Matt Lodder on Tattoos, Memory and the History Written on Skin

Matt Lodder on Tattoos as Art History

Art historian and author Matt Lodder joins Ben Yeoh to explain why tattoo history is not a niche subject, but a way into art history, class, colonialism, gender, fashion, technology, archives, and the stories societies choose to preserve or forget.

Matt is the author of Painted People: Humanity in 21 Tattoos and Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art, and co-host of Beneath the Skin, a podcast that explores history through the lens of tattooing.

In this episode, Matt argues that tattoos have often been misunderstood because the historical record overrepresents people whose bodies were monitored: sailors, soldiers, prisoners and other surveilled groups. Meanwhile, tattooing among women, the middle classes, queer communities and “ordinary” people was often hidden under clothing, poorly documented, or preserved only in private archives.

The conversation moves from Matt’s childhood fascination with tattooing to the art-historical questions that animate his work. Rather than asking only whether tattoos are “art”, why people get tattooed, or what a tattoo “means”, Matt asks what tattoos reveal about style, taste, authorship, technology, reception and power.

They discuss myths around Captain Cook, the strange archival afterlives of tattooed skin, the invention of electric tattooing, Instagram’s acceleration of trends, AI-generated tattoo aesthetics, eye tattooing, and why museums still struggle to preserve an art form carried on living bodies.

It is a conversation about tattoos, but also about how culture gets remembered, flattened, misread and rediscovered.

Key takeaways

• Tattoo history is a way of reading wider human history, because tattoos sit at the intersection of image, body, identity, fashion, technology and social judgement.

• Many tattoo myths persist because archives preserve the bodies of people who were surveilled, while more private or ordinary tattooing often left fewer records.

• Matt pushes against the narrow question of whether tattoos are “art”, arguing that art history is more useful when it asks about style, authorship, taste and reception.

• Tattooing was not simply “discovered” by Europeans through Captain Cook. That story reflects later colonial myth-making more than historical reality.

• Instagram has not changed the basic fact that people copy visual culture, but it has radically accelerated the life cycle of tattoo trends.

• AI tattoo imagery is technically influential, but Matt is sceptical of its aesthetics and ethics, especially when it shortcuts artistic authorship.

• Matt’s practical advice: ask tattooed people who did the work, look at healed portfolios, choose artists by style, and do not treat people’s bodies as public property.

Summary contents, transcript and podcast links below. Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to pods. Video above or on Youtube.

Contents

00:00 Meet Matt Lodder
00:36 Why tattoos tell history
03:27 Misunderstood tattoos
10:49 The art history lens
19:48 Performance art and the body
23:12 Writing Painted People
28:28 Unfinished tattoo mysteries
31:59 Myths, Captain Cook and cultural amnesia
39:28 Archives, access and private collections
42:02 Medical curiosities and preserved skin
42:31 Lost tattooed skin
43:56 The electric tattoo breakthrough
45:23 Museums misplacing history
46:32 How Instagram speeds tattoo trends
52:13 The internet and flattened styles
54:23 AI tattoo aesthetics
58:38 Overrated / underrated
01:00:50 Tattoos in museums
01:03:55 Eye tattooing risks
01:05:42 Current and future projects
01:07:13 Better questions to ask about tattoos
01:12:44 Closing and Ben’s tattoo confession

Transcript (lightly edited with AI so mistakes are possible)

Ben: Hey, everybody. I am super excited to be speaking to Matt Lauder. Matt is a historian of art. He's the author of Painted People: Humanity in 21 Tattoos, and also the author of Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art. Both are brilliant books, which I found fascinating in how they treat tattoos as a story of being human.

He co-hosts his own podcast, Beneath The Skin, which looks at the history of everything through the lens of tattoos. Matt, welcome.

Matt: Hi, thanks for having me.

Ben: When and how did you first realize that tattoo history and tattoos in general was a way of telling the history of almost everything?

Matt: That's a good question.

I think when I, ... i- I've been fascinated with tattooing, tattooing itself and tattoos for a long time. And I didn't do history at school. I didn't do GCSE history or eight level history. I didn't ... I've got a PhD in art history now, but I didn't have any undergraduate or master's degree in art history.

So I had no ... It wasn't like I had a big wide ranging interest in history per se that then translated into a histori- into a historical interest. It really was the other way around. I got fascinated with tattoos from a very young age, and wanted to figure out as much as I can about them. And then I found my way through a kind of fairly circuitous, although it makes sense in hindsight the route to doing a PhD in art history.

And I think what you realize when you start understanding what art history is exactly that, right? We're not just art historians, not just interested in pretty pictures from the past. It's different from art criticism in that way. We're not just interested in whether a painting or a sculpture is good or bad.

But we're interested in what we would call, the indexicality of a work of art, right? So the basic kind of practice of art history is to figure out what works of art tell us about people and places in the past. And I realized, without really, cynically sitting down to, to do it this way, my, my questions about tattoos and where they came from or what they told us about tattoo people were also then really, interesting ways into thinking about human stories and cultural historical stories from a wide range of the human past, right?

If you can ... the way I used to explain it, if you can tell something about the past by looking at paintings in museums and churches and country houses, that must be also and perhaps particularly true for the images that people carry on their bodies. And yeah, when I sat down to write my first book and I was talking with the publisher and the agent about what kind of thing would work telling a story that wasn't just about the history of tattooing, but was about what tattooing could tell us about people and places in the past was a way into it.

