Keep the Flow

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

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

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

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

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

You don't lose time to laziness. You lose it to a series of small, completely defensible decisions... and if you're a creative person, you feel every minute of it.Every morning I do Wordle. Then I make an espresso and watch one Colbert monologue. Totally reasonable. But then Colbert went on break, YouTube suggested Kimmel, and I noticed something genuinely interesting: three different comedians, same news story, completely different angles. Almost like research. So I started watching all three. Every day. And then I'd wonder why I never had time for my creative work.This episode is about how time disappears: not in one dramatic theft, but in a series of small, completely defensible decisions. It's also about something stranger: what happens when you actually run out of time, and what that tells you about the conditions you've convinced yourself you need.🎧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

The more experience I got as a jazz drummer, the worse my instincts became – and figuring out why changed how I think about every creative decision.There's a moment in almost every creative project where the variables multiply past what you can reasonably think through – and the harder you try to decide, the less clear it gets. I know this feeling from the bandstand: I'm a jazz drummer, and for a stretch of my 30s I lost access to the one thing I'd always been able to rely on – my improvisational instincts. I couldn't explain it, and reaching for more information made it worse. In this episode I talk about an essay by an anesthesiologist who went through the same thing, what his experience revealed about how creative intuition actually works, and the simple technique I developed to get my instincts back – one that turns out to apply far beyond drumming.🎧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

I've been reading Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anna Lembke – a book about addiction, not creativity... but I couldn't stop reading it like it was about creativity. Dopamine Nation: https://amzn.to/4tPSkCg Turns out there's a reason for that. Neuroscientist David Linden found that creative people often have low-functioning dopamine systems, meaning we feel less baseline pleasure than average. Which means the dopamine economy we're living in right now (the phones, the scroll, the endless cheap hits) is particularly hard for people like us. In this episode I get into the pain-pleasure seesaw, the marshmallow test, and the temptation nobody talks about.The only marshmallow worth waiting for is the work itself. But you have to earn it.🎧Check out my music: https://scottmclemore.bandcamp.com/🤟Join the Patreon community: https://patreon.com/scottmclemore