Creative collaboration with Jon Batiste and Suleika Jaouad

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1:08The admin, the repetitive processes, the invisible load that pulls attention away from what really matters. That's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work. They actually do it. Start to finish. Cases closed. Requests handled. No extra work for you. To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. I love the idea of thinking about music as energy and as frequency. There's such an interesting cross-pollination when you collaborate with artists across different disciplines. So John, for example, will play me a list of songs and ask me how he should sequence them.

1:53and I'll say, what is the narrative arc here? And I'm thinking of it from a writer's mind. Sometimes I'll show John a draft and he'll say, the rhythm of this sentence isn't landing. And that feedback is so eye-opening and expansive and has fundamentally changed the way that I think about how to write a sentence. Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast with Ted on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people who explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

2:37Grammy-winning musician John Batiste and Emmy-winning writer Suleika Jawad have a creative partnership unlike any other I've seen. And it's not just because they're married and they've been friends since they were kids. As artists, their individual practices are in conversation with each other, and the structures and language of their mediums inform their work. Their ability to create and learn from each other has helped them through tough times, like Suleika's battle against cancer. We've talked about the notion of survival being its own kind of creative act, figuring out how to paraphrase the poet G.S.

3:12Eliot, to find a still point in the spinning world when your life feels mired in chaos. That requires creativity. Their creativity has also sparked a sense of possibility. It's so powerful to witness with what she's going through. Every day, the possibilities of that in you are just, it makes me emotional just to think about witnessing it day in, day out, day in, day out. Both John and Suleika have been on Rethinking before, but never together. So I'm delighted to share a conversation we all had on stage at the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos. We talked about creative collaboration, how the arts play a much larger role in our lives than simply entertaining us.

3:55But first, I wanted to go back to the beginning of their story as friends, partners, and each other's muses.

4:04Oh, so excited for this conversation. Welcome, John and Suleika. Hi, Adam. It's always a joy to have an Emmy winner, a Grammy winner, and me on stage. Multiple times ever, New York Times bestselling author. Which one of these is not like the others? So stop redirecting. I'm in charge here, you two. Listen, I met the two of you, I think, about a decade ago. Did not know that you knew each other, let alone loved each other. And the moment I found out that you were in love, it just made more sense than I think any relationship I'd seen in a long time. I think the audience needs to know how you met and fell in love.

4:42That's easy. Two words. Band camp. Band camp is an amazing thing. And just to let you all know, this is a veiled advertisement for bands. We met, it was the first sleepaway camp that I'd ever done in upstate New York. And I'm coming from Louisiana, so I hadn't seen snow. And I hadn't seen any of these landscapes. And these people were very different to the people in my community. And then I see this girl, and she's carrying around a huge double base that's about twice her size. And she's wearing Birkenstocks. She has a bunch of books and is trekking through the woods. Saratoga Springs and the Skidmore campus, where the camp was, is just completely submerged in woods.

5:36and I was like, whoa, where am I? Who is that? It was also John's first time ever seeing Birkenstocks, which he was very confounded by. Yep. How do you remember it? You know, John had been playing the piano for about a year or two. I think I was 13, you were 14, and it was immediately obvious to me and likely everyone else in the room that we were in the presence of Rare Genius. I also remember that you were incredibly awkward and very, very shy. So the biggest source of surprise, I think, to anyone who knew you back then is to see you gracing these stages with ease and confidence and comfort, that there's a real beauty and humility to staying in touch with the people that you know long before you arrive in rooms like this one.

6:47Well, I mean, this is relationship goals right here. Who has not wanted their partner to call them both a genius and extremely awkward in one sentence? Right there. Okay, so I want to talk about the genius of the two. you because you are both brilliant creatives. I actually love for the two of you to tell us about each other's creative process. So Suleika, what have you learned from watching John make music? John, what have you learned from watching Suleika write and make art? So to describe John as a musician or an artist is reductive. John is a polymath. He is a voracious reader. Everywhere he goes, he has two or three books.

