, it's impressive to see somebody that can handle it as well as Hemingway or any of the writers, like the war journalists that you read. Not necessarily these days but from like the 1300s and 1400s, 1500s, there was like an era of American journalism where they practice that sort of terse direct pros. It's just remarkable, something I strive for but I'm not very good at.

Jeff Bullas

00:40:14 - 00:40:49

I think the other thing that I discovered along the way, I'd be interested in your thoughts is and I think Stephen King might have talked about it, don’t know if it was him or not. But the rhythm of writing, and I've experimented with it to actually use one word sentences, five word sentences, eight word sentences. But as you've talked about and mentioned is the importance of keeping it, you know, sentences short. How do you feel about, what do you think about the rhythm of writing? Is it something that you're aware of, and matters to you?

Addison Wiggin

00:40:50 - 00:44:27

Yeah, absolutely. And, you can do a lot with rhythm actually. So we're talking about sparsity of words and economy of sentences or words within sentences. I think that's really important. But you can also use block quotes and like train, what's it called? Like if a character is just thinking but not really editing themselves, you can use, you can make sentences longer and more difficult to read on purpose. Like that's the rhythm of like you can set it up and then use the opposite to your advantage. And I do think, but you're mentioning a headline should get you to the first line and then, and so on. You can also do that like paragraph by paragraph, you can do it chapter by chapter, you can do it, you can structure things so that you're engaging the reader to go along the journey with you really and the rhythm is really to do that. If it's really tense and dramatic, your sentences wanna be short and punchy and, you know, you wanna be able to express things like anxiety or anger or whatever. Those are all short and punchy. But if you want to talk about, you know, more emotional things like love or loss or things like that, you have a lot more latitude and a lot more space. Your sentences can be longer and the word choice can be way different too. I think all of those things are nuances. Like I've never been a painter other than painting houses, which I did a lot of. But like, I understand at least the philosophy of painting like brush strokes and color choice and texture on the canvas and those kinds of things. And the actual whether you use oil or watercolor or whatever, that's the way I think about writing too is that you have all these tools and they're all words, but they're, you can build in layers of texture into the writing and rhythm is part of it. It's like the musical part I wrote, I was doing a critique of one of the fed, the interest rate, they chose to pause. I think it was in mid-September. They paused their rate hikes and I did the entire thing in imagining Rock the Casbah by The Clash in my head. So each sentence I tried to make it sound, like, as if you were singing Rock the Casbah as well. Actually, you know what it was, this is kind of weird because I only noticed it afterwards. I wrote that on October 8th which was one day after Hamas attacked Israel and I wrote a piece called Rock the Casbah and I only, I looked at it like a month later and I'm like, that is weird, but something was happening on that day.

Jeff Bullas

00:44:27 - 00:45:24

The other thing that I've had some fun experimenting with is not only just rhythm in terms of just the writing, but the visual rhythm of writing in terms of almost like you end up with a single word at the end of multiple words and almost goes down cascades. So there's a visual rhythm to writing. I've played with that just for fun. Because I just, if you can make it visually interesting, I think, whereas if you look at a wall of text, you're going, oh my God. This, I, you feel like running for the hills as a reader, right? I do. But if you break it up and it's also the art of simplification, but, for me, it is experimenting with the visual rhythm of presenting a story. I've played with that a bit. Look, it ebbs and flows but that's what I sometimes do.