But I came here really initially from a very ... literally childlike. I was literally a child who thought that tattoos were cool, and like 40 years later, here we are.

Ben: And they're still cool.

Matt: Yeah, exactly. Or people could tell me they're not, which is also part of the interesting, trajectory of tattoo history, whether

Where ... People ask me often. I speak to journalists and people ask me if tattoos are cool and I said, look if I could tell you answer that question, I wouldn't be a historian. I'd be a presentist, a- and I certainly wouldn't be a middle-aged man. You don't ask middle-aged men what's cool.

Ben: Yeah. I guess that's the problem is that some Facebook and social media isn't cool because now your dad is on it. And if your mom and dad are on it, how c- how can that, by definition, be cool? Exactly. I'm interested in how you came to it, partly because I have the impression that tattoos are still misunderstood.

I'd be interested if you think that they are misunderstood. And if they are, why in your mind are they so persistently misunderstood? And I don't know whether you'd hint at some of the biggest misunderstandings that you think you come across.

Matt: Yeah. It's, again it's mis- it was misunderstandings really that dr- that drove me here.

I've told this truth before, but I'll tell it to your listeners too. When I was a kid I got told ... I, basically, I was born in 1980. I was growing up in the early 1980s and seeing basically WWF- WLF wrestlers like The Undertaker, with cool tattoos and rock bands like Guns and Roses with cool tattoos.

And started as many young kids still do today to start scribbling on my arms with Byro and Felt Penn, and explaining it slightly to my mom and dad what called tattoos I wanted to get when I was older. And my grandparents sat me down and told me two stories, both intended to, to put me off, right?

One was the story of my grandfather, who was a Dutchman, submariner in the Dutch Navy in the then Dutch East Indies in World War II, and he told me a story that he was drunk on his rum ration somewhere in Jakarta in the early 1940s as they ... And he woke up just as they were about to tattoo a fly on the end of his nose.

So he told me and he woke up just in time and escaped the ignominy of having a facial tattoo, which is even more hilarious. It would be even more holistic if you knew my grandfather. He was a very austere, very stern, sensible kind of guy. And so that, in a way, is a quite familiar story.

I think that the drunken sailor and the regretful, youthful mistake i- is a fairly familiar story. My grandmother, though, told me another story about her mother, so she was born in England, but grew up in Australia. Her mother was the, grew up in Kent, the daughter of a tenant farmer in the early part of the t- early part of the 20th century, late part of the 19th century.

And she'd said that her mother, so my great-grandmother had a tattoo, which came about because one day her brother came home one day with a tattoo machine and said, "Hey, sis, can I tattoo you? " And she said, "Will it come off?" And he said, "Yes." So she apparently had her initials tattooed on her wrist and obviously hated it and regretted it.

And again, in a way, it's this story of a kind of youthful regret. But as I got older and jumped in those puddles, so to speak, you tell a kid not to do something and they'll get obsessed with it, as at least I did. I, as a bookish lad, I went looking for books about tattoo history and the late, the 90s in particular was what I now know as an academic of this period, we call the culporeal turn in the humanities, lots of real interest in the body in the 90s, lots of gender theory and racial theory and that sort of interest tallied into interest in tattooing as well.

And so when I got to university and I was starting to get tattooed and pierced and body modified as well I was just getting all the books I could find from the library at the university I was at and then on interlibrary loan about tattooing. And they all hinted at least in some senses towards that drunken sailor story of my grandfather, but didn't

The story of, like, where my great uncle got a tattoo machine from as a tenant farmer's child in Edwardian Kent I was like, "Where's that story?" And then moreover, as I was getting more and more tattooed and hanging around with tattooed people, the kind of only tattoos, t- only criminals and tailors get tattoos kind of thing I was reading was making less and less sense.

And I think w- to properly answer your question, I think the misconceptions have come from really a lack of visibility of the kind of stories of my great-grandmothers. I now know that, for example, tattoo machines were sold in Edwardian London in essentially department stores.

Whether or not that was the kind of machine that my great uncle had, I don't know, but, th- those catalogs, for example, were not in any museums I looked for, or libraries. The vernacular history in general, let alone tattooing, is not very well preserved and tattooing, of quote unquote regular people, is just not recorded anywhere.

It's not, you have to look very hard for it, at least. But what you do find if you're an academic who's interested in tattoo history, and this has been going on really since the middle of the 19th century when tattoos became a kind of important part of various branches of anthropology and criminology and sociology research.

If you're looking for tattoos in libraries and museums, what you find is tattoos on surveilled populations, criminals, because their bodies get recorded because if you run away, they wanna be able to check that they've got the right person and on sailors for similar reasons. So I think a huge part really, and we're talking, I'm talking about with, Western tattoo history a huge part of the misconception is just that most of it has not been visible.

Literally, it's been under clothing a- as well as being subcultural, and it hasn't been recorded in a way that was available to academics of prior generations. I think the other thing as well, to complete that thought is that tattooing is something that I think if you ha- if you are tattooed, or even if you understand the desire to be tattooed it's not that weird.

There is something ... I hesitate to use the words inherent, but it will do. There's something inherent about that desire to get tattooed if you have it or even if you don't, I think you can understand it. But for someone who doesn't want or have that desire to be tattooed, it looks painful.

So, it looks like why would you get something permanent on your body when you're gonna be, it's gonna be out of fashion in whatever time, and it's gonna make your life more difficult, it's gonna interfere with your job prospects. The questions that non-tattooed people ask tattooed people, does it hurt?

