My Adventures in Journalism (with guided detours)

By Scott S. Smith

There is a home movie when I was eight, showing me in a Santa Claus suit (despite being skinny and it was summer), at the reins of some lawn furniture was supposed to be my team of reindeer. My parents encouraged their five sons and daughter to dream of becoming whatever we wanted. From 11 to 13, I aspired to be an archaeologist, 14-16 a pianist, then a naturalist in my senior year, before I discovered I didn’t have the patience to dig, the talent to play, or a desire to survive on a ranger’s salary.

My ultimate choice to become a freelance journalist allowed me to interview such super-achievers as Mark Cuban, Quincy Jones, Meg Whitman, Stan Lee, Dean Koontz, Richard Branson, Buzz Aldrin, Bill Gates, and model-turned-mogul Kathy Ireland. As a travel writer, I was able to describe coming under the spell of the whirling dervishes in Egypt, report on the jaw-dropping splendor of the tile art in Uzbekistan, and experience a face-to face encounter with a leopard in South Africa. I also covered the war in Northern Ireland, reported on credible sightings of unidentified flying objects, and analyzed who really produced the literature attributed to Will Shakespeare (for which I earned a journalism award).

It was all fascinating, exciting, incredibly stressful, and a deep education for me and the readers, but did not always pay the bills (in part due to so many media which went out of business before I could collect). But Americans once read enough to support the $1-plus per word for 2,000-5,000 word assignments that was standard for many freelancers for decades and I have been blessed to have 1,800 pieces appear in over 190 media, so far.

Now, in an era when so many are aliterate (they could read if they wanted to) and attention spans barely can take in 280 characters, everyone wants instant knowledge for free. A quarter of Americans don’t even read one book per year and much of what is read is fiction that is as entertaining as a soap opera.

To succeed as freelancer writer today, one really needs to be a deep expert on an in-demand specialty-of-the-moment to supply search-optimized digital content (e.g. politics, cybersecurity, rap music). It helps to also have a real job or an employed spouse to give one the option of being selective about taking assignments. But my semi-retirement is getting ahead of my tale of what I discovered in a wild journey down the rabbit hole of pursuing whatever topic struck me as interesting. Widely applicable lessons for life will emerge in the telling of this tale, if you’ll bear with me.

Elvish Fanzines and Honeymoon in a War Zone

Most writers-in-embryo probably have early symptoms of their obsession, but I ignored them for as long as possible. My first grade report on how I spent my summer went on for pages—including an imaginary shark-fishing trip with my dad—while the other kids scratched out a sentence or two in large block letters. I produced original plays for gatherings of our extended family, chose provocative term paper topics like time travel that thrilled teachers, and published a mimeographed magazine for fans of J.R.R. Tolkien in high school (partly in Elvish).

At Brigham Young University (of all places), I produced a counter-culture newspaper and had a letter seemingly every week in the university's daily during my first year. Then before the next academic year started in the fall of 1969, I accepted a request from the Mormon (LDS) church to be a missionary in West Germany for two years (the faith is much misunderstood and to appreciate its innovative philosophy the best sources would be Mark Koltko-Rivera's The Rise of the Mormons, Harold Bloom's The American Religion, and Richard Bushman's Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling).

Living like a monk from 19 to 21 in a strange country, learning a language, and dealing with peoples’ spiritual crises was, to put it mildly, life-changing. While I was there, my first article appeared in a major magazine, The Instructor, for the large number of lay teachers in the church. It dealt with what I thought made a great teacher, based on my professors at BYU. This became one of the articles I could show editors early in my career (most probably were too busy to actually read them, but they legitimized my pitches).

Lesson: To jump-start a career as a professional writer, pick a special interest, trade, or community publication, or a dedicated website, as an outlet. They won't likely pay much or perhaps anything, but they need good material. Study back issues and competitive media to brainstorm what has not been recently covered. A few of these published “clips” become the Trojan horse to get inside the walls of resistance to working with new writers from the next level up of editors.

When I returned to BYU in 1972, I met my future wife, Winn, then dropped out after a semester. I got my first real job that summer to teach anything I wanted at an international boys’ camp in upstate New York (hired because I had earned far too many merit badges as a Boy Scout, driven by a broad curiosity that is in the DNA of all writers, and they needed someone who could hold the attention of teenagers for three months). Natch, I was also put in charge of the weekly camp newspaper (as at BYU, getting myself into trouble with those in charge by printing edgy opinions).

Winn and I married there, but we were too unaware of what it took to have a good relationship to get beyond our subconscious programming and bad prior experiences. The start was made more difficult by trying to hitchhike around Europe on our honeymoon to get to West Berlin, where I knew there was a serious shortage of workers due to being surrounded by then-communist East Germany.

After a delightful start at a medieval banquet near Shannon airport in Ireland, we hitched our way to Dublin, then headed north with an intent to get quickly to Belfast to take a ferry to Scotland. Somehow, we ended up in Derry at the wrong end of Northern Ireland, after getting rides with a soldier and then a priest, before we arrived. By then, the ferry had left and we laid our sleeping bags out behind a low wall in what seemed a deserted street nearby. A gun battle broke out on the other side during what would turn out to be the bloodiest month of the war. Little did I know I would draw on this brief experience for a significant part of my reporting career. When we landed in France, Winn was shocked by the language barrier and rudeness and realized living in another country would put further stress on our relationship, so we returned to L.A.

Lesson: Very few people understand why they pick their mate or why so many relationships don’t work out. By far the best guide to reprogramming our cluelessness about others and doing something about our dysfunctional habits is Harville Hendrix’s Getting the Love You Want.

Back in Los Angeles, I took a job putting newly-arrived parts into inventory at a computer factory, but was soon fired for not paying close attention. I ran out of money just as my son was about to be born. Then career lightning struck, twice.

Thrust Into the Whole Foods Revolution

On the flight home from Europe, I had read a book on nutrition and health and suddenly understood the implications. One grandfather had five medical degrees and had healed my infected tonsils in a week using a chiropractic massage, astonishing the surgeon, so I knew a bit about alternative medicine. My mom had read the works of nutrition pioneers Adelle Davis and J.I. Rodale and we ate whole wheat bread and took some vitamins.

After being fired, I came across Dr. Paavo Airola’s Are You Confused?, which presented the scientific case for a vegetarian whole foods diet, which I began following this in early 1973 (and I have not been seriously sick since then). I got excited about working in the natural food field, like my cousin Dave.

He was studying to be a chiropractor while managing what we then called a health food store, so I started calling around to see if any needed a bagger, to get me on the ground floor of the industry. To my astonishment, one owner asked if I thought I could manage two downtown L.A. stores, though I had never even opened a cash register, and I agreed to start July 3, 1973 (this can only be explained by his sense of my self-confidence, instilled by my family, my over-achiever Scouting record, and the experince of being a young missionary).

But this turned out to be my cousin’s position, astonishingly enough, but he told me had been planning to leave anyway and had not told the owner. He said he would help me in the transition by taking shoppers’ blood pressure at a booth next to the store while the man who normally did it was on vacation for a month.

On the first day, however, I couldn't start the job because Winn went into labor with our son, Chris, and Dave had the flu. That hands-on retail experience (I went on to run four other large stores over the next decade) was a virtual master’s degree in building customer loyalty, merchandising, the supply chain, and managing a workforce. All this laid the foundation for being able talk to CEOs when I became a business journalist.

Lesson: To be truly successful in business you need to listen to your frontline employees about their needs and those of the customers. Almost all companies are command-and-control from the top down and lose lots of customers and workers as a consequence. One of my favorite interviews about why smart executives do so many stupid things was with former Honeywell CEO Dave Cote, author of the best business book I have ever read, Winning Now, Winning Later.

But one lightning strike was not enough. Shortly after I started at the top in retail, I got another stunning career break. Flavia Sayner, a fellow LDS vegetarian, suggested I meet Bill Blanchard, chief-of-staff for an L.A. City Councilman, who was about to launch a national tabloid quarterly, Vegetarian World. She thought I might be able to help him and in the process stimulate his interest in our faith. He declined our enthusiasm for that, but asked me to be the managing editor, my first actual job in journalism, and I worked there whenever I wasn’t at the store.

For the first issues, I sold most of the advertising and the drama of meeting bills and content deadlines was further training in overcoming adversity. Dealing with the internal controversies of a movement with many factions and an uncomprehending media help me understand the psychology of effective mass communication.

Veganism was almost unheard of then and our attempts to get celebrities on the record about a meatless diet were often blocked by publicists, who treated us like we were from the National Enquirer. It was challenging to fact-check rumors before the Internet, but we gradually built up a solid list. In the process, I interviewed or met a number of the pioneering vegetarian stars, including James Cromwell and Mary Tyler Moore.

We published some groundbreaking research on topics like vitamin B12 and protein, subjects about which there is still a lot of misinformation about vegetarian needs. This is the first of four blogs on the case for vegetarianism, which were originally chapters in a proposed recipe book some years ago and now are available on my Linkedin page: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/your-health-part-i-comparing-no-low-high-meat-diets-scott-s-smith

If someone wants an objective understanding of the evidence about global research on nutrition now, I refer them to the recently published The Whole Foods Diet by John Mackey (founder of the Whole Foods chain, whom I interviewed in 2013), Alona Pulde, M.D., and Matthew Lederman, M.D. Only one percent of Americans were vegetarian when we started, but a 2015 Harris Poll showed 3.3% are now vegetarian (no meat or fish) and .4% vegan (no dairy or eggs). As much as natural foods have grown in popularity, sales are around $80 billion out of the total of $5.75 trillion for all grocery outlets.

