This Research System Will Change How You Write — Johann Hari — searchlore

This Research System Will Change How You Write — Johann Hari

David Perell · Johann Hari

Published Apr 30, 2025

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0:00

The world isn't made of atoms, it's made of stories.

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This quote captures the episode that you're about to hear with Johan Hari.

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And look, I'll tell you this.

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I've never heard someone speak so deeply about interviewing.

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Yoan's written four books, and for every single one, what he does is he travels the world to record hundreds of interviews.

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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.

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this wild story of the apple in Vietnam that almost killed him.

0:35

So, as I was looking through your different books, what I what I sense is that every book basically looks at a systemic problem and it says something's gone wrong here.

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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.

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Is that how you think about your work or no?

0:54

Oh, that's so interesting.

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No, that's not I mean I I think that is an accurate description of my work, but that's not where I start from at all.

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So for me, for all of my books, it always begins at a much more basic level.

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There's always a problem that I want to solve or understand in my own life and I start from that.

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So my first book, Chasing the Scream, yeah, we had a lot of addiction in my family.

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One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not be able to.

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And I was I was too young then to understand why.

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But understood as I got older and by the time I started researching that book got um 14 years ago, nothing I was doing was helping.

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The people I loved who had addiction problems were in a terrible state.

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And I just wanted to understand, okay, what's actually going on here?

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And what can I actually do?

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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 um with my book loss 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

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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 um with stolen focus my book about attention I wanted to understand why our attention was getting so much worse. Why can't I

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Why can't I read anymore?

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And and with the magic pill book about the new weight loss drugs, I like I was like, well, wait a minute.

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We actually really do now have drugs that can cause massive amounts of weight loss.

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What is that going to mean for us physically, psychologically?

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Um, so for all of them, when you follow the threads, when you do all, you know, I spend years and years researching my books.

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I travel all over the world.

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Ultimately that leads you obviously to personal insights but systemic insights.

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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.

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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 I'm sure at the start I have some sense I'm going to get to bigger picture but that that's not where I begin.

3:17

That's not my instigating point. Yeah.

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So, let's talk about research.

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You are an obsessive researcher, interviewer.

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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 uh be interesting or help you uncover something that other people haven't seen?

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There's an analogy in an amazing book about writing that I really recommend called the writing life by Annie Dillard um where she uses analogy from from thorough.

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I think it's from Walden Pond.

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I know nothing about nature, so I can't testify if this analogy is correct.

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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 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.

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So, you chase the bee, but the bee's going to be faster than you.

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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?

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And my process of research is like that.

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So let's think about um my my book about um addiction and the war on drugs, chasing the scream.

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So I knew I started very early on.

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Every book I ever do, I write out a list of questions I want to answer.

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So in that case it was [Music] um what causes addiction? What is addiction? What causes addiction?

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Um we were coming up to 100 years since drugs were first banned, why were drugs banned?

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Why do we continue what are the alternatives?

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So I had this list of sort of questions, right?

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And then I break it down into who could help me to understand this, who could carry this story for the reader.

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So I was like, okay, I want the story of a drug dealer.

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I want the story of a cop who supports the drug war.

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I want the story of a cop who no longer supports the drug war.

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I had a big I want the story of a I want to meet a Mexican cartel member.

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I want to track their story.

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So I had a list of those things.

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And sometimes I found those people very early on like um there's a wonderful group called Vocal NYC who do work in deprived parts of the of New York. Um and I went to them.

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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?

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And they introduced me to Chino Harden who's a a trans former crack dealer who was conceive I ever met Chino. I'll never forget it.

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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.

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I spent years interviewing Chino.

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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 huge amount academic papers huge amount of journalism um and then I identify I drop what I call a talk to list so I just

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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

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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 interviews 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

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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 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

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When you're doing investigative interviews, are there different mantras that you've discovered in order to get good information out of people? Give you an example.

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Robert Caro, he always asks, "What would I see if I was there?

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What would I have seen if I was there?"

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And he just asks it over and over and over again.

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and he says that there's something about that question that brings out really good answers.

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Do you have something like that?

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I mean, I literally use that question because I've read Robert Car's brilliant book, Working, where he talks about his methods, but that I recommend to people.

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But for me, when I interview someone, I'm looking for a reason to love that person.

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If I I always start from a position of this person knows something I don't know.

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And that's whether they're a homeless person living in a tunnel underneath Vegas or a professor at Yale.

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They they've had a life I haven't had.

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They have a huge number of insights that I don't have.

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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.

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and different people, you need different methods.

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I I do believe people can tell if you like them and are curious about them and care about them and think they're important.

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And one of the ways you demonstrate their importance is you prepare thoroughly.

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You you go in knowing as much as you can know, but you you have to go in in in a spirit of radical openness.

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You want to be as open and as humble as as you can.

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And you you got to know why you're there, which is that they know more than you.

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I think a lot of people when you start out in journalism, and this was certainly true of me, you you're sort of interviewing for an angle, right?

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You think this and I want to use you to illustrate that.

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Um, and I I try now to to not go in with that psychology, but to just and I'm constantly surprised by people's eloquence and and brilliance.

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And and one thing I find is people will people are trying to figure out what tone and register in which to talk to you.

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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 they're I think they wouldn't react well to this.

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But I often do is I will lower myself.

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Sometimes I will physically lower myself like um like the last 14 years I've spent a lot of time in the tunnels underneath Las Vegas interviewing people for the book I'm just finishing now and I always physically sit down on the tunnel floor with them, right?

9:49

But that's a very literal way of expressing the kind of um attitude you want to take which is you never want to be I never want to be standing over people.

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So even people who there are times I go into interviews and I know I'm going to really morally disapprove of that person.

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I'll give you two obvious examples.

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Um, there's a guy called Sheriff Joe Araio, no longer a sheriff.

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He was the sheriff of Maricopa County for many years.

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Lots of people will know who I'm talking about.

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And he set up a series of um horrific prisons in in Arizona.

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I spent a lot of time in it's called Tent City or Estrella Prison was the official name of it.

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name of it. Um, 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

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they were made to go out on chain gangs wearing t-shirts saying I was a drug addict while members of the public jer at them and mock them and they're made to dig graves and um so Joe set this up clearly I'm horrified by what he's done, right? But if I go in, you know, you can

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But if I go in, you know, you can do a performance.

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There's the Philip Roth has this great phrase, the sanct the ecstasy of sanctimony, right?

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I can go in in an ecstasis 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.

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I didn't suspend my horror what he'd done.

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And I had seen these women he was monstrously um mis mistreating.

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But I because I don't believe in evil. There are evil acts.

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There are no evil people.

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People are the way they are because of reasons things that happened to them.

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I really wanted to understand what what what's going on here. Right.

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So Joe was the youngest of nine children.

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His parents were extremely devout uh Italian-American Catholics.

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And uh when his mother was pregnant with him, she was told that she had to have an abortion or she would die in childbirth.