What will your mom think of it and what will you do when you're older? I think they are saying psychological insights as well into the kind of misconceptions about this practice. 'Cause as I talked about in both books- there's the wrong question to ask.

Why do you wanna get tattooed is the wrong question, at least for me.

Ben: Yeah. Reflecting on that, it feels a little bit like, I think people will probably understand if you say, why do people wanna dance? You dance from young, you have this impulse, probably quite a hard thing to put into words, but people, people- Yeah.

would get. And I'm interested that you come at an art history lens because like you say, there's being anthropologists, sociologists, blah, blah, you've got a high art, low art, what gets documented, what are the untold stories element to it? And I'm interested in looking at it as a cultural form, this art history form.

Yeah. What do you see or the kind of ... To me, it seems like a broader lens that perhaps anthropologists or sociologists have missed or this whole telling of the story, which seems it ... There's a sort of irony that I feel that it is art on your body or too on your body. Yeah. And yet some of it seems to be hidden and untold.

Yeah. Whereas it seems to be, I guess it, tends to be la- last for the life of the person, although we have mummified and other things, so it doesn't go into museums at some art, but you have more ephemeral art practices- Yeah. ... which do go into the art conscious, from my practice, performance for sure- Yeah.

but a lot of other ones. So it seems to me really intriguing this and how it got picked up by the sociologists and things maybe first and through potentially a narrow lens and where we've ended up.

Matt: Yeah. I think ... So this is really at the core of ... I think this is really where I got to. It wasn't really the starting point of my PhD, but it's where I got to.

So my PhD, which I started in 2005 on the back of a master's degree that touched on some of the same topics a couple years earlier I wanted to write really in this kind of, l- in the light of this late '90s work on embodiment, I wanted to think about what it meant to be an artwork in the world, right?

Like what was the kind of ... This is a kind of very pretentious, philosophical thought, really, commensurate with scholars in their 20s and what academia was like in the late '90s anyway. I wanted to understand, I think, the phenomenology and ontology of an artwork, right?

Because tattooing's an art practice body art, we all know what that is. So I thought then I'd be interested to know what it means to be what's the ontology or phenomenology really of being an artwork in the world? And it turns out that the first premise of that question, which is tattooing an art form anyway, was actually way more complicated

In some senses, not complicated at all, I think, but it was certainly understudied. And so I'm still working on what was gonna be really the first chapter of my PhD that I started 20 years ago, right? The ... What I think is really important about art history as a methodological set here is that we don't care what is and isn't art, right?

Whether something is or isn't art is for us a kinda contingent question, right? So we will take it as a given in a historical moment or, the classic kind of formulation of if an artist says it's art. That's really the position that art history as a discipline has taken since the least 1970s, probably e- even a little bit earlier.

For philosophers of art, aestheticians, the question of is something art or not is interesting, but art historians, we don't really care. In fact, I have interesting conversations with my philosophy colleagues at Essex who keep telling my students that there is a definition of art, and I have to tell them off telling them that.

So art historians can skip over the thing that I think a lot of other disciplines get hung up on. Anthropology is really important here. Anthropologists and I've written an academic paper about this particularly the work of a guy called Alfred Gail although there are predecessors as well to him in the '90s wrote basically a kind of series of books about what has n- now become known as visual anthropology, right?

The anthropology of making things, making images and objects. And Gail basically based that initial thinking because he was largely anthropologist of the Pacific on tattooing, right? He wanted to think about how tattooing could be art in an anthropological sense. And in a well-meaning way, he wanted to avoid this idea that he understood art Western art history to have, which was a kind of chauvinism, right?

Which it can be art if it's good, if it's beautiful, if it's technically proficient, if it's normative, none of which is particularly true. I don't think of contemporary art history as a method but probably is true of art history as a cultural thing. So Girl and others then came up with this idea that to, to get away with that the way that anthropologists should, would think about tattooing and other forms of, i- indigenous art making, for example, would be to think about, not about their style, not about their beauty really, but to think about their function.

And this was and Gail himself says "I'm methodologically Philistine, Philistine, I'm a methodological Philistine." He said, "I'm anti-art necessarily," right? And what he meant by that is he didn't wanna get bogged down into questions of beauty, which he understood as hierarchical, and he wanted to think about form.

So that's why it functions. The point of making a shield with a lion's head on it, this is an example that he gives, is because it's scary for the, for example, the scary for your enemies. So there's a kind of functional thing here. And so anthropologists who've been thinking about tattooing after Girl, and it's also implicit in work before him too, we're asking basically, why do you get tattooed right?

Which for a nice story, and I, as I just said, I think it's the wrong question. We don't ask. In fact, it's completely uninteresting to tell a night story and why people paint, or if we do ask that question, it's only the beginning of our inquiry. There are functional art objects in the Western Historical Canon, things like altar pieces and stuff.

But, like, why people do it is only the first kind of layer. And then we get into things like, which I think are much more interesting, which are questions of style and taste and reception. And weirdly although it seems really obvious to me that tattooing is a, can be understood in the same way as a painting.

Crucially, I don't ever wanna make the claim that tattooing is art for reasons I've already explained. What that was- wasn't present anywhere, surprisingly enough to me when I started up my research. And it feels a bit like an open goal to me, because most tattoo people understand it.

