Shownotes Transcript
The world isn't made of atoms. It's made of stories. This quote captures the episode that you're about to hear with Johan Hari. And look, I'll tell you this. I've never heard someone speak so deeply about interviewing. Johan's written four books. And for every single one, what he does is he travels the world to record hundreds of interviews. He's going to tell you how he does it with stories of how he got up close and personal with homeless people in Vegas, a crack dealer in New York.
And then if you stick around to the end, you're going to hear this, this wild story of the apple in Vietnam that almost killed him. So as I was looking through your different books, what I sense is that every book basically looks at a systemic problem and it says something's gone wrong here. You do research and then generally you then find something where you're like, what people think has gone wrong is actually different from what's going on. Is that how you think about your work or no? Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah.
No, that's not. I mean, I think that is an accurate description of my work, but that's not where I start from at all. So for me, for all of my books, it always begins at a much more basic level. There's always a problem that I want to solve or understand in my own life. And I start from that. So my first book, Chasing the Scream, we had a lot of addiction in my family. One of my earliest memories is of
trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. And I was too young then to understand why, but I understood as I got older. And by the time I started researching that book, God, 14 years ago, nothing I was doing was helping. The people I loved who had addiction problems were in a terrible state, and I just wanted to understand, OK, what's actually going on here, and what can I actually do? So I was starting... Of course, I had ideas in my head, right? I wasn't a complete blank slate, but I...
So it started from that very basic question with my book Lost Connections. You know, I was about to turn 40. Every year that I've been alive, depression and anxiety had increased in the US and Britain, the countries where I spend my time, batch across the entire Western world. I've been quite depressed. I was like, what's going on? Why is everyone getting more and more anxious and depressed? With Stolen Focus, my book about attention, I wanted to understand
why our attention was getting so much worse. Why can't I read anymore? And with the magic pill in my book about the new weight loss drugs, I was like, well, wait a minute, we actually really do now have drugs that can cause massive amounts of weight loss. What is that going to mean for us physically, psychologically? So for all of them, when you follow the threads, when you do, you know, I spend years and years researching my books, I travel all over the world. Ultimately...
That leads you, obviously, to personal insights, but systemic insights. These things happen in the context of systems, and they can only be solved, in my view, or not only solved, but they can best sustainably be solved in the context of changing those systems.
So I think you've taken the thing that I get to at the end and assumed it was there at the start. And I'm sure at the start I have some sense I'm going to get to a bigger picture, but that's not where I begin. That's not my instigating point. Yeah. So let's talk about research. You are an obsessive researcher, interviewer. How do you think about almost your sense of smell as you're researching in terms of knowing where to go for what's going to find you?
be interesting or help you uncover something that other people haven't seen. There's an analogy in an amazing book about writing that I really recommend called The Writing Life by Annie Dillard where she uses an analogy from Thoreau. I think it's from On Walden Pond. I know nothing about nature so I can't testify if this analogy is correct but apparently
If you want to find a beehive and you don't know where it is, if you wait for a while with a jar and you catch the bee in the jar and you keep it there for a minute and then you let it go, it will always fly in the direction of the hive. So you chase the bee, but the bee's going to be faster than you. So then you wait again. Another bee will come along. You trap that one in the jar. Let that one go. Chase that one as far as you can. And if you do that like 50 times, you'll find your beehive, right? And my process of research is like that.
So let's think about my book about addiction and the war on drugs, Chasing the Scream. So I knew I started very early on. Every book I ever do, I write out a list of questions I want to answer. So in that case, it was what causes addiction? What is addiction? What causes addiction? We were coming up to 100 years since drugs were first banned. Why were drugs banned?
Why do we continue? What are the alternatives? So I had this list of sort of questions, right? And then I break it down into who could help me to understand this, who could carry this story for the reader. So I was like, okay, I want the story of a drug dealer. I want the story of a cop who supports the drug war. I want the story of a cop who
no longer supports the drug world. I had a big list. I want the story of a... I want to meet a Mexican cartel member. I want to track their story. So I had a list of those things. And sometimes I found those people very early on. Like, there's a wonderful group called Vocal NYC who do work into Pride Parts of New York. And I went to them. I was living in New York at the time. And I said, I want to meet some interesting drug dealers. And they said...
Do we know a great person for you? And they introduced me to Chino Hardin, who's a trans former crack dealer who was, first time I ever met Chino, never forget it, we were in a diner in Brooklyn, and he walked in and he said,
One of the very first things he ever said to me was, "I was conceived when my mother, who was a crack addict, was raped by my dad, who was an NYPD officer." And we were just in it. I spent years interviewing Chino. So different people, it takes different layers. But generally what I would do is I start by identifying... I read a huge amount. I read a huge amount of books, academic papers, huge amount of journalism.
And then I identify, I drop what I call a talk to list. So I just come up with a big list of people to talk to wherever possible. I go and sit with them in person because you get 90% more when you sit with people in person. And then at the end of every interview, I say, who else should I talk to? I do, you know, between two and 300 interviews for each book that I do roughly more for some of them. And 80% of them don't make it into the book.
But they're usually part of a kind of chain. And sometimes people look at the list of main views and they go like, oh, so you wasted 80% of your time. But I always think it's a bit like, think about a police investigation. If the police investigate 12 people and the 12th guy did it, you could go, oh, you wasted your time. The first 11 didn't do it.
But that's only if you think retrospectively. They didn't know in advance the 12th guy did it, right? And often you get insights from them or you learn a lot. But a huge amount goes on the cutting room floor from my book. When you're doing investigative interviews, are there different mantras that you've discovered in order to get good information out of people? I'll give you an example. Robert Caro, he always asks, what would I see if I was there? What would I have seen if I was there? And he just asks it over and over and over again.
And he says that there's something about that question that brings out really good answers. Do you have something like that? I mean, I literally use that question because I've read Robert Caro's brilliant book, Working, where he talks about his methods that I recommend to people. But for me, when I interview someone, I'm looking for a reason to love that person. If I always start from a position of this person knows something I don't know, and that's whether they're
A homeless person living in a tunnel underneath Vegas or a professor at Yale, they've had a life I haven't had. They have a huge number of insights that I don't have. And my job as an interviewer is to find a way to tune into them so they can tell me the things I don't know and narrate the experiences I have not had. And different people, you need different methods.
I do believe people can tell if you like them and are curious about them and care about them and think they're important. And one of the ways you demonstrate their importance is you prepare thoroughly. You go in knowing as much as you can know. But you have to go in in a spirit of radical openness. You want to be as open and as open.
humble as you can and you've got to know why you're there which is that they know more than you I think a lot of people when you start out in journalism and this is certainly true of me you're sort of interviewing for an angle right you think this and I want to use you to illustrate that and I try now to not go in with that psychology but to just and I'm constantly surprised by people's
eloquence and brilliance. And one thing I find is people will...