Addison Wiggin

00:45:25 - 00:48:37

Yeah, I do that a little bit too. And I'm aware of it because I have raised three kids through elementary and then high school writing before they head off to college. And I've just used everything that I've learned about writing to help them learn first that it is a craft and you have to study it. You're not just a good writer or a bad writer. You have to actually want to learn it and you have to figure it out. And then there's some easy tools to teach younger writers, like younger, like eight year olds, you need a five paragraph essay, you have to have a lead sentence and then you have to follow it up with your support and then the three paragraphs support the opening paragraph and then you need a conclusion like you can teach the structure. But then in all of my writing, I break all those rules all the time and I do it on purpose because of what you're talking about, like making it visually attractive. Like I don't want, like if I, one of the mediums that I write in is a daily email, I don't want you to open my email and see an entire block of text that goes below the fold on your computer screen because I want you to be engaged in what I have to say. So I'll break up paragraphs and things like that based on whatever the content is. But then how it's gonna visually appear when you open the email. And I think that's important too. That's like an aesthetic part of it. That goes beyond the words themselves. And a lot of times I didn't, I would never teach a kid writing for school to do this. But if I really want to make a point, even if it's in the middle of a paragraph, I'll just break the paragraph apart and leave that sentence on its own. So if you're like scrolling down then I know for a fact that you read at least that sentence and that's a way of guiding. And another thing too, I learned this also from writing sales copy is that you can break up paragraphs and chapters and whatever with subheads. So you can have titles, subheads, you can use quotes or pull quotes. So that you, even if you have a longer piece of text that's like 10 pages, you can read it in like three minutes because I've broken it up with the different headlines that tell the story on a flip through. That's what I imagine. It's like, you know, reading through a newspaper and you're just reading headlines and then you go back and read the fuller story for the parts that you're actually interested in. But if you flip through and look at all the headlines or subheads or pull quotes or like captions or pictures that I've put in, all of those things help tell the story to someone who's just sort of glancing.

Jeff Bullas

00:48:37 - 00:49:41

Yeah. I think technology and devices have also changed how we need to think as writers for me anyway. During the pandemic, I started writing poetry on my notes app on my iPhone. And what's really good about that for me was there's good to work with constraints because the iPhone's a certain size and you only fit a certain word across a line. So I found that writing on my phone, you've really gotta try to make that every word counts almost by that constraint and every sentence really counts because you're constrained by physicality and size of the phone. Be interested in your thoughts on that in terms of constraints for writing. So, do you and the other thing, maybe I haven't needed to look at again is if someone's ‘cause, most people are now reading on their phones.

Addison Wiggin

00:49:42 - 00:50:35

Yeah, that bothers me more than anything because I don't like to think of writing to space. So if I know that somebody's gonna be reading it on the phone, I don't want it to change the sort of the research or the depth of the idea or whatever I'm working on. I rather get that figured out first and then worry about the presentation. And so I, the constraints are, to me, they are impediments to the creative process, not necessarily helpful. So I’m trying not to use the word, they annoy me, but that's really what.

Jeff Bullas

00:50:36 - 00:51:34

I think as writers, the creative process is actually breaking the rules and rules get in the way of the creative process. Like you said, you teach your kids, this is how you do a five paragraph paper, for example. And then you go and break all the rules next time you write. So, for me listening to you and our conversation about writing is that, and it's a term we talked about before and I've mentioned already, how important and you said that at the end of every podcast session that you run, you say follow your bliss, how important is following your bliss, you believe in life. And I'd be interested in your thoughts because this is a term raised by Joseph Campbell, which was at the core of what he did. He followed his bliss no matter what. Tell me about your thoughts on following your bliss.

Addison Wiggin

00:51:35 - 00:55:20

Yeah, I think that you can't really be successful over the long term. Unless you do follow your bliss, you can have short term success. You can figure out what you wanna achieve and work towards that. But if it's not in line with whatever your bliss might be and that's why it's a tough phrase to nail down and you kind of have to embrace Campbell's entire philosophy of writing and the way he ties it into, myths and legends and the way that humans have communicated with each other culturally over time, I think it's all part of a package. But following your bliss is like a feeling like if you're following your bliss, then you're moving along the right path, which sounds mystical, but it's not really, it's like, are you doing the right thing at the right time? So if I'm following an idea that I think is important in writing and I, and it's clicking and I'm able to do some wordsmithing. I'm excited about it and I know that I'm on the right path even if it's just a short piece or if it's a longer piece, I know that I'm getting to where I wanna go. It's like athletes call it being in the zone, like, you know, when you're in the right place and doing the right stuff. And to me that's akin to following your bliss. I try to figure out what that is. It's more of a feeling than it is an intellectual concept. It's not like a reasonable thing. It's more like something they feel and I don't think you can be successful for 30 years, 40 years your life, unless you're doing that, I don't think you can be successful in any parts of your life, you know, your relationships with other people or where you live or whatever. Unless you're following that, you may not always have it. You probably won't. It's like chasing perfection. You probably won't always have it, but at least you're on the way to getting it and that's what it means to me. And that's just from reading it and thinking about it and then, like looking at my own processes, looking back on the things that worked and the things that didn't, and then trying to understand how I might make it easier in the future and that feeling of following your bliss is like a state of mind that you're in when you're doing something that, you know, you're gonna be proud of and that you want to share with people because that's part of the process. You gotta be in that zone over a long period of time. You cannot be in that zone for short periods of time. That's usually what happens when you're training, like you're an apprentice or like someone's trying to teach you something, you're doing something because you're doing it for, because you were told to do it or to achieve like when you're going for a degree, I don't know why we subject our kids to this. We make them go and get degrees from school and I did the same. But most of what you do in school is you do a bunch of series of tasks that are not related to anything that you're interested in and you're doing it just to get that degree at the end. And so you can do it for short periods of time. But most successful people just blow that stuff off and go and follow their books. They figure out what it is that they want to achieve and, and go for it.