It's natural, right? But the implications of that question, so things like who is the author of a tattoo, for example, is it me as the person who has it on their body? Is it the person who puts it on my body, the tattoo artist? Is it some combination of us? These are things that art history has tools for and theoretical arguments about.

We talk about things like patronage and architecture. For example, there is a lot of interesting literature on collaborative making, but anthropology and functionalism can't do that, don't even think about that. And I think I have been asking the wrong questions. And there are similar examples for sociology as well.

The sociology of tattooing comes out of criminology, really, which was designed in a moment of scientific racism to try and diagnose how primitive you are, right? So I think ironically, art history, particularly art history as it developed in the back end of the 20th century, was just a method set that was increasingly interesting, let, uninterested in the things that had bogged down and I think impeded other disciplinary approaches to the same set of questions.

But it seems, it's ... I talk to tattooists sometimes and have my whole career who go, "Yeah, obviously." Obviously it's an art form or obviously we can think about style, taste, authorship, fashion, technique, the relationship between technology, machines and inks and the kind of tattoos people get.

All of those things for people who are doing it, it's almost a bit obvious to them.

Ben: Yeah.

Matt: And it's very rarely that I say stuff and publish stuff that hasn't in some form been articulated by a tartarist amongst themselves in the last century.

Ben: That's fascinating. That brings up so many things, but the simple answer is yes but then you go on and then also that it might be completely the wrong question.

I recall speaking to someone who essentially studies photography as well through this lens. I don't think they quite called themselves a historian of photography, but maybe ... And they also answered, there's a question, from philosophers is photography art and they were completely- Yeah.

uninterested in whether it was art or not art or how you might ...

Matt: It's interesting as a historical question. So as a contingent question, when galleries start treating photography as art and photographs as artists, is it a historically interesting question because it tells us something about the cultural moment, but whether the object itself is or isn't art is exactly, as you say, a weird question.

Anthropologists also, some of my students take a module with my colleagues. We have a really great set of anthropologists  and I'm not shitting on them really although it sounds often like I am. I don't mean to. I've got some of my best friends who are visual anthropologists.

But some of my students take visual anthropology classes which focus on photography in visual anthropology and that, and they're quite astonished actually the methodological divergence between those two approaches because those first photographs will be te- treated as functional or as documentary or even if they're not, even if they have a kind of aesthetic dimension, that aesthetic is itself taken as functional, which is just not how art historians think about images,

Ben: Yeah. I guess it's the same on, I guess what we call cave art it's got, it's, completely, obviously we have, we'll never, ever know what the people who made those things were thinking, and it's just impossible. Yeah. So exactly. You gotta start from a complete-

Matt: Yeah. I cited an art historian in, in, in this paper that I wrote about who pointed out that art historians still, or maybe now especially, don't have a theory of intention.

We have to import theory. We, if we need them for our questions we're asking, we have to import them from i- from psychology and art and anthropology. But since the 1960s and 70s, art historians haven't had a theory of intention, which for me is interesting because, so many things about tattooing pa- have boiled down to what does that mean or why would you do that?

So why would you choose a tattoo in the first place and it, why did you choose that tattoo? And I think for that really makes sense, it really cuts off a lot of potential areas of inquiry which an historical approach enables, you know?

Ben: Yeah, that feels very narrow. I'm really fascinated essentially by what word would I use?

The interdependencies, the interdependency of the tattooist, your choice, how you present, and that's for a lot of creative human endeavors, interdependencies in music, when we make things together- Absolutely. ... collaboratively, particularly in performance art where you have a script and then it's embodied and then it's ephemeral, all of these types of things.

Matt: Performance art for me, performance art for me was a real clique moment as I was doing my ... I did a master's, so I did an undergraduate degree in languages. I've been really interested in ... I did a theater studies MA. So I was really interested in my teenage years in Brexton and in fact my A- level theater teacher hated theater theory, and I ended up teaching my class Brett when I was 17.

But I went and did a degree in French and German, and in my final year, had a module in European cinema about remakes. And all, in that, we started reading again some of the things that I'd been interested in, including Brecht actually in, in, in my theater studies degree. And then I started realizing

I did a master's degree in the body at Reading, interdisciplinary master's degree in the body. And on that, we had lessons, lectures from theater studies and performance studies people. And all of a sudden, someone said to me like someone like Lee Bowery the fashion, club kid and performance artist who I'd seen on a genes ad, in the late 80s and thought was incredibly cool.

Or like all these people that I was seeing, like Ron Athey who were getting in trouble for doing kind of very bloodily performance art. Someone said, That's called art, right? All of these bands that I liked were doing very bodily, shocking performances, the fact that there was a kind of lens to understand that stuff as art, as I said, my parents didn't take me to art galleries.

I didn't really have a frame for knowing what art was. And when someone said, "That stuff that you like that is performative and performance is art in some senses," I was like, "Oh, that really clicks for me. " But I didn't know it was art, when I saw Franco B bleeding, until he fainted and when I saw I don't know, Gina Parney, all of those very extreme, if you like, or very kind of intense performances from the late '90s that just crept into my subculture as a kid who was like reading heavy metal magazines.

When s- when it turned out to me that was art, I was like oh, okay. Now I can start making the connections." And performance art for me was really, a real cornerstone of how I think about all of this stuff.

Ben: I remember seeing Franco B, I think a performance cutting and bleeding on a white paper roll in the room 

being so viscerally impacted and thinking if I have this visual impact from all of these kinds of things, I can see why these things we're putting in the realm of art." I'm interested that through the lens of history, I guess a typical person thinks of history chronologically within time, but when I read Painted People and your choice of that, you went through individual tattoos, I think 21 of them, rather than a straight chronological history.