Working With Pioneers of Integrative Medicine

In 1975, I took off a year to first serve as the PR director for Dr. Ann Wigmore of Hippocrates Health Institute in Boston, where she pioneered wheatgrass juice therapy for health and healing. I saw many miracles from this regimen before serving an apprenticeship to Dr. Airola, a bestselling author and magazine columnist who became my first mentor in the art of writing articles for the general public.

I had been composing pieces until then based on what had I learned from teachers and avid reading. Airola had made his career criticizing not only the medical establishment, but other popular authors in the nutrition field. He showed me how to research evidence that was being ignored and construct a science-based counter-argument for his monthly columns in the popular Let's Live magazine. By the end of my four-month internship, we had stirred up enough controversy that Airola was replaced by a pro-meat nutritionist the industry leaders preferred.

I continued to help him with his organization for medical doctors who were pioneering what was then called alternative or holistic medicine, but is now more accurately referred to as integrative medicine, combining the best of all specialties. This has been standard in Europe and Asia for decades, while the narrow focus on pharmaceuticals and surgery gets the U.S. ranked at No. 29 among countries on the Healthcare Access & Quality Index.

I returned to Vegetarian World and merged it with Vegetarian Times in 1978, where I remained the part-time associate editor for five years. By that time, I had married Vicki Smith, a Jewish convert to Mormonism and to a meatless diet. I was also in touch with Winn about working out visiting rights to Chris, who would eventually become an important part of my journalism career.

In 1980, I self-published Animals and the Gospel, co-authored with Gerald Jones, about the neglected doctrines of early LDS leaders who taught that animals had souls and advised that those lives should be treated with respect. Not surprisingly, this volume created a huge controversy because most members had adapted their religious beliefs to the culture of the West, including hunting for sport, despite it having been explicitly forbidden by early prophets. I also formed a national organization for those who supported our views and published a newsletter on the topic. All this had its origins in my first spiritual crisis at 17, when someone sent me a brochure regarding the suffering of animals, about which I had heard nothing at church.

In early 1983, I managed an integrative medical clinic. But a book I later wrote about the world's most successful cancer center in Rosarita Beach, Mexico, was never published when the head doctor decided he didn’t want the additional attention. He lived in San Diego and U.S. authorities had long harassed him, once going through his trash for two years, trying unsuccessfully to find insurance fraud. I have interviewed other doctors practicing unorthodox therapies with very positive results, who reported efforts to try to take away their licenses. Skeptics should look at the solid clinical evidence for alternative treatments and nutritional supplementation in Phyllis Balch’s Prescription for Nutritional Healing.

Much later, 2005-09, I was publisher and editor of Doctor of Dentistry Los Angeles, which gave me an opportunity to learn about just how underrated dentistry is as a medical specialty. Many still think dentists primarily fix cavities, but periodontal disease (infection of the gum and jawbone) is much more serious as we mature and can lead not only to the loss of all teeth, but raises the risk for diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Changing my oral health habits made a big difference in my life and I became so passionate about educating the public that today I do a fair amount of blog writing for dental practices and dental labs. And my work with them has confirmed the observation that only the top 5% in any profession are consistently committed to excellence, the only long-term winning formula.

Lesson: In my journalism experience, from covering everything from alternative medicine to New World archaeology, conventional wisdom is rarely correct (and this type of thinking controls media coverage). According to the classic study of intellectual orthodoxy, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it takes two generations for the pioneering research in any field to be accepted by the gatekeepers of the Academy. At first, advocates of the new ideas are declared heretics and banned from publication. Then those in charge retire or die and the next generation is more tolerant, allowing fresh ideas to be discussed, but not endorsed. Then the onetime pioneers become the gatekeepers and the process starts all over. When it comes to medicine, the media are especially skittish, preferring to rely on the counsel of those with impressive credentials, even though they are most likely decades behind practitioners on the cutting-edge of science.

From Flack to Flak

In late 1983, as my contract with Vegetarian Times was expiring, I decided to leave the healing and natural food businesses, since the prospects for these catching on seemed dim, while my financial needs were increasing.

I was offered two well-paying jobs. One was to be a companion to Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys as an employee of his psychiatrist during the years he was troubled and not performing. The other was to work for a PR agency representing public companies to the investment community, to convince them to buy shares or write favorable analytical reports. The first job would certainly have been the more interesting (I knew the Beach Boys from having interviewed Mike Love for Vegetarian World), but success relied on the slim thread of the relationship between Wilson and the therapist, so I took the business PR gig. The therapist later got into some legal trouble and Wilson returned to the stage.

The PR job was another baptism-by-fire in crisis management, as well as a exposure to corporate finance and how to explain major financial decisions to Wall Street. In the 14 years I was there, it also became clear that most journalists lacked the management experience that would help them understand business in general. Our press releases would be rewritten and screwed up and media coverage was sometimes wildly inaccurate because the reporters did not bother fact-checking with us. All this was invaluable insight I would take into my later career as a freelance business journalist.

In 1985, I stumbled into a new writing career. Although my resume was thin, I had enough published pieces and my experience under fire on my honeymoon to pitch Los Angeles magazine about the local Irish American community's response to the turmoil. A couple of months later, the week before St Patrick's Day, I received a call from the editor, wondering why he hadn't seen the first draft of an article. I had never received his assignment letter, but said I would get right on it.

The British Secretary for Northern Ireland, Douglas Hurd, was in town that week and I went to the press conference. I had done enough homework to know that the government's line about being a neutral party in the conflict disguised a history of backing the Protestant majority's violent suppression of the Catholics. I also knew that British media coverage was censored on national security grounds. When I asked him bluntly about some of these issues, he gave me answers other reporters failed to recognize as disingenuous.

As it turned out, the editor and I could not agree on how to treat the subject, but I was hooked and ended up writing 54 articles about the conflict for the Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Newsday, Soldier of Fortune, The Guardian, Northern Ireland News Services, and other media. I had a fair number of scoops from my trips in 1987, 1991, and 1993, including interviews with leaders of the Irish Republican Army, the Irish nationalist Sinn Fein party, and their "Ulster loyalist" counterparts.

Chris and Vicki were with me on the first return and Sandra Wells, my future wife, accompanied me on that final trip, arriving just after what turned out to be the last major IRA bombing. I was stopped by various authorities during these trips, but played the tourist and continued to report discreetly, explaining how the official line about what was happening was at variance with the facts on the ground. I was able to build credibility for my reporting because I made a point of talking off-the-record about what critics of each faction really thought was true. For example, activists in the SDLP, a predominantly Catholic party that favored a peaceful process to reunite the island politically, told me that the corruption charges British officials regularly made about the IRA were rubbish.

Thanks to collaboration between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's regime and the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, the FBI compiled a 300-page, half blacked-out file about my activities over there and in the U.S., which I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. I heard from friends who were interviewed by the FBI, but was never directly approached, presumably because they did not want me writing about the encounter. I do think I made a small contribution to the process that led to the Good Friday 1998 peace agreement.

But I also wrote about the lighter aspects of Irish culture, including the addictive traditional Celtic music my interviews with people who claimed to have seen fairies. The latter came about as the result of my burgeoning interest in covering the paranormal in as rational a way as possible, to help me understand how these experiences fit into my gradually eroding orthodox-but-liberal religious faith (more on that later).

Lesson: If you tackle a controversial subject, be prepared that most media will not want to stir up trouble with their readers. Plan to find alternative outlets, such as dedicated websites and social media, in case promises from more mainstream editors are not kept.

The Greatest Games

In 1980, I had directed the regional campaign for President Jimmy Carter's reelection, which had confirmed my evolving political views that the left did not understand the needs of the business world Sen. Teddy Kennedy had challenged him, so it is ironic that one recent study showed that Carter was the most liberal president since FDR (read the account of the unfair coverage of the campaign in The Other Side of the Story by Jody Powell, Carter's press secretary). I went on to work for the campaigns of former V.P. Walter Mondale and Gov. Michael Dukakis and even losing efforts allowed one to participate in the greatest game of political change.

I began working for local congressional campaigns and met with Democratic leaders in D.C. to suggest ways to make the party a winner again. I interviewed Sen. Harry Reid, whom few outside of Nevada knew anything about, for my newsletter for Mormon Democrats and the result was an offer to work for him, though we were unable to work out the compensation to make it realistic.

In late 1991, when President George H.W. Bush enjoyed a 90% popularity rating after the Gulf War had driven Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, the Democrats were looking for a sacrificial lamb to take him on. I was invited to hear Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas speak at a fundraiser for the Democratic Leadership Council, a pro-business organization I supported. At a time when the country seemed to be on the right track, I was spellbound by his ability to passionately argue that things were not nearly as rosy as most people thought.

Afterwards, I talked with him for 10 minutes about a long letter I had written the party national chairman on how to revive Democrats' fortunes. He gave me his undivided attention and I came away understanding why so many had talked about his intelligence and charisma.

