Good morning, Americans. It's Friday and how are you? Having a good day? This, this, boys and girls, is a podcast.
This is a daily grateful with me, Michael Cross, your amiable, affable host. And today I want to talk about writing and the therapeutic value of writing. You know, when you write, you know what you're doing. You want to know what you're doing when you're writing.
You wanna know? You wanna know? I'm being all excited here. I, I have to tell you, I'm going to tell you what you're doing as soon as I adjust my sound.
I've adjusted my sound. It sounds just really the bad way. I don't edit it. I just break on through to the other side.
Number one point. Number one, the therapeutic power of a brain dump. When you have something on your mind, you sit down and you write. Now, there's many ways you can do that, but I just sit down and I write.
Especially if I'm trying to figure out an idea for something. I learned, oh, gosh, from my friend Ralph of Ralph and Jan. You've heard me talk about my friends Ralph and Jan. Ralph taught me many, many, many, many years ago, 30 plus years ago, probably longer, that the best way to come up with something is to yellow pad it.
And I'm looking at my dresser right over here to the right, and there is like, I don't know, five or six yellow pads that I've grabbed at various times to brain dump with and just go over things. Now, how about writing analog versus digital? We talked about analog yesterday. Do we do analog, which is sitting down with the wonderful pen?
And you know what I need? I need a really good pen. I had a really good pen. And I don't know where it is, but I.
And I'll tell you what I really, really want. You want to know what I want? When I went to Catholic school, we used to use fountain pens. And you had to buy this one brand of fountain pen and it had an ink cartridge that came with it, and you'd put the thing in, you'd screw it in.
And fountain pens are awesome. I haven't had a fountain pen since sixth grade. And when you consider that I'm just a little tiny bit older than dirt, sixth grade was, you know, older than many of you are. But anyway, analog is writing it down or digital, you know, the tactile experience, hitting the keyboards and doing that.
How do you write? I do it both ways. I just bought a blank journal book that I'm writing into right now, and I'm doing it with the pen. And again, it would be more satisfying to me if I had a better pen.
I gotta get a better pen. But still, it's good. It's a great way to do it. Uh, it's when you hand write something, it is really linked to memory retention.
And the slower and more intentional pace that you do this at it, it kind of like inspires deep reflection. But how do we find out what is going to. You know, you want to write about? It's finding your North Star topic.
It doesn't have to be daunting. You know, I. If I'm writing about something, I will. Sometimes I don't use ChatGPT, but I might use Gemini and I will.
Or one of the. One of the large language things. And I'll ask it to make a selection of five things to talk about having to do with horticulture. Say I want to write an article about horticulture.
I just write. I write a Wednesday newsletter for the technology club I'm on. And, you know, I try to keep up with all the cool stuff in technology and I'm sitting there saying, what's cool and new with technology? So I will sometimes go in and ask AI, give me some topics.
But you know what I found out tonight? You know what I found out tonight? I'm so excited about this. I have to remember what this is.
My granddaughter's doing it. I have a sparkly granddaughter. She's seven years old. She's autistic as the day is long, but she is freaking brilliant.
She has a. She has an iPad and she does all kinds of things with this iPad. But. But she goes on Snapchat on her mother's Snapchat account and she.
There's this, oh, K Pop monster something. It's real big with all the kids now. And she will go and she'll use. She'll put the camera on her face and then she will put this filter on, which turns her into this K Pop monster, whatever it is, and she will stare at it.
I was FaceTiming. You know, I. I need to have my daughter and I FaceTime when she does this, because I want to see it. Cassandra, if you're listening, my dear, my darling, sweet, wonderful daughter, the next time Maya does this, would you kindly take a picture of the screen so I can see it?
But, you know, finding your topic, getting back to that, staying on track. I need to stay on track anyway. Writing helps me a lot. I like writing.
And I have to write the Wednesday newsletter for the technology club. That's what I was talking about. And how do I come up with topics for that? Because you need to know what's new.
So I'll go into an AI and I'll say, what's the new thing in technology? And he'll say it. And all of a sudden I'll realize, hey, I know about that. So I will sit down and I will just, you know, take the lead from there, and I will start cranking that out, and I will write it out.
And then there's. I discovered another way. A friend of mine who is really into AI and also used to be a record producer in London in the 60s. How.
Just a minute. How freaking cool is that, by the way? Record producer in London in the 1960s. I mean, holy.
He knows all these famous people. He's a. Matter of fact, he just did some work for Felix Papiardi of the Young Rascals. Remember that?
Oh, God. Anyway, he said that you can do this. I don't do this, but I'm going to try it. Well, I don't do it, and I do do it, but I like, here's what I do with this podcast.
I'm talking the podcast to you right now. I'm doing the whole thing. When I'm all done with this, wherever you listen to this podcast, you're going to find a podcast description, right? So what I do is I go onto the Internet, as my youngest son used to call it.
He's 30 now, and he used to call it, when he was young, he'd say, yeah, we should go on the Internet. He said it just like that. But I go and I find a free transcription service, and there's a ton of them out there, and there's a couple that I like. I kind of bounce back.
And I will take the audio of this and I will transcribe it, okay? And then I will look at that. It turns out to be, you know, depending on how long I ran along here. But getting a thousand words is not difficult.
You know, when you're sitting there dictating and it does that. Well, if you ever tried to read something. I tried to read something that I did. The first time I did this.
My friend Tony taught me how to do this. I read what I had talked about, you know, I read what. I read my podcast. I read the transcription of my podcast.
