Eavesdropping on experts

Three recent encounters.

Recently I’ve been privy to several moments where I simultaneously thought: I don’t really know what they’re talking about running alongside, I’m totally fascinated.

This is an interesting state of mind. I’ve long been a fan of throwing myself in the deep end of an experience and seeing if I can swim my way out. In a way, that’s what I was up to with the “inappropriate books” I wrote about last month. I was a young teenager curious about the adult world and seeking out those inappropriate books gave me access to knowledge it otherwise would’ve taken me years (if ever) to acquire.

My seeking out of those books was fundamentally driven by curiosity, and once engaged, I was often confused, but never bored, and my primary impulse was to want to know more.

In this, my thinking out loud space, I wanted to try to better understand how these particular experiences were able to keep me in that happy suspension between confused and curious, and maybe enlist the collective wisdom of the group to help me better understand the phenomenon.

Example One: Rick Beato

Rick Beato is a musician and music producer with the YouTube page I probably spend more time on than any other. Beato videos are a combination of lists, song breakdowns (what makes this song great?), and interviews, all of them a demonstration of Beato’s obsession with music of all kinds. His most popular videos are on topics like “The 20 Rock Guitar Solos of All-Time,” but it’s Beato’s interviews with various artists that I find most fascinating.

Some are with well-known artists like Sting and Stewart Copeland (of The Police), Billy Corgan, and Brad Mehldau, the greatest living jazz pianist. But he also talks with session musicians most have never heard of, like the amazing young bass player Mohini Dey or the amazing old bassist, Chuck Rainey who was the driving force behind both many of Steely Dan’s and Aretha Franklin’s best known works. Beato also has an interest in the nitty-gritty of production as shown in this interview with Bill Schnee, the guy who engineered Steely Dan’s Aja.

Maybe this sounds like serious music geek stuff, and I definitely like music and even play it a little bit, but I wouldn’t say my knowledge extends too much beyond the basics. And yet, one of Beato’s recent interviews with producer/musician Butch Vig had me particularly fascinated, even though I could barely follow it in spots.

Vig is most known as the producer for the first two Smashing Pumpkins albums (Gish and Siamese Dream) as well as Nirvana’s Nevermind, perhaps the biggest and most enduring and influential rock albums of that era. Do Beato and and Vig spend time reflecting on the prickly geniuses of Billy Corgan and Kurt Cobain?

No, mostly they talk about microphones and amplifiers and mixing boards. It is the conversation of two music producers who are also musicians hashing out what it’s like to try to capture great songs and unique performances on a recording. I honestly had no idea what they were talking about, but it was awesome.

Why?

For one, all that technical talk was about music that I know and love. I’m sure at some level I’ve wondered how music like that came to be and here was a conversation about one aspect of that question, conducted at an extremely technical level.

For two, Beato and and Vig are in a true conversation. The recording equipment in the room and the fact that it winds up on a channel is incidental. It really is like we’re eavesdropping on two colleagues talking about their craft. There’s something inherently interesting to me about simply witnessing expertise to see what expertise looks like in a particular domain. It really could be any subject. In this case, it’s recording music.

Lastly, there’s a kind of awe, an appreciation for everything that must’ve come together to make these records. I would never have had access to that particular sense of awe without being privy to this conversation.

Even though I barely understood what they were talking about.

Example 2: Mind the Game Pod w/ LeBron James and JJ Redick

This is a brand new podcast hosted by former pro basketball player, JJ Redick, in which Redick and Lebron James talk basketball.

When I say they talk basketball, I’m saying they talk basketball the way that Rich Beato and Butch Vig talk microphones. They use basketball lingo, they break down the specifics of plays - the video podcast includes some helpful diagrams - they share stories and experiences from their careers, and offer perspective on how they see the game today. They also share what appears to be a rather pricy bottle of wine.