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But anyway, they were like, they prayed and said, "No, no, that won't happen."

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And she did in fact die in childbirth.

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And Joe spent his entire childhood being attacked by his older siblings and his dad being told, "You killed our mother."

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Right now, when you know that, it doesn't excuse for a second anything Joe did, right?

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It doesn't excuse abusing these other women.

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But you're like, "Oh, the minute Joe told me that, I was like, okay." Right.

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Your founding story, you're you're kind of a murderer. Yeah.

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This reframes everything that I'm seeing right now.

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If I had gone in in a mode of listen you [ __ ] I'm here to tell you what a bad person you are.

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I would never have learned that.

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I would never have got that.

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It would have been I would have gone in feeling, you know, I would have left feeling sanctimoniously pleased.

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But I would have missed a key part of the reality.

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So for me, it's about openness, intellectual openness.

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What am I going to learn from you that I don't know?

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Yeah, it's experiential openness.

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What experiences have you had?

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And and a kind of moral openness actually about we live in a time of such severe moral judgment.

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It's actually the most of our public discourse is about saying no, you're the bad person, right?

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That essentially that's most of our the way we talk to each other now.

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And if you can set all that aside and go in in an in an open disposition, which is partly about asking very open-ended questions, you don't say, "Did you feel bad?"

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You say, "How did you feel?"

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Because actually, if you say, "How did you feel bad?"

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Often people go expect me to say I feel bad. Yes, I felt bad.

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But if you say, "How did you feel?"

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And they go, "I was surprisingly happy the day my mother died or whatever."

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Often you get very unexpected answers.

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So you want to guide and lead people as little as possible.

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You want to really demonstrate that you are listening to them.

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We we we live in a culture where people are profoundly lonely.

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I think the figure is 42% of Americans agree with the statement no one knows me well.

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So we live in a profoundly lonely and isolated culture. People are not heard.

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And even where where when people are talking very often they're uh they're sort of alternatingly monologuing. Yeah.

14:08

You know, I was once sitting in a a diner in Province Town and there were these two young guys next to me, maybe I think they're in their mid20s 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.

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They were like spoke for like two hours.

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They literally did not listen to each other at all.

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If they if they had been reading out each other's Facebook posts, one just read out his Facebook post, the next one read out his and just taken turns.

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They were just alternately monologuing.

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At one point, one of them mentioned, if I remember rightly, that his mother had died recently. Some relative.

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He didn't even go, "Oh, what happened to her?

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I'm so so we live in a culture where even when we're talking to each other, we're very often not listening."

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So, you want to really listen.

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You want to reflect on what people are saying.

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You want to tune in to what they're saying.

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Sometimes you want to challenge what they're saying.

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You want to say, "Look, I could be completely wrong about this. I'm just thinking."

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you want to speak provisionally rather than definitively.

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Um, as you say that, it makes me think rather than um you're wrong or whatever.

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Um, so there's a whole array, but but in a way you have to start with love and curiosity for people.

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So I think a lot of people when they interview, if they're not good at it, often the issue isn't technique.

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There are lots of techniques you can learn.

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and they're really important.

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But often it starts with a much more basic thing.

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Are you really interested in the person you're talking to?

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Do you know do you really know that they're wiser than you about so many things?

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And the truth is everyone is wiser than you about loads of things, right?

15:45

Like by definition you 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.

15:52

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.

16:04

Yeah, I think that's just a good thing to do.

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I think it's partly people can hear the voices of the people that I'm talking about.

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Obviously, part of your job as a writer is to convey people's voices, but I often think of my job as being like a concierge.

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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 concurge between you and this amazing person.

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The the moment that always makes me happiest when my book's 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."

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And that's the moment when I feel best because it's like, yeah, so, you know, there's um I mean, I give a really obvious example.

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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 a that my book really helped and my TED talk really helped popularize and um 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.

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I'm the connecting thread between you and the people that I get to know.

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Um, and I spend a lot of time with these people mostly, you know, keep going back.

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Often it's the eighth time you interview someone that they'll reveal something really important.

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Like at the moment, this book I'm finishing about, I've been working on a book for 14 years about Vegas. Yeah.

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A series of crimes that have been happening in Vegas.

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I'm not meant to talk too much about my publishers will taser me if I say too much about it.

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But the, you know, I just was 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.

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But you get a depth of knowledge about a person if you keep going back.

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I haven't just shown up once gone, thank you very much, I'm off now.

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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.

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And I think lots of people should know what you know.

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Um, so you're you're communicating to people not with your words.

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It's easy to communicate things with words, but with your actions and with your attention.

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And I go away and I really deeply think about what they tell me.

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Let's go back again to that moment when you were 14 and you were in the park.

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Just tell me again if we were making a movie about your life, what would the key scenes be? That's a good question.

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You know, um, what would the turning point?

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turning point? often I'll say what do you see in your mind when you picture that moment y right um but it's it's all about attunement and different people have different needs to be attuned to some people uh you know Chino you ask Chino a question and he's off and he's

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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 Changis um who began a protest movement that transformed Berlin um and is an absolute hero. But I remember the very first time

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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?

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Cuz her experience in Germany had been of many people treating her that way."

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So she actually needed to meet me a lot and she actually needed me to talk.

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Some people don't need you to talk at all and some people need you to talk a lot.

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for me for and very often I will I try to not speak very much unless they indicate they need me to speak.

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But usually what I will do at the start of an interview is explain why I care about this subject.

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So when when I was doing Chasing the Scream, I would 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 of trying to wake one of them up and not be able to, right?

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And the minute you say that, they get, okay, I see I know why you're here, right?

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Um, so usually I will start with some moment of emotional investment because I think that helps them to emotionally invest with me.

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Yeah, I've been interviewed by some journalists and I'm now realizing that I just don't trust them at the beginning.

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I don't trust them in a few ways, but the biggest the biggest one being I don't trust that they're going to represent my words fairly sometimes.

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And I think that that's 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.

20:40

And well that's another thing I do partly to for um to prevent that is with almost everyone I send them what I'm about to quote for them and I I don't give them quote approval.

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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?

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Do you think this is a fair represent?

20:59

You know did you were you misspeaking in that moment?

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Did you make a factual mistake?

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I don't always sometimes they'll go because sometimes people tell you the truth and they regret they told you the truth.

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So it's not giving them complete approval over it, but almost always you get something interesting in that process.

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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."

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And you know, there's there's all sorts of different things going on.

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So, but you always want to, again, it comes back to time as well.

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You want to give people the time and space to give the fullest possible representation themselves.

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But that's another thing I think about interviewing that's really, really important to me.

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You want to give people the space to be complex and contradictory.

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I'm not looking to tell the one underlying truth about you, which is some negative or indeed positive characteristic.

21:53

People are really complicated and people always surprise you, right? Or can surprise you.

21:57

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.

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I've interviewed people who've done terrible things and then one incredibly good thing.

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I've interviewed people who were wonderful and then [ __ ] up. Yeah.