I told a friend I thought he could beat Bush, but when I mentioned this to others, they denounced him as "a right-winger." My party's left never liked the central idea of democracy that the Founders had embedded in our system: to get anything done, you need to make compromises that advance the overall good. The dreamers would rather imagine that an invisible People's Revolution is about to take place. They only want to follow a leader who is "perfect," and since no one is, they get disillusioned and look for the next savior who will impose the perfect society on the masses who are counter-revolutionary (we know how that works out). My role model for combining idealism and pragmatism was Gov. Jerry Brown, who once described himself as a "radical moderate," someone who was not wishy-washy about principles an goals, but practical enough to appreciate incremental improvements.

I came to also realize that few understood the danger that the Electoral College posed to the winner of the popular vote and formed a committee of prominent leaders to lobby Congress to introduce a resolution. Nixon had pushed a measure through the House of Representatives in the 1969-71 session after his close victory over V.P. Hubert Humphrey in 1968, recognizing the threat to the candidates of each party (he won 56% of electors vs. Humphrey's 35.5%, with just 43.5% of the vote vs. 42.9%). It was stalled in the Senate.

 It was not until Ralph Nader helped elect George W. Bush in 2000 that this was taken seriously (60% of Nader's 100,000 supporters in Florida said they wished they had known that 537 ballots would determine the outcome, with the help of the Supreme Court). My own efforts failed to get much traction with either Congress or the media, but look prescient after the debacle of 2016.

Opinion: The winner-take-all current system of most states for the presidential Electoral College is unconstitutional on its face because the Supreme Court has upheld the right to "one person, one vote." The EC clearly violates this because the political majority takes away the votes of the minority, reinforcing the dominant party, a status that is reinforced in most elections, as campaigns only focus on a few swing states. There is a reform movement underway that has signed on 38 states so far. This agreement would require electors to vote for the winner of the popular vote, if it takes effect. In July 2020, the Supreme Court upheld the right of states to impose requirements on electors.

 I have written extensively about the history of the presidency, such as this on Harry Truman: https://www.investors.com/news/management/leaders-and-success/president-harry-truman-made-tough-decisions-in-war-against-japan/. It has been an honor to have been able to interview many leading historians (Ron Chernow four times) and my favorite ranking of presidential performance is The Leaders We Deserved by the principled and objective conservative Alvin Felzenberg.

The Business of Death

After hours and on weekends during the early 90s, I had been building up my business writing credentials by contributing to the trade magazines of the funeral and cemetery industries. I found them full of profiles of the colorful characters that would be depicted in what became my favorite TV series of all-time, “Six Feet Under,” set in Southern California 2001-05. Local mortuaries had been struggling for decades as people opted for cheap cremation and no ceremony, though cemeteries like Forest Lawn were tourist attractions, satirized in Evelyn Waugh's novel The Loved One (Sandra's one-time boyfriend John Calley was the director of the movie version). But in the 80s and 90s, they were hit with twin tidal wave of the AIDS epidemic and gang deaths.

I used my connections with funeral directors to land an assignment to write about gang warfare in South Central L.A. for Soldier of Fortune. I discovered a community that was beset not only with a violent history of grudges between the Crips and the Bloods, made worse by the crack cocaine trade, but victims of a justice system that sentenced blacks far more harshly than whites. Job opportunities and good education were hard to come by and discrimination in every facet of life made things worse. I completed the article and sent it overnight with photos to the editor on April 28, 1992. The next day, riots broke out over a not-guilty jury decision for the police who had beaten Rodney King nearly to death. I called the editor and he agreed that it was the hottest story in the country, since it highlighted conditions that sparked the riots.

A month later I called back, wondering where the edited proofs were. The editor said the publisher had decided to hold the article to see how the recently declared gang truce worked out. I protested that these things never lasted because the problems were too deep and they should have given me the option of taking the piece elsewhere. Now it was too late to start that process. We argued and he killed the story (along with another of mine ready to go to press about the Asian mafias in the U.S.), one of a handful in my career that were never published.

Meanwhile, covering the death trade took me from Hawaii to New Mexico, but one profile of a consultant who specialized in helping people memorialize their pets caught the attention of Mark Horowitz, managing editor of Los Angeles magazine. He taught me how to open a story and to flesh it out with anecdotes. "Good Mourning, L.A." in the Nov. 1996 issue was my first cover story for a major publication.

In the December issue, Sandra and I penned some of the "LA-to-Z" entries, such as a scientific assessment of the number of insects in the county and descriptions of our oddball museums, such as the award-winning parody of the serious ones, the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

We also contributed another set of "LA-to-Z" pieces at the end of 1997, this time on topics such as Bodhi Tree, the New Age bookstore made famous by Shirley McLaine, and the Palmdale Bulge, where the California Aqueduct lies right over the San Andreas Fault, waiting for the Big One.

Lesson: I besieged too many editors with far too many half-baked ideas. I think the archetypal perfect pitch, as thoroughly researched as an article, is too big of a risk, given that most ideas have already been considered or won't be of interest to a particular editor. Less than a page ought to be enough to explain the rationale or it's a waste of time. I was very fortunate later to have a relationship with an editor who would assign me most ideas just based on a paragraph, once he knew I could deliver.

 The contact with the drug world came at a bad time for me because I was ripe for something to numb my feelings. Later, I will get into the consequences of my hidden parallel life of addiction that started in 1991, but the groundwork had been laid in the late 1980s, when I gradually became disillusioned with the faith in which I had grown up and mainstream religion in general. The idea that we were put on earth to learn spiritual lessons made little sense as I became knowledgeable about the history of epidemics, including wiping out 95% of the post-Columbus population of the Western Hemisphere. This sense of a godless world was compounded as I studied UFOs, especially as I studied the objective evidence for the abduction phenomenon.

The UFO Crash

Mark and the editor-in-chief of Los Angeles, Michael Caruso, were considering having me help put together an issued called Weird L.A. The discussions let them to next assign me to write the history of local UFO encounters.

It was a sobering experience as Sandra and I took a hard look at reports, starting with a mysterious set of red lights hovering over the city on February 25, 1942 (five years before pilot Kenneth Arnold coined the term "flying saucers" to describe what he saw near Mt. Rainier, Wash.). Anti-aircraft artillery, afraid this was some strange Japanese craft, began an hour-long assault with 1,500 12.8-pound shells to no avail, when the lights zig-zagged out of sight over the ocean. It was truly unidentified.

We interviewed witnesses to other events who defied the wacko stereotype, like Don Ecker, a former Special Operations soldier in Vietnam who had "crypto-access" clearance (above top secret), who later served as a police officer on a narcotics task force. In 1996, after a deer hunt, he and three friends came over a hill to see a cluster of brilliant lights slowly cruising, then one of them shot straight up. He also talked with ranchers who told him about strange lights where surgically mutilated cattle were later found. A conversation with a friend who worked for the National Security Agency (which no one at the time even wanted to admit existed) convinced him that the phenomena deserved more serious attention. He and his wife, Vicki Cooper, started UFO Magazine to take a rational approach to trying to solve the mystery.

Another source was Dr. Roger Lair, a podiatrist whose team of doctors had surgically removed strange objects from people who claimed they were implanted by the ETs who had abducted them. Time spent with just one of them was spooky because he seemed to be very sane and scared about what he said had happened to him. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist C.D.B. Bryan, in Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind, told us, "About 15% of these people are crazier than loons, but the rest are unnervingly normal."

Bryan got out of investigating so-called alien abductions because the more he looked into them, including other kinds of hard evidence that is not easily dismissed, the more he questioned his own sanity. Sandra and I had only seen strange clusters of lights, but I had done some research on the abduction phenomenon that had brought me to the same brink as Bryan.

I had first started thinking about this in 1975, when I was working for Dr. Airola. He had just returned me about a trip with two friends in southern Arizona and mentioned an argument with one of them, a nationally-respected nutritionist, who thought the idea of undetected ET visitors ridiculous. Then suddenly he stopped and said, "I have the strangest feeling we're about to see a UFO" As they drove up a hill, at the top they saw a saucer on the road. The nutritionist, dumbstruck, kept repeating, "Oh my God! Oh, my God!" until it flew off (I later confirmed this with him).

Astrophysicist J. Allen Hyneck, the head of the Air Force's Project Bluebook, which was supposed to "investigate," but really debunk, the public hysteria over the phenomenon, had ascribed what some witnesses thought they saw in one case to "swamp gas." Eventually, he and his assistant, Jacques Vallee, founded the Center for UFO Studies to marshal scientific interest.

Vallee had gone on to develop his own sophisticated theory to put "abductions" into the context of folklore about fairies that kidnapped mortals. The more one knows about this phenomenon, the more Vallee's idea makes sense, but this does not exclude the possibility that some UFOs are related to extraterrestrials.

Los Angeles had scheduled the UFO article to run in the October 1997 issue, but I was shocked to hear that the editors were going to be replaced before then. Rumor had it that Michael Eisner of the Walt Disney Co., which owned ABC (parent of the magazine), had been miffed by a critical article that it had run on him. The new editor, coming from the fashion rag W, offered me the agreed price of $5,000 if he could kill the article, since it did not fit with his vision for the content, or he would pay me half and I could take it elsewhere. I accepted the opportunity, having been told there was another local outlet that would probably be interested, according to someone who knew the editor, but it turned out that publication already had its own UFO story underway.