Jeff Bullas

00:55:21 - 00:55:51

Yeah, I think you mentioned something important if you're going to do something for a long time and it's not your bliss. It's gonna be very hard to stick to because it's not something that drives or motivates you from within. And it doesn't mean the journey is gonna be easy but I think if you're gonna play the long game and you've been in the game now for 30 years of writing and publishing, you wouldn't have stuck it out unless you really loved it and you were following your bliss, would you?

Addison Wiggin

00:55:52 - 00:57:03

Well, it also has an alternative purpose too, which is when you're not, it's not fun. Like all the mistakes that I've made along the way are because I was not, I hate to keep repeating the phrase if I'm trying to describe it. That's the cardinal rule in our cardinal sin in writing is don't use the word that you're trying to describe in its definition. But if you're not following your bliss, then it doesn't work like that's all the times that I look back on when things broke or I wasn't able to achieve what I set out to do or I wasn't able to nail the concept that I wanted to write about or whatever. I can look back. It doesn't always, it's not always, oh, I'm not always aware of it when it's happening, but I can look back and like, I wasn't even close to where I should have been going and that's an example of negative bliss. The opposite of following your bliss is you're stuck in some anti bliss.

Jeff Bullas

00:57:04 - 00:58:11

Yeah. They're like anti bliss. I stumbled into writing over the age of 50 when I started the blog because I was curious and I think it's important that we as writers need to be curious and I was just curious about social media rising back in 2008. And I'm still very curious about it. Now, I'm very curious about the next generation of technology and its intersection with humanity, which is the role of AI and humans and the tension between those. And I think as creators will AI remove our creativity, will amplify our creativity. And I think there's a lot of creators, whether it would be, you know, photographers, artists, writers, filmmakers, I think there's a lot of questions being asked about the role of AI and its intersection with being what it means to be human. I'd be interested in what your thoughts are on that if you've considered that.