People are trying to figure out what tone and register in which to talk to you hmm And they will often if you go in with a formal tone They will mirror back a formal tone unless it wouldn't be appropriate unless there I think they wouldn't react well to this but I often do is I will Lower myself sometimes. I will physically lower myself right like the last 14 years I spent a lot of time in the tunnels underneath Las Vegas interview people for the book I'm just finishing now and I always physically sit down on the tunnel floor with them, right? I
but that's a very literal way of expressing the kind of attitude you want to take, which is you never want to be, I never want to be standing over people. So even people who, there are times I go into interviews and I know I'm going to really morally disapprove of that person. I'll give you two obvious examples. Um,
There's a guy called Sheriff Joe Arpaio, no longer a sheriff. He was the sheriff of Maricopa County for many years. Lots of people will know who I'm talking about. And he set up a series of horrific prisons in Arizona. I spent a lot of time in, it's called Tent City, or Estrella Prison was the official name of it. So I spent a lot of time there with these women who had the most terrible lives and had developed addiction problems to cope.
and they were made to sleep in tents in the middle of the unbearable heat in the desert, and they were made to go out on chain gangs wearing T-shirts saying, I was a drug addict, while members of the public jeer at them and mock them, and they're made to dig graves. So Joe set this up. Clearly, I'm horrified by what he's done, right? But if I go in...
You know, you can do a performance. Philip Roth has this great phrase, the ecstasy of sanctimony, right? I can go in an ecstasy of sanctimony to go, I'm here to tell you what a bad person you are and I will get nothing out of him and it will be pointless, right? So I approached Joe. I didn't suspend my horror at what he'd done. I had seen these women he was monstrously mistreating. But I...
Because I don't believe in evil, there are evil acts, there are no evil people, people are the way they are because of reasons, things that happen to them. I really wanted to understand what's going on here, right? So Joe was the youngest of nine children. His parents were extremely devout Italian-American Catholics and
When his mother was pregnant with him she was told that she had to have an abortion or she would die in childbirth But anyway, they were like they prayed and said no no that won't happen And she did in fact die in childbirth and Joe spent his entire childhood Being attacked by his older siblings and his dad being told you killed our mother right now when you know that It doesn't excuse for a second anything Joe did right doesn't excuse abusing these other women But you're like the minute Joe told me that I was like, okay
Okay. Right, your founding story is you're kind of a murderer. Yeah, this reframes everything that I'm seeing, right? Now, if I had gone in in a mode of, listen, you asshole, I'm here to tell you what a bad person you are, I would never have learned that. I would never have got that. It would have been...
I would have gone in feeling, you know, I would have left feeling sanctimoniously pleased, but I would have missed a key part of the reality. So for me, it's about openness, intellectual openness. What am I going to learn from you that I don't know? Yeah. It's experiential openness. What experiences have you had? And
and a kind of moral openness actually about, we live in a time of such severe moral judgment. It's actually that most of our public discourse is about saying, no, you're the bad person, right? Essentially that's most of the way we talk to each other now. And if you can set all that aside and go in an open disposition, which is partly about asking very open-ended questions, you don't say, did you feel bad? You say, how did you feel?
Because actually if you say how did you feel bad often people go expects me to say I feel bad. Yes, I felt bad But obviously how did you feel and they go I was surprisingly happy the day my mother died or whatever often you get very unexpected answers So you want to guide and lead people as little as possible You want to really demonstrate that you are listening to them. We live in a culture where
people are profoundly lonely. I think the figure is 42% of Americans agree with the statement, no one knows me well. So we live in a profoundly lonely and isolated culture where people are not heard. And even where when people are talking, very often they're sort of alternatingly monologuing. You know, I was once sitting in a diner in Provincetown, and there were these two young guys next to me, maybe I think they were in their mid-20s,
And they were very clearly, they'd met on an app and they were on a first date from the context. And it was fascinating. They spoke for like two hours. They literally did not listen to each other at all. If they had been reading out each other's Facebook posts, one had just read out his Facebook post, the next one had read out his, and just taken turns, they were just alternately monologuing. At one point, one of them mentioned, if I remember rightly, that his mother had died recently. Or some relative. He didn't even go, oh, what happened to her? I'm so sorry. So...
We live in a culture where even when we're talking to each other, we're very often not listening. So you want to really listen. You want to reflect on what people are saying. You want to tune in to what they're saying. Sometimes you want to challenge what they're saying. You want to say, look, I could be completely wrong about this. I'm just thinking... You want to speak provisionally rather than definitively. As you say that, it makes me think rather than...
You're wrong, but whatever. So there's a whole array. But in a way, you have to start with...
love and curiosity for people. So I think a lot of people when they interview, if they're not good at it, often the issue isn't technique. There are lots of techniques you can learn that are really important. But often it starts with a much more basic thing. Are you really interested in the person you're talking to? Do you know, do you really know that they're wiser than you about so many things? And the truth is, everyone is wiser than you about loads of things, right? Like...
By definition, you've lived your life and you're wise about your life and the things that you've experienced. But they're wise about all their things. Well, I really want to communicate just how seriously you take your research and your interviewing. Because every website or every book has a website, basically, where you have all the audio of all your interviews. And tell me about that. Yeah, I think that's just a good thing to do. I think it's partly that people can hear the voices of the people that I'm talking about. Obviously, part of your job as a writer is...
is to convey people's voices. But I often think of my job as being like a concierge. There's some amazing person in the world who knows something great. And there's you, the reader of my book. And my job is to be the concierge between you and this amazing person. The moment that always makes me happiest when my books come out, when someone I've written about emails me and says...
oh, people are emailing me about your book and they're asking me these questions. And that's the moment when I feel best because it's like, yeah, you know, there's, I mean, I give a really obvious example. There's a guy called Professor Bruce Alexander who did an experiment called Rat Park that transformed how we think about addiction that I did, that my book really helped, that my TED talk really helped to popularise. And, yeah,
Bruce got loads of people contacting him and I thought, yeah, he did this amazing thing. And there are loads of people who needed to know this amazing thing that he did and that he discovered and that helps us understand so much. I'm the connecting thread between you and the people that I get to know. Um,
And I spend a lot of time with these people mostly. You know, keep going back. Often it's the eighth time you interview someone that they'll reveal something really important. Like at the moment, this book I'm finishing about, I've been working on a book for 14 years about... Vegas. Yeah, a series of crimes that have been happening in Vegas. I'm not going to talk too much about it. My publishers will taser me if I say too much about it. But the...
You know, I was just literally listening this morning to interviews that I did in 2011 and then again, an interview I did with the same person like last year. But you get a depth of knowledge about a person if you keep going back. I haven't just shown up once, gone, "Thank you very much, I'm off now." I've come back again and again and again because what you know that I don't know is really precious and important to me and I think lots of people should know what you know.
So you're communicating to people not with your words, it's easy to communicate things with words, but with your actions and with your attention. And I go away and I really deeply think about what they tell me. Let's go back again to that moment when you were 14 and you were in the park. Just tell me again, if we were making a movie about your life, what would the key scenes be? That's a good question. You know, what would the turning point... Often I'll say, what do you see in your mind when you picture that moment? Yep. Right? Yeah.
But it's all about attunement, and different people have different needs to be attuned to. Some people...
you know, Chino, you ask Chino a question and he's off and he's freakishly articulate and brilliant. Some people need a huge amount of reassurance and understanding. I remember someone who's a key part of my book, Lost Connections, an amazing woman called Nuria Cengiz, who began a protest movement that transformed Berlin and is an absolute hero. But I remember the very first time I went to see her,
she said, oh, you're just going to present me as some stupid Turkish immigrant, right? Because her experience in Germany had been of many people treating her that way. So she actually needed to meet me a lot. And she actually needed me to talk. Some people don't need you to talk at all. And some people need you to talk a lot. For me, and very often I will...