I ended up having "The L.A. UFO Scene" published in the June-July 2002 UFO Magazine. It is no longer available online, but a chapter from my book about the paranormal, God Reconsidered, has examples of cases with hard scientific and credible witness evidence that I originally analyzed in the same magazine:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/5825ea50e4b02b1f5257a03d

Lesson: If you work on an article that is controversial, have a back-up plan for an alternative outlet. Websites have the room to make instant decisions, there may be a small magazine that won't pay but will appreciate the content, and you should also have a blog so get anything you want out on social media.

The Art of Interviewing Entrepreneurs

My hands-on small business management experience and doing PR for public companies gave me a big edge when it came to getting assignments to profile entrepreneurs and CEOs. I also had the benefit of another mentor, Bob McGarvey, a legendary business writer who could converse with top leaders on almost any topic without much preparation.

We began collaborating when he showed me how one could take past articles one had written and repurpose them for other publications, without violating any exclusivity rules. He set me to work finding fresh sources and angles to respin his work, but all too often I would ignore instructions and try to do things my way, so he would have to yank me back to reality.

From 1993 to 1997, we revised a couple of dozen pieces for trade publications like Retailing News and Training Magazine. His most important lesson: "Treat the editor like a customer" (study exactly what is needed and deliver on time).

He also introduced me to the American Society of Journalists and Authors, whose national conferences became a way to learn from top freelancers and to share my own experiences as I advanced in the profession. Some of the panels I organized included how to write funny material (yes, you can methodically develop a sense of humor) and how to deal with editors who are very difficult to work with. At the latter, I related an anecdote about one at an airline magazine (unnamed) who was utterly clueless about the basics of business management who had asked me to do all kinds of revisions that made no sense. I was relieved to hear later that it wasn't just me: McGarvey asked for the kill fee on an article he had turned in, rather than try to please her.

He also tipped me that he was planning to step down as the long-time interviewer for Entrepreneur, so it might be a good time to pitch. I landed my first major CEO Q&A, Howard Schultz of Starbucks, for the May 1998 issue. I went on to have provocative conversations on best practices with a wide range of figures that included Bill Gates, then-Gov. Jesse Ventura, Alvin Toffler (author of the bestseller Future Shock), and digital marketing innovator Seth Godin (one has to sign up for a digital subscription to Entrepreneur.com to access the content, but a search of my name would bring up all of my work).

My most notorious interviews in retrospect were with David Stewart, an investment advisor, and Ed Yardeni of Deutsche Bank. Both predicted a market crash in 2000 because the business world and governments did not appear prepared for the so-called Y2K transition (having to do with the traditional computer dating using just two digits for the year, creating an enormous technical problem at the millennium). I had done PR for some firms in that business and knew there was frantic preparation for this, but it did not seem adequate. The public was not aware of the seriousness of the problem, however, so when the crash did not occur, everyone assumed it had been some kind of hoax or hype. In fact, such vast sums had been spent on this transition that almost immediately in 2000, business magazines that had depended on advertising collapsed, since companies did not need to invest in new technology for a long time.

The editor of Entrepreneur felt the format had run its course after 37 of these interviews, so my last one ran in December 2001.

Leaders and Success, Round One

One of those interviews had been with Charles Fine, an expert in the emerging field of supply chain management: coordinating everything from the supplier to manufacturers to the final consumer to avoid shortages. He provided an example of the Jeep Grand Cherokee, one of Chrysler's hottest vehicles in the early 1990s. One of the valves was made of a clay and the provider had decided that he was losing money on it, so had decided to process it into kitty litter instead, putting Cherokee production at risk of being stopped entirely until a substitute could be found. I did a more in-depth interview with Fine for Supply Chain Technology News and did others with executives at Amazon, Microsoft, Home Depot, and other companies in 1999-2000, before deciding it was taking too much time for me to stay on top of the highly technical issues.

Lesson: There is an endless appetite for informed business writers, whether for trade publications, company websites, or social media content, so pick out a niche that interests you and you will find an eager and good-paying market. Read the books that get the best reviews from the wisest business leaders of all kinds to understand the issues that should be the basis for a stimulating conversation.

In the same period, I had started my first round of writing for the "Leaders & Success" column of Investor's Business Daily www.investors.com (you can search my name to see 400 of my over 600 articles, half of which are accessible to non-subscribers for a limited time). I received my first assignment on Labor Day weekend 1998 because I had told the editor that if she ever needed something quickly and no one else was available, to give me a call. Mark McGwire had just hit a record-breaking home run and I was able to deliver an informative profile about the nuts-and-bolts of how he became successful the next day.

The column is designed to find applicable lessons for any career, whether it be the importance of paying attention to details, continuous learning, planning goals, building resilience to overcome adversity, and so forth. Every high-achiever in history has some behaviors and ways of thinking to emulate and these stories provide real-world examples about how one might deploy these tactics to succeed. Sometimes the subjects have been controversial and I like to point out to critics that if you only want to learn from perfect people, you're out of luck, since you are not perfect either. I went on to write 46 other such profiles, doing interviews with the likes of consumer activist Ralph Nader, bestselling novelist Barbara Cartland, and the controversial painter Thomas Kinkade.

I also was able to indulge my love of history by being assigned to write about, among others, Socrates, Akbar the Great, Tecumseh, Sir Thomas More, and Cyrus the Great (considered the greatest leader in history according to Peter Drucker, the inventor of the study of business management, whose own career I would later write about: https://www.investors.com/news/management/leaders-and-success/out-of-peter-druckers-musings-came-the-makings-of-modern-management/).

But midway into this run, the editor had to leave for personal reasons and when my assignments ran out, I was promised more by the new editor. Nothing came, however, and she did not respond to calls or emails (I later learned this was a common experience for other freelancers). My last article ran March 2000, just as tech media were disappearing in the wake of Y2K's resolution, making my future as a business writer very uncertain.

The Untold Stories From History

Flashing back to recent history, the 90s had been my journalism experimental stage during which I tried to focus on specializing in business to leverage my experience, but kept getting distracted by other fascinating subjects.

In December 1992, Delta's Sky inflight magazine published "Will the Real Will Shakespeare Please Stand Up?" I had read Charlton Ogburn's The Mysterious William Shakespeare, a 900-page masterful study of why it was impossible that Will of Stratford was the actual playwright. Of course, the belief that he was is well-entrenched, but the closer one examines the evidence, it becomes clear that the claim raises lots of questions that have never been adequately answered. Everything suggests that the actor could not read, let alone write (his six scrawled signatures, each with different spellings, appear to have been guided by another hand, he never corresponded with the leading lights of his day, his will does not mention possessing any books, and so forth).

The depth and breadth of knowledge and insight about human nature in everything from Hamlet to Macbeth seem unlikely to have come from the biography of the Stratford actor. The author's wit and wisdom fill twice as many pages in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations as the entire Bible. His vocabulary of 20,000 words was triple that of all the biblical writers and an educated person today will draw on a mere 4,000 in normal conversation. Shakespeare had an astonishing range of expertise, from medicine to horticulture. The claim that this can all be explained by "genius" begs the question: a high IQ does not qualify someone to be given a Ph.D.

There is also much evidence in the works that he had a noble background, since he knew five languages and referred to books not then in English translation. His dialect was upper class, unlike the actor's Warwickshire one. His main characters are the elite, while the commoners are treated with amusement. He is intimately familiar with the sports of the nobility. His comments on politics would have landed the actor in prison. So why should we not know who the actual author was and why should there be confusion?

Ogburn pointed to Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, from a family that was England's most illustrious, who after his father's death became a ward of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth's main advisor for 40 years. But British nobility looked down on those involved in the theater and de Vere could not be publicly involved, plus he was in a politically sensitive position. Everything about his life was reflected in the plays and poems. He apparently used Will of Stratford as his front man, which credibly explains much about the latter's life.

Sky received an award from the Florida magazine publishers association for the article. I was contacted shortly after it appeared by someone who had a different theory and wanted a book ghostwritten. Two researchers at the Folger Shakespeare Library were at my call, but as I uncovered evidence that did not fit with the argument I was tasked to make, we parted ways. The evidence for the de Vere theory has continued to mount since my article: https://www.shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/.

Another piece came within one vote of winning an award, I was told by an insider (the idea came from Bob McGarvey, while Mark Horowitz suggested the magazine). This was about the impact of barbed wire on world history and "The Wire That Won the West" appeared in the Fall 1998 American Heritage of Invention and Technology Fall 1998 https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/wire-won-west-1. Barbed wire enabled settlers in the Plains and West to fence in livestock and keep away predators in areas where there were few trees. The patent battle over who owned the rights to the invention went all the way up to the Supreme Court and the 1892 decision became the model for others. In World War I, it became a primary means of defense against infantry charges and tanks were designed to roll through it. In World War II, the Japanese used it in harbors to entangle American submarines, so the U.S. Navy created frogmen to cut the way through.

Lesson: Few Americans know much about our own history, let alone that of the world. There are a lot of fascinating stories left to tell, certainly for audiences who have never heard a version that can be made to appeal to them by a writer who does the homework. Some of the best resources for original research that gave me hundreds of ideas from the past were found in real libraries, not the Internet.