7:31He came with me last week to chemo at 7 a.m. and he had two books, one called The Great Pianist by the New York Times music reviewer Harold Schoenberger. And then the second was The Radical King, which was a collection of edited essays put together of Martin Luther King. Not my choice of 7 a.m. hospital waiting room reading, But he is someone who is a true genius, not just musically, not just when it comes to pattern recognition, not just when it comes to being a student of history. He's also a brilliant writer. I call him a YouTube historian. Every night he becomes obsessed with a moment in history, an individual, and I'll wake up and find thousands of browser tabs open on my computer, which is evident of whatever late night fascination he has.

8:38But your intellect, your ability to work across so many different mediums and to master them is nothing short of breathtaking. Okay. So you heard it here first. Your late night YouTube binge is creatively stimulating. I love that. All right, John. Rabbit hole city. What have you learned from Suleika? Oh, my goodness. Okay, so this could be the whole panel. I can express the depth of humanity of this individual in every choice that she makes, the integrity of every choice, the purity of the intention of every choice, and how it's never forsaking the path to true north of the first intention, the pure intention of the world.

9:30It's never forsaken it for money, for fame, for any sort of accolade or trend that could come and just disrupt the signal. It's the most pure intention of anyone that I've ever seen create. And I'm talking about from legendary people who I've been in the room with and any genre of creativity. Then there's the craft. Talk about the rigor of the craft, the toil of the craft that it takes to really know exactly what you're saying, exactly what you're doing, to know your stuff to the point where you just know it cold. Somebody wake you up cold, 6 a.m. in the morning and say, break down to me the thesis of your latest worker.

10:15Can you tell me the philosophy behind why this is interconnected with that and why it led you to this direction? Yeah, well, actually, John, this is a person who has done the work. Anything you see publicly, there's been years of excavation and silent meditation and reading and research and development. And all of it's just undergirded with the deepest integrity. So I find that to be an inspiration because it's very easy if you have a gift to hone it. And I won't even say it's easy to get to a level where you're able to express something that's very original. But many of us in these rooms can do that.

10:56But to have the other piece, the humanity, I could count on a single hand.

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13:42Given the reverence that you have for each other, what is it like to critique each other's creative work? Do you wake up in the morning and say, I'm sorry, that's actually bad, Suleika? Does John miss? John, do you have to tear apart any drafts? So. Notice the awkward pause here. I love it. Tell us what you really think of each other's worst work. So John is a workshopper. He loves to collect an array of different voices and feedback. And he's able to ask questions and to pick and choose what matters to him. I'm a little bit more protective and moated around my first drafts. I show no one my work until I've taken it as far as I can.

14:31That has changed in recent years in part because of John's example. I think, you know, the challenge as an artist is to hold true to what it is that you're trying to say and to pick your first readers, to pick your first listeners wisely. And John gives me advice and feedback all the time that I don't like. What's an example? Hmm. Okay, so I have some. I think that you need to delegate more. Second, a lot more. Two versus one. I think that you can still transmit the care and the depth of the work that you're doing and do less. But the result speaks for itself. On the other hand, I love the kind of advice that Sulika gives.

15:29And I seek out advice that's very brutally honest and contrary to what I would think. Because a lot of times I'm workshopping to see what I actually believe. And a good friend of mine, he'll say that John asks a thousand people and listens to none of them. He explained that to me and I didn't know that it was like a mirror. I was like, oh, wow. But I will say that I listen most to Suleika's feedback because it's just, it comes from a place where she knows, obviously, me more than anybody, but she sees things in a way that it's not clouded by a lot of things that ultimately become superficial in the final act of creation.

16:13Okay, let's level the playing field a little here. So, John, you want Suleika to delegate more. Suleika, what's your feedback for John? What does he need to work on creatively? I want John to focus his genius more. I think the gifts of being able to master so many different genres and disciplines is that you do all of them. But I'd be really interested to know what would happen if John Batiste did one thing for an entire year. I don't think I've ever done that before You haven't And I love that this is on the record Because now you're both accountable For having to take each other's advice Okay, so I want to talk about healing You both have been major forces for healing in the world Suleika, literally, that's when you rose to prominence Writing about the early stages of your experience with cancer John, I think last night at the opening concert one of the most frequent comments was, John is healing us, in part by making us dance together.

