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Who else in literature today could be more interesting to interview than Brandon Taylor, the author of Real Life, Filthy Animals, and The Late Americans, as well as the author of popular reviews and the sweater weather Substack? We talked about so much, including: Chopin and who plays him best; why there isn’t more tennis in fiction; writing fiction on a lab bench; being a scientific critic; what he has learned working as a publisher; negative reviews; boring novels; Jane Austen. You’ll also get Brandon’s quick takes on Iris Murdoch, Jonathan Franzen, Lionel Trilling, György Lukács, and a few others; the modern critics he likes reading; and the dead critics he likes reading.
Brandon also talked about how his new novel is going to be different from his previous novels. He told me:
I no longer really want to be starting my books, quote unquote, in media res. I want my books to feel like books. I don’t want my books to feel like movies. And I don't want them to feel like treatments for film. And so I want to sort of bring back all of what a novel can do in terms of its structure and in terms of its form and stuff like that. And so it means starting books, you know, with this sort of Dickensian voice of God speaking from on high, sort of summing up an era. And I think also sort of allowing the narrators in my work to dare to sum up, allowing characters in my work to have ideologies and to argue about those ideologies. I feel like that is a thing that was sort of denuded from the American novel for a lot of millennials and just sort of like trying to put back some of that old fashioned machinery that was like stripped out of the novel. And seeing what of it can still function, seeing, trying to figure out if there's any juice left in these modes of representation.
I have enjoyed Brandon’s fiction (several people I recommend him to have loved Real Life) and I think he’s one of the best critics working today. I was delighted to interview him.
Oh, and he’s a Dickens fan!
Transcript (AI produced, lightly formatted by me)
Henry: Today I am talking to Brandon Taylor, the author of Real Life, Filthy Animals, and The Late Americans. Brandon is also a notable book reviewer and of course he writes a sub stack called Sweater Weather. Brandon, welcome.
Brandon: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Henry: What did you think of the newly discovered Chopin waltz?
Brandon: Um, I thought, I mean, I remember very vividly waking up that day and there being a new waltz, but it was played by Lang Lang, which I did not. I don't know that, like, he's my go-to Chopin interpreter. But I don't know, I was, I was excited by it. Um, I don't know, it was in a world sort of dominated by this ethos of like nothing new under the sun. It felt wonderfully novel. I don't know that it's like one of Chopin's like major, I don't know that it's like major. Um, it's sort of definitively like middle of the road, middle tier Chopin, I think. But I enjoyed it. I played it like 20 times in a row.
Henry: I like those moments because I like, I like it when people get surprised into realizing that like, it's not fixed what we know about the world and you can even actually get new Chopin, right?
Brandon: I mean, it felt a little bit like when Beyonce did her first big surprise drop. It was like new Chopin just dropped. Oh my God. All my sort of classical music nerd group texts were buzzing. It felt like a real moment, actually.
Henry: And I think it gives people a sense of what art was like in the past. You can go, oh my God, new Chopin. Like, yes, those feelings are not just about modern culture, right? That used to happen with like, oh my God, a new Jane Austen book is here.
Brandon: Oh, I know. Well, I mean, I was like reading a lot of Emile Zola up until I guess late last year. And at some point I discovered that he was like an avid amateur photographer. And in like the French Ministry of Culture is like digitized a lot of his glass plate negatives. And one of them is like a picture that Zola has taken of Manet's portrait of him. And it's just like on a floor somewhere. Like he's like sort of taken this like very rickety early camera machinery to this place where this portrait is and like taken a picture of it. It's like, wow. Like you can imagine that like Manet's like, here's this painting I did of you. And Zola's like, ah, yes, I'm going to take a picture to commemorate it. And so I sort of love that.
Henry: What other of his photos do you like?
Brandon: Well, there's one of him on a bike riding toward the camera. That's really delightful to me because it like that impulse is so recognizable to me. There are all these photos that he took of his mistress that were also just like, you can like, there are also photographs of his children and of his family. And again, those feel so like recognizable to me. He's not even like a very good photographer. It's just that he was taking pictures of his like daily life, except for his kind of stunt photos where he's riding the bike. And it's like, ah, yes, Zola, he would have been great with an iPhone camera.
Henry: Which pianists do you like for Chopin?
Brandon: Which pianists do I love for Chopin? I like Pollini a lot. Pollini is amazing. Pollini the elder, not Pollini the younger. The younger is not my favorite. And he died recently, Maurizio Pollini. He died very recently. Maybe he's my favorite. I love, I love Horowitz. Horowitz is wonderful at Chopin. But it's obviously it's like not his, you know, you don't sort of go to Horowitz for Chopin, I guess. But I love his Chopin. And sometimes Trifonov. Trifonov has a couple Chopin recordings that I really, really like. I tend not to love Trifonov as much.
Henry: Really?
Brandon: I know it's controversial. It's very controversial. I know. Tell me why. I, I don't know. He's just a bit of a banger to me. Like, like he's sort of, I don't know, his playing is so flashy. And he feels a bit like a, like a, like a keyboard basher to me sometimes.
Henry: But like, do you like his Bach?
Brandon: You know, I haven't done a deep dive. Maybe I should do a sort of more rigorous engagement with Trifonov. But yeah, I don't, he's just not, he doesn't make my heart sing. I think he's very good at Bach.
Henry: What about a Martha Argerich?
Brandon: Oh, I mean, she's incredible. She's incredible. I bought that sort of big orange box out of like all of her, her sort of like masterwork recordings. And she's incredible. She has such feel for Chopin. But she doesn't, I think sometimes people can make Chopin feel a little like, like treacly, like, like a little too sweet. And she has this perfect understanding of his like rhythm and his like inner nuances and like the crispness in his compositions. Like she really pulls all of that out. And I love her. She has such, obviously great dexterity, but like a real sort of exquisite sensitivity to the rhythmic structures of Chopin.
Henry: You listen on CD?
Brandon: No, I listen on vinyl and I listen on streaming, but mostly vinyl. Mostly vinyl? Yeah, mostly vinyl. I know it's very annoying. No, no, no, no, no.
Henry: Which, what are the good speakers?
Brandon: I forget where I bought these speakers from, but I sort of did some Googling during the pandemic of like best speakers to use. I have a U-Turn Audio, U-Turn Orbital record player. And so I was just looking for good speakers that were compatible and like wouldn't take up a ton of space in my apartment because I was moving to New York and had a very tiny, tiny apartment. So they're just from sort of standard, I forget the brand, but they've served me well these past few years.
Henry: And do you like Ólafsson? He's done some Chopin.
Brandon: Who?
Henry: Víkingur Ólafsson. He did the Goldbergs this year, but he's done some Chopin before. I think he's quite good.
Brandon: Oh, that Icelandic guy?
Henry: Yeah, yeah, yeah. With the glasses? That's right. And the very neat hair.
Brandon: Yes. Oh, he's so chic. He's so chic. I don't know his Chopin. I know his, there's another series that he did somewhat recently that I'm more familiar with. But he is really good. He has good Beethoven, Víkingur.
Henry: Yeah.
Brandon: And normally I don't love Beethoven, but like—
Henry: Really? Why? Why? What's wrong with Beethoven? All these controversial opinions about music.
Brandon: I'm not trying to have controversial opinions. I think I'm, well, I'm such a, I'm such, I mean, I'm just like a dumb person. And so like, I don't, I don't have a really, I feel like I don't have the robust understanding to like fully appreciate Beethoven and all of his sort of like majesty. And so maybe I've just not heard good Beethoven and I need to sort of go back and sort of get a real understanding of it. But I just tend not to like it. It feels like, I don't know, like grandma's living room music to me sometimes.
Henry: What other composers do you enjoy?
Brandon: Oh, of course.
Henry: Or other music generally, right?
Brandon: Rachmaninoff is so amazing to me. There was, of course, Bach. Brahms. Oh, I love Brahms, but like specifically the intermezzi. I love the intermezzi. I recently fell in love with, oh, his name is escaping me now, but he, I went to a concert and they sort of did a Brahms intermezzi. And they also played this, I think he was an Austrian composer. And his music was like, it wasn't experimental, but it was like quite, I had a lot of dissonance in it. And I found it like really interesting and like really moving actually. And so I did a sort of listening to that constantly. Oh, I forget his name. But Brahms, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, love Rachmaninoff. I have a friend who says that Rachmaninoff writes Negro spirituals. And I love that theory that Rachmaninoff's music is like the music of the slaves. It just, I don't know. I really, that really resonates with me spiritually. Which pieces, which Rachmaninoff symphonies, concertos? Yeah, the concertos. But like specifically, like I have a friend who said that Rach II sounded to her like the sort of spiritual cry of like the slaves. And we were at like a hangout with like mostly Black people. And she like stopped playing like Juvenile, like the rapper. And she put on Rach II. And we just like sat there and listened. And it did feel like something powerful had entered the room. Yeah, but he's my guy. I secretly really, really love him. I like Liszt, but like it really depends on the day and the time for him. He makes good folk music, Liszt. I love his folky, his folk era.
Henry: What is it that you enjoy about tennis?
Brandon: What do I enjoy about tennis? I love the, I love not thinking. I love being able to hit the ball for hours on end and like not think. And like, it's the one part of my life. It's the one time in my life where my experience is like totally unstructured. And so like this morning, I went to a 7am drill and play class where you do drills for an hour. Then you play doubles for an hour. And during that first hour of drills, I was just like hitting the ball. I was at the mercy of the guy feeding us the ball. And I didn't have a single thought about books or literature or like the status of my soul or like the nature of American democracy. It was just like, did I hit that ball? Well, did I hit it kind of off center? Were there tingles in my wrist? Yes or no. Like it was just very, very grounding in the moment. And I think that is what I love about it. Do you like to watch tennis? Oh, yeah, constantly. Sometimes when I'm in a work meeting, the Zoom is here and the tennis is like playing in the background. Love tennis, love to watch, love to play, love to think about, to ponder. Who are the best players for you? Oh, well, the best players, my favorite players are Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Stanislas Wawrinka, love Wawrinka. And I was a really big Davydenko head back in the day. Nikolai Davydenko was this Russian player who had, he was like a metronome. He just like would not miss. Yeah, those are my favorites. Right now, the guy I'm sort of rooting for who's still active is Kasper Rud, who's this Norwegian guy. And I love him because he just looks like some guy. Like he just looks like he should be in a seminary somewhere. I love it. I love, I love his normalness. He just looks like an NPC. And I'm drawn to that in a tennis player.
Henry: It's hard to think of tennis in novels. Why is that?
Brandon: Well, I think a lot of people don't, well, I think part of it is a lot of novelists. Part of it is a lot of novelists don't play sports. I think that they, at least Americans, I can't speak for other parts of the world, but in America, a lot of novelists are not doing sports. So that's one. And I think two, like, you know, like with anything, I think that tennis has not been subjected to the same schemes of narrativization that like other things are. And so like it's, a lot of novelists just like don't see a sort of readily dramatizable thing in tennis. Even though if you like watch tennis and like listen to tennis commentary, they are always erecting narratives. They're like, oh yeah, she's been on a 19 match losing streak. Is this where she turns it around? And to me, tennis is like a very literary sport because tennis is one of those sports where it's all about the matchup. It's like your forehand to my backhand, like no matter how well I play against everyone else, like it's you and me locked in the struggle. And like that to me feels incredibly literary. And it is so tied to your individual psychology as well. Like, I don't know, I endlessly am fascinated by it. And indeed, I got an idea for a tennis novel the other day that I'm hopefully going to write in three to five years. We'll see.
Henry: Very good. How did working in a lab influence your writing?
Brandon: Well, somewhat directly and materially in the case of my first book, because I wrote it while I was working in the lab and it gave me weirdly like time and structure to do that work where I would be pipetting. And then while I was waiting for an assay or a experiment to run or finish, I would have 30 minutes to sit down and write.
Henry: So you were writing like at the lab bench?
Brandon: Oh, yeah, absolutely. One thousand percent. I would like put on Philip Glass's score for the hours and then just like type while my while the centrifuge was running or whatever. And and so like there's that impression sort of baked into the first couple books. And then I think more, I guess, like spiritually or broadly, it influenced my work because it taught me how to think and how to organize time and how to organize thoughts and how to sort of pursue long term, open ended projects whose results may or may not, you know, fail because of something that you did or maybe you didn't do. And that's just the nature of things. Who knows? But yeah, I think also just like discipline, the discipline to sort of clock in every day. And to sort of go to the coalface and do the work. And that's not a thing that is, you know. That you just get by working in a lab, but it's certainly something that I acquired working in a lab.
Henry: Do you think it's affected your interest in criticism? Because there's there are certain types of critic who seem to come from a scientific background like Helen Vendler. And there's something something about the sort of the precision and, you know, that certain critics will refuse to use critical waffle, like the human condition. And they won't make these big, vague gestures to like how this can change the way we view society. They're like, give me real details. Give me real like empirical criticism. Do you think this is — are you one of these people?
Brandon: Yeah, yeah, I think I'm, you know, I'm all about what's on the page. I'm all about the I'm not gonna go rooting in your biography for not gonna go. I'm not I'm not doing that. It's like what you brought to me on the page is what you've brought to me. And that is what I will be sort of coming over. I mean, I think so. I mean, very often when critics write about my work, or when people respond to my work, they sort of describe it as being put under a microscope. And I do think like, that is how I approach literature. It's how I approach life. If there's ever a problem or a question put to me, I just sort of dissect it and try to get down to its core bits and its core parts. And and so yeah, I mean, if that is a scientific way of doing things, that's certainly how I but also I don't know any other way to think like that's sort of that's sort of how I was trained to think about stuff. You've been to London. I have. What did you think of it? The first time I didn't love it. The second and third times I had a good time, but I felt like London didn't love me back. London is the only place on earth I've ever been where people have had a hard time understanding me like I like it's the only place where I've like attempted to order food or a drink or something in a store or a cafe or a restaurant. And the waiters like turned to my like British hosts and asked them to translate. And that is an entirely foreign experience for me. And so London and I have like a very contentious relationship, I would say.
Henry: Now, you've just published four classic novels.
Brandon: Yes.
Henry: George Gissing, Edith Wharton, Victor Hugo and Sarah Orne Jewett. Why did you choose those four writers, those four titles?
Brandon: Oh, well, once we decided that we were going to do a classics imprint, you know, then it's like, well, what are we going to do? And I'm a big Edith Wharton fan. And there are all of these Edith Wharton novels that Americans don't really know about. They know Edith Wharton for The Age of Innocence. And if they are an English major, they maybe know her for The House of Mirth. Or like maybe they know her for The Custom of the Country if they're like really into reading. But then they sort of think of her as a novelist of the 19th century. And she's writing all of these books set in the 1920s and about the 1920s. And so it felt important to show people like, oh, this is a writer who died a lot later than you think that she did. And whose creative output was, you know, pretty, who was like a contemporary of F. Scott Fitzgerald in a lot of ways. Like, these books are being published around the same time as The Great Gatsby. And to sort of, you know, bring attention to a part of her over that, like, people don't know about. And like, that's really exciting to me. And Sarah Orne Jewett, I mean, I just really love The Country of the Pointed Furs. I love that book. And I found it in like in a 10 cents bin at a flea market one time. And it's a book that people have tried to bring back. And there have been editions of it. But it just felt like if we could get two people who are really cool to talk about why they love that book, we could sort of have like a real moment. And Sarah Orne Jewett was like a pretty big American writer. Like she was a pretty significant writer. And she was like really plugged in and she's not really read or thought about now. And so that felt like a cool opportunity as well to sort of create a very handsome edition of this book and to sort of talk about a bit why she matters. And the guessing of it all is we were going to do New Grub Street. And then my co-editor thought, well, The Odd Women, I think, is perhaps more relevant to our current moment than New Grub Street necessarily. And it would sort of differentiate us from the people, from the presses that are doing reissues of New Grub Street, because there's just been a new edition of that book. And nobody in America really knows The Odd Women. And it's a really wonderful novel. It's both funny and also like really biting in its satire and commentary. So we thought, oh, it'll be fun to bring this writer to Americans who they've never heard of in a way that will speak to them in a lot of ways. And the Victor Hugo, I mean, you know, there are Hugos that people know all about. And then there are Hugos that no one knows about. And Toilers of the Sea was a passion project for my co-editor. She'd read it in Guernsey. That's where she first discovered that book. And it really meant a lot to her. And I read it and really loved it. I mean, it was like Hugo at his most Hugo. Like, it's a very, it's a very, like, it's a very abundant book. And it's so wild and strange and changeful. And so I was like, oh, that seems cool. Let's do it. Let's put out Toilers of the Sea. So that's a bit of why we picked each one.
Henry: And what have you learned from being on the other side of things now that you're the publisher?
Brandon: So much. I've learned so much. And indeed, I just, I was just asked by my editor to do the author questionnaire for the novel that I have coming out next. And I thought, yes, I will do this. And I will do it immediately. Because now I know, I know how important these are. And I know how early and how far in advance these things need to be locked in to make everyone's life easier. I think I've learned a bit about the sometimes panicked scramble that happens to get a book published. I've learned about how hard it is to wrangle blurbs. And so I think I'm a little more forgiving of my publishers. But they've always been really great to me. But now I'm like, oh, my gosh, what can I do for you? How can I help you make this publication more of a success?
Henry: Do you think that among literary people generally, there's a lack of appreciation of what business really involves in some of the senses you're talking about? I feel like I see a lot of either indifferent or hostile attitudes towards business or commerce or capitalism, late stage capitalism or whatever. And I sometimes look at it and I'm like, I don't think you guys really know what it takes to just like get stuff done. You know what I mean? Like, it's a lot of grind. I don't think it's a big nasty thing. It's just a lot of hard work, right?
Brandon: Yeah, I mean, 1000%. Or if it's not a sort of misunderstanding, but a sort of like disinterest in like, right, like a sort of high minded, like, oh, that's just the sort of petty grimy commerce of it all. I care about the beauty and the art. And it's just like, friend, we need booksellers to like, sell this. I mean, to me, the part of it that is most to me, like the most illustrative example of this in my own life is that when I first heard how my editor was going to be describing my book, I was like, that's disgusting. That's horrible. Why are you talking about my race? Why are you talking about like my sexuality? Like, this is horrible. Why can't you just like talk about the plot of the book? Like, what is the matter with you? And then I had, you know, I acquired and edited this book called Henry Henry, which is a queer contemporary retelling of the Henry ad. And it's a wonderful novel. It's so delightful. And I had to go into our sales conference where we are talking to the people whose job it is to sell that book into bookstores to get bookstores to take that book up. And I had to write this incredibly craven description of this novel. And as I was writing it, I was like, I hope Alan, the author, I hope Alan never sees this. He never needs to hear how I'm talking about this book. And as I was doing it, I was like, I will never hold it against my editor again for writing this like, cheesy, cringy copy. Because it's like you, like, you so believe in the art of that book, so much that you want it to give it every fighting chance in the marketplace. And you need to arm your sales team with every weapon of commerce they need to get that book to succeed so that when readers pick it up, they can appreciate all of the beautiful and glorious art of it. And I do think that people, you know, like, people don't really kind of, people don't really understand that. And I do think that part of that is publishing's fault, because they are, they've been rather quick to elide the distinctions between art and commerce. And so like publishing has done a not great job of sort of giving people a lot of faith in its understanding that there's a difference between art and commerce. But yeah, I think, I think there's a lot of misapprehension out there about like, what goes into getting bookstores to acquire that book.
Henry: What are the virtues of negative book reviews?
Brandon: I was just on a panel about this. I mean, I mean, hopefully a negative book review, like a positive review, or like any review, will allow a reader or the audience to understand the book in a new way, or to create a desire in the reader to pick up the book and see if they agree or disagree or that they, that they have something to argue with or push against as they're reading. You know, when I'm writing a negative review, when I'm writing a review that I feel is trending toward negative, I should say, I always try to like, I don't know, I try to always remember that like, this is just me presenting my experience of the book and my take of the book. And hopefully that will be productive or useful for whoever reads the review. And hopefully that my review won't be the only thing that they read and that they will in fact, go pick up the book and see if they agree or disagree. It's hopefully it creates interesting and potentially divergent dialogues or discourses around the text. And fundamentally, I think not every critic feels this way. Not every piece of criticism is like this. But the criticism I write, I'm trying to create the conditions that will refer the reader always back to the text, be it through quotation, be it through, they're so incensed by my argument that they're going to go read the book themselves and then like, yell at me. Like, I think that that's wonderful, but like, always keeping the book at the center. But I think a negative review can, you know, it can start a conversation. It can get people talking about books, which in this culture, this phase of history feels like a win. And hopefully it can sort of be a corrective sometimes to less genuine or perceived less genuine discourses that are existing around the book.
Henry: I think even whether or not it's a question of genuine, it's for me, it's just a question of if you tell people this book is good and they give up their time and money and they discover that it's trash, you've done a really bad thing to that person. And like, there might be dozens of them compared to this one author who you've been impolite to or whatever. And it's just a question of don't lie in book, right?
Brandon: Well, yeah. I mean, hopefully people are honest, but I do feel sometimes that there is, there's like a lack of honesty. And look, I think that being like, well, I mean, maybe you'll love this. I don't love it, you know, but at least present your opinion in that way. At least be like, you know, there are many interpretations of this thing. Here's my interpretation. Maybe you'll feel differently or something like that. But I do think that people feel that there have been a great number of dishonest book reviews. Maybe there have been, maybe there have not been. I certainly have read some reviews I felt were dishonest about books that I have read. And I think that the negative book review does feel a bit like a corrective in a lot of ways, both, you know, justified or unjustified. People are like, finally, someone's being honest about this thing. But yeah, I think it's interesting. I think it's all really, I think it's all fascinating. I do think that there are some reviews though, that are negative and that are trying to be about the book, but are really about the author. There are some reviews that I have read that have been ostensibly about reviewing a text, but which have really been about, you don't like that person and you have decided to sort of like take an axe to them. And that to me feels not super productive. I wouldn't do it, but other people find it useful.
Henry: As in, you can tell that from the review or you know that from background information?
Brandon: I mean, this is all projection, of course, but like there have been some reviews where I've read, like, for example, some of the Lauren Oyler reviews, I think some of the Lauren Oyler reviews were negative and were exclusively about the text. And they sort of took the text apart and sort of dissected it and came to conclusions, some of which I agreed with, some of which I didn't agree with, but they were fundamentally about the text. And like all the criticisms referred back to the text. And then there were some that were like projecting attitudes onto the author that were more about creating this sort of vaporous shape of Lauren Oyler and then sort of poking holes in her literary celebrity or her stature as a critic or what have you. And that to me felt less productive as like a book review.
Henry: Yes. Who are your favorite reviewers?
Brandon: Ooh, my favorite reviewers. I really love Christian Lawrence. And he does my, of the critics who try to do the sort of like mini historiography of like a thing. He's my favorite because he teaches me a lot. He sort of is so good at summing up an era or summing up a phase of literary production without being like so cringe or so socialist about it. I really love, I love it when he sort of distills and dissects an era. I really like Hermione Hobie. I think she's really interesting. And she writes about books with a lot of feeling and a lot of energy. And I really love her mind. And of course, like Patricia Lockwood, of course, everyone, perhaps not everyone, but I enjoy Patricia Lockwood's criticism. You don't?
Henry: Not really.
Brandon: Oh, is it because it's too chatty? Is it too, is it too selfie?
Henry: A little bit. I think, I think that kind of criticism can work really well. But I think, I think it's too much. I think basically she's very, she's a very stylized writer and a lot of her judgments get, it gets to the point where it's like, this is the logical conclusion of what you're trying to do stylistically. And there are some zingers in here and some great lines and whatever, but we're no longer, this is no longer really a book review.
Brandon: Yeah.
Henry: Like by the, by the end of the paragraph, this, like, we didn't want to let the style go. We didn't want to lose the opportunity to cap that off. And it leads her into, I think, glibness a lot of the time.
Brandon: Yeah. I could see that. I mean, I mean, I enjoy reading her pieces, but do I understand like what's important to her at a sort of literary level? I don't know. I don't, and in that sense, like, are they, is it criticism or is it closer to like personal essay, humorous essay? I don't know. Maybe that's true. I enjoy reading them, but I get why people are like, this is a very, very strong flavor for sure.
Henry: Now you've been reading a lot of literary criticism.
Brandon: Oh yeah.
Henry: Not of the LRB variety, but of the, the old books in libraries variety. Yes. How did that start? How did, how did you come to this?
Brandon: Somewhat like ham-fistedly. I, in 2021, I had a really bad case of writer's block and I thought maybe part of the reason I had writer's block was that I didn't know anything about writing or I didn't know anything about like literature or like writing. I'd been writing, I'd published a novel. I was working on another novel. I'd published a book of stories, but like, I just like truly didn't know anything about literature really. And I thought I need some big boy ideas. I need, I need to find out what adults think about literature. And so I went to my buddy, Christian Lorenzen, and I was like, you write criticism. What is it? And what should I read? And he gave me a sort of starter list of criticism. And it was like the liberal imagination by Lionel Trilling and Guy Davenport and Alfred Kazin who wrote On Native Grounds, which is this great book on the American literary tradition and Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel. And I, and then Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle. And I read all of those. And then as each one would sort of refer to a different text or person, I sort of like followed the footnotes down into this rabbit hole of like literary criticism. And now it's been a sort of ongoing project of the last few years of like reading. I always try to have a book of criticism on the go. And then earlier this year, I read Jameson's The Antimonies of Realism. And he kept talking about this Georg Lukács guy. And I was like, I guess I should go read Lukács. And so then I started reading Lukács so that I could get back to Jameson. And I've been reading Lukács ever since. I am like deep down the Lukács rabbit hole. But I'm not reading any of the socialism stuff. I told myself that I wouldn't read any of the socialism stuff and I would only read the literary criticism stuff, which makes me very different from a lot of the socialist literary critics I really enjoy because they're like Lukács, don't read in that literary criticism stuff, just read his socialism stuff. So I'm reading all the wrong stuff from Lukács, but I really, I really love it. But yeah, it sort of started because I thought I needed grown up ideas about literature. And it's been, I don't know, I've really enjoyed it. I really, really enjoy it. It's given me perhaps terrible ideas about what novels should be or do. But, you know, that's one of the side effects to reading.
Henry: Has it made, like, what specific ways has it changed how you've written since you've acquired a set of critical principles or ideas?
Brandon: Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is, part of it has to do with Lukács' idea of the totality. And, you know, I think that the sort of most direct way that it shows up in a sort of really practical way in my novel writing is that I no longer really want to be starting my books, quote unquote, in media res. Like, I don't want, I want my books to feel like books. I don't want my books to feel like movies. And I don't want them to feel like treatments for film. And so I want to sort of bring back all of what a novel can do in terms of its structure and in terms of its form and stuff like that. And so it means starting books, you know, with this sort of Dickensian voice of God speaking from on high, sort of summing up an era. And I think also sort of allowing the narrators in my work to dare to sum up, allowing characters in my work to have ideologies and to argue about those ideologies. I feel like that is a thing that was sort of denuded from the American novel for a lot of millennials and just sort of like trying to put back some of that old fashioned machinery that was like stripped out of the novel. And seeing what of it can still function, seeing, trying to figure out if there's any juice left in these modes of representation and stuff like that. And so like that, that's sort of, that's sort of abstract, but like in a concrete way, like what I'm kind of trying to resolve in my novel writing these days.
Henry: You mentioned Dickens.
Brandon: Oh, yes.
Henry: Which Dickens novels do you like?
Brandon: Now I'm afraid I'm going to say something else controversial. We love controversial. Which Dickens? I love Bleak House. I love Bleak House. I love Tale of Two Cities. It is one of the best openings ever, ever, ever, ever in the sweep of that book at once personal and universal anyway. Bleak House, Tale of Two Cities. And I also, I read Great Expectations as like a high school student and didn't like it, hated it. It was so boring. But now coming back to it, I think it, honestly, it might be the novel of our time. I think it might accidentally be a novel. I mean, it's a novel of scammers, a novel of like, interpersonal beef taken to the level of like, spiritual conflict, like it's about thieves and class, like it just feels like like that novel could have been written today about people today, like that book just feels so alive to today's concerns, which perhaps, I don't know, says something really evil about this cultural stagnation under capitalism, perhaps, but I don't know, love, love Great Expectations now.
Henry: Why are so many modern novels boring?
Brandon: Well, depends on what you mean by boring, Henry, what do you mean? Why?
Henry: I mean, you said this.
Brandon: Oh.
Henry: I mean, I happen to agree, but this is, I'm quoting you.
Brandon: Oh, yes. I remember that. I remember that review.
Henry: I mean, I can tell you why I think they're boring.
Brandon: Oh, yes, please.
Henry: So I think, I think what you said before is true. They all read like movies. And I think I very often I go in, I pick up six or seven books on the new book table. And I'm like, these openings are all just the same. You're all thinking you can all see Netflix in your head. This is not really a novel. And so the dialogue is really boring, because you kind of you can hear some actor or actress saying it. But I can't hear that because I'm the idiot stuck in the bookshop reading your Netflix script. Whereas, you know, I think you're right that a lot of those traditional forms of storytelling, they like pull you in to the to the novel. And they and they like by the end of the first few pages, you sort of feel like I'm in this funny place now. And to do in media res, like, someone needs to get shot, or something, something weird needs to be said, like, you can't just do another, another standard opening. So I think that's a big, that's a big point.
Brandon: Well, as Lukasz tells us, bourgeois realism has a, an unholy fondness for the, the average, the merely average, as opposed to the typical. And I think, yeah, a lot of it, a lot of why I think it's boring echoes you, I think that for me, what I find boring, and a lot of them is that it feels like novelists have abandoned any desire to, to have their characters or the novels themselves integrate the sort of disparate experiences within the novel into any kind of meaningful hole. And so there isn't this like sense of like things advancing toward a grander understanding. And I think a lot of it is because they've, they are writing under the assumption that like the question of why can never be answered. There can never be like a why, there can never be a sort of significance to anything. And so everything is sort of like evacuated of significance or meaning. And so you have what I've taken to calling like reality TV fiction, where the characters are just like going places and doing things, and there are no thoughts, there are no thoughts about their lives, or no thoughts about the things that they are doing, there are no thoughts about their experiences. And it's just a lot of like, like lowercase e events in their lives, but like no attempt to organize those events into any sort of meaningful hole. And I think also just like, what leads to a lot of dead writing is writers who are deeply aware that they're writing about themes, they're writing about themes instead of people. And they're working from generalities instead of particularities and specificities. And they have no understanding of the relationship between the universal and the particular. And so like, everything is just like, like beans in a can that they're shaking around. And I think that that's really boring. I think it's really tedious. Like, like, sure, we can we can find something really profound in the mundane, but like, you have to be really smart to do that. So like the average novelist is like better off like, starting with a gunshot or something like do something big.
Henry: If you're not Virginia Woolf, it is in fact just mundane.
Brandon: Indeed. Yeah.
Henry: Is there too much emphasis on craft? In the way, in the way, in like what's valued among writers, in the way writers are taught, I feel like everything I see is about craft. And I'm like, craft is good, but that can just be like how you make a table rather than like how you make a house. Craft is not the guarantor of anything. And I see a lot of books where I think this person knows some craft. But as you say, they don't really have an application for it. And they don't. No one actually said to them, all style has a moral purpose, whether you're aware of it or not. And so they default to this like pointless use of the craft. And someone should say to them, like, you need to know history. You need to know tennis. You need to know business. You need to know like whatever, you know. And I feel like the novels I don't like are reflections of the discourse bubble that the novelist lives in. And I feel like it's often the continuation of Twitter by other means. So in the Rachel Kong novel that I think it came out this year, there's a character, a billionaire character who comes in near the end. And everything that he says or that is said about him is literally just meme. It's online billionaire meme because billionaires are bad because of all the things we all know from being on Twitter. And I was like, so you just we literally have him a character as meme. And this is the most representative thing to me, because that's maybe there's craft in that. Right. But what you've chosen to craft is like 28 tweets. That's pointless.
Brandon: 28 tweets be a great title for a book, though, you have to admit, I would buy that book off the new book table. 28 tweets. I would. I would buy that. Yeah, I do think. Well, I think it goes both ways. I think it goes both ways. I somewhat famously said this about Sally Rooney that like she her books have no craft. The craft is bad. And I do think like there are writers who only have craft, who are able to sort of create these wonderfully structured books and to sort of deploy these beautiful techniques. And those books are absolutely dead. There's just like nothing in them because they have nothing to say. There's just like nothing to be said about any of that. And on the other hand, you have these books that are full of feelings that like would be better had someone taught that person about structure or form or had they sort of had like a rigorous thing. And I would say that like both of those are probably bad, like depending on who you are, you find one more like, like easier to deal with than the other. I do think that like part of why there's such an emphasis on craft is because not to sort of bring capitalism back in but you can monetize craft, you know what I mean? Like, craft is one of those things that is like readily monetizable. Like, if I'm a writer, and I would like to make money, and I can't sell a novel, I can tell people like, oh, how to craft a perfect opening, how to create a novel opening that will make agents pick it up and that will make editors say yes, but like what the sort of promise of craft is that you can finish a thing, but not that it is good, as you say, there's no guarantor. Whereas you know, like it's harder to monetize someone's soul, or like, it's harder to monetize like the sort of random happenstance of just like a writer's voice sort of emerging from from whatever, like you can't turn that into profit. But you can turn into profit, let me help you craft your voice. So it's very grind set, I think craft has a tendency to sort of skew toward the grind set and toward people trying to make money from, from writing when they can't sell a book, you know.
Henry: Let's play a game.
Brandon: Oh dear.
Henry: I say the name of a writer. You give us like the 30 second Brandon Taylor opinion of that writer.
Brandon: Okay. Yeah.
Henry: Jonathan Franzen.
Brandon: Thomas Mann, but like, slightly more boring, I think.
Henry: Iris Murdoch.
Brandon: A friend of mine calls her a modern calls her the sort of pre Sally Rooney, Sally Rooney. And I agree with that.
Henry: When I'm at parties, I try and sell her to people where I say she's post-war Sally Rooney.
Brandon: Yes, yes. And like, and like all that that entails, and so many delightful, I read all these like incredible sort of mid century reviews of her novels, and like the men, the male critics, like the Bernard Breganzis of the world being like, why is there so much sex in this book? It's amazing. Please go look up those like mid-century reviews of Iris Murdoch. They were losing their minds.
Henry: Chekhov.
Brandon: Perfect, iconic, baby girl, angel, legend. Can't get enough. 10 out of 10.
Henry: Evelyn Waugh.
Brandon: So Catholic, real Catholic vibes. But like, scabrously funny. And like, perhaps the last writer to write about life as though it had meaning. Hot take, but I'll, I stand by it.
Henry: Yeah, well, him and Murdoch. But yeah, no, I think I think there's a lot in that. C.V. Wedgwood.
Brandon: Oh, my gosh. The best, a titan, a master of history. Like, oh, my God. I would not be the same without Wedgwood.
Henry: Tell us which one we should read.
Brandon: Oh, the 30 Years War. What are you talking about?
Henry: Well, I think her books on the English Civil War… I'm a parochial Brit.
Brandon: Oh, see, I don't, not that I don't, I will go read those. But her book on the 30 Years War is so incredible. It's, it's amazing. It's second to like, Froissart’s Chronicles for like, sort of history, history books for me.