Yeah. And alluding to that, I'm interested why you chose to do it that way via, versus time, essentially a linear time thing, although I guess historians would argue that. And also then how did you choose, and maybe in that choosing and choice and investigation, did the, was there anything which you discovered or your mind was changed a lot about what you thought about it?

So it's a little bit why through individuals rather than say a strict timeline and how did you go about ... thinking and choosing that?

Matt: So I'm a big fan of chronology in general, partly because we talked about misconceptions earlier. One of the misconceptions that really bugs, for example, the history of Western tattooing is this idea that it quote unquote only recently became, not just for sailors.

I have a whole lecture that I give on this and the re- more, most recent book was a bit structured about this too. This idea that tattooing is over now and is far too fashionable and it was better and it was underground, and it goes back to the 1880s. There's examples from every single decade in the la- from the late 19th century to the present, saying that tattooing only recently, became fashionable, which I think is hilarious when you're finding examples from the the, from 1905 saying that, ta- tattooing used to be confined to seeming only, so when I did my exhibition, I did a big exhibition called British Tattoo Revealed, that doing that chronologically is really important because it helped people understand, I think, when we started out telling, what early modern antiquarian historians were saying about tattooing in the 16th century it was able to instantly give people an idea that everything they thought they knew about the recency of tattooing as a presence on British bodies wa- was misconce- misconceived.

So where tattooing can, where chronology can serve a rhetorical purpose, I think it's really useful. The painted people is laid out chronologically, but I also really wanted to A, tell as much of a geographically diverse story as I could, although I because I'm not an anthropologist, something else I'm really, I try and do that, that other people haven't done in the past is I try and not go, get out over my skis.

So painting people I talk about, for example, Inuit tattooing and a couple of chapters. I talk about tattooing in Fiji, I talk about tattooing in ancient Siberia. But I do so as much as possible from a lens of, like, how the people from outside those cultures encountered them, wrote about them, en- en- engaged with them, I can't write and wouldn't wanna write an anthropological account of what those practices really quote unquote mean, because to do that requires, much deep expertise and I don't.

And this is, this comes down to this sort of cl- one of the cliches that I repeat a lot, which is, tattooing as a medium, not a phenomenon. I wanna, so I wanna try and ... So the painting of people approaching having an individual sort of character tattoo for each chapter was a way of de- anthropologizing the practice in a way.

It was also a way of trying to break up this idea that again, is a problem, I think, in the historograph- historiography of tattooing in the West, which is that people think increasingly less now. I think the message has been getting out there after me and some of my predecessors were shouting about it for a long time.

People thought, like Gail himself did, that tattooing was discovered in the Pacific and there was no tattooing in Europe prior to the late 18th century. And so deanthropologizing those stories and having individuals from dif- disparate parts of the world from a broader period of time, I hope, try

I wanna sever the connection between that and the idea that Western people stole tattooing from indigenous people, because that itself is a kind of racist lie. And in fact, there's a chapter right in the middle of Painted People about Mecock, this Inuit woman who was brought to England basically commissioned with the departure of Cook's fleet to Tahiti for the first time.

And her portrait with her facial tattoos was hanging on the wall of the Royal Academy in London the day that Captain Cook and Joseph Banks first set foot in Tahiti in 1769, which I think is a remark- it was a remarkable piece of like final nail in the coffin of that, what my colleague and friend Anna Friedman called The Cook Me.

So the approach was just a way of yeah, de- anthropologizing, ta- tattooing in a way selecting the stories there are annoyingly actually, and we only, I, only 20 chapters, because the 21st was supposed to be the prologue, which was the story of my great-grandma that I've already told you.

But the editor basically thought that it was taking too long to get to the first chapter, which was fair enough. So we incorporated her story into the book, and by that point it was too late to change the title. So there actually are only 20 chapters although I, the 21st is my great-grandma and I got that into the introduction.

But the way we chose them really, I wanted to tell cool stories. I wanted to tell stories that represented as much kind of global tattoo history as I reasonably could with my skills and what I thought was interesting. There were some things we had to get in, all good popular history books need a bit of ancient Rome and ancient Egypt and ancient Greece and ancient China, these are great.

But they were also opportunities to tell, I think big stories of the kind we were alluding to about colonialism, about myth making, about cultural normativity and each of those individual stories were ways into specific problems. There's a, there, there's chapters which also deal with things that I wanted to myth bust.

There's a chapter, for example, about two criminal, two Victorian s- sex working women who were presumed to be part of this gang, the 40 thieves, and it turned out that, the jailer in that case basically pointed out that not every single person who has a tattoo is in the same gang, a mistake that the FBI is still making 200 years later.

So there were a few stories I wanted to tell in there, stories that needed to be told and stories that kind of worked in the context of a trade book. In terms of things that I learned there were two stories in the book that are unfinished and they're ones that I've written errata for on my website and are still unfinished.

And with them, when we did the paperback there wasn't enough room to fully include the bigger stories and both of them kept developing. So this is a long answer, but we'll just go quickly into both of them. One is the story of this young girl, which I think is also a really good example of what the book's trying to do.

