(Matt Cook, photo credit to Joey Ikemoto)
Matt Cook finds joy in the deep dive.
He means this literally and figuratively. This bestselling author happens to hold the title of Divemaster to his long list of credits. Cook also pilots land and seaplanes, entertains Hollywood audiences with magic skills that he learned at the famous Magic Castle. Yet most importantly, he tells stories. Through writing, music, magic, and numbers, he charms audiences with internationally bestselling novels that include the thrillers Sabotage and Good Little Marauder. His nonfiction includes Sleight of Mind (MIT Press), a nonfiction book on paradoxes in math, physics, and philosophy.
Numbers excite Matt. As an economist, he has worked in entertainment finance and founded a government transparency organization. Music also inspires his creativity and classic orchestra speaks to his soul. This is all at just 32 years old. Get to know Matt Cook in our exclusive interview.
Colleen Bement: What do you “nerd out” over?
Matt Cook: To me that means finding joy in the deep dive. Lots of my deep dives involve storytelling in some way, with words or musical notes, or numbers. Words tell conceptual stories. Music tells emotional stories. Numbers tell stories written into the universe, which we get to discover. I’ve taken it as a goal and motto to “live great stories and tell great stories.” That goal brings me to a lot of enjoyable study . . . or nerding out.
CB: What are your favorite kinds of stories?
MC: A good story dramatizes the values of the author. Because I think happiness is achievable to people who live a good life, I like stories that reflect this belief through heroes with admirable virtues—characters created in the spirit of what can and should be. That doesn’t necessarily mean perfect or superhuman. It means the good guys’ values, and the way they go about earning them, are respectable. A good story projects the heroes’ ideals or those which they eventually learn.
CB: Why do you like thrillers?
MC: Thrillers follow from the Romantic school of art that sees people as beings of free will, who direct the courses of their lives by making decisions in pursuit of values. Romanticism is concerned with showing people as they can and should be, and thrillers tend to do the same. At the core of the thriller is an extreme conflict of goals, which means that characters are acting purposefully in pursuit of their values. Thrillers don’t necessarily identify those values clearly; usually, the good values are assumed, and the moral conflict boils down to basic good versus evil. But you still have the key elements that make a story Romantic, and you have the same flow of characters making choices, pursuing goals, entering dangerous conflict, struggling through the conflict, and achieving victory.
CB: What is your recent historical novel, Good Little Marauder, about?
MC: Good Little Marauder is a post WW2 thriller with elements of espionage and art intrigue. It tells the story of Kate Atwell, presumably the daughter of British wealth, who seems to have everything—talent, beauty, a promising career as an art consultant. But Kate also has a secret. Her name isn’t really Atwell. Her real father had been an officer in the Third Reich, and Germany’s most infamous forger of art. She’s kept this secret buried for twenty years, ever since she’d escaped Germany on a submarine at the age of eight. Kate will later learn more about her real father, and a band of real artists who actually helped turn the tides of war in the Western desert by orchestrating one of the greatest camouflage operations in history.
CB: What do you enjoy most about music as a performing art?
MC: I marvel at the storytelling power of the classical orchestra. We tend to think of technologies nowadays as things relying on circuits and silicon. But really, each instrument in the orchestra is a very advanced technology that’s had more time to evolve than anything with a circuit. They’ve had centuries of shaping and crafting, and now they speak to us in a language fine-tuned for the human soul. There’s even a lot of interesting math and physics involved.
When you listen to an orchestra play music, you’re hearing something special on the spectrum of human invention, discovery, and creativity. Every one of those instruments took centuries to evolve and develop. Some even millennia. Each player on stage has invested thousands of hours to achieve virtuosity, learning from others who did the same. Then there’s all the compositional work. That’s been in progress for thousands of years, too—people figuring out what it is about certain soundwaves that can connect with our minds and hearts. All that excites me. I like to walk into a concert hall and think about everything that had to happen for that single performance to take place.
CB: You’re a magician and a traveler. Do those things connect?
MC: A deck of cards is my universal translator. I always carry a deck of cards when traveling. It communicates some deep ideas, and it crosses the barrier of any language by establishing common ground. Let me explain what I mean.
One thing all of us share is an understanding of certain rules our world follows. Whether you’re in LA or Morocco or Tibet, things happen in certain ways and not other ways. We give those rules different names, and we explain them differently—as the will of god, or physical law. But we all see the rules and have a strong sense that those rules can’t be violated.
A deck of cards is something I use to make it seem like those rules are getting broken. That brings universal delight because of what it communicates without words. It says, “We both know the world follows these same rules. We both like to figure out how those rules work. We both like to try to explain things, and it feels funny when we can’t!”
CB: Do you ever take a breather? What do you do to unwind and relax?
MC: To me, relaxing and unwinding is all about finding the right balance between output and input. It feels good to produce creative output, which for me might look like some pages of a manuscript or some bars of a musical piece. But at some point, we all exhaust our reserves and need fuel. That’s when I like to switch over to taking things in instead of putting things out. And we can all do a lot of that at home—reading a good book or watching a good movie or listening deeply to what our loved ones are thinking about. But I also travel as much as possible; travel opens us up to some of the most fascinating inputs.
CB: Why do you travel so much?
MC: It boils down to knowledge and memories. When traveling you learn about other people, histories, systems, beliefs, and geographies. Some of that knowledge can help you practically, but all of it can also be enjoyed for its own sake—the knowledge itself is fulfilling. Sometimes there’s knowledge that can help you refine your own set of values, your appreciation of what you have, or even your sense of purpose.
Now, you can learn a lot from the internet, too. You can look up pictures and read things. In fact, it’s more efficient, and a lot less expensive, to read Wikipedia articles than it is to go somewhere. So, why go?
Since we’ve talked about music, let’s draw an analogy there. Let’s say you’re an experienced musician, and you’ve spent your whole life reading notes. If someone hands you an unfamiliar piece of music, you can look at the music with your eyes. You can stare at it, study it, and in your brain, you can actually imagine what it sounds like if you know how to read music. But I promise you, no matter how long you stare at those dots on the page with your eyes, nothing will ever make you feel the same way about that music as hearing it played by a full orchestra, with all the instruments coming together and vibrating in your ears!
Imagination and perception are different experiences. There’s an important place for both of them. Directly perceiving things is how we form basic concepts to begin with. The more we experience directly, the easier it is to understand things theoretically. Understanding the world has many practical reasons, but it’s also a joy in itself. To me, that’s the end goal, and the memories formed in the process are the greatest riches we can accumulate.
Written by Colleen Bement
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