Henry: Northrop Frye.
Brandon: My father. I, Northrop Frye taught me so much about how to see and how to think. Just amazing, a true thinker in a mind.
Henry: Which book?
Brandon: Oh, Anatomy of Criticism is fantastic. But Fearful Symmetry is just, it will blow your head off. Just amazing. But if you're looking for like, to have your, your mind gently remapped, then Anatomy of Criticism.
Henry: Emma Cline.
Brandon: A throwback. I think she's, I think she's Anne Beattie meets John Cheever for a new era. And I think she's amazing. She's perfect. Don't love her first novel. I think her stories are better. She's a short story writer. And she should stay that way.
Henry: Okay, now I want you to rank Jane Austen's novels.
Brandon: Wait, okay. So like, by my preference, or by like, what I think is the best?
Henry: You can do both.
Brandon: Okay. So in terms, my favorite, Persuasion. Then Mansfield Park. Sense and Sensibility. Pride and Prejudice. And then Emma, then Northanger Abbey. Okay.
Henry: Now, how about for which ones are the best?
Brandon: Persuasion. Pride and Prejudice. Mansfield Park. Emma,.Sense and Sensibility. Northanger Abbey.
Henry: Why do people not like Fanny Price? And what is wrong with them?
Brandon: Fanny Price is perfect. Fanny Price, I was just talking to someone about this last night at dinner. Fanny Price, she's perfect. First of all, she is, I don't know why people don't like her. She's like a chronically ill girl who's hot for her cousin and like, has deep thoughts. It seems like she would be the icon of literary Twitter for like a certain kind of person, you know? And I don't know why they don't like her. I think I'm, I am becoming the loudest Mansfield Park apologist on the internet. I think that people don't like Fanny because she's less vivacious than Mary Crawford. And I think that people are afraid to see themselves in Fanny because she seems like she's unfun or whatever. But what they don't realize is that like Fanny Price, Fanny Price has like a moral intelligence and like a moral consciousness. And like Fanny Price is one of the few Austen characters who actually argues directly and literally about the way the world is. Like with multiple people, like the whole, the whole novel is her sort of arguing about, well, cities are this and the country is this. And like, we need Parsons as much as we need party boys. Like, like she's arguing not just about, not just about these things like through the lens of like marriage or like the sort of marriage economy, but like in literal terms, I mean, she is so, she's like a moral philosopher. I love Fanny Price and she's so smart and so sensitive and so, and I guess like maybe it's just that people don't like a character who's kind of at the mercy of others and they view her as passive. When in fact, like a young woman arguing about the way the world should be, like Mary Crawford's, Mary Crawford's like kind of doing the above, not really, not like Fanny. But yeah, I love her. She's amazing. I love Fanny Price. And I also think that people love Margaret Hale from North and South. And I think that when people are saying they hate Fanny Price, what they're picturing is actually how Margaret Hale is. Margaret Hale is one of the worst heroines of a novel. She's so insufferable. She's so rude. She's so condescending. And like, she does get her comeuppance and like Gaskell does sort of bring about a transformation where she's actually able to sort of like see poor people as people first and not like subjects of sympathy. But Margaret is what people imagine Fanny is, I think. And we should, we should start a Fanny Price, like booster club. Henry, should we? Let's do it. It begins here. I just feel so strongly about her. I feel, I love, I love Fanny.
Henry: She's my favorite of Austen's characters. And I think she is the most representative Austen character. She's the most Austen of all of them, right?
Brandon: Yeah, I mean, that makes great deal of sense to me. She's just so wonderful. Like she's so funny and so observant. And she's like this quiet little girl who's like kind of sickly and people don't really like her. And she's kind of maybe I'm just like, maybe I just like see myself in her. And I don't mind being a sort of annoying little person who's going around the world.
Henry: What are some good principles for naming literary characters?
Brandon: Ooh, I have a lot of strong feelings about this. I think that names should be memorable. They should have like, like an aura of sort of literariness about them. I don't mean, I mean, taken to like hilarious extremes. It's like Henry James. Catherine Goodwood, Isabelle Archer, Ralph Touchett, like, you know, Henry had a stack pole. So like, not like that. But I mean, that could be fun in a modern way. But I think there's like an aura of like, it's a name that you might hear in real life, but it sort of add or remove, it's sort of charged and elevated, sort of like with dialogue. And that it's like a memorable thing that sort of like, you know, it's like, you know, memorable thing that sort of sticks in the reader's mind. It is both a name, a literary, a good literary name is both a part of this world and not of this world, I think. And, yeah, and I love that. I think like, don't give your character a name like you hear all the time. Like, Tyler is a terrible literary name. Like, no novel has ever, no good novel has ever had a really important character named Tyler in it. It just hasn't. Ryan? What makes a good sentence? Well, my sort of like, live and let live answer is that a good sentence is a sentence that is perfectly suited to the purpose it has. But I don't know, I like a clear sentence, regardless of length or lyric intensity, but just like a clear sentence that articulates something. I like a sentence with motion, a sense of rhythm, a sense of feel without any bad words in it. And I don't mean like curse words, I mean like words that shouldn't be in literature. Like, there's some words that just like don't belong in novels.
Henry: Like what?
Brandon: Squelch. Like, I don't think the word squelch should be in a novel. That's a gross word and it doesn't sound literary to me. I don't want to see it.
Henry: I wouldn't be surprised if it was in Ulysses.
Brandon: Well, yes.
Henry: I have no idea, but I'm sure, I'm sure.
Brandon: But so few of us are James Joyce. And that novel is like a thousand bodily functions per page. But don't love it. Don't love it.
Henry: You don't love Ulysses?
Brandon: No, I don't… Listen, I don't have a strong opinion, but you're not going to get me cancelled about Ulysses. I'm not Virginia Woolf.
Henry: We're happy to have opinions of that nature here. That's fine.
Brandon: You know, I don't have a strong feeling about it, actually. Some parts of it that I've read are really wonderful. And some parts of it that I have read are really dense and confusing to me. I haven't sort of given it the time it needs or deserves. What did you learn from reading Toni Morris? What did I learn? I think I learned a lot about the moral force of melodrama. I think that she shows us a lot about the uses of melodrama and how it isn't just like a lesion of realism, that it isn't just a sort of malfunctioning realism, but that there are certain experiences and certain lives and certain things that require and necessitate melodrama. And when deployed, it's not tacky or distasteful that it actually is like deeply necessary. And also just like the joy of access and language, like the sort of... Her language is so towering. I don't know, whenever I'm being really shy about a sentence being too vivid or too much, I'm like, well, Toni Morrison would just go for it. And I am not Toni Morrison, but she has given me the courage to try.
Henry: What did you like about the Annette Benning film of The Seagull?
Brandon: The moment when Annette Benning sings Dark Eyes is so good. It's so good. I think about it all the time. And indeed, I stole that moment for a short story that I wrote. And I liked that part of it. I liked the set design. I think also Saoirse Ronan, when she gives that speech as Nina, where she's like, you know, where the guy's like, what do you want from, you know, what do you want? Why do you want to be an actress? And she's like, I want fame. You know, like, I want to be totally adored. And I'm just like, yeah, that's so real. That's so, that is so real. Like Chekhov has understood something so deep, so deep about the nature of commerce and art there. And I think Saoirse is really wonderful in that movie. It's a not, it's not a good movie. It's maybe not even a good adaptation of The Seagull. But I really enjoyed it. I saw it like five times in a theater in Iowa City.
Henry: I don't know if it's a bad adaptation of The Seagull, because it's one of the, it's one of the Chekhov's I've seen that actually understands that, like, the tragic and the and the comic are not meant to be easily distinguishable in his work. And it does have all this lightheartedness. And it is quite funny. And I was like, well, at least someone's doing that because I'm so sick of, like, gloomy Chekhov. You know what I mean? Like, oh, the clouds and the misery. Like, no, he wants you, he wants you to laugh and then be like, I shouldn't laugh because it's kind of tragic, but it's also just funny.
Brandon: Yeah. Yes, I mean, all the moments were like, like Annette Bening's characters, like endless stories, like she's just like constantly unfurling a story and a story and a story and a story. Every scene kind of was like, she's in the middle of telling another interminable anecdote. And of course, the sort of big tragic turn at the end is like, where like, Kostya kills himself. And she's like, in the middle of like, another really long anecdote while they're in the other room playing cards. Like, it's so, it's so good. So I love that. I enjoy watching that movie. I still think it's maybe not. It's a little wooden, like as a movie, like it's a little, it's a little rickety.
Henry: Oh, sure, sure, sure, sure. But for someone looking to like, get a handle on Chekhov, it's actually a good place to go. What is the best make of Fountain Pen?
Brandon: That's a really good, that's a really, really, really good question. Like, what's your Desert Island Fountain Pen? My Desert Island Fountain Pen. Right now, it's an Esterbrook Estee with a needlepoint nib. It's like, so, I can use that pen for hours and hours and hours and hours. I think my favorite Fountain Pen, though, is probably the Pilot Custom 743. It's a really good pen, not too big, not too small. It can hold a ton of ink, really wonderful. I use, I think, like a Soft Fine nib, incredible nib, so smooth. Like, I, you could cap it and then uncap it a month later, and it just like starts immediately. It's amazing. And it's not too expensive.
Henry: Brandon Taylor, thank you very much.
Brandon: Thanks for having me.
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I’ve been a big Zena Hitz fan since I read Lost in Thought in 2020, a book I am still recommending to people nearly five years later. We talked about Shakespeare, children’s books, St John’s College, the Catherine Project, whether you should read secondary literature, Tolkien, nuns, and we had a giggle while we did so. Zena is one of the best public intellectuals who remains deeply committed to reading the Great Books and I was very pleased to record this conversation with her.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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I spoke to Samuel Arbesman about late bloomers. He asked many splendid questions no-one has asked before. With Mark Crowley I discussed some practical aspects of late blooming.
On December 5th I am talking to professor Stephen Greenblatt and psychoanalyst Adam Philips about their new book Second Chances, which combines Shakespeare and late blooming. What more could I ask for?
I was delighted to talk to Marion Turner, the J.R.R. Tolkien professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford. We talked about how the printing press affected the English language, the effect of science and technology on Chaucer’s poetry, how Chaucer influenced Shakespeare, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and plenty more. I could have kept asking questions for another hour! Marion recommends translations of Chaucer (Wright or Coghill), talks about the invention of the iambic pentameter, and discusses Chaucer and the question of influence. I recommend Marion’s book Chaucer: A European Life to you all.
Remember, you can read a transcript on the webpage version.
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It was a delight to talk to Naomi Kanakia who writes the Woman of Letters Substack. We talked about the homogeneity of modern fiction, whether the Great Books are really great (and which ones she found boring), as well as economics and fiction. I enjoy Naomi’s literary criticism on Substack very much and I am anticipating her new book about the Great Books.
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I was delighted to talk to the novelist Catherine Lacey, whose book Biography of X I admired very much indeed. We talked about personal websites, how she learned to code in HTML, 9 Beet Stretch, her writing on Substack (Untitled Thought Project), biography as a genre, modern novels, figurative art, Derek Parfit, MFAs, fiction and non-fiction, short stories, Merve Emre, W.S. Merwin, television, and plenty more.
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There’s a profile about me and Second Act in the New Zealand Listener. It’s very good so if you’re in NZ and have a subscription (it’s paywalled) do take a look. I chuckled at this line: “Speaking by Zoom from London, Oliver is a serious fellow, and has the manner of someone older.” This was nice too: “He also has a strong sense of his own mortality. For someone still in their 30s, this seems surprising until he talks about his penchant for poetry… Our interview is peppered with quotes from poems.” My thanks to Sarah Catherall for a lovely write up!
When I asked to interview Nabeel, he asked to interview me. How could I refuse? Nabeel is a well-read literary enthusiast so of course we had a good time covering many topics such as favourite books, autofiction, Harold Bloom, modernism, subjectivity culture post-1945, Anthony Powell, The Englishness of Robert Frost, modern novels, George Eliot, viewquakes, novels about older people, and being self-authorised. And then I turned it round and ask Nabeel questions about tech reading lists, entertainment and learning, the utilitarian value of Shakespeare, and whether AI will be good for literature. He’s a visiting fellow in AI at the Mercatus Centre, with a background in tech companies, so his answers are well-considered and interesting. And I got a book recommendation!
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I always enjoy corresponding with Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal) and was therefore delighted to talk to her about poetry and literature. It’s a wonderful conversation that ranges across so many books and ideas. We covered why there is no crisis in the humanities, why you should read Walter Scott, our favourite modern poets (Hollis: Terrance Hayes; Henry: Sally Read—I like her book Day Hospital very much), Regency video games, the role of AI in teaching, AI and poetry, how Hollis would change the way literature is taught, memorising poetry, Shakespeare, why the 1850s was such a remarkable literary decade, and so so much more! Her peroration at the end about literature and education is especially exciting.
The two Utah poets Hollis mentions are Jacqueline Osherow and Craig Dworkin. Osherow had a sonnet in the New Yorker recently. Hollis is here on Substack where she has been writing interestingly about academia and Bridgerton, and why English majors should become plumbers. She has a deep knowledge of poetry and I hope she’ll be writing about that too.
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What a delight to talk to James Marriott, the Times columnist who writes about literature, culture, and being a millennial. James is very well-read and we covered the ground from Iris Murdoch to Harry Potter, from why men should read novels to whether the crisis of modernity is actually modern. You can read James’s columns at the Times or see his Twitter feed here. I found James’ comments on the important of being pretentious interesting and they reminded me of what the philosopher Agnes Callard has written about aspiration, which I discussed in Second Act.
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NB The first two or three minutes have some audio glitches but the rest of the recording is much better quality.
I was delighted to talk to A.N. Wilson, novelist, journalist, biographer, and historian, whose books on Iris Murdoch, Dante, and Prince Albert I very much admire, as well as his memoir Confessions. Wilson’s new book Goethe. His Faustian Life comes out in September (December in the USA) and is a splendid account of Goethe’s lifelong work on Faust. In this interview we talk about Goethe’s work as a scientist, his influence on psychotherapy, and his extraordinary drinking, as well as covering a range of literary topics from Professor Helen Gardner to Elizabeth Jenkins and Charles Dickens. (We agree: Dickens is the best. I’ve written about: David Copperfield, Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit, and Bleak House.)
You can (and should) subscribe to Andrew’s excellent Substack here.
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In Tyler Cowen’s new book there is a whole chapter about John Stuart Mill, and I think Tyler really gets Mill, and draws on many of the key sources, both primary and secondary. So I’m pleased to offer you this conversation about Mill and biography, economics ideas where Mill remains relevant, how to read Mill properly, why Mill isn’t so influential today, whether Mill was a coherent thinker, the gap in the intellectual heritage of Effective Altruism, when the different arts peaked, why you should read Mill’s Bentham and Coleridge, and more. Several of you how got in touch to tell me that you read Mill’s Autobiography and hopefully this conversation will encourage you to explore further.
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Writing ElsewhereRecently I have written for The Critic about how to find somewhere to live in London, solving the problem of modern architecture, and in praise of stupid politicians. I also produced some epigrams framed as advice for young people.
Noah Smith is an economics blogger with his own Substack (highly recommended). We talked about late bloomers, motivation, modelling effects, peer effects, culture, and Anime. I’ll leave you to decide what you believe about the disagreement half way through about whether we are morally obliged to work hard and use our abilities.
Henry Oliver: Well, thanks for joining me. I appreciate your time and your willingness.
Noah Smith: Absolutely.
Henry Oliver: What I am interested in, I'm writing about late bloomers, so I'm interested in ideas to do with, your intelligence is flexible, it's not determined at birth, and you have lots of margin to improve yourself. And I saw your tweet, is he called June? Is it Huh, June Huh, the mathematician?
Noah Smith: I don't know. I don't know who that is.
Henry Oliver: Yeah, he won the Fields Medal, he dropped out of high school.
Noah Smith: Oh, right. That's right, that guy.
Henry Oliver: He wanted to be a poet and he didn't like maths. And then it was like six years into college, he went to a maths class and he got into it and then he got really obsessed with it and he dropped poetry and he got really... He only ate pizzas, 'cause he was just sitting there doing maths all the time. And then he wins the Fields Medal, so he's like a total late starter, and it defies all the stereotypes that you have to be good at maths when you're young. And he's everything that you're not supposed to be.
Noah Smith: Right. Right.
Henry Oliver: So what I'm interested in is your views on this whole area. Sorry.
Noah Smith: Well, it's hard to say. You can definitely pick out lots of anecdotes like this, of people who come late to a subject and then just go really far in it. And then you're gonna get this infinite debate between people who say, "Well, he always had the talent, he just didn't wanna do it before." And people who say, "Well, you really... You can do anything you set your mind to." And blah, blah, blah. And there's no way you can really prove that. But I think that the better... It's cool to have a guy who dropped out of school to be a poet and then eventually became a Fields Medalist. That's eye-catching and neat, but I think the better examples are the more prosaic examples of people who are just middling students who go on to be math professors. And so for example, I had two classmates.
When I was in school, we knew who the very best math people were. I was one of them. And but there were a handful. There were three or four kids each year who were the best people at math and who would go to the top schools and do technical subjects and blah, blah, blah. And one of those did become a math professor, but I think most of them just went to... Eventually became software engineers at Google or whatever, or just blew up their life and became an economics pundit like me. So almost none of them actually went into the field. And then when I look at the couple of people I know from my high school who became math professors, they were both fairly middling in math in high school. They didn't win the competitions. They weren't on the math team.
Actually, so when I was in high school, what I liked was not math but physics. That's what I really liked. But I wasn't that interested in math because I felt like it wasn't real, physics felt more real to me. But then when I got to college, I started to really love math proofs, and so I started to like math a lot more in college. The people who ended up becoming math professors, they were on that sort of journey magnified several fold. And so now, they're teaching at some, at a college. And so I guess the point is that...
Henry Oliver: What happens to them?
Noah Smith: They get interested. Motivation is everything. When we talk about late bloomers, we have to talk about motivation, because kids aren't born motivated. And when kids are young, their parents provide them with motivation. Their parents hug them and tell them they're great, and then insist that in order to keep getting that approval, they've got to ace a bunch of math tests. Or some parents take a more harsh approach where they say, "If you don't ace your math test, I'll beat you with this belt."
[laughter]
But I think that's kind of going out, that approach, which is definitely what my grandmother had to deal with, with her immigrant parents immigrating from what's now Ukraine. If she didn't get perfect scores on math, they would hit her with a belt.
And that is just... That seems very harsh. It is very harsh. It's a world... [laughter] That's the world of the depression and the World Wars, and that old world that was very harsh, and you still get a few immigrant parents who try to take that extremely harsh attack. But I think that in America, we're moving away from that toward something that can be just as emotionally damaging, which is, "You had better get 100 on this math test or I won't love you." And that's the alternative way. But then when people are young, they get all this motivation from their parents, and the people that we call nerds are really just people who are closer to their parents. People who are less close to their parents, we don't call nerds. And no matter how much they are talented at math or good at math...
One of my best friends was incredibly smart as a kid. He could ace the SAT as a little kid or whatever and could do a bunch of math stuff. He didn't care at all. He just wanted to play rock music, play rock guitar, and... I don't know, play Dungeons & Dragons, and hook up with girls, and get in fights. And he was very good at all of those things.
[laughter]
And now he's a physicist in Europe. His parents are both math professors. If there's any natural talent to be had, he obviously had it. And then he just... When he was ready, he just effortlessly went and became a physicist. And so you could argue that there's both talent and motivation here, but the motivation component was key. He had to feel like he no longer felt like... He would go and get in bare-knuckled boxing competitions in Germany or something, which he won. [chuckle] And then... Or just do the craziest combinations of drugs you'd ever not wanna do. And he just did that kind of stuff, and then when he felt like, "Oh, I guess it's time for me to get a job," he just went and did physics. And then he got interested in it, and he got really interested in the physics that he was doing. And it became this... Just like when he was a kid, he used to pour over Dungeons & Dragons manuals, crafting the perfect adventure, he would now just pour over physics, like experiments, and he worked at CERN, and etcetera.
And so that's an interesting journey right there. Because motivation changes over life, he was not a nerd as a kid, but he got motivated later in life. And I think that with a lot of nerds, with a lot of the kids that you see who are very close to their parents, and who are motivated by parental involvement, you see burnout, because then those kids are like, "Yeah, I do what my parents want." Blah, blah, blah. And then they get to age 17, 18, and they're like, "Wait a second, why am I not getting laid? Why am I not partying with the other party kids?" And then when they get to college, when they get out of their... Out from under their mother's wing, out to the world where you live in a dorm and you're around all the other young people and no one's really supervising you. I seen... I went to a fancy school and saw this happen again and again and again and again. And so these people just... These people lose motivation and they run off the rails. And they say, "Why did I not get to party?" And often, they regain motivation later in life. The most common pattern is that they party, they figure out how to hook up with people, they find romance, they get married. And then they get their motivation back to be really serious, and then they...
So I have a friend who's a mathematician who when he was in college, he was just very down because he had always been so motivated by his parents, and now he was away from them. And now he was like, "Why do I not have a social life?" And we were his friends and always trying to promote him to get a social life. And then he started working out, dating girls, whatever. I went to his wedding, his wedding was a math wedding where a bunch of math people came and made really elaborate esoteric math puns on PowerPoint at his wedding. [laughter] And it was a great wedding.
Henry Oliver: That's a good wedding. Yeah.
Noah Smith: It was a really good wedding, it was great. And then we all played board games and stuff like that. Now he’s a mathematician, but anyway, but the point is that he went through that period where he lost motivation, and some people never get it back. Some people really... And so I think motivation is the key, life motivation. Yeah.
Henry Oliver: Right. And then some people talk about... Some people are very fixated on the prefrontal cortex doesn't mature until you're 25, and so you don't get executive making decision abilities. And that's why people in their 20s run around and they don't work hard, and then in your mid-20s, you kind of get your life together. But that seems like a very pat... It's like a Just So story like, “Don't worry when you're 25, it'll just happen and you'll just wake up and your prefrontal cortex will have turned on.” That's a very inadequate explanation. What is motivation? Where can we get it? How can we explain this to people?
Noah Smith: I can tell you what I think, and I can pull in various psychology papers to support this thesis. But I can tell you my thesis, that it's all about human approval, it’s all about... Motivation is social, there is some intrinsic motivation that you get from nothing, just from curiosity. And we over emphasize this. It's fun to tinker with stuff, and it's fun to play with stuff. There’s certainly, like mathematicians out there like Terence Tao, who just from a very early age, were just intrinsically motivated by the fun of tinkering with stuff and have never stopped. That's real, that's a thing that exists. But I think that for most people in most cases, motivation is social. It has to do with the people around you saying attaboy, attagirl, atta non-binary person, [laughter] and patting you on the back and saying... What do you say for atta with a non-binary person? I don't know that. But anyway, so then the point is that people give you congratulations and approval and they say, “You done did good kid.” [chuckle] And that’s really what it is, it’s... I don’t know what the British idioms are here. What do you tell someone you did something good?
Henry Oliver: We would just say, “Well done.”
Noah Smith: Oh, got that.
Henry Oliver: You don’t wanna over do it. You say, “Well done.” That's pretty big, right?
Noah Smith: Yes, well done.
Henry Oliver: If they speak, that's approval. Speaking is approval.
[laughter]
Noah Smith: Got it, got it. [laughter] That reminds me of a guy, the software engineer in Japan, who was very briefly my roommate for two months. And then we took him to a tattoo piercing bar, which freaked him out so much that he moved out of our apartment. [laughter] He was very... [laughter] Alright, but that's where motivation is, it's social and parental motivation is important, but it doesn't last forever.
Henry Oliver: So you’re saying it’s like status seeking, you want to be seen in a positive way by your peers, you want to have the status of someone who’s done whatever these things are, and if we took that away, you would lose interest in the thing itself, the substance.
Noah Smith: Well, maybe... So I would be a little more subtle than that. So status, I think, which we pronounce with a short A, sorry. But yeah, status is like...
Henry Oliver: No, it’s good. It’s good.
Noah Smith: It’s a public thing, it’s a public facing thing, like you get the top score in the competition, so your name is up on a board, or you get a medal or something. It’s something that everyone... It’s something of common knowledge that everyone can see, that everyone else can see, but approval is more general. So that is one sort of approval, yes. But approval can also just be your friend saying, I think you did a good job, and then no one sees. And that's not status, you don’t actually get status for having one friend who likes you, and yet that one friend who likes you can often be more important approval. And I think that the most important form of approval for most people is romantic, it’s your romantic partner is who gives you the most important approval in your life. That’s the person whose approval you seek the most, in fact, achieving romance itself is a form of approval for people, like, “I was good enough that this person liked me and wanted to exclusively dedicate there, whatever to me.” Blah, blah, blah. And so I think that in itself is a powerful form of approval for people who want to... I don't wanna be crude here, but for people who wanna go around and get laid. The getting of laid, it is approval from someone. It’s not status necessarily. You can go brag about how much you get laid, but people just don’t like you when you do that. Unless they’re on a sports team or something. But generally, people don’t like that, but you get the approval privately from someone… you know you are attractive. You know you could attract people. And to be honest, I think that’s a bigger motivation for a lot of people than the actual enjoyment of sex, is just the knowledge that you're attractive, the... I’m asexual, so I can observe this from an outside vantage point. Yeah, so people get that approval and then romance is that magnifier, because someone approves of you not just to spend a night with you, but to actually dedicate their life to you, or at least some large portion of their life. And so that's an important part of approval. So romance, friends, parents, community. The community approval is status, but it’s only one type.
Henry Oliver: How far can we take this?
Noah Smith: Colleagues….
Henry Oliver: But in some ways, this sounds a bit like you’re saying people do difficult work for the same reason that the peacock grows a heavy tail, because people will look at that work and go, “I like you. That’s a nice tail. Maybe I'll sleep with you.”
Noah Smith: [laughter] Well, I don't know about that. I don’t think people would...
Henry Oliver: Have like...
Noah Smith: I don't know about that. But some people are doing that.
Henry Oliver: There must be more to it. There must be more to it than, “I want people to like me, so I will study Physics.” Studying Physics is hard. There are other ways to get people to say, “Dude, good job.”
Noah Smith: Well, okay, studying Physics isn't always hard.
Henry Oliver: No, but you see my point, like you could...
Noah Smith: It was a lot easier for me than Computer Science. And then I can’t...
Henry Oliver: But you could paint the fence and someone would say, “That was really good. Well done.” You don't have to get a... You don’t have... People do some impressive things, especially late bloomers. Late bloomers often, it’s like, “I haven't done this thing with my life, I'm gonna bloody well go and do it.”
Noah Smith: Right. But so it gets pretty subtle because I think that some people have internalized... So here, there is a lot of psych research, actually. My dad's a psychologist, so I learned about a lot of this. But people have internalized motivation that comes from sort of imagining modeling of the people who might approve them. So you think even if your mom is long dead, you might think, “What would... My mom would be so proud that I did this.” Or even if your mom doesn't actually care or even is alive, but just doesn't give a s**t. You could imagine that.
And so often, this sort of imagined approval from this ghost of someone hovering over your shoulder is so subtle that you don't even think about it unless you stop to think about it, like, “Why do I think that getting married by 28 is important? Why do I think that?” Someone thinks like, this is a conversation I had with someone the other day, “Why do I think getting married is important?” Their mom never actually called them up and gave them the sort of call, which every female lead gets at the beginning of every rom-com of the mom calling you at your... You wake up in your urban apartment and in your sloppy bed and then your mom calls you and your mom's like, “Why haven't you gotten married and settled down?”
Henry Oliver: “Where are my grandchildren?” Yes.
Noah Smith: “Where are my grandchildren?” It’s like the beginning of every rom-com. I don't know, Bridget Jones or whatever. And so then that scene is just again and again, and so... [laughter] Yeah, so basically, your mom doesn't actually have to call you up. You have an imaginary emulation of your mom in your mind, that may or may not be accurate, that tells you... That calls you up in your mind and tells you need to get married by 28 or whatever, or that you need to succeed in some career. So maybe you choose a career out of interest, or you choose a career out of aptitude or both, but then what drives you to succeed in that career instead of just sitting around and tinkering around. So often...
Interestingly, often we think of people who are on the autism spectrum as people who are more intrinsically motivated by curiosity and stuff like that. Those people don't always end up being very high achievers, because I know a guy who’s definitely on the autism spectrum who is a professor who just likes to just do his research and never worry about self-promotion or prestige. And so didn't get that prestigious until later in life when people started urging him to become more prestigious and then he started sort of promoting... He’s like, “Oh, maybe I should.” And started promoting his stuff, and then got very well known. But for many years, he just wanted to do his own thing in his own lab.
And so, intrinsic motivation doesn't always lead to what... To “success.” Because remember, when we’re talking about success, there’s an automatic selection bias filter there, because we, the public, have decided what is success. So when you’re asking what causes success, you're asking what causes people to do things that the public recognizes as success? And so, it’s not just public recognition, but the fact that we’re filtering by public recognition when we’re looking for a thing to explain means that we start out with the kind of thing that could get recognition. You know, we... Like, Fields Medal instead of just, “What if you just did math because you were really into anime and you sat around figuring out all the different ways you could re-watch your favorite show?” Someone did that and he proved...
[laughter]
He got the core of a very important math result on hyper-permutations from sitting around figuring out how many ways he could re-watch The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which is a boring cartoon, sorry, [chuckle] that you can re-watch a bunch of different ways? And so, he was figuring out like, “How many ways could I re-watch this?” And so he was posting about it in some forum, and someone relayed it to the sci-fi author, Greg Egan, who also works as a mathematician. And so, Greg Egan came in and partnered with this guy and they published this important paper, but the anime guy just wanted to watch some dumb cartoons. [laughter] That's all he wanted to do and he came up with this result. So...
Henry Oliver: What is your best guess for how many people like...
Noah Smith: It's just he did it by accident.
Henry Oliver: Like how many people are there, like the anime guy, where if we could pair them up with someone or if we could discover them or if we could be like, “Dude, lift your head up and look at the world for 10 minutes, you're actually doing something.” Like, how much talent could we uncover like that? Or are there just not that... Most of them are just watching cartoons, they're not that many of them?
Noah Smith: Well, okay, there's not that many of them, but more importantly, if you did discover them, why would they care? How would you get them to care?
Henry Oliver: Well, how did Greg Egan do it? I mean, he got this guy to publish a paper.
Noah Smith: Well, Greg Egan published the paper.
Henry Oliver: Okay.
Noah Smith: He’s a mathematician who cared. [chuckle] Like, he... He took... This guy would never have published the paper. So, you know, another... The most famous example of this is Grigori Perelman, right? Do you know who that is?
Henry Oliver: No.
Noah Smith: He’s a wacky Russian mathematician who... I hope he’s okay now. He’s very... Anyway, he came to the United States and was studying, and then while he was here, he figured out how to solve the Poincaré conjecture, which was one of the older, more difficult open problems in mathematics. He figured that out. He wrote it up in a very sloppy way, he just enjoyed it, he wrote it up in a sloppy way and just posted it on the archive. And then he just posted this pre-print and then people are like, “Oh, hey, this guy solved the Poincaré conjecture,” and then some other mathematicians from Princeton went through it and they're like, “Okay, yes, this works.” [chuckle] And so, then... But then they were like, “Okay, publish this paper,” and he was like, “No, I don’t wanna publish the paper,” and they were like, “Come on, you're gonna be famous, you’re gonna be so important and famous of a mathematician, blah, blah, blah,” and he disliked it so much that he moved away.
Moved to St. Petersburg, moved back to Russia to live with his mom, on his mom's pension instead of having a job. He could have gotten a job at any university. And then the Clay Mathematics Institute offered him a million dollar prize for solving this open problem, ’cause they had a million dollar prize for this, he turned the million dollars down, didn't take it. He got a Fields Medal, he refused the Fields Medal.
[laughter]
Henry Oliver: Oh my God.
Noah Smith: He refused... Look up Grigori Perelman, he refused the Fields Medal. This guy’s nuts, he just like... He has a beard that looks like a 19th century Russian guy beard, really. And he like... What he likes to do is... His pastimes apparently include breaking into the opera to watch from the janitor seats or whatever, and hopping rooftops...
Henry Oliver: Okay.
Noah Smith: In St. Petersburg, he lives on his mother’s pension. And so this guy solved one of the most important problems in math, obviously has a lot of talent, what is he doing? [laughter] Like, he didn't even care. He was like, “No,” he just... “I quit”, and he's never done any math again, because the social... The stress of getting so much attention kinda broke him. And so, that’s... And so the question is...
Henry Oliver: But yeah.
Noah Smith: Would the anime guy or this guy, who's like anime guy times 20, would [chuckle] they actually want that. When we look at... If you talk to VCs a lot, I think they just generally will tell you that Founder is a personality type, and you’re not gonna change people’s personality types by discovering hidden talent, they’re gonna have the same personality. So you can harvest their ideas, but turning them into the person who wants to be an Elon Musk type...
Henry Oliver: Right.
Noah Smith: Or a Jeff Bezos type, is just not going to happen. And so I think that we have to understand that there are people whose personality types... So, I think that it’s more important to discover the people with the right motivations directing it in the wrong directions, than it is to discover the people with the hidden talent. Somewhere, there is a guy who is extremely good at organizing people and at improving operations and at incorporating new technological ideas, blah, blah, blah, who is using that to sell drugs, and who is basically part of a mafia, drug cartel kind of thing, who is a respected gang leader, and who is using his talents to sell drugs and organize a drug gang, right? And then find that guy and tell that guy, “Why don’t you start a tech company instead, it’s like a drug gang, but nobody gets shot, hopefully.”
[laughter]
Unless it’s Anduril, in which case somebody gets shot. [laughter] But then like... Yeah, so then nobody... Why don't you start a company instead of a drug gang? And so, there’s people who are just... Whose motivations are pointed in the wrong direction. If you want people to apply their motivation to creating value in the corporate world, you should find people who have the motivation to build organizations, to implement new technologies to solve problems, to get money, etcetera. Find those people. Those are the missing entrepreneurs, the people who are leading drug gangs instead of being entrepreneurs.
Henry Oliver: How can we change someone’s motivation? That seems like the most difficult thing.
Noah Smith: Different friends, different romantic partner: that’s how you change someone’s motivation.
Henry Oliver: Right, but anyone who’s got a friend who’s in a bad friendship group or who knows someone who's made a bad choice of romantic partner or... Like, this is a cliche thing, right? You can’t... There’s nothing you can do once someone gets into that, like, there’s nothing you can do.
Noah Smith: Yes, you can, different friends. Go find them, invite them to some hangouts. You don’t tell them to stop hanging out with your hoodlum friends or whatever, you don’t do that, you don't police who they currently hang out with, you just give them an alternative, you introduce them to some new people and then they can get approval from the new people. And so, I will give you an example.
Henry Oliver: Okay.
Noah Smith: The example is my brother-in-law, who gave me permission to use this example.
[chuckle]
Henry Oliver: Okay.
Noah Smith: My brother-in-law has never met his father, his mother had him when she was 16, he grew up in a trailer park, very classic. No one in his family had ever been to college. His sister was pregnant at 15, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Henry Oliver: Yeah. Yeah.