22:19

And people who are everywhere in between, right?

22:20

There's a temptation when you're telling a story about someone to act like you've captured their essence, right?

22:25

But you want to give people the space to be complex, contradictory, ambiguous.

22:32

You want to be attentive to their complexity.

22:36

Especially, it's interesting that's partly true with people who are demonized, but also this is a dilemma at the moment with with the book I'm writing about Vegas.

22:46

So, um, some of the people I've been following for a very long time and who I've grown to really love are are homeless in Vegas.

22:55

And homeless people are so demonized, particularly at the moment in the US and and literally persecuted, the temptation is to sanitize them, right?

23:06

The temptation is to take them and go, you think these people are devils.

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In fact, they're angels, right?

23:14

But that's disrespecting them just as much, almost as much as if you present them as devils.

23:20

There's a great review that Pauline Kale, the great um critic for The New Yorker, wrote once.

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She was writing about a film I actually like much more than she did, but uh a great Australian film called Walkabout. Do you know this movie? It's amazing film. People should watch it.

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Um but it's it's about um two uh 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 um rescues them basically.

23:48

Um, but she said um, she says in this review, I think she's being actually unfair to the film, but she says that the 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?

24:04

and and demonization and uh valorization are equally to me untruthful or or or not untruthful but oversimplifications of human beings.

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So, with the the homeless people I'm writing about, particularly someone I really loved who was murdered.

24:24

Um, he was complicated and he had some absolutely remarkable qualities and 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 that's not according him the dignity of being who he was, right?

24:43

being who he was, right? It's not it's not and actually the way to respond to the oversimplified these people are demons is not with a parallel oversimplification is to say no let me show you this real person and if you met

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the real Tommy you would have liked him right um so but 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 mult as what Whitman said people contain multitudes they are Great. And

25:12

And and and you you have to allow that and accommodate that.

25:18

So as you now begin to think about structuring your books, you basically you end up with just so much content from your interviews.

25:25

How does all that come together?

25:27

So I have a very simple technique.

25:29

Um so you can just get overwhelmed by, you know, I generally have like a a wardrobe full of transcripts like longer than War and Peace, right?

25:39

What am I going to do with this?

25:40

I have a very simple technique.

25:42

Um, 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?

25:51

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.

26:01

But if you're just sitting opposite a person and 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.

26:11

So that's my first mode is actually that helps you filter out a lot of the unnecessary stuff.

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And so that's basically from memory.

26:20

It actually reminds me Jordan Peterson did this guide to writing essays 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.

26:35

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. Yeah.

26:45

Very few people get blocked when they speak.

26:47

Some people are chronically shy or whatever, but not many people, right?

26:51

But I think it's also comes back to what questions are you trying to answer?

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What story are you trying to tell? Right?

26:57

Once you're attuned to why am I telling this story? Why does it matter? Right?

27:03

If 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?

27:11

So, walk me through, let's talk about uh stolen focus.

27:16

So, walk me through the different questions there and give me the question and the answer.

27:20

They were pinned to my door for three years.

27:22

Let's see if I can remember them. That's great.

27:24

Is our attention really getting worse? If it is, why? Who is doing this to us? How do we fix it?

27:34

Where in the world is fixing it? I want to go see them.

27:36

I think those are my questions. Something like that.

27:38

So, you're writing with those questions in mind.

27:40

You're saying, "All right, I'm always 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?"

27:53

And the key, you know, there's that famous writing advice from F.

27:56

Scott Fitzgerald, kill your darlings.

27:58

And he was saying, "Kill the most beautiful things you write."

28:02

I actually would I would tighten his advice.

28:04

For me, kill anything that isn't serving the questions you're asking and the story you're telling.

28:12

What you put into your book is not the most interesting stuff you found out.

28:16

It's not the most lyrically written stuff that you managed to produce.

28:18

It's not even um the the best insights.

28:20

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. M.

28:28

And then when do you write those?

28:31

Do you write them before you start writing the book?

28:33

Before they literally they are the basis for the book, right?

28:35

They're they're what I they're the reason I write the book.

28:38

For me, the best way to represent an intellectual journey is to turn it into an actual physical journey, right?

28:47

Partly because that is actually how I learn the stuff, right?

28:48

So the things I learned about attention for stolen focus, I didn't learn them sitting in my apartment.

28:56

I learned them by going on this big journey all over the world from, you know, New Zealand to Iceland to to MIT, right?

29:06

Um, so my promise is here's a question we both share.

29:11

Um, I don't know the answer.

29:11

you don't know the answer.

29:14

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.

29:27

What did you change about your life and your writing after writing stolen focus and realizing we just all of the attention span of sidewalk pigeons?

29:38

Well, pigeons are probably ahead of us by this point.

29:40

Um, the uh well, so much.

29:43

I mean I mean I wrote it because I could feel my own attention was getting much worse.

29:47

Um so I do loads of things.

29:47

I have something in my office called a K safe. It's plastic safe. You take off the lid. You put in your phone. You put on the lid. You turn the dial. Push the button. Locks your phone away.

29:57

Anything between 5 minutes and a whole day.

30:00

I use that for eight hours a day.

30:02

I would not be able to finish my book about Las Vegas if I did not own a caseafe.

30:05

You know, I look that up.

30:06

It's clear, too, which makes it really, you know, you're like looking at your phone right there.

30:12

Like, they don't even give you the dignity of having like a a wooden box or something.

30:16

You just got to look at your phone right there.

30:17

The torment is if you forget to switch it off as well.

30:19

You can see your text coming in. It's like torture. Um, I do that.

30:22

I have on my synced to my phone and my uh laptop an app called Freedom, which can cut you off either from specific websites.

30:31

Let's say you were addicted to eBay or Pornhub or Instagram, whatever it might be.

30:36

You just say, "Don't let me onto those websites for the next um 5 minutes, whole day, whatever it is."

30:43

I have it renews every day.

30:43

I have social media permanently blocked on all my devices.

30:47

If I want to do a social media post, I send it to my assistant. She does it for me.

30:50

Um so, uh Kay Freedom, but there's lots of more subtle um changes.

30:57

One is about mind wandering.

31:02

So there's this really fascinating science of mind wandering.

31:04

Mind wandering is when you let your thoughts float without an obvious object.

31:09

You don't have a podcast to listen to or a book to read or whatever.

31:12

And mind wandering has been really squeezed out of our heart.

31:16

Just any people will be listening to this with their heads on. Look around you.

31:20

How many people are just mind wandering? Right?

31:21

We've always to some degree demonized minding.

31:23

If you go to your kids's parents evening and they say, "Little Johnny, his mind wanders a lot."

31:28

That would not be a compliment, right?

31:30

But we've we've really driven it out of our lives.

31:32

And it and we think of it as like an indulgence.

31:35

But actually, when I interviewed the leading experts on this and read a lot of the science, um it's totally fascinating.

31:40

Um so when our minds are wondering, turns out we're doing crucial functions.