I was, oh, wait a minute. Talking and writing is totally freaking different. This is not good. But I do do this.
I do do this. I will take that transcription and I will stick it into an AI and there's two AIs that I like for that Claud I like. And the other one that I like is gemini.google.com and I will stick it into one of those, maybe both of those. And I will say, take this transcription and check all my punctuation and my grammar and make it, you know, polish it a little bit.
And then the podcast description that you read when you get this is usually about 120 to 130 words. Sometimes I mess with it and with Claude especially, I'll say, write me a 133 word podcast description based on this transcript and make it sarcastic. And if you're listening to this podcast, wherever you're listening to this podcast right now, I want you to read the notes that are on. If you're listening to it on Apple Podcasts, you know, the podcast description will be there.
Well, that is written by taking my words that I'm saying right now and throwing it into an AI and letting it come up with the 120, 130 but, you know, words. And I remember just goofing off on time. I said, make it 133 words in. Clyde said, Here it is.
It's exactly 133 words. I said, oh, jeez, Amazing. So that is something. So you can dictate your book.
My good friend John Palmer Claridge wrote a book about wine several years ago, and he wrote the book by dictating it into his iPad. He just opened up his iPad and he dictated into it and he would, you know, would write out a sentence and then he'd say period with the period or comma. He did all of that and he wrote a 300 page book dictating it out of his brain instead of sitting down and writing it. And I have tried to do that.
And I talk differently than I write. My writing is totally different than my sitting here talking to you, probably because I've done live radio for so many years and it's just, it's just different. It is just totally different. So I'm now finding that AI can help me refine that.
You know, somebody doesn't rewrite it for you, but it can help refine that. Now I've got a book, I've got two books that I wrote, and I'm about ready to take one of my books. I've got, you know, I've got it all in a Word document, and I'm about to stick that in Claude, and I'm going to have them go through the whole thing and edit it, which you can do which is a fun, you know, because otherwise you have to pay an editor. You know how much an editor cost.
And I've got an editor that will work for my putting her name on the COVID of my book. But I'm going to. And she's doing that. As a matter of fact, she actually has my Word file and she's going through it and doing it on her spare time.
She's an English teacher. So I said, who better to do this? And she's finding it exciting. But now I'm going to take the whole thing, I'm gonna stick it into Claude and I'm going to have not telling her I'm doing this, by the way.
I'm going to have Claude do it and I'm not gonna tell her about it, but when I get her marked up copy back, I'm going to compare it to the Claude AI edit of the thing and see how different it is and see who's better. That will be my test. And you know, that is good. So choosing topics to talk about.
When I write the Wednesday newsletter for the, for the technology, I will go into, believe it or not, Google and I'll say, please, you know, give me technology news. And you know, these technology news things will pop up and I'll just glance at them and from there I will sit down with my keyboard and I will write my version of some of the news and I also will give it credit. I will say, you know, from Tech Watch, you know, and all this and. But it's not.
I'm not doing it word for word. I'm rewriting it. You're hearing my opinion of what Tech Watch said about it. So that's good.
If you're writing fiction, which I've never done. I've never done fiction. I've always wanted to do fiction, but I've never done fiction. And I've also never done a screenwriting.
I would love to do screenwriting, but I have to have somebody teach me how to do it. I don't. Or take a class on how to do screenwriting because you're writing characters and all of that type of thing. But you know, if I was going to write fiction, I would sit here and I would stare at the screen.
You know what they call that? You know, I'm trying to think of what the hell I'm gonna write about. It's called blank page phobia. And.
And when I write something, I write mostly nonfiction, mostly technical stuff, mostly stuff about gardening, mostly stuff about business or something like that. But when I Write at something. I have the joy, you want to know the joy that I get out? It's the joy of looking at the shitty first draft.
Oh, I just said a bad word. But you know, that's. I have a joy of that. So that's one.
Another thing that I do is I have a sacred space in my house where I have two sacred spaces in my house where I'm sitting right now and I'm remodeling this space right now. I've got two very good tables in here and I'm changing everything around. But I do all of my computer writing in here and at the other desk that I'm looking at where that I'm going to move around, I'm going to start doing. When I, you know, write off my yellow pad, as they say, my handwritten or my journal writing, I will do that there.
I for some reason cannot. I know stuff. I have an old girlfriend who used to journal. If she's alive today, I'm sure she is.
She journals every day. She's always journaled every day. And she does it from her sofa or her easy chair. I have tried to do that and I can't.
I cannot sit down in a comfortable chair with a notebook in my hand and write. I can't do that. But that's her sacred space for writing, not me. I have to be at a table and I can have the yellow pad on the table and I can sit and write from that.
You don't need to do that. I'm going to tell you something that I learned from Gary Vaynerchuk and that is legacy. Legacy is more important than currency. He said that and it stuck with me.
I'm going to tell you something. Writing is legacy. And the more you write when I. When I'm dead, when I am dead and gone, all of my writing is in flash drives that are in my safe.
Oh well, there's one of them right here. Holding it in my formerly chloride stained and. But all my writing is gonna be. I have no idea if my offspring or grandchildren will ever find it and read it.
But if they do, there it is. By the way, I never write about my secret stuff. I have secret stuff that I keep it inside here. Nobody will ever find out about it.
My old girlfriend, she writes all secret stuff in her journal. So I said, when you broke, somebody's gonna read that. She said, I don't care, I'll be dead. God, I love this.
That's all about writing and I didn't even cover everything. See you tomorrow.