The story of a young girl called Madeline Altman, who was a middle class girl from Brooklyn in the early 20th century, 1906. She ran away from home and they found her a few days later cheering gum and covered in tattoos, basically. And she's linked to tattoo history because one of the people that tattooed her was the guy who invented the electric tattoo machine, a guy called Samuel O'Reilly.

But as far as recorded history goes, she was in the papers for about three days, four days. She, and she just seems cool. Like she's 15 and sassy and I always wonder what happened to her. And what happened to her becomes a story of that chapter and it's, the book becomes a story about children's homes and how young women are treated in America in the early part of the 20th century.

And when I wrote the book, I wasn't able to find her. She disappeared into the historical record. And then in subsequent years some more genealogical documents were uploaded to various databases that allowed me to finish her story. And long, long story short, after a sad life marrying into a wealthy family in Texas, she ended up running away with a cowboy actor who's one of the most famous cowboys in drugstore cowboys in Hollywood history.

So that was nice. Her her ha- she got a happy ending anyway. And then the other story, which is a story that is also interesting and ongoing, was the story of whether Picasso was a tattoo artist. And there were stories essentially in the Icelandic press in the 1950s. So that chapter becomes a story about basically prop- propaganda, communist propaganda in the 1950s.

I was researching the Argentinian beef trade, for example. There were a couple of things that I missed in that story and a couple of things that came to light later on. And anyway, it turns out the story was that he was, as a joke, Picasso tattooed the wife of an Argentinian beef magnate with a hammer and sickle in 1953 and this became a diplomatic incident.

None of that is true at all. So then the question became like, where did it come from? I think it was pretty likely a CIA plot. And then a paper was published by a guy in Sweden who pointed out that the author of the original article in the Swiss, in the Swedish papers was basically a kind of undercover Swedish intelligence operative.

So my kind of instinct played out there, but it's still quite murky. But then subsequently, I have found through some private archives and some really digital stuff that there is evidence of Picasso discussing tattooing with George Brack in about 1917. The, those two stories, which both of those chapters almost were written as I'm going through these very weird and strange archive trails and both of those trails continue to roll out,

Ben: That's amazing.

It just really reflects your other tagline, the history of everything or certainly the history of humanity. And it seems all entangled. And I was, it was really interesting that a lot of the ideas we're grappling with now are ref- are reflected with that, or been grappling with, since forever.

And I'm interested in some of those myths. How important do you think it is that we have these origin stories and they're apocryphal or wrong and where they are. You mentioned a couple sort of the Captain Cook one. Yeah. The class one, through the British lens of class, but you can see it through money or call it aristocrats or not, which seems to also reflect this low art, high art kind of thinking around and what respectable women to tourists seem to be- Yeah.

like women in art and also women in novels, although perhaps a little bit less at least as writers, mostly forgotten or not. And that seems almost amazing as well. And then obviously the Western traditions versus all non-Western. Do you think that just reflects how human culture is developed or do you think there's something specific around this where you think about it through class and women and what's been forgotten?

Is it just unsurprising to you that we have this history which just reflects through tattoos?

Matt: Yeah. It becomes, I think it becomes essentially a historiographical question as much as a historical one, right? So the Cook example is really interesting. So as I said, you will still find books and even scholarly books written. I said fewer now, because I think we've got better at getting the story out, but certainly up until very recently, books that said Captain Cook discovered tattooing in the Pacific.

Now, Captain Cook didn't even believe that. That story s- so the Cook Voyages, between 1769 and 1776, that story appears, that said not long after the Voyages, the first examples I think are in the early 1800s. So then the question becomes, why does that story happen, right? Why is it that people believe that Captain Cook discovered tattooing and there was noticing on Europeans?

And of course the ar- I pause that I say, of course, I posit the answer to that is essentially, scientific racism, that it becomes the story of the colonial era of the 19th century that non-Western people, the people of the, global majority who were colonizing are different to us in a quite profound way.

And tattooing is one way to articulate that. So the narrative of history is a way of cultural storytelling. And that's really just, and I don't mean that in any kind of conspiratorial way, really. It can be, but it's just a way that, it's just the way that history and historians work and the way that knowledge works.

The Anisia question for me was so interesting and why the story of Meacock was one of my favorites to write in Painted People because I was like, how did people forget that there was, a tattooed Inuit portrait on the wall of the British the role of the Royal Academy in 1769.

And prior to that, not even hidden away in ... there is some tattoo history that we're discovering that is very buried and quite obscure back into the 16th century and stuff at the moment. But every major history of the British Isles, for example, talks about tattooing amongst the ancient Britains.

Now, it turns out, ironically, it probably, it actually probably wasn't true but certainly antiquarian Britons believed that there was tattooing happening in the British Isles, and these are in all of the classic histories of British tattooing. It's in all of the major Roman histories and of Britain, it's in Tacitus.

So how did we miss that? What, why did people think that? The same is true of, and again, to pick my great-grandmother's example, right? It was really amazing to me to learn that you could buy tattoo machines in essentially Edwardian Debenhams, a place called Gamages, and we've since found out they were also available elsewhere.

Not, not hidden away. One of, one of the catalogs is basically tattooing, comma, telephones, et cetera. It was a fairly normal part of the offering of this particular store and some others like it in the Edwardian period. But the story of the 20th century and World War II, et cetera, a- and the intellectual histories doesn't really allow for that to be an understandable, perceptible truth.

The same is true across all kinds of historical thinking. You see all this outrage in tabloids about storytelling of people of color in British history, for example, and it gets slandered as rewriting history, as if that's a bad thing. But what all rewriting history is doing is basically going, "Let's go back and actually check.