Addison Wiggin

00:58:13 - 01:04:23

Yeah, I mean, I have, I'm curious about the topic, so I've read a fair amount of it. I've read it, I think most of what I've read about it is the implementation of AI in the business world. Like how we use it in publishing and how the company, like all the stuff that OpenAI is going through with firing Sam Altman and then hiring him back and like, I'm interested in the intricacies of the business world. And the writers strike that was going on in Hollywood and also the actors too, the fear that is coming because it's an introduction of the new technology into a fairly defined. So I'm interested in it and I've used it myself too. A lot of times what I'll do is I'll pull up the bar or ChatGPT when I'm trying to figure out a concept that I'm not that I haven't done enough research on yet. I'll key in some questions and then see what it says. And I think it, at least on that front as far as doing research and stuff, it might be good for putting together a resume or putting together a paper for college or something like that. But there's no nuance in it and there's no, like there's no humanity in the writing that comes back to you. And I've also noticed that a lot of times I already know more than what it gives back to me. So it's sort of incomplete in that way. But that doesn't mean, I mean, it's a learning technology so that it's gonna outpace us at some point. So that's just a really long way of saying I'm interested in it. I'm trying to use it myself. But I don't really have an opinion on whether it's good or bad, but I do think just from studying history and looking at the introduction of technologies in the past, they always come with this level of fear and going all the way back to Adam Smith and the pin makers. His famous example from wealth of nations where the Luddites came in and destroyed the machines that made the pins like every new adaptation of technology to the way that we conduct our business in society comes with this level of fear because it, especially with something like AI the speed at which things change is beyond our comprehension and we don't know what it's gonna mean. Just look at what AI did in the marketplace in the year of 2023. The companies that were formed in 2019 and 2020 became trillion dollar companies. In a few short years, we used to marvel at the fact that Google or Yahoo was first, but then Google and then Facebook, they became, and Apple, they became massive companies quickly. But that was a 10 year span. And prior to that, it was, you know, automobile companies grew quickly, but it was a 50 year span. Each time new technology was introduced into the marketplace anyway, there's a level of fear that the future people thought that they could count on because their own livelihoods were based on a fixed set of ideas. Throw new technology into the mix shortcut that the economics that support those fixed sets of ideas and you get a wave of fear and yeah, I think we're going through that really quickly right now and it's usually commensurate with some kind of dislocation in the economy itself. Like us, we just experienced almost two years of pretty rampant inflation and the changes that are being brought in by AI and high frequency trading and things that are actually happening in the marketplace are outpacing our imagination to figure out what could be coming next. Which I find fascinating and I want to be able to use it. I do think there's gonna be an explosion of creativity. I'm a writer and I want AI to help me write ‘cause if I can, you know, like I imagine myself going to the library in the mid 1900s because I wanted to research, I don't know the history of DNA. I used to have to drive to the library and then go to the microfiche thing and scroll through newspapers until I found what I was looking for and it took hours and hours and hours, days even to find anything that was useful. Now, I can literally, I can, if we fast forward all the way to ChatGPT, I can key in a question about the history of DNA, find everything I need and forget about it in like 30 seconds. So I think that the explosion of creativity is gonna be amazing and I think we should embrace it. I am a little bit worried, I don't know, maybe it's because I was a Terminator fan once, but I am worried about what happens when computer systems get attached to weapon systems and we already know that people make bad decisions when we go to war in the first place. If they, if that gets out of hand. I mean, that's the end of civilization, in my opinion, that's kind of scary.

Jeff Bullas

01:04:24 - 01:04:52

That is very scary. The weaponization essentially of AI to create autonomous decision making and weapons of destruction. And I think Nobel started the Nobel Peace Prize because his technology of gunpowder or well of explosives was originally done to you know, do mining but it was turned into industrial killing with wars. So any technology is gonna cut to.

Addison Wiggin

01:04:53 - 01:05:07

I think it goes hand in hand. We're gonna see both. So we, the explosion of creativity, but we're also gonna see an explosion of destruction as well. Yeah, I mean, history tells that story over, and over again.

Jeff Bullas

01:05:08 - 01:05:22

I think that's a good segue. Let's chat about your books before we wrap it up. So the one that interests me in your books is The Demise of the Dollar. So you've become a financial writer over the decades.

