Category: The Arts
Those new service sector jobs
Poets with Mercor, for $150 an hour. And that is just a start.
Northern Ghana travel notes
You will see termite mounds, baobab trees, and open skies.
The major city is Tamale, the third largest urban settlement in the country. The town is manageable and traffic is not intense. At night it is quiet. The “main street” is just a strip of stuff, and it feels neither like a center of town nor an “edge city” growth. Some of the nearby roads still are not paved. It is a shock to the visitor to realize that the center of town is not going to become any more “center of town-y,” no matter how much you drive around looking for the center of town.
We all liked it.
The “Red Clay” is a series of large art galleries and installations, of spectacular and unexpected quality, just on the edge of Tamale. Some of the installations reminded me of Beuys, for instance the large pile of abandoned WWII stretchers. One also sees there a Polish military plane from the 1930s, an old East German train, and a large pile with tens of thousands of glass green bottles. Some of the galleries have impressive very large paintings by James Barnor, mostly of Ghana workers building out the railroad. Goats wander the premise and scavenge for garbage. If you are an art lover, this place is definitely worth a trip.
The Larabanga mosque does not look as old as internet sources claim. I consider it somewhat overrated?
The surrounding area is 80-90 percent Muslim.
A driver explained to me that Islam in Tamale was very different from Islam in Saudi Arabia, because a) in Ghana women can drive motorbikes, and indeed have to for work, and b) in northern Ghana husbands cannot take any more than four wives.
Many more people here speak English than I was expecting. Some claim that they all speak decent English. I doubt that, but the percentage is way over half.
It all feels quite safe, and furthermore the drivers are not crazy.
Zaina Lodge has a kind of “infinity pool,” at a very modest scale, with views of the forest and sometimes of elephants drinking at the nearby water hole. It is one of the two or three best hotel views I have had.
My poll will grow in size, but so far zero out of two hotel workers use ChatGPT. One had not heard of it. High marginal returns!
What to Watch (or Not): Ballard, Perfect Days, Billy Joel
Ballard (Amazon Prime) — I liked Bosch, so I had high hopes for this spinoff. The core premise—a team of misfits solving cold cases—is solid enough but the writing is unimaginative and lazy. In one scene, Ballard is told she needs to get a confession. We expect clever interrogation tactics. Instead, she walks in and bluntly asks, “Did you shoot Yulia Kravetz?”
Maggie Q is charismatic but the writers don’t write for her. She’s exceptionally slim, for example, yet the show repeatedly asks us to believe she can physically overpower men twice her size. I have no problem with that in a superhero movie but it’s off putting in a show that pretends to be grounded and gritty. If you’re casting someone with that physique, write her as sharper, more cunning, more insightful—not as a female stand-in for macho Bosch.
Worst of all is the ending: a killer reveal that comes out of nowhere, with no foreshadowing or internal logic. The writers don’t understand the difference between a twist and a cheat. Disappointing.
Perfect Days (Hulu, Amazon) — a 2023 Wim Wenders film that won the award at Cannes for “works of artistic quality which witnesses to the power of film to reveal the mysterious depths of human beings through what concerns them, their hurts and failings as well as their hopes.” The film follows the life of Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho, who won at Cannes for best actor) as he cleans public toilets in Tokyo’s Shibuya district. You will not be surprised to learn that the movie proceeds slowly. The toilets and the cleaning are the most interesting part of the first hour! I say this not as critique–I liked Perfect Days and the toilets really are interesting–only to illustrate the kind of movie that it is.
It helps to know the following from a useful Sean Burns review:
Komorebi is a Japanese word for the dancing shadow patterns created by sunlight shining through the rustling leaves of trees. There’s no equivalent term in English, and it’s tough to imagine any American caring enough to come up with one. But every afternoon on his lunch break, Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) takes a picture of the komorebi from his favorite park bench using an old Olympus film camera. Back at his apartment, he’s got boxes and boxes of black-and-white photos of the same spot, every one of them unique. Subtle shifts of the light and swaying branches in the breeze make similar snapshots strikingly different every time. Indeed, the whole concept behind komorebi is that it can exist only in a moment, never to be repeated. “Next time is next time,” Hirayama’s fond of saying, “Now is now.”
Although I would disagree with Burns slightly because there is an English term for something related to komorebi and that is crown shyness, the phenomena where trees grow in such a way that their branches keep from touching one another creating a canopy of closeness yet also distance. Indeed, I would argue that crown shyness expresses more of what the movie is about than komorebi.