Let's go and see if we've missed anything. Let's see if those of our prior generation look..." And of course, we do this ourselves, we're looking, we're always looking through the evidence we have through the lens of our own politics and experience to some degree. Yeah, I think for me, tattooing's really interesting because so much of its history has been told by i- in particular ways and also much of it's been invisible.

So much tattooing has been under clothing, particularly marginalized tattooing. Gay, I write a lot and do a lot of research on queer and gay tattoo histories- so much of that would be hi- hidden away. And I never wanna kinda also say that and this was a problem in the newer book, really.

I, I, in a way, the new book's a bit re- it feels a bit regressive historically because it is, someone did write this in a review, but it is a story of largely white men, right? But unfortunately, I have to say, that is what happened. The tattooist who was in ... There were loads of tattooists who were women, people of color doing stuff, tattooing, but the people who were influential, the people who were popular, people who were known about, the people who actually made an impact on the history per se, were white men.

Some of them gay, not all of them straight white men but were white men. And it's a fair criticism, but as a c- a friend of mine once said, he's a historian of piercing, he's or he's where are all the kind of trans, diasporic piercers from the 1950s?

And it's they didn't exist or they did exist, but they didn't exist in a way that is relevant to the overall big story of the tattoo and piercing industry story. So we found these individual people who were doing cool stuff o- on their own time, and there were some interesting archival lens problems that we got into.

L- lesbian history's much worse told than gay male history, for example, partly b- largely because of social reasons.

Ben: That's really fascinating. That, that whole idea that what, what gets told, what gets hidden, all of the reasons, all of the reasons behind that, I think that's really, that's really fascinating about what remains not.

And on the whole, we forget the amnesia point the more I speak to people, it's interesting how we seem to do this across all domains. So we seem to have forgotten science ideas. Yeah. Like even just because Captain Cook's been mentioned a couple of times, but the whole lemon scurvy thing, it's an idea- Yeah.

we seem to rediscover two or three times within a period of 50 to 100 years because we forget it. And even scientific method ideas, like we come to this idea of today, this controlled trial, which is a very core science idea, you, we could have discovered it ages ago and it seems to have popped up and then disappeared again.

We humans seem to be very good at forgetting stuff. 

Matt: Yeah, for getting stuff and getting stuff wrong, and again, I'm, we're all guilty of this just necessarily as human beings. And part of the structure of academic thinking and scientific thinking is meant to correct for that or meant to kinda, mitigate those things as much as possible, things like peer review and things like just, academic rigor in general footnotes and citing your sources and stuff, like that's meant to as much as possible work against that.

But also a big part of it for me has been the institutional history that I alluded to earlier on as well. Historians of tattooing in the past have those who've been academics have either come to tattooing really because they were bored with what else they were doing and they thought tattooing would be a fun hobby and they'd ring someone up and basically, "Hey, you're weird.

Can I come and interview you, whatever?" And they get told to, to go away. But also this institutional history of collecting. Tattoos are not easy to collect because of their ephemeral nature. But more than that, just the ephemeral history of tattooing, the things that I study a lot, machines, drawings, photographs self-published, small run magazines, letters between tattoos, they're not the kind of things that have any institutional history anywhere in the world, right?

Some are collected peripherally, but the big collections of tattoo history are all in private hands which comes with its own challenges, but with its own joys. And it's, I think it took a generation ... So there was a ... I came, as I said, of age as an academic in this period in the late '90s and the 2000s, which coincided with a general interest in the body, which I'm very fortunate to have.

Lots of my colleagues who did PhDs in tattooing are now not working in academia, they're doing other things. But nevertheless, I think we all benefited from having been tattooed, from knowing tattooed people, from understanding it from the inside to some degree but even, it's taken me as I've been doing this, however you wanna count it, for somewhere between 25 and 30 years.

And it's taken me that long in a way to really start to get credibility and access to material that, let alone the things that people don't know are out there, that people know and just don't wanna share with people. And there still, I'm sure there's still things out there like that too. And that's important.

Huge amounts of my work is premised on, in a way stuff that the tattoo industry in, in part already knew, but it's based on documents, images, stories that just weren't accessible to conventional academic methods.

Ben: I think that's really important. I remember viewing the photographs of Nan Goldin and part of her work is the fact that she's essentially documenting her community and coming through that and you have that.

And it's this really interesting question of, who gets to collect, who gets to decide, who documents, and in the past, like you say, l- the lesbian community wasn't documenting anything for l- lots of reasons- Yeah. ... or were being purposely marginalized, and then even coming through it.

Matt: Let me give you another example from, that's in both books, but again, I found out more about this in the time since. During COVID I was, putting together Painting People and I came across this report in the Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons and it talked about in 1891, this group of, group of surgeons, as they do, get together, and they basically meet up once a, a few times a year or whatever, and they'd bring along a cool thing.

They'd cut off a patient recently, essentially, show and tell, right? And there's a story in there of this guy called Jay Biggs, who brought along I'm not, I'm quite from memory here, but some, something like a most interesting specimen of a tattooed Irishman, right? I have been doing this a long time. As I said, my colleague, Gemma,  is a historian of specifically preserved tattooed human remains. I said, "Have you heard of this, Gemma?"

No, I looked at the University of Edinburgh's human remains record. It wasn't there. And, no one had seen or heard of this since. So I presumed it must be lost, but I wrote to the librarian and said "I know you haven't got this skin anymore, but do you have any records of where it might have gone or who it might have come from in the first place?"

