Thank you Conor Hilton, Madison Contardi, G Anderson, Free Will and many others for joining in on what will likely become the first episode of a brilliant and exciting new television program called “Two Mormon Jordans” with Jordan Call.
For those scant few of you who are not panting with eagerness to watch or listen to the recording of our raw and uncut live performance, I’ve cobbled this together, which we’ll call #55 of my 100 essay project, because I’m not MADE OF TIME, folks.
Writing scared
Jordan PETERSEN: We’re in the age of AI, and I suspect the more genuinely you can show up as yourself, the more value you contribute. Anonymity feels like it’s becoming less valuable than it used to be.
Jordan CALL: Well, that validates my priors, so I like it a lot.
But then — sometimes I feel dumb that it’s my name and my face on the internet, attached to all this stuff I’m writing. Is this a terrible idea? Every time I think about starting an anonymous account, I ask myself what I’d even use it for. I feel a lot of hesitance. Shyness. I don’t want to offend people, so I water down my takes, try to see all sides. It would be freeing to write totally unfiltered — but I’m not willing to leverage my personal social capital to do it. It’s like I’d want the thing to exist in the world, I just don’t want me to be the one saying it. And then I wonder — would the anonymous version just be angrier, more bitter? Is that going to be nourishing my soul, or am I just finally getting to say the thing that isn’t very nice?
PETERSEN: I’m strongly suspicious of sensitivity to other people’s feelings. I think we fall back on it — “I don’t want to hurt anyone” — and it is true; I hate hurting people’s feelings more than almost anything. But I have to question how much of that is actual moral fabric and how much is just the instinctive fear of rejection. A lot of the time, when we’re avoiding hurting someone’s feelings, what we’re really doing is protecting ourselves. That’s very hard to admit, or even see.
So I try to run everything through one question: would it be better for this thing to be said than not be said? Not how it’ll affect me, not whether people will be offended or flattered — all of that is ego. Instead, is this useful? Will it help if somebody says it? My job isn’t to make people feel good about themselves. That’s fun to do — I’ve emceed, it’s great to gas a room up, you’re all so attractive for being here. But helping someone is a different thing from making them feel good or bad.
CALL: I think people’s feelings belong in the calculus, though. People change when they feel loved or cared for. It’s the Dale Carnegie thing. It’s the missionary thing — by the end of my mission I’d figured out you do so much more by genuinely loving and serving people than by teaching them doctrine. At the start I thought, if I can just explain it right, if they can just understand what I understand. But for most people that’s so many orders of priority down from am I feeling loved here? You say a true thing, it goes out into the world, and it knocks over zero dominoes because everyone’s put off by it. That feels like a Pyrrhic victory to me.
PETERSEN: The truth you’re circling is love. To be both courageous and loving isn’t about managing people’s feelings, it’s about doing right by them, whatever that means. Whenever I write anything, I’m trying to love whoever reads it. And you can read feelings-management in someone’s work. It’s the disclaimers and the hedging. “Before I say this, I really want you to know…” etc. I don’t think that’s a sign of love. I think it’s a sign of fear. If you actually love your audience, you treat them like grownups. You say: I’m going to tell you what I believe is true, in the most loving way I can, and then I have to trust you, and accept that your feelings are not my responsibility.
CALL: So you’ve conceded anonymity is purely fear-based and cowardly?
PETERSEN: Yes, absolutely. They’re all cowards.
No, I actually think there’s still huge value in it, even if it’s diminishing. Especially in cultural conversations where there’s real risk to saying something true. If you’ve got a valuable perspective but you’re afraid you’ll get fired for sharing it, then sure, open an anonymous account and find out whether people agree with you. And I speak from enormous privilege here: I own my own business, so it’s easy for me to gab on about being courageous. There are people facing genuine cultural and economic risk for saying the wrong thing to the wrong people.
There’s no such thing as a magical career
CALL: Tell me about your job. It sounds creatively fulfilling, which is the unicorn everybody’s chasing.
PETERSEN: I’m a producer. My company’s a white-label podcast production agency. We’ll work on anything someone will pay us to do.
I went to film school for four years, got a master’s in screenwriting in Boston, and then my professional life was pure chaos before I pivoted to podcasting, mostly because I loved the intimacy of the medium. My favorite thing to do is write, and I’m constantly hunting for ways to make money doing it, which is very hard in a world absolutely full of writers and writing.
CALL: My dad’s old roommate was a head animator at Disney. Prince Naveen’s design was supposedly based partly on him, based on the fact that my dad was one of the “lady’s men” that he knew. This is deep family lore I’m dropping, by the way.
Anyway, I asked him once if working at Disney was magic, and he said no, it was just his job.
PETERSEN: There’s no such thing as a magical career. There isn’t. No matter who you are or what you do, there’s a pile of crap you have to wade through, usually every day, to get to the thing you actually want to do.
When I started this business it was a dream come true. I was my own boss, we had paying clients, it was amazing! That honeymoon lasted maybe three to six months, and then it was: how are we going to pay the bills? I’m the guy who decides whether there’s money in the company, based on whether I can land clients. It’s a terrifying responsibility. And then when you do land them, every new client is another boss, except none of them pay your health insurance, and there’s no protection from getting “fired.”