I try to not speak very much unless they indicate they need me to speak. But usually what I will do at the start of an interview is explain why I care about this subject. So when I was doing Chasing the Scream, I would usually say at the start, you know, I'm here because I had a relative who was very severely addicted and my first memories were trying to wake one of them up and not be able to, right? And the minute you say that, they get, okay...
See I know why you're here, right? So usually I will start with some moment of emotional investment because I think that Helps them to emotionally invest with me. Yeah, I've been interviewed by some journalists and I'm now realizing that I just don't trust them at the beginning I don't trust them in a few ways
But the biggest one being I don't trust that they're going to represent my words fairly sometimes. And I think that that's what I need is a sense of you don't need to agree with me, but a sense that you're going to give me the dignity of taking my words and not taking them out of context because I just know so many people in my life who have been interviewed by somebody and then they looked at the final piece and they're like, I said that, but that was not the context at all.
But that's another thing I do partly to prevent that is with almost everyone I send them what I'm about to quote for them. And I don't give them quote approval. I don't say you can't take your words back. But you can revise it. But I say, well, not necessarily. But I say, is there anything you want to add? Do you think this is a fair representation? Were you misspeaking in that moment? Did you make a factual mistake? No.
I don't always, sometimes they'll go, because sometimes people tell you the truth and then regret they told you the truth. So it's not giving them complete approval over it. But almost always you get something interesting in that process. Sometimes they just go, yeah, I'm happy with everything I said. But sometimes they go, you know, I've thought about that and actually I said that about my dad, but actually he wasn't all bad. And, you know, there's all sorts of different things going on. But you always want to
It comes back to time as well. You want to give people the time and space to give the fullest possible representation. But that's another thing I think about interviewing that's really, really important to me. You want to give people the space to be complex and contradictory. I'm not looking to tell the one underlying truth about you, which is some negative or indeed positive characteristic.
People are really complicated and people always surprise you, right, or can surprise you. One of my favorite lines in any movie is from the Philadelphia story where one of the characters says, the time to make your mind up about someone is never. Wow. I've interviewed people who've done terrible things and then one incredibly good thing. I've interviewed people who were wonderful and then fucked up.
And people who are everywhere in between, right? There's a temptation when you're telling a story about someone to act like you've captured their essence, right? But you want to give people the space to be complex, contradictory, ambiguous. You want to be attentive to their complexity, especially, essentially, that's partly true with people who are demonized, but also this is a dilemma at the moment with the book I'm writing about Vegas. So...
Some of the people I've been following for a very long time and who I've grown to really love are homeless in Vegas. And homeless people are so demonised, particularly at the moment in the US, and literally persecuted, the temptation is to sanitise them, right? The temptation is to take them and go, you think these people are devils, in fact they're angels, right? But that's disrespecting them just as much...
Almost as much as if you present them as devils. There's a great review that Pauline Kael the great critic for the New Yorker wrote once she was writing about a film I actually liked much more than she did but a great Australian film called walkabout. Do you know this movie amazing film people should watch it? But it's it's about two white kids whose Dad takes them out to the desert and kills himself and they're left in the desert and a teenage Aboriginal boy rescues them basically
But she said she says in this review, I think she's being unfair to the film but she says that the the film represents the Aboriginal characters as kind of magical and mystical and what it denies them is the dignity of just being real people like everyone else right and and demonization and valorization are equally to me
untruthful, or not necessarily untruthful, but oversimplifications of human beings. So with the homeless people I'm writing about, particularly someone I really loved who was murdered, he was complicated. And he had some absolutely remarkable qualities, one of the best people I've ever known. And he did some bad things. And it's tempting to downplay the bad things, but I have to say to myself, no, because that's not according him the dignity of being who he was. It's not...
And actually, the way to respond to the oversimplified these people are demons is not with a parallel oversimplification. It's to say, no, let me show you this real person. And if you met the real Tommy...
you would have liked him, right? So that's a complex thing to go. So you're going into the interview not looking for the one thing that unlocks them, but knowing that people contain, as Whitman said, people contain multitudes, they are great, and you have to allow that and accommodate that. So as you now begin to think about structuring your books, you basically end up with just so much content from your interviews. How does all that come together?
So I have a very simple technique. So you can just get overwhelmed by, you know, I generally have like a wardrobe full of transcripts for like longer than War and Peace, right? What am I going to do with this? I have a very simple technique. I will sit down with a 12-year-old and I tell them the story. Because a 12-year-old is smart enough that they can understand pretty much anything, but their attention span is not that great, right? So you sit down and I record it.
And I just tell them the story. And you can see when a 12-year-old gets bored. Because if you're trying to edit on the page, it can be very complicated. But if you're just sitting opposite a person, you're looking into their eyes, and you tell them the story. If I sit down and tell them the story of Chino, the Transcrack dealer, I can do that in 15 minutes, right? I can tell it to them. Boom. So that's my first mode is actually that helps you filter out
a lot of the unnecessary stuff. And so that's basically from memory. It actually reminds me, Jordan Peterson did this guide to writing essays a long time ago. And he said, one of the best things you can do is write a draft and then just rewrite the draft because the brain is so good at just filtering out the things that don't matter. And it's not that the second draft that you write will have everything, but when you're forced to summarize and distill, and I think what you're really getting at is doing it in the spoken word.
We're really good at that sort of compression. Very few people get blocked when they speak. Some people are chronically shy or whatever, but not many people, right? But I think it also comes back to what questions are you trying to answer? What story are you trying to tell, right? Once you're attuned to why am I telling this story? Why does it matter, right? If you remain tuned into that,
I always go back to my questions. Why am I asking this? Why does this matter? Who cares, right? So walk me through, let's talk about stolen focus. So walk me through the different questions there and give me the question and the answer. They were pinned to my door for three years. Let's see if I can remember them. Is our attention really getting worse? If it is, why? Who is doing this to us? How do we fix it? Where in the world is fixing it? I want to go see them.
I think those are my questions. Something like that. So you're writing with those questions in mind. You're saying, all right, I'm always coming back to those. Literally every time I walk out my front door, they're on the back of my door and I look at them and they anchor me. Because it's so easy when you're writing, especially when you're traveling all over the world, you're meeting interesting people, to go down a million rabbit holes, right? And the key, you know, there's that famous writing advice from F. Scott Fitzgerald, kill your darlings. And he was saying, kill the most beautiful things you write.
I actually would, I would tighten his advice. For me, kill anything that isn't serving the questions you're asking and the story you're telling. What you put into your book is not the most interesting stuff you found out. It's not the most lyrically written stuff that you managed to produce. It's not even the best insights. If those things are not salient to the questions you are asking and the journey on which you're taking your reader, you've got to kill them. Mm.