A key question that divides reviewers is whether Hirayama is happy or content. The standard interpretation is that he has found, as Davis puts it, “beauty in the routine,” stopping to smell the roses. Yes, that is one aspect, but the routine is also a narcotic for the lost. Hirayama is estranged from his family. Barkeeps like him but all his relationships are superficial. He plays a game with a “friend” he never meets—distance and disconnection are everywhere.. In two scenes he finds meaning and joy in looking after a child but in both these scenes the child’s mother quickly rips the child away. Hirayama’s work partner disappears in the second half of the film. He almost makes connections with three women but in each case, crown shyness intervenes. He takes pride in his work but is operating well below his ability. He is isolated, alone, and without someone else to share a life, he is incomplete.
There are great scenes and music in Perfect Days, including a beautiful scene in which a Japanese hostess (Sayuri Ishikawa) sings House of the Rising Sun.
Billy Joel: And So It Goes (HBO) — 52nd Street was one of my favorite albums as a youth and it was fun to revisit his career. Billy Joel’s first wife, Elizabeth Weber, was the muse for many of his early songs including Big Shot and Stiletto:
She cuts you hard, she cuts you deepShe’s got so much skillShe’s so fascinatingThat you’re still there waitingWhen she comes back for the killYou’ve been slashed in the faceYou’ve been left there to bleedYou want to run awayBut you know you’re gonna stay‘Cause she gives you what you need
She is indeed, fascinating! Wow. Even today, she comes across as formidable.
I thought a lot about genetics while watching And So It Goes. Joel’s father was a classical musician, though his only notable comment on Billy’s playing was to knock him unconscious for taking too much liberty with a piece. The father left when Billy was eight. Not much nurture. Years later, they reunite in Vienna—where Joel discovers he has a half-brother, Alexander Joel, a successful pianist and conductor.
Joel grew up poor, but his paternal grandfather had been a wealthy Jewish businessman in Germany until the Nazis forced him out. His mother, Rosalind, was also musical, but her primary inheritance may have been bipolar disorder. Joel’s mental health struggles are never explicitly named in the documentary, but the signs are everywhere: an early suicide attempt, alcoholism, repeated motorcycle and car crashes of a self-destructive nature. The emotional cycles also help explain the pattern of intense, short-lived marriages to beautiful and accomplished women—Weber, Christie Brinkley, Katie Lee, and Alexis Roderick. In his highs, he was irresistible. In his lows, unbearable. He goes to extremes.
Critics didn’t always love Joel’s music, but his catalog has become part of the American songbook. Proof of something Tyler and I often discuss, the power of simply keeping going.
Berthold and Emanuel Lasker
A fun rabbit hole! Berthold was world chess champion Emanuel Lasker’s older brother, and also his first wife was Elsa Lasker-Schüler, the avant-garde German Jewish poet and playwright.
In the 1880s (!) he developed what later was called “Fischer Random” chess, Chess960, or now “freestyle chess,” as Magnus Carlsen has dubbed it. The opening arrangement of the pieces is randomized on the back rank, to make the game more interesting and also avoid the risks of excessive opening preparation and too many draws. He was prescient in this regard, though at the time chess was very far from having exhausted the possiblities for interesting openings that were not played out.
For a while he was one of the top ten chess players in the world, and he served as mentor to his brother Emanuel. Emanuel, in due time, became world chess champion, was an avid and excellent bridge and go player, invented a variant of checkers called “Lasca,” made significant contributions to mathematics, and was known for his work in Kantian philosophy.
Of all world chess champions, he is perhaps the one whose peers failed to give him much of a serious challenge. Until of course Capablanca beat him in 1921.
Design Your Own Rug!
For my wedding anniversary, I designed and had hand-woven in Afghanistan a rug for my microbiologist wife. The rug mixes traditional Afghanistan designs with some scientific elements including Bunsen burners, test tubes, bacterial petri dishes and other elements.
I started with several AI designs, such as that shown below, to give the weavers an idea of what I was looking for. Some of the AI elements were muddled and very complex and so we developed a blueprint over a few iterations. The blueprint was very accurate to the actual rug.
I am very pleased with the final product. The wool is of high quality, deep and luxurious, and the design is exactly what I intended. My wife loves the rug and will hang it at her office. The price was very reasonable, under $1000. I also like that I employed weavers in a small village in Northern Afghanistan. The whole process took about 6 months.