Noah Smith: Zero people in his family had ever been to college, but he liked Japanese cartoons, he liked anime, and so he went in the high school anime club where he met my sister. They ended up getting married. She convinced him to go to college. He went to a mediocre college. He's like, “Okay, fine, I’ll... My family aren't the college type.” [chuckle] But she convinced him to do that and he was like, “Oh, you know, it was okay, I met some nice people. That was kind of fun.” And then they moved to DC where she’s a lawyer. And then she just kept telling him about the work that she did and introducing him to her lawyer friends, you know, and then he met... He started hanging out with all the lawyer friends because his own motivation... Like, his own impulse would just be to like, make friends with a bunch of like, bums he knew from high school who like to play table-top role playing games and watch anime, and yet she's here introducing him to all these lawyers. And he’s like, “Well, there’s all this cool stuff,” you know? And so he decided to go get a law degree and he got into a top law school. [chuckle] And then he...
Henry Oliver: Wow.
Noah Smith: Yeah, and so then... Now he just graduated from the top law school and now he's like... He’s not a practicing lawyer, he does like, legal consulting work or whatever, but then... But yeah, he graduated from a top law school, and then, no one in his family had ever been to college. They were just hanging out in a trailer park getting pregnant too early. And what happened... No one harshly said, “Don't hang out with the trailer park people, no more of that. Cut off those people.” No one did that. He just met a group of people who inculcated him with this different perspective, you know? He realized he could do different things, he got interested in law, but it wasn't just that... I mean, yes, he got intrinsically motivated, he thought law is cool, right? But also the people around him, his friends who were my sister’s friends, were people who did law, and he could get engaged in interesting discussions by talking about legal stuff with them and turned out to be just as naturally smart as any of they were... As any of them were.
But then he never would have been discovered by the system had he not met my sister in the Anime Club. So, I guess my real answer to this question of how do we discover the hidden gems of talent is Anime.
[chuckle]
Henry Oliver: There’s a report today in the New York Times of a Raj Chetty study, I think, showing that people of lower socioeconomic status families, the people who move into a higher income bracket, I think tend to have made friends across class divides. So the areas of the country where there are more people making friends across class divides tend to have this... This is exactly what you're describing, that they...
Noah Smith: Oh wow, so... Well, I was b**********g based on anecdote, Raj Chetty was doing the systematic study, so that’s why Raj Chetty is the greatest.
Henry Oliver: He’s got a big... Yeah, he’s got a big scatter plot that I think suggests what you’re saying.
Noah Smith: Hold on. So actually, yeah, send me that. I know he’s done work on Lost Einstein’s modeling effects, neighbourhood effects, things like that. This is a follow-up to that. This is great.
Henry Oliver: I believe so.
Noah Smith: I love that. Raj Chetty is so good, and anyway...
Henry Oliver: Yeah, no, it’s very interesting. It’s very interesting.
Noah Smith: Yeah.
Henry Oliver: So you’re saying we need to leverage that a lot more, that’s the way we match smart people with better motivations, better, better incentives.
Noah Smith: Right. Right. Find the people and find something that doesn’t require them to immediately jump into Math competition or do a bunch of hard work in the service of something...
Henry Oliver: Right.
Noah Smith: That they've never been interested in. So that's... You know what, I just invented the Anime theory of motivation. Anime theory of talent discovery. [laughter] How about that?
Henry Oliver: So here’s my follow-up...
Noah Smith: Why Anime? Because it is something that engages your mind a little bit, but it’s 99 parts fun, one part thinking about stuff.
Henry Oliver: So low barriers to entry.
Noah Smith: It’s low barrier to entry. That’s why a person who is a bum, which is... I use the word bum and it’s pejorative, but I think it’s absolutely fine to be a bum, if you wanna just sit around and play Dungeons & Dragons, and work in McDonalds your whole life, do that! Fine, I don't need you to work hard for the nation, be a McDonalds Dungeons & Dragons bum, but if you’d also like some... [chuckle] If you’d also like to graduate from a top law school, cool. Okay. So really... So Anime and Dungeons & Dragons, those things are things that... Dungeons & Dragons engages your mind a little more than Anime because you have to calculate a few probabilities and you don’t know that's what you’re doing, you're like, how likely it is that I’m gonna be able to make this role in Dungeons & Dragons?
You’re calculating a probability from a uniform distribution, but you don’t know that. Also, you just learn a little baby statistics just playing D&D by accident. You learn about fat-tailed versus thin-tailed distributions too, because fat-tailed distributions are the ones that make you die a lot. [chuckle] And so, anyway...
Henry Oliver: So we should have Dungeons & Dragons in every school.
Noah Smith: We should have Dungeons & Dragons in every school, we should have Anime in every school.
Henry Oliver: Okay.
Noah Smith: And so... Or the option to do this, and we should have a club where people watch Anime and then write essays about it or something. I don’t know, I just made that up, but Dungeons & Dragons should be an extra-curricular activity because it teaches creativity better than anything else. All the Asian countries that are trying to revamp their educational system to teach creativity, should have Dungeons & Dragons classes, and then they’re there, that’s it, that’s all you do. Anyway...
Henry Oliver: Okay. I want to follow up on the thing about your brother-in-law.
Noah Smith: Yeah. Very cool dude.
Henry Oliver: He is a very cool dude, and that’s a great story and it’s a great outcome, but it’s very contingent, because he met your sister, he ended up being a lawyer, if he’d met someone else’s sister, he might have done something else.
Noah Smith: Correct. He could be an engineer, entrepreneur, who knows.
Henry Oliver: Who knows, right? Because smart people can do this whole range of stuff.
Noah Smith: Right.
Henry Oliver: Is there a problem of like, a lot of people who are smart and who come from a middle class family and they go to university and then they do all become lawyers and consultants and whatevers. And actually, if we’re gonna start pulling other people in and re-motivating them, we don't need more lawyers, like, we’re fine for consultants, we would prefer you to be engineers and computer scientists and poets and whatever, how does that work?
Noah Smith: That’s at the policy level. So that’s... The government is what does that. And you change the incentives. You can do in a stupid way, like Xi Jinping, where you just basically take people who are doing all the stuff you don’t wanna do and then just find them and arrest them. [chuckle] That is stupid and that will fail, because... [chuckle] But instead, we use positive promotion. So, right now we’re finding a need to do this with semiconductor engineers...
Henry Oliver: Right.
Noah Smith: Which China also does, ’cause we’re in this race of semiconductors, right? And so China is doing it by basically kicking your ass if you do anything but semiconductors and that’s not gonna work. It’s gonna work, but not well. But then what we can do is we can promote, we can, of course, subsidize money because people do care about money. Money matters, especially if you have kids. Kids are very expensive. Kids are a huge source of motivation for people to make money.
Henry Oliver: Oh, you don't need to tell me.
Noah Smith: Oh, you have kids?
Henry Oliver: Yeah.
Noah Smith: Nice. And so, there is pressure on you to always get some money.
Henry Oliver: Yeah. [laughter] Yeah.
Noah Smith: Whereas me, there’s no pressure on me to get money except to just like, buy my... Like I’ve bought my rabbits like all the treats that money can buy, and now it’s just like, more money just means like line go up for me, right?
Henry Oliver: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Noah Smith: But if you have kids, then you need the money. And so, yeah, of course, if you’re like super rich, if you’re like Elon Musk, then you’re back to line go up, because you don't need that money or [chuckle] any of that. You know? You just wanna make the line go up, but then, so... That's government policy. We can promote STEM through stuff in school where we like do... I don’t know, MacArthur Genius, blah, blah, blah. I don’t even know what that is.
Henry Oliver: Yeah, yeah.
Noah Smith: And then we can pay money so that Intel will go out and hire a million people and they’ll do a job fair and they’ll do like, summer internships and they’ll be like, “Hey, college kid, how would you like to come do an internship at Intel?” And they’re all like, “Oh, sure.” [laughter] And then like, nerd goes and does his internship at Intel and then, “Wow, like that’s cool. I’d like to do that after I graduate,” or whatever. Although I guess they mostly hire PhDs. But anyway, you can do that. And so, policy can put their thumb on the scale for whether people become lawyers. In fact, there’s been a big sort of crash in the legal field. My brother-in-law went into it, but in fact, the number of people going to law school is like way down.
Henry Oliver: Oh, really?
Noah Smith: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And the sort of billable hour model collapsed, so basically like, lawyer ran to the end of its... The lawyer boom ran to the end of its life.
Henry Oliver: Okay.
Noah Smith: There was a big lawyer boom for various reasons. Their underlying drivers were things like the changes in patent law that allow you to patent business process and software drove a need for IP lawyers, which drove up the wages for other lawyers. There was like expanding federal regulation in a number of areas, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. My sister’s a human rights lawyer. She works for the Equal Opportunity Employer Commission, so like, she’s not in that world. But there was just a general expansion, kind of like business school expansion drove the demand for Economics profs and raised salaries even in traditional Econ. departments. You get the supply... Or, I’m sorry, demand affect bleeds through the whole industry. And you had that in law for about, I don’t know, like half a century, and then it just ended one day [chuckle] in the 2010s, it ended.
And then like... And to be perfectly honest, I think this is one of many causes of increased unrest in the 2010s is the fact that the legal profession became much more closed off as a sort of like a high-earning kind of out for people who study the humanities. I’m gonna write about that soon. How the drying up of opportunities for humanities majors led to a bunch of pissed off humanities majors who instead were like... They're like, "Now I'm a socialist. I'm gonna rebel. Marxism!" And like... Really it's just because no one would let you be like a fancy lawyer that you expected to be, because we need fewer fancy lawyers. So like, demand plays a huge role here and the government can put its thumb on the scale for demand. And finance can too. You know, like VC...
When the second tech boom drew... When finance crashed on the East Coast, a second tech boom, like suddenly everybody was giving their money to Andres and Horowitz and whoever or... I don't know, Soft, I think. Tiger Global. These people were just showering money on entrepreneurs, and so all these smart people who used to go into investment banking, trading, hedge funds, whatever, flowed to the west, and they all started starting companies, tech companies. And so, for a few years in the 2010s, the VCs really had their pick of all this talent because of this massive amount of money they were throwing at it. And I think the recent crash is kind of the end of that rainbow. There's still gonna be some of that going on, but I think that the days of easy money are temporarily over.
Henry Oliver: One of the questions on policy that I think is relevant here is like... It’s kind of about policy, but it starts with, “What is the status of stuff like STEM generally in the culture?” And one of the problems I think we have... We certainly have this problem in Britain, I think you have it in America, is that to be a scientist is just not cool enough relative to like the number of people we need to study like Physics or Maths at A level. But if you look at Eastern Europe... So this is one reason given why fewer women study STEM subjects. And if you look at Eastern Europe, there’s a much higher percentage enrollment of women in STEM subjects. And one of the main explanations for this is that under Communism like you had to be a scientist to help the country and this, “Why would you wanna do something else? We need these scientists. Get on with it.” And so this has left them with a culture that says, “Well, of course, it’s good to be a scientist. Why shouldn’t you be a scientist?” Whereas in the West, it’s more like, “Science, that’s hard. You’re a nerd. It’s boring.” So policy... Policy that’s not...
Noah Smith: Maybe so...
Henry Oliver: As far as China has gone, but that worked better than our thing worked. So how can we split the difference on this?
Noah Smith: Well, and I think that it’s just role modeling effects are important here. With women in science, I think what you’re interestingly seeing is that in Bioscience fields, the women are kind of taking over, and that’s really interesting. So if you look at... And I don’t wanna attribute it to a modeling effect but you can note that, who are the most popular biologists. The most famous popular biologists of the last like decade, that would be Katalin Karikó who invented mRNA vaccines, and Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, who were the discoverers of CRISPR. And so those people have really gotten... And you’ve got a lot of... And there’s a lot of other very prestigious like role models for women in Bioscience right here. And it was just... I don’t know if there's any deep reason. People are gonna look for deep reasons why electrical engineering is still like the most male-dominated thing in biosciences, like getting increasingly... Not female-dominated, the top tenured professors because that takes many decades to filter through.
Henry Oliver: Yeah, sure.
Noah Smith: But in terms of who’s going to grad school and who’s getting, etcetera, that's... Women are just surging and I predict will eventually take over like they did in psychology. And so when you look at these fields, you ask why women in this one field, people come up with all these ridiculous Ev. Psych. explanations, like, “Women like things that are alive.” I'm like, “Come on.” [laughter] They’re like a f*****g bacterium or a piece of RNA versus flow of electrons in a device that’s... One’s not more alive. You can’t pet it. It’s not a cute little bunny. That’s b******t. It’s like... And I know because I spend most of my day petting cute little bunnies. But... [laughter] So, no, what’s really happening is that you happen to get some women in the bioscience field first and they provided the modeling effects for other women to look at them and be like, “Oh well, that famous scientist is a woman, I could be a women too. And... “ I can be a woman too? I could be a woman, no, I could be scientist too. That’s something else. [laughter] Then I can be a scientist too, and put on a lab coat and be just like this person. And I think that you see another thing in the theoretical fields, you see that Theoretical Physics is still extremely male-dominated, but you see that Math...
A lot more women are going into Math, and certain segments of Math are getting a whole lot of women, like certain sub-fields of Math are getting a whole lot of women, and Math majors are now about half women. And so Math, I would argue that the skill set required to Math and versus Theoretical Physics is not so incredibly different. It’s a little different, Physics has a little more intuition in some areas, and Math a little more rigor, but it’s not so different. And the fact that women are going a lot into one field and not into the other field, don’t b******t me with some Ev. Psych. explanation of why women like Math instead of Theoretical Physics. Shut up! To the imaginary Ev. Psych. person who's gonna yell at me on Twitter. No, no, it’s not. It’s modeling effects. It’s founder effects and modeling effects, it’s like... You get some... And like TV, I’m sure has to do with this, there’s probably some effects of media, like media shows women, some famous woman doing bioscience stuff, but not electrical engineering stuff. I don’t know. And there’s probably that, I don’t know, I can’t prove that, I don’t have any evidence.
Henry Oliver: Do we prioritize too young, getting people to sort themselves and decide what they’re gonna do, and therefore cut off like range and sampling? And one of the reasons why being a late bloomer is kind of like a slightly weird thing is because we say to people, “Well, you gotta pick something and you gotta go and do it”, and we don't let them just... We don't encourage this thing where actually you might just bum around for a bit and try different stuff and...
Noah Smith: Honestly, no. America is really good about that. Other countries do that, and they’re trying to do it less. So for example, the most famous example I know of this is a guy named Kim Ung-yong in South Korea, who was... He had the highest IQ ever measured, blah, blah, blah. And they were like, “Well, you've got to...” I don’t know, there was this whole national thing where, “He’s this great genius, and we’ve gotta make him...” And the most genius-y thing they thought they can make him do is go work for NASA. They were like “NASA!” And then he was just like, “You know what? I don't wanna do this, I just wanna be a middle manager at like some company and just have a job and have a life, I don’t really wanna do hard intellectual stuff. I have like a 210 IQ or whatever, like off the charts.” That's... 210 means nothing. It means our test isn’t good enough to measure how well you do these things. And so then he's just like, “I’m just gonna go do my thing.” And so now he’s just like some middle manager somewhere and everyone was, got real upset at him, they were like, “You were supposed to be this ass-kicker”, he’s a baby boomer, I think, and he’s just like, “Yeah, no. I wanna have a life, I just wanna have some kids.”
And the other famous example of this is a guy named William Sidis, who was an American guy who had the other highest IQ ever measured, similar kind of situation, who like everyone in the early 20th century just went crazy over this kid, they're like, “Ah! Smartest kid ever.” Blah blah, blah, blah, blah. And he's like, “No, what I wanna be is a Communist.” [chuckle] And so he became like a revolutionary, he just went to protests and stuff like that, and I think ended up getting killed or something. But I actually don't remember what happened to that guy, so don't quote me on that, but William Sidis was this guy's name. He was just the earlier version of Kim Ung-yong. And so now I think if you look at how society treated Kim Ung-yong, pushing him into this thing, versus how it treated Joon Hu, the poet guy, just letting him do something first in Korea, then in America, you see a big evolution, you see this evolution toward letting people discover what they’re gonna do. And I think we do let people have time to play around and discover what they wanna do.
I think there’s more we could do on this front, and I think that... I don’t wanna go on a tangent, but I think that the most important thing we could do to provide people with a perspective that we don't currently do is pay Americans, especially, to go on overseas trips when they’re young to get some perspective by actually seeing another country, ’cause Americans really get out of their country, especially disadvantaged kids. Imagine you take some disadvantaged kid who's never been more than 20 miles from where he grew up, and suddenly he’s doing three months in Vietnam. That’d be pretty cool. That would be a big perspective expander. But, so anyway, I think that would be a big one. But in the old days, how would you... If you just grew up on the farm and never left your hometown, how would you get out, see the world, and meet new kinds of people? Well, the army. It would be the army. What do they say? “Meet fascinating new people from foreign cultures, and shoot them.” [chuckle] “Join the army!” But, I...
Henry Oliver: That’s kind of what happened to Chris Gardner. Do you know him? The guy... He’s a stock broker. He wrote a really good book called The Pursuit of Happyness, that Will Smith turned into a movie.
Noah Smith: Oh, I didn't know that.
Henry Oliver: He basically had a really bad childhood, lived with a violent step-father, his mother went to jail because of social services problems, and he got out by joining the Navy, and the Navy was the only educational credential he really had. So he's a smart guy, but he didn't have the degree and whatever, and ended up selling medical equipment, and working all the time, and he had... Single father and it was just not working, and he sees a guy with a Ferrari and he's like, “Dude, I need to get me a Ferrari. What do I do?” And got an interview at a stock brokers firm and just... He’s like 27, he’s African American, he has no degree, he’s none of the things that the 1980s stockbrokers firms are looking for.
Noah Smith: That were looking for, right.
Henry Oliver: Right. But he’s been in the Navy and he’s obviously like, he’s obviously got some smarts and some perspective, and he just claws his way up and now he owns his own firm and he is a multi-millionaire and he’s a big success.
Noah Smith: Perspective, so I would say that motivation is really important, and motivation comes from friends, friend groups, and then I would say that... And by the way, the person to really talk about this is... But insufferably in a French way is René Girard. He talks about mimetic desire, and this is just the approval thing I’m talking about, but said in a Frenchier way, and... But it is good, it’s good, it’s good, you should read it. But, yes, like venture capitalists and people in the tech world love to talk about, "Girardian and blah, blah, blah," and yes, okay. [chuckle] So then... Yeah, so motivation is one, but perspective is the other, perspective is exposing your mind to things that you had never thought of before, because when people optimize, they optimize within the choice set that they’re aware of, expand that choice set and they will land on some other optimum, they’ll find it...
Henry Oliver: Do we have to send people abroad though, could we not just give them more anime, more novels, more movies, like different... ’Cause western movies are kind of bad, but if you gave them...
Noah Smith: It’s worth trying all these things, I think of anime and Dungeons and Dragons, the fantasy geek, the discovery method, I think of that as more about bringing people together, a social... That’s a social thing. So you... The DnD group that you play with will be a bunch of nerds, the anime group that you watch with will be a bunch of nerds, and then it’ll be nerds reinforcing nerds, so that’s more about... Even if other times you’re going out and getting into fights and stealing cars or whatever people do now, I guess you can’t steal cars anymore, because of new technology, but you can do other... I don’t know. I don’t know how people steal things anymore, but then... I don’t keep up with these things, I’m old. How do hoodlum kids hoodlum now? But the point is that not that you squash that, you give people like this nerd land that they can then... And there’s more things than just anime, and Dungeons and Dragons, there’s like a million things like that, but basically get nucleus-es of where nerds will pat you on the back for being nerdy, in someway.
Henry Oliver: You've said a couple of times that like you don’t... If you wanna work at McDonald's, that’s fine, you don't have to work hard for the nation, and, but is that true? If someone has a talent or an aptitude, or someone is smart, is there not some sort of moral obligation to use... Like people used to say, “God gave you, God gave you your head, you should use it. It’s wrong not to use it.” Is there not something in that? Otherwise, what would happen to us all?
Noah Smith: Look, God also gave us prostates that enlarge at age like 55. So God can just shut up, I don’t know. [laughter]
Henry Oliver: But you know what I'm saying?
Noah Smith: No, no.
Henry Oliver: If you’re born lucky enough to be good at something, you’re somewhat obliged to practice what you’re good at.
Noah Smith: Not at all.
Henry Oliver: Why?
Noah Smith: Not at all, because the simplest answer is because if your heart isn’t in it, you won’t be good at it. That’s the simple answer, if your heart isn’t in it, then all the talent in the world won't make a damn bit of difference because motivation is the key.
Henry Oliver: Are you not worried that the easiness of Netflix and all the other stuff that Netflix is, the whole Netflix culture, means that this has become a very different problem now, because... It’s... The motivation is too easily...
Noah Smith: Leisure is just so fun, that no one wants to work hard anymore.
Henry Oliver: It’s so easy... It’s more than it’s so easy to turn it on and so easy to then just not turn it off. It used to be, if you had to go to the movies, you had to get up, you had to go there, you had to get to yourself home, whatever. Now you get home, you turn on Netflix and the next thing you know, it’s bed time and nothing’s happened. Right?
Noah Smith: I don't know, when I was a kid, all I did was pick up a fantasy book, it’s like, it’s low tech, but I could just escape all day.
Henry Oliver: But that's reading. That's different.
Noah Smith: I know. Well, is it? My parents were like, and they said, “Don’t play video games, don't watch TV, period.” They'd only allow me to watch Star Trek, and they’d allow me to play video games like just like four hours a week, and this is the same... I think four hours a week is the same amount allowed by Xi Jinping, so you’re, basically, right now, you’re recapitulating ideas of Xi Jinping, who is cracking down... Is limiting the amount that kids can play video games by federal government law. He is cracking down on fandoms, he's saying you can't be part of these pop fandoms, cracking down on pop idols, cracking down on all these fun things that kids do, so that kids won't have fun things to do, so they will use their abilities for the national geopolitical martial power of the great Chinese nation state. The only reason for us to do the same thing is if it would somehow help us compete with Xi Jinping, because Xi Jinping has a giant army, backed by massive amounts of industry and whatever, and if we are just sitting around watching Netflix while they take over the world, then we’re not gonna be able to watch Netflix for long.
Henry Oliver: Right, and I'm not saying that so much, I’m asking...
Noah Smith: And war is a real motivation, war is a thing.
Henry Oliver: We have a lot of people... We have a lot of people who are smart, but maybe less aspirational than they should be given how smart they are, or how capable they are. It’s not just smartness. And do we have a cultural problem where we’re not encouraged to be as aspirational as we could be, and we’re two lax with ourselves about, “Well, you did your seven hours today, don’t worry about it,” whereas we should say, “Look, let’s all use the talents we've got, because this is... It’s immoral to just spend your life on the surface...”
Noah Smith: So okay, so about the moral obligation, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I just like, That's a matter of opinion, as David Hume would say, This is like a, this is just a matter of opinion. He’d say it better than that. But that's the point of it.
Henry Oliver: Yeah, but he would also work quite hard. [chuckle] He didn’t waste his talents.
Noah Smith: No, but he wanted to, but he would also go and hang out with Andrew Lord Kames, and get drunk as hell and...
Henry Oliver: I’m not... No, yeah, I’m not against fun, I’m just, I’m asking if we reached a cultural point where...
Noah Smith: We have Netflix. They had alcohol. Right? When you went to Lord Kames's dinners, you would be called either a one-bottle man, or a two-bottle man, which represented the number of bottles of wine you would consume in one dinner.
Henry Oliver: Sure.
Noah Smith: That's just nuts. In terms of leisure, that's like nuts. That’s so much more leisure than we now have. With the time people work hard, the time people really put their nose to the grindstone and work, work, work, work, work, is during rapid industrialization. If you look at any rapidly developing country, rapidly industrializing nation, then you see this pattern of extreme work, and there’s a very good reason for that, because of the opportunities, because instead of living in a shack, your kids could... The opportunities are just wide open, and every, it’s a scramble. But scrambles don't last forever. We’re not gonna be scrambling forever. And if we had only one country in the world, that country would get rich, and then we’d watch Netflix, and then we'd think, “Wait, should we be doing something more important? No, because our ancestors scrambled and struggled, and starved, and blah, blah, blah, so that we could watch Netflix.” If we had only one country in the world and it just got rich, and then we would be like, “Party time! Thanks, Gramps. Thank you for working hard, now we get to party and watch Netflix all the time.”
And so that’s the one country thing, and so when we talk about economic growth, we're like, “Well, we’re rich and happy, why did our grandparents work so hard, except for us to be rich and happy? They... Why did all this stuff... Why did my grandfather walk to work with cardboard in the soles of his shoes that he couldn't afford to replace for like, I don't know, cents per hour? A few cents an hour, whatever he made in the Depression. Why did he do that? Why did my grandparents make sure to always turn off the lights whenever they left every room to save on their electricity bill, and blah, blah, blah? Why did my great-grandfather beat my grandmother with a belt if she didn't get A’s on her test, if she didn’t perfect her Math tests? Why did he do that? Why do they do all that horrible stuff, except so that I can watch Netflix? They did that for me. They did that, well, I mean they did that for my mom, but they did that for... But they did this for me, and my parents didn't like...
Weren’t really poor, but they... But we grew up in a one bathroom house with no garage, and we... And my parents worked hard. And why did they do that if not for me? Why... If we just had one country and we didn't have the possibility of war, then I think that that would be the end of it. It would just be like, “Leisure is the goal. Now have fun.” Dr. Seuss in One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, wrote the most profound line, the fundamental statement of utilitarianism when he said, “If you have not tried these things, you should. These things are fun, and fun is good.” But then, so that’s just utilitarianism. That's just like, “Kick back and enjoy it, man. Consumption, leisure, complementarities,” as we say in economics. But...
Henry Oliver: It's difficult to think of any prominent utilitarians who have just kicked back and enjoyed it, though, isn't it?
Noah Smith: Well, but they did what they liked. Like Jeremy Bentham, or whoever was like, he was writing stuff, because he liked writing. Like I do my hobby. Actually, I’m a perfect kind of example of this, because now I’m doing my hobby as a job. I wrote, I blogged every day, because I liked it. Before I got paid for it, and then when I needed some extra money, I started charging people for it, and now I can just do that as a job and it works pretty well, as a job. And yeah, and so that's great, right? But Jeremy Bentham could have gone to work at some industrial corporation. He didn’t. He did what he wanted.
Obviously, in a leisure, in a rich leisure society, you’re not gonna be able to motivate people to work as hard. And but I would argue that the only problem with that, that there’s no moral problem with that at all. There’s no increased wealth is not its own justification. That’s just line go up, that’s just making a line go up. There’s no reason to make that line go up. The reason is the consumption that you get, and this is deeply baked into the philosophy of economics, right? Working your whole life and slaving away your whole life and socking away your pennies, and never consuming anything, and leaving your kids with millions and millions of dollars, as I have a great uncle who did that. He made a bunch of money but never spent a dime. Then died and left it to his kids, who then, of course, wasted it all, at being complete bums. He did this. That’s not morality, that is obsessive compulsive order. The only reason you do that, is OCD. OCD with anxiety, that is why you save all your money and make all the money and never spend any of it, you do it because you’re anxious, you’re...
Henry Oliver: And are you saying under the framework you’re lining out that those people who spent that inheritance, and just like blow through it, you’re saying there’s nothing wrong with that, that’s fine.
Noah Smith: I might think those people are losers, as I do, those people are losers, they could have done a lot more stuff, they...
Henry Oliver: But that’s what I’m saying, I’m saying people should... We should be careful about this culture that says, “It’s okay to kick back,” because actually people could do more stuff. What’s the difference... What’s the real difference between blowing through an inheritance and working at McDonald’s...
Noah Smith: But who am I to tell people to do stuff? Who am I? I am just some blogger. Who am I to tell my loser...
Henry Oliver: Bloggers are the people who tell other people what to do.
Noah Smith: I know, but I’m saying like, my loser cousins are just wasting all their inherited money, and I'm just like, “Okay, you do you. I’m not gonna make you stop that,” like do I want you to build some rich dynasty? No, give your money to someone else, let someone else do something with that money.
Henry Oliver: Okay. If there are... No, it’s good. If there are people, like there’s some way through their life, they're in their 20s, their 30s, their 40s, whatever, and they feel like they haven't reached their potential, they haven’t done what they want to do, they took the wrong track, like whatever, these things happen.
Noah Smith: Right.
Henry Oliver: They think they could be a late bloomer, right? What’s your best advice for these people?
Noah Smith: Meet people, it's all about the people that you meet. Meet people who are the kind of people who do the kind of things you wanna do. Then you will do it too, and if you don’t know what you wanna do, which is a lot of people, meet interesting people, meet people who do kind of neat stuff that you don’t know what you'd wanna do, meet scientists, meet coders, meet lawyers, like my brother-in-law did, meet people who... Like if you’re thinking, you know what, I had fun, I partied, I did a bunch of drugs, I rode a motorcycle around... Yeah, that reminds me of my other friend who he led a dissipate youth, rode with motorcycle gangs, did a bunch of drugs, I don’t know, dated European models or something like that, and that was his deal. And then went to Berkeley, naturally smart guy, but then some time in his 20s, he decided, you know what, enough with that, I’m gonna get serious and I’m gonna become a movie director, now he directs documentaries, that’s his thing, he’s really good at it. Yeah, he just sort of... He gave up drugs, gave up motorcycle whatever-ing.
And then now he’s just super into it, he’s very artistic guy, but, anyway, he does some great movies. He just released a movie about Cuba, that’s like a documentary about the opening of Cuba. It is very cool. Which is just called, Cuba, you can look it up.
Henry Oliver: Yeah, yeah.
Noah Smith: But yeah, anyway, so then he's just another example, he’s like, he wanted to party, and then he decided he wanted to do something else, but social connections are the thing. He knew people in the movie world that worked on films, social connections are the key, that friendship connections are the magical elixir through which everything else happens.
Henry Oliver: Okay, so people need to sample the world.
Noah Smith: Sample the world, get that perspective, get those friend groups.
Henry Oliver: Can they do this online, or do they have to go out and actually, and actually find these people in real life?
Noah Smith: That's an incredibly important good question that I have no idea about the answer to, and that I would like to know the answer to it, ’Cause that's one I don't have an answer to...
Henry Oliver: ’Cause I have known people, like I knew a woman who was a really, or is a really good social media manager, and she came to this career in her own words because she said she had no friends as a child, and she made friends on the internet, and then by doing this, she kind of spiraled up into being a proficient social media curator and whatever else, it’s not really my thing, and it’s like she developed not only like a life and some friends and whatever, but she developed a career out of this, quite unexpectedly. Like how viable do you... If you wanna be a lawyer or physicist or a poet or a director, is it viable or do you have to be in the room? Do you have to see that person, not only for you to get inspired, but for them to take you seriously.
Noah Smith: I don’t know.
Henry Oliver: Okay. All right.
Noah Smith: Yeah, I don’t, I honestly don’t know the answer to that, and that’s an, but that's an important question, the question of how much offline can substitute for online, that’s a question for Raj Chetty.
Henry Oliver: Great. Noah Smith. Is there anything I should have asked you that I didn't?
Noah Smith: What's the best Anime on TV right now?
Henry Oliver: [laughter] What is the best Anime?
Noah Smith: Spy X Family.
Henry Oliver: Okay. It’s on Netflix?
Noah Smith: It's not on Netflix. You have to look somewhere else to... It’ll be on Crunchyroll after it’s run finishes, but it’s still airing, if you didn’t wanna settle down and have a family before you watched this anime, I think now you will.
Henry Oliver: Okay, great, thank you very much.
Noah Smith: Absolutely.
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Anna Gát was a showbiz child in Budapest. She converted to Catholicism aged twelve under her own initiative. After an exciting but then dispiriting youth in Hungary at the time of EU accession, she emigrated to London which was a dreary and disappointing experience. In her thirites, she got a job in a startup. Then she read an article by Sam Altman: “I didn't know that startups were a philosophy.” From here, her life started to change. She gave up playwriting and scriptwriting and became the founder of InterIntellect. Her entry into the start-up world changed her life, unrecognisably. This interview is a brief account of Anna’s life so far. You can read Anna’s writing here. This is the InterIntellect site.
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This conversation with economist and late bloomer Robin Hanson probably peaks towards the end, when we were bouncing ideas around, but the whole thing is highly interesting. Robin has a habit of rephrasing questions to make sure he is answering something specific, something I have seen in successful lawyers. Robin talked about his idea for a polymath department in universities, why desperation not inspiration was what made him change his life, how to talent spot late bloomers, and whether Robin might become lazy if he lived for ever (I don’t believe him). We also covered ems, the magic of motivation, signalling, and the importance of having a good spouse. Robin is a professor of economics, a former physicist and AI researcher, and the author of two books. He works at George Mason University and blogs at OvercomingBias. Although we didn’t cover it here, he is very interesting on the subject of aliens. This is a very selective description of what Robin does and you can and should read more about his work here. The page of wild ideas Robins thinks are true is especially good value. This is also a good summary of what drove Robin to change his life in his mid-thirties.
Henry Oliver: Did you always wanted to be an economist or are there versions of your life where you could have stayed in AI research?
Robin Hanson: I don't know. That is, my trajectory was one where I changed a number of times, and each time I wasn’t sure that I should change, I was making these guesses about what would be better, and then I guessed economics, but under alternative stars, I could have guessed different things or not made changes. A couple of years before I switched and decided to go into Econ, I applied to a bunch of graduate programs in Social Studies and Science, and I got accepted into some. And I even had told them I accepted their acceptance. And then a day later, I changed my mind. I decided not to do that. So I was on the borderline, I guess, of doing that.
Henry Oliver: And was that... Were you changing your mind for practical reasons or was there just deep uncertainty about what to do?
Robin Hanson: It was more, do I want to go into that world? Is that world going to be good enough or congenial for me? And I initially thought, yes, and then I guess let my subconscious tell me no.
Henry Oliver: So it was kind of instinct, you would just get a feeling and think, “Okay, don't go with it.”
Robin Hanson: Right, it was like... Part of it is about sort of the size of the world you could inhabit, so one of the nice things about physics where I started, and economics where I ended up is that you could just do a lot of things and call them that, and then there’s some other fields where you’re going to be pretty narrowly confined to things close to the prototype of that. And so science studies is more of that second sort, whereas economics is much broader, and physics was much broader as well. I think that I do well there. I think that’s done me very well to be in a much broader place where I can just do a lot of things and call it economics.
Henry Oliver: Do you think that one explanation of why there are late bloomers or how people become late bloomers could be that some people’s talents or interests are just naturally interdisciplinary or broad in the way you're describing, and that there are fewer maps for that kind of thing, and you just will get more late bloomers because it’s not straightforwardly specialized?
Robin Hanson: Well, so the question is, if you’re going to have a wider range, does that take longer training or longer time to recognize?
Henry Oliver: Right.
Robin Hanson: So, certainly, if most standard training is somewhat narrow, and if you’re going to have a broader range than that, then you’re deviating from the usual thing, and you might in fact need to do several things... So I guess somebody who’s just more uncertain about what narrow thing they want to do might similarly take longer, but somebody who’s just more inclined to have a wider range, that also just might take longer both to figure out that that’s what you want and to realise that the wider range just means you’re going to take longer training for the wider range.