And then when do you write those? Do you write them before you start writing the book, before the research? Literally, they are the basis for the book, right? They're the reason I write the book. For me, the best way to represent an intellectual journey
To turn it into an actual physical journey right partly because that is actually how I learned this stuff, right? So the things I learned about Attention for stolen focus. I didn't learn them sitting in my apartment I learned them by going on this big journey all over the world from you know, New Zealand Iceland to MIT right So my promise is here's a question we both share. Um, I don't know the answer. You don't know the answer and
But I spent loads of years traveling everywhere, meeting the people who do know the answers, finding it out, and being honest with you about the complexity and the doubt in that. But also that will lead us, I believe, to greater insight and crucially to solutions. Yeah. What did you change about your life and your writing after writing Stolen Focus and realizing it was just all of the attention span of sidewalk pigeons?
- Well, pigeons are probably ahead of us by this point. The, well, so much. I mean, I wrote it 'cause I could feel my own attention was getting much worse. So I do loads of things. I have something in my office called a K-safe. It's a plastic safe. You take off the lid, put it in your phone, put it on the lid, turn the dial, push the button, locks your phone away,
Anything between five minutes and a whole day. I use that for eight hours a day. I would not be able to finish my book about Las Vegas if I did not own a case safe. You know, I looked that up. It's clear too. Yeah. Which makes it really, you know, you're like looking at your phone right there. Like they don't even give you the dignity of having like a wooden box or something. You just got to look at your phone right there. The torment is if you forget to switch it off as well. You can see your text coming in. It's like torture. I do that. I have on my, synced to my phone and my laptop,
an app called Freedom, which can cut you off either from specific websites. Let's say you were addicted to eBay or Pornhub or Instagram, whatever it might be. You just say, don't let me onto those websites for the next...
Five minutes, whole day, whatever it is. I have it renews every day. I have social media permanently blocked on all my devices. If I want to do a social media post, I send it to my assistant. She does it for me. So K-safe, freedom. But there's lots of more subtle changes. One is about mind-wandering.
So there's this really fascinating science of mind wandering. Mind wandering is when you let your thoughts float without an obvious object. You don't have a podcast to listen to or a book to read or whatever.
And mind-wandering has been really squeezed out of our lives. By the modern world, yeah. People will be listening to this with their hands on, look around you how many people are just mind-wandering, right? We've always, to some degree, demonized mind-wandering. If you go to your kid's parents' evening and they say, little Johnny, his mind wanders a lot, that would not be a compliment, right? But we've really driven it out of our lives. And we think of it as like an indulgence. But actually, when I interviewed the leading experts on this and read a lot of the science...
It's totally fascinating. So when our minds are wandering, it turns out we're doing crucial functions. You are making sense of the past. You are anticipating the future.
and you are combining ideas that are otherwise disconnected in your mind. And that's actually basically what creativity is, combining previously uncombined ideas, a crucial component of creativity. So one of the things I do is every day, no matter where I am in the world,
I leave my phone at home. I take a notebook in case I have any good thoughts, but I take no technology of any kind. And I just go for a walk for an hour. And that is almost always the most creative hour of my day. And it resets me and it makes sense of the day before and anticipates the day to come. So yeah, I mean, I could go through a million other things, but there are a huge number of changes I made because of that. And do you find that you're usually working through writing projects? No, sometimes I set out on the walk with a very specific like,
How am I going to write about that? How am I going to help my friend who's got this problem or whatever? But I actually try to not do that. I really try to just engage in actual mind-wandering. Now, that can be difficult when you feel anxious because mind-wandering can easily flip into rumination, which is very unpleasant. It's one of the reasons why we're so afraid of mind-wandering. Rumination is an unpleasant sensation. But again, that can be a useful indicator. Oh,
I'm not in a pleasant mind wandering state. I'm ruminating. What's wrong? Oh, I've got to solve this problem, right? I've got to resolve that. So yeah, but that's been a really big change. I've got to tell you, when you're in Vegas, not easy to walk around for an hour without devices in Vegas. Like people are just baffled, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not if you're close to the strip. What do you think has allowed, like your book hit rate is very high. I feel like you're four for four. And what has allowed that to happen?
Yeah, no, my books have done, I'm very lucky my books have resonated with lots of people. I think it's been a combination of factors. You're pushing me to do an un-British thing, which has bigged myself up. Yeah, us Americans love to do that. I think the key reason is because I am asking questions that really matter to people. Mm-hmm.
I'm going on a good faith journey to try to genuinely figure out what's going on. I explain and integrate my doubts, which is a really important part of writing we might want to talk about. And also, I think it relates to another bit of writing advice I have. A lot of people think intelligence is making simple things sound complicated and fancy.
True intelligence is about making complicated things comprehensible to everyone. And this is partly rooted in my biography, right? I was raised by my grandmother mostly, who left school when she was 13. My parents both left school when they were 15. I got to go to this fancy university. But my dad was a bus driver, my mother was a nurse. So I think I grew up...
This is a I can hear my mother's voice in my head going don't be such a wanker because it sounds too fancy but I grew up a kind of democratic spirit, right? Who do I want to talk to? I want to talk to people like my grandmother. My grandma was the best people one of the best people I ever knew right? I mean absolutely incredible woman. What the thing that most pleases me and the feedback I get is how many people say to me I don't normally finish the books I start and I really finished yours really quickly and
people say I understood what you were saying, and how many people say you changed my mind, which I really like because I think people can tell I'm not coming at it in a tribal, judgy way. Tell me about the doubt thing. So when you are writing, you inevitably experience doubt, all sorts of doubts. And the temptation, for me anyway, and I think for most people,
is to back away from your doubts, to hide your doubts or suppress your doubts. You think you'll be less persuasive or less compelling if you're doubtful. In fact, what I found is exactly the opposite is the truth. I can't remember who said this, but someone said, sometimes the reason not to write your essay should be the subject of your essay.
When I experience doubt, what I do is I candidly confess it to the reader, right? I'm like, actually, I'm afraid of... Even if you're afraid of writing something for a reason, like this will be too self-exposing or just say to the reader, I am afraid of writing this because I think it'll be too self-exposing. That's funny. I was working on a piece yesterday and this was... I came in talking to my editor and I was super blocked on it. And I realized that...
the way I'm going to start this section is at this point, I wanted to say this thing, but this thing that I wanted to say wasn't true. So I got blocked on it for some time. The truth was actually that thing. So now I'm going to break the fourth wall. I'm going to talk about that thing and then go into, oh my goodness, I'm kind of embarrassed to say this, but this is actually the truth. And it was like, it was like the Red Sea had been parted for me. I think that's so important what you just said there because the,
When you are blocked, that contains wisdom. We demonise writer's block. Oh, I've got writer's block as if you've caught malaria or something. If you are blocked, there is a reason why you are blocked. Sometimes it's that you're out of energy or out of ideas and then you need to go back to the world to generate more material.
sometimes it's that you sense that what you're saying is inauthentic. Yeah. And you have to confess. I'm trying to think of an example where I confess. Give me an example. In Chasing the Scream, obviously part of what I was writing is that the war on drugs has been a catastrophe. It has not worked. It's in fact made addiction worse and caused all sorts of terrible problems. And I knew that Portugal had decriminalised all drugs. Mm-hmm.