31:46

You are making sense of the past.

31:50

You are anticipating the future.

31:55

and you are combining ideas that are otherwise disconnected in your mind.

31:58

And that's actually basically what creativity is, combining previously uncombbined ideas or a crucial component of creativity.

32:05

So one of the things I do is every day no matter where I am in the world, I leave my phone at home.

32:10

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.

32:20

and it resets me and it makes sense of the day before and it anticipates the day to come.

32:25

So yeah, I mean I could go through a million other things but there are huge number of changes I made because of that.

32:31

And do you find that you're usually working through writing projects?

32:34

No, I sometimes I set out on the walk with a very specific like how am I going to write about that?

32:39

How am I going to help my friend who's got this problem or whatever.

32:43

But I actually try to not do that.

32:45

I really try to just engage in actual minding.

32:48

Now, that can be difficult when you feel anxious because mind wandering can easily flip into rumination.

32:52

Uh, which is very unpleasant.

32:54

It's one of the reasons why we're so afraid of mind wandering.

32:58

Rumination is quite is an unpleasant sensation.

33:02

Um, but again, that can be a useful indicator.

33:04

Oh, I'm not in a pleasant mind wandering state. I'm ruminating. What's wrong?

33:08

Oh, I've got to solve this problem, right?

33:11

I've got to resolve that.

33:13

So, yeah, that that but that's been a a really big change.

33:16

I got to tell you, when you're in Vegas, not easy to walk around for an hour without devices in Vegas.

33:21

Like people are just baffled, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

33:25

Not if you're close to the strip.

33:25

What do you think has allowed like your book hit rate is very high?

33:30

Feel like you're four for four.

33:32

And what has allowed that to happen? Yeah.

33:34

No, my books have done I'm very lucky my books have um resonated with lots of people.

33:39

Um I think it's been a combination of factors.

33:44

Um, you're pushing me to do an unbritish thing, which is big myself up.

33:48

But yeah, us Americans love to do that.

33:50

I think it the key reason is because I I'm asking questions that really matter to people.

33:55

Um, I'm going on a good faith journey to try to genuinely figure out what's going on.

34:01

I explain and integrate my doubts, which is a really important part of writing we might want to talk about.

34:05

Um, and also I think and it relates to another bit of writing advice I have.

34:12

A lot of people think intelligence is making simple things sound complicated and fancy.

34:21

True intelligence is about making complicated things comprehensible to everyone.

34:25

And this is partly rooted in my biography, right?

34:26

I was raised by my grandmother mostly who left school when she was 13.

34:30

Um my parents both left school when they were 15. Okay.

34:32

I got to go to this like fancy university, but I was from a you know, my dad was a bus driver.

34:37

My my mother was a nurse.

34:37

So I think I 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."

34:47

But um I grew up a kind of democratic spirit, right?

34:51

Who do I want to talk to?

34:53

I want to talk to people like my grandmother.

34:54

My grandmother was the best people, one of the best people I ever knew, right?

34:56

An absolutely incredible woman.

34:58

What the thing that most pleases me in 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."

35:08

People say, "I understood what you were saying."

35:11

Um, and how many people say you changed my mind, which I really like because um, I think people can tell I'm not coming at it in a tribal judgy way.

35:20

Tell me about the doubt thing.

35:22

So, when you are writing, you inevitably experience doubt, all sorts of doubts.

35:31

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.

35:42

You think you'll be less persuasive or less compelling if you're doubtful.

35:47

In fact, what I found is exactly the opposite is the truth.

35:49

Um, I can't remember who said this, but someone said, um, sometimes the reason not to write your essay should be the subject of your essay.

35:59

When I experience doubt, what I do is I candidly confess it to the reader, right?

36:04

I'm like, actually, I'm afraid of even if just go if you're afraid of writing something but for a reason, like this will be too self-exposing or just say to the reader, I am afraid of writing this cuz I think it'll be too self-exposing. Right? That's funny.

36:16

I was working on a piece yesterday and this was I I came in talking to my editor and I was super blocked on it and I realized that the 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.

36:29

So I got blocked on it for some time.

36:31

The truth was actually that thing.

36:33

So now I'm going to break the fourth wall.

36:34

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.

36:39

And it was like it was like the Red Sea had been parted for me.

36:43

I think that's so important what you just said there because the when you are blocked that contains wisdom.

36:47

We demonize writer's block.

36:50

Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh I've got writer block as if you've caught as if you've caught you know malaria or something.

36:54

You if you're if you are blocked there is a reason why you are blocked.

36:58

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 um material.

37:06

Sometimes it's that you sense that what you're saying is inauthentic. Yeah. And you have to confess.

37:09

I'm trying to give an example where I confess my give you an example in chasing the screen when I obviously part of what I was writing is that the war on drugs has been a catastrophe. It has not worked.

37:20

It's in fact made addiction worse and caused all sorts of terrible problems.

37:25

And I knew that Portugal had decriminalized all drugs. Mh.

37:31

And I was putting off going to Portugal.

37:34

I was kind of blocked around. I was this is weird. Why? Why am I doing this?

37:35

And I realized I was afraid, what if I go to Portugal and that didn't work either?

37:41

This will be the most depressing [ __ ] book in the world because I'll be saying, well, nothing works then, right?

37:45

And actually, as it happens, Portugal was an incredible success.

37:48

But I thought, oh, I should just tell the reader that, right?

37:52

That's that's an interesting insight, right?

37:54

Um, so the more you can confess your doubt and the more you can say, I don't know. We we it's interesting.

38:00

We think that the persuasive person is the highly confident Hey guys, I got the truth for you.

38:07

You know, I figured it all out. Listen to me.

38:11

Um, and you know, some people find that persuasive, but far it's actually far more persuasive to go, I'm not sure about this.

38:18

Let me tell you my thought process.

38:20

Let me tell you what I learned. This might be right. That might be right.

38:23

We all have to make decisions in a circumstances of uncertainty. Right?

38:28

Um, we all have to make circumstances where it's very rare we make a decision when we're 100% sure.

38:31

It's an easy decision if it's 100% sure what's going to happen next.

38:35

Very rarely does that happen in your life, right?

38:37

We make decisions in circumstance of uncertainty.

38:40

We all live with uncertainty.

38:42

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 capacity partly because I'm not here to tell you the answer, right? I'm here to think.

38:55

One of my favorite writers, Jermaine Greer, amazing Australian feminist who I know slightly, said, "You know, all I want in my writing is to make you think." Yeah.

39:04

I mean, the the thing that is comes to mind for me as a heristic is that you you just always tell the truth.

39:13

And the thing is once you realize that that's your heristic, if you start talking to people, you actually realize that you're afraid of telling the truth in all sorts of ways.

39:20

either you don't like how the truth makes you look.

39:21

Uh you don't like um with the Portugal thing, you were maybe afraid of finding the truth.

39:27

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.

39:32

And I just notice when I actually write the truth, it just comes out.

39:38

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 can kind of come out.

