Ted Gioia's Advice on Writing: Distraction, Deep Reading, and Why Culture Is Declining

Ted Gioia is a music historian, cultural critic, and author of twelve books including The History of Jazz and How to Listen to Jazz. His Substack, The Honest Broker, has over 500,000 subscribers. His 2024 essay "The State of the Culture" went mega-viral for diagnosing what he calls dopamine culture: a shift from art to entertainment to pure distraction. He has been reading the classics every day for roughly 50 years.

He did not game algorithms or chase trends. He read deeply, wrote honestly, and waited decades for the audience to find him.

Here are the key principles from his conversation on the How I Write podcast, his own Substack essays, and external sources.

1. Be the Honest Broker

The name of Gioia's newsletter comes from a drunk Australian he met in a hotel bar in China. Gioia was doing business consulting overseas, and every contact gave him contradictory advice. The Australian told him: "You need to find the honest broker. He's the person in the community that everybody trusts."

Gioia applied this to writing. Critics suck up to artists for backstage access. Journalists write what editors want. Academics write for tenure. Newsletters write for clicks. Gioia decided to strip all of that away and serve only the reader.

He tests every piece against three questions: Is this fair? Is this accurate? Will this be persuasive to all fair-minded observers?

As he told Perell: "There's a crisis of trust out there. Nobody trusts the media. Nobody trusts the experts." Every editor who told him to dumb it down is now out of a job. The periodicals they worked for have disappeared.

In a Substack essay on honest writing, Gioia puts it bluntly: "If you pursue it with total bravery, it will break down every obstacle in your way. Your writing will be stronger. Your thinking will be stronger. You will be stronger."

2. Spend More Time on Input Than Output

Gioia's single most emphatic piece of advice: read more than you write. He spends more time per day on input than output.

"I could not write at the level I do if I didn't have a constant intake of new ideas and new perspectives. This is why I don't start writing till I have read a big chunk every day. Because the reading is like fuel in the tank."

He reads books, articles, philosophy, financial analysis, poetry. He reads across disciplines to find connections nobody in his field would find. He studied George Soros's currency models and applied them to cultural trends. He learned from Rene Girard's mimetic theory and used it to explain how social media works.

When Gioia reads Hegel and finds a passage about heterogeneity in ancient Greek culture, he puts the book down, walks to his computer, writes a few paragraphs connecting it to his own thinking, saves the file, and goes back to reading.

"There is no field in which your input doesn't help your output. If I was a cook working in the diner, the more I learn about food the stronger I am."

3. Become an Expert in Something Beyond Writing

Gioia holds a degree in economics from Oxford and an MBA from Stanford. He worked in Silicon Valley consulting before becoming a full-time music writer. Those credentials sound unrelated to music criticism. They are the foundation of it.

When he studied the origins of the blues, analytical techniques from his business career helped him see that the blues was not an innovation but the retention of an old tradition preserved in isolated rural areas. No other music writer would have approached the question that way.

He told a classroom of aspiring writers: "If you want to be a writer, you must also become an expert in something. Find one or two areas in which you know more than the other writers. That will give you perspectives. It will give you things to write about. It will empower you."

4. Keep a Brutally Honest Journal

Gioia's most practical exercise: buy a blank journal. At the end of each day, write what happened in the last 24 hours. One rule: what you write must be absolutely and totally honest.

"There's no flinching. Don't sugarcoat anything. You write what you really feel, what you really believe, what you really saw. Don't make it polite. Don't make it slick. Don't try to go with the crowd. Don't worry what others will think."

After 30 days, go back and read it. Ideas you did not know you had. Perspectives you were afraid to voice. A writer you did not know was inside you.

Evolution programmed us to fit in, not to be honest. We adapt to social groups. We imitate. We adopt the cool pose. The journal is where you unteach all of that.

5. Fight the Formula

Gioia considers heavy reliance on formulas the single biggest crisis in culture today.

"My wife and I will watch movies and I'll say the thing I hate most is when the movie starts and within the first five minutes I already know how it's going to turn out. There's the hero. That's the villain. The hero will triumph."

The bestselling nonfiction formula of point-anecdote-study-summary repeated over and over produces books that feel interchangeable. Publishers say they want fresh voices but actually want whatever was on the bestseller list last week.

When his Substack grew 30% in ten weeks, he welcomed new subscribers by telling them: "The first thing you need to know is to expect the unexpected."

"It's very difficult to come out with something creatively fresh because the system will shut you down." The liberation will come from the grassroots. On platforms like Substack, writers can take risks without answering to corporate bosses, advertisers, or sponsors.

6. Trust Spontaneity Over Repetition

Gioia's years as a jazz pianist shaped his writing philosophy. In jazz, musicians who play the same solo every night are derided within the community.

He tells a story about saxophonist John Handy playing an inspired solo with Charles Mingus. The audience went wild. Afterward, Mingus told him: "Don't ever do that again." Handy initially thought Mingus was jealous. Later he understood: Mingus was saying don't try to recreate the inspiration. Stay open to the next experience.

"I will write things and some of the stuff I write is pretty strange. But this is the only way I know how to work. If I just tried to do it by rote and routine and formula, I could get up there maybe consistently. But if I want to get up to that higher level, I've got to take risks."

7. Resist Dopamine Culture

Gioia's "State of the Culture" essay drew a distinction that reframes the media landscape. Twenty years ago, the debate was art versus entertainment. Now there is a third category: distraction. Scrolling videos of someone's pet. A photo of a meal. Not even entertainment. Just a dopamine hit every 15 seconds.

"The people that designed these social media platforms shifted to scrolling, reeling interfaces because it's addictive. They haven't told you why, but the reason is it gives a jolt of dopamine to the brain."

A video of him went viral with two million views on Instagram. It got him zero readers. Zero engagement. You cannot build a career on distraction.

"When I was growing up, the big thing were high-tech foods. Frozen foods. Microwave meals. We've seen a reaction against it. Gourmet cooking. Organic food. The natural stuff is growing faster than the processed stuff. I think the same thing will happen in writing."

8. Adapt Your Prose to the Medium

Gioia did not plan to write conversationally on Substack. When he launched the newsletter, he continued writing music criticism for a magazine audience. His prose started changing without him noticing.

"One of the people there told me: 'When you write on Substack, your readers are getting emails from you several times a week. They feel they know you personally.' And what I found was I started writing the way I would have a conversation at dinner."

The conversational tone makes it awkward to show off. No quoting Plato and Aristotle for its own sake. But Gioia hides layers within the conversational surface. He drops obscure references in asides that one in a thousand readers will catch. Those readers are delighted. Everyone else gets the clear, direct argument.

9. Play the Long Game

Gioia has been writing for publication for 50 years. He started in high school.

"We need a slowness revolution in our whole culture right now. And I practice that myself. If you want to build a career as a writer over the long term, 10, 20, 30 years, I do believe that this approach works."

Read the classics every day. Write honestly. Build trust with readers. Take risks. Do not chase trends. Let the compound interest of deep knowledge accumulate over decades.

Gioia spent decades as a music writer that almost nobody read. He read the Western canon while working in Silicon Valley. He built the Honest Broker on a foundation of fifty years of deep reading. And now, in his seventies, he has one of the largest and most respected newsletters in the world.

Stop chasing the algorithm. Start reading Hegel.

For more on building a writing career through deep reading, see Dana Gioia's advice on why poetry matters. And for practical writing techniques that any writer can learn, check out Mark Forsyth on the rhetorical formulas everyone should know.

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