17:24Talk to me about the power of music to heal and the power of writing to heal. So I'll give you one example that involves John. Three years ago, I had a recurrence. I went through a second bone marrow transplant, which involved multiple weeks in the hospital. And because of a surge in COVID and the infection risk, there was a period of time where John and I weren't able to be in the same room, about a week or two. And John responded to that challenge by deciding to compose lullabies and sending me a lullaby every single day that I could listen to on loop as a way of enveloping me with his presence and his love.

18:21And of course, not everyone has a spouse who can compose them lullaby. That's not fair. But what struck me about that is how, you know, everything we do requires creativity and especially survival. Figuring out how to tap into your imagination when you're confined to a hospital room or a cell to move beyond the confines of whatever your space is that you find yourself in requires creativity. And so I think that small act for me, which was not public facing, there was no goal. It wasn't part of some album project, has changed the way that I think of my own small creative acts outside of my creative work.

19:15When you asked the question, I started to recall our recent tour. We went on a tour together. This is the first time that we were on stage together last year. And we did this really, I didn't know it was possible to bring your living room on tour. The closest thing that you could. It was basically the couch from our living room, the rug, some of the lamps, even some of the decor. And then we had books. And Sulika has been journaling since she was a kid and has trunks of journals. And the show was basically reading from the journals, reading from the book. and us making music together. And that was, it felt like a creative church.

20:01The people that were in the audience were such a range of different experience, different generations, just a culmination of so many different life forces and the energy of all the people being so focused and invested in something that feels super, it's with the stakes of everything in the world today, us hanging out in our living room, it felt so consequential. It was so deep in a way that reminded me, and I'm reminded every time we get the blessing to play and perform. And as a musician, when I listen to all the musicians, my peers, and also the greats who I admire, I'm always conscious of that.

20:43But this was a different, it was a soul cleansing. Everybody brought their souls and we all cleansed our souls together. And then we walked out and it was like, wow, we can just have moments like that. That was powerful. That's to me what your question brought to mind. I don't think I've ever heard the word soul in Davos before. You know, anyone who's read something or listened to a song and felt less alone, more connected to anyone who's been moved, then you know that the arts is more than entertainment. I think our artists are often translators of history, translators of the moment, torchbearers often of the future, and they're able to synthesize the human experience, be it despair or heartbreak or great joy and success into something that doesn't just make sense, but allows for meaning to be taken in and metabolized.

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24:32Okay, I have to pick up on the journaling theme. John, you mentioned that Suleika is an obsessive journaler. Truly, truly. And of course, we know that would mean that you also have to start journaling, but you have gone farther. The two of you have a shared journal. What in the world is that? I love the idea of communication lessons and learning how to communicate, learning how to be a better communicator. And for me, I'm oftentimes trying to think of ways to build my skill in that area. With music, ultimately, we're trying to communicate. Even if it's an instrumental song, we're trying to communicate meaning making.

25:15If it's a conversation, we're trying to communicate things that oftentimes are not possible to be fully transmitted in words, but through our inflections, through the way that we're able to put our ideas together, references, we can get closer. And in relationship, we value that so much because there's so much that's on our soul. There's so much on our spirit every day. How do we figure out how to communicate that in the bustle of life? When everything is moving, the pace of things is, it's going. And there's so many significant moments. There's so many milestones. There's so many hardships. Sometimes you can be at a loss for words.

25:57And I learned from Sulika that the journal, you know, it's really a very sacred place, but it can also just be something that helps you to communicate. So we decided to start writing each other letters. Well, and I think the practice of writing letters is increasingly a lost art form. And there's benefit, especially in romantic relationships, to having a lag between what you have to say and the response. I think of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. But there's a way in which when we're in conversation, we're not always able to say what it is that we want to say. And sometimes we don't even know what it is that we want to say.

26:52And when you put pen to paper, I think there's a more direct line between the subconscious, between the unsaid, and what emerges. And so because we're millennials, we weren't actually mailing each other letters. I would write a letter to John in my journal. I'd snap a photo of it and text it to him. He would write a letter in his and text it back to me. But I think we had conversations that we never could have had on the phone or even in person. I don't think our audience knew they were getting marriage advice today, let alone that it would be to become pen pals with your partner. But I think it's time for audience questions.