39:48

I think that's exactly right.

39:50

Know that when you're blocked, there's a wisdom in that.

39:53

Try to tune into that wisdom.

39:56

Write out the nature of your doubt.

39:59

Write out the nature of your uncertainty.

40:01

Level with the reader about why.

40:04

Well, actually, this a really interesting question is how do you write through writer's block? Right?

40:08

So, if you're blocked and you have the Portugal problem, how do you actually uncover that faster?

40:12

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.

40:18

You actually get a little sick.

40:20

You're like there's something off here.

40:21

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.

40:36

Like a lot of the time for for my books I uh I mean I'm lucky I've got friends who are interested in stuff I'm interested in.

40:42

um and are really wise people.

40:45

But very often I just sit with my friends and I record the conversation uh and I just go something not right.

40:49

I mean my most recent book, Magic Pill, a lot of that book is just um you know is punctuated with conversations I had with my friends where especially since in that case because that was about the new weight loss drugs.

41:05

I had friends who had really I had friends who were really in favor of them and friends who were really angry with me for taking ompic.

41:10

Your friends often know you better than you do.

41:13

We assume that we know ourselves, right?

41:15

There's a fantastic book I recommend everyone read called Strangers to Ourselves by Timothy Wilson, a guy I interviewed and you should definitely talk to him.

41:21

A classic of psychology, um, which is about he's done loads of experiments that demonstrate you do not know why you do the things you do.

41:28

And the stories you have in your head about why you do the things you do are usually wrong. Right?

41:33

In the OMIC book, it was about trying to think through the new weight loss drugs.

41:37

I was taking them and I was trying to and and I was stuck in this frame of weighing the health benefits of the drugs versus the health risks of the drugs.

41:46

And I've got a friend who um is I'll tell you she's not overweight because you otherwise you might think something else was going on there who normally I discuss my books with load.

41:57

She's great and she was pissed with me while I was working on this book.

42:01

She was just tur and irritable.

42:03

One day she was in London. We were both in London.

42:04

We went for dinner and I was talking about oh this dilemma in the book the health benefits versus the health risk.

42:10

She said I can't listen to another [ __ ] word of this.

42:13

She said and I'm like what?

42:15

She said level with yourself.

42:15

You keep saying oh it's all about health benefits health risk.

42:18

I'm sure that's part of your concern but you want to look better.

42:22

Like this is about vanity.

42:25

Level with yourself right?

42:25

Level with yourself right? don't give me this [ __ ] about oh heart disease you know um you know she was underestimating the health issues but but it was a moment of like oh yeah and I needed I 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 but probably but I broke it much quicker

42:44

so just talk with your friends record your friends on voice notes argue with your friends you know 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 a 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. Shut up.

42:59

You just want to look better.

43:01

You know, there's really something to that.

43:02

But the other thing that really stands out about like your topic selection is just very good.

43:06

And you know, if you talk to entrepreneurs, a lot of them people have started multiple companies will say, "Yeah, you know, the team matters, the product matters, but like you know what I really think about more and more?

43:17

I think about the market that I'm going to pursue.

43:18

What is the market going to be and how do I find a good market?"

43:21

And if you get the market right, then a lot of other things work out well.

43:24

And I see the same thing in terms of what you've chosen, right?

43:26

You have books like Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections where it's like, okay, look, we got a social problem here.

43:31

We have depression and we have drug addiction all over the place. What is going on?

43:38

Then we have other books like the magic pill where there's basically two factions.

43:43

There's like yes, you should take Ozmpic, no, you shouldn't take OMPic, and both of them can be religious.

43:49

And you can kind of come in and say, okay, there's going to be a lot of conversation about this book.

43:52

And as I think about a kind of topic selection, if you're doing non-fiction work, I would look for one of those.

43:59

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?

44:05

So, I think I'm lucky that I it's not like I really want to write about the history of beekeeping in Syria and but for commercial reasons I write about addiction or um those are the things that interest me.

44:18

me. I mean I am working on other projects that I've been for the last 14 years I've been also researching a biography of Nam Chosky the great American intellectual who I've got to know very well and uh I'd be very surprised if that's a New York Times

44:30

bestseller or anything but that's a real passion project thing I believe is really important so I do have some less commercial uh ideas but I think my instincts are generally pretty I I tend to like whatever song is number one in the charts. I tend to like

44:43

I tend to like whatever is the most watched show on television.

44:46

I mean, I have much more obscure interests as well. Say you're basic.

44:49

I've got Yeah, I've got pretty, you know, like a friend of mine who knows that I love how much I love country music said like basically all your core arguments could be expressed in a country song.

44:58

And I was like, that's actually a really good point.

45:01

I've recently spent three months in in Jamaica in a small fishing village in Jamaica.

45:04

And one of the I love Jamaica more than anything, but uh one of the really surreal things about Jamaica is they have this bizarre form of cultural appropriation where they love country.

45:15

Like so they they they either listen to like reggae or country and it's like this it's bizarre.

45:18

You'll go to like this tiny little bar in a fishing village and they'll be like singing 9 to5.

45:23

It's I love country music.

45:23

I actually really like the writing of country music too because it is so relatable. It's so relatable.

45:29

You know, it just does a great job with these stories. It's not complicated.

45:33

And I think that a lot of times as uh as writers, we just forget how simple writing that resonates can be.

45:40

I remember before my my first TED talk um listening to loads of country music and like um and and trying to think how how h how would this you know if Tommy Wette was writing this how would she do it right and it did really help unlock it for me.

45:58

Um yeah now tell me about your editing because you must be just doing a preposterous amount of editing on these books.

46:05

So I have a a sort of uh set pattern with editing.

46:09

So, I write the book from beginning to end.

46:11

I I don't write it out of sequence.

46:14

Sometimes I change the order after I've written it, but I don't 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.

46:25

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.

46:32

I try not to even think about it.

46:34

Then I come back, I print it all out.

46:34

I cuz nor up to then it's been on a screen and physically I go through it.

46:40

Uh and usually I'm crossing out bits I'm like oh my god.

46:44

You know the writer Will Self once said to me the biggest challenge of writing is managing your nausea at what you've produced.

46:50

And you're like oh my god I should just be shot. This is terrible.

46:54

Uh so you're cutting generally you're cutting cutting cutting.

46:56

You're like oh wait this doesn't fit with that.

46:59

Oh wait there's an unanswered question here.

47:01

Oh wait I So then I rewrite on the page.

47:05

Then I print it out again. I do the same process.

47:08

Then after editing again, I read it on my um phone just because it's a different format.

47:13

You just see it differently. It's a weird thing. I read it on my phone. Then I rewrite again.

47:18

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.

47:24

Um they always have interesting thoughts.

47:27

Um I send it to my actual editors who are brilliant.

47:33

Uh and then I rewrite it again.

47:36

Then I read the stuff to the people I've written about uh or send them the stuff um and I rewrite it again and then it goes back to my editors and then it's done apart from the cop and then fact checking and copy editing. Huh. Okay.

