What if you’re better at judging than enjoying?

I watched that finale and cried, which I wasn't expecting, and then immediately started trying to work out why. What I settled on is that the thing that turns Deborah Vance around isn't a person or a speech. It's an idea. She gets a joke, opens her little book, writes it down – and then has to sit with what that means about where she's going. I think that's the whole argument for a creative life. In here I get into Bill Frisell on always reaching, a Hannah Montana song my daughters wore out on road trips, and why playing big rooms matters less to me than a melody showing up at the piano back home.🎧Check out my music: https://scottmclemore.bandcamp.com/🤟Join the Patreon community: https://patreon.com/scottmclemore📭 The free newsletter goes deeper into ideas like these: https://ktfpod.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I bought a camera a few weeks ago, and it changed how I experience a day. I started noticing sounds, smells, the air, my stepfather's ancient dishwasher in Virginia. But the second I actually noticed that dishwasher, my brain immediately asked which one was better – his or ours. That reflex is what this episode is about. Somewhere along the way we started rating everything, and when that filter runs unchecked inside your own work it stops being taste and starts being the thing that keeps you from enjoying anything, or wanting to make anything. I have some suggestions.🎧Check out my music: https://scottmclemore.bandcamp.com/🤟Join the Patreon community: https://patreon.com/scottmclemore📭 The free newsletter goes deeper into ideas like these: https://ktfpod.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When I got my first set of drums, my parents thought I was a natural. I let them think it – it felt good.What they didn't see was the years I spent obsessed with drums before I ever sat down at a kit.This episode is about talent: why we're so drawn to the idea of it, why we quietly trust "naturals" over people who obviously worked (there's a Harvard study on exactly this that's hard to shake), and how believing my own talent cost me almost ten years of coasting.I get into Carol Dweck's fixed vs. growth mindset, the 10,000-hours idea from Anders Ericsson and Malcolm Gladwell, and the factor almost nobody names: taste.Talent, luck, and environment were handed to you. The work – and your taste – are the parts that are actually yours.🎧Check out my music: https://scottmclemore.bandcamp.com/🤟Join the Patreon community: https://patreon.com/scottmclemore📭 The free newsletter goes deeper into ideas like these: https://ktfpod.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I've been carrying around a tiny bit of panic lately. This sense that I need to get everything done before the AI robots turn up and make it all pointless. I don't think I'm alone in that. In this episode I talk about what happened when I heard the tortoise and the hare brought up on Rich Roll's podcast, and then spent an hour stuck in a line at the recycling center in Reykjavík with nothing to do but sit there. I get into why I tell my drum students to slow down, why boredom is doing more for your ideas than you think, and why I'm not convinced that sprinting after this week's new tool is the move. The threat is real. Panicking about it still isn't useful.🎧Check out my music: https://scottmclemore.bandcamp.com/🤟Join the Patreon community: https://patreon.com/scottmclemore📭 The free newsletter goes deeper into ideas like these: https://ktfpod.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I keep hearing the same fear on repeat: AI is going to hollow out creative work. I feel it too. I've got kids about to start college, and it keeps me up at night. Then I watched a talk by David Lee, the chief creative officer at Squarespace, who argues almost the opposite: that creativity is the only job left once the machines take the rest. Around the same time I heard the writer Dave Eggers on the Wild Card podcast say something I can't shake – that you're one of one, and handing your voice to a machine is a crime against yourself. This episode is me thinking out loud about where those two ideas meet, why I stopped leaning on AI to develop my scripts, and where I think it can still genuinely help.🎧Check out my music: https://scottmclemore.bandcamp.com/🤟Join the Patreon community: https://patreon.com/scottmclemore📭 The free newsletter goes deeper into ideas like these: https://ktfpod.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I just got back from my first tour in Iceland with my own band – which, after more than 20 years of living here, was long overdue. This episode is me sitting with what the tour actually taught me. Some of it was small and practical: I left all my CDs and vinyl on a stage in Blönduós and had to drive four hours round trip to get them back. Some of it was bigger – how much a group runs on trust, why the hours you spend not playing matter as much as the ones you do, and why I don't want to stop taking small creative risks, like the night I muffled my ride cymbal with a scrap of cloth and it changed the whole band. If you've been putting something off because it felt overdue, this one's for you.