Henry Oliver: So in one interview you said this, “Early in life you're a seller not a buyer.” Can you tell us what you mean by that?
Robin Hanson: Well, many people think about what career they want and what life they want, as if they are the main consumer of it, as if it’s about what they want out of it, and when you’re independently wealthy, say, then you could just decide what you wanted to do with your life based on what you liked because you can pay for it. If it’s a job or a career and you need a job or a career to survive, then you can’t just look at what you might want to get out of it, you’ll have to have other people get something out of it. And so that’s the sale that you’re selling yourself to other people. What can they get out of you? So you want to keep an eye on what you want to get out of it, but it isn’t enough, you know, if you decide, I love singing, so I’m going to be a singer. Well, that may not work if the world doesn’t love your singing, you’ll need to pay attention to what the world likes from you, for a while at least, and then if you get some idea of a range of things the world might be okay with from you, then you can start to think about which of those you prefer.
Henry Oliver: And this was the sort of thing you were realising when you worked at NASA?
Robin Hanson: So... I mean, honestly, for my early life, I really wasn't paying attention to buyers, I was just paying attention to what I wanted, and I would just change my mind about what I wanted, and then I would see if anybody else would let me do that, and if somebody else would, then I just switched. But I didn't try to become a singer or actor or something where it’s sort of known to be much more competitive, or Olympic athlete or something else, I wasn't trying to be those things, but I was maybe more on the edge of what I could get away with.
Henry Oliver: But you were doing something pretty competitive?
Robin Hanson: Well, initially, I was just being a grad student and applying to various grad student programs, and so I guess I was good enough to get into the grad student programs, and then I wanted to do computer research, and so I went, asked, applied for jobs and I got some jobs, and so it's more competitive than being a janitor, I guess but...
[laughter]
Robin Hanson: Not as competitive as trying to be an actor or a musician.
Henry Oliver: This is the sort of thing that people often advise you to do, so it’s like the Steve Jobs thing like, “Do calligraphy, do whatever you feel like, and it'll all sort of work out and you'll pull the threads together later,” but you seem to be saying, “Well, it’s one way of living a life, but it’s maybe not a good way.”
Robin Hanson: Well, you have to make a judgment of just how selective something is and how selective you are, right? It’s a matching thing, so I don't think... I mean, so I think it’s basically a brag to tell everybody that I always just did what I wanted. I mean, because some people can get away with that, and you’re basically saying, “I was good enough to get away with that, I could do that, I could pull it off, because I was in high enough demand, I was good enough.” And so I... It is a brag and it does apply to some people, but you have to realize, if you’re just taking it as some sort of inspiration and attitude toward life advice, it’s not going to work for everybody, and so... Now, you’ll have to ask just how good are you and how lucky do you feel punk, about how selective you can be. So, for most people, say, who might be listening to this, they don’t have to just take the first job that appears to them, right? They have some ability to select among jobs out there, and they should use that ability to think about which things they would like better, but they can’t just ask, “What does my heart love?” And just do that, regardless of what the world seems to offer or what abilities they seem to have, and so that it’s a compromise.
Henry Oliver: If you were talent spotting or recruiting, and someone came with a CV a bit like yours, and they said, “Well, I’ve just been doing the stuff I wanted to do,” would this count against them, would this count in their favour, like how would you assess that now?
Robin Hanson: So in some sense, the person I would be most able to assess would be someone who is very like me, that is, when I take a very unusual life path, I’m just going to be much worse at judging people who took other life paths, I’m not going to know who’s good or not in those other paths, someone who is near my path, I have a better shot at, and for people who look like that path, I guess the thing I would most be looking for is sort of how driven or passionate are they, because you meet a lot of people who switch between various things they want to do, and it seems almost like that they just don’t have much motivation or interest in anything, and they’re just sort of drifting past things that might grab their attention, and that wouldn’t inspire... That wouldn’t inspire much confidence in me. So somebody who just changes things a lot just because they’re bored or nothing seems to matter, nothing seems to interest them, that... I would be wary of that, they probably will switch yet again, they probably won’t put that much energy into whatever they do, but somebody who is... Whatever they’re doing, they’re really into it, and they’re really trying hard, but then they also have these other big things that target them and tempt them away, that would be more appealing.
I would want to see that it was a whole bunch of things, each of which they would love to do, but they are... Can’t be sure which one, but whichever one they pick, they will be into it and they will be really immersing themselves into it and pursuing it, then that would be better, and then of course, that... They are much more likely to be a good generalist or a wide range person. So some people call themselves generalists just because they can’t be bothered to get into anything very far, and I would want to distinguish a different kind of generalist. So I’ve had this idea for a while, I'll tell you, which is, you might say universities neglect generalists, right? So we reward people for being very specialised and knowing the best about some very narrow area, but a lot of great things have happened by people who have been in different areas, and so how could we reward and pick out generalists, and so here’s... So, a problem is a lot of interdisciplinary areas where you have more than one area, people look down on them, it looks like you’re being held to lower standards than you would in either the adjacent disciplines and that you’re trying to evade judgement by making it hard for people to tell how good your work is, and so people tend to think that people in the middle of a discipline are more reliable and higher quality work because they're being held to higher standards and it’s easier to judge them.
And so they think of people who are being interdisciplinaries kind of evading judgement, trying to slip by with making it hard to judge them, so my solution to that is to try to create a polymath department where we’re going to have higher, not lower standards. So my standard would be, let’s make a department and in order to qualify for this department, you need to persuade us that you would have qualified for tenure in two departments, and I’ve known people like that, and I might even qualify that way, it’s not necessary that you actually have to have tenure in two departments, but persuade us that you could have possibly gotten tenure in two departments, and two somewhat different departments.
Henry Oliver: Right.
Robin Hanson: Right? Not in Biochemistry and Chemistry or Biology.
Henry Oliver: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[laughter]
Robin Hanson: But, two substantially different things. So now, you see, this department would be the elite, you will have to meet a higher standard to be there, and now people might aspire once they have gotten tenure somewhere to, as a next level, become considered a polymath to have gotten to move up. And then I think this would go better in terms of, it would have more respect, it would be more acceptable, and it would then inspire more people to that level of generality by holding it as a higher, not lower, standard.
Henry Oliver: And you would expect maybe more of those people to be “late bloomers”, because they would have had to be... They're just doing more different things and not settling into something earlier on, right?
Robin Hanson: Maybe, I’m not so sure. I’m more sure that they would have to sort of just be inclined toward generality, so definitely a lot of people managed to focus enough to get tenure and then don't want to focus quite so much, and so we would be tempting those people to say, “Yeah, it looks like you got tenure in here but now you'd want to drift over there, well, that can contribute to what we're looking for.” Maybe even departments would be proud of their members who had graduated to the polymath division, and they would then support you in your efforts to broaden or to make that next step.
Henry Oliver: One of the models I have of different sorts of late bloomers is someone who has a double peak, so if you think about Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect, he has a great career. By the time he’s 40, he’s done some original staff, he has a successful practice and whatever, but then by the time he’s 60, like it’s all dried up, he’s teaching apprentices, he’s not fashionable, the Great Depression is happening, he’s not getting any commissions, and then a few years later, he starts again, and he builds Fallingwater, and then in the last, I think, quarter of his life, he does more than half his work, including the Guggenheim and other major things. This could be something in the polymath department, like, it would encourage that view of a second career.
Robin Hanson: Although, in that case it might be, he didn’t actually go to a separate department, he stayed in his general area.
Henry Oliver: Sure.
Robin Hanson: We would still might want to wait to anticipate and celebrate that, so it’s definitely true that... I mean, I meet a lot of people who, maybe they’re 22 years old and they got a college degree and they said, “Oops, it was the wrong degree. My life is over, I wasted…”
[laughter]
No, your life... You're still at the beginning, you have a lot, you can just pivot and move over there, it’s not that much of a problem, you’re a little delayed compared to some of the other people who might have started their path before, but you’ve got plenty of time. And so I think a lot of people like... They have some sort of career path and they reach some sort of threshold like say tenure, and then they quit, like that’s enough for them, and they’ve achieved what they wanted, and... But they might be 30 years old or something, and in some sense, they’ve got a whole life ahead of them, they could try lots of other stuff.
Henry Oliver: So you went to get your PhD starting age 34?
Robin Hanson: Yes, with two children, age zero and two.
Henry Oliver: Oh my God. You’ve sort of talked about this, but I’m interested in what finally tipped the balance, and it sounds like it was a kind of gradual process and that this was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but was there a sort of conversity to that, like a moment of inspiration, a moment of, “You know what, if I don't do it now…”
Robin Hanson: It was more desperation I would think than inspiration.
[laughter]
Robin Hanson: So basically, I was a research programmer in a... Which is a low level position within a research lab, so research lab is a high level prestigious place, but a research programmer is kind of the bottom of the line, someone who is there to support the researchers in what they do, and I was decently paid and we had children, a stable life, and I just kept feeling itchy that I had this big potential in life and I wanted to realise it, and that just kept grating on me as more and more unacceptable. So now this is, I think, a somewhat common male scenario, I think, which is men are more primed to achieve glory in life and men are more primed to take risks to achieve glory in some sense, in the middle, good enough isn’t good enough, because glory calls, right? Something greater could be achieved, and the question is, will we try for it? And so I was torn there because my wife didn't want me to do that, she didn't want me to go back to school and quit my decently paying job, especially as we just had two kids, age zero and two, and she had a private practice as a therapist and she had a lot of clients in that area that if she moved with me to a different area, she would lose all her existing clients and her connections.
So it was a lot to ask. And at that point, I basically chose to ask for a lot by the argument that I’m desperate, so I had to sort of be unhappy, be unhappy with my life, and communicate that to my wife and associates to say, “Please understand, this is a strong drive. I’ve got to see if I could make it.” So, you’ll probably see... There’s a lot of movies or whatever, I don't know, Rocky or something, some ambitious boxer or something early in life, and their family might tell them like, “Somebody's offering you a sales job, somebody else wants you to work in a shoe store and why are you throwing this safe life away for some long shot that hardly anybody ever succeeds at.” Right? That's a classic story. There's a famous rock song, “Don't go chasing waterfalls”, by a woman telling the man, “Stop, just stay near like creeks and rivers nearby that are calm and safe, and stop trying to go for these large ones.”
Henry Oliver: It’s making me think of all those people... This is sort of a recurrent topic among my generation, like you have a good job, you’re a lawyer or a consultant or whatever, but you don't want that job, and you... For many people, the worst thing is to not reach desperation, because then the equilibrium is, “Well, I’ll stay, it’s not actually that bad. I’ll stay.”
Robin Hanson: But it’s rolling the dice, the desperation, you role the dice, and a big fraction of dice rollers fail.
[laughter]
Robin Hanson: You gotta put that into the equation. I got lucky, I'd say I didn't have any strong right to expect that I would succeed.
Henry Oliver: But did you think like that or did you think at the time, you know, “I’m just going to do it and make it work.”
Robin Hanson: I just thought, “I gotta see.”
Henry Oliver: So it was kind of scary?
Robin Hanson: Yeah, absolutely.
Henry Oliver: When did it stop being scary, at what point did you sort of start to feel like you were settling into something that had worked?
Robin Hanson: Well, getting a tenure track job offer was a relative sign of success, that is... Most people who get tenure track job offers get tenure, so that meant more than a 50-50 shot of reaching a successful end point, but most people who start a PhD program won't get a tenure track job offer, so starting the PhD program is the moment of taking this risk where the odds are against you.
Henry Oliver: You’ve said that you were lucky, what other factors played into you being one of the people who did get a tenure track job offer?
Robin Hanson: I mean, presumably some aspect of who I am and what I can do...
Henry Oliver: But I mean, did you work harder than your peers on the program?
Robin Hanson: So I think I did. So... I was, again, age 34, and I was around lots of 20-year-olds, 22-year-olds or whatever, and they just didn't work as hard, that as I just was a parent and a student and little else, and I realised how much was at stake and that I risked my family and my career... Financial security at least, to take this big chance, and so I was very motivated to work hard at it, and a lot of 22-year-old students it was just... They didn’t know what else to do, they just went to grad school instead of trying to go get a job, that’s often a common thing for students, they just want to keep on the path rather than switching, it sort of feels less risky for them to just stay on the path they’ve been on, but they're not that into it.
Henry Oliver: Was there anything about having had a background in physics and computers that gave you a distinction or a difference on the program or helped you in any way?
Robin Hanson: So, I once talked with a Stanford professor about going back to school, and he said that older students are known for being different than younger students. So one way older students are different is that they are more driven and more organised, and they sort of put a higher priority and they work harder, that was a positive, but his opinion, the other side of the equation was, they are less pliable? They were coming with their own idea of what they want to do and what's important, whereas a lot of younger students are just willing to be clay-moulded by their advisors and just be willing to perform their priorities based on whatever somebody else around them says, and many professors prefer play.
Henry Oliver: Sure.
[laughter]
Henry Oliver: In your polymaths department, would you maybe have a PhD program where it’s like the Senate, you know you have to be 30 before you can apply?
Robin Hanson: I think I might rather just have advisor advisee relationships with, but not classes per se, I think, if you’ve gotten tenure somewhere and now you’re trying to get your second tenure such that you could be applied in, you’re well past the point where you need to take classes, but you’d still always be the mentor and advisor.
Henry Oliver: But I mean, not for those people, but I mean... But could your... Could your polymath faculty offer a PhD program, but rather... But unlike the specialized departments, you would have to be older to get on that program, is that something that would be marginally beneficial to academia? Like there used to be colleges just for mature graduate students, right? I think there still are.
Robin Hanson: I haven’t thought much about it, I guess the... I’m thinking of the difference between taking classes and just doing research, and thinking that, honestly, we only really need classes for younger people, that is by the time you’re older, you should be able to just sit down and do research, but you might very well want an advisor of some sort...
Henry Oliver: Oh, I see what you mean. Yep.
Robin Hanson: To look over what you’re doing and work with you, et cetera. But I do think the polymath department could offer classes that everybody could take where they emphasised sort of generality, the connections between fields, sort of broader topics that are being neglected by fields, I mean, that would be a fine thing to draw people’s attention to, and then they would have the authority to speak on that.
Henry Oliver: You mentioned Stanford, you used to go to classes there while you worked at NASA and you... I think you went without paying, so you've got the classes, but not the degree...
Robin Hanson: Right.
Henry Oliver: What did you learn from... Like, Why did you do that? What did you learn from that?
Robin Hanson: Literally, I learned the content of the classes.
Henry Oliver: What classes were they?
Robin Hanson: In that sense, so there were some econ classes, some computer science classes. Basically, I could just start to see what fields were like by sitting in classes and seeing what they taught, and also as a way to shop, see what fields you might want to go into to get a sense for what their issues were and how they did things.
Henry Oliver: Okay, and then you went to CalTech for the PhD. Why did you choose that school?
Robin Hanson: So I had a physics background, and then I went into computer science, but sort of with a physics perspective on Computer Science, if you will, and I started to learn more about social science, but my physicist basically trashed social science.
[laughter]
Physicists privately do not speak very respectfully of social science, they basically talk as if those people are just making stuff up, they don't know how to be rigorous and careful like we physicists do, and if we just bothered to quit doing physics and went over there for a few years, we could probably just clear them all out because we know how to do science and they don't, so that sets up in my mind this concern. I'm more interested in social science topics, but I'm wondering whether I can believe it. And then I came across this paper in Science magazine about experimental economics, people doing lab experiments to test various social science hypotheses and mechanisms, and that sold me in the sense that physicists trust experiments. That's legit. That's real. So that right there convinced me, oh, if I went and did that, then we would be learning real things, it would be real, it wouldn't just be made up, that would be solid answers, and I was interested in some institution designs and you could see how to directly test them with experiments.
Robin Hanson: So, how did different ways to say buy medicine or whatever, you could run a lab experiment and test your idea directly in a lab and see how it works, and so I could just more directly see things I wanted to do there, I wanted to do some experiments on the institutions I was interested in. So then, I looked up who does experiments, and I saw there was a group there at Calech. And Caltech is sort of known for being very techy and very respected by physicists, and so well, that looked like a good match, I would get... Go to Caltech, very well respected places for the hard sciences, where they are doing experiments in social science.
Now, just what I learned once I got there...
[laughter]
Was that they had this norm that you couldn’t just take an institution do a lab experiment, you could, but you shouldn’t. They weren't going to allow that. What you had to do is have an institution idea, then a game theory paper, a theoretical model of your institution, and then you could test the theoretical model, you weren’t supposed to just go test institutions without a model of it, and so that was an obstacle to my plan, because for many of my institutional ideas, I didn't have a model of them, I just had the mechanism.
Henry Oliver: What did you do about that?
Robin Hanson: Well, I learned how to make models, and I learned in that process that the people making models actually know a lot, that is, as a physicist, I might not have believed them from a distance, but as someone looking at the details, the details persuaded me. I mean, they had many experimental tests and very specific game theory models, but just more generally, it made sense, it worked. So I was willing to learn theory, and then in essence, most... My thesis work was basically all theory, I didn't do lab experiments as part of my PhD thesis in the end.
Henry Oliver: So as well as being a discipline change, it was also a sort of reasonably significant mindset change?
Robin Hanson: As have all my moves been. And so, what people who grow up in any one discipline don’t usually quite realise is just how different many different disciplines are in terms of how they think, what their tool kit is, how they define a problem, what’s a good enough contribution, those vary quite a bit across academic disciplines.
Henry Oliver: And there's no real way of teaching that kind of thing? Like undergraduates don’t get classes in, “By the way, this is how different areas think differently about similar things.”
Robin Hanson: I don't know of them, no. So mostly... So I have this observation that if somebody wants to have a conference, an academic conference about X and Y, the combination of X and Y, say law and economics, one strategy you could do is go look for the people who have most studied that intersection between X and Y, that's not what they do.
[laughter]
What they do is they go look for the most prestigious people in X that they can find, and the most prestigious people in Y they can find, and they put them in the room together, even when these people have not actually looked at the overlap much, that’s just the standard operating procedure in creating these things, because their agenda is to put the most prestigious people overall, and the people who look at the intersection are just generally not as prestigious as the people who have stayed in each discipline, and this is of course one of the reasons why interdisciplinary work often fails, this is where the failures come from, put people in a room who haven’t looked much at the other side and have them talk past each other.
Henry Oliver: Yeah, interesting. So now you’re at George Mason University, and I think you're part of... A sort of a “small group” of sort of peers and people who are sort of sharing ideas and so forth, and my impression, very much an outsider's impression, is that that small group is quite enabling of the work that you all do in the economics department.
Robin Hanson: So it's a basic question. What do your colleagues do for you?
Henry Oliver: Yeah.
Robin Hanson: Right. So in Academia, some colleagues are co-authors for example, or people on your same research project. And for them, it’s much clearer what they’re doing for you. You’re working together with them, on a particular project. But most academics don't co-author much with most people in their department. So, there’s a basic question, well, what are they getting out of each other? Now in some sense, they need, there needs to be a department there with people who teach different things. So all the different courses get covered so that, there can be a program, but that doesn’t mean they really need to talk to each other much, just means they need to be there, similar time and place to teach classes. Right? And in many departments, they don’t actually interact that much. That’s a sad secret about academia. In even most departments, most of the professors are not actually intellectually engaging each other much. They show up for class, they show up for seminars, ask them questions, maybe they’ll go to lunch. But at lunch, they mostly aren’t talking ideas, they’re talking gossip, politics, TV shows.
Henry Oliver: Right.
Robin Hanson: Not ideas, right? So what do you get out of colleagues? Now, one thing you can just sort of get is a set of consultants, right? If you ever come across some topic, not in your area, you can go ask somebody about it, right? Maybe they’ll answer some questions, but you could probably have done that with other people around the world. So, if you have some sort of like a style of doing things differently, then one big risk is you will feel just all alone in the world. Like nobody else there... Out there does things your way.
And so, just having a bunch of people near you who are doing something somewhat like you, just legitimises the idea that you could also be like them. And that seems silly [chuckle] or trivial even, but I think it’s true. I think you just need some other people around who are in your face, that real people you can see they’re not gods or anything, but they’re making a thing work that you could make work.
Henry Oliver: How significant is it? I'm sort of filling in some gaps, but how significant is it that before you got to George Mason, you didn’t have a group of like-minded people. Is that one reason why it took you a little longer to get to where you were going or no?
Robin Hanson: I don't know, but I think it’s somewhat lucky, but I think just when somewhat, some other people find each other and stick together and that helps them. But I also think some people, at least for a while, are just bullish and pig-headed enough, that they just hope that’ll happen eventually, but it doesn’t have to be true now, and they’re just going to plough ahead. And I often look... I look back on my younger self and I go, “He didn't seem so scared. [laughter] Shouldn't he have been more scared of what he was doing.”
[laughter]
“Shouldn't he even have more doubts about just ploughing ahead and doing his own thing his own way, when hardly anybody like ever did anything like that.” But in some sense, that’s something we humans are primed to do at times is to plough ahead in a somewhat arrogant, confident way in the absence of a lot of reassurance that it’ll work.
Henry Oliver: So you’re not sure that if you’d been part of a different peer group at that age, it would’ve brought you down to earth a bit as it were?
Robin Hanson: I don’t know. I still was pretty different from my colleagues there, even if they were more like me than most people. And in some sense, I might have been the most different among them, in terms of having a different set of research priorities. But I still think that eventually it’ll just wear down on you, if nobody around you isn't all like you. You need some sort of peers.
Henry Oliver: Yeah. What mentors have been important to you and where did... What stage of your career did they appear at?
Robin Hanson: I’ve definitely had people who helped me, and people who were senior relative to me, but I just don’t think the relationships rose to the, what people think of when they think of a mentor relationship. So, I’d hold the phrase mentor or the description mentor for a relationship, where someone is relatively close and you’re kind of modelling after them and they’re giving you a lot of advice. And I’m not, I’m not sure most supervisory relationships really are of that form. [chuckle] So, people will use the word mentor because it’s sort of an aspirational description of how they’d like the relationship to go. But, I kind of, honestly say that described me very well. So, I was a pretty independent, say PhD student, so I picked an advisor who didn’t mind very independent students and would give them more freedom, some PhD advisors don’t, they are very constraining of their students and others will give them a lot of rope to hang themselves. So I picked one like that. And in the past, I’ve also chosen bosses and superiors who were also more willing to let me go my own way and make me do it their way.
Henry Oliver: So you didn't want a mentor?
Robin Hanson: Well, of the strong sort, of the sort that... Make you into... Turn you into clay that reforms another copy of them.
Henry Oliver: Right. So now I have some questions kind of more about your ideas and how they might help us think about late bloomers. But you might say these are stupid questions, because this is a long way outside of my area. So you wrote a blog post saying that belief in the late bloomers is populist because it sort of allows people to think that the way we get allocated when we’re young could be wrong. And there’s something else out there for me, and that kind of thing. If we live in a world dominated by signalling, is it not rational to believe that there’s some significant subset of people who will be late bloomers because not everyone who is high potential is good at signalling or responding to signalling in the ways that help you climb a hierarchy or get noticed or whatever.
Robin Hanson: Well, that explanation seems to not need signalling to be part of it, as long as you have some initial path and people who look initially promising and not all of them turn out to be as promising as they looked, then you get the same effect here, whether it’s signalling or not that makes people look promising. You just need a difference between how promising they looked and how they turned out.
Henry Oliver: But one way that like whether someone actually is good, one way that we know that is that they know how to signal it to the right sort of people. Which is why you often get in any group of genuinely sort of, high-achieving people, there are some people who were are there based on...
Robin Hanson: So I would say most signalling in the world is signalling of correlate features and not usually of the direct feature of interest. So an educational degree, for example, will show that you’re smart maybe and conscientious and can do some work, but they know that’s correlated with success, but doesn’t directly imply success. And many other kinds of things that we use to signal. I mean, I could flash my rich... My expensive watch. It might mean I’m rich, or it might mean I just spend a lot on an expensive watch.
[laughter]
Robin Hanson: Most signals we have are correlates, they... All else equal, they indicate something that is not necessarily that strong a connection. So I know honestly, when we directly see how good somebody is at something, we don’t call that the signal, we call that the thing. Right?
Henry Oliver: And it’s not always easy to see how good someone is at something, is it?
Robin Hanson: Sure. But if somebody says an artist and they have a portfolio and they’ve got three things in their portfolio but both of them look pretty good to you, then you're thinking, “Well, this guy may well produce more good stuff in their portfolio”, but it’s kind of a noisy signal, it’s just three things there. And maybe they just got lucky. But you wouldn’t... But you still wouldn’t think of it as a signal so much as well, that was their actual performance, here’s their things, here’s what they did. Whereas, you might have a signal of somebody being an artist in terms of what they... An award they got or some school they graduated from, or some letter of recommendation from somebody, those would be more indirect signs.
Henry Oliver: In a world of ems, would we have any reason to expect more or fewer late bloomers or would it have no... Would this idea of late bloomers have no sort of relationship there?
Robin Hanson: So a striking feature of the world of ems is you would have billions or trillions of ems, but they would mostly be copies of the few thousand most productive original humans. So that means on average each emulation would have billions of other copies out there who are very similar to them, much more similar than we are to each other. So that means once you get a track record for how this em performs at in a range of jobs, you have a much better idea of how they will perform at in future jobs, a much closer connection. So it’s like, we might not be sure how good of a physicist Einstein’s children would be, but we think if we actually had saved a copy of Einstein when he was 18 years old and revived that copy again, we have more confidence that that copy could be a good physicist. It’s at that level of similarity of basically going back to the same person and rewriting their life a little differently. And because of that, they would just know much better what these people are likely to be able to do.
Now, no, that does depend on them having a large enough clan that they have a larger history of them having done a wide range of things. So if you’re a clan of only... Well, there have only been 100 of you so far, well, we know more than you would of a human, but still there’s a lot we don’t know. Once we’ve had a billion of you, now it would depend like, okay, across how many different careers do we have the billion of you? If most of those billion were plumbers, then we really know well how good of a plumber you would be, but if now you’re trying to ask us to consider you for a management role or something, we’ll have to ask well, yeah. But how many of those billion were managers? And if that was only 100, now we’re back to the other situation of still not knowing a lot. But it does mean that there’s a lot less attention to what in our world is sort of early life signalling. So in our world, because each person is so unique, you have to make them jump through a lot of hoops whereby they produce standardised signals we can compare to each other, and then we’re still pretty uncertain about what they’re going to be like and their abilities. ems again, because millions of copies of the same one, we just got a lot more better stats.
Henry Oliver: Okay. There is a view, a sort of quite commonly held view that in the hard sciences, especially physics and also in Maths, there are just very few, if any, late bloomers, and that most of the work is done by people in their 20s, maybe in their 30s, what do you think of that?
Robin Hanson: So there's this famous distinction that I think makes sense, I can't remember the author who drove it, but between areas where an excellent performance will be some sort of breaking out of other traditions versus areas where excellent performance is going to be a synthesis of a lot of things all pulled together. And so that’s a correlate of when people peak. So, in places where the distinctive thing you do when you’re excellent is to sort of just have a whole distinctive new style that breaks away from previous styles, that’s the sort of thing that blooms earlier. And if what you need to do to really achieve something great is to sort of just have a lot of stuff you pull together, then that tends to correlate with being a late bloomer.
And of course, that would also be true of a generalist, [chuckle] that is if a generalist is someone who knows many different areas and then can pull them together and integrate them, well, then a generalist will also be a late bloomer in that sense. Whereas you might have thought, maybe there’s a different kind of generalist, a generalist is just somebody who comes up with a whole new general way of thinking about things, in which case, you would expect them to be in the first group. So, this class distinction is often applied to math and physics, at least some areas of physics, where you say the people who had the biggest contributions are just people who could find a different way of thinking about things in math or physics and therefore they tend to be the earlier bloomers. But I think there was a recent... The last couple of years, some study I blogged basically asking when during your life is your biggest contribution most likely to happen? And the basic result was pretty uniform across your life.
Henry Oliver: Oh, that's Sinacra.
Robin Hanson: I don't remember the author. But basically, that suggests that you shouldn't get so obsessed about no longer being a 25-year-old, no longer making the 25-year-old big contribution, if they are. You should just keep trying, because every year you get another lottery ticket on whether you’re going to do your biggest thing.
Henry Oliver: Why is it that there just are fewer people in their 50s who’ve done big work in physics and maths, even though the continuous probability of success seems to be true, there just also seem to be fewer people over the age of 50 doing these things.
Robin Hanson: So, there’s a lot of things going on and it’s hard to tell how important each one is. But I think the following seems to be pretty important: the more you know, the more that you can target your efforts to be close to what is likely to be successful in your area. So, if you’re a 50-year-old, you know a field pretty well. And so now you can pretty well judge what’s likely to be popular or fashionable in the near future in that area, and what tools it will require. And you’ve already invested in a certain set of tools and you’re going to be more likely to just do something that builds on the tools you’ve invested in. When you’re really young, you just don’t know the lay of the land very well, you don’t understand the difference between what’s promising and what’s not very well. And so, you’re just being a lot more random because you have to be, you just don’t understand it very well. And that randomness is going to show up as creativity when you’re lucky, that is, there’s just going to be things you're going to try that a 50 year old wouldn’t try. Not because you think it’s a good idea, it’s because you just don't know the difference.
The 50-year-old is going to just be much better targeted at what they’re trying to do, and you’re just going to be much more random. So, if one of your random forays happens to be lucky, then that’ll happen and you’ll do it and the 50-year won’t because they were smart enough not to even take that long shot chance, but you, the 20-year-old, you don’t know the difference. You just ended up taking a lot of chances, not because you are creative or ambitious, just because you're random.
Henry Oliver: Yeah, people... Well, first of all, how many other people do you think that might be out there who could be future Robin Hanson’s and make a big risky change in their life at a time when it’s like financially inopportune or difficult, but they’re not doing it, but we might want to encourage to do it. Do you think it’s a big sub-group or do you think it's not a major group?
Robin Hanson: So, the question is, how to distinguish the people you want from the people you don’t? So, this is a common observation that I think is roughly right. When somebody says, “Should I try to be an actor or a singer”, or something like that, right? Should I take the chance? Am I good enough to take that chance? And the advice is often of the following form, only do it if you can't, not do it. That is, if this is just such an important thing that you're just so driven that you just can’t not do it, you’re going to be doing it one way or another, somehow, it’s just like you’re really just driven to do it, then we might say, “Okay, fine, do it.” Because if there’s enough of those people doing something, then the rest are going to be at a pretty big disadvantage if they’re not that obsessed with it and maybe there's already going to be plenty. So I think, I guess it’s related, but I think I, like some trumpeter or something. I think it was a trumpeter who was talking about the secret of their success or something, they just said, “Well, I knew that I wasn't as good as the other people. So I was going to have to compensate by just practising more hours a day.” And that they just knew that they could push themselves harder than other people could, to just go for more hours.
And that seems sad to me, [chuckle] but there’s some truth to that. That is, a lot of the variation in success is just about how much energy people put in, which is a combination of just how driven they are into it and just how much stamina they have. And so, actually, a neglected area of who succeeds and who doesn’t, that people don’t really talk about is just raw stamina. Some people don’t need as many hours of sleep. [chuckle]
Some people don't need as much free time. They can just drive themselves to work more often. And honestly, of the people I’ve seen who are the most successful, there’s an awful big correlation with they, they just have more stamina. And, of course, often it’s they have a spouse who’s willing to like let their profession be their life. And that’s another big thing that’s made a big difference in many people’s life, is they have some very supportive spouses.
Henry Oliver: Right. Because one thing that you... Like, I like this explanation, but if there are people out there who are in your position, but their wife says, “What? Are you crazy? This is never going to happen. We have these children. We need money. Like, I’m not giving up my practice.” Those people end up, like there’s only so much they can do, they can have the stamina, they can have the obsession, but they can’t do the PhD. Right? They’re on...
Robin Hanson: So here’s another ground. So maybe this will help. I’ve worked in a lot of different areas, right? So I’ve allowed myself to adapt with a lot of different topic areas. And after a whole while, I’ve decided to hold myself to the following standard of when going into a new area was a waste of time or was justified. And my standard is this; if I go into an area, I need to spend long enough there and understand it well enough to publish something there that meets the standards of the locals. Or at least I could, that is I can contribute to it. And so that standard will cut out a lot of wishful thinking and still dilettante.
That is as you say, “Sure. You want to study this other area? You boarded these things? Fine. But this is the standard you’re going to hold yourself to. You're going to study this for long enough and come up with an idea and then, execute it such that at the end of that, you've got a contribution, to this area, that people of this area would recognize as a contribution. And if you do that, then I say, fine, I approve. In retrospect, if having done that, I’m going to see a track record of you, each time you went a new area, you did that, I will say, okay, that was good enough.” Now from the point of view of, maximizing sort of your world reputation, this is not maximum in the sense that the world doesn’t give as much credit or attention to people who just come in and do one or two things then go onto another area. They much more rather that you stick around and fight for your reputation and join coalitions that will fight against other coalitions, et cetera.
So they’re not that eager to support people who just come in and do one or two things. Okay. But nevertheless, they still might acknowledge that you did one or two things. Those were real things. And they were really contributions to the area. So, I mean, I might say that I was holding myself to that standard in the sense that I had already done several things. And in each area I was able to make a contribution and I could see how much work it was to make a contribution to a new area. And then I could ask myself, “Am I willing to try that again?”
Henry Oliver: And I guess if we were trying to distinguish between people as well, like someone who’s gone to Stanford and done the classes, just for doing them, that's a good sign. Whereas someone who says like, “This is really what I want”, but they haven't done something of that sort. That's more difficult to say, “Well, how much do we believe in this person?”
Robin Hanson: So, here’s a different set of issues that you, might be important. My father and my parents always had projects. So they generated their own projects and then they executed them in various ways. My dad was into finance and then he was a pastor and they were missionaries and then my mom wrote books, et cetera. And so, there was this idea of like generating your own project idea and then executing it. And I did that in school too. So I don't know if you know the story that like as an undergraduate, the first two years of physics were going over a standard set of topics. And then the next two years of physics were going over the same topics with more math. And at that point I wasn't happy with that. And I decided to just roll my own curriculum, in the sense that I would study the subjects my own way, by playing with the equations, I wouldn’t do the homework. I would just ace the exams, which I did. And then I would let other people decide what grade to give me on the basis of seeing that I aced the exam even if I didn’t do the homework. And I had a series of projects that I defined for myself and then would execute myself, or I would just get the idea that this was an interesting thing to do, and then go figure out how to do it and go do it, without supervision or advice or anything like that.
And I think that sort of a self-directed project orientation, is just something that sets you up well for a life of being a loner researcher who's not what the whole group was going to tell them what to do, but is going to be able to just go into an area and define a project and execute it without a supervisor or a co-author, or a class that you're taking, or something like that.
Henry Oliver: Right.
Robin Hanson: And so I've learned over time that this is an unusual feature. Most people in school… I mean... So a lot of students say, “I want to learn something, what classes should I take?” And I say, “Why do you need to take a class, just go learn it.” And for a lot of people that doesn’t make sense, they don't know how to learn anything if they don’t take a class.
Henry Oliver: Right.
Robin Hanson: And for a lot of students they just don’t know how to direct their own life, in this literal sense of deciding what to do and then just doing it without some supervisor, advisor, curriculum telling them what to do. So I think if you’re going to be a generalist, i.e, you’re going to be someone who goes into an area without precedent, at least local social precedent or people telling you how to do it or what to do, you do need to be somewhat more self-directed. You’re going to have to be able to do it yourself.