47:48

And what sort of heruristics do you use when editing?

47:50

Like what are you looking for?

47:52

You looking for what makes you bored?

47:53

Like what's going on there?

47:53

The single most important thing for me by far is clarity, emotional connection, uh answering the questions I set up at the start.

48:03

Oo, tell me about emotional connection.

48:05

I've got a friend called Dave Fleer, an amazing man.

48:06

He ran the Los Angeles LGBT uh center, a key part of it for a long time.

48:12

And they did this really interesting work called deep canvasing where they persuade people to change their minds.

48:17

And I won't go into detail of it.

48:18

I'm going to write about it at some point.

48:19

But um the first thing they do, they they had this realization if you want to change someone's mind, don't start by arguing with them.

48:25

You start by making an emotional connection.

48:29

So after the gay marriage initiative was struck down by the um voted down in California before obviously the Supreme Court rendered that irrelevant um they just went out all over California just turned up to talk to people about about it and they developed

48:47

this brilliant technique where instead of talking about gay rights they shouldn't talk about 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 5

49:00

And they would often talk about it for 5 10 minutes and then they go, "That that must have been awful."

49:03

And they go, "We're here to talk about the gay marriage ballot."

49:06

And the thing about if you've emotionally connected with people, they will go on a long journey with you.

49:12

But until you've made that emotional connection, it's much harder.

49:15

There's another group of people who made me think about this a lot.

49:16

Um the group of French brilliant professors called Sperber and Mercier.

49:22

So, we always say like, oh, people aren't good at comparing facts or weighing facts, right?

49:28

We're living in this time facts don't matter, right?

49:29

Actually, when people are on juries, they take facts really seriously.

49:35

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 quitting, right?

49:45

We And so they're trying to figure out, well, why is it that we take evidence so seriously there, but not say in the political realm?

49:49

political realm? M 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 a murderer goes to prison and a bad thing if an innocent man goes to

50:05

prison everyone right 100% agreement on that 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 going to be good at weighing evidence right so my goal is when I'm writing is a to take that insight from Dave in the LA LGBT center. Have you emotionally

50:21

Have you emotionally connected with me?

50:24

It's why all my books begin with a moment of vulnerability of some kind, right?

50:27

U lost lost connections begins with a moment I nearly died, right?

50:30

Um begin with a moment of vulnerability. We bond.

50:36

Then we establish a shared goal.

50:38

Okay, we all think it's a good thing if there's less addiction.

50:40

We all think it's a good thing if there's less depression.

50:42

We all think it's a good thing if people can focus in the world.

50:45

Okay, now we can go forth and weigh the evidence and listen to the stories.

50:47

But until we've done those two things, it's gonna be much harder for us to do that.

50:52

Well, one of the things that I've noticed it works well, but I kind of find it annoying.

50:58

It's a bit of a trope is you see this structure in non-fiction 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 are some scientific studies that prove that out.

51:13

They bring those two things together.

51:15

you kind of have a final analysis, a nice clean wrap-up at the end, then the next chapter does the same thing.

51:21

And given that that there's something clearly effective about that, but there's also something ioly 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?

51:34

It's a really important question, something I've thought about a lot.

51:37

I think there's several things.

51:37

So for me in in my writing, every insight needs to be earned by a story, right?

51:45

If I just tell you the war on drugs was created for racist reasons.

51:52

Okay, you might intellectually be persuaded that if I tell you the story of Billy Holiday and how she was stalked and killed by Harry Anne Slinger, the man who launched the war on drugs, which is how I open Chasing the Scream, that story will land with you in a much more powerful way than if I just tell you this abstract insight. Right?

52:07

Every insight has to be earned by a story.

52:09

But I think the way you make that not pat and glib and propagandistic is you tell a truthfully complicated and ambiguous story.

52:18

Do I present Billy Holiday as some magical saint who did everything right in her life? No. That would not be true.

52:26

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.

52:39

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?

52:49

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.

52:58

You know many years I was a newspaper columnist when I was very young.

53:01

Um, and when I was a newspaper job columnist, my job was to persuade people, right?

53:05

You're a newspaper columnist, you're meant to stand above them and tell them what to think, right?

53:11

It's particularly ridiculous that I was doing that when I was like 22 years old.

53:13

But but it's even when someone's 60, it's mildly irritating, but um that's not my job with my books.

53:20

I I find it pleasing when people read Stolen Focus and are in favor of say regulating social media companies.

53:27

But if you read my books and you came to a different conclusion, that'd be a perfectly legitimate expression of the journey, right?

53:32

Um, I'm not here to persuade you, right?

53:35

I'm here to convey the complex reality and encourage you to think about it with me.

53:43

Now, if you come to the same conclusion as me, that's delightful.

53:44

Then we can build political coalitions for change.

53:48

But if you come to different conclusions to me, that's a completely legitimate reading of my book. Right.

53:51

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?

54:09

I think there was a tension in my early career.

54:12

So, from when I was like 21 to when I was 31, I did two kinds of writing.

54:20

I wrote newspaper columns.

54:20

writing. I wrote newspaper columns. So op-ed columns and that was a much more influential thing then because there weren't so many pe now everyone has an opinion we have social media we're all arguing all the time but at that time that was it was actually not that many people in the public sphere were putting

54:33

forward arguments so I did that and in 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

54:54

I would go to Dubai or the war in the Congo or uh Israel and the Palestinian territories, whatever it might be.

55:01

And I remember that the first time I went to Israel and the Palestinian territories, I was in pmical mode, as most people are when it comes to Israel, Palestine.

55:14

Um and I realized quite early on in being there that it was blocking me from seeing what was in front of me. Yes.

55:21

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 your own the thing you came with, it you're actually not really being present or perceiving reality at all.

55:45

Um, and and as I was doing these 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.

56:00

You don't want to be the [ __ ] 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.

56:10

that is just not I was raised in an environment with too many conflicting views to want to be that person. Right?

56:16

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.

56:34

It doesn't mean there aren't of course there are things I want to change.

56:37

There are things I believe in.

56:38

All of my books end with things I would like people to do and things I'd like us to fight for.

56:43

But yeah, I'm not I don't think I'm arguing with the world anywhere near as much.

56:51

I think I'm sort of listening and absorbing and um especially at a time when just everyone is screaming at everyone else.

57:00

I just do not want to be part of that. Yeah. Yeah.

57:03

It's just not productive.

57:05

It's not a good way to spend got very limited amount of time on earth.

57:08

It doesn't even persuade anyone.

57:09

It doesn't even achieve its goals. Yeah.

57:11

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.

57:24

And my favorite analogy for this, it's how I always think about information consumption is the the current in the wind.

57:31

So, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area.

57:33

And if you talk to someone who sails there, um, they're always looking at the currents.

57:37

The San Francisco Bay has currents that are far more forceful than the winds.

57:42

Now, the winds are prominent, don't get me wrong.