27:35We can take a few. Alan Fleischman, Mike is coming to you. You guys are such a beautiful couple. Have you thought about writing a book together? I love your book. I love your music. Have you thought about taking that collection and putting it to publication? We did start toying with the idea. I don't know if it's a book or a musical, but the title came to us called Band Camp. because Bandcamp, I feel like, is such a fun playground for, yeah, so many of the joys and challenges and the glorious awkwardness of coming of age. Yeah, Bandcamp. Look out for it whenever it happens. I think that would be a dream of mine.

28:28I'm going to start with a book that I'm writing, and Sulayka will help me because I'm going to need the help and I'm excited about Bandcamp because it is what we did on the tour, the blending of the mediums. It's a cross-translation. It's a translation between mediums that I'm very interested in and I think that our relationship, it really represents very well. Hand over here. Thank you. Meena Arebi from The National. You're both incredibly talented, but all of us sometimes hit a block on creating, writing, expressing yourself. So how do you deal with it? I am someone who feels blocked more often than not.

29:12And the reason I think I've been an obsessive journaler my entire life is because it's the writing that doesn't count. It's a rare space, especially in our world today, where there is no audience, unless you have a very nosy mother who's reading your journals. Where you get to show up as your most unedited, unvarnished self. And so often when I don't know what to say, I begin by writing, I don't want to write about, and then I write into that. And inevitably, it's an indication of what I'm most curious about. I think also just refilling the well outside of whatever your discipline is, for me, is always what inspires me.

30:14Listening to music, reading poetry out loud or going to an open mic night, rereading books that influenced me as a child, all of that inevitably sparks some idea or some little igniting moment that leads me to the next thing. And John, we want to hear how you get unblocked, but because Tuleka is too modest, if you have not read her book of alchemy yet, it is the best guide to overcoming writer's block and all kinds of creative blocks that I've encountered. Highly recommend. I was literally about to give that advice. I would just say, read Tuleka's book.

30:56there's so many great, great lessons, and I would highly recommend that. John, you're a gamer. Do video games help you creatively at all? For sure. 100%. Before I left, I was sitting on the couch. We watched some films, and so like when you went to sleep, I went and put on NBA 2K. I was Steph Curry. because I love, I just love, I always would escape into a game, especially RPGs where you could become the person and live in the world through that person's eyes. That was a beautiful thing. Something about that really is connected in some way to my music making. I couldn't explain how though. All right, we have time for one more question right there.

31:43We'll do it quickly. Hi, John. I'm Vinicius. I'm Brazilian and I love, love, love my country. I love my culture. And you've been showing so much respect for Brazilian culture by bringing artists to the spotlight. And I want to ask you, nowadays I work with climate, and I would like to ask you about healing the world with sounds and words. How do you think that we're saving the world through culture? In 30 seconds or less, go. Okay, so I think about that all the time. I love the idea of thinking about music as energy and as frequency. And frequency emits intention. And it also plants the seed of intention.

32:27And that intention sprouts in your subconscious and then in your conscious mind is ideas. Ideas become things. If you look at, we know we had the birthday of the great Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights movement and the music that preceded it was the soundtrack. And also one of the things that gave it a life force in a different way that it would not have had without that energy frequency permeating every moment, every march. every bus ride, every protest. All of this is important, and we have a superpower in music when we view it as not only entertainment, but as a spiritual practice. Well done.

33:03I would call the two of you a national treasure if we were in America, but we're in Europe, you're an international treasure. Thank you both. Thank you, Adam. Thank you.

33:16Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Graham. The show is produced by TED with Cosmic Standard. Our producer is Jessica Glazer. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our engineer is Asia Pilar Simpson. Our technical director is Jacob Winnick. And our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Roxanne Hilash, Banban Chang, Julia Dickerson, Tansika Sung Manivong, and Whitney Pennington Rogers. Original music by Hans Dale Su and Alison Leighton Brown.

33:46Oh, it's fitting because John was one of our first guests on the show. Was he? Okay, I have to go back and listen. No, I think you probably have better material from John than me talking to John. But I feel like every time we talk, I learn something new and I have so much fun and I need more Suleika and John in my life. I feel the same way. Let's have a micro-retirement slash summer camp evening. I'm all in.

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