Henry Oliver: You said your parents were missionaries?
Robin Hanson: At one point, yes.
Henry Oliver: Are you religious?
Robin Hanson: No, but most of my family has been quite religious. And so some people, perhaps correctly, accuse me of giving a religious style an aura to many things that I do, even if I’m not formally religious. So that’s a different issue.
Henry Oliver: Do you think that's true or you do not agree with that, about yourself?
Robin Hanson: I certainly think that I assimilated a religious worldview when young, in the sense of growing up in a religious world. And even if I reject formally the religious dogma claims that I inherited, I still inherited a way of thinking about the world and a way of framing the world that I’m then going to project onto everything else I see.
Henry Oliver: Like a lot of what you’ve said is very consistent with the parable of the talents, for example. That it's a sin not to use your abilities, and you shouldn’t wait to be told, you should just go and be using them.
Robin Hanson: But I guess that’s not how I think, in the sense of it’s... That also seems silly.
[laughter]
It’s about getting something done. Your motivation should be a thing you want to get done. Just using your abilities, that seems stupid. I don’t want to just use my abilities just to make sure they get used, like stretch my legs because I haven't stretched my legs in a while, but...
Henry Oliver: Well, no, the parable of the...
Robin Hanson: I haven't played chess in a long time. My chess abilities have gone down a few, but I shouldn't keep playing chess periodically just to make sure I have those abilities. I should only practise those abilities if they're useful for something.
Henry Oliver: Yeah, I think the parable, it means that everyone is... Everyone’s good at something, as they say, and if you’re not using that, if you go home and you just watch Netflix all night rather than doing something useful that you could... Like you say, your parents always had projects and stuff, then some people would draw a moral distinction between that. And it’s a similar thing. Well, this is the reading of your career, right? There were other things you could do, you had those abilities, and if you hadn’t gone off and done that PhD and tried to make use of those talents, in this reading that would have been wrong of you not to try and use those talents, because you were sitting on that capability and that would have been a waste.
Robin Hanson: So when I try to model other people’s behaviour, I am inclined to model their behaviour in terms of drives or motivations about showing off and showing the world that they are good. And so I have to, in the abstract, believe that that must drive some of my behaviour as well. But, in my head, [chuckle] in terms of what I’m consciously focused on, I feel that it’s important to be mainly focused on the thing I want to do. If there’s not a thing I want to do, then I don’t see it as such a bad thing to laze around. The reason I do not laze around is because there’s stuff to be done that’s glorious and interesting and spectacular and has an honest potential. So, in my mind... So, early on, I think I chose, say, Einstein as a model, career model. So I think it’s a basic fact that people like to pretend they don't care what other people think, but in fact they do, and you can’t much change yourself to not care what other people think. But what you can do maybe is to change who it is that you’re trying to impress. To put in your mind the person that you are imagining judging you and wanting to live up to their standards.
And so, early on, I chose people like Einstein as my model. That is, somebody who saw a big potential and went for it and tried to realise a big interesting insight. And that’s the sort of thing I always wanted to do. Now, if I had not found such things, that would have just been this abstract hypothetical. Some people are motivated to go find dragons, right? I have no idea where a dragon is, so it doesn't motivate me much, I have no idea where I would go searching for dragons. Right? Well, I have come across enough big, interesting ideas that seem to me unexplored or insufficiently explored, that I've got this long list of stuff that's worth doing.
Henry Oliver: Are you saying...
Robin Hanson: And so that’s what pulls me. That’s... And I would most respect somebody else who was pulled by the things they want to do, as opposed to feeling some obligation to use their talents.
Henry Oliver: But if... Let’s say we could make you live forever, or for an extraordinarily long time and you...
Robin Hanson: That would be nice, please, thank you.
Henry Oliver: Sure. But then maybe you would run out of things to do. There would still be work to be done in the world, but you would run out of things that interest you. Are you saying you would then spend an eternity like gardening and watching...
Robin Hanson: I might. I mean, I don’t know... In that situation, it’s an open possibility. Yeah, so in my mind, yes, actually, I do actually believe that there is a limited amount of big, interesting, intellectual stuff to be found and eventually our descendants will have found most of it and they’ll have to live in a world where most of the interesting stuff is known and has been found. That's the kind of world our distant descendants will have to accept and deal with. And, I’m not in that time, I’m at a time where there are great, huge, new interesting things to be found. We suffer because of that, but as our world is impoverished and has war and all sorts of things going wrong because there are all these things we don't know, but at least on the positive side, there’s things to find, interesting things to uncover. So, I can be motivated to do this. But yeah, once they’re all found, yeah, there’s not... Maybe I’ll enjoy gardening.
Henry Oliver: So, this doesn’t limit your appetite for living forever?
Robin Hanson: Well, living forever, if you just reframe it as, every day you want the option to go on. And now, that’s a much more manageable thing. Every day I have that choice. Do I want the option? Sure. Or as opposed to not having the option. The other alternative is, there’s a day when you don't have the option, you die. That day, you die, you don’t have the option to keep going. If you were to say, “On that day, would I rather have the option to keep going?” Sure. On reflection, I might choose that option, but I want the option.
Henry Oliver: Okay. So, you don't want to live forever, you want the option?
Robin Hanson: I want the option everyday, to go on or not.
Henry Oliver: And there’s a good chance that when the world runs out of interesting things, you will take that option and not do very much with it.
Robin Hanson: The fun thing about options is, you don't have to decide ahead of time what you’re going to do with them.
Henry Oliver: Fair enough. Is there anything I didn’t ask you that I should have done? Or do you have any other views on late bloomers?
Robin Hanson: I think it’s interesting, since you’re studying late bloomers, I’m more interested in probing what you think, or what you know.
Henry Oliver: Sure.
Robin Hanson: So I describe this idea of the way by, late bloomers might be seen as a certain egalitarian pitch, right? There’s some other way in which... Is there another way in which late bloomers are admirable? Because I feel like people are trying to pitch late bloomers as being admirable and you might think, “Well, it’s all equal, it would have been better if you had bloomed earlier. I mean, sure, we’ll take your bloom later if we’re going to get it.” But why not? Why is blooming late, admirable?
Henry Oliver: I don't know whether it’s admirable or not, but I think it’s real. I don't think it’s always the result of delay or imposition. So, one thing that people... It’s very implied, but people tend to believe, I think that if you’ve bloomed late, something got in your way. And can we solve that problem? Whereas I think a lot of the late bloomers I'm studying...
Robin Hanson: They couldn't have bloomed earlier, their kind of field doesn't bloom early.
Henry Oliver: Well, they don't bloom early, they might be in a... Like novelists, Jane... You could be Jane Austin and write Pride and Prejudice, when you're 19, or you can be Penelope Fitzgerald and start writing when you’re 60. They're both great novelists. I don't think there’s any guarantee that if Jane Austin had lived a long life, she would have kept getting better. And the normal explanation for Penelope Fitzgerald is, she had a terrible marriage, she had a chaotic life, her husband was a drunk. But I think if you look at the... Look at her until she’s 34, when she has children, she’s not writing. She does spend a whole life learning, learning languages, going to places and this all comes out in the fiction later. And I think some people just run on that time table, so I’m interested not in like, is it admirable? But it is real. Some people bloom later and that’s okay.
Robin Hanson: So I would say, there's a sense in which, it’s more admirable. In the sense that, if you bloom early... So, there’s two things you get out of blooming, one is you get to accomplish whatever you were accomplishing and the other is, you get the celebration and adulation of people noticing your accomplishment.
Henry Oliver: Right.
Robin Hanson: The people who bloom early, not only do they get to accomplish-ing, then they get to spend the rest of their life as the celebrated accomplisher, who is known for having accomplished, they get better mates and better associates and better invited positions, they get to give talks or whatever... Right? And a late bloomer, even for the same accomplishment, they will instead, having to spent most of their time in obscurity, not being celebrated, having to hope that they would eventually accomplish, having to resist the people looking at them deciding they were failures and to persist with their hope that they would succeed and then they eventually succeed, but they don't get to spend much time in the limelight, once they do succeed. Because they’ve spent most of their life, not. And so, as sort of a matter of compensation, we might think, “Well, once we notice somebody is a late bloomer, let's give them a little more celebration.” [chuckle]
Henry Oliver: Also succeeding young can set up this thing where the rest of your life is like, slightly disappointing because you’ve done it now and... Like, I don’t know how happy Einstein was when he was old.
Robin Hanson: But still, if you’d take the mid... Their mid-career person and you give somebody a choice, “Would you rather at this point be past your peak and be celebrated, but now it's downhill? Or would you rather be in obscurity, hoping that you will eventually succeed but not being very sure of that? Which would you rather choose?”
Henry Oliver: I think more people should choose obscurity. I think that's one of the problems we have.
Robin Hanson: They should choose but which would they choose?
Henry Oliver: Oh, they all choose to peak early.
Robin Hanson: Okay, see? Well then, from a point of envy then. The first person isn’t deserving of much envy... I'm sorry, of sympathy for their... Feeling sorry for themselves, because they would rather have that than the alternative.
Henry Oliver: Yeah. And well, and also because it’s low risk. Like “I just want my success now, and then I've had it. And whatever happens to me, I can say, I made that success.” Whereas if you choose the obscurity path, it’s higher risk, as you were saying about your PhD. And in a way, it’s a symbol of the lack of risk appetite in modern culture that we don’t view late blooming in that way. We more often view it as one day I’m going to wake up and I'll discover that I'm a genius. You know what I mean? It’s not like I'm going to toil in obscurity for 20 years and then it’ll happen. It’s, “Oh, I'm going to work out, I'm going to wake up and I'll be Toni Morrison in the morning,” [chuckle] which is just... You know what I mean? It’s this fairytale idea. And that I think is wrong, and I think that’s a...
Robin Hanson: Yeah. Honestly, in order to have hope that you will be a late bloomer, I think you need to have had shots that you thought could have gone on goal.
Henry Oliver: Yeah.
Robin Hanson: Right. They didn’t go on goal, but they had a plausible shot, like you have a whole, you’re just a whole lifetime of taking shots at things that don’t quite work out, but they had a chance. And then you have an expectation that maybe one of those eventually will go in the goal and you’ll finally succeed. But if you aren’t even taking shots, then...
Henry Oliver: There are people who don't take shots who then come out really strongly later on. Do you know Sister Wendy, the art historian, TV presenter. She was an actual hermit. She lived in a trailer, in a forest and she studied art. She didn’t start studying it until later on. And she was, she took her annual trip to some small Norfolk art gallery and happened to be seen by a TV producer who realized that having a very, very sort of old-school Catholic nun on the TV being hugely enthusiastic about erotic art was a winning formula [laughter] and she...
Robin Hanson: I can see that.
Henry Oliver: She totally... I mean, she’s amazing. It’s Julia Child. She was a superstar, but she had made no shots on the goal, partly because, you're not allowed to, you’re a hermit. Right. And Penelope Fitzgerald, the same.
Robin Hanson: Good point.
b: I think, if you're looking for a late bloomer who’s more in the middle of their life, I agree. They need to show some like something that they;ve done, but there are people, I don’t know whether it's a midlife crisis or the menopause or grief, those things that can happen after 50, that can sort of...
Robin Hanson: Right.
Henry Oliver: Tip your life upside down a bit. Some of those people suddenly come out and you are, “Oh wow. You're a whole new person now.” I don’t...
Robin Hanson: Right. I should revise my views. I might more say, if you are constructing yourself, methodically, steadily over a lifetime and improving yourself in ways that you can see, at least you are working at something and building something in yourself, your insight, your observations, your self control, whatever it is, then you might have a plausible hope that this self you’ve constructed will eventually be useful for something.
Henry Oliver: Yes. And I...
Robin Hanson: And people will find a place for it. But you can see that it’s a real thing. This yourself, you’ve constructed, you have better judgement. You can figure things out. You can plan, you can put off gratification. You've become a person who is a solid construction.
Henry Oliver: But often I think these people are not good at knowing how to match themselves to... Because these are the people who can’t fill out a mortgage application. It's not that they’re idiots. They just cannot navigate the world.
Robin Hanson: But there’s something about them, they’ve been paying attention to and making well. And then of course, it could well be that most people that never get framed as a late bloomer because we never find the right way to use them.
Henry Oliver: I think that’s right. And I think it’s... There’s potentially a lot of people out there who need some sort of push or some sort of link up or just good luck.
Robin Hanson: I would love somehow to sort of just give those people a little more confidence in themselves in the sense that, we have a world that celebrates people who go through some early success path. And they go to the right schools and then they get the right job. And then, anybody who doesn’t go along that path, we’ve got this, “Oh, you're a failure, sorry.” That's this path to success and you didn’t go to an Ivy League school and you didn’t get a job at McKinsey. And then, sorry, you’re just... I wish we could sort of give more people the sense that there are just so many ways, if you will just methodically learn and build yourself that we may be able to find a great use for you later. And then put more work into finding those people and trying to match them.
Henry Oliver: And that’s why I'm writing this book. Because I think that there are people out there. My mother was one of those people and people like that need something... They need to be able to pick something up that says on its cover, “There are people like you and they've done it and this is how they did it. And you should keep going.” Like Margaret Thatcher, right? When she’s in her 30s, late 20s, early 30s, she writes to the Conservative party and says, “I’m not going to do this politics thing anymore. It’s too much. I’m not... It’s not working. I'm just going to be a lawyer.” And then just over a year later, she writes back and says, “Okay, no, I am going to do it. But only put me down for safe seats,” because she obviously just can’t go through anymore...
Robin Hanson: Trauma.
Henry Oliver: And they write back, this is Margaret Thatcher and they all know she’s good, but they obviously don;t know who she is. They write back and they say, they basically say, “Yeah, no, we'll bear you in mind.” And it’s like, what if they, what if that hadn’t lucked out. Like what if she’d just been one name further down the list, or you know? Like that’s crazy. We’ll bear you in mind.
Robin Hanson: So there’s a key trade-off here. So in a world, say, of class hierarchy where everybody is in their place, right, you don’t have any uncertainty about your future, you just know right where you are, and if you’re not at the top, then that's just who you are really. But like, you don’t have to feel guilty about it, you never had any choice. There was never anything you could do about it. Well, that was just where you were slotted, right? Now, in a world where we’re uncertain about who can be where and there’s a lot of ferment and a lot of possibilities, you can have hope that even if you're low now, you could be high later. But you could also now feel guilty that if you aren’t high it’s your fault and you should be blamed. So it is a... By giving people hope, we’re also letting them feel guilty and blamed for not doing things.
Henry Oliver: I have no way of proving this, but I do believe that a lot of people instead of reaching your position, which is like, “It’s desperation, so I’m just going to do it.” The desperation is expressed more as, “Well, look, I failed.”
Robin Hanson: Right, and that set it aside and chuck it off, and now you don't have to try anymore.
Henry Oliver: And it’s... I don’t know. It’s difficult to believe that if you were that driven, that you would ever be able to give up, but I’m sure people do.
Robin Hanson: I'm sure they do. That’s not so crazy to me. I think it’s just more some randomness of your emotional configuration at the moment, which way might seem to be the easiest way out.
Henry Oliver: Right. Your personality... You’re sort of a victim of your personality in that sense.
Robin Hanson: I guess... I think an awful lot of how the world goes for people is in terms of just how they emotionally manage the threat of sort of people accusing them of failure or people accusing them of not trying hard enough or not succeeding enough. And it’s just a really emotionally wrenching thing to even think about, and people just have these random ways they adapt to it depending on context and it makes it a whole big difference in various things that is a lot of people don’t try to succeed because it would feel much worse to fail after they tried to succeed than if they just never try.
Henry Oliver: Yeah. I think they...
Robin Hanson: And they're more comfortable never trying.
Henry Oliver: Maybe because it’s a slightly kooky concept, or like a religious or spiritual concept or whatever, so we’re slightly... We’re uncomfortable with it, but inspiration is quite important. Right? A lot of late students study...
Robin Hanson: It's really a lot important just having people around you who are robots. So it’s a classic story, it seems trite, but it is true. If you’re in a world who's nobody has ever been a doctor, then you think, “How dare I think I should be a doctor? I could be a doctor. Who am I to think that if nobody around me has ever done that”, right? If two of your parents are doctors, now you might think, “What a shame... How dare I not be a doctor? They’ll be so ashamed of me.” People’s expectations are changed by just people they personally know who did various things, and that seems somewhat sad because it means there’s all this randomness and who does what then?
Henry Oliver: Do you know Chris Gardner from the movie The Pursuit of Happyness? It's like a Will Smith movie.
Robin Hanson: I probably have seen it, but I can't remember it at the moment.
Henry Oliver: He's a real guy, he's got his own stock broker firm, and he’s very successful, but he had this... They had this awful childhood, but he was good at school and he went into the Navy, but he didn’t have a degree and in this X, Y, Z. He ends up as a medical technology salesman. But he’s a very high potential guy... He had been heavily mismatched. And when he’s 27, he’s walking along and he’s got a kid and he hasn’t got any money and he's just in that kind of phase. And he sees a Ferrari and something about this, the way he described it, it is like...
Robin Hanson: I could use do that?
Henry Oliver: Yeah. But it's a real road to Damascus moment for him. Like he actually stops and says, “Oh my God.”
Robin Hanson: “Why don't I have that?”
Henry Oliver: Yeah, and he goes up to the guy and he’s like, “What do you do?”
[laughter]
And this guy gets him an interview and he’s 27 with none of the background that a stock broker would have in the '80s, but he works his way in and he makes it. And it’s like if he didn’t have that inspiration, which... That’s very like Saint Augustine. It’s very... How do we give more people those moments of the penny drops, if you like? That’s another question.
Robin Hanson: So the closest thing to magic in our world is motivation. Motivation just appears or it doesn’t. There’s these various magical incantations and formulas you try to do to make them appear to go away your way, and they just have this enormous power, they are this magical power, some people are just motivated and then just do stuff. And other people are not motivated. And I think we still just hardly understand what makes that difference.
Henry Oliver: I think more grown-ups, for want of a better word, should experiment with finding out young people’s motivation. There’s a great line in David Ogilvy’s memoir where he says... He says, “I didn't study a single minute when I was at Oxford. And then I go and get a job and I realised that if you work, you get money.” And he said “If they'd paid me to study at Oxford, I would have been the Regius Professor of History.”
[laughter]
Because he'd never found his motivation. But once he got it, he becomes David Ogilvy.
Robin Hanson: Almost everybody, when you have your motivation, you look at it and it feels obvious. Like but it's just hard to realise that if you didn’t have it, it wouldn’t be there and it wouldn’t be obvious.
Henry Oliver: But in a way, the university should do more of that, right, it should do more of like just let's find your motiva... Is it money? Is it status? Is it, “I want to sit in the library.”
Robin Hanson: Well, except, a standard story about what school is for is exactly to train you to do stuff when you don’t feel very motivated. That is the story...
[laughter]
That’s the story, that is, the modern workplace is mostly full of jobs that people aren’t that into. And the whole point of school is to find the people and train people into this habit of, you’re in a classroom, somebody tells you the assignment, you do the assignment, even if you're not that into it, because that’s just what everybody does, and that’s the practice that school is setting you up for, and the selection is to find the people who will do that, and that’s what modern workplaces are looking for, people who will in fact do the job when they’re not very motivated or not very immediately directly motivated. We could say, that is the point of school.
Henry Oliver: But it can work the other way around, right? Like Ray Kroc, who made McDonald’s into McDonald’s, and made it global and everything. His memoir is called Grinding It Out, he ground it out until he was like 55 and a job he didn't want, but he kept going because he wanted to find his success, he want... And he had a string of failures, and he sold everything and he... You can flip that and say, “Well, we're going to give you your motivation and that will help you... That will get you to do all the stuff you don't want to do because you’ll still be working towards your motivation.”
Robin Hanson: I think in a world without school, people just have a much wider random range of motivations, and some of them are really into things that a lot of them aren’t and it’s just harder to more reliably get people to do stuff. That is... That’s...
Henry Oliver: Okay. Yeah.
Robin Hanson: And so, if you're an employer looking for, to fill a lot of slots with people who will mostly do them, if you could go to a place where people are sometimes really lazy and even destructive and other times they’re really motivated into things. Would you rather choose from that pool or would you rather choose from the pool of people who mostly just do what they're told and not very inspired?
Henry Oliver: But another way of framing it is, employers always say, “We want people who have researched the company and really want to come here.” But I would always look for people where it’s like, “No, I want someone who really wants whatever they want, and is going to come and use me for a couple of years, because that'll be two great years, someone who’s compliant, could be two great years, could be 10 years of, ‘Oh my God, nothing changes with this guy.’” [chuckle]
Robin Hanson: In some sense, just more fundamentally, you and I might agree that the thing we’re most often looking from people is just, are they motivated by anything?
Henry Oliver: Right.
Robin Hanson: Right. Whatever it is, just, is there something that’s driving them, that’s pulling them along, that’s just the focus of their attention that they want? Just anybody with that sort of a thing is interesting, and then you could look for the match for whether what’s driving them can match what you’re interested in, but somebody who doesn’t have that is just a whole different category of person.
Henry Oliver: Yeah. I think it’s very underrated right now, in selection. Robin, this has been great, thank you very much for your time.
Robin Hanson: Nice talking to you. Good luck with your book.
Henry Oliver: Yeah. Thank you.
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It was such a pleasure to talk to Sarah Harkness. Sarah is a former partner at Arthur Andersen who had a career in corporate finance and then as a non-executive director. She is now a literary late bloomer. She has self-published a book about the Victorian artist Nelly Erichsen. She has an MA in Biography from the University of Buckingham, where she studied with with Jane Ridley. She won the Tony Lothian Prize, 2022. And she is now writing a biography of the Victorian publisher Alexander Macmillan and his brother which will be published next year. We talked about Sarah’s career, her long-held ambitions, what she learned from corporate finance, her views on talent spotting, Alexander Macmillan, how Sarah would try to discover other late bloomers lurking in the wrong jobs, and why a business career helps you to understand Victorian literature.
Being a Late Bloomer and Alexander MacMillan
Henry: Are you a late bloomer?
Sarah: My husband says I should be very annoyed at that question because he says I've been marvellous all along. I think I'm a late bloomer if in the blooming bit, which is that I'm now doing something that makes me really unconditionally happy, whereas before I did a lot of stuff that was sometimes important and sometimes well paid, but I never enjoyed it half as much as what I'm doing now.
Henry: So, let's start with just briefly, what are you doing that makes you really happy now?
Sarah: I have a contract to write a book that a proper-publishing house says they're going to publish. So I'm writing a biography, a double biography called The Brothers of Daniel and Alexander Macmillan, who founded MacMillan publishing 180 years ago. And it's taken me a while, but I've got an agent and I've got a publishing contract, and I need to submit a manuscript in the next eight months, and it will come out in 2024 all being well. And that's making me very happy.
Henry: Good, and that's the grandfather or great-grandfather of the prime minister?
Sarah: Daniel is the grandfather of the prime minister, and Alexander, who's the one who really built the business after Daniel died, is his great uncle.
Henry: So an interesting family for more than just their business interests.
Sarah: Yeah. And I mean, fantastic achievers themselves because Daniel and Alexander were born into absolute poverty on the West Coast of Scotland. Their father was a carter, who died when they were young boys. Daniel left school at 10, Alexander when he was 15. And by the mid-1860s, Alexander is one of the literary hosts of London, and within two generations, they have an offspring who will be prime minister and married into the Duke of Devonshire’s family, it's quite a climb.
Henry: So, what we're talking about, this is really the Victorian self-made man?
Sarah: Absolutely. Samuel Smiles and all his glory, absolutely.
Henry: Yeah, yeah, we love Samuel Smiles.
Sarah: Yeah, same.
Henry: So, where does your interest in that type of subject or person come from?
Sarah: Well, there's a basic love of all my period, of all the periods of history and all the periods of literature, Victorian times would be absolutely bang on is what I know most about. I'm very comfortable working in that time, and I love the books and the poetry from that time. The way I found it was very serendipitous, which was that my husband collects art and had found a lot of art by a big, very unknown Victorian woman painter. And I researched her life, and the more I researched it, the more I thought I need to write this down, and it turned into a book that no one would publish, but people said to me, "Write about someone we've heard of and come back to us," and that's a really hard question because almost everyone you've heard of has got a book.
That's why you've heard of them, but I had a stroke of luck, which was literally in the research on the book about... The artist is called Nelly Erichsen, and in my research on her, she was a neighbour of the MacMillan family in South London in the 1870s, and related by marriage, sort of in a hop and a skip to the MacMillan family, so she knew the MacMillans, she stayed with the MacMillans. And I did research the MacMillan family to write about Nelly, and there wasn't a book, there haven't been a book since the 19... Since 1940. So there was an opening to do a book because most people have heard of MacMillan Publishing, most people would think it was interesting to understand how that had been started and no one has written about it for 80 years. So that was the stroke of luck, I think.
Henry: So it comes from a kind of a long-term immersion in the period and a very indirect discovery of the subject matter?
Sarah: It does, it does. I mean, I have been talking about Nelly Erichsen and her bit of Tooting where she lived and the people that she knew for, gosh, nearly 20 years now, so I mean it is a long immersion, but it took me a very long time to have confidence to show anyone what I was writing about it.
Early interest in Victorians
Henry: Yeah. And that if we go back 20 years, is that where you start sort of reading and working on this?
Sarah: Yes.
Henry: Or had you been reading about the Victorians from earlier?
Sarah: I think that... I mean, I did PPE at Oxford, but my favourite paper and finals was Victorian social political history, so the 1860s is bang on the period. I think all the time I was working and having a career, I was reading my way through Trollope and Dickens and George Eliot, so... And Tennyson. So that in that way, and it's the sort of art I like, so it is definitely my spot, but I had never thought about researching online, finding out about anyone and writing it down until, yeah, 15 years ago when I started doing that.
Henry: But when you started doing that, you'd actually had years of reading the novels, being immersed in the period, it goes back, you were ready, you weren't just coming to this out of nowhere?
Sarah: Yes, I wasn't, I wasn't. And it does remind me that about... Well, it was at the time when my children were babies, I wanted to give up work and study Victorian literature. I mean, I felt then that it was something I wanted to do, and I had an idea of writing... The book that inspired me was some Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now.
Henry: Fantastic book.
Sarah: And I was fascinated, yeah, fascinated by the Melmotte character and I wanted to do an MA or something that would allow me to write, to use the knowledge I had at the city today against what was Trollope writing about, I thought that would be interesting. So I have thought about it 25 years ago, and that had to absolutely no encouragement from anyone to do anything about it. So I didn't, I kept working, but it's funny that that's almost where I've ended back up, which is looking at Victorian literature.
Henry: Yeah, it's like a... It's a deep vein that runs through your life and now it's come to the surface.
Sarah: It is, it is, absolutely.
Sarah in the City: business expertise as a literary advantage
Henry: So, you've hinted it that you did PPE, you were in the city, tell us, because you were already blooming before, you are not a late bloomer, you're a repeat bloomer, tell us what was happening when you weren't being a Victorian writer.
Sarah: So, I went from Oxford into the city into a corporate finance house that was part of NatWest Bank, so we call that NatWest markets, and I did corporate finance, so flotations, mergers, takeovers, raising money from 1983 right the way through to 1990s. In the 1990s, I left London and moved up to Yorkshire, but I kept working. And at that point, I had small children, so I was working three or four days a week, working in Leeds doing corporate finance. And then there was a big excitement in 1998 because I left NatWest and took my team into Arthur Andersen, which at the time caused a bit of a fuss and a bit of a stir. And I had three or four... Four years at Arthur Andersen. And then Arthur Andersen went into liquidation. And at that point, I'd been doing corporate finance for nearly 20 years and I'd had enough of it, and there were a lot of young and unpleasant young men coming up who didn't think that women in their 40s with children should be stopping them doing what they wanted to do. So I did head-hunting for a little while, and then I started becoming a non-executive director, so I became plural. And I'm still plural, I still do trustee jobs, and audit jobs, non-executive director jobs.
Henry: So you, in three different ways, at Arthur Andersen, and then as a head-hunter, and then as a non-exec, you've actually been a senior person. You've been running an area of a business, you've had that kind of oversight?
Sarah: Yeah.
Henry: Does this help you... You've got the background reading Trollope and understanding the character of Melmotte, but you've also got the background as actually a business person. So when you look at someone like MacMillan, if you hadn't done that career, you would have had less insight. Do you sort of...
Sarah: I think that's right, I think that's right. I've spent some time in the archives just the other week looking at the partnership deeds from when he set the business up. I've looked at... There had to be a court case in Chancery when Daniel's widow died because she died in testate and there was a risk that the partnership would have to be dissolved and split around his children. So to me, that makes sense. The big risks that he takes, like moving from Cambridge to London, and then at the moment, I'm really interested in him opening an office in New York, which he did in 1869. I mean to me, that is about a business risk. And then, this little small bit. So at the time when I was running an office in Leeds, I was very conscious of how vulnerable you feel when you are not in the head-office, when you are running a satellite. And I've been reading this week, the letters coming back from New York to London, from the poor chap that Alexander sent out to New York. And I can... I mean, I could have written those letters, you know, "Just tell me what's going on?" "What are your plans?" "What do you mean your son's coming to work here?" "Is that alright? Is that a good sign?" And so that to me is business as well, so I do recognise a lot of it.
Henry: Yeah, that's a timeless problem, especially in big-business today, right, global businesses?
Sarah: It is, it is. "How do you make everyone feel equally important?" and, "How do you manage something that's the other side of the ocean?"
Henry: So your book will be interesting, not just from a sort of literary and social-history perspective, but for people in business or people trying to understand how to be a manager.
Sarah: I hope so, I hope so. Alexander did an enormous amount all on his own, but as I move on, he's going to start running a more complex business. And I haven't really gotten into that yet. He's got one partner and he's just set up, sent someone to New York. But it will become more interesting. And then, how he's gonna bring the sons and nephews into the business, is gonna be fascinating. Because they didn't all want to come in at the same time and he's got to manage that as well. So it is a business book.
Henry: So he's a sort of... He's a great publisher with an eye for a book, he's a great businessman who can cut deals and manage money, and he's also important as a people manager.
Sarah: He is, he is, and seems to manage that well. Other firms are not nearly as successful as MacMillan, avoid the wrong people. He never really gets anything... The big calls, he doesn't get them wrong. He never has a big failure. If he launches a magazine, he goes on supporting it, it survives. If he launches an office in New York, it becomes... MacMillan, New York, becomes bigger than MacMillan, England. He doesn't make bad calls, he is a good manager.
Henry: And where does that come from? Because he grew up... He did not grow up around business people. Where does that come from?
Sarah: He certainly didn't, he certainly didn't. I don't know, that's really interesting. I mean, I think he was much more entrepreneurial than his brother was. The business really takes off when Daniel dies. Daniel was driven by a Christian missionary spirit. He was driven by Christian socialism, he wanted to bring good-quality and religious literature to the masses and the working man. And he saw it as... He wasn't well enough to go to India, so this was his mission. Alexander goes along with that and is fascinated by the Christian socialist side, but he also wants to make money. And I think some of it might just be, you know... He wakes up one day in 1857, and suddenly he's responsible for eight children, his wife, and a widow, people who work for him. He really has to grip it or he'll sink. And he grips it. But how and why? Apart from sheer bravery, I don't know how he got to do that. He didn't have any models, he wasn't being mentored by anyone else in the industry, they all saw him as a Scottish upstart. So there's one guy he talks to who's a publisher in Edinburgh called MacLehose, but he becomes much more successful than MacLehose.
Henry: Was he a late-bloomer?
Sarah: Alexander? So when Daniel dies, he... How old is he? He's nearly 40, he's nearly 40. And up until then, yes, he's been the second fiddle in the business. He's had a ton of energy. I mean, if you research him, he's living in Cambridge, running a shop in Cambridge, but he's also... He's on the board of the Working Men's College that they establish. He's doing stuff with the YMCA in Cambridge. He's a parish overseer. He has a ton of energy, and he talks about... You know, he was up reading throughs till 2:00 in the morning, and he was up again at 6:00 to get a train to London. His wife must have been pulling her hair out, I would think. [laughter] So he was a man of phenomenal energy, and not good health, he suffered badly from sciatica and various other problems. He was sometimes frustrated with pain, but he never gave up. He's quite a hero.
Henry: Yeah, he is. He sounds really interesting. I'm really looking forward to this book. So, I want to go back over your... We've had the summary of your life. I want to get into some details because it's really, really interesting how you kept to yourself those interests and ambitions for so long, and obviously lots of people do that. Lots of people leave university and they've got a thing that they really, they're passionate about, but they end up as an accountant or whatever, and it just sort of slowly dies, or they realise they're not quite as interested as all that, or life gets in the way, or they have kids. Why didn't it go away for you? Because when you were a senior at Arthur Andersen, you were pretty busy, right?
Sarah: Yeah, and I don't think, if you'd said to me... If you had said to me when I was a senior at Arthur Andersen, "Would you still like to write a book?" I just said, "Don't be daft, of course not." [laughter] But my huge frustration with Andersen, and I had some mentoring at the time from a coach who said to me, "The problem you have is that you have a person who needs choice and the more involved in one particular job you get, the more you push, get pushed down a tunnel, the less happy you will be, Sarah, because you like to wake up every morning and you think, I'm gonna do something different today. What am I going to do today? What am I going to do today?" And that's the life I now have. And it's the life I've had since the day I walked out of Arthur Andersen in 2002, which is every day I've done something a bit different. And the lucky break that happened to me was the collapse of Andersen could have been a disaster, but actually it gave me a lump sum and it gave me freedom to explore, bend my career to suit my children and my circumstances, and it gave me time to discover the things I liked doing.
Henry: Do you think... So one thing that separates a lot of late bloomers from early bloomers, although as discussed you were an early bloomer, but it's that early bloomers often have a mentor or they belong to a small group of their peers. So they have people that they can experiment with and have ideas with, or they have someone saying, "Don't be an idiot, you need to do this, why haven't you written to that person or whatever." And late bloomers often just don't have this.
Sarah: No.
Henry: But I've got a little theory that it probably wouldn't have made any difference. And that in a way, you're... Tell me if this is right, you're quite a divergent person.
Sarah: Yeah.
Henry: But you were in a very narrow life.
Sarah: I was.
Henry: And the only mentorship that you required was for someone to say, as they said to you, you're in the wrong game here.
Sarah: Yes.
Henry: And you needed to take your own time, you needed to take your own path. There's something innate about, or just in your personality, that means you were never going to write a book when you were 25.
Sarah: No.
Henry: And the other experiences you gathered along the way were part of that divergence. What do you think of that as a sort of model of you and of other late bloomers?
Sarah: I certainly think that there was no way when I was in my 20s and 30s, anyone that I knew, socialised with or worked with would have had any interest at all in what interested me. I mean, none of them read. None of them went to the theatre like I went to the theatre. None of them had the interest in film that I had. And at the time, I was married into the medical profession, and they absolutely weren't. So I mean at business they weren't interested, medics aren't interested, or don't have time to be fair to them. So it had to be just in my head and what I read and what I started listening to once you started getting audio books and I had time. So definitely there was no one around in my 20s who would have given me any encouragement to do anything different, and I was sucked into a job that was very high, very exciting, very high pressure and very rewarding, and then I had children, which we know, really upped the confusion of life. And I was just lucky that at the age of 40 I was relaxed and comfortable enough to be able to start spending my time with people who were encouraging.