57:43

You're, you know, if you're sailing, you you want to know what the winds are doing on any given day, but actually the currents you can really predict.

57:50

They sort of show up over time.

57:52

And if the currents are going against you, you're not going to the Pacific Ocean.

57:56

And coming back, you're not getting back into the bay.

58:00

The currents are that definitive.

58:00

And I think that a lot of the problem with most modern journalism is it's so focused on the winds.

58:06

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.

58:15

What are the things that are underneath the surface that a lot of people are missing?

58:18

And I actually think that you end up with a much more accurate picture of reality.

58:21

I think that's really interesting and astute.

58:25

Most people's opinions, not all, but most people's opinions are expressions of deeper needs, narratives, wants, and you're much better off addressing the deeper need.

58:44

you know, um 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 you an example.

58:57

Well, I love what you said, right?

58:58

The opposite of addiction isn't soiety.

59:00

It's it's it's connection, right?

59:02

That's that's that's exactly what you're getting at there. Yeah.

59:06

I'll never forget a woman, give you an example.

59:09

I never forget a woman I met with Dave Flea, the guy from the LA LGBT Center who I mentioned.

59:17

It was just before the 2016 election and the LA LGBT Center is a nonpartisan organization.

59:22

They don't campaign for specific candidates, but they were there to get out the vote.

59:28

And we were in Cleveland in West Cleveland in an area that was just devastated.

59:34

It was like parts of Detroit, you know.

59:35

We wanted 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.

59:42

And we knocked on this door and there was a a woman, I'll never forget her.

59:48

I thought from looking at her, she was like 65 from talking to her.

59:51

I realized she was the same age as me.

59:53

She had a really hard life. She very smart woman.

59:57

And we're trying to persuade her to vote and she uh was really angry.

1:00:06

Um, and 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.

1:00:16

And she said, not great for me, right?

1:00:19

And she said this thing, I've never forgotten it.

1:00:24

She was describing what the area used to be like for her parents and grandparents and uh how they got jobs when they left school when they were 16. They had good lives.

1:00:33

And she meant to say when I was young, but what she actually said is when I was alive.

1:00:39

And I remember and Dave looked at each other and it sort of knocked me back.

1:00:43

And I thought that's how she feels.

1:00:45

She feels like she has died.

1:00:47

And her basic psychological needs and many of her actual physical needs are not being met.

1:00:56

I would feel like that if I was her, right?

1:00:57

Um, and I well understand why her response would say, "Well, [ __ ] burn it down then." Right?

1:01:02

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.

1:01:11

You're missing the point entirely.

1:01:12

You're completely missing the point, right?"

1:01:13

Um, and so much of our discourse is at that level that you're just missing the point.

1:01:18

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's not true. She's not dumb.

1:01:30

I saw no evidence she was racist.

1:01:32

But also it's it's it's cruel.

1:01:34

Um but also it it makes the problem worse, right?

1:01:37

Um 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.

1:01:51

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 Carol has the map territory distinction from Alice in Wonderland. Sure.

1:02:02

And a lot of what ends up happening is we argue at the level of the the map at the level of abstractions.

1:02:08

And what you literally do is you're like, I get that the territory or I get that the map is saying this.

1:02:17

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 and 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.

1:02:28

By the way, people who want to think about that analogy more, there's an amazing novel by Michelle Wbeck, the French novelist called the map and the territory.

1:02:35

But um you know there's um 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?

1:02:50

Well, when I was a teenager, I was quite depressed.

1:02:52

In fact, it was cuz I in my case there are many causes of depression.

1:02:56

Uh I had experienced some absolutely horrendous things when I was a child.

1:03:02

Um, and I went to my doctor who's a very nice person.

1:03:05

And my doctor said, "We know why people feel like this.

1:03:09

Some people are lacking a chemical called serotonin in their brains.

1:03:10

You're clearly one of them.

1:03:12

All you need to do is drug yourself."

1:03:14

And I took a an anti-depressant called Paxil um or Serox. It's the same thing.

1:03:18

Made me feel a bit better for a while.

1:03:20

Then I felt terrible again.

1:03:21

Then they gave me a higher dose.

1:03:22

And I was taking higher and higher doses for years and years.

1:03:24

Um, and I still felt terrible because in my case, I had been given the wrong story about my pain.

1:03:30

It's not to say anti-depressants don't help some people.

1:03:33

Chemical antipressants, they do help some people.

1:03:34

And anyone listening, if you are being helped by them, my advice is to carry on taking them.

1:03:37

But I was told a ludicrously oversimplified story about my pain.

1:03:42

And what it meant is that I I was follow it's like having an inaccurate map of your pain.

1:03:46

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.

1:03:55

Um so you know there's the the poet Muriel Reichkesme said uh the world isn't made of atoms the world is made of stories.

1:04:03

Oh that's a great 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.

1:04:18

and helping people to tell more complex and nuanced stories is my job, right?

1:04:22

But it's the job of all of us to to tell deeper and more complicated stories.

1:04:27

But that can be a very painful process, right?

1:04:29

If I think about that story I was told by my doctor, I experienced great comfort in that. Right?

1:04:34

You've been told why you feel the way you do. Great.

1:04:37

The fact that story didn't work for me. Okay.

1:04:38

But I was still very committed to it for a long time.

1:04:42

And I was very disconcerted and angered by the more complicated story for a long time as well.

1:04:46

So we need to be attentive to how adjusting stories is not easy.

1:04:51

Can be very very hard for people.

1:04:53

The more accurate your map, the better you can find your way out.

1:04:57

So now as we begin to wrap, like how much do you think about style?

1:05:00

The style of your writing, reading for style, uh mimicking other people's style.

1:05:06

How do you think about the sort of poetry and artistry of your words?

1:05:10

It's really important to me.

1:05:10

I I I think a lot about primarily clarity and just like I was saying like all insights have to be earned by a story.

1:05:20

For me, lyricism has to be earned by the story you're telling.

1:05:26

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.

1:05:33

One of my probably my favorite writer, George Simon, the great French um novelist, a complete genius.

1:05:39

If anyone watching, if you have not, have you read him? No. Oh my god.

1:05:42

He's I was going to send you some of his books. He's an absolute genius.

1:05:45

You can start anywhere, but there's a If anyone hasn't read him, I would recommend starting with um either Red Lights or Muland Vanishes.

1:05:49

But um he said in his editing process, I go through and I strike out everything that sounds like writing, right?

1:05:57

Like so for me, clarity is absolutely the most important thing.

1:06:04

Um clarity and keeping you with me in the story.

1:06:06

um and not standing above you.

1:06:09

Um but yeah, that those are really important things to me.

1:06:15

But so my style, this is a very pretentious thing to say, but uh I think I've been unpretentious so far, so let's hope I've earned it.

1:06:22

Um I hope my style is an expression of my underlying philosophy, which is democratic, clear, um and attuned to people's emotional realities and needs. Right?

1:06:34

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.