You can develop your own custom rug from Afghanu Rugs. Tell them Alex sent you. Of course, they also have many beautiful traditional designs. You can even order my design should you so desire!
Why does renovating the Fed cost so much?
Here is a good WSJ piece on that question. Excerpt:
For example, members of the fine arts commission in 2020 recommended that the Fed use more marble to better match the original buildings. The Fed had initially proposed using more glass in an effort to represent the Fed’s transparency, according to the commission’s meeting minutes. The Fed amended the design to incorporate more marble.
To be clear, I am fine with an unabashedly elitist approach to designing or redesigning a central bank building, at least provided one’s domestic politics is able to sustain such a thing. I am glad for instance that the Cleveland Fed is quite a nice building, and I wish more DC architecture were of comparable quality, noting that these days we are not very good at constructing Beaux Arts buildings, and for DC modernist styles do not always fit the surroundings very well, thus creating a broader dilemma.
My excellent Conversation with Helen Castor
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Helen explore what English government could and couldn’t do in the 14th century, why landed nobles obeyed the king, why parliament chose to fund wars with France, whether England could have won the Hundred Years’ War, the constitutional precedents set by Henry IV’s deposition of Richard II, how Shakespeare’s Richard II scandalized Elizabethan audiences, Richard’s superb artistic taste versus Henry’s lack, why Chaucer suddenly becomes possible in this period, whether Richard II’s fatal trip to Ireland was like Captain Kirk beaming down to a hostile planet, how historians continue to discover new evidence about the period, how Shakespeare’s Henriad influences our historical understanding, Castor’s most successful work habits, what she finds fascinating about Asimov’s I, Robot, the subject of her next book, and more.
Here is an excerpt from the opening sequence:
COWEN: Richard II and Henry IV — they’re born in the same year, namely 1367. Just to frame it for our listeners, could you give us a sense — back then, what was it that the English government could do and what could it not do? What is the government like then?
CASTOR: I think people might be surprised at quite how much government could do in England at this point in history because England, at this point, was the most centralized state in Europe, and that has two reasons. One is the Conquest of 1066 where the Normans have come in and taken the whole place over. Then, the other key formative period is the late 12th century when Henry II is ruling an empire that stretches from the Scottish border all the way down to southwestern France.
He has to have a system of government and of law that can function when he’s not there. By the late 14th century, when Richard and Henry — my two kings in this book — appear on the scene, the king has two key functions which appear on the two sides of his seal. On one side, he sits in state wearing a crown, carrying an orb and scepter as a lawgiver and a judge. That is a key function of what he does for his people. He imposes law. He gives justice. He maintains order.
On the other side of the seal, he’s wearing armor on a warhorse with a sword unsheathed in his hand. That’s his function as a defender of the realm in an intensely practical way. He has to be a soldier, a warrior to repel attacks or, indeed, to launch attacks if that’s the best form of defense. To do that, he needs money.
For that, the institution of parliament has developed, which offers consent to taxation that he can demonstrate is in the national interest. It has also come to be a law-making forum. Wherever he needs to make new laws, he can make statute law in Parliament that therefore, in its very nature, has the consent of the representatives of the realm.
COWEN: What is it, back then, that government cannot do?
CASTOR: What a government doesn’t have in the medieval period is, it doesn’t have a monopoly of force. In other words, it doesn’t have a police force. It doesn’t have a professional police force, and it doesn’t have a standing army, or at least by the late Middle Ages, England does have a permanent garrison in Calais, which is its outpost on the northern coast of France, but that’s not a garrison that can be recalled to England with any ease.
So, enforcement is the government’s key problem. To enforce the king’s edicts, it therefore relies on a hierarchy of private power on the landed, the great landowners of the kingdom, who are wealthy because of their possession of land, but crucially, also have control over people, the men who live and work on their land. If you need to get an enforcement posse — this is medieval English language that we use when we talk of sheriffs and posses — the county posse, the power of the county.
If you need to get men out quickly, you need to tap into those local power structures. You don’t have modern communications. You don’t have modern transport. The whole hierarchy of the king’s theoretical authority has to tap into and work through the private hierarchy of landed power.
COWEN: Why do those landed nobles obey the king? They’re afraid of the future raising of an army? Or they’re handed out some other benefit? What keeps the incentives all working together to the extent they stay working together?