The World Beyond Paris And London

Sandra and I began developing a passion for travel, especially for destinations few Americans had been to and which had important experiences and perspectives for us, which we wanted to share. We had no interest in the standard formula for a travel article, which recounts the writer's adventures at breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner, and drinks, as well as requisite visits to a boutique and a contemporary art gallery. Our focus was on the unique history and culture of places we did not expect to return to and that dictated our itinerary: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-s-smith/im-never-coming-back-to-this-place_b_10467624.html.

Our first trip together was to Northern Ireland and we have as of this writing been to 53 countries or distinct regions (as well as a dozen each on our own previously).

The second was to the Hopi Indian reservation in 1995, which resulted in a story about how the native religion had survived in large part because of the efforts of the last traditional priest, Dan Evehema, who was 102 at the time (he died four years later). We were not able to meet him, but through his friends were introduced to Thomas Mails, the author of landmark books on Native Americans, who was working with him on a book about Hopi prophecies that had not been made public to that time.

I wrote about Mails' own amazing background for Orange Coast, the magazine for Orange County, Calif., where he lived, in 1997. He had been a young associate professor of architecture at U.C. Berkeley when one night he woke up to find his room lighted and a monk standing at the end of his bed. He told Mails, "You will serve God, no matter what you do," then disappeared. Mails was especially astonished because he was an atheist and did not believe in anything supernatural. He eventually became a Lutheran minister in Minnesota and in 1962 decided to return to California. He had an interest in American Indians since he was a boy and decided to stop by reservations on the way back to buy some crafts.

As his collection grew, he was frustrated by the lack of a guidebook with pictures of exactly what these items were, so he began drawing and writing his own. He was showing this one day at a shop where he had bought some artifacts and a representative of Doubleday overheard him and signed him to a contract on the spot. Among the dozen books he went on to write and illustrate was the 610-page Mystic Warriors of the Plains, the primary source for the movie "Dances with Wolves." He told me some jaw-dropping stories about events he had witnessed as he had worked with tribal spiritual leaders.

I kept being drawn back to Indian themes, including an article for the September 1998 Cowboys and Indians, "The Scandal of Fake Indian Crafts," about the thriving counterfeit market that helped keep natives in poverty. I was surprised that efforts to expose and prosecute these wholesale thieves never caught fire.

We started covering underappreciated destinations or offbeat takes on popular ones for the regional publications of the Automobile Club (AAA) and city magazines. These included pieces for Orange Coast on Cleveland and Cuba. For the latter, we had been cleared for the visit by the U.S. Dept. of State because I had an agreement to interview Fidel Castro for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But the Cuban bureaucrats who were supposed to arrange this had gone on vacation without even leaving a press pass, so we had to deny we were reporters as we stealthily put together a travel article. It reported watching one of Castro's four hour speeches on Revolution Day at the same time as Mardi Gras was celebrated in the streets, a mindboggling combination nicknamed Tropical Communism.

For Las Vegas Magazine we wrote about Kansas City and Egypt (no longer available, but I reposted here: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-s-smith/egypt-the-eternal_b_824362.html). We were originally scheduled to go to Egypt in October 2001 to take a cruise down the Nile for Porthole, but when 9/11 occurred we were reassigned to Greece, and cruising the islands became one of our most enjoyable experiences (we also enjoyed Athens and came to appreciate the Greek roots of the Renaissance and democracy). Ironically, when we did get to Egypt a year later for another magazine, we had been traveling for a month in Asia and needed to get back home, declining the cruise, so the one in Greece turned out to be our last (so far).

Lesson: While travel writing does not pay like it used to and sometimes not at all, you can develop a niche that will attract editors and open doors to educational vacations, which are their own compensation. Some of the expenses can even be legitimately written off in the eyes of tax authorities, since all stories are potential money-earners and a way to build your reputation in this niche. It is impossible to do too much research: even after reading four tour guides (my favorites are in the DK Eyewitness series), I was not prepared to fully appreciate Italy. It was only reading Will Durant's volume about the Renaissance in The Story of Civilization that I realized how much we did not understand.

 First Steps To Recovery

Writers are infamously prone to alcoholism and addiction, an unfair image for the majority, but the nature of the profession can offer anxieties about everything from harsh editing to the failure of books to sell. As mentioned before, I was shaken by the religious implications of the UFO abduction phenomenon in the late 1980s and a failed second marriage, so was susceptible to the opportunity to buy cocaine when I came into contact with gangs in the early 90s. I also secretly began occasional drinking.

Coming from a sober family, I had no idea I had the gene that could make me an addict (an estimated 10% of Americans do, which means they have a tendency to cover emotional pain with alcohol or drugs). I was one of those who could, however, compartmentalize and function at the PR firm I was working for in the 90s, as well as meet deadlines for my budding writing career.

But I got arrested for solicitation and put on probation, spent money I didn't have when I relapsed, and got totally drunk when I went out for drinks with friends. By 1995, I knew I had to see a psychotherapist: most Americans think this is some admission of insanity and fail to understand that no one sees themselves objectively. As I later learned from reading Bruce Lipton's The Biology of Belief and Harville Hendrix's Getting the Love You Want, everyone gets programmed within their first years of life, which strongly influences everything from our choices of mates to our self-image.

For those unfamiliar with therapy, a good way to understand it is to watch any of the episodes of the old HBO series "In Treatment," in which Gabrielle Byrne plays a psychotherapist who sees mostly smart high-achievers who can't understand why they are unable to solve some of their problems. Pick a patient you relate to and follow her or him through the season so see the value talk therapy can provide.

I was somewhat familiar with Carl Jung's highly-regarded theory of dream interpretation and chose someone who was a specialist, the late Edmund Cohen, a former Madison Avenue ad man and a renaissance man with astonishing range and depth of knowledge on just about everything. Over the next eight years, I would see him an average of twice a week to talk about my dreams and my personal issues. He helped me put things in perspective and was not dismissive of my views on the paranormal. Seeing the origins of my pain and taking responsibility for making changes helped me to stop substance abuse. I would eventually learn that Jung's psychology was based on his own visionary experiences, which matched my insights and he was an important influence on the 12-Step Anonymous addiction recovery programs: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/case-gnosticism-part-8-carl-jung-scott-s-smith/

 After my arrest, I was ordered to become active in a 12-Step program, read the literature, listen to others and share my own experiences in meetings, as well as take assignments to help these programs to continue functioning. Most important, after delaying until 2000 because I thought I could not find the "right sponsor" to oversee the process of "working the steps," I finally asked Dave W. to guide me through the AA version. (I should mention that in these days of 24/7 social media attention, public figures have a hard time staying anonymous and if they fall back into old habits, they can stain the reputation of the process; on the other hand, one can try to be a positive influence when an opportunity presents itself).

What these programs do is to help the individual to stop seeing himself or herself as a victim. The sponsor goes over exactly what happened and why and the sponsee learns that in most cases she or he played some kind of role in the events, if only holding a deep resentment against the person who harmed them. They accept responsibility, come to forgive the offender, and begin to dispel anger about what happened by drawing on these experiences to help others. When I had a relapse with cocaine, Dave recommended I find someone who had experience with that and I asked Shadoe S. to help me with the CA Steps.

Opinion: Smart people usually mistake their conscious mind as the decision-maker in their lives because no one learns in school about the power of early subconscious programming. No matter how high the IQ, no one is exempt from making bad choices in relationships, which in retrospect often seem very puzzling. Anyone who thinks they can work out their personal problems on their own without the insights of a psychotherapist or the benefit of an appropriate 12-Step program is only demonstrating how little they know of their inner core and they will pay dearly for it. 

Spiritual Renewal

Equally important to the 12 Steps, a "spiritual path" (influenced by Jung's ideas) is said to be necessary to allow one to call on a "higher power" for help. In the case of agnostics and atheists, they can refer to this as the power of the "Group of Drunks" or the subconscious. Since I had lost my original faith, I embarked on a wide and deep search for something that would answer my deepest questions about the meaning of life and the truth about the metaphysics that govern us.

I had been fascinated by what I felt was the first objective studies of the paranormal I had come across in books by parapsychologist Scott Rogo. These included Miracles (how to rationally explain things like the mass visions of the Virgin Mary), The Search for Yesterday (an effective debunking of reincarnation claims), and Psychic Breakthroughs Today (which showed why skeptics about Uri Geller's abilities were wrong, as I later would assess myself when I tested him). I set up an interview with him in 1990 for Fate magazine, which was extremely interested, since Rogo had rarely talked with the media, relying on his reputation to sell his 30 volumes.

My son, Chris, synchronistically, was in town for a visit and accompanied me, along with his mother, Winn. Over the next hour of a wide-ranging discussion, Rogo admitted that "after 25 years of studying these things, I'm more confused than ever about an overarching philosophy." Near the end, I asked if by chance he knew about the appearance of any animals in accounts of near-death experiences, since the lack of such had bothered me. Did this imply they didn't have an afterlife, in contradiction to the beliefs of my LDS upbringing? He told me he knew of one case, a boy who returned to life to claim he had been greeted on the other side by his dead dog.

I typed up the first draft of the conversation and went on vacation and when I returned, heard that Rogo had been murdered. The interview certainly seemed providential and launched my career covering the paranormal. Rogo's answer about animals led to my compiling The Soul of Your Pet: Evidence for the Survival of Animals After Death in 1994. I found a number of ways to show that people who claimed to have encountered the ghosts of dead animals were credible. Many of them were, for example, not the owners of the pets, so there was no emotional attachment that might have caused them to imagine the their return. Others had no idea that the animal in question had died. Some even had living pets who reacted to the ghostly animal, they told me, so they knew it was no mere fantasy.