The appeal of Mind the Game is similar to the work of Rick Beato. I’m a basketball fan watching two experts talk with what is, above all, a kind of intimacy about the sport that fans are not usually privy to. There is an assumption that what is interesting to the experts will also be interesting to the layperson, and this is correct, even though I am in over my head.

There is something rather moving about the clear attachment Redick and LeBron have to the game of basketball. They refer to it as “our game” and clearly know not just the present but the past of the sport. I am a Michael Jordan guy until the day I die, but LeBron is clearly a great basketball genius, and the way he talks about the game, his depth of appreciation and knowledge is I don’t know…inspiring?

At the 17:37 mark LeBron and Redick engage in a discussion about “basketball IQ” that would apply to just about any subject you want to as they get into the intersection of natural ability, with the importance of early teaching/guidance, and then the persistence necessary to continue to progress at your craft. You could write a solid book on education that leaps off from that discussion.

Example 3: Know Your Enemy Podcast

Know Your Enemy (KYE) is a podcast co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell in which they explore the historic and socio-cultural origins of today’s conservative and right wing movements. As with the previous examples, it’s clear that these guys know their stuff. Sitman was once a young movement conservative and frequently drops in anecdotes about his personal experiences with major conservative figures, and I’m not sure if there’s a political book that Adler-Bell hasn’t read.

As with the previous examples, a significant part of the appeal is that we are listening to a conversation, in this case between two people who are clearly good friends, which is, for lack of a better word, pretty charming. Sitman and Adler-Bell throw out a topic and then go back and forth on it, sharing thoughts and insights, cracking each other up, agreeing and disagreeing and we follow along.

(These experiences have me thinking that the structured conversation is a significant improvement on the “lecture” as a pedagogical tool when it comes to presenting a body of information to an audience via direct address.)

One specific episode on the philosopher René Girard really drove home the potency of being thrown in too deep and then being allowed to eavesdrop on the experts. The episode incorporated John Ganz , proprietor of the Unpopular Front newsletter and author of the forthcoming book When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990’s.

René Girard was a Stanford philosopher who has had an enormous influence on certain portions of the contemporary right, most notably tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who was Girard’s student. I had previously read John Ganz’s multi-part series on Girard at his newsletter, and while some of the ideas penetrated, I could not say that I acquired a significant wealth of knowledge about Girard. This is no fault of Ganz’s, considering his articles were the basis for the KYE podcast episode, but there was a density of material in print that left me better informed, but not conversant.

I tend to think about myself as a good reader, able to understand even difficult texts, or puzzle through what I don’t understand, but this is a case where the podcast conversation between Sitman, Adler-Bell, and Ganz illuminated the subject in a way that brought it home where mere reading did not.

Perhaps I had been primed by my reading in the way I might be if I’d prepped for a class lecture, but really, I think there was something in the medium and presentation that got me over the hump. After the podcast, I walked away with considerable sticky knowledge about Girard and could now even tell you why he’s important to conservatives and be mostly conversant with Girard’s “mimetic theory of desire.”

All of the virtues of the other examples are present, the expertise, the conversation, the deep interest of the interlocutors, and the end result for the audience is that same appreciation. I was grateful that these folks are looking deeply at a part of the world I don’t really understand and bringing back these insights about that part of the world.

One of the ongoing meta debates on KYE is how much of the current politics of the right is part of a continuum with the movement’s past, and how much is an aberration, and the conclusions I often draw from my eavesdropping is that it is much more of a continuum than I would have thought, or than perhaps one would wish. It would be nice to think that Trump is an aberration, but in many ways he’s a figure around which various longstanding strands of conservative thought and action have coalesced around a strongman figure who is willing to be whatever those different factions want him to be, provided it gives him access to power.

In each of my examples, I see that I came to the table with a combination of (limited) knowledge, and significant interest. That raw material allowed me to be engaged in a conversation between experts that is at least in part going over my head, but which, at some level I could still appreciate.