CASTOR: They have a very important pragmatic interest in obeying the king because the king is the keystone of the hierarchy within which they are powerful and wealthy. Of course, they want more power and more wealth for themselves and for their dynasty, but importantly, they don’t want to risk everything to acquire more if it means serious danger that they might lose what they already have.
They have every interest in maintaining the hierarchy as it already is, within which they can then . . . It’s like having a referee…
A very good episode, definitely recommended. I enjoyed all of Helen’s books, most notably the recent
My excellent Conversation with David Robertson
David is one of my very favorite conductors of classical music, especially in contemporary works but not only. He also is super-articulate and has the right stage presence to make for a great podcast guest. Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and David explore Pierre Boulez’s centenary and the emotional depths beneath his reputation for severity, whether Boulez is better understood as a surrealist or a serialist composer, the influence of non-Western music like gamelan on Boulez’s compositions, the challenge of memorizing contemporary scores, whether Boulez’s music still sounds contemporary after decades, where skeptics should start with Boulez, how conductors connect with players during a performance, the management lessons of conducting, which orchestra sections posed Robertson the greatest challenges, how he and other conductors achieve clarity of sound, what conductors should read beyond music books, what Robertson enjoys in popular music, how national audiences differ from others, how Robertson first discovered classical music, why he insists on conducting the 1911 version of Stravinsky’s Petrushka rather than the 1947 revision, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: I have some general questions about conducting. How is it you make your players feel better?
ROBERTSON: Oh, I think the music actually does that.
COWEN: But you smile at them, you occasionally wink or just encourage them, or what is it you do?
…ROBERTSON: There’s an unwritten rule in an orchestra that you don’t turn around and look at somebody, even if they’ve played something great. I think that part of our job is to show the rest of the players, gee, how great that was. Part of the flexibility comes from if, let’s say, the oboe player has the reed from God tonight, that if they want to stay on the high note a little bit longer, or the soprano at the Metropolitan Opera, that you just say, “Yes, let’s do this. This is one of these magical moments of humanity, and we are lucky to be a part of it.”
COWEN: When do the players look at you?
ROBERTSON: Oh, that’s a fabulous question. I’ll now have to go public with this. The funny thing is, every single individual in an orchestra looks up at a different time. It’s totally personal. There are some people who look up a whole bar before, and then they put their eyes down, and they don’t want any more eye contact. There are other people who look as though they’re not looking up, but you can see that they’re paying attention to you before they go back into their own world. And there are people who look up right before they’re going to play.
One of the challenges for a conductor is, as quickly as possible with a group you don’t know, to try and actually memorize when everybody looks up because I always say, this is like the paper boy or the paper girl. If you’re on your route, and you have your papers in your bicycle satchel, and you throw it at the window, and the window is closed, you’ll probably have to pay for the pane of glass.
Whereas if the window goes up, which is the equivalency of someone looking up to get information, that’s the moment where you can send the information through with your hands or your face or your gestures, that you’re saying, “Maybe try it this way.” They pick that information up and then use it.
But the thing that no one will tell you, and that the players themselves don’t often realize, is that instinctively, and I think subconsciously, almost every player looks up after they’ve finished playing something. I think it’s tojust check in to see, “Am I in the right place?”
Recommended.
What should I ask Seamus Murphy?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. An associate of his emails me this excellent description of his work:
Spent over two decades photographing in Afghanistan (12 trips between 1994–2007). Has been back since the fall of the U.S. side.
- Collaborated with P.J. Harvey on her album Let England Shake— they travelled together through Kosovo, Afghanistan, and the U.S. while she wrote songs and he filmed/photographed. This lead to P.J.’s album, and Seamus’s documentary ‘A Dog Called Money’
- Made a film on recently deceased Irish poet Pat Ingoldsby. Pat was a well known Dublin character, a former TV presenter who sold his poetry on the streets of Dublin outside Trinity college for decades.
- Published several books, including:
- A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan
- I Am the Beggar of the World (with Afghan women’s Landay poetry)
- The Hollow of the Hand (with P.J. Harvey)
- The Republic (on Ireland pre-2016 centenary)
- Won 7 work press photo awards, and has photos held in the Getty Museum and Imperial War Museum
- More recently Seamus has published Strange Love which is a photography book on visual parallels between the U.S. and Russia.
- Seamus also semi lives in India now and has photo collections on modernising/not-modernising India (https://www.seamusmurphy.com/Epic-City/2)
TC again: So what should I ask him?
p.s. Here is Murphy’s home page.