Addison Wiggin

01:05:23 - 01:14:26

Yeah, this one, so this Demise of the Dollar, I'm just holding it up in case anybody's actually watching still. This is in its third edition and I actually wrote, I think the first draft was in or the first published version was in 2005. And I was curious about the relationship between the US dollar, the rest of the world currencies because I was writing about financial markets and its relationship to gold. So there's a history here of the founding of the Bretton Woods Exchange rate system which replaced the pound. The US dollar replaced the pound as the reserve currency of the world in 1944. Effectively as the result of a conference that people got together and said, okay, we're not gonna use the pound anymore. We're gonna use the dollar and the dollar itself will be backed by gold. And then anybody else who wants to use the dollar for unilateral trade between other countries like Britain and South Africa or something, they can use the dollar. But if they want to redeem it for gold, it has to go through what was then known as the gold window. They would have to exchange it through the United States. The only currency from 1944 to 1971 that was convertible into gold was the US dollar. And during that period, we had a massive explosion of prosperity that followed World War II. And the financial structure of the global economy was developed around the US dollar and it's pegged to gold up until 1971. In 1971, actually part of the reason that the dollar was convertible into gold is because at the end of World War II, the US had almost 70% of the world's gold reserves. They won the war and they got all the gold. The golden rule is if you have the gold, you make the rules. So that's how we ended up in that position. But by 1971 that a lot of other countries were looking at the books of the US government, we were going through the Johnson era, great society spending, we were fighting a war in Vietnam. And so were our allies, Australia was there with us and we were spending more money than we were taking in tax receipts and were able to raise in the bond markets. So people like France notably wanted to redeem all of its dollar reserves, the world reserve currency for gold. So they were actually the outflows of gold leading up to 1971 were eventually just gonna erode the amount of reserves the US held in gold at all. So they had to close the gold window. There's a lot more to it than that. But that's the basic story since 1971 when the Great Bretton Woods exchange rate system was taken down that the world has been on, still on a reserve currency backed by the US dollar, but the US dollar is no longer backed by gold. It's backed by the full faith and credit of the US government which created an era that we're still living in that's known as a fiat era, meaning that the value of the currency that we all use is based on government decree, the confidence that the government can pay its bills. So it's history. The book is really just a history of how that happened and then the period between because I just finished the update earlier this year. The period between 2005 and our most recent bout with inflation in 2022 and 2023 is all covered as a result of the Federal Reserve. The central bank is trying to manage the world reserve currency on a fiat basis. And it's pretty easy to understand once you sort of wrap your head around it. But there's a lot of people that read about this for the first time and they have no idea that the money that they have is in their wallet and that goes for Australian dollars or Japanese Yen or European Euros. It's all back just by government decree. It doesn't have any intrinsic value, there's nothing backing it really. And that's a shocker for a lot of people. It also allows the massive rise in debt that all of our societies incur at all levels at government, corporate and individual and family levels. We all manage debt rather than savings and investment. So it's kind of a whole story of how we got there and then what we can expect. It was interesting doing the update to it this year because between 2005 and 2015, the tense was this is going to cause inflation, inflation will happen. Like the tense of the book was all forecasting. But, as I was doing the update this year, I was changing the tense of a lot of sentences from this is going to happen to, this is what happened. So in a way that was sort of gratified because we got the story right. But then at the same time, it was like we've been talking about this for a long time and it's still shocking to a lot of people to just even make that discovery. So that's one and then the other one, this is a parallel book to it and I'll just bring it up, it's a book, it's also consistent with trying to understand fiat currency as this one is a study of booms and busts throughout history. We started this investigation during the credit, the .com bubble in 2000 and just the kind of crazy investment decisions that people were making during that time. They're investing in companies that would throw up a website and since websites were a new technology being introduced into the marketplace, nobody knew what the value of them was. So they were bidding up, one of my favorite stories that's in the book too is of corning that made fiberglass. They put a .com on the end, it became corning.com and they started selling fiber optic cable to WorldCom because they were putting cable between the United States and the US, I mean in Europe, under the Atlantic Ocean and Corning, which had been a most of their core business. I think even to this day, it was insulation for homes, just went through the roof in the stock market because people thought that they had discovered some new business plan. And they're still in business, they still make insulation. But that boom and bust era was a feature of effectively free money, fiat money going into the system and then people not knowing what the outcome was gonna be. The corollary to that is what we have experienced with the introduction of cryptocurrencies into the market. I actually deal with cryptocurrencies in both books because one, it's by many the crypto purists believe it's an antidote to a fiat system. So I deal with that in The Demise of the Dollar. But it's also subject to the throes of the boom bust cycle. We've seen Bitcoin go way up to 60,000 and down to 6000 as in a cyclical period because it's a new innovation being introduced in the market. And that's what we're gonna see with AI. AI has been on a tear in the stock market all year. We're gonna see a bust, a big bust in that coming at some point too as new technology gets introduced into these different marketplaces and you have a flood of cash sitting around waiting to be deployed. Stock prices get bid up without any real intrinsic value behind them and that goes back all the way back. I start with the tool of bubbles and come all the way forward to the crypto craze in 2018. So those are the books.

Jeff Bullas

01:14:27 - 01:15:03

That's why I brought them up. Just people be aware of them. And so let's just have a quick just before we wrap it up. You know, the timing is Thanksgiving eve in the USA. So I'm aware that you need to sit down with the family. So crypto, we've had a recovery in crypto because it's an inkling that it might end up being part of normal, you know, exchanges and so on, where do you see crypto today? And where do you think it's going?