The end result is not only additional knowledge about each of these subjects, but additional energy to keep filling in that knowledge. For example, after watching Mind The Game I started trying to pay attention to the actual plays the college teams have been running during the March Madness tournament, and also trying to pay attention to how Caitlin Clark’s high basketball IQ both elevates and frustrates her teammates (and herself).

Books are obviously great ways to engender these kinds of experiences provided we come with enough (but not too much) background knowledge and sufficient curiosity. When we are in a deep reading experience, we are literally creating a conversation between ourselves and the book that would not otherwise exist if not for the coming together of these two unique intelligences, ourselves and what the author has put into the book.

This strikes me as something like an ideal state for building knowledge in educational contexts. Unfortunately, our educational system tests for “understanding” (often at a very surface level) instead of “curiosity,” which is, IMO, one of the chief reasons why students find school alienating and boring. If we spent more energy on keeping students curious, I believe they’d ultimately catch more knowledge, though what each student caught may be different individual to individual.

Anyway, thanks for helping me think out loud. Now it’s your turn.

Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune I share my appreciation for what Tana French is up to in her new novel, The Hunter, and with how she’s exploring the boundaries of crime fiction in general. Those who recall my worries about the dogs in The Hunter should know that no dogs are killed in the novel. Also from me this week at Inside Higher Ed I explore how ChatGPT has come for academic scholarship and how our collective response should be to “do less that matters more.”

Percival Everett’s James is now available and being recognized as the masterpiece it is. A couple of related links of note: a profile of Everett by Maya Binyam at The New Yorker, an insightful review from James Yeh at New York, and my column from 2017 in which I declared Everett our greatest working novelist. 2017 people. Before James, before The Trees, before Telephone, before Erasure was made into an academy award winning film. 2017. I don’t call myself the Biblioracle for nothing.

At The Baffler, Dan Sinykin writes about “the gigification of publishing.” Is this a future of potential unleashed, or just another move to make previous secure jobs precarious?

Interesting piece at LitHub by Sarah Tomlinson on what writers can learn from adapting their own books to film and television.

Vogue has “the best books of 2024 so far.” And here I thought we weren’t all that far into 2024.

Maybe some other folks can appreciate this week’s humor from McSweeney’s, authored by Sam Carlson: “You Think Pickleball Is Bad? Try Living Next to an Eighteenth-Century Warship.”

Recommendations

1. All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West by David Gessner
2. The Red Caddy: Into the Unknown with Edward Abbey by Charles Bowden
3. Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness by Amy Irvine
4. In Search of Snow by Luis Alberto Urrea
5. Unmarked: Landscapes Along Highway 16 by Sarah de Leeuw

Joel R. - Troy, NY

For Joel, I’m going to one of my personal desert island novels, a book that isn’t known nearly as much as it should be, The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury.

1. Ready or Not by Cara Bastone
2. The Chain by Adrian McKinty
3. Razorblade Tears by SA Cosby
4. Shutter by Ramona Emerson
5. Love Theoretically by Ally Hazelwood 

Katrena L. - Appleton, WI

Interesting mix between contemporary romance and nail biting suspense/crime. Count me in with suspense: Beware the Woman by Megan Abbott.

1. Love Letters: Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West
2. The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer
3. Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov
4. One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston
5. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Elizabeth E. - Columbia, MI

For Elizabeth, I’m recommending a literary mystery with romantic letters at the heart of the action: Possession by A.S. Byatt.

If you are reading this Sunday, picture me in the final hours of revising “the stupid book” which I’m starting to think is maybe kind of smart. I’m doing my best to be in conversation with all the other intelligences I’m trying to bring to the page in order to give the audience something they can converse with in turn.

As always your indulgence of these posts that allow me to think out loud is greatly appreciated and your thoughts on being in over your head, what makes you curious, and the nature of expertise are most welcome.

See you next week,

John
The Biblioracle