And I was putting off going to Portugal. I was kind of blocked trying to, that's weird. Why am I doing this? And I realized I was afraid, what if I go to Portugal and that didn't work either? This will be the most depressing fucking book in the world because I'll be saying, well, nothing works then, right? And actually, as it happens, Portugal was an incredible success. But I thought, oh, I should just tell the reader that, right? That's an interesting insight. So the more you can confess your doubt and the more you can say, I don't know.
We, it's interesting, we think that the persuasive person is the highly confident, hey guys, I got the truth for you. You know, I figured it all out. Listen to me. And, you know, some people find that persuasive, but it's actually far more persuasive to go, I'm not sure about this. Let me tell you my thought process. Let me tell you what I learned. This might be right. That might be right. We all have to make decisions in the circumstances of uncertainty, right?
we all have to make circumstances where it's very rare we make a decision when we're 100% sure. It's an easy decision if it's 100% sure what's going to happen next. Very rarely does that happen in your life, right? We make decisions in circumstances of uncertainty. We all live with uncertainty. The
best way to level about that is not, in my view, to override the uncertainty, but to level with the uncertainty, to be candid with people, to tell them the complexity. Partly because I'm not here to tell you the answer, right? I'm here to think. One of my favorite writers, Germaine Greer, amazing Australian feminist, who I know slightly, said, you know, all I want in my writing is to make you think. Yeah. I mean, the thing that
is comes to mind for me as a heuristic is that you just always tell the truth. And the thing is, once you realize that that's your heuristic, if you start talking to people, you actually realize that you're afraid of telling the truth in all sorts of ways. Either you don't like how the truth makes you look, you don't like
with the Portugal thing, you were maybe afraid of finding the truth. I don't know what it is, but like, I think a lot of writer's block is there's some sort of fear of the truth. And I just noticed when I actually write the truth, it just comes out. And whenever there's some sort of manipulation or deception or fear, whatever it is, there ends up being like the plumbing gets a little gross in there and nothing can kind of come out. I think that's exactly right. Know that when you're blocked, there's a wisdom in that.
Try to tune into that wisdom. Write out the nature of your doubt. Write out the nature of your uncertainty. Level with the reader about why. Well, actually, this is a really interesting question is how do you write through writer's block, right? So if you're blocked and you have the Portugal problem, how do you actually uncover that faster? Because what happens a lot with writer's block is you actually spend weeks or months inside of writer's block and you can feel it's a writer. You actually get a little sick. You're like, there's something off here.
And the question is, like, is there a meta process to basically work through that writer's block and actually shine a light on what that gap is? Yeah. Talk to your friends. Like, a lot of the time for my books, I'm lucky I've got friends who are interested in stuff I'm interested in and are really wise people. But very often I just sit with my friends and I record the conversation and I just go,
Something not right. I mean my most recent but magic pill a lot of that book is just you know It's punctuated with conversations. I have with my friends where especially in that case because that was about the new weight loss drugs I had friends who have really had friends who were really in favor of them and friends who were really angry with me for taking a Zen pick and
Your friends often know you better than you do. We assume that we know ourselves, right? There's a fantastic book I recommend everyone read called Strangers to Ourselves by Timothy Wilson, a guy I interviewed. You should definitely talk to him. A classic of psychology, which is about, he's done loads of experiments that demonstrate you do not know why you do the things you do. And the stories you have in your head about why you do the things you do are usually wrong, right? In the Ozempic book, it was about trying to think through the new weight loss drugs. I was taking them.
And I was stuck in this frame of weighing the health benefits of the drugs versus the health risks of the drugs. And I've got a friend who isn't, I'll tell you she's not overweight because otherwise you might think something else was going on there.
who, normally I discuss my books with loads, she's great, and she was pissed with me while I was working on this book. She was just terse and irritable. And one day she was in London, we were both in London, we went for dinner, and I was talking about, oh, this dilemma in the book, the health benefits versus the health risks. She said, I can't listen to another fucking word of this. She said, and I'm like, well, she said, level with yourself. You keep saying, oh, it's all about health benefits, health risks. I'm sure that's part of your concern. But,
You want to look better. Like, this is about vanity. Level with yourself, right? Don't give me this bullshit about, oh, heart disease, you know. You know, she was underestimating the health issues, but it was a moment of like, oh, yeah. And I needed, I don't think I would have broken that block about what is it that I'm not saying. I mean, eventually I would have, probably, but I broke it much quicker. So just talk with your friends. Record your friends on voice notes.
argue with your friends. Often it's in the heat of an argument that the clarity will come. Yeah, two things come to mind. The first is there's real clarity around anger. Like your friend was kind of mad at you, annoyed at you. There's a real clarity. Like, this is about vanity. Shut up. You just want to look better. There's really something to that. But the other thing that really stands out about... Like your topic selection is just very good. And if you talk to entrepreneurs...
A lot of them, people have started multiple companies. They'll say, yeah, you know, the team matters, the product matters. But like, you know what I really think about more and more? I think about the market that I'm going to pursue. What is the market going to be and how do I find a good market? And if you get the market right, then a lot of other things work out well. And I see the same thing in terms of what you've chosen, right? You have books like Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections where it's like, okay, look, we got a social problem here. We have depression and we have drug addiction all over the place. What is going on?
Then we have other books like The Magic Pill where there's basically two factions. There's like, yes, you should take Ozempic. No, you shouldn't take Ozempic. And both of them can be religious. And you can kind of come in and say, OK, there's going to be a lot of conversation about this book.
And as I think about a kind of topic selection, if you're doing nonfiction work, I would look for one of those. Where do we have a major problem that's affecting a lot of people, touching people personally, and then where is there just like screaming debate? So I think I'm lucky in that it's not like I really want to write about the history of beekeeping in Syria, but for commercial reasons I write about addiction or a Zen pic.
Those are the things that interest me. I mean, I am working on other projects. For the last 14 years, I've been also researching a biography of Noam Chomsky, the great American intellectual who I got to know very well. And I'd be very surprised if that's a New York Times bestseller or anything, but that's a real passion project, something I believe is really important. So I do have some less commercial ideas, but I think my instincts are generally pretty...
I tend to like whatever song is number one in the charts. I tend to like whatever is the most watched show on television. I mean, I have much more obscure interests as well. As I say, you're basic. I've got pretty, you know, like a friend of mine who knows how much I love country music said like, basically all your core arguments could be expressed in a country song. And I was like, that's actually a really good point. I recently spent three months in Jamaica in a small fishing village in Jamaica. And one of the
Love Jamaica more than anything but one of the really surreal things about Jamaica is they have this bizarre form of cultural appropriation where they love country like so they they either listen to like reggae or country and it's like this tiny little bar in a fishing village and they'll be like singing 9 to 5. I love country music. I actually really like the writing of country music too because it is so relatable and
It's so relatable. You know, it just does a great job with these stories. It's not complicated. And I think that a lot of times as writers, we just forget how simple writing that resonates can be. I remember for my first TED Talk, listening to loads of country music and trying to think how would this –
you know, if Tammy Wynette was writing this, how would she do it? Right. And it did really help unlock it for me. Yeah. Now tell me what you're editing. Cause you must be just doing a preposterous amount of editing on these books.