1:06:46

There are so many moments I think of that emotional connection and clarity in my work.

1:06:50

So I hope those are the moments when I let myself be lyrical because I feel that the people I'm writing about have led the reader to to that feeling that that is earned.

1:06:57

But yeah, so for me style is very important and the single most important things 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.

1:07:10

I think my obsession with clarity is partly rooted in my early childhood as well.

1:07:16

So I had a my dad's from Switzerland.

1:07:17

My dad did not speak good English when I was a child.

1:07:19

So he um and he's a very strange person anyway.

1:07:21

But um very often he literally didn't understand what people were saying and I was translating for him.

1:07:26

My mother is from a working-class Scottish background, but we were living here in London um in a class environment that was quite alien to her.

1:07:35

She was from a quite poor background.

1:07:36

We were in a kind of middle- class area.

1:07:38

So, in Britain, there's a real translation between classes.

1:07:41

So, and I always had this weird little posh voice.

1:07:43

I was like Stewie from Family Guy right the moment of birth. I don't know why.

1:07:46

And my grandmother was from a very working who basically raised me was from a very poor background.

1:07:53

So I think all the time I was aware there's these people who don't quite understand how this stuff works.

1:07:57

So all the time I was translating between these people and this understanding and and and realizing oh I can figure out how this works even if they can't.

1:08:06

Um, 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?

1:08:19

When people are speaking past each other, I I find it almost literally intolerable and you want to go.

1:08:26

A number of times in public, I want to trust and go, "No, he's not saying that.

1:08:30

what he actually means is, you know, um I always have the image of like a layered cake and one person's talking at this layer and the other person's talking on this layer.

1:08:39

And I mean that's that's why we get the metaphor talking past each other because they're just not talking about the same thing.

1:08:48

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 uh 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 the same point.

1:09:10

Often the way to get there is through a moment of vulnerability.

1:09:19

It's a very powerful thing to make yourself vulnerable in public.

1:09:23

Um so for example, I open my book Lost Connections with this moment.

1:09:29

It's a weird moment for me, but um I was in Vietnam researching my biography of Nam Chosky and I was interviewing survivors of the Vietnam War and people he knew in Vietnam.

1:09:39

And while I was there, I um one day I was so tired and I I was in an alleyway and I bought an apple and I I thought, "Oh, I'm a good a good tourist. I know the rules.

1:09:50

I'll you um you you wash it in bottled water, right?" And I and a bit into it.

1:09:55

I was so tired in the hotel.

1:09:56

Um and I thought, "This tastes weird." But I still ate it. Right. Oh, yikes.

1:10:00

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.

1:10:05

You have to cut the peel off. Oh, wow. I didn't know that.

1:10:08

I woke up the next day like the girl in The Exorcist.

1:10:10

I was like projectile vomiting like was [ __ ] everywhere. It was horrific. Right.

1:10:14

Basically, I spent four days lying in bed um watching CNN.

1:10:20

I still associate Anderson Cooper's face with vomiting.

1:10:22

Um and uh and it got to the fourth day and I was still really sick and I phoned Hang my translator and fixer who was arranging all my interviews and I said, "Look, I haven't got much more time in Vietnam.

1:10:31

My flight's in a few days.

1:10:33

We've just got to go and do these interviews, right?

1:10:36

I'll just take a load of Emodium. Well, let's just do it.

1:10:37

So, he drove me like 5 miles out of Hanoi into the countryside and uh we went to interview this woman.

1:10:46

So, she was an if I remember rightly, she was like a 91y old woman.

1:10:50

She was the only woman in her village who with her children survived the war, right?

1:10:54

So, I'm sitting there in her in her heart and I'm interviewing her. She was fascinating.

1:10:58

And as she was speaking, never happened to me before or since, it literally felt like the room was rotating around me. Whoa.

1:11:05

And all of a sudden, I started to vomit and [ __ ] all over this poor old woman's heart, right?

1:11:11

And I literally just collapsed and was just like gone, right?

1:11:13

And I and and I said to Hang, "Put me in the car.

1:11:21

We'll drive back to Hanoi."

1:11:21

And this woman said through him, she said, "He's really sick.

1:11:26

You need to take him to the hospital."

1:11:27

And I said, "No, no, take me to Hanoi."

1:11:29

And Huang said, "Yo, this is the only woman who survived the Vietnam War in this village.

1:11:34

I'm going to listen to high health and buy something else.

1:11:37

We're going to the [ __ ] hospital. Right.

1:11:38

So, we went to the hospital.

1:11:38

He completely lied to them and said I was like some really important western who had to survive.

1:11:42

Um and uh as I was lying there and I felt so nauseous.

1:11:47

I said to this doctor, "Give me something for the please give me something for the nausea to take this nausea away." Yeah.

1:11:55

And the doctor said to me, you need your nausea.

1:11:59

It will tell us what's wrong with you.

1:12:02

And I remember even lion thinking, huh, that's that's a really interesting insight, right?

1:12:07

And I was like, I'm going to die.

1:12:09

I'll never get to write about it.

1:12:10

And anyway, it turned out what happened is um because I had retained no water in my body for like 5 days, I I was literally I was like a person in the desert who'd had no water.

1:12:19

I was my kidneys had stopped working.

1:12:21

And I remember um I remember thinking as I was lying there, oh, I've been killed by a poisoned apple. I'm like Snow White. I'm like Alan Turing. I'm like, "Eve."

1:12:32

And then I was like, I was going to say that's literally the oldest story in the book.

1:12:36

But then I thought, you're about to die and your last thought is that you're a pretentious [ __ ] Screw you.

1:12:43

Anyway, and I remember when I was leaving the hospital, I said to this guy, the doctor, lovely man, um, what would have happened if Wang had driven me back to Hanoi, and he said, "Oh, your kidneys have stopped working.

1:12:55

You would have died on the way." Wow. Right.

1:12:56

But, but that thing that he said, you need your nausea.

1:13:00

It will tell you what's wrong.

1:13:02

tell us what's wrong with you.

1:13:02

That's true of much more than if your kidneys had stopped working, right?

1:13:05

It's why it begins my book about depression because painful and agonizing though depression and anxiety are.

1:13:10

They are not malfunctions. They are signals.

1:13:12

They are telling us something really important about your unmet needs, about what you've gone through, about what you you need as going forward.

1:13:20

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 [ __ ] on the floor of an old woman, right?

1:13:31

But if you make yourself vulnerable, some people will take advantage of your vulnerability and punch you, right?

1:13:35

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.

1:13:44

And you should respond if you can with love and empathy.

1:13:45

But most people will lean into you.

1:13:48

So there's an incredible power in vulnerability and making yourself making yourself vulnerable in public. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard.

1:14:01

You don't want to do it, right? Yeah.

1:14:03

But it but it has a power.

1:14:05

Well, Johan, thank you so much. Oh, what a pleasure. You ask great questions. Cheers, David. Thanks so much.

1:14:08

Yeah, it's good to finally meet