🎧Check out my music: https://scottmclemore.bandcamp.com/🤟Join the Patreon community: https://patreon.com/scottmclemore📭 The free newsletter goes deeper into ideas like these: https://ktfpod.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm 77 episodes in, most of them barely get seen, and I'm not sure anymore whether that's enough of a reason to keep going... so I'm just going to tell you the truth about it.I've been doing this podcast for a couple of years now, and lately I've been wrestling with a question I didn't expect to be asking out loud: is the response I'm getting enough to keep going? This many episodes in, most don't get much traction, and I thought I'd be farther along by now. So this one's different. No real lesson, no framework – just me thinking through what it means to keep making something when the numbers stay small, why I'd probably keep writing even if nobody watched, and the difference between music (which feels like it's in my DNA) and this (which I actually have to choose). I made an episode last year about doing the work for its own sake and not obsessing over whether it matters. Turns out I now need to take my own advice. If you've got thoughts on what I could be doing better, I'd really like to hear them.🎧Check out my music: https://scottmclemore.bandcamp.com/🤟Join the Patreon community: https://patreon.com/scottmclemore📭 The free newsletter goes deeper into ideas like these: https://ktfpod.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Pope wrote an encyclical about AI — and the part that hit me hardest had nothing to do with technology.📭 The free newsletter goes deeper into ideas like these: https://ktfpod.com I'm not a religious person, but when Pope Leo released his encyclical on artificial intelligence, something in it stopped me cold. He wrote about "authentic encounters" – the bonds we form with each other through listening, presence, and even wasting time together. He wasn't talking about creativity, but I couldn't stop thinking about how much he was. What we do as creative people is facilitate those encounters. We make things that connect people to each other and to themselves. That's not something an algorithm can imitate, and the Pope actually says as much – AI can mimic certain functions of intelligence, but a person's future depends on freedom and relationship, not optimization. I'm not dismissing the real dangers of the technology or the legitimate fears many of us have. But this episode is about why I think those fears, while understandable, are missing the point of what creativity actually is.🎧Check out my music: https://scottmclemore.bandcamp.com/🤟Join the Patreon community: https://patreon.com/scottmclemore📭 The free newsletter goes deeper into ideas like these: https://ktfpod.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I have a confession. I've been using AI to help make some of these episodes... not to write the music, but the show itself. A recent New York Times piece made me stop and ask what I was actually giving up. Studies show essays written without AI contained up to eight times as many new ideas as AI-assisted ones. I also came across a video by photographer Rick Bebbington making essentially the same point on the same day, which felt like a sign. This episode is my honest accounting of how it crept in, where I think the line actually is, and why I'm not giving up the idea-generation part for anything.🎧Check out my music: https://scottmclemore.bandcamp.com/🤟Join the Patreon community: https://patreon.com/scottmclemore📭 The free newsletter goes deeper into ideas like these: https://ktfpod.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After years of obsessing over the news and feeling powerless about all of it, I'm finally trying something I've never actually done.For years I was a news junky. Subscriptions to the New York Times and the Washington Post, hours of cable news, BBC on the radio in the car. I told myself it was civic duty. Eventually I realized it was just making me miserable – and I'd done basically nothing about any of the things I was obsessing over.So I cut most of it out and turned my attention to creativity instead. But a panel discussion I caught at JazzAhead in Bremen last month put a question in my head that hasn't left: what does it actually look like to use creativity for a cause you care about? In the next few weeks I'm going to try it. If you want to try it too, post what you make in the comments and I'll post mine.🎧Check out my music: https://scottmclemore.bandcamp.com/🤟Join the Patreon community: https://patreon.com/scottmclemore📭 The free newsletter goes deeper into ideas like these: https://ktfpod.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.