So I have a sort of set pattern with editing. So I write the book from beginning to end. I don't write it out of sequence. Sometimes I change the order after I've written it, but I don't do that because you're always trying to simulate what does the reader know, where are you taking them, and it would be too confusing for me to do that out of sequence. Then I put it to one side for a month and I do something else, just something completely different. I don't look at it. I try not to even think about it. Then I come back, I print it all out,
because up to then it's been on a screen and physically I go through it and usually I'm crossing out bits. I'm like, oh my God, you know, the writer Will Self once said to me, the biggest challenge of writing is managing your nausea at what you've produced. And it was like, oh my God, I should just be shot. This is terrible. So you're cutting, generally you're cutting, cutting, cutting. You're like, oh wait, this doesn't fit with that. Oh wait, there's an unanswered question here. Oh wait, I, so then I rewrite on the page and
Then I print it out again. I do the same process. Then after editing again, I read it on my phone just because it's a different format. You just see it differently. It's a weird thing. I read it on my phone. Then I rewrite again. And then I've got like, I've got three close friends whose judgment is impeccable who I send the book to. They read it. They always have interesting thoughts. I send it to my actual editors who are brilliant. And then I rewrite it again.
Then I read the stuff to the people I've written about or send them the stuff and I rewrite it again and then it goes back to my editors and then it's done apart from the fact checking and copy editing. Okay. And what sort of heuristics do you use when editing? Like what are you looking for? Are you looking for what makes you bored? Like what's going on there? The single most important thing to me by far is clarity, emotional connection, answering the questions I set up at the start. Tell me about emotional connection.
I've got a friend called Dave Fleischer, an amazing man. He ran the Los Angeles LGBT Center, a key part of it, for a long time. And they did this really interesting work called deep canvassing, where they persuade people to change their minds. And I won't go into detail of it. I'm going to write about it at some point. But the first thing they do, they have this realization. If you want to change someone's mind, don't start by arguing with them.
You start by making an emotional connection. So after the gay marriage initiative was struck down by the voter down in California, before obviously the Supreme Court rendered that irrelevant, they just went out all over California, just turned up to talk to people about it. And they developed this brilliant technique where instead of talking about gay rights, that shouldn't talk about for quite a long way in, they would just start by saying,
Has there ever been a time in your life when you felt judged? And everyone has a story, right? And they would often talk about it for five, ten minutes. And then they'd go, that must have been awful. And they'd go, we're here to talk about the gay marriage ballot.
And the thing about if you've emotionally connected with people, they will go on a long journey with you. But until you've made that emotional connection, it's much harder. There's another group of people who made me think about this a lot. The group of French brilliant professors called Sperber and Mercier. So we always say that, oh, people aren't good at comparing facts or weighing facts, right? We're living in this time where facts don't matter. Actually, when people are on juries, they take facts really seriously.
If the prosecution shows you the guy, you know, the murder was in Camden, New Jersey, and the guy was in New York, everyone's in favor of acquitting, right? And so trying to figure out, well, why is it that we take everything so seriously there, but not, say, in the political realm? What they discovered, what they argue, I think very persuasively, I talked to them about this in Paris, is in a jury, we have agreed on our goal.
Everyone on the jury thinks it's a good thing if the murderer goes to prison and a bad thing if an innocent man goes to prison Everyone right 100% agreement on that. Mm-hmm. Once we've agreed we've on our goal We will weigh evidence very well, but if we don't agree on our goal, we're not gonna be good at weighing evidence Right. So my goal is
What I'm writing is, A, to take that insight from Dave and the LA LGBT Center, have you emotionally connected with me? It's why all my books begin with a moment of vulnerability of some kind, right? Lost Connections begins with the moment I nearly died, right? Begin with a moment of vulnerability. We bond, right?
Then we establish a shared goal. Okay, we all think it's a good thing if there's less addiction. We all think it's a good thing if there's less depression. We all think it's a good thing if people can focus in the world. Okay, now we can go forth and weigh the evidence and listen to the stories. But until we've done those two things...
It's going to be much harder for us to do that. Well, one of the things that I've noticed, it works well, but I kind of find it annoying. It's a bit of a trope. You see this structure in nonfiction books all the time where they introduce a character, the character represents something bigger, they talk about the character, then they lead into, hey, here's some scientific studies that prove that out. They bring those two things together. You kind of have a final analysis of,
nice clean wrap up at the end and the next chapter does the same thing and Given that that there's something clearly effective about that, but there's also something I rolly about it What can we do as writers to basically take the best of that without? Becoming the cliche that has become so common here. It's a really important question So I've thought about a lot. I think there's several things so for me in my writing
Every insight needs to be earned by a story right if I just tell you the war on drugs was created for racist reasons Okay You might intellectually be persuaded that if I tell you the story of Billie Holiday and how she was stalked and killed by Harry Anslinger the man who launched the war on drugs which is how I've been chasing the screen yeah that story will land with you in a much more powerful way than if I just tell you this abstract insight right every insight has to be earned by a story but
I think the way you make that not pat and glib and propagandistic is you tell a truthfully complicated and ambiguous story. Do I present Billie Holiday as some magical saint who did everything right in her life? No, that would not be true. So if the story is too flat, two-dimensional, morally unambiguous...
it's not going to be you're not actually going to earn the insight right right we are surrounded by we are morally ambiguous people and we are surrounded by morally ambiguous people and we reach judgments in the context of moral ambiguity complexity and doubt right so what you want to do is tell people stories that are truthful to that and nonetheless help them to um to to come to conclusions you know many years i was a newspaper columnist when i was very young um
And when I was a newspaper columnist, my job was to persuade people, right? You're a newspaper columnist, you're meant to stand above them and tell them what to think, right? It's particularly ridiculous that I was doing that when I was like 22 years old. But it's... Even when someone's 60, it's mildly irritating. But...
That's not my job with my books. I find it pleasing when people read Stolen Focus and are in favour of, say, regulating social media companies. But if you read my books and you came to a different conclusion, that would be a perfectly legitimate expression of the journey, right? I'm not here to persuade you, right?
I'm here to convey the complex reality and encourage you to think about it with me. Now, if you come to the same conclusion as me, that's delightful. Then we can build political coalitions for change. But if you come to different conclusions to me, that's a completely legitimate reading of my book, right? As you've gone on your career as a writer, what are the things that you've really worked on? You know, where if you look at, hey, this is where I was early in my career. And wow, you know, I made a lot of progress because of deliberate effort.
What has that been? I think there was a tension in my early career. So from when I was like 21 to when I was 31, I did two kinds of writing. I wrote newspaper columns, so op-ed columns, and that was a much more influential thing then because there weren't so many people. Now everyone has an opinion. We have social media. We're all arguing all the time. But at that time, it was actually not that many people in the public sphere were putting forward arguments. So I did that. And in that kind of writing, you stand above the reader,
You are confident, you're like, "I'm here to tell you what to think about the minimum wage or David Cameron or Donald Trump or whatever it might be." And the other kind of writing I did was reporting often from other countries. I would go to Dubai or the war in the Congo or Israel and the Palestinian territories, whatever it might be. And I remember that the first time I went to Israel and the Palestinian territories,
I was in polemical mode, as most people are when it comes to Israel-Palestine. And I realized quite early on in being there that it was blocking me from seeing what was in front of me. Yes. Because if you are approaching a situation, especially one as complex as the Middle East, with a pre-existing narrative and you're asking questions to feed your pre-existing narrative and you're perceiving everything through the thing you came with,
you're actually not really being present or perceiving reality at all. And as I was doing these two different kinds of writing, I was just increasingly aware of how reporting is a much more interesting way of engaging with the world. You don't want to be the asshole in the corner who's telling everyone what to think and arguing with everyone else about when they don't agree with you and acting all outraged and horrified when they have a different point of view. That is just not...