Addison Wiggin

01:15:04 - 01:20:02

Where I see it today is what I was just describing. I think it's been the object of immense amounts of speculation. It's a really new technology. We started writing about Bitcoin in 2009. It's a decade old, really. And we've seen massive fortunes and failures in that amount of time. We were just talking today. Today is the eve of Thanksgiving and Binance, which was the second largest crypto exchange in the world. Behind FTX, both FTX and Binance got went out of business in criminal and civil charges were filed against the founders of both looks like Sam Bankman-Fried, SBF as he's known, he's probably gonna go to jail for, I don't know, I've heard up to 105 years and then the guy, CZ, from Binance just agreed to pay a $43 billion fine through his company, as long as the company could stay open and then he had to step down. So that's a feature of these booms and busts. He introduced technology, a new technology, bunch of money flows in all kinds of fraud and speculation happens. And then you have your heroes and your villains. The story repeats itself consistently throughout financial, especially modern financial history in the West. So I think that to me, at least as a writer anyway, the most interesting part of crypto up to this point is how it overlays on to the boom and bust cycle of financial history perfectly. There are a ton of good stories to write about. There are interesting characters who do really foolish things and you have, like, this kind of aura that somehow it's the currency of the future that's gonna replace all paper currencies and whatever. So there's a lot of myth and legend and characters that go along with the story, what I do think and going back to the .com bust, what we were left over with after all the fraud and speculation was dealt with in the 1998 to like the 2003 period we were left with email, which has been a vastly useful tool led to things like Zoom, which we're talking on right now. Everyone uses websites. The communication revolution was a real thing. It didn't necessarily materialize into the sort of digital utopia that everyone thought it was gonna be. But it did introduce tools that are very useful and most at least Western society and we don't, we can't function without them. I think the same thing is gonna happen with crypto. It introduced Blockchain, which is a vastly superior efficient tool for making transactions and guarding the privacy of those transactions. It's gonna make banking much more efficient which drives down the price. There's a lot of benefits that we're gonna see from just even the technology that makes cryptocurrencies possible, even if the currencies themselves don't end up being the solution to the fiat situation that we all find ourselves in. The downside is that as we're seeing with the regulation of the Binance and FTX. There's regulators all over the world that can't wait to get their hands on cryptocurrencies and they're rapidly trying to use Blockchain to develop state or central bank controlled digital currencies. Central bank, digital currencies will give, it's not only efficient for the banking system, but it's also gonna be efficient for control of the currency of any given nation. And that's one of the, that's like AI. Once that genie is out of the bottle, we don't know what government control over a currency in a digital space is gonna look like. And that makes a lot of people nervous too. So I think it's just like AI just like we were talking about AI. It's a feature that has a huge amount of potential, like cryptocurrencies and the technology behind it have a huge amount of positive potential. But there's also a dark side that we should pay attention to as well.

Jeff Bullas

01:20:03 - 01:20:52

Yeah, any new technology brings its advantages and disadvantages and in the end, we get left over with maybe the good bits and the bad bits. Social media started out as this, you know, boom and it's actually continued, but then there's also the dark side of social media as in it creates narcissism, is creating depression in our youth and anxiety and it's being used to create division amongst countries and politicians and society. So, but on the other hand, it still has distinct real advantages and opportunities. So yeah, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, doesn't it at the end of the day.

Addison Wiggin

01:20:52 - 01:24:24

I mean, that almost sounds like a lame way to end our conversation because that is true. Like there are good and bad sides to every piece of technology. And it's beholden on us the users, the end users to understand how to use it for positive ends. And I think that that's one thing that we're at least in the US. I would say that we're sadly lacking in when new technology is interesting. We went through this with .coms or just the introduction of the internet first, then social media, then cryptocurrency. And now we're gonna go through it with AI again is how poorly we educate new users to the benefits and the dangers like we do, our education system is way behind the average user with the AI. We're talking about AI, there's gonna be an explosion of creativity. Is it gonna be good or bad? That's really up to the people that are employing it. And, you know, having come from studying philosophy in the Western Canon, morality and ethics and all the things that they were talking about pre Christian philosophy and in the Greek times and even some of the Latin thinkers were worried about civic dirty and those kinds of things we seem to have lost all that. And I think it's important, it's much easier to convey those ideas online now, than ever before. But I don't know if we need, I believe we need sort of a resurgence in interest in civil society in a way that we can both support and make it more efficient because of technology. But also we should make it a, I don't know, I don't even know how, I hate the word should because it implies that I have an answer of what we would do next. But it is the natural guard rail to any of the dark side, things creeping up with new technologies. And I would say to me, those are the two most concerning things are AI like how are people gonna use it? And then also the advent of CBDCs, the Central Bank Digital Currencies. What are governments going to do? I'm sure there's plenty of central bankers that would like to have one digital currency for the entire world and be able to control it. The worst case scenario like in the dystopian sci-fi kind of aspect would be that they could use social credit scores to decide whether you get to use your money the way you want to or not. Like they think you drink too much so that you can't go to the wine store and buy a bottle of wine, that kind of thing. Or I mean, that's a pretty benign example. But there's a lot of things that they can decide they don't want you to have and I don't think the technology exists for, to tap into your buying patterns and stuff like that. But that's where the mind goes when you think of sort of a centralized control of any kind of technology like that.