Henry: How unusual do you think it is to have... You do PPE, you work in corporate finance, but you've also got a strong interest in literature and the arts, and as you say, you don't do...
Sarah: Really unusual. I can think... Of all the people I worked with right through for NatWest under Andersen, I can remember the one guy who, if you went on a business trip with him would open his briefcase to get out a book. He was a wonderful man, he was called Simon Metgrove, and he carried poetry around his briefcase. I remember him. He is the only one. I mean, no one else did, they read the... They read the FT, they talked about business. There was a lot of heavy drinking. It just, it wasn't part of the culture at all, and I didn't live with anyone who read like I read either. So it was completely me on my own blowing my own little furrow.
Henry: Where does this joint interest come from? Is that parents, school, Oxford? Is it something you just always remember?
Sarah: I think from my parents. I think particularly from my mother who had, came from a very, very poor background, left school as fast as she could when war broke out and got a job at the age of 16. And then after she married, my dad became a more senior civil servant. My mum discovered she needed and wanted to educate herself, so when I was growing up, my mother was doing WEA classes, and talking to me because I was by far the youngest child, so I was more or less at home on my own with her. She would talk to me about an essay she had to write on Jane Austin or she was reading T.S. Eliot, and she would talk to me about it all the time. So that was very encouraging. And she knew poetry, and that's... I've passed on to my children who are all interested in literature in their way. That background, if you need to... You know the stories, you know every Jane Austin, you know your Dickens, you know your poems. That comes from my mum and my dad as well. Yeah.
Henry: Sounds like your mum was a bit of a late bloomer.
Sarah: I think she was a frustrated, never bloomed because she was that generation of just they stated at home, and it didn't do her any good at all. She was quite an unhappy woman.
Henry: Do you have her in mind as a sort of model of she went back and started doing that education and was that something that was just with you?
Sarah: I think it probably was, I think it made sense to me that I could do an MA when I was 55, because my mother would have thought that was a sensible thing to do. If I had the time and the money, and then why wouldn't I do it? So yeah, it seems perfectly sensible to me, I didn't think it was odd. My husband had done one as well, and he was... I've never had any education at all, and did an MA ten years ago, so.
Henry: Oh great.
Sarah: Yeah, University of Buckingham.
Henry: Oh very good.
[laughter]
Henry: And how did you end up at Oxford?
Sarah: Oh, I came from a tiny Grammar School in Dorset that sent one girl to Oxford or Cambridge about every three or four years, so it felt like quite a lonely process. And I had massive imposter syndrome. I didn't get into the college I applied to, but there's a college in Oxford, Mansfield, that used to just collect all the best people that didn't get into any of the other colleges. We were all there with chips on our shoulders because we haven't got into some St. John's or Balliol and the others. And it was an incredibly good atmosphere, but it's still, there were two issues, one was Oxford was still dominated by the public schools, and I was a Grammar School girl.
And Oxford was dominated by the big confident academic colleges, and I was at the college no one had heard of, so spinning out of that and into the city, just felt like that was a bit of a weird stroke of luck, because even though I was at Oxford doing PPE, I didn't feel like I was... I didn't feel like I had... It would never have occurred to me to become academic when I left university. I wasn't going to get a first, I wasn't going to do that.
Henry: But did this thing about imposter syndrome and sort of being in a marginal position, is that quite good because it does encourage you to sort of keep seeing yourself as divergent and keep seeing yourself as not quite in the right place. It preserves that energy of well, I'm here, but I'm not going to stay here, whereas if you'd got into the right college and being more accepted, maybe you would have just a bit more easily slipped into a, staying on the track, if you like.
Sarah: Maybe, maybe. But I don't feel that I was a very assertive person when I started work. To me, working my way up through the city, I would contrast myself with mostly men who were working around me, all of whom had a time table, I've got to be an assistant director by this age and I'm going to be director by this age, then I'm going to go out and join a real company and I'm going to make money. And I was just wanted to keep my job and keep doing it.
And not get in any trouble. But then what used to happen is I would get to know someone at my level, and I think, well, other clever people in the next room because he's not very bright, and then why is he gonna get promoted and not me? Because I think I'm better. So I think there's a bit of that chippiness or edginess which makes you... Which can make you push on a bit harder, but it certainly didn't drive me. I was always a bit surprised, to be honest, I was always a bit surprised when I got promoted, I was a bit surprised when Andersen hired me and I was very surprised when that got in the papers. It was always a bit of a surprise to me. So I didn't have much confidence.
Henry: As you talk about your background, it sounds a bit like there are parallels between you and McMillan. You don't come from an Arthur Andersen background, but there you are and you become very successful, just like he didn't come from that. Is that part of what interests him to you, like, are you writing about yourself?
Sarah: Well, I haven't thought of that, but I think I absolutely am sensitive. So I feel for him when I know how much he did for certain Victorian writers, and I go to their memoirs and diaries and letters, and he hardly gets a mention. And I know because I can see all the letters he wrote to them where he said, "You've got to change the title, you've got to take out half that book, why don't you write about this instead." I can see what he was giving to them, and then you go to the index of some of their books, and he gets a one line or it mentions that this is something I wrote in Macmillan magazine. I am very sensitive to Alexander 's, feeling that people took him for granted, didn't give him any due reward, and I suspect he... Yeah, I suspect, I do imagine that he felt some of the stuff that I felt, which is, have I got any right to be in this room and actually now I've met them, they're not a bright as I thought they were gonna be. And you could see his confidence grows in the '60s, he definitely becomes a lot more assertive with his authors during the '60s.
Henry: Oh, really?
Sarah: Yeah, the more he spends time with them, the firmer he gets about I'm not publishing that, this isn't good enough, he takes on Lady Caroline Norton and that's quite a brave thing to do.
And I think he wins, so that's very hard to tell.
Henry: I always have a slightly, not very well-informed view, but a view that there was less editing of novels in the 19th century, and that Thomas Hardy dropped off his manuscript and they printed it, and that was that. You seem to have found a lot of material that suggests that the authors wouldn't talk about it, but that their work more edited quite heavily.
Sarah: I think their work was edited quite heavily. And particularly, so the complication is the ones who are submitting for something for serialisation in a magazine, I think they were just so relieved to get at each month and another month that turned up. 'Cause you know that they were writing up to the deadline. So that didn't get edited, but then sometimes you can see at Macmillan saying, "When we turn this into a book, we're gonna do something different with it." That definitely happens. He does it to Charles Kingsley, Water Babies when it comes out as a book, has been edited from what appeared in the magazine. And what the other author, Mrs. Oliphant published a serial in the magazine, and he definitely got her to change it before it went into the book. So he did have an influence on these people, you wouldn't get from either their biographies or autobiographies.
Life Lessons
Henry: No. So this sort of feeling that you've described as almost a chip on the shoulder feeling, I think this is potentially an advantage because when I look at some of the scientific research on late bloomers, one thing you notice is, take scientists, for example. A lot of scientists make their breakthrough when they are young, but when people have researched this and said why is that, it's because a lot of scientists stop working once they get tenure or once they win a prize or whatever. The scientists who do carry on working, keep making breakthroughs. [chuckle] So it's actually not because there's anything special about being young, it's because that's when people are really trying. If you don't ever settle into, the people you have met who are on a time table, "I'm going to be a director at this age," they get there and they settle in and, great. They can cruise through for a bit. But if you never settle into that or you retain the chip or you retain the sort of feeling of oh, God. Oh, God. Should I really be here? That's actually quite good because it keeps you energetic and it keeps you looking and it keeps you thinking "What am I going to do? What am I going to do?" Do you think there's a kind of... I don't know. Was that part of your success and Alexander's success that it... You never settled for what you had.
Sarah: Yeah. I think that's right and there's something else I would see a parallel, which is I was not the greatest corporate financier in terms of my grasp of numbers and I'm hopeless at negotiation. But what I was doing, which most of my colleagues weren't, is I can market and sell. I'm interested in people and I used to go and win business. I used to bring it back and then other people would transact it, but that's certainly what I did in Yorkshire. I was out all the time meeting people because I was interested and I wanted to know what they did and what they did and how does that business work.
So I was always out looking and I never wanted to just sit at my desk and shout at people and run the numbers again. I wasn't very good at any of that, but I think I can see that in Alexander too. I mean, Alexander recruits a partner in the mid-1860s to take the back end off him because he just wants to be out meeting new authors and that's what he's gonna be good at and George Lillie Craik is going run the numbers and have the fights with the printers and talk to America. So I can see that and I think that is... You're not that interested in the day job, you're interested in the next idea and the next interesting thing that's gonna grab your attention. And because you're interested, other people bond with you and, hey, you've made a sale. I used to talk to potential clients who would say, "It's really good that you've come out because you sound like you're genuinely interested in this business whereas the other three guys were just wondering what fee they could get out of me."
That's why I would win business 'cause I was interested in them as people and I made friends and I asked interesting questions. And I wasn't just there kicking the tires and then hoping I can sign someone up, you know?
Henry: Yeah, yeah. That's the novel reader in you.
Sarah: Yes.
Henry: There will be lots of women in their 30s in City jobs or office jobs or accountancy jobs or whatever who feel the way you felt. Either they've got imposter syndrome or they secretly would rather just be reading Trollope or whatever. What's your advice to them? Difficult to give advice in general terms, but, you know.
Sarah: Yeah. My advice is you will... The thing you will do best is the thing that makes you happiest. So if you go on trying to push yourself into being something that you see other people being and it's not really making you happy, you won't be very successful at it anyway. So it is worth taking a risk and thinking is there something out there I could do, which I'm... Owning a flower shop or whatever, that would make me happier. If I had stayed on in corporate finance, if I had gone into private equity, I could have made millions and millions, but I don't think I'd have been any happier. In fact, I think I'd have been a lot less happy than I am sitting here on a tiny, little book advance doing exactly what I wanted to do. I don't regret any of that because I wouldn't have enjoyed it. I wouldn't have liked doing it.
I mean, the other thing is... The other thing I would say to all women who are in my position is don't beat yourself up all the time that you're not being the perfect mother or the perfect executive because you're gonna live with that guilt forever and you're never gonna know what you could have done better. If you had given up, maybe you'd have been a terrible mother at home. If you'd found the children out or never had them, maybe your career wouldn't have taken off. You're never going to know. So don't beat yourself up with that, just do the best you can and cut corners wherever you can and get help. And don't be afraid to say, "I need help with this" and "I can't come tonight 'cause I've got to go to a parents evening." Just... The more women say that we need help with this and don't try and pretend that it's easy. It's not easy. It's never gonna be easy to do both. I found it very hard.
Henry: So you are now navigating the publishing world. Doing book research, being a writer. What things did you learn from your earlier career in all its guises whether it's like small techniques and skills or sort of big life lessons or whatever, but what things did you learn from that earlier career that you're sort of using now?
Sarah: I certainly learned... I mean, I certainly picked up a lot of small skills along the way. I am a very fast reader, I'm a summariser and a lot of my job in corporate finance was writing good, crisp, prose because you wrote prospectus because you wrote... So I think all of that has helped. I think I'm a better writer and a better researcher because I did it professionally for 20 years, but we called it corporate finance. I mean, there was a lot of cross over. In terms of the bigger stuff, what have I learned? I've learned to cope with worry and stress. I mean, if you wake up in the middle of the night and stuff's going around in your head, get up, have a cup of tea and write it all down. Don't lie in bed worrying that you're not going back to sleep. You just have to learn to cope with stress.
And I think the other thing I've learned and I try and get into my children's head all the time is to be more assertive just not to run away and hide. If you think something's wrong or you're not being treated properly, don't lose your temper, don't sulk and don't spend your whole life taking it out on your friends and your family. You have to address it at work. Nothing is more boring than the person who really ought to have handed in their notice and just spends their whole life moaning to their wife, their husband, their best friends about what their bloody job is. Don't do it. If you don't like what you're doing, you will become very boring and to everybody else. Change your job. Change your job.
Henry: Yes. Yes. Having recently been that person, I can endorse that sentiment.
Sarah: So we've all done that. We've all spent time listening to someone who's thinking, why don't they just stop doing this job if it's making them so unhappy? And I know that's a... I know particularly the current climate that's easier said than done, but don't, life's very short really.
Henry: Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's right. And what would the Alexander McMillan advice be? Could we have a little book of the wisdom of Alexander McMillan?
Sarah: I think he's going... I mean, I am absolutely immersed in his life in the 1860s. And it is that the decade of the 1860s is the absolute pivotal decade for the business. It completely transforms. It looks utterly different in 1870 than it did in 1860. In 1871, his first wife dies and he rapidly remarries a much younger woman. And I think he starts going abroad on holidays. And I think his life changes. I think the 1870s Alexander is gonna... Had a younger woman saying to him, you're killing yourself. It's not worth it. You've got sons coming into the business, let George take the strain. We're going to France for a month Alexander and you are coming too. I mean, I think his life is gonna change in the 1870s.
Ask me again when I know what he's writing to people in the ’70s. Because in the ’60s, he's saying, get your head down. Really got to work. Put start another book. Don't let the grass grow on your feet. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. He's at it all the time. I think he's gonna have a very different attitude in 10 years' time.
Henry: A lot of writers seem to have a decade or a 15 year period where they kind of really do most of their great work. If that seems to be like that for him, but in a business sense, then you're saying the '60s that was his time and then it cooled off.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. And well after... But with a publishing house in particular, I think once you built up a critical mass, it's not so difficult to run because good authors are going come to you and you can be selective and you can take a Thomas Hardy manuscript and you can take a Kipling manuscript and a Henrig. They're going to come to you. Whereas in the 1860s, he's really scrabbling around. What's going to be good? And he creates things like the Golden Treasury Series or the Clarendon Press textbooks with Oxford University. He's creating things because he hasn't got Thomas Hardy or Henry James. He's got Charles Kingsley, who's becoming increasingly racist and unpleasant. By the 1870s, the business is... There's a magazine that comes out every month. It has regular subscriptions.
And now Nature is going to come out every month and be written for by her Huxley. And he's got, he can choose who he publishes. So I think by the 1870s, the business runs much better even when he is on holiday. Whereas in the 1860s, he just needs to be there every day and he needs to read every manuscript and he needs to look at every proof and he's changing the colour of the bindings. He's in all over it and I think it would've killed him and it killed his wife possibly. And I think in the 1870s, it's easier for him to step back. And then he starts having a son and a nephew in the business. And then he has three nephews in the business, I mean, it just moves on. And he's lucky that the next generation of the one, two, three, five boys, three of them stay in the business and are still in the business in their 70s and 80s. And they all die within a couple of months of each other in 1936, bang, bang, bang. But they were all there, three brothers. So he's lucky in that there is at least two generations of McMillan that know how to run a publishing company. Not everyone gets that. Do they? Some people can't even get to some...
Talent Spotting
Henry: What did you learn about talent spotting when you were at Arthur Andersen?
Sarah: That one of the best things you can have in a business career is instinct about people, that I could always tell within five minutes of an interview starting whether I ought to hire this person or not. It's a bit like house hunting, it all looks lovely on paper and then sometimes you get to the gate and you think I'm not even going to look at this house. [laughter] I can't imagine living in this house, why have I come? And I think I had really good instinct for people spotting and I was good at bringing people on particularly women. I mean, there were a couple of women around who say nice things to me about I learned a lot from you, Sarah.
Henry: What were the signals? The good and the bad signals? What set your instincts off?
Sarah: Genuine intelligence, not just... A spark in the eye literally and a bit of a sense of humour. So not just they've learned it all by wrote. I wasn't ever interested in the people who told me they'd been reading the Financial Times since they were 12. I was interested in someone who'd tell me something interesting they'd seen it on the back of a lorry coming into the interview. That was a better sign for me of genuine interest. And I always used to say when I was teaching other people to interview and hire as well, if you don't think...
If this new person is going start on Monday morning, am I going to really look forward to seeing them? Or am I thinking that, I hope this is gonna be alright? Then you've already made your decision, you want that person to be someone you wanna work with on a Monday morning when it's pouring with rain and you've got to hangover you. So pick people who you are gonna get on with and who are as bright as you are or brighter if you can find them.
Henry: Let's say I was going to plant you into the offices of some big consultancy, PwC or EY or someone, and your job is to talent spot some potential late bloomers. They don't have to want to write a book or be victorious, they just have to be some other Sarahs, who have this in them, but they're not talking about it, and we don't know what it is, how are you going to go about looking for these people, and when will your instinct sort of prick up and say, "Yeah, I'm gonna get to know her, she seems like there's something in the background there."
Sarah: I think it's the... You're gonna see that person thinking outside the box. So in a room of people where everyone said something around the table, they've said the most interesting thing that wasn't what anyone else said. And it might have been a small point that they've made, but it was just different their brains weren't working, they weren't doing groups speak. Because they may not have been listening to the group speak and they might though it was very dull, but this was the thing that had been interesting them about this problem. And I know that's the thing. I also think I would be looking for the person who had done something interesting at the weekend, or was going to theatre that night or just the show that the brain was not completely sucked into the job, that in fact, they were probably more looking like hoping they were gonna get to the national theatre that night, than worrying about anything else that was going on. It's that feeling that you have a life outside work. And for lots of people, there is no life outside work.
And I feel so sorry for them when they give up because, what are they gonna do with their lives? Whereas I always knew that there were 50 things. If I'd have to stop working tomorrow, I wouldn't have been bored for a second, there are 50 things I wanted to do, and I always feel sorry for people to say, "Oh, I don't know what I'd do if I didn't have this job." Really? You know.
But I think, how do you spot them when that's not coming out? I think you are gonna spot them because they are gonna say something that's a different take from everyone else.
Henry: Yeah, no, that's interesting, if you're not going to sort of have the chance to see them pull a book of poetry out of the briefcase or whatever, you can... You're saying there are signals in the meeting. Comes back to divergence almost, they're not...
Sarah: It does.
Henry: How many people do you think you met like that in your career? I tell you why I'm asking, I feel like we have no idea how many late bloomers there could be out there. But my suspicion is there a lot of people who could be in the right circumstances, given the right conditions or whatever, but we just don't know.
Sarah: No, I don't know. I don't think many. I can't think of people. There were people who did surprisingly well after I'd worked with them, went off and did other business things and have done very well, and I think... Well, I wonder what they might do next.
Henry: Were they the ones saying the out of the box stuff in the meeting or are there other indicators of those?
Sarah: There's a girl in particular, I'm thinking about, who worked for me and Leeds who could have gone down a very boring banking corporate route. Actually, she's now running a really interesting small business, and she always... She used to get teased and laughed at because she would sometimes say such off the wall things, used to make a look a bit stupid sometimes, but I always used to be interested in what she'd said, 'cause there was something going on there. So I would think about her. I'm trying to think. So later life, when I've been around NHS boards, there are people there who I think could easily spring off and do something completely different, 'cause working for the NHS is so completely absorbing of your life, your energy and your compassion, but some of them are very interesting people, they wouldn't be doing that job otherwise.
Best Victorian Novel?
Henry: Finally give us a recommendation for one really good Victorian novel that we might not have read.
Sarah: Okay, I'm going to say a part from I've already told you that I love The Way We Live Now, and I love Middlemarch, which I think are the two absolute classic novels. But the one that I read last year, which I'd never heard of and loved, it's by Mrs. Oliphant, and it's called Hester, and it was written, I think in the 1880s, and it's set in a small town, but it's about a woman who saves the Family Bank from going bankrupt. Her father has over extended the bank and run off, and a bit like, It's a Wonderful Life, there's going to be a run on the bank, but Hester goes into the office, it's a small town, and the fact that she's there, she saves the bank and effectively runs it, and then the book starts as the next generation are coming through what's gonna happen. And will she have to do it again? It's a really good book.
Henry: Yeah, that sounds a great.
Sarah: Hester by Mrs. Oliphant.
Henry: I'm going to read that. Well, Sarah, thank you very much.
Sarah: Thank you, Henry. It's been very enjoyable.
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Before we get started… Writing elsewhereI have recently written about modern Russian literature for CapX, as well Victorian YIMBYs and Katherine Mansfield and 1922, for The Critic.Tours of LondonSign up here to get updates when we add new tour dates. There will be three tours a month, covering the Great Fire, Barbican, Samuel Johnson and more!
Helen Lewis is a splendid infovore, which is how she has come to be one of the most interesting journalists of her generation. You will see in this conversation some of her range. We chatted before we recorded and she was full of references that reflect her broad reading. She reminded me of Samuel Johnson saying that in order to write a book you must turn over half a library. I recommend her book Difficult Women to you all, perhaps especially if you are not generally interested in “feminist” books. Helen is also working on a new book called The Selfish Genius. There’s an acuity to Helen, often characterised by self-editing. She has the precision — and the keenness to be precise — of the well-informed. She was also, for someone who claims to be a difficult woman, remarkably amiable. That seeming paradox was one of the things we discussed, as well as biography, late bloomers, menopause, Barbara Castle, failure, Habsburgs and so on... I had not realised she was such a royal biography enthusiast, always a good sign. Helen’s newsletter, by the way, has excellent links every week. It’s a very good, and free, way to have someone intelligent and interesting curate the internet for you. Her latest Atlantic feature is about defunct European royals who are not occupying their throne. Let’s hope one of Helen’s screenplays gets produced…
(I do not know, by the way, if Tyler Cowen would endorse the reference I made to him. I was riffing on something he said.)
[This transcript is too long for email so either click the title above to read online or click at the bottom to go to the full email…]
Henry: Is Difficult Women a collective biography, a book of connected essays, feminist history or something else?
Helen Lewis: Start nice and simple. It was designed as the biography of a movement. It was designed as a history of feminism. But I knew from the start I had this huge problem, which is that anyone who writes about feminism, the first thing that everybody does is absolutely sharpens their pencils and axes about the fact that you inevitably missed stuff out. And so I thought what I need to do is really own the fact that this can only ever be a partial history. And its working subtitle was An Imperfect History of Feminism, and so the thematic idea then came about because of that.
And the idea of doing it through fights, I think, is quite useful because that means that there was a collision of ideas and that something changed. You know, there were lots and lots of subjects that I thought were really interesting, but there wasn't a change, a specific "We used to be like this, and now we're like this," that I could tie it to. So I don't think it is a collective biography because I think there's no connection between the women except for the fact that they were all feminists, and to that extent, they were all change makers. And I've read some really great collective biographies, but I think they work best when they give you a sense of a milieu, which this doesn't really. There's not a lot that links Jayaben Desai in 1970s North London and Emmeline Pankhurst in 1900s Manchester. They're very disparate people.
Henry: Some people make a distinction between a group biography, which is they all knew each other or they were in the same place or whatever, and a collective biography, which is where, as you say, they have no connection other than feminism or science or whatever it is. Were you trying to write a collective biography in that sense? Or was it just useful to use, as a sort of launching off point, a woman for each of the fights you wanted to describe?
Helen Lewis: I think the latter because I felt, again, with the subject being so huge, that what you needed to do was bring it down to a human scale. And I always feel it's easier to follow one person through a period of history. And weirdly, by becoming ever more specific, I think you'll have a better chance of making universal points, right? And one of the things that when I'm reading non-fiction, I want to feel the granularity of somebody's research which, weirdly, I think then helps you understand the bigger picture better. And so if you take it down all the way to one person, or sometimes it's more... So Constance Lytton and Annie Kenney, that's sort of two people. I think probably Constance is bigger in that mix. It helps you to understand what it's like to be a person moving through time, which is what I wanted to kind of bring it back. Particularly, I think, with feminism where one of the problems, I think, is when you get progress made, it seems like common sense.
And it's one of the things I find I love about Hilary Mantel's, the first two of that Thomas Cromwell trilogy, is there is a real sense that you don't know what's going to happen. Like the moment, the hinge moment, of Anne Boleyn's star appears to be falling. It's very hard not to read it now and think, "Well, obviously that was destined to happen. You'd obviously jumped ship to Jane Seymour." But she manages to recreate that sense of living through history without knowing the ending yet, right? And so maybe you should stick with Anne Boleyn. Maybe this has all just been a temporary blip. Maybe she'll have a son next year. And that's sort of what I wanted to recreate with feminism, is to put you back in the sensation of what it is to be like making those arguments about women having a vote at a time when that's seen as a kind of crackpot thing to be arguing for because obviously women are like this, obviously women are delicate, and they need to be protected. And when all of those arguments... Again, to go back to what it's like to just to live in a time where people's mindsets were completely different to... Which is to me, is the point of writing history, is to say... And the same thing about travel writing, is to say, "Here are people whose very basis, maybe even the way that they think, is completely different to all of your assumptions." All your assumptions that are so wired so deeply into you, you don't even know they're assumptions. You just think that's what consciousness is or what it is to be alive. And that's, I think, why I try to focus it on that human level.
Henry: How do you do your research?
Helen Lewis: Badly, with lots of procrastination in between it, I think is the only honest answer to that. I went and cast my net out for primary sources quite wide. And there was some... The number of fights kept expanding. I think it started off with eight fights, and then just more and more fights kept getting added. But I went to, for example, the LSC Women's Library has got a suffragette collection. And I just read lots and lots of suffragette letters on microfiche. And that was a really good way into it because you've got a sense of who was a personality and who had left enough records behind. And I write about this in the book, about the fact that it's much easier to write a biography of a writer because they'll fundamentally, probably, give you lots of clues as to what they were thinking and doing in any particular time. But I also find things that I found really moving, like the last letter from Constance Lytton before she has a stroke, which has been effected by being force fed and having starved herself. And then you can see the jump, and then she learns to write again with her other hand, and her handwriting's changed.
And stuff like that, I just don't think you would get if you didn't allow yourself to be... Just sort of wade through some stuff. Someone volunteered to be my research assistant, I mean I would have paid them, I did pay them, to do reports of books, which apparently some authors do, right? They will get someone to go and read a load of books for them, and then come back. And I thought, "Well, this is interesting. Maybe I'll try this. I've got a lot of ground to cover here." And she wrote a report on a book about… I think it was about environmental feminism. And it was really interesting, but I just hadn't had the experience of living through reading a book. And all of the stuff you do when you're reading a book you don't even think about, where you kind of go, "Oh, that's interesting. Oh, and actually, that reminds me of this thing that's happened in this other book that's... Well, I wonder if there's more of that as I go along." I don't think if you're going try and write a book, there is any shortcut.
I thought this would be a very... I'm sure you could write a very shallow... One of those books I think of where they're a bit Wikipedia. You know what I mean. You know sometimes when you find those very 50 inspirational women books, those were the books I was writing against. And it's like, you've basically written 50 potted biographies of people. And you've not tried to find anything that is off the beaten track or against the conventional way of reading these lives. It's just some facts.
Henry: So biographically, you were perhaps more inspired by what you didn't want to write than what you did.
Helen Lewis: Yeah, I think that's very true. I think writing about feminism was an interesting first book to pick because there's so much of it, it's like half the human race. It's really not a new subject. And to do the whole of British feminism really was a mad undertaking. But I knew that I didn't want to write, "You go girl, here's some amazing ladies in history." And I wanted to actually lean into the fact that they could be weird or nasty or mad. And my editor said to me at one point, and I said, "I'm really worried about writing some of this stuff." She said, "I think you can be more extreme in a book," which I thought was really interesting.
Which I think is also very true in that I also feel like this about doing podcasts is that I very rarely get in trouble for things I've said on podcasts because it's quite hard to lazily clip a bit of them out and put them on Twitter and toss the chum into the water. Right? And I think that's the same thing about if you write something on page 390 of a book, yeah, occasionally, someone might take a screen-grab of it, but people hopefully will have read pages 1-389 and know where you're coming from, by that point.
Henry: Maybe trolls don't read.
Helen Lewis: Well, I think a lot of the stuff that annoys me is a shallow engagement with complexity, and an attempt to go through books and harvest them for their talking points, which is just not how... It's just such a sad, weathered way of approaching the experience of reading, isn't it? Do I agree with this author or not? I like reading people I disagree with. And so for example, the fact that I call the suffragettes terrorists, and I write about that, I think people are reluctant to engage with the fact that people you agree with did terrible things in the pursuit of a goal that you agree with. And I think it's very true about other sectors. I always think about the fact that Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for terrorism. And that gets pushed down in the mix, doesn't it? When it all turns out that actually, he was a great man. And that incredibly long imprisonment in Robben Island is its own totemic piece of the history of modern South Africa, that you don't wanna sit with the awkward bits of the story too.
Henry: You've had a lot of difficult experiences on Twitter? Would you have written this book if you hadn't lived through that?
Helen Lewis: I think that's a hard question to answer. I tried not to make it a “Here is the cutting of all my enemies.” And actually, my friend, Rob read this book in draft and he insisted that everyone I knew that I was going to argue with had to be of sufficient stature to be worth arguing with. He's like, You cannot argue with, I think I put it in my drawing piece, a piece like Princess Sparklehorse 420. Right? That's quite hard when you're writing about modern feminism, because actually if you think about what I think of as the very social justice end of it, right? The end of it, that is very pro sex work, very pro self-identification of gender, very pro prison abolition, police abolition, it's actually quite hard to find the people who were the theorists of that. It's more of a vibe that you will find in social media spaces on Tumblr, and Twitter and other places like that. So trying to find who is the person who has actually codified all that and put that down to then say, "Well, let's look at it from all sides", can be really difficult. So I did find myself slightly arguing with people on Twitter.
Henry: I'm wondering more, like one way I read your book, it's very thought-provoking on feminism, but it's also very thought-provoking just on what is a difficult person. And there's a real thing now about if you're low in agreeableness, that might mean you're a genius, like Steve Jobs, or it might mean you're a Twitter troll. And we have a very basic binary way of thinking about being difficult. And it’s actually very nuanced, and you have to be very clever about how to be difficult. And in a way, I wondered if one of the things you were thinking about was, well, everyone’s doing difficult in a really poor way. And what we need, especially on the left, is smart difficult, and here is a book about that, and please improve. [chuckle]
Helen Lewis: Yeah, there was a lot of that and it's part of the sort of bro-ey end of philosophy is about maybe women have been less brilliant through history because they're less willing to be disagreeable, they have a higher need to be liked, which I think is kind of interesting. I don't entirely buy it. But I think there's an interesting thing there about whether or not you have to be willing to be iconoclastic. The thing that I find interesting about that is, again, there's another way in which you can refer to it, which is the idea that if you're a heretic, you're automatically right.
Henry: Yes.
Helen Lewis: And there's a lot of...
Henry: Or brave.
Helen Lewis: Or brave, right? And I think it's... You can see it in some of the work that I'm doing at the moment about the intellectual dark web being a really interesting example. Some of them stayed true to the kind of idea that you were a skeptic. And some of them disbelieved the mainstream to the extent that they ended up falling down the rabbit holes of thinking Ivermectin was a really great treatment for COVID, or that the vaccines were going to microchip you or whatever it might be. And so I'm always interested in how personality affects politics, I guess. And yeah, how you can be self-contained and insist on being right and not cow-tow to other people without being an a*****e is a perpetually interesting question.
It's coming up in my second book a lot, which is about genius. Which is sort-of the similar thing is, how do you insist when everybody tells you that you're wrong, that you're right. And the thing that we don't talk about enough in that context, I think Newton is a very good example is that, obviously, he made these incredible breakthroughs with gravity and mathematics, and then spends literally decades doing biblical chronology and everyone tells him that he's wrong, and he is wrong. And we don't really talk about that side of it very much.
All the people who spent all their time studying phlogiston and mesmerism, or that's more complicated because I think that does lead to interesting insights. A lot of people who the world told was wrong, were wrong. And we're over-indexing, always writing about the ones who were the one Galileo saying the Earth still moves, and they turned out to be correct.
Henry: Yes. There are good books about biographies of failures, but they're less popular.
Helen Lewis: Which is tough because most of us are going to be failures.
Henry: Yes. Well, you’re not gonna buy a book to reinforce that.
Helen Lewis: No, but maybe there could be some deep spiritual learning from it, which is that a life spent in pursuit of a goal that turns out to be illusory is still a noble one.
Henry: That’s a fundamentally religious opinion that I think a secular society is not very good at handling.
Helen Lewis: Yeah, maybe. Yeah. I’ve been doing lots of work for Radio 4 about the link between politics and religion, and whether or not religion has to some extent replaced politics as Western societies become more secular. And I think there is some truth in that. And one of the big problems is, yes, it doesn’t have that sort of spirit of self-abnegation or the idea of kind of forgiveness in it, or the idea of just desserts happening over the horizon of death. Like everything’s got be settled now in politics here, which I think is a bad fit for religious impulses and ideas.
Henry: What is the role of humour in being difficult?
Helen Lewis: I think it’s really important because it does sweeten the pill of trying to make people be on your side. And so I had a long discussion with myself about how much I should put those jokes in the footnotes of the book, and how much I should kind of be funny, generally. Because I think the problem is, if you’re funny, people don't think you’re serious. And I think it’s a big problem, particularly for women writers, that actually I think sometimes, and this happens in journalism too, that women writers often play up their seriousness, a sort of uber-serious persona, because they want to be taken seriously. If you see what I mean, it’s very hard to be a foreign policy expert and also have a kind of lively, cheeky side, right? We think that certain things demand a kind of humourlessness to them.
But the other thing that I think humour is very important, is it creates complicity with the audience. If you laugh at someone’s joke, you've aligned yourself with them, right? Which is why we now have such a taboo and a prohibition on racist jokes, sexist jokes, whatever they might be, because it’s everyone in the audience against that minority. But that can, again, if you use your powers for good, be quite powerful. I think it is quite powerful to see... There’s one of the suffragettes where someone throws a cabbage at her, and she says something like, “I must return this to the man in the audience who's lost his head.” And given that all the attacks on the suffragettes were that they were these sort of mad, radical, weird, un-feminine, inhuman people, then that was a very good way of instantly saying that you weren’t taking it too seriously.
One of the big problems with activism is obviously that people, normal people who don't spend every moment of their life thinking about politics, find it a bit repellent because it is so monomaniacal and all-consuming. And therefore, being able to puncture your pomposity in that way, I think is quite useful.
Henry: So if there are people who want to learn from Helen Lewis, “How can I be difficult at work and not be cast aside,” you would say, “Tell more low-grade jokes, get people to like you, and then land them with some difficult remark.”
Helen Lewis: Use your powers for good after that. It’s tricky, isn’t it? I think the real answer to how to be difficult at work is decide what level of compromise you’re willing to entertain to get into positions of power. Which is the same question any activist should ask themselves, “How much do I need to engage with the current flawed system in order to change it?” And people can be more or less open with themselves, I guess, about that. I think the recent Obama memoir is quite open about, for example on the financial relief in 2008, about how much he should have tried to be more radical and change stuff, and how much he... Did he actually let himself think he was being this great consensualist working with the Republican Party and therefore not get stuff done?
And then the other end, I think you have the criticism I made of the Corbyn project, which was that it was better to have kind of clean hands than get things done. There's a great essay by Matt Bruenig called Purity Politics, which says... No, what is it called? Purity Leftism. And it said, “the purity leftist’s approach is not so much that they're worried about that oppression is happening but that they should have no part of it.” And I think that’s part of the question of being difficult, too, is actually how much do you have to work with and compromise yourself by working with people with whom you're opposed? And it's a big question in feminism. There are people who will now say, “Well, how could feminists possibly work with the Conservative Party?” Entirely forgetting that Emmeline Pankhurst ran as a Conservative candidate.