My search for a new spiritual path went far and wide. I reviewed Tony Robbins' seminar on the power of the mind (including participating in the fire walk, which gave me second-degree burns, proving that skeptics about the heat involved were wrong). I learned transcendental meditation (and still practice it twice daily) and visualization with at the Alpha Workshop of Jim Tackas, who had been a advisor to the American military on brainwashing during the Korean War. I wrote about taking classes at Esalen Institute with the masters of New Age personal development programs, Michael Murphy and George Leonard. I had a grueling experience at the Landmark Forum (formerly est, founded by Werner Erhard, whom Sandra had known). I studied Indian philosophies here and on a trip to India, from Shankara's Advaita Vedanta to the ecstatic worship of Hindu deities exemplified by the Hare Krishna movement. I also tried the Buddhist prayer chant Nam-Yo-Renge-Kyo and visited Buddhist shrines in Japan and India.

In 2004, after a relapse, I needed to get serious about finding my own spiritual path. The following year, a story in the L.A. Weekly about Stephan Hoeller, the bishop of Ecclesia Gnostica www.ecclesia-gnostica.org, introduced me to Gnosticism, an early Christian heresy (which influenced Jung). It viewed the Jehovah of the Old Testament as the creator of this world of suffering, separate from the Transcendental God, with whom Gnosticism asserted anyone could have a direct connection. Suddenly, some of my mystical experiences were put into context and my many questions were answered. This ultimately led to the publication in March 2015 of God Reconsidered: Searching for Truth in the Battle Between Atheism and Religion (more about this later, but the book's Facebook page has the related blogs and podcasts: https://www.facebook.com/God-Reconsidered-388142548691857/).

Lesson: Never give up on finding a way to improve the quality of your life, no matter how long you have searched or how dysfunctional your life has been. It is never too late to have a more fulfilling life.  

The American Way

Despite the post-Y2K tech spending crash in 2000, the surviving magazines with business readers had a strong interest in getting interviews with leaders. I leveraged my prior experience to get assignments. I started in 2001 with American Airlines' American Way in a series of Q&As with CEOs such as Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems, Meg Whitman at eBay, and Canon's Fujio Mitarai. We discussed not simply their companies' products and services, but the broader issues, such as the future of tech, the global economy, and how to manage any business successfully.

Most memorable was the discussion with Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle. I was told to be on call and waited for six months, expecting to be flown to its headquarters in Redwood City, Calif. One day his PR person phoned to say he might have an hour free if I would go to New York, where he was at a business conference, and wait until she could squeeze me between meetings with other CEOs. It was a big maybe and I sat around the hotel room for two days preparing when I called the front desk and found out that a message had been left hours before, but my phone's ringer was dead. I rushed over, then waited for several more hours until he finally came out an apologized. He was out of time for a sit-down, but invited me to ride with him to his private plane (which he piloted) and talk. I began asking him about Oracle's new supply chain management technology, a hot topic. But he got off-topic and I went into a quiet panic that I would not have enough material to produce a full Q&A. Fortunately, it turned out that he was a really fast talker and I had plenty to fill the 2,000-word slot.

Lesson: If you do your homework, ask solid questions that allow the interviewee to respond to critics, and work with PR to fact-check your story, you will find leaders willing to talk, even if they feel they have been unfairly treated by the press in the past. Then send the last story you did to someone at the next level of leaders and gradually move up to the global the movers and shakers.

I had completed seven of these, had another six set up, and was about to talk with Bill Marriott, son of the founder of the hotel chain, when I got a shocking call. I had recently turned in my interview with Marilyn Carlson Nelson, head of The Carlson Companies, one of the largest private firms in the U.S. (owner of, among many other brands, the Radisson hotels and the worldwide Carlson-Wagonlit travel agency chain). The PR person for Carlson phone to ask why it was killed. He had learned this when the photographer for the story cancelled the appointment. I was later informed that someone in the American Airlines hierarchy had decided that other hotel groups would be jealous. I pointed out to the editor that much of the interview had been about why the federal government needed to support the travel sector after 9/11 and she was the spokesperson on this issue for the entire industry. American Airlines executives, of all people, should have known this.

But as stupid and counterproductive as that decision was, how is it possible that the cancellation had been handled this way? If they were reluctant to give her this forum, the CEO of American Airlines should have called Nelson and offered to run the interview as a free advertorial.

Instead, a couple of weeks later they made things worse, killing the interview with Marriott just before we spoke and after he had put in considerable time to prepare to answer my questions (I did not remind him of this when we did talk in 2017 for a profile in Investor's Business Daily). I realized this disrespect for the invaluable time of leaders was going to damage my reputation with corporate publicists, never mind waste of my own time researching only to be paid a small kill fee. I began contacting some of the other airline magazines to offer them the upcoming opportunities. Inexplicably, one of these rival editors decided to report me to American Way and I was fired for badmouthing the company--but they still wanted me to finish with the final interviews that had already been set up. The last one, with Joe Forehand of tech consultant Accenture, ran in February 2003.

Or almost the last. In 2005, the new editor contacted me and I did two more for the magazine: Sumner Redstone of Viacom and Craig Ferguson, who had just taken over as host for "The Late Late Show."

 Flying High For A While

I moved the Nelson interview to California CEO, for which I wrote 2000-01, and another that was originally slated for American Way, with Harold Burson, founder of Burson-Marsteller, the godfather of modern business PR. He had a lot of wise tips for flacks, such as to do a thorough study of all kinds of potential crises, prepare for the PR fall-out, and then if they occur, plan to deal with them in a decisive and enlightened way. You would think this is common sense, but many corporations are not fully prepared for crises.

Meantime, I was also writing for United Airlines' Hemispheres. My first article in November 2000 was on all the new ways to learn foreign languages. This was a personal interest, since I had used a Berlitz-style method to learn German and had taught myself to read the international language Esperanto, but failed to even be ranked as a beginner in Irish Gaelic. My article on J.R.R. Tolkien and the "Lord of the Rings" movies was reprinted in Reader's Digest. I also interviewed some fascinating individuals, including Lee Iacocca and Quincy Jones, who made my list of the 10 most interesting people I've ever interviewed: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/10-most-interesting-people-ive-interviewed-other-than-scott-s-smith/

 Alas, the timing could not have been worse for the talk with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Normally, my questions were quickly approved, but because this was so important, it took several week and just as I was about to send them to his PR aide, 9/11 happened.

I did write once more for the magazine, in 2009, when a new editor assigned me to cover L.A.'s specialty bookstores, since it had an abundance of them. One was Autobooks-Aerobooks, which was at last check somehow still in business. My editor was astonished to find some quotes from one fan I found shopping there: Jay Leno. This led to an interview for IBD about his career.

I also conducted 10 interviews 2008-09 for Go, the AirTran magazine, notably with comic book legend Stan Lee, Biz Stone (one of the four founders of Twitter), and Reed Hastings of Netflix (one of his tips: hire people for the right personality that fits your business, rather than the resume, since skills can always be trained). And I also did a handful of pieces for MyMidwest Magazine, Continental, and TWA's Ambassador.

And I was writing business profiles for other publications, including one about a Sikh family from India and London that had come to Los Angeles to open a chain of gift shops. People started asking for Halloween costumes and other items each season, which led them to open a warehouse-size store, the Halloween Club. It is open year-round, sustained in the off-season by requests from horror film makers for custom-made items and the cult of Halloween hobbyists (the West Hollywood Halloween Parade is a street carnival that draws up to half a million). It was published in Los Angeles Times Magazine in October 2004: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-oct-24-tm-halloween43-story.html

My most controversial in-depth article about a CEO during the early 2000s was of Lee Raymond, then head of ExxonMobil. McGarvey told me was expecting to retire and might want to have a chance to talk about his legacy, since he did not think much of the press and rarely gave interviews. The resulting 10-page profile for Chief Executive in 2002 was centered on the battle over his succession, why he was a climate change skeptic, and the ever-deeper drilling into the ocean floor. He felt it was fair enough that he granted me another interview a decade later when I had returned to writing for Investor's Business Daily in 2007.

Leaders and Success, Part Two

Seven years after the mysterious break in my assignments from IBD, I noticed there was a new editor for the "Leaders & Success" column, so I pitched some ideas to Bucky Fox. This ran Monday through Friday and looked at the traits and behaviors of leaders in every field, past and present, who provided good role models for becoming successful.

Its readership was relatively modest at 385,000, compared with other business publications, which had millions, but top CEOs were often willing to take time to discuss their experiences and insights for several reasons. One was that a positive story about a company, fact-checked and credible, could support the stock by making a larger audience aware of what it was doing right. Second, CEOs knew that this could be a way to develop its network, from finding new vendors and customers to attracting the best employees. Third, great leaders want to raise the standards from the way the business world usually operates (that was the case for John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods, who has written books on the subject, such as Conscious Capitalism).