We had a client, less than a year ago, which was a disastrous relationship we couldn’t afford to leave. We poured in time and energy trying to make it work, got treated terribly, and then they dropped us anyway. Horrible feeling. That’s not something you go through with a nine-to-five. So the business is wonderful, and it sucks. Just like every job.
“I don’t think what I’m doing is wise”
CALL: How does Substack fit into all this? I’m genuinely impressed and inspired. I keep trying to figure out how to copy what you’re doing without making it obvious.
PETERSEN: I should say right off the bat: I don’t think what I’m doing is wise. Not in terms of actually being successful on Substack. Right now every scrap of my creative time is going into two projects, about to be three. I’m finishing a novel, writing an essay every day, and I’m about to bring my podcast back from a two month break. Realistically I should quit all but one of them. I don’t have the courage, because I love them all too much and I can’t kill babies.
The daily-essay thing would only be smart if I were passionately promoting every single essay, and I’m not, because I have somewhere between thirty and ninety minutes a day to write and publish. That’s it. If you do nothing to grow your audience, it probably won’t grow. That’s a lesson you should know before you get on Substack.
And the essays themselves are okay. Some of what I publish, I look at and think, this could be really great if I spent a week on it. But I’m going to spend forty minutes, and that’s that. I have a bittersweet moment every time I hit publish: I’m proud of what I made in the time I had, and I know it would be a lot better if I gave it another couple of days.
So why do it? Because I needed it, personally. I needed to get back to a daily writing habit, and the only way I was going to do that was with extreme accountability. I also needed to get a lot less precious. I need to be able to throw something away and say, yeah, great idea, and I’m done with it now. My hope is that by the end of this hundred-essay challenge, I’ll won’t have to publish every day in order to be a person who writes every day.
Yes, writing is a disease
CALL: Why do you feel you need to be someone who writes every day?
PETERSEN: I wrote a little essay called “Writing is a disease,” and I’ve believed that for a long time. I’m not healthy unless I’m writing every day. It doesn’t matter if anyone reads it, if it’s successful, if it’s any good. If I’m not writing — serious, high-effort — I sort of go crazy.
And it’s not that I want to so badly and can’t. It’s the opposite. Most of the time I don’t want to. I’d much rather watch TV or hang out with people than put in the cognitive energy it demands. I don’t want to, but I have to.
I’m 41, and I’ve been making excuses not to write for about twenty-five years — ever since high school, where I used to do it compulsively, before my ego got involved and the whole thing picked up baggage.
When I’m not writing, every other domain of my life suffers. I make stupider decisions, start insane projects and don’t finish them, all kinds of weird OCD stuff crops up. When I am writing every day, I’m at peace, and everything else benefits. So I’ve learned to think of it as a disease that needs managing.
But even if I’m writing every day, I can’t guarantee any of it is valuable to anybody. That’s not up to me. So I have to sit with the fact that ninety-nine percent of the time, the product is useless. It’s just moving rocks around. It’s practice.
CALL: It’s like the gym. I used to think gym rats saying “I’m addicted to it” were being ridiculous. How is this additive? Now I get it. I don’t love it, but I crave it as part of the fabric of my life. Writing on Substack was the same for me. It felt like digesting. Instead of ideas rattling around giving me stomachaches, I could pass them through and out the other side, and I felt better.
Choose again
CALL: I constantly go back and forth on whether I should just write all the time and not be precious (high volume, low weight, a million reps), or spend three months on one thing I think is really meaningful. Most writers seem to lean hard one way. I don’t feel like I know my own personality here yet.
PETERSEN: Part that’s because the answer is all of the above. There are no right answers.
One of the ways we torture ourselves is by thinking, I just have to figure out what’s right, when there are all kinds of potential options and not a single correct one. You pick. And then you pick again.
Have you read Hyperion? There’s a young messianic character who feels pregnant with a message she has to get out into the world, and she keeps cutting it down. It starts out as a five-hour sermon, then it’s an hour, then its a page, a paragraph, a sentence, until it’s just two words: Choose again. A little self-important, the way it’s handled, but I love it.
It reminds me of my favorite novel, East of Eden, which is my favorite novel.
CALL: Dude. East of Eden. My guy. So good.
PETERSEN: So good. And it revolves entirely around human agency. The last word in the book is timshel, “thou mayest.” You can decide, if you want to.
That’s what I come back to whenever I hit a supposed dilemma of “what’s the right thing to do?” There isn’t a right thing to do. There’s a decision to make, and you’re going to make it, and it won’t be the right decision, it’ll just be the decision. Then you move on. And then you have to decide again, over and over. That’s life.
So if you want to pump out a hundred essays, go for it. If you want to spend three months on one beautiful thing, go for it. There are pitfalls either way.
In my case, I’m publishing a lot of essays that could’ve been better with more time. But you might take three months on something and get the same number of likes on it that I get on something I wrote in 40 minutes. That’s gonna hurt. I’ve published things I poured myself into that got five likes. Okay. Cool. Thanks. Honestly, that pain is part of what pushed me to just spam the essays. Maybe one of them hits, maybe it doesn’t, but at least I stop worrying about it so much. Now something gets one like, two likes, doesn’t matter. I’m just going to write again tomorrow.
We didn’t even get to mindfulness. Next time, on Two Mormon Jordans.
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