Henry: She was very conservative.
Helen Lewis: Right. And there were members of the suffragettes who went on to join the British Union of Fascists. That actually... Some of the core tenets of feminism have been won by people who didn't at all see themselves on the left.
Henry: If I was the devil’s advocate, I’d say that well-behaved women, for want of a better phrase, do make a lot of history. Not just suffragists but factory workers, political wives, political mistresses. What’s the balance between needing difficult women and needing not exactly compliant women but people who are going to change it by, as you say, completely engaging with the system and almost just getting on with it?
Helen Lewis: There’s a scale, isn’t there? Because if you make yourself too unbelievably difficult, then no one wants to work with you and it's... I think the suffragettes is a really good example of that actually. The intervention of the First World War makes that story impossible to play out without it.
But had they continued on that course of becoming ever more militant, ever more bombings, and pouring acid on greens, and snipping telephone wires... The criticism that was made of them was, “Are they actually turning people off this cause?” And you get people saying that, that actually the suffragettes set back the cause of women’s suffrage, which I'm not entirely sure I buy. I think I certainly don’t buy it in the terms of the situation in 1905. Fawcett writes about the fact that there were loads of all these articles decrying the suffragettes, whereas previously they’d just been... The cause of suffrage, which had been going on for 70-80 years, quite in earnest, in legal form, had just been completely ignored. So there was definitely a moment where what it really needed was attention. But then, can you make the same argument in 1914 about whether or not the suffragettes were still doing an equal amount of good? I think then it's much more tenuous.
And there was a really good article saying that, essentially your point, well-behaved women do make history, saying that a lot of boring legal heavy-lifting... And it's one of the things I find very interesting about where modern feminism in Britain is. A lot of the work that’s most interesting is being done through things like judicial reviews, which is a lot of very boring pulling together large amounts of court bundles, and people saying, “Is this obiter?” This word which I once understood, and now don't anymore. But it’s not people chaining themselves to railings or throwing themselves under horses. It’s people getting up in the morning and putting another day shift in at quite boring admin. And I do think that maybe that's something that I underplayed in the book because it’s not so narratively captivating. Brenda Hale made that point to me that she would have been a suffragist because she just believed in playing things by the book. You won it by the book.
And I do think now I find I don’t agree with throwing paint and pies and milkshakes and stuff like that at people whose political persuasions I disagree with, right? I fundamentally don't believe in punching Nazis, which was a great debate... Do you remember the great Twitter debate of a couple of years ago about whether it’s okay to punch a Nazi? I think if you live in America or the UK, and there are democratic ways and a free press in which to make your political case, you don't need to resort to a riot. And that’s not the case all over the world, obviously. But I do think that I am... I think difficulty takes many, many forms.
Henry: A question about Margaret Thatcher.
Helen Lewis: Yes.
Henry: Was she good for women, even though she wasn't good for feminism? So millions of women joined the labour force in the 1980s, more than before or since. It was the first time that women got their own personal allowance for income tax, rather than being taxed as an extension of their husband’s income.
Helen Lewis: I'm trying to remember. Was that a Tory policy?
Henry: That was 1988 budget, and it came into effect in 1990. And she also publicly supported. She said, “You should be nice to mothers who go out to work. They're just earning money for their families.” So even though she definitely did not, consciously I think, help the cause of feminism, you would probably rather be a woman in the ’80s than the ’70s...
Helen Lewis: Oh yeah, definitely.
Henry: But because of her. That's my challenge to you.
Helen Lewis: No, it's a good challenge. And I think it's one that has a lot of merit. I’m not sure whether or not she would be grateful to you for positioning her as Margaret Thatcher, feminist hero. And it's really into having... I wrote a screenplay last year about the women in politics in the years before Margaret Thatcher, and it’s very... And I cover this a bit in the book. That women have always struggled in Labour, a collective movement, where it’s like if you let one woman through, you’ve got to let them all. Like, “I’m the vanguard” versus the Thatcher route, which was like, “I’m just me, a person. Judge me on who I am,” and not making such a kind of radical collective claim. So that’s the bit that holds me back from endorsing her as a kind of good thing for women, is I think she was Elizabeth I in the sense where she was like, “I’m good like a man,” rather than saying, “Women are good, and I'm a woman,” which I think are two different propositions. But it’s definitely true that... I think that growing up in a society that had a female prime minister was a huge deal. America still hasn’t had a female president. It’s just not... If you're a girl growing up there, it’s just... That’s something that you’ve never seen.
And the other half of it is, I think it was incredibly powerful to see Denis Thatcher. The true feminist hero that is Denis Thatcher. But genuinely, that's somebody who was older than her, who was willing to take a back seat. And he found a role for men that was not being the alpha. It was kind of the, “I don't have anything left to prove. And I like playing golf. Haven't I got a great life while the little woman runs around with her red boxes. All a bit much.” I think that was almost a more radical thing for people to see.
And it’s interesting to me that he was somebody who had fought in the Second World War because I think the ’70s and the feminist revolution, I think in some ways depends on there being a generation of men who didn’t have anything to prove, in terms of masculinity. And it’s really interesting to me that... So Barbara Castle’s husband Ted was also, I think, a little bit older than her. But he was also very much in that Denis Thatcher mould of, “Woman! Right, you're exhausting.” And Maureen Colquhoun, who I also write about in the book, her husband Keith was, by all accounts, a very decent guy who was totally accepting of her ambitions. And then he conducted himself with incredible dignity after she left him for a woman. And I think that’s a story that I’m interested in hearing a bit more about, is of the men who weren’t threatened. So I do think that's a big challenge that the Thatchers did present to orthodox values. But let’s not underplay them as conservatives.
Henry: Oh no, hugely conservative.
Helen Lewis: And also the fact that, to some extent, Margaret Thatcher was reacting to an economic tide that was very useful to her. More women in the workforce meant more productivity, meant higher GDP. And I think it was at that point a train that was just not... Why would you throw yourself in front of it to try and reverse it and get women back into the home?
Henry: Her advisors wanted a tax break for marriage.
Helen Lewis: Oh, that’s a classic Conservative policy.
Henry: Because they said, “We're in office, and this is what we're here for.” And she said, “I can't do it to the mill girls in Bolton. I can't give a tax break to wives in Surrey playing bridge.” And in a way, I think she was very quietly, and as you say for political reasons not entirely openly, quite on the side of the working woman for moral reasons that we would usually call feminist. But which because it’s her and because of everything else she believes, it doesn’t really make sense to call them feminist, but it’s difficult to think of another Prime Minister who has had so much rhetoric saying “Yes, women should go to work, that's a good thing. Don't yell at them about it.” And who has implemented economic policies that's giving them tax breaks and trying to level the playing field a bit. So it’s a sort of conundrum for me that she didn't want to be called a feminist, but she did a lot of things that quotes, if you were that sort of person would say “undermined” the traditional family or whatever.
Helen Lewis: Yeah. And she found a way to be a powerful woman and an archetype of what that was, which I think again, is based enormously on Barbara Castle, I think Barbara Castle is the template for her.
Henry: Oh yeah. Down to the hair. Yeah.
Helen Lewis: With the big hair and the fluttering the eyelashes, and that kind of, what I think of as kind of “Iron Fem” right? Which is where you're very, very feminine, but it's in a steely ball-crushing kind of way. Although interestingly, Barbara Castle cried a lot. She would have frequently burst into tears about stuff, which again was, I think kept the men around her slightly off balance, they didn't know how to... Which I think any good politician uses what they’ve got. But the thing that struck me when I read more about Thatcher last year, was about the fact that if she hadn't been the first female Prime Minister, I think we would write a lot more about her lower-middle middle class background and what a challenge that was. And the fact that that really, in some ways, I think the Tory Party really loved having a female leader once they got over the initial shock because it was kind of like, “Well, aren't we modern. And now Labor can’t have a go at us about all this kind of stuff, 'cause look at our woman leader.” What I think was more of a profound challenge for a long time, was the kind of arriviste sort of idea that she was, as you say, a representative of working people, upwardly mobile, or from right to buy being an example of one of these policies. I think that was a big challenge to the kind of men in smoky rooms.
Henry: I don't think they ever got over it. Carrington called her “a f*****g stupid petit-bourgeois woman.”
Helen Lewis: Petit-bourgeois is exactly the right, I think the right term of abuse. And there was a... And I think that’s why... I mean, I think it came out as misogyny but actually it was also driven by class as well, the fact that she was no better than she ought to be, right?
But that’s about... I think that’s how you see, and honestly I think Ted Heath experiences as a great... Leading to the incredible sulk, one of my favorite phrases, [chuckle] that he just never kind of got over that he had been beaten by a woman. I think that was an extra kind of poisoned pill for him, of the ingratitude of the party, that they would replace him with a woman.
Henry: And a woman of his own class.
Helen Lewis: Right. And exactly, it’s not like she... So she wasn’t sort of Lady Aster wafting in a cloud of diamonds and violet scent. It was, “Hang on a minute, you're saying this person is better than me.”
Henry: Now, before Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Tory Party, almost nobody thought that she was going anywhere, right up to say a week before the leadership election. People would have meetings about who the candidates were and they wouldn't even discuss her. Who are the people in politics today that no one’s really sort of gathered actually have got this big potential?
Helen Lewis: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting isn't it, that essentially she goes into that leadership context and they sort of think, “Well, someone's gonna shake it up a bit, someone’s gonna represent the right to the party.” And then they go round... And it was Airey Neave who was running her campaign, going around sort of saying, “Well, you know, vote for her, it’ll give Ted a shock.” And then the first ballot result comes in and they go, “Oh God, it’s given us a shock as well.” And then I think at that point, Willy Whitelaw piles in, doesn’t he? But it’s too late and the train’s already moving. And the other one who's... It's Hugh Fraser is the other... And he runs very much from the sort patrician candidate background. I love that, that leadership election, it symbolizes what I like about politics, which is just that sometimes there is a moment, that is a hinge when a force that’s been bubbling away suddenly pops up. And not to get too much into the great man or in this case, a great woman theory history, but someone makes a big decision that is either going to be the right call or the wrong call.
And for Margaret Thatcher is almost insanely ambitious, and she could have ended up looking incredibly stupid, and because the life didn’t take that fork in the road, we’ll never look back on that. But there are many people who have made that gamble, and again, go back to failures point, have crashed. You have to have that kind of instinct in politics.
Who’s good now? I was just thinking this morning that Bridget Phillipson of Labor, who is now currently shadow education, I think has been underrated for a long time. Finally less so, given that she’s made it to the Shadow Cabinet, who knows if she can make an impression there, but she is smart. So I’ll give you an example, she was asked the inevitable question that all labor politicians are now asked, like, “What is a woman?” And she said, “The correct... “ This is Richard Madeley asked her this. She said, “What to my mind is the correct legal ounce that would also makes sense to normal human beings who don't follow politics all the time, which is, ‘It’s an adult human female or anybody with a gender recognition certificate. And there are difficulties in how you might sometimes put that into practice, but those are the two categories of people.’”
And it was like this moment, I was like, Why? Why has it taken you so long to work out an answer to this question that is both correct and explicable. And I think that is an underrated gift in politicians, is actually deciding what issues you’re going to fudge around and which issues you actually have to come out and say what you think even if people disagree with it. It was one of Thatcher’s great strengths, was that she made decisions and she stuck to them. I mean, obviously then you get to the poll tax and it becomes a problem. But I think there’s... One of the problems I felt with the Ed Miliband era of Labor was that he didn't want to annoy anybody and ended up annoying everybody.
Wes Streeting, I think is also... No, I won't say underrated, I will say he's now rated and clearly has got his eye on the leadership next.
Bridget Phillipson has a much more marginal seat than you'd like to see from somebody who’s going to be a leader. Wes is an interesting character. Grew up on free school meals, has been through cancer in the last couple of years, is gay, has a genuinely kind of... But is also on scene as being on the right to the party. So he’s got lots of different identity factors and political factors that will make people very hard to know where to put him, I think, or how to brand him, I guess. But those are two of the ones who you make me think that there's some interesting stuff happening.
On the Tory side, there are some people who are quietly competent. So Michael Gove, I think, whatever you think about his persona or anything like that, is the person they put in when they want stuff actually to happen. I think Nadhim Zahawi did very well as Vaccines Minister without anyone really noticing, which is probably not what you want when you’re a minister, but it’s probably what you want from the public.
Henry: Why are so many women late bloomers? Well, obviously, the constraints of having a family or whatever.
Helen Lewis: I think the answer is children, I think is the answer to that one.
Henry: But there must be other reasons.
Helen Lewis: I think... I mean, who knows? I may be straying into territory which is pseudo-science here, but I do also think that menopause is quite important. When you lose all your caring for others, nicely, softly, softly hormones and your hormone profile becomes much more male, I think that makes it easier to not care what people think about you, to some extent. As does the fact that you can no longer be beautiful and play that card. And I don’t know, I think also... Again, this is... I don't know if this is supported by the evidence, I think there's more of... I think more of the men fall away. I don't know, I think if you're a guy who’s found it very hard to form personal relationships, then maybe your 50s and 60s can be quite lonely, whereas I think that’s often the time in which women kind of find a sort of a second wind. Does that make sense? This is all... I mean, none of this is... There's no evidential basis for this, this is just based on my sort of anecdotal reading of people that I’m thinking of.
Henry: Camille Paglia once wrote, she put it in very strict terms, she said something like, when the menopause happens, the wife becomes this sort of tyrant and starts flourishing.
Helen Lewis: Yeah. No, I’m very much looking forward to that, yeah. Oh yeah.
Henry: And the husband becomes this kind of wet rag and his testosterone level drops and the whole power balance just flips. And you're sort of, you’re saying that, but not in quite that... Not as quite an aggressive way as she’s phrased it.
Helen Lewis: Yeah, and it’s not a universal truth.
Henry: No, no, not at all.
Helen Lewis: I just think for the people for whom that happens, that is quite an arresting thing that often gives them the liberation. I also do think there’s a kind of mindset change. I don’t have kids, but I know from women that I know whose kids have gone off to university, that if you have been the primary caregiver, there is suddenly a great, big hole in your life, and what do you fill it with? And actually, do you have to find a new focus and direction and purpose, because you don’t want to be sort of turning up at their halls of residence going, “Hello, just thought I check in, see if you’re alright.” And whereas for men, who’ve maintained a sort of career focus throughout, whilst also adding on a family, that’s not such a kind of big realignment of their day and their life and what they feel the focus of their life is.
Henry: I spoke to Tyler Cowen about this and he wondered if there’s something about women become more acceptable in their looks. So you think about Angela Merkel and Margaret Thatcher as... I think you were sort of implying this, when a woman reaches middle age, the public or the people around them are less likely to judge them on whether they’re good-looking, and so some of that sexism slightly falls away, because when you are a woman in your 20s or 30s, you’re very susceptible to being looked at or rated or whatever, whereas Margaret Thatcher had a sort of, I don’t know, a motherly quality that no one would... There was a kind of cult of finding her attractive and Alan Clark said disgusting things about her.
Helen Lewis: Yeah, and also we've had a queen for 70 years, right? So we do have that sort of idea of what female power looks like, which is icy and so it's non-emotional, but yeah.
Henry: But I've seen that in the office, that women in their 20s have a difficult time if they’re good looking because there are a certain type of men...
Helen Lewis: Well, people assume you’re stupid as well.
Henry: Well, and also it’s just what men go to. They talk about you being that, whereas once a woman gets slightly past that, men don’t automatically sort of go, “Oh, how would you rate her out of 10” or whatever? And that creates a space to see them as the person.
Helen Lewis: And see them as actual human. I think that's a really interesting thesis. I also think that there’s a... I think being a young woman is a particular kind of problem. So I think there’s definitely a form of ageism against women, where it’s silly old bat, right? Which I do think you get silly old duffer as well, but there is some extra level as well about women, it’s like, “Why are you still talking? No one wants to hear from you? Your... “ This is a phrase they use in the internet now, “You're dusty, you and your dusty opinions.” But I think you get the contrary version of that as a young woman, whereas I think we find... The phrase Young Turk implies man, doesn't it?
It’s like, thrusting young guy, on his way up, super ambitious, he’s the new generation, whereas I don’t think you necessarily have that whole sort of coalition of positive stereotypes about young women. It’s untested, learner, still needs to learn the ropes, that kind of...
I’m eternally grateful to my boss in my 20s, Jason Cowley of the New Statesman, for making me deputy editor of the Statesman when I was 28, which I think was a pretty radical thing to do. When I don’t think it would have necessarily felt so radical to make a 28-year-old guy.
Although I say that, but then Ian Hislop became editor of Private Eye when he was 26, and there was like a revolution among the old guard. And he had to metaphorically execute a few of them outside the woodshed. So I do think that... I also think people begin to... There’s... Now, this is really straying to some dangerous, choppy feminist waters. Competition between women can be very fierce, obviously. I write about this in the book in the terms of Smurfette Syndrome. The idea that there's only one place for a woman, and by God, I’ve got to have it. But I do think that there can be some jealousy that maybe recedes. And I think it’s probably true for men and women. As you get older, people don't see you as a threat because they think, “Well, by the time I’m 40, maybe I'll have all the stuff you have.” But if you’ve got that stuff at 28, I think there’s a real feeling from other people in the generation that those, the stars are peeling away, and there’s a real resentment of them. So one of the things I do is I provide kind of counselling services to young journalists who’ve just suddenly had like a really big promotion or career lift or whatever it is. And I feel indebted to go and say to them, “By the way, this is amazing, but people will hate you because of it.”
Henry: It’s very striking to me that we’ve had a period of very young politicians being leaders, but they’re men. And the women who’ve either competed with them or become leaders afterwards are in their 50s. And I do think there’s something about what’s an acceptable public woman.
Helen Lewis: And the idea of authority, I think that’s the thing. I think as you get older as a woman, it’s easier to seem authoritative.
Henry: Someone like Stella Creasy, I think, has had a much more difficult time just because she happens to be under a certain age.
Helen Lewis: Yeah, I think that’s interesting. And I think the fact that she's now got very young children at a relatively older age. I know that’s... Sorry. Apologies to Stella, if you're listening. But it is comparatively old to have children after 40, still. That that will be interesting of how that complicates her next decade in politics.
And I do think those super top jobs… There was a really brilliant piece of research which I put in the book about the sort of so-called demanding jobs, the kind of lawyers, the top lawyers, and I think journalists and politicians. Greedy jobs, they're called. And the fact is that they have become more demanding in terms of hours as women have entered the workforce. And now the thing has become fetishized as can you do the 14-hour days? And it becomes a soft way of excluding women with young kids.
The problem, I think, will come with all of this when both men and women end up needing to look after elderly parents, as we’re having more and more of that extension, those decades at the end of life when you’re alive but maybe you’re not as mobile as you were. Maybe you need more help from your family. And I think there is a lot of anger among certain types of women that they just feel like they’re finally free from their caring responsibilities, and then they get landed with another one. But I know, I’ve been to some feminist conferences recently where... There’s a famous saying which women are the only minority that get more radical with age, which I think is probably true. You can meet some groups of 50-something women, and they are fuming, really fuming. And they’ve now got the time and the sort of social capital with which to exercise that fuming-dom, as it were.
Henry: Is Roy Jenkins overrated?
Helen Lewis: [laughter] That’s the most random question. He’s not my favourite politician, mainly because I'm Team Castle for life, right? And I think she was treated very badly by the men in that Wilson cabinet, the first, the ’66 to ’70 one, of whom he was one, right? I think that, yeah. I think... Do you know what? I haven't got very strong opinions on him compared with my strong opinions on James Callaghan, who I am anti. And I know there are some Callaghan-stans out there. But I think the utterly cynical way in which he sucked up to the unions in order to get the leadership at the cost, ultimately, of then Margaret Thatcher in ’79, out-strikes me as one of the most sort of cynical pieces of politicking.
Henry: You are sailing very close to being a Thatcherite.
Helen Lewis: I'm not a Thatcherite. I'm not.
Henry: No, I know.
Helen Lewis: But I can see... I think you... And I think Rachel Reeves has basically written about this, who's now Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, that if Barbara Castle had succeeded with In Place of Strife on what were, now, to us, very mild measures, right? A conciliation pause where you have negotiations, strike ballots, no wildcat strikes. If she’d managed to push through some of those, then some of the excesses of the ’70s would not have happened. Or at least, Labour would have been able to show that it had a grip of them. But you have a situation where the teachers were asking for something like 25% pay rise in the run up to the ’79 election. And the Labour government just looked completely out of control. And so yeah, that’s my Callaghan beef. What's your Roy Jenkins beef, then?
Henry: I don’t have beef. I can’t remember why I wrote that question. I read about him in your book. I suppose I think that he did implement some good progressive measures, but that he was essentially a sort of patrician wannabe. And that his whole career in politics is much more middling and establishment, and his radicalism was... I don't know. Perhaps overrated, when we look back.
Helen Lewis: Well, I will go away and read some more. I read quite a lot of the... The mad thing about the cabinet, particularly in that Wilson government, is that they were all obviously sitting there writing copious amounts of... To the extent that Barbara Castle would actually write literal notes in cabinet, save it for diary later on. But Tony Benn was writing notes. Crossman was writing notes. Jenkins essentially wrote lots of... A very full memoir. Harold Wilson wrote one of the most boring memoirs that the world has ever seen. The trade union leaders wrote memoirs. Jack Jones wrote a memoir. It was an astonishingly literate and writerly sort of set of people. And yet the cabinet was, in some respects, kind of utterly dysfunctional, but with Wilson still running a sort of... You know, sort of like who was kind of currently had been nice to me. And he went... And of course in his second term, he became incredibly paranoid.
It was not a model of good government really. And again, Callaghan is one of the greatest political resurrections ever, right, when he completely screws up the Treasury and then uses Northern Ireland's Home Secretary in order to kind of make himself back into a respectful mainstream figure. But before we go and fight Roy Jenkins-stans, we should both go and find out what our beef is with him.
Henry: I'm gonna say her name, well, Colquhoun?
Helen Lewis: Colquhoun.
Henry: Colquhoun. She said, “Labor would rather fight Powell than solve poverty.” Is that still true?
Helen Lewis: What read it out there is a phrase that I think Maureen Colquhoun said after not “the rivers of blood” speech, but another Enoch Powell speech in the ’70s, which got her in enormous trouble. Would you like to endorse this sentiment that got her called a racist? And it was used as a pretext for drumming her out of the Labor party. So what happened to Maureen after that is that she... Her local party tried to de-select her, it then went to an appeal at the NEC. She eventually ended up holding on to her candidacy and then she lost in ’79 to a guy called Tony Marlow, who’s one of the most... Talk about Thatcher, I mean... He was bristly, to the extent that his nickname was Tony von Marlow. But yeah, he has some terrible quote about Harriet Harman as well, which is something like, “These bra burners have got a chip on their shoulder,” or something. It was something terrible mixed metaphor involving how you couldn’t wear a bra if you also had a chip on your shoulder. Anyway, I digress.
Henry: I’m not trying to endorse her quote, but if you replace Powell with Boris.
Helen Lewis: I think it’s a really interesting quote about... It comes back to purity leftism, what we were talking about before, is actually, “Do you want the win or do you want the fight?” And there is, I think, more of a tendency on the left than the right, to want to be on the right side of history, to want to be pure, to want to be fighting, and that sort of sense that... The perpetual struggle is the bit that you want to be in, that's the bit that’s exciting, rather than the win.
I think one of the really interesting sounds to me is gay marriage. I was just reading this Jonathan Rauch piece this morning about the fact that... His argument being, that there was a coalition of kind of right-wingers and centrists and liberals in America who fought with the radical left, who wanted gay rights to be predicated on the idea of sort of smashing the nuclear family and everything like that, to say, “Let’s make gay rights really boring, and let's talk a lot about how much we want to get married. And maybe we wanna adopt. Let’s recruit all the people who happen to have been born gay, but are also Tories or Republicans.”
And I think a similar thing happened to him here, where you have David Cameron saying, “I support gay marriage not in spite of being a conservative, but because I’m conservative.” And you frame it as essentially a very norm-y, boring thing. And I think that has been really interesting to watch in the sense of... I think that's why gender is now come much more to the fore because it's a sense that, “Well, if even Tories are okay with people being gay, it’s not... Like what's left? How is that interesting anymore?” And so, I think the criticism that she was trying to make there is very true in the sense that sometimes Labor wants to look right more than it wants to win a halfway victory.
Henry: What are some of the best or most underrated biographies of women?
Helen Lewis: That’s a really interesting question. I read a lot of royal biographies, so I very much like Leonie Frieda’s biography of Catherine de' Medici, for example. There is also... You’re gonna think this is terrible, Princess Michael of Kent wrote a joint biography of Catherine de Medici and Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of Henry II, which is called The Serpent and the Moon, which is a really... I think it's... Actually, it’s not a bad biography, but I think it’s quite interesting to write a biography of the wife and the mistress together.
Henry: Yeah, I think that’s a great idea.
Helen Lewis: Because the story of them is obviously so intertwined and their power relationship obviously changes, right? Because Catherine is the dowdy wife who bears the 10 children, Diane is the kind of unbelievably gorgeous, older woman. But then of course, the king dies and it’s like, “Oh, nice chateau you've got there. Shame, one of us is the dowager queen and one of us is now just some woman,” and makes her hand back her Chenonceau to her. So I enjoyed that very much. I’m trying to think what the best political women biographies are. Do you have a favourite Elizabeth I biography? I think there must be a really great one out there but I can’t... I don't know which one actually is best.
Henry: Well, I like the one by Elizabeth Jenkins, but it’s now quite out of date and I don’t know how true it is anymore. But it’s, just as a piece of writing and a piece of advocacy for Elizabeth, it’s an excellent book. And it sold, it was sort of a big best seller in 1956, which I find a very compelling argument for reading a book, but I appreciate that a lot of other people might not.
Helen Lewis: No, that's not to everyone’s taste. That’s interesting. I like Antonia Fraser as a biographer. I don't know if you'‘e got a strong feelings, pro or anti. Her Mary Queen of Scots book is very good. Her Mari Antoinette book is very good. And I actually, I interviewed her once about how she felt about the Sofia Coppola film, which is basically like a two-and a half hour music video. She was totally relaxed, she was like, “It's a film, I wrote a book.”
She didn't say it like that, she didn't go, “Film innit,” sucking on a roll-up, she said it in a very lofty, Antonia Fraser kind of way. But I think that’s a good thing if you’re an author, to kind of go, “What works in a biography is not what works in a film,” so...
But yeah, I grew up reading those Jean Plaidy historical novels, so I guess I read a lot of biographies of Queens. I’m trying to think whether or not I read any biographies of modern women. I haven’t read... I have on my shelf the, Red Comet, the Sylvia Plath biography. And I also, which is on my to-read pile, as is the biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas by Janet Malcom, which I one day, will treat myself to.
Henry: What are the best or most underrated biographies by women?
Helen Lewis: By women? Well, again, then we go back to...
Henry: I mean, you’ve named some of them, maybe.
Helen Lewis: The interesting thing is, I remember when I did Great Lives, they said... The Radio 4 program about history. That they said, the one thing that they have tried to encourage more of, is men nominating women. Because they found there was no problem with getting women to nominate men and men to nominate men, but they found there weren't that many men who picked women, which I think is interesting. I really wanted, when Difficult Women came out, I wanted a man to review it.
Henry: Did that not happen?
Helen Lewis: No, it didn’t happen. And I think everybody would’ve... I think, from the point of view of your male reviewers, why would you review a book on feminism when you're gonna get loads of people going, “Ew, what are you doing?mansplaining feminism?” But it’s an intellectual project, right? It’s not a... It should be open to criticism by absolutely anyone, not on... You don't have to pass an identity test. It’s an ideology and a school of history. And so I would... What's the best biography of woman written by a man, is kind of a question I'm interested in.
Henry: Yes. That’s very difficult to think of.
Helen Lewis: And how many of them are there? Because it just strikes me that when I'm naming all my women, biographies of women, that they’re all by women.
Henry: Yes. It’s difficult to think... It'‘ easy to think of biographies of men written by women.
Helen Lewis: Right. Hermoine Lee's out there repping for Tom Stoppard biography recently. But yeah, people can send in answers on a postcard for that one.
Henry: Should there be less credentialism in journalism?
Helen Lewis: Yes. I started as a sub-editor on the Daily Mail. And I worked alongside lots of older guys who had come up through local papers at the time when the trade unions were so strong that you had to do two years on local paper before you got to Fleet Street. And therefore, I worked with quite a lot of people who had left school at either 16 or 18 and were better at subbing than people who’d... than recent university graduates. And so, the way that journalism has become first of all, a graduate profession and now a postgraduate profession, I don’t think it’s got any real relationship to the quality of journalism. There are a sort of set of skills that you need to learn, but a lot of them are more about things like critical thinking than they are about literature, if you see what I mean?
That’s the thing. That is what I find very interesting about journalism, is the interesting marriage of... You have to have the personal relationships, you have to be able to find people and make them want to be interviewed by you and get the best out of them. Then you have to be able to write it up in prose that other humans can understand. But then there is also a level of rigour underneath it that you have to have, in terms of your note-keeping and record-keeping and knowledge of the law and all that kind of stuff. But none of that maps onto any kind of degree course that you might be able to take. And so, I think that’s... And the other huge problem, I think in journalism is that, everyone in the world wants to do it, or at least that’s how it seems when you’re advertising for an entry level position in journalism.
When I was at the New Statesman, we used to recruit for editorial assistants and I once had 250 applications for a single post, which was paid a fine amount, you could live on it just about in London, but was not... It was a plum job in intellectual terms, but not in economic terms. And I think that’s a real problem because I could have filled every position that we had, with only people who’d got Firsts from Oxford or whatever it might be. But it wouldn't have been the best selection of journalists.
Henry: No. Quite the opposite.
[laughter]
Helen Lewis: Yes. I enjoy your anti-Oxford prejudice. [chuckle] But you know what I mean is that I... But the fact that you had to have at least a degree to even get through the door, is sort of wrong in some profound way. And actually, some of the places have been... I think Sky did a non-graduate traineeship for people who were school leavers. And I think that there are profound problems in lots of those creative arts, publishing is the same, academia is the same, where you could fill every job which is low paid, and in London, with middle-class people whose parents are willing to fund them through. And the credentialism just is a further problem in that it just knocks out bright people from perfectly normal economic backgrounds.
Henry: Do you think as well, that in a way, the main criteria for a good journalist, whether they're a sub-editor, or writing leaders or whatever, is common sense? And that a good English degree is really no guarantee that you have common sense.
[laughter]
Helen Lewis: Yeah. I couldn’t put my hand in my heart and say that everybody I know with an English degree demonstrates common sense. I think that is actually not a bad... The famous thing is about you need a rat-like cunning, don’t you? Which I think is also pretty true. But yeah, you do need to come back to that kind of idea about heresy and you do need to have a sort of sniffometer, not to be... I think you need to be fundamentally cynical, but not to a point where it poisons you.
The right amount of cynicism is probably the thing you need in journalism. Because my husband's a journalist and quite often, there'll be a story where we just go, “I don't believe that. I just don't believe that.”
And it really troubles me that that’s become harder and harder to say. So I wrote a piece a while ago, about TikTok and people who claim to have Tourette’s on there and actually quite a lot of them might have something else, might have functional neurological disorder. But there are whole genres of that all across journalism, where people will talk very personally and very painfully about their personal experiences. And the other half of that is that, we are not... It’s mean, to question that. But they’re often making political claims on the basis of those experiences. And you therefore can’t put them in a realm beyond scrutiny. And so it’s interesting to me, having been a teenager in the ’90s when journalism was incredibly cruel. I’m talking about the height of bad tabloid, going through people’s bins, hate campaigns against people. And a lot of this “be kind” rhetoric is a response to that and a necessary correction, but I do think there are now, lots of situations in which journalists need to be a bit less kind. That's a terrible quote. [laughter] But do you know what I mean?
Henry: I do know exactly what you mean.
Helen Lewis: When you have to say, “I know you think you've got this illness, but you haven't.” That's tough.
Henry: People need to be more difficult.
Helen Lewis: That's always my marketing strategy, yes.
Henry: I want to ask if you think that you are yourself a late bloomer? In the tone of voice that you write in, you very often... You write like an Atlantic journalist and there are these moments, I think, of real wit. I don't mean jokey. I mean, clever. And so, a line like, “Your vagina is not a democracy,” is very funny but it's also very...
Helen Lewis: It’s true.
Henry: Sort of Alexander Pope-ish.
[laughter]
Helen Lewis: That’s the best possible reference. Yes, I hope to write very mean epigrams about people, one day.
Henry: Please do. But you can also be very jokey like when you said, I think in a footnote, that you don't watch porn because the sofas are so bad.
Helen Lewis: True.
Henry: Now, there is something in those moments of wit that I think suggest that you could, if you wanted to, go and do something other than what you’ve already done. Maybe like Charles Moore, you’d become a biographer, or maybe you'd become a novelist, or maybe you’ll run a think tank, or maybe you’ll set up a newspaper and only employ 16-year-old school leavers, or... I don’t know. Is that how you think about yourself or am I...
Helen Lewis: You are trying to tell me I need to just grow up.
[laughter]
Henry: Not at all.
Helen Lewis: Stop clowning around like a sea lion for applause after throwing fish.
Henry: My theory on Helen Lewis is, you’ve got all the accolades that someone could want from a journalistic career.
Helen Lewis: Not true. I’ve only ever won one award for journalism and you’ll love this, it was Mainstream Video Games Writer of the Year.
Henry: Oh my god.
Helen Lewis: That’s it. From the Games Awards in 2013, which I only remember this because every so often my publisher will put award-winning journalist as a merit that I have. Not really gov, not if I'm honest.
You're right though. I have one of the plum jobs in journalism which is I work three days a week at the Atlantic, and then I make radio documentaries on the side and write books, and that is a position which is enormously enviable. But I have also... So I’ve moved away from column writing, in the last couple of years — I used to write a regular op-ed column — because I found it a deeply unsatisfying form. And I think, when you do jokes, you begin to realize that you can actually just say stupid, easy clap lines and with sufficient confidence, and people will respond to them, and after a while, you begin to hate yourself for doing that.
[laughter]
Well, that's one of the reasons I again... Like getting off Twitter. You know what I mean? You see some of those accounts that just exists to do lazy little dunks about the people that are appointed, that are sort of designated hate subjects. So if someone gets designated as a hate subject, then you can say nasty things about them and then everybody will applaud you. And I fundamentally revolt from that and I don't like it.
I think that as a journalist, you should always try and be at right angles to whatever the prevailing opinion is. And actually as I've got older, I value the sort of... The people I think of as contrarians who I think really believe it rather than the people who are doing it for effect. Someone like a Peter Hitchens. He’s got a whole ideology that’s very much not mine and a set of interesting opinions and he believes them, and he truly argues them, and although they... Whether or not they’re popular or unpopular is of no interest to him, that’s what he believes. And I distinguish that from other people I think are opportunists who end up tacking where they see that... And a lot of the anti-woke people end up in that space where they just... That’s the little niche where you can get kind of clapter. And so I really do think that’s the point of journalism, but... Yeah, I take your point. I think I feel I’ve exhausted having glib opinions at short notice. And that’s not something that I'm interested in.