Still, it was often a challenge to get to the biggest names, though sometimes the timing was just right timing, because of a milestone in the company's history or publication of a book by the subject. These were the reasons I was able to talk with a diverse group of high-achievers like Richard Branson, Chris Nassetta of Hilton, Kevin O'Leary and Barbara Corcoran of Shark Tank, entrepreneur John Paul Dejoria, author Tony Robbins, novelists James Patterson and Ray Bradbury, former President of Mexico Vicente Fox, General Tony Zinni, jazz master Herbie Hancock, Monty Python's John Cleese, comedy producer Carl Reiner, actor Kirk Douglas, and civil rights pioneer James Meredith.

This is the second article I wrote about one of the most impressive people I've interviewed, former model turned retail mogul, Kathy Ireland, who discussed how she overcame all kinds of setbacks (this took place on the set of her Fox Business show): https://www.investors.com/news/management/leaders-and-success/supermodel-kathy-ireland-became-a-role-model-for-moguls/

The interview with Pam Nicholson, the first female CEO of the car rental giant Enterprise Holdings, Inc., was my second about the company, having first covered Andy Taylor, son of the founder. Among the keys to her success have been learning the business from the ground up, listening to customers and acting on their feedback, and hiring and mentoring the right people, then empowering them to make decisions at the local level: https://www.investors.com/news/management/leaders-and-success/pam-nicholson-drives-global-growth-for-enterprise-holdings/

Many of those I wrote about were not well-known to the general public, but were revered in the business world for their long-term record of achievement, such as Jim Goodnight of data analytics software giant SAS Institute and Pat Gelsinger of virtualization software specialist VMware:https://www.investors.com/news/management/leaders-and-success/pat-gelsinger-vmware-shows-you-how-evolve/

I would rank this as the most important profile I ever wrote on a business leader because Dave Cote's book Winning Now, Winning Later is the most detailed analysis if why most companies are so badly managed and what he did about it at Honeywell:  https://www.investors.com/dave-cote-honeywell-former-ceo-bio-success/?fbclid=IwAR0PO3dtW57BQUHOodOfjWONHjS8jLEqVp4sSWB0hqjC554qXxtqBjJR7I8

Lesson: I was a quick study and thorough researcher, but in the rush to deadlines I sometimes did not proofread carefully enough and might not be 100% sure of every stated fact. Traditional fact-checking is a painstaking process of going over every assertion with a source by phone or email and is now impractical with the business model meltdown of most media. I learned that the fear of editors that if a source or subject sees a draft of an article that they will want to censor it is wrong: sources can prevent stupid mistakes from being published because they know the story far better than the writer. You just have to make sure they understand that this opportunity is only for corrections, not rewriting.

The Relevance Of History

In 2011, I had 38 profiles published in IBD, an increasing number of them historic figures, many under-appreciated for their innovative contributions, such as Nikola Tesla (yes, the hero of Elon Musk). As I explained in my second write-up of his life four years later, he never got full credit for inventing much of the technological basis for the modern world, including the electricity grid, radio and TV transmission, mobile phones, radar, fluorescent and neon lighting, X-rays, robotics, and remote guidance systems:

https://www.investors.com/news/management/leaders-and-success/nikola-tesla-created-much-modern-technology/

Then Bucky challenged me to try to contribute twice a week, allowing him to concentrate on filling the other three slots with current business leaders. He shared my passion for history and believed my background would enable me to draw out lessons from their careers that would be relevant to readers.

This became an incredible education for us and our readers, who loved to be able to read 1,300 words that gave them not only real-world examples of how to achieve great things, but a wider understanding of global history. The amazing range included military genius Hannibal, comedy icons the Three Stooges, Ida Rosenthal (inventor of the modern bra), novelist Jane Austen, football creator Walter Camp, medieval martyr Joan of Arc, actor John Wayne, and painter Salvador Dali.

 Here are few of my favorites:

Martial arts and movie star Bruce Lee (train more than anyone else)

https://www.investors.com/news/management/leaders-and-success/bruce-lee-popularized-martial-arts-movies/  

Novelist Agatha Christie (read voraciously)

https://www.investors.com/news/management/leaders-and-success/no-mystery-with-agatha-christies-standing-among-all-time-authors/ 

Admiral Hyman Rickover, founder of the Nuclear Navy (be a perfectionist in everything)

https://www.investors.com/news/management/leaders-and-success/hyman-rickover-led-naval-nuclear-safety/

Mary Pickford, Hollywood movie pioneer (demand to be paid what you know you are worth)

https://www.investors.com/news/management/leaders-and-success/mary-pickford-was-first-movie-superstar/

Lesson: Find a specialty and an editor who needs lots of articles or blogs with that focus to lay the foundation to develop a full-time writing career, while having some other source of income (another specialty for different media, a pension, investments, consulting, tutoring, a day job, spouse's income, etc.).

 Despite its name, Investor's Business Daily went weekly in June 2016, as far as the newspaper was concerned. Bucky left and his successors, the late Kent Zelas and now Matt Krantz, helped me refine my style to make articles easier to read, despite the intense amount of information required. I now contribute about eight per year. The experience of being paid to share what I have learned about the high-achievers of the world has been a career most writers could only dream about.

Book Learning

I could write a book about why books never get published or fall far short of sales expectations, but no one would be likely to buy it because most people seem to believe they can get all they need to know on any topic with a google search. Even when book stores were thriving, very few books ever became truly successful (I know authors who had multiple bestsellers who can't get any contract now). If someone is able to put a Nook or Kindle version on some platform, they will earn the standard royalty of 10% of the net earnings, usually less than $1 per copy (but the digital world is so flooded with ebooks it would be hard for Charles Dickens to make a living in that game).

Hence, when I am approached about ghostwriting or editing a book, I give the author a reality check to see if there is a more practical reason to publish, such as using a mini-book or PDF to market their services. Right now, I am working with a world-renowned dentist and a highly-regarded acting teacher with their projects and not sure how they will end up. I never get compensated by sharing royalties, which is fairer to clients because if I'm wrong about the commercial prospects, she or he would be the beneficiary.

I was able to self-publish my first three books in the 80s and early 90s because they had special interest audiences and I could go through small distributors to stores with sections on those topics, advertise in publications catering to the same readers, and be interviewed on dedicated radio shows. I also benefited by publishing some other authors wanting to reach the same group (interested in religion, vegetarianism, and Ireland). I made profits on all of these with just 5,000-10,000 in paperback sales.

In 1992, I had a burst of interest in ghostwriting, starting with a noted psychic, Bevy Jaegers, who had already been published and had a top agent. She wanted to tell her story, which included helping police with dozens of murder cases, many in St. Louis where she lived. About the same time, a businessman in Chicago had seen my article in Delta's Sky about who Shakespeare really was and he wanted me to help him write about his own theory. I visited both on the same trip in early 1993, met some of those who had worked the cases with Jaegers, and signed a contract with the Chicago author.

On top of all this, I had been pitched by a notorious madam, who had seen the news coverage Heidi Fleiss had generated and thought it was a good time to capitalize on the topic (I had actually met Heidi when she was a child in the mid-70s, since her mother wrote a column for Vegetarian World, and I also talked with her father, a pediatric physician, who got caught up in the 90s scandal for helping Heidi financially).

With a top agent and interesting stories, my prospects as a book co-author looked promising. Then the Shakespeare project tanked a couple of months later when my research turned up inconvenient facts for my collaborator's theory. As for the madam, publishers felt they had been burned by Fleiss, so no one was interested in our sample chapters. And I got so busy with my PR and freelance journalism careers that I ran out of time to do the extensive research required to verify Jaegers' claims, so had to hand the project back to her after we finished the first few chapters.

I did ghostwrite several books for which I was paid, but which never appeared:

*One manuscript was about the author's father, a key revolutionary leader in the independence movement of Eritrea, but I had to sue her for my fee because she wanted a longer book (I won because she could not supply enough stories to make that possible).

*Another about an entrepreneur was nearly finished when he died (he had paid in full when we started, but was so busy it took 10 years to get that far).

*A biography of Ray Charles could not be published because a key source reneged on permission to use his comments after the manuscript was completed (I was allowed to keep the advance).

*I also had written most of one about the integrative cancer clinic in Mexico mentioned earlier, when the head doctor, who lived in San Diego, decided publication would only bring more harassment.

Others never got very far and I did not receive a penny. Several members of the Michael Jackson extended family were eager to work with me, based on what they had read. I turned down one due to a reputation for not paying bills. I wrote sample chapters for another the publisher liked, but it did not think the individual would make a good media interview. A third wanted my help, but her publisher insisted on someone who had already ghosted a bestseller.

There were three entrepreneurs who agreed to hire me (one the CEO of a publicly-held recycling business and the other two owned drug rehabs). I cleared my schedule to make the time to write for them, but they never sent the advance deposits and never explained why. I mention all these examples so that wannabe ghostwriters are aware of the range of troubles that can plague even the seemingly most promising projects.

I did get some books published and in one way or another was paid what was promised (with some, I had agreed to a small royalty, as well as my fee). One concerned Corey Clark, a contestant on the TV Show "American Idol" in the second season, who had a (reputed) affair with judge Paula Abdul. The manuscript was allegedly leaked by a friend of his to the National Enquirer and caused a major scandal that Fox tamped down with a cover-up "investigation" that found no wrongdoing. Book publishers which had been interested decided the sensation over the news might not last, so his record company posted the book on its website to use in promotion, instead.

Another was a very funny take on the seven sins of celebrities by a lawyer specializing in drunk driving cases, which he decided instead to pitch as a TV program and use in his marketing.

