Re:Thinking with Adam GrantJon Batiste and Suleika Jaouad on their creative process and finding love at band camp | ReThinking
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Jon Batiste and Suleika Jaouad on creativity, healing, and love
- Batiste and Jaouad describe a cross-pollinating creative partnership where writing influences music decisions (like album sequencing) and musical thinking influences sentence-level rhythm and prose craft.
- They contrast creative feedback styles—Batiste as an expansive “workshopper” and Jaouad as protective of early drafts—while emphasizing the importance of choosing trusted first readers/listeners.
- The conversation frames art as healing: Batiste’s daily hospital lullabies and their “living room on tour” performance model music and storytelling as communal soul-cleansing rather than mere entertainment.
- They share practical tools for expression and connection, including journaling to bypass self-censorship and a shared letter-writing journal to enable deeper relationship communication.
- Batiste argues that culture can “save the world” by treating music as energy/frequency that carries intention, citing movement music (e.g., civil rights era) as a force that seeds ideas and collective action.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasCross-disciplinary feedback can upgrade craft at the sentence and song level.
Jaouad helps Batiste think in narrative arcs (e.g., sequencing an album), while Batiste sharpens her attention to rhythm and “landing” of sentences, showing how medium-specific instincts transfer productively.
Protect early drafts, but expand your feedback circle intentionally.
Jaouad keeps first drafts private until she’s taken them as far as possible, whereas Batiste gathers many perspectives; both stress that the key is selecting first listeners wisely so the core signal isn’t diluted by noise.
Use other people’s opinions to discover what you actually believe.
Batiste workshops partly to test his own convictions—seeking “brutally honest and contrary” input—then decides what aligns with the work’s true intent rather than defaulting to consensus.
Creative integrity is a competitive advantage, not a constraint.
Batiste admires Jaouad’s refusal to forsake “true north” for money, trends, or accolades, arguing that deep humanity plus rigorous craft is rarer—and more enduring—than originality alone.
Small, private creative acts can be powerful healing technologies.
Batiste composing daily lullabies during Jaouad’s hospitalization reframes creativity as a survival tool and a form of care, even when it’s not public-facing or tied to a “project.”
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesI love the idea of thinking about music as energy and as frequency.
— Jon Batiste
It's always a joy to have an Emmy winner, a Grammy winner, and me on stage.
— Adam Grant
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.
— Suleika Jaouad
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 in any genre of creativity.
— Jon Batiste
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, um, or great joy and success into something that doesn't just make sense, but allows for meaning, uh, to be taken in and, and metabolized.
— Suleika Jaouad
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