Henry: So there might be a second act where we see a whole new Helen Lewis?
Helen Lewis: Well as I say, I wrote a screen play last year and I’m now having meetings with TV companies. And I certainly at the Atlantic, have moved to writing much less than I used to and then much weirder stuff and much more in-depth. So I’ve got a piece that's coming out in the magazine this month which is about Europe’s ex-Royals and what they do. What do you do when you should be Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but there’s no Austro-Hungarian Empire, right? Or you should be king of Albania but Albania doesn't have a king anymore. And I thought this is really weird. I get to interview a Habsburg, which is basically the pinnacle of my life.
[laughter]
It’s all I've ever wanted from journalism. But to do that kind of stuff is interesting.
But you’re writing a book so you are just about to embark on the fact that writing a book is the worst possible thing that you can do to yourself. Because it’s like torture, probably to no end, that you've chosen freely. So you literally got no-one to complain to. When... On the day when you’re like, you just cannot focus on writing your book, no one wants to hear it. My granddad went down a mine. That’s a job you can complain about. I have to sit in the library and try and think how these two ideas connect in my mind. No-one cares. The tiniest violin is even then too big for that complaint. But I like the idea of being a late bloomer. What I like more, I guess, and bloomer makes you imply that you're somehow bigger. I think it's more about being different.
And my best friend, Laura’s had the most amazing career. So she did PPE at University and then she went to work for KPMG and then she went to work... To Teach First, then she became a teacher and she taught at schools in East London for a while. Then she took... Started working a PhD about Charter schools, then she took Michael Gove to court. Then she founded a newspaper about education, now she’s founded an app that surveys teachers. And it all has a coherence to it, right? It’s all in the same genre, she's obviously interested in education. But at no point has she ever thought, “Right, that's it, that's me. Done. I'll see you at 65 when we... For some golf and gardening.” It's always been about, “How can I keep moving?” She’s the shark of education. And I think that's true, and if you don't have kids, she doesn’t and I don't, you have the luxury to be able to do that, and therefore you should keep moving on and... But I do think it’s... Don’t you think that people want to be able to categorize you?
Henry: Yes, it can be very career-limiting to do different things. Depending on what sort of career you want. Whether you care about what other people think is the critical effect.
Helen Lewis: Yeah. I think if I wanted to win lots of awards and or have a nice well paid life, I would just keep writing the same book about feminism 90 times, and then people will be like, “Oh that's... We need to get the feminist speaker in. Who’s the feminist speaker? It's Helen.” So I think you have a more interesting career. But it’s interesting, which writers... Penelope Fitzgerald, who I know you love too...
Henry: Yes.
Helen Lewis: She writes a different book every time.
Henry: Yes, although there’s a sort of continuity in the type of characters and the weirdness of her settings, even though the actual places are very different. So she’s not quite one of those novelists who really does move from one thing into another and you can't...
Helen Lewis: Yes, some sort of baroque revenge drama to then suddenly writing a kind of realist detective fiction and you go, “What?”
Henry: But that definitely meant that reviewers and sort of all the highbrows who were enjoying Martin Amis at that time, it gave them another reason to say, “Who is this old woman and what are her books? I don't understand.”
Helen Lewis: Why is this one on a boat? Obviously, yeah.
Henry: “Why is she not Salman Rushdie?” That made it very easy for them to do that to her.
Helen Lewis: Yeah. And I think that’s probably what happens in journalism too. Columnists tend to last for an incredibly long time because people just sort of have a familiarity to them. And I used to think that was kind of... I would read the Richard Littlejohn column and be like, “He’s written this column again?” But then I realized that people quite like the... They want to know what a Richard Littlejohn column is and what all of his opinions are going to be.
Henry: Might it be different now, because you've got people who read your newsletter who are more interested in you than in, “Oh, I want another Helen Lewis column.” And if you did turn around...
Helen Lewis: No one has ever said, but go on.
Henry: Well, no. I think there'‘s a certain truth to... You have more control over your audience then just it being the people who read the Atlantic because they get what they get. If you did turn around and say, “I’m going to write a history of Sardinia,” or whatever. Something totally sort of, “I'm going to write a history of defunct royals or I'm going to be a playwright.” They might go, “Great. I'm in it for what Helen Lewis is doing,” and I don't know, it might be easier to have that sort of career now.
Helen Lewis: I think that’s interesting. I think maybe is true as well, because I think writers now do become brands and there's a version in economics, this idea of superstar theory, where it’s become very hard to be like a mid-level musician.
But if you’re Taylor Swift and Beyonce, you're making better money than anyone ever made. And I think a similar thing has happened with journalism. If you look at Substack, if you’re Bari Weiss or Andrew Sullivan or one of the top, Matt Yglesias, one of the top people, you’re earning millions. Far more than you would have got from a staff job at a paper and you are the brand. But at the same time, it’s actually... I would say, the wages have stagnated enormously for a kind of sub-editor on a paper. It just hasn’t gone up at all, and inflation is just eating it away. And so, I think there is a big reason to be a brand, much though the word makes me want to cry.
Henry: And in a way, what that argues for is to say, “Well, if I'm not going to be Matt Yglesias and make x millions, I should do lots of different things, because otherwise I'll get caught in being the same. In 10 years, I'll turn around and say, “God, I'm still doing this and I'm not a millionaire.””
Helen Lewis: But that’s it, but I don't know why you want to write, but the reason I want to write is that I’m incredibly nosy and I love finding stuff out. Nothing makes me happier than the idea of finding stuff out, and even more so if I can then find people who will listen to me, telling them the thing that I just found out. And why would you want to not... Being curious and having licensed curiosity, I like nothing more than getting off a plane somewhere new and weird and being like, “Well, this is all different. The cups are different, and I'm going...”
[laughter]
Whatever it might be, that you're just going to immerse yourself, and I feel like that about reading history as well. When you just suddenly find out about what it was like to... Tudor toilets were like. It's sort of mind-blowing that you go, Why, even the toilets were different, which of course they were, but that’s to me, the point of writing. There are any number of things that are easier, better paid, have better hours, whatever it might be, than writing. But the thing you get with writing is that, you get to keep moving and keep digging new soil.
Henry: That's why I'm wondering if you might turn around and become a historical novelist or a biographer of a defunct Habsburgs. Royal biography sells very well.
Helen Lewis: It’s true.
Henry: Especially in America.
Helen Lewis: But I don’t... I speak a bit of German and I speak slightly better French, so Royal biographer is tough. I feel like all the British royals have really been kicked to death, at this point. Mary II, that’s an underrated...
Henry: Very underrated.
Helen Lewis: Royal biography. Perhaps I can write that. But I have been enjoying trying to write screenplays. It’s a very different discipline because you have to... But it’s all about hard decisions. You have to make the hard decisions, and you have to put your characters in places where they make hard decisions, and each time, you’re like a tiny... Like a judge banging a tiny gavel about [laughter] deciding what an incident means or who was in the wrong or who was in the right. So it does force you to take positions, I think, which is not something that... Something I feel like I’ve cleaved away from. There’s someone that did a thing about why young people write... It was maybe even you. Did you mention this? That young people write better rock songs?
Because they're very certain about what's wrong and what's right and they're very angry and they're angry and the same thing that the guy behind Slate Star Codex has written about one of the things that happens with bipolar people is, you tend to get less. I think it's about, is it bipolar or is it borderline personality? Maybe it’s borderline, where people tend to... One of the things that ameliorates it is age, because we generally will become more stable and grounded and boring. And at 50, you’re not seeing some guy on the bus and immediately falling in love and writing poetry about him. And I think the same thing has happened to me in terms of my career. I feel a lot less certain about stuff and I’m not as interested in putting forward my incredibly strong opinions on stuff. And I wonder if that’s a reaction to social media or I wonder if that’s just, “I'm going old. I'm now in my nuance era.” [laughter] I’ve entered my nuance years. And have you entered your nuance years or were you always in them?
Henry: I think I’ve been here for a long time, I’m afraid. I’ve been told that I’ve been old for a long time.
Helen Lewis: I was an angry young woman, I guess, and I just maybe I have mellowed.
Henry: Helen Lewis, thank you very much.
Helen Lewis: Thank you very much for having me.
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I was very pleased to talk to Charles Moore, who I have read admiringly for many years. His three volume biography of Margaret Thatcher is one of the most interesting biographies published in the last few years. He also edited a volume of T.E.Utley’s journalism. In this discussion you will hear (or read the transcript below!) whether Margaret Thatcher is more left-wing than we think, what Charles thinks of political biography, how his footnotes work, who are the most underrated Thatcher cabinet ministers, the relationship between fiction and biography, why he’s not a natural Thatcherite, and more. I asked a lot of my questions much less elegantly than I had written them, but the answers are frequently models of spoken English. I particularly enjoyed Charles’ use of “jealous” in its original, perhaps now semi-archaic, meaning (i.e. suspiciously vigilant or careful). He also seems to use “cunning” in the way Johnson defined it, pleasingly. I remember reading once how much Charles enjoyed the language of the Book of Common Prayer as a child. Perhaps those lexicographical waters run deep. The transcript is lightly edited for intelligibility. You will notice, sometimes, that the transcript moves from past to present tense when Charles talks about Margaret Thatcher. Here, as elsewhere, he often refers to her in the present tense. One topic we didn’t cover was Margaret Thatcher as a late bloomer. Maybe another time.
Henry: You once wrote that you found political biography boring to read, or you used to. Why did you find it interesting to write?
Charles Moore: I think making one's own enquiries makes you think about it more deeply, which is intrinsically interesting. But also I think the subject, Mrs. Thatcher, is a particularly interesting person because she was very unusual and because she was the first and, effectively at the time, only woman. And so everything's different. And so the impact of her is very strikingly different from that of even very well-known male politicians.
Henry: And do you enjoy reading political biography more now that you've written your book?
Charles Moore: I don't find that I do read it more, particularly. But probably the answer's yes because I can understand more how the work is done. And therefore, I can see who's good at it and who isn't, and when they're evading a subject they don't understand or whether they've really got to the bottom of it and so on.
Henry: How do you assess that? What sort of things make you think that someone's really got a grip on what they're telling you?
Charles Moore: Partly it's their mastery of the sources, of course. And also, it's a matter of, to some extent, perceiving their fairness. And I think that's quite an interesting subject, because fairness doesn't mean, necessarily, that you're neutral about the person. You can be highly sympathetic to the subject, or you can be even unsympathetic to the subject and still be fair. But fairness is something about considering the evidence and trying to give it its right weight. This, I think, is easily detectable in biographies. And some just don't do that. They wish to assassinate the character, or they wish to make a hero of the character, or they're simply rather lazy. If you've walked down that path, you can detect what's going on.
Henry: What parts of Margaret Thatcher's life did you find it most difficult to be fair about?
Charles Moore: Well of course, I wouldn't be the best judge of that, I suppose.
Henry: Were there any bits, though, where you had to work at that practise of fairness?
Charles Moore: One way in which you need to be fair to a subject is simply to try to understand the subject. I don't mean the biographical subject. I mean the issue. And there are certain subjects that I'm less good at and, therefore, have to work harder on like, let's say, monetary policy or details about missiles. Neither of which are my natural territory, and both of which are important in the case of Mrs. Thatcher. So I would have to make more efforts about that, mental efforts, to really understand what's going on than I would about, say, fighting an election or reform of the trade unions or something like that. There's a sort of broad point about being fair, which is that biography naturally and inevitably and rightly must focus on the individual. And therefore, it may do that to the exclusion of other individuals or of a wider milieu, which is an inevitable danger but is also a mistake because the individual in politics doesn't act alone, even a very remarkable character like Margaret Thatcher or Winston Churchill. And one needs, somehow, to convey the milieu and the weight of the other characters while never ceasing to focus on the one character.
One of the extraordinary features of Hilary Mantel's novels about Thomas Cromwell — Wolf Hall etc — is that, I think it's right to say, he is in the room the entire time, or in the field or whatever. I think Thomas Cromwell is in every scene. Sometimes it's reported speech that he's hearing, but still. And, as a biographer one sort of does that. Mrs. Thatcher is almost always in the room, not absolutely always. And that's right. That's fine. But one mustn't let her crowd everything else out.
Henry: Were the Mantel books a conscious model or influence for you, or is that something you've noticed separately?
Charles Moore: Not really because I was reading them more towards the end. Well, I read Wolf Hall quite a long time ago, and then I read the other two pretty much when I was finishing. But I think they're very good. Obviously, they're not biographies. But I think, I hope, I learnt something from them because there's a sustained effort of the imagination, which the novelist has to have, to see through the eyes of, in her case, Thomas Cromwell. And though biography is fact not fiction, imagination is required in biography as well. And so in some ways, it's a similar task.
Henry: On this question of the milieu that Margaret Thatcher was in, you paid a lot of attention in the three books to the biographies of all the people around her, especially in footnotes, but also when you're describing events such as the leadership election in 1990, there's a lot of biographic information. Is this compilation of brief lives, a way of providing not just information, but commentary, almost like a sort of prosopographia? What stood out to me was that, even just through the footnotes, it really details the way that she was very, very different to everyone else in that world, demographically and socially.
Charles Moore: Yes. That's right. So, in putting footnoted autobiographies of most of the characters, that's useful for reference, but it's also a sort of short-hand way of telling you about the milieu and the range of characters she was dealing with, and of course, it brings out the fact that they're almost all male and a very high percentage of them went to public schools and Oxford or Cambridge. She of course went to Oxford, but she didn't go to public school and she wasn't a man. So I think when your eye goes to bottom of the page and picks up one of those biographies, it should be helpful in its own right, but it also should have a cumulative effect of placing Mrs. Thatcher among all of these people and of course, rather like the only woman in the room is very noticeable physically, she's very noticeable as unique in this milieu.
Henry: Is that a technique that you took from somewhere, or is that something that you devised yourself?
Charles Moore: Well, I think she devised it to some extent, and I picked up on that. She always had to wrestle with the point that it was considered a disadvantage to be a woman in the world in which she was moving. And she realized that though in certain respects it was objectively a disadvantage because of prejudice and so on, she could turn it to advantage. And I think one thing she understood very early on, because though she's a very sincere person she's also a very good actress, is that she could see the almost filmic quality of her position. So she would know that the camera would come in on her, and therefore she should exploit that to the full with her hair, her bag, her dresses, the sense of being different and noticeable, her voice. And she put that to good use and tried to refine that and simplify it really so that it could have maximum impact.
Henry: There was a High Tory ambivalence about Margaret Thatcher, so someone like T.E Utley was a supporter, but not a complete supporter, a slightly guarded pro-Thatcher. And I think you potentially fall into this group, not entirely aligned with the Thatcher government on Ireland, Hong Kong for example. How did this position affect you as her biographer?
Charles Moore: I don't think my own specific views on political questions were so important in that, but I think perhaps my overall approach affected it. What I mean by that is that my background, I'm actually brought up as a liberal with a big “L” — Liberal Party. And by cultural inclination I wouldn't be a natural Thatcherite, and I would always look at Mrs. Thatcher as somebody different from my way of thinking in that sense, which of course makes that very interesting. I'm not part of her tribe, and wasn't by upbringing, and I hope that's useful because it gives a certain historical detachment. However I wasn't trying to write an interpretation of Mrs. Thatcher coming from my tribe, it wasn't like the Whig interpretation of history sort of thing. And indeed, in some ways, I was more impressed by her because I came from a different tribe, that's to say, she had to overcome more barriers in my mind, perhaps. Suppose I'd been writing a biography of Asquith, that would have been more like the world I grew up in, and perhaps less of a challenge. And writing about Mrs. Thatcher, it's exciting to enter a world which in social terms and political terms, and of course, a different sex as well, was less known to me.
Henry: I think you wrote that she is, with the possible exception of Jim Callaghan, the most socially conservative Prime Minister that Britain has had. To what extent do your background and your personal views make it easy or difficult for you to be, as you said earlier, fair in the way that you presented that?
Charles Moore: She's a very odd mixture in that way. I think I perhaps did write that. But of course, she also was such a change bringer. If you think of Mrs. Thatcher's natural demeanour and reactions, she would be very socially conservative. I mean not ultra socially conservative. For example, she married a divorcee, which was quite unusual in 1951. But a fairly conventional Christian, starting as a Methodist and sort of sliding gradually into Anglicanism as she rises up the social scale without ever abandoning Methodism. Believing strongly in firm punishments for criminals. A very uncomplicated monarchist. No problem about hereditary peers in her mind, etcetera, etcetera. Very fond of obvious traditional British things like the armed services, support for the police, all that sort of thing. And things like traditional high standards in school of a rigorous kind. So on and so on, all those things. But in another way, she's so impatient to change things and unafraid of challenging whatever it is that people usually go around saying. So it's a curious combination and an interesting one. For me, I don't remember that presenting a particular fairness issue. It's just this funny thing about her, which is also biographically very interesting, that she's very, very conservative and very, very radical.
Henry: Do you think the fact that you have religious belief. Do you think that had any part in the consideration to pick you as the biographer? I think you've said before, you don't really know why she chose you.
Charles Moore: No, I wouldn't have thought that it did have any consideration. Mrs. Thatcher's religion was quite vague, and she wasn't interested at all in ecclesiastical or theological questions. But one of the things she respected in religion was some sort of seriousness about ultimate purpose. And she certainly had such a seriousness herself. And I remember talking to her about that. This is before I was engaged in the work, I think just in conversation. I had recently become a Catholic, and she talked about that. This is another interesting example of her, in some ways, rather open mind because she's fundamentally brought up anti-Catholic as most English Protestants were. And I don't think she would ever have considered becoming a Catholic. But I remember her being rather pleased that I had become a Catholic because she thought this is a proper serious Christian thing to do, and it was something she respected. She felt this about Jews too, obviously they weren't Christians. But again, she had a respect for Judaism and Judaic law and custom and manners and thought. And that was something which she recognised and liked in other people.
Henry: Margaret Thatcher is sometimes thought of, or dismissively described, as un-philosophical. You said in your prefaces that she would confound Socrates with her lack of reflection on her own life. But in some ways she was quite an ideological person, at certain times, about freedom and things. Is the difference between being philosophical and ideological really so great? And was she really living if not a philosophically reflective life, a very philosophical life in what you've just been saying about seriousness and purpose? Is she more philosophical than she looks?
Charles Moore: Yes. Good way to think about it, I think. Alfred Sherman, with whom she fell out but who was close to her in the '70s, said that “she is not a person of ideas but a person of beliefs.” And beliefs, he said, are better than ideas. I think he meant better from a political point of view, for politics. And I think that's sort of right. So there was a sense in which Mrs. Thatcher was philosophical, which was that her mind was an enquiring one. And she was always thinking, thinking, thinking. “What's right here? What's the best? What's the problem? What's the solution?” But she didn't have the philosopher's sceptical mind or pure intellectualism. She wanted results. And she wanted good things to happen and bad things to be stopped. And so she did have what you could call a philosophy, but she was not a philosopher. She was a person of action and beliefs.
Henry: I heard an interview with you recently where you, I'm going to paraphrase, you said something like the limitation of left-wing political thought is that it has a utopian belief in politics. As in, if everybody only could have the right politics, everything would be okay. And you've written and talked about Margaret Thatcher trying to create a Christian Social Order in Britain. And that's really the drive she had. Is she, in that sense, a bit more of a "left-wing" political thinker, with a more utopian vision, than we would typically think of her as being?
Charles Moore: There is an element of that because she is partly a preacher in politics. There's an element of, some sense in her mind of building Jerusalem or rebuilding Jerusalem, I think is there. And that tends to be more associated with socialism and, indeed with certain forms of Protestant Christianity going back, than with conservatism. So there is something of that. However, one of her beliefs, which was true — I mean, which she did adhere to — was that politics doesn't contain the solutions of everything, because people do not political structures. And she did believe that. Though of course, she also, because she was very egotistical, she did believe that something which she ran was bound to be good. So she could accommodate. People said she was very intolerant of other ideas. She was certainly very argumentative. But for example, she respected the Labour Party. She didn't respect the Liberal Party, but she respected the Labour Party because she thought that it represented something in Britain that ought to be represented and that conservatism didn't really represent, the way she put it was that it was the party of the underdog. And she thought there should be a party of the underdog.
And her own approach to the problem of people who are less successful and poorer and things like that was to open up their opportunities. But I think within that was also a sort of acknowledgement that not everybody can take those opportunities. And for those people, it's important that there be a party that represents their interests. And she thought that Labour was the party to do that. So that shows a certain sense that, “I, Margaret Thatcher, don't have the answer to everything. I'm trying to do a particular set of things, and I believe I can do this right. But life is bigger than that, and politics is bigger than that.”
Henry: On the question of her being argumentative, or however you want to phrase it, you have that great memo, I think from 1981, that someone in her office wrote to her...
Charles Moore: Oh, John Hoskyns?
Henry: Yeah, yeah. And saying everything that gets quoted about her. But actually, after that memo, she was in power for another nine years. Should we be quite cautious about this idea that she was single-minded, not consensus-minded, a rude person? Should we try and be revising that image of her and saying that actually that was a more narrow part of her leadership style than is thought?
Charles Moore: Well, the famous Hoskyns memo was very powerful and contained criticisms which were true. But it's also a sort of protest because he was feeling that she wasn't listening to him. And also she had certain completely maddening qualities, if you were working with her every day, which he had to get off his chest. One of them was, the less sure she was about something and the more tired she was, the more rubbish she talked. And she could, in a tight corner, particularly before she'd made a decision, burble on a great deal and criticise others for a problem which really rested with her because she was psyching herself up to do something. And that happened a lot in certain economic decisions where she was worried about their unpopularity. She might argue with Geoffrey Howe or, later, Nigel Lawson about putting up interest rates, which she was almost always against. They were quite often in favour of it. And she used this tactically and psychologically, I think without realising it. And it could be a nightmare to live with, but leaders perhaps have to be a bit of a nightmare to live with some of the time.
The other thing was that because she was so jealous of her position and felt so fragile in her position as the only woman and the leader that she sort of knew people would like to get rid of, she had to — she thought, at least, that the way to deal with this is to be extremely forceful and not to be seen to give in. An upper-class man would tend to think that the graceful and sensible thing to do would be to give in and say, as a tactical thing, to say, “I'm frightfully sorry. You're completely right. I've got this completely wrong.” And she never felt she could do that. She felt she had to maintain her argument, her position at almost all times. But it didn't mean that actually she paid no attention to the criticisms or that she never altered her views because she would always claim consistency, which might not, in fact, always be there. And that was, again, a sort of technique of hers. And so she was more consensual and more pragmatic than she would admit. Her colleagues often find that hard to understand because she didn't want them to understand it. She wanted them to think that she was iron and immutable and unchangeable and, as she would put it, staunch. And actually, there was a lot more subtlety, and a sort of listening, than she or they would acknowledge.
For example, trade union reform. She was always complaining about Jim Prior going so slowly, but actually she did, herself, want to go slowly. She had a great impatience which made her want to get reforms in and bring about the changes, but she also knew that she mustn't make the mistake of Ted Heath of doing one great big law all at once. She must do it bit by bit. And so she was much more pragmatic in what she did when about trade union reform than she would say she was being.
Henry: You found some new material about Thatcher, particularly from when she was a young woman to do with boyfriends and letters to her sister and things that inevitably gave a much broader view of her character than we were used to from the television and the news and so forth. How did that change your view of the way she operated politically?
Charles Moore: I think it confirmed something which I sensed, but it brought it out much more clearly, which is what a cunning person she was. I didn't mean that in a nasty way. Her self-description was of somebody who just knew what’s right and does it. But it wasn't like that. She did have a strong moral sense and she did have strong convictions, but she also had very strong ambitions and a sense of when to do something and when not to do something.
So if you look at Margaret Roberts that she then was, wondering whom to marry, it’s the female equivalent of what nineteenth century novels used to call the choice of life for a man, which is often depicted in 19th and 18th century novels. A young man goes out to the world. What does he want to do? Does he want be a soldier or a lawyer, or whatever it might be. And how is he going to shape his life? And she was thinking a lot about that. She wanted, in the case of marriage, she definitely wanted true love, she is a romantic person, but she also wanted security, financial security, and a sense of a man she could look up to, almost certainly older, or very unlikely that anyone she would marry will be her own age, I think would be fair to say. And her most serious boyfriend was twice her age and then Dennis was 11 plus years older than she.
And you can see her particularly in the year 1951 when she has three serious boyfriends, one of whom was Dennis, weighing up. One’s a farmer. Does she want to be married to a farmer? No. One is a distinguished doctor. Yes, but he is a lot of older than her. And then there’s Dennis who had had a good war and had his own business, but on the other hand was divorced. And so she’s thinking, wouldn't perhaps put it to herself like this, “How am I going to be an MP? Maybe even, how am I going to be a minister? Maybe, maybe, even how I'm I going to be Prime Minister.” Though I'm be much less sure about that, this is all very early on. But also, “How am I going to marry the right man and have children?” And these things are all going around and around in her head and influencing her decisions. “And how am I going to be able to support myself or be supported by a man. How will I have enough money?” Because she had no money from her family.
And so you can see this very ardent person, but also a person who thinks very carefully before she does something, she loves the expression, the well known expression, “time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted,” and I think she was always making reconnaissance.
Henry: The political scientist, Mark Garnett, has described Thatcher as banal. This is a quote from him, he says: “She was prepared to face down establishment institutions, if they opposed her. This defiance was not the product of a deep delayed plan: only interesting people engage in that style of thinking.” Is that a helpful way to think about Margaret Thatcher?
Charles Moore: No, I think it’s an unhelpful way to think about it, because what he’s not acknowledging is that she's a politician. So the point about being a politician is not, do you have a brilliantly original mind? But what are you capable of doing? And she’s extremely unusual in politicians for a sustained interest, sustained over a very, very long period in her case, in office, in the content of what she was doing. And therefore, she was thinking really hard about some questions. How do we end the Cold War? How do we beat trade union leaders? How to beat inflation? With a resourceful seriousness, which might not be intellectually original, but which was in a political sense, profound. To call it banal is mistaken, because actually nobody else was like that. There was simply nobody else in the first rank who was behaving and thinking that way. So it was original. It wasn’t original in the sense that Plato’s original, but in politics it was original.
Henry: Tyler Cowen has talked about the advantage of having or displaying what he calls autistic cognitive traits, so the ability, and the absorbing interest, to absorb a lot of information to categorize it, to order it, and to do this much more so than other people, along obviously with some other things. Do you think Margaret Thatcher displays those sorts of traits and did they, as I think you are sort of suggesting here, give her a political advantage and an advantage as prime minister?
Charles Moore: I wouldn't use the word autistic, and I know something about autistic behavior through my own family, my own wider family. I think it's probably not the right sort of categorisation, but I think Mrs. Thatcher had astonishing powers of application. And she did have the ability to, in order to apply herself to a subject, to shut out other ones, while she was applying herself. However, she was a vulnerable human being as well. And though she wasn't the best person at reading other people’s emotions, she was, in many ways, sympathetic to people. I mean, she could be very unpleasant to people. But she was really fond of some people and grateful to them and solicitous in their difficulties and conscientious in how she ought to behave to them. She was odd in the way that all great people are odd. I don't mean all great people are odd in the same way, but all great people are odd in some way.
But I don't think her mentality was quite as you described there. And I think she couldn't have survived in politics if it were because one of the things you have to do in politics is you have to have intuition about what other people are thinking. She constantly attended to what she thought voters were thinking, what was the public reaction to something or other. She wasn't obsessed with the media to anything like the degree that politicians are now, but she knew how to sniff the wind. And though she could be very brutal with colleagues, I think she did actually have powers of diplomacy which were put to very good use on the world stage, if you think of her relation with Reagan or with Gorbachev for example.
Henry: How much of what we call Thatcherism was actually Lawsonism?
Charles Moore: Perhaps they started out more or less together and diverged. And there was a lot in common. Before things went wrong, there was a strong alliance about that. But I think Lawsonism — I wouldn't call it an ism actually — but I think Lawson’s views about things were generally more economically based, as you might expect. There was less politics and more economics in it. And he was more thoroughly liberal in economics than she. Whereas she tended to see economics as the instrument. She did believe in free market economics, but she saw them more as the instrument of something wider. Whereas he was more interested in them in themselves, I think.
Then there’s a second point, of course, which takes us on to rather different territory that Lawson, like Thatcher — because, again, a big ego — suffered from feeling that if he was doing something himself, it was bound to be good. I think all important politicians tend to fall into this category. So it was sort of self-evident to him that if he was Chancellor of the Exchequer it must be better than anybody else being Chancellor of the Exchequer. And this led him, after several successes, to a great mistake which was the whole attempt to get into the ERM and the shadowing of the Deutsche Mark in relation to that. Because it became a sort of totem about how you could manage Sterling, and it became a piece of alchemy or magic or a sort of hieratic thing, which only people of great brilliance could operate. And she, I think, had a wider view, a more common sense view about economic questions and how they weren't really like that. They didn't really depend on such calculations but on things that are, in a certain sense, simpler. Lawson was much the superior economic brain to hers, but I think he was more defective politically and didn't understand. I think there's a reason why he couldn't ever have been Conservative Party leader, though he was a very distinguished Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Henry: Who are the most underrated Cabinet ministers from Margaret Thatcher's governments?
Charles Moore: Well things went wrong for Geoffrey Howe. It's perhaps forgotten that he was a very good Chancellor of the Exchequer. In some ways he was a very good Foreign Secretary, but he was perhaps too indecisive and too sort of official minded. Howe was also very important in Thatcherism, though he didn't really like Mrs. Thatcher much. Richard Ryder described him as the tapestry master of Thatcherism. I think it’s a very good phrase. Howe actually preceded her in his interest in free market economics, even in the ’50s, ‘60s and ‘70s. She was interested, but he got there first very often. I think he was very important to her, in the early days, and of course, it was pretty disastrous when they finally fell out. And he was definitely a really high-class servant of the state.
I think Nicholas Ridley was so bad in public presentation and politics in that general sense that people didn’t realise what a competent Minister he was and what a good brain he had. I think he was temperamentally very unsuited to modern politics in some ways, but of all the ministers in her government I always found he was one most respected by officials interestingly. He was decisive, he would take responsibility, he wouldn't duck problems, he would think through things, he was a bit wild on the political aspects, but he was more impressive than people realised.
And then Norman Tebbit is an interesting one because of course, he suffered great difficulties because of the terrible injuries he suffered, he and his wife suffered in the Brighton bomb. So he may not have been such a good minister of a big department, but he did have the most formidable brain and the most tremendous capacity to express something very clearly and often amusingly. And so he sort of cut through both the people who agreed with him and people who disagreed with him. It was a very striking phenomenon, Norman Tebbit, and highly unusual in somebody who in formal terms was a middle to higher ranking rather than top ranking cabinet minister in terms of jobs. You never knew who he was and you had to watch out for him and his fierceness in debate his sort of rather spare eloquence, his toughness. All that was formidable.
Henry: We live at a time when so many of the essential moments in Thatcher’s political career can be watched on YouTube, and we can hear radio clips, and we can see her letters online, and it’s possible to imagine a sort of biographical Museum of Margaret Thatcher where you can be sort of immersed in her and in her world. What sort of challenge does that present to a biographer? There’s a sort of inevitable limitation in that Disraeli only exists on paper, but Margaret Thatcher exists in all these mediums. But you as a biographer only have paper.
Charles Moore: Yes, well of course I didn't only have paper in a sense that I only have paper on which to express it, but I could myself watch the clips, and indeed I saw them live frequently, because I was around at the time. I think it's very, very interesting and instructive to watch clips of Mrs. Thatcher and I'm always urging people instead of sort of theorizing about it to in television programs to show those clips because she had a tremendous gift of communication, even though sometimes the communication didn't please the recipients. She very, very clear and, in that sense, extremely good at getting a message across and that survives very well in the clip. So you can see her intent often much more clearly and strikingly than that of modern politicians and the sheer sort of emotional force she put into everything.
For example, you watch when she's answering questions on the day she resigned in November 1990, answering questions in the house and then doing the no-confidence debate. It's absolutely astonishing. Particularly in the questions. When if you keep bearing in mind that she has just resigned. So she's still Prime Minister, but she's tendered her resignation that day, and there she is, not a hair out of place, incredibly tough argument, really rather witty. And as she said at one point in the debate, “I'm enjoying this.” And sort of playing it for all it's worth and engaging with people from the other side. There's a sort of almost banter she has about the nature of the gap between the rich and the poor, I think it's with Jim Sillars, the Scottish Labour MP. And a bit of a ding-dong with Simon Hughes, the Liberal MP. And it's a very good theatre, and it brings home a lot of us. I think those clips are vivid.
And thank goodness for television interviews and news clips, because the House of Commons was not televised until 1989. So she'd been Prime Minister. It was on the radio all through her prime ministership, and not on the television. So we haven't got most of that on television. But we can see other things like Brian Walden interviews or news clips and so on. And they are really, really worth studying.
And you're right that, obviously, I can't convey that fully in a book. I can describe it, I can quote from it, but I hope that what would happen is when people read the book, they can get more out of the clips, and when they look at the clips, they can get more out of the book.
Henry: One or two general questions to close with. Who should write Tony Blair's biography?
Charles Moore: I don't know who should write Tony Blair's biography, at all. And I’m certainly not volunteering myself. But I think, again, the question of fairness is important, because Blair suffered from a thing where he received absurd adulation and then absurd vilification. And, actually, the judgment on him, the historical judgment on him, should be much more nuanced and requires some detachment. And speaking only for myself, I must have written, as a journalist, thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of words criticising Mr. Blair and his policies. But I think he deserves to be taken seriously as a political leader and was important, and that his fundamental message about New Labour was actually true. He's often described as a liar, but I think his fundamental message about what he was and what he was trying to do was true, and people appreciated it. And it's also true, unfortunately, that a lot of his actions were rather ill-thought-out and didn't come to much, so that's a slightly tragic element in his time. But he deserves much more serious attention than the great majority of British prime ministers.
Henry: What are the most underrated political biographies?
Charles Moore: I think there are quite a lot that are overrated, but it would be invidious to say which. What I most value, but this is probably somebody who's in the trade talking rather than the general reader, but what I'm looking for, I want to feel very confident that the author is fair-minded, and it also has a sort of feel for what it is he's writing about. So that he is not somehow off the point or out of his depth, or, as it were, wasn't there. I didn't mean that a biographer has to have been present when these things happen, but I mean he doesn't have a feel for how, let's say, the House of Commons really works or something like that. I like, in that sense, the biographers that are a professional. I think that man D. R. Thorpe is good, for example. I'm afraid I don't have a biography of a modern politician (and by modern I'm going back quite a long way) to hold up and say, “This is it. This is how it should be done.” But this may well be my fault. I've read by no means all of them.
Henry: Charles Moore, thank you very much for your time.
Charles Moore: Thank you.
Don’t forget!My salon, on 1st March, TONIGHT, is Samuel Johnson: Reading for Wisdom where we will discuss pessimism, pragmatism, and the good life. The attendee list has some interesting Johnson enthusiasts — join them!
My am giving a tour of the City of London tracing the route of the Great Fire and the genius of Christopher Wren on Saturday 5th March.
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