I was raised in an environment with too many conflicting views to want to be that person, right? The biggest change is that I talk much less and listen much more. And I'm much more interested in attending to the complexity of the world than I am in fixing the reality of the world. It doesn't mean there aren't, of course, there are things I want to change. There are things I believe in. All of my books end with things I would like people to do and things I'd like us to fight for.
But yeah, I'm not, I don't think I'm arguing with the world anywhere near as much. I think I'm sort of listening and absorbing and especially at a time when just everyone is screaming at everyone else. I just do not want to be part of that. Yeah.
It's just not productive. It's not a good way to spend it. It's got a very limited amount of time on Earth. It doesn't even persuade anyone. It doesn't even achieve its goals. Yeah. Well, one of the major problems with contemporary journalism is that it ends up being very rooted in single events, in charts, in data, that somehow if you only look at that, you miss something fundamental about how reality works. And my favorite analogy for this, it's how I always think about information consumption, is the current and the wind. Right.
So I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and if you talk to someone who sails there, they're always looking at the currents. The San Francisco Bay has currents that are far more forceful than the winds. Now, the winds are prominent. Don't get me wrong. If you're sailing, you want to know what the winds are doing on any given day. But actually, the currents, you can really predict –
They sort of show up over time. And if the currents are going against you, you're not going to the Pacific Ocean. And coming back, you're not getting back into the bay. The currents are that definitive. And I think that a lot of the problem with most modern journalism is it's so focused on the winds. And I think that what...
What somebody's trying to do if they're writing about something, thinking about something for many years is kind of looking a little bit more at the currents of society. What are the things that are underneath the surface that a lot of people are missing? And I actually think that you end up with a much more accurate picture of reality. I think that's really interesting and astute. Most people's opinions, not all, but most people's opinions are expressions of deeper needs, narratives, wants, desires.
And you're much better off addressing the deeper need. You know, I mean, there's so many examples, but, you know, some people are so lonely and disconnected and angry. And it's much better to deal with those things than the kind of surface phenomena. Give me an example. Well, I love what you said, right? The opposite of addiction isn't sobriety. It's connection, right? That's exactly what you're getting at there.
Yeah, I'll never forget a woman. I'll give you an example. I'll never forget a woman I met with Dave Fleischer, the guy from the LA LGBT Centre who I mentioned. It was just before the 2016 election and the LA LGBT Centre is a non-partisan organisation. They don't campaign for specific candidates, but they were there to get out the vote. And we were in Cleveland, in West Cleveland, in an area that was just devastated. It was like parts of Detroit, you know. We were on a long street,
where a third of the houses had been demolished, a third were abandoned, and a third still had people living in them. And we knocked on this door, and there was a woman, I'll never forget her. I thought from looking at her, she was like 65. From talking to her, I realised she was the same age as me. She had a really hard life. She was a very smart woman. And we were trying to persuade her to vote, and she was really angry and angry.
I remember it was just after Michelle Obama had said that thing that people like me and I loved, which, you know, he says, "Make America great again. We say America's already great." And she said, "Not great for me," right? And she said this thing, I've never forgotten it. She was describing what the area used to be like for her parents and grandparents and how they got jobs when they left school. When they were 16, they had good lives. And she meant to say when I was young, but what she actually said is when I was alive,
And I mean, Dave looked at each other and sort of knocked me back. And I thought, that's how she feels. She feels like she has died. And her basic psychological needs and many of her actual physical needs are not being met. I would feel like that if I was her, right? And I well understand why her response was, well, fucking burn it down then, right? The idea that you would go to that woman and argue with her and go...
well, Donald Trump is wrong about this policy, you're just missing everything. You're missing the point entirely. You're completely missing the point, right? And so much of our discourse is at that level that you're just missing the point. And also, the idea that the solution is to scorn that woman and call her dumb or racist or... Where does that get us? It...
It's not true. She's not dumb. I saw no evidence she was racist. But also it's cruel. But also it makes the problem worse, right? So yeah, you can speak to the thing at the surface. And there are times when that's the right thing to do.
But to me, it's much more important to talk to the stuff below the surface. Yeah, not to just throw another analogy at this, but one of the things that has been a real theme throughout this conversation, throughout your work, is there's the Lewis Carroll has the map territory distinction from Alice in Wonderland. Sure. And a lot of what ends up happening is we argue at the level of the map, at the level of abstractions, and what you literally do is you're like, I get that the territory is
Or I get that the map is saying this. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the territory and I'm going to actually have hundreds of conversations. I'm going to be boots on the ground and I'm going to go talk to these people rather than trusting that the maps of reality are actually accurate. By the way, people who want to think about that analogy more, there's an amazing novel by Michel Welbeck, the French novelist, called The Map and the Territory. But, you know, there's a psychologist who said,
One of the most powerful things you can ever do is give someone a story about their pain. What does that mean? Well, when I was a teenager, I was quite depressed. In fact, it was because I, in my case, there are many causes of depression. I had experienced some absolutely horrendous things when I was a child. And I went to my doctor, who was a very nice person.
And my doctor said, we know why people feel like this. Some people are lacking a chemical called serotonin in their brains. You're clearly one of them. All you need to do is drug yourself. I took an antidepressant called Paxil or Seroxat. It's the same thing. It made me feel a bit better for a while. Then I felt terrible again. Then they gave me a higher dose and I was taking higher and higher doses for years and years. And I still felt terrible.
Because in my case, I'd be given the wrong story about my pain. It's not to say antidepressants don't help some people. Chemical antidepressants, they do help some people. And anyone listening, if you are being helped by them, my advice is to carry on taking them. But I was told a ludicrously oversimplified story about my pain. And what it meant is...
is that I was following, it's like having an inaccurate map of your pain. I was following an inaccurate map and it led me away from the thing that I actually needed, which was to get help with what had happened. So, you know, the poet Muriel Reichsmeyer said, the world isn't made of atoms, the world is made of stories. And, you know, if you are given bad stories or incorrect or inaccurate or oversimplified stories about...
where you are, what's happened to you, why you feel the way you do, that will have
bad consequences for you and helping people to tell more complex and nuanced stories is my job right but it's the job of all of us to tell deeper and more complicated stories but that can be a very painful process right if I think about that story I was told by my doctor I experienced great comfort in that right you've been told why you feel the way you do great the fact that story didn't work for me okay but I was still very committed to it for a long time and I was very
disconcerted and angered by the more complicated story for a long time as well. So we need to be attentive to how adjusting stories is not easy. It can be very, very hard for people. The more accurate your map, the better you can find your way out. So now as we begin to wrap, like how much do you think about style, the style of your writing, reading for style, mimicking other people's style? How do you think about the sort of poetry and artistry of your words? It's really important to me. I...