Are cultural products getting longer?
Ted Gioia argues that cultural products are getting longer:
Some video creators have already figured this out. That’s why the number of videos longer than 20 minutes uploaded on YouTube grew from 1.3 million to 8.5 million in just two years…
Songs are also getting longer. The top ten hits on Billboard actually increased twenty seconds in duration last year. Five top ten hits ran for more than five minutes…
I’ve charted the duration of [Taylor] Swift’s studio albums over the last two decades, and it tells the same story. She has gradually learned that her audience prefers longer musical experiences…
I calculated the average length of the current fiction bestsellers, and they are longer than in any of the previous measurement periods.
Movies are getting longer too. Of course this is the exact opposite of what the “smart phones are ruining our brains” theorists have been telling us. I think I would sooner say that the variance of our attention spans is going up? In any case, here is part of Ted’s theory:
- The dopamine boosts from endlessly scrolling short videos eventually produce anhedonia—the complete absence of enjoyment in an experience supposedly pursued for pleasure. (I write about that here.) So even addicts grow dissatisfied with their addiction.
- More and more people are now rebelling against these manipulative digital interfaces. A sizable portion of the population simply refuses to become addicts. This has always been true with booze and drugs, and it’s now true with digital entertainment.
- Short form clickbait gets digested easily, and spreads quickly. But this doesn’t generate longterm loyalty. Short form is like a meme—spreading easily and then disappearing. Whereas long immersive experiences reach deeper into the hearts and souls of the audience. This creates a much stronger bond than any 15-second video or melody will ever match.
An important piece and useful corrective.
Rasheed Griffith on the economics and aesthetics of Asunción
Yet, on my first visit to Asunción last week none of that was on my mind. What was striking was the total absence of any aesthetic coherence of the city.
There are some economic reasons for this:
Going back to the middle class consumption point. If only around 300,000 Paraguayans make up the domestic personal income tax base then it’s perhaps not a local middle class that is buying and renting the new modern high rise apartments in Asunción.
Indeed, 70% of the new housing supply are acquired by foreign investors as a capital preservation strategy. They are not bought by locals. These are often investors from Argentina, who according to some data account for 70% of all foreign investors. They buy the apartments and then rent them out? But to who?
Usually foreigners who go to Paraguay for work purposes or new residents who take advantage of Paraguay’s quick and easy residency scheme and citizenship program. And the fun part is that these rental contracts are usually in dollars! Not the local currency (the Guaraní, PYG). Of course, Argentines buy property in Paraguay and prefer to receive dollars in rent.
The entire post is excellent There is also this:
There is a lot more that I could say about Paraguay. Like how the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) resulted in the death of 70% of adult men in Paraguay; giving the country the highest male-mortality proportion ever reliably documented for a nation-state in modern warfare.
I have yet to visit Paraguay, but someday hope to. But should this post induce me to accelerate or delay my timetable?
Chantilly destination achieved, the Limbourg brothers are amazing
Commissioned by the Duc de Berry, the enormously wealthy brother of King Charles V of France, this exquisite Book of Hours was begun by the Limbourg brothers, a trio of Netherlandish miniature painters, in around 1411. The Duc and the Limbourgs died in 1416. The manuscript was completed by other wealthy patrons and talented artists 70 years later and contains 131 full-page illuminations. Now, in a vanishingly rare opportunity, the general public has been invited to step into this world.
Until October, visitors to a special exhibition at the Condé Museum in the Château de Chantilly, 55km north of Paris, will be able to view as independent works the 12 monthly calendar pages of the Très Riches Heures, on which much of the fame of this 15th-century prayer book rests. Its importance and influence are contextualised by an exceptional display of some 100 medieval manuscripts, sculptures and paintings loaned from museums and libraries around the world.
…as the renowned scholar Christopher de Hamel, author of the 2016 book, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, explains, the Très Riches Heures are so much more than a luxury object. “The staggering originality of the design and composition is overwhelming,” he says. “The full-page calendar miniatures were the first ever made. It marks the very first moment when the Renaissance touched northern Europe.
Here is the full story. This is very likely the best and most important artistic exhibit in the world right now. It is only the third time (ever) the pages of the book have been on display for the public. In the exhibit more broadly, it is remarkable how many of the best works were created in the first decade of the fifteenth century.
All three of the brothers died before the age of thirty, possibly because of the plague.