Jeff Bullas

01:24:25 - 01:24:38

And that does become worrying. Yeah. So, technology is good and it's bad and it follows human behavior and amplifies it quite often.

Addison Wiggin

01:24:38 - 01:25:28

Yeah, I would say too that's why I, that's another sort of driver of the work that I have been doing and not by design, but just because it's what I'm most interested in. We have the historical trends that lead up to where we are. We've been through booms and busts. We've been through fiat cycles and currency, we've been through political cycles and divisiveness like we're seeing right now. We've seen this movie over and over again in history and so understanding history and how to apply it to events that are coming forward or even tracking trends and seeing where they're likely to go are really important. They're important for managing your own life, but also your investments and your finances and how you teach your children and all that kind of stuff.

Jeff Bullas

01:25:29 - 01:25:33

Well, hopefully we learn from history but history shows that we don't.

Addison Wiggin

01:25:34 - 01:25:37

Yeah, that's the problem.

Jeff Bullas

01:25:38 - 01:25:54

So two quick questions to wrap it up. Number one, what brings, you know, Addison bliss. If he had all the money in the world, what would Addison be doing every day that would bring him deep joy and happiness?

Addison Wiggin

01:25:55 - 01:26:34

Yeah. It sounds like a lame answer. And you did give me a chance to think about this because you asked me before we started recording, but I wouldn't really change much. I like what I do. I like reading. I like exploring ideas. I like writing about them. It's painful and it's not easy but I can't imagine doing anything else even if I had, you know, I do it for a living too. I wanna get paid. Everybody wants to get paid. But this is what I would choose to do if, even if I had all the money in the world.

Jeff Bullas

01:26:35 - 01:27:09

I have detected, I think, you speak the truth, I think you are doing what brings you bliss. And it's great to see. And you're following Joseph Campbell's strategy or suggestion, which is great. The second question before we wrap it up is the human condition is not only filled with joy and happiness, but also there's suffering and pain as we go through life. The ups and downs, what's maybe the biggest lesson you've learned from tough times?

Addison Wiggin

01:27:10 - 01:29:05

I don't know if there's an overriding answer to that. I can think of specifics. My dad died, like, my dad died when I was 24. And I wish that I spent a lot more time with him than I did. But the period of time that I didn't spend with him, I was in my teens and I didn't care what my dad had today or whatever. So, I mean, there was, like periods of loss that teach you things that you can't understand until you've been through it. I've had a couple businesses that have failed because I had the wrong idea or I didn't treat people the right way or like, whatever.There are specific reasons why different things didn't work the way I wanted them to. So I, those are painful experiences too like, I don't know, there are things that I have learned from trying to, it's like the extension of trying to get yourself out there in the world and I don't know, in a banal way, just sell your product, which is your productivity of the things that you produce that teaches you a lot about yourself and the way that you interact with other people. And then I think that another one is at least something I've learned is honesty is like, is probably paramount to any other thing when it comes to relationships with other people. And I violated that enough times where I think that that is probably one of the most important things that I would, I try to teach my kids and I try to totally up to.

Jeff Bullas

01:29:05 - 01:29:12

I think I detected a common theme through all of that answer is the importance of human relationships.

Addison Wiggin

01:29:13 - 01:29:22

Yeah. I mean, that's, it is what it is, that's what it's all about really.

Jeff Bullas

01:29:23 - 01:29:33

So Addison, thank you very much for sharing your insights, your wisdom and your life stories. I've learned a lot and it's been an absolute joy to have a conversation about writing.

Addison Wiggin

01:29:33 - 01:29:46

Thank you for having me on because I don't feel like I have to expound on any of my philosophies of the world to the Thanksgiving table anymore. Not at all.

Jeff Bullas

01:29:47 - 01:29:59

Well, have a great Thanksgiving and enjoy the time with the family and thank you very much for sharing your thoughts with me and with the world. Thank you very much.