A publisher also bought all rights for a flat fee for The Everything Public Speaking Book (Adams Media 2008): https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Public-Speaking-Book-presentation/dp/159869622X/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=everything+public+speaking+book&qid=1594280760&s=books&sr=1-4

My two last published books seemed promising, but I ran into unexpected problems. In 2014, Extraordinary People: Real Life Lessons on What It Takes to Achieve Success came out in paperback. The publisher claimed to have outlets in 50 stores specializing in business and self-help books, promised to set up media interviews, and do other marketing for which I paid. I also had promises for help with from an impressive list of people I had covered in my business journalism career. I gave it every effort, but got little help, though it received some positive reviews.

Fortunately, my costs were ultimately paid because Bucky read the book and decided to have me write for IBD on the subjects of 11 of the 21 leaders I had profiled, including Simon Bolivar, General Douglas MacArthur, Catherine the Great, Native American leader Little Turtle, and Antoine de St. Exupery, author of the classic novel The Little Prince. This is the link to the Amazon listing: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/162865113X?pf_rd_p=c2945051-950f-485c-b4df-15aac5223b10&pf_rd_r=KNRWHE0VKXT8HYJJ8R74

Success Reconsidered

My last book, later in 2014, was God Reconsidered: Searching for Truth in the Battle Between Atheism and Religion. The opening chapters took a rational approach to trying to sort out whether there is persuasive evidence for anything that is supposedly paranormal, such as ESP and near-death experiences. The middle chapters took an in-depth look at all the major religions and why I found them dissatisfying. I ended with several on the mystical path I had chosen, Christian Gnosticism (an early heresy).

I had offered it to another publisher who specialized in controversial books on religion, but the owner turned out to be so unreliable that I ended the contract and the publisher of Extraordinary People agreed to put out paperback and digital versions. Before we got very far, I discovered the first publisher had pirated the book and was distributing it in Asia, so I had to hire an attorney to stop him.

By the time this was settled, my publisher decided the sales of my first book did not justify a paperback. I spent the first year promoting the Kindle and Nook versions without much in compensation before a fellow author asked why I didn't have Amazon's on-demand service to produce paperbacks. I had never needed it and had no idea how it worked. Amazon prints a small run at a time to give the option of buying a paperback, so the term "on-demand" is a little misleading. Since this provides an opportunity to expand sales, especially during the initial publicity push, it was inexplicable that my publisher had not set it up from the start.

I ordered a dozen of the paperback from Amazon to give to those who had been my primary sources for God Reconsidered. But when I looked for these on the next royalty report, they did not appear (a royalty was owed, since I could have been anyone buying at retail). I asked the head of the publishing company why and was given various excuses, then communication and payments stopped. It eventually went bankrupt and stiffed other authors. The new owners are honest, but I no longer have the time or money to do much marketing. 

I intend to keep www.GodReconsidered.com active, where there is a sample chapter, a podcast, and other content (despite the lack of publisher support and the provocative subject that made getting reviews almost impossible, as of this writing it has attracted over 21,000 visitors). While sales did not begin to pay costs, the experience of this book was fulfilling in other ways. It gave me a new social media reach, growing from 500 in 2014 to over 12,000 now, spending no more than a half hour a day on social media. Readers, world events, and interview questions have enforced me to think more deeply about the answers to the big issues, which I explored further in blogs like this one:

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/case-gnosticism-part-10-big-questions-religions-ignore-scott-s-smith/

This is a typical wide-ranging interview about the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCN9LZP4AWA&t=3467s

My last book brainstorm was to collaborate with a good friend on an alternative analysis of the American Civil War. We knew that the producers of "Game of Thrones" were planning to launch a TV series in 2021 about what course U.S history might have taken if the Confederacy had won the war. This seemed like a good opportunity for a thought-provoking and informative book that could ride that publicity wave.

We had both written extensively about various aspects of the war and knew there was a lot of misunderstanding about it. For example, most books claim that the number of military deaths on both sides totaled 623,000, making it by far the bloodiest war in U.S. history (by comparison, 407,000 Americans were killed in World War II). But more recent research documented that the more accurate figure would be around 750,000.

More importantly, most Americans are unaware that the North and South combined only had a population of 30 million, not even a tenth of the current number. That was important to make clear the impact that would be equivalent today: it would be as if 7.5 million died in just four years. In a time when people are shocked by a single soldier being killed in Afghanistan and are not very willing to serve or sacrifice themselves, this raises the stakes for all military decisions. We are both pro-military, but believe the political debate on all sides about war is without any serious context from U.S. history.

We wanted to explore a lot of issues that few popular books had done, including questions about the leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, how American slavery had evolved, and ways the North could have achieved victory and ended slavery at far less cost. A survey 20 years ago reported that a quarter of college juniors could not figure out in which century the war had been fought, a level of ignorance and inability to use logic that is no doubt much worse now. This presented both a barrier to potential readership and an opportunity to stimulate interest.

However, we finally decided that two white guys provoking a reexamination of the war would make easy targets for attacks that we were somehow racist (even though we both have a record writing about African American heroes). We also were really too busy with other projects to give this the attention it needed. This is the draft of one chapter I had written: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/slavery-original-sin-founding-fathers-scott-s-smith/

Lesson: If you have a great idea for a book, consider writing a long blog instead. It would be free and easy to promote on social media, with much less effort and expense, and could probably achieve much more influence than a book, which should be the goal of every author.

Peak Travel

Parallel to all my other journalism excursions--CEOs, the death trade, UFOs, celebrities, nutrition, barbed wire, war, history, spirituality--Sandra and I continued to travel. We wanted to share not only the pleasure and education each trip provided us, but to encourage other Americans to get out of their isolation tower to understand the wider world. It is almost always safer to visit other countries than staying at home in any of our large cities. I compared the U.S. with many Muslim countries: https://1000traveltips.com/safe-travel-muslim-countries/.

We also began specializing in in-depth reviews of hotels for two luxury travel sites, which gave us an appreciation of the differences between very good hotels with four stars or diamonds and the very best four and five ones. The Jefferson in Richmond, Va., was the best we ever stayed in (and was the setting for some scenes in the last seasons of HBO's "Homeland": https://simonandbaker.com/the-jefferson-hotel/

What we discovered in our travels was that we had a talent for attracting unusually interesting experiences (I attribute this to my intense advance homework and Sandra's psychic abilities that seem to attract these things and she has shared events from her truly magical life on our podcasts at www.thegodabovegod.com). What we thought we were going to be most interested in at a particular place more often than not turned out to be incorrect. For example, we were sure we had no interest in formal gardens, but on our trip to Santa Barbara, Calif., the visitors' bureau insisted we got to Lotusland, which has been rated No. 1 in the world for that category. We were blown away by the tour: https://luxurytravelreview.com/2019/10/07/why-we-enjoyed-santa-barbara-garden/

We also specialized in going places that deserved more visitors, such as Uzbekistan: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/art-and-architecture-of-the-silk-road_b_815899 (the company that arranged this, Bestway Tours, is one of the best for exotic destinations). Ironically, our first effort to get there the year before was denied because I had the same name as a journalist who was advising local reporters on how to criticize the government. Eventually, the ambassador to the U.S. cleared this up.

In 2016, I was banned from entering Iran to review a tour, despite the operator's sponsorship. Apparently, an Iranian dentist in L.A. had sent the government my article about our 2005 trip to Riyadh, which had been arranged by the University of Southern California's dental school. The prince, who was second in line for the crown and was a USC grad, wanted to talk about his arrangement for the school to send students there to practice. Saudis would get first class dental treatment and the students would benefit from being able to do more full-mouth reconstructions in a couple of months than during their entire careers in the states, he pointed out. He wanted to convince those who were afraid of visiting in the wake of 9/11 that it was very safe.

The outcome of trips also depended a lot on the quality of the individual tour guides and the one in Guatemala was the best I ever had (Sandra was too busy to go and the ancient city of Tikal was on my bucket list, since I had lectured dozens of times at UCLA on the origins of the Maya): https://www.chattanoogan.com/2015/8/17/306340/Guatemala-Land-Of-The-Maya-And-Eternal.aspx

There were also those destinations where anyone should be able to have a tremendously impressive experience, simply because of the richness of the history and culture, such as the Golden Triangle of Northern India (the quality of the tour was also due to the organizer, Abercrombie & Kent):

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-s-smith/-northern-indias-golden-t_b_1356071.html

But of all our amazing experiences, Sandra and I agree that the most moving one was in South Africa. I had gotten the idea for it when I interviewed Bob Newhart for AARP: The Magazine in 2006 and asked my standard celebrity question about a favorite travel memory. He replied, "I just returned from a safari in South Africa and it was like going back to the Garden of Eden." We knew we had to go there, but it was really hard to find sponsors until 2013, when we lined up South Africa Airways and The Saxon Hotel in Johannesburg (where Nelson Mandela had written The Long Walk to Freedom). I will let the article explain why this had such an impact on us: https://indiacurrents.com/the-cradle-of-humankind/

In 2018, the only year when we were too busy to go anywhere, we decided to rank all of our favorite travel experiences (which ranged from Toronto and the Vatican to Turkey and Malta):

https://www.chattanoogan.com/2017/12/28/360725/My-Top-21-Peak-Travel-Experiences.aspx

The adventure continues and we always expect that the best is yet to come.