Chantilly is about an hour north of Paris, and it is a pleasant but fairly extreme town. Think of it as a French version of Middleburg, VA? Or perhaps parts of Sonoma? It is their version of horse country, with non-spicy food to boot. The accompanying castle, by the way, also is interesting and has some wonderful art works, including by Poussin, Watteau, and Greuze. The decor and trappings give you a sense of what eighteenth century French Enlightenment nobles might have considered to be beautiful.
A major goal of this trip has been to get a better handle on the Western European medieval world, and visiting this exhibit has been a big and very successful part of that.
Reims and Amiens
Both cities have significant war histories, but they are very different to visit, even though they are only two hours apart by car.
Reims was largely destroyed in World War I, and so the central core was rebuilt in the 1920s, with a partial Art Deco look. The downtown is attractive and prosperous, the people look sharp and happy, and it is a university town. You arrive and feel the place is a wonderful success. If you had to live in a mid-sized French city, you might choose this one.
The main cathedral is one of the best in France, and arguably in the world. The lesser-known basilica also is top tier. There are scattered Roman ruins. French kings were coronated in Reims from early on, all the way up through 1825.
Amiens is on the Somme, and the 1916 Battle of the Somme, followed by a later 1918 offensive, was a turning point in WWI history. The town is a melange of architectural styles, with many half-timbered homes but also scattered works from different centuries. The town also has France’s “first skyscraper,” renowned in its time but now a rather short and out of place embarrassment. The main Amiens cathedral, however, is perhaps the best in all of France.
The town itself feels like visiting a banlieu, with large numbers of African and Muslim immigrants. It is lively, and it feels as if a revitalization is underway, though I do understand opinions on these matters differ. Real estate prices are at about 3x their 1990s levels. That to me is strong evidence that things are going well.
Restaurant Momos Tibetian has excellent Chinese and Tibetan food. The Picardy museum has some very good works by Boucher, Balthus, Picabia, El Greco, and Chavannes.
Both cities are radically undervisisted. They do attract some tourists, but for the most part you feel you have them to yourself.
Bordeaux observations
The central core is one of the most consistent eighteenth century cities you will find in Europe. Until the visit, my first there, I had not realized how much of the town’s growth came during that time, in part because of some special trade privileges, and in part because of the slave trade. Here is some 18th century economic history of Bordeaux. The central plazas and radiating streets are splendid, as is the large Girondins monument nearby.
The main museum is subpar, with some good Redons (he is from there), and the main church is pretty good but excelled by other locales. In this sense there is not much to do in Bordeaux. There is, however, some good modern and also brutalist architecture near and across the main river bank. Check out this bridge. I enjoyed these creations, as they injected some element of surprise into my visit.
You can still get an excellent meal at the nearby country chateaus, but if you just stop for normal French food in the town it is pretty mediocre, not better than say WDC. The classic French food traditions are moving more and more into corners of the country, and away from everyday life.
Typically I am surprised by how normal France feels. People want to say “The French this, the French that…” but to me they are fairly Americanized, often speak good English, and have few truly unique cultural habits these days. They also seem reasonably well adjusted, normal mostly in the good sense, and thus of course somewhat boring too.
Walking and driving through the less salubrious parts of town is a useful corrective, but I do not feel the place is falling apart. And the best estimates are that six to nine percent of the city is Muslim, hardly an overwhelming number.
I learned just before leaving that Kevin Bryan was in town too, here are his observations. Bordeaux is certainly worth visiting, but I also am not surprised it is the last major French city I have been to in my life.
More from YouTuber Any Austin
COWEN: Next question. Speaking honestly, what makes you a great YouTuber?
AUSTIN: Speaking honestly, all right.
COWEN: We know you work hard. We know you’re smart, yes, yes, but what’s the secret sauce?
AUSTIN: Well, I don’t think I should know that. I think, honestly, the less I know about . . . I think all I should have in my head is, “This video that I’m making right now is going to be the best video I could possibly make.” And that’s all I should think. The less I understand about my own inner machinations, the better because, number one, I’m going to get it wrong. You see this all the time with artists who learn what their thing is, and they just fly off a cliff.
COWEN: They become much worse, right?
AUSTIN: They become so much worse.
COWEN: Parodies of themselves.
AUSTIN: Exactly. The less you know about how you do what you do, the better. I might, for my own self-protection, refuse to answer this question.
Again, here is the video, audio, and transcript.