I think a lot about primarily clarity and just like I was saying like all insights have to be earned by a story for me lyricism has to be earned by the story you're telling so I I have kind of lyrical passages in my writing but I
I only go into them when I really feel I've earned them with the reader. One of my, probably my favourite writers, Georges Simenon, the great French novelist, a complete genius. If anyone watching, if you have not, have you read him? No. Oh my God, I was going to send you some of his books. He's an absolute genius. You can start anywhere, but there's a, if anyone hasn't read him, I would recommend starting with either Red Lights or Monsieur Monde Vanishes. But, yeah,
He said in his editing process, I go through and I strike out everything that sounds like writing. Right. Like, so for me, clarity is absolutely the most important thing. Clarity and keeping you with me in the story and not standing above you. But.
Yeah, those are really important things for me. So my style, this is a very pretentious thing to say, but I think I've been unpretentious so far, so let's hope I've earned it. I hope my style is an expression of my underlying philosophy, which is democratic, clear, and attuned to people's emotional realities and needs, right? So for me, the moments when I would be lyrical are moments when I'm describing moments of great...
emotional truth for the people I write about. There are so many moments, I think, of that emotional connection and clarity in my work. So I hope those are the moments where I let myself be lyrical, because I feel that the people I'm writing about
have led the reader to that feeling that that is earned. But yeah, so for me, style is very important. And the single most important thing is the worst thing you could ever say to me about anything I write or anything I say is, I don't understand you. I'm confused. Yeah, I don't get it. What do you mean? Right? I think my obsession with clarity is partly rooted in my early childhood as well. So I had a... My dad's from Switzerland. My dad did not speak good English when I was a child. So he... And he's a very strange person anyway, but...
Very often he literally didn't understand what people were saying and I was translating for him My mother is from working-class Scottish background, but we were living here in London In a class environment was quite alien to her. She was from a quite poor background. We were in a kind of middle-class area So in Britain, there's a real translation between classes. So and I always had this weird little posh voice I was like Stewie from Family Guy right the moment of birth. I don't know why and my grandmother was from a very working Basically raised me was from a very poor background so
I think all the time I was aware there's these people who don't quite understand how this stuff works. So all the time I was translating between these people and this understanding and realizing, oh, I can figure out how this works even if they can't. So I think for me that translating across boundaries and clarity
It pains me when I hear people not understanding each other. And it's very, very common, right? When people are speaking past each other, I find it almost literally intolerable. And you want to go, there were times in public I went and tried to go, no, he's not saying that. Yeah. What he actually means is, you know. I always have the image of like a layered cake. Hmm. And one person's talking at this layer and the other person's talking on this layer. Hmm.
And I mean, that's why we get the metaphor talking past each other because they're just not talking about the same thing. And if you're trying to talk about whether you're talking about why we can't read for more than five minutes or you're talking about why people – why we have such bad drug addiction in the world, you just have to get to a place no matter what it is where you're just talking about the same thing because you can't make any progress until you're looking at the same point. Yeah.
Often the way to get there is through a moment of vulnerability. It's a very powerful thing to make yourself vulnerable in public. So, for example, I opened my book Lost Connections with this moment. It's a weird moment for me, but I was in Vietnam researching my biography of Noam Chomsky and I was interviewing survivors of the Vietnam War and people he knew in Vietnam. And while I was there, one day I was so tired...
And I was in an alleyway and I bought an apple. And I thought, oh, I'm a good tourist. I know the rules. You wash it in bottled water, right? And I bit into it. I was so tired in the hotel. And I thought, this tastes weird. But I still ate it, right? Oh, yikes. And now I know that in Vietnam you have to actually cut the peel off the apples because it's so drenched in pesticides. You can't just wash it. You have to cut the peel off. Oh, wow. I didn't know that then.
I woke up the next day like the girl in The Exorcist. I was like projectile vomiting. I was shitting everywhere. It was horrific, right? Basically, I spent four days lying in bed watching CNN. I still associate Anderson Cooper's face with vomiting. And it got to the fourth day and I was still really sick. And I phoned Huang, my translator and fixer who was arranging all my interviews. Pfft.
And I said look I haven't got much more time in Vietnam my flights in a few days We've just got to go and do these interviews right? I'll just take a load of Imodium. Let's just do it So he drove me like five miles out of Hanoi into the countryside and We went to interview this woman so she was in from a variety. She was like a 91 year old woman She was the only woman in her village who with her children survived the war right? So I'm sitting there in her in her heart, and I'm interviewing her she's fascinating and
And as she was speaking, it's never happened to me before or since, it literally felt like the room was rotating around me. And all of a sudden I started to vomit and shit all over this poor old woman's heart, right? And I literally just collapsed and was just like gone, right? And I said to Hwang, put me in the car, we'll drive back to Hanoi. And this woman said, through him, she said,
he's really sick, you need to take him to the hospital. And I said, no, no, take me to Hanoi. And Hoang said, Johan, this is the only woman who survived the Vietnam War in this village. I'm going to listen to her. We're going to the fucking hospital, right? So we went to the hospital. He completely lied to them and said I was like some really important Westerner who had to survive. And as I was lying there and I felt so nauseous, I said to this doctor,
Give me something for that. Please give me something for the nausea to take this nausea away Yeah, and the doctor said to me you need your nausea. It will tell us what's wrong with you No, but even I'm thinking huh? That's that's really interesting insight right and there's like I'm gonna die I'll never get to write about it and it turned out what happened is because I had retained no water in my body for like five days and
I was literally, I was like a person in the desert who'd had no water. My kidneys had stopped working. And I remember, I remember thinking, this was like the, oh, I've been killed by a poisoned apple. I'm like Snow White. I'm like Alan Turing. I'm like Eve. And then I was like- I was going to say, that's literally the oldest story in the book. But then I thought, you're about to die.
And your last thought is that you're a pretentious asshole. Screw you. Anyway, and I remember when I was leaving the hospital, I said to this guy, the doctor, lovely man, what would have happened if Wang had driven me back to Hanoi? And he said, oh, your kidneys have stopped working. You would have died on the way. But that thing that he said, you need your nausea. It will tell us what's wrong with you. That's true of much more than if your kidneys have stopped working. It's why it begins my book about depression because there is...
Painful and agonizing though depression and anxiety are they are not malfunctions. They are signals They are telling us something really important about your unmet needs about what you've gone through about what you you need is Going forward and the reason I open the book with that the truth is if you make yourself vulnerable in public It's not an attractive thing to describe yourself vomiting and shitting on the floor of an old woman, right?
But if you make yourself vulnerable, some people will take advantage of your vulnerability and punch you, right? That will happen sometimes. But far more people, and they'll be like that because of pain and bad things that have happened to them, and you should respond if you can with love and empathy. But most people will lean into you. So there's an incredible power in vulnerability and vulnerability.
Making yourself vulnerable in public. It's hard. You don't want to do it, right? But it has a power. Well, Johan, thank you so much. Oh, what a pleasure. You ask great questions. Cheers, David. Thanks so much. Yeah, it's good to finally meet you.