And a few days later, he was like, "Yeah, I think I've seen that. I think it's in the storm." Anyway, there were two freestanding dry preserved skin specimens, one of basically a whole front of a man, a young man, and then one another of two rib panels. The back piece must still be out there somewhere or always lost.

And it's just been sitting in this library since it was, or archive, since it was donated to them in 1891, and no one had looked at it or recorded it or seen it since. And I went to look for records of ... So now I know a bit about big things and stuff. I went to look for more records. And basically, the records are just had a meeting, people bought stuff.

It wasn't even officially interesting to them to write much down about it which I find amazing. And it turns out, and here's the kicker, something that isn't in the book because I found out subsequently, that, those skin, that skin is basically the first tattoos ever done with electricity.

That man was the brother of Sammy Lo'Riley, the first electric tattoo artist in the world, and I only spotted that because someone on Reddit had posted a picture of this guy, John O'Riley, that I'd seen before, but had upped the up the contrast of the image, and I was looking for something else, and I was Googling it, getting something else.

I think I was looking ... I was looking for a story about another, a different tattoo Irishman, actually. So I was Googling how to tattoo an Irishman, this image came up, and I've seen the picture, but I hadn't seen it with the contrast made up. And I was like, instantly you only see the top part of his chest, but I was like, "Oh my God, that's the skin."

And now all the story makes sense, but how this guy died, we know that he was still performing in America about three or four months before his skin showed up in Scotland. Like, how his skin's in Scotland, why it's there, how, who, who dissected him, what none of that information we've yet discovered.

I'm sure some of it may be out there, some of it isn't. But basically, unless some Victorian or Edwardian person wrote it down and for whatever reason, those records have been preserved for the present day, we'll never really know what happened there. And we're building up these pieces of where his back is and if it's still out there yeah, it's, but that's the kind of thing we deal with all the time.

Ben: Yeah. That's amazing. But at least you know why it's, why it probably was important, why they kept it and may- maybe of the time.

Matt: I don't think they even knew. I just think, I just think- It's interesting they just didn't, so many museums, you hear, I've had a few of these in my career where it's like, "Oh, we found this in our museum.

Where does it come from? No idea." This is professional museums, let alone private collections and family collections,

Ben: maybe it's no, no surprise then if the professional memory keepers are doing this that we're losing so much.

Matt:  And a friend of mine, a friend of mine who's a historian of like protest and political protest he went, he was doing a book and he went looking for images of some posters and they were from a, I think they were from a Native American group in the '70s or something.

And he found the person who owned them as far as he knew and they said, "Oh, we donated them to this particular museum." And so he wrote to the museum, they said, "No, we haven't got them. No, that's not ... " He said, "Look, can I just come and look for them in your stores?" And he basically went there knowing that they were there, the muse- and found them in a box labeled uninteresting catalog last.

Ben: Oh, crazy.

Matt: This is systematic.

Ben: I would- maybe we'll mention museums in a little bit, and I know we're pressing on in time. I'd be interested in teasing today a little bit and your thoughts. I guess two things come up on social media or particularly Instagram because I guess that's visual social media, but in, in general.

And I guess another one will be what you think AI might do. And I guess there may be a tiny bit interrelated as well, but I was interested in how you think Instagram has changed or not how we pr- how we present this. And I, you know- Yeah. ... I've only flicked onto it, but there's a whole seemingly another subculture of where Instagram meets tattoos or maybe it's just an.

Matt: Yeah. No, 100%. Yeah. I think so, I, again, came of age at the, this is, I think also part of the reason I have a career. I came of age, at a particular moment in the 90s when the internet was nascent and I was a big early adopter of online culture. I got a modem for my 15th birthday in 1995 and the first thing I did was seek out information about tattooing and piercing on a web, on a, on bulletin boards, on usernet groups and on websites that didn't have any pictures on them, or at least I couldn't afford to see them if they were pictures because they were, it was like 60P a minute.

I remember my mom on my 14 four board mode. But even that early, even that early moment of the late '90s, early thousands tattooing culture, being online, started to change how people thought about it. But more, more so perhaps with piercing and body mod stuff. So we're talking about things like subdermal implants, tongue splitting that, things like that basically

And I've talked to a really good friend of mine who ran one of the most important very hardcore archives of subcultural body modification practice on the internet in the early 2000s. And he's now, as a much older and wiser man, a bit worried about this question, about what it was that making visible this stuff to people who would perhaps not have encountered it on their own did, for example, so I have a split tongue.

Ben: Oh, wow. Yeah. For those that are seeing the video, that's quite amazing.

Matt: Tongue splitting is the only body modification that we have no anthropological antecedent for until 1997.

Ben: Really?

Matt: Yeah. So there were rumors about it and it being possible from the mid '90s onwards but no one had seen it or proved it was possible until 1997.

And then, some, basically a guy in Italy sent an anonymous photograph of his tongue split to this website, in the middle of 1997. And then instantly, about three or four weeks later, four more people had copied it. And then, I got my insight six years after that, partly because I didn't understand it, and I think the only way to understand it would be to do it.

But would I have independently come to the idea of cutting my tongue in half? Probably not, right? And then you come to the question of the ethics of that proof for another podcast. But this kind of thing, there have been people doing stuff, their body's tattooing and everything else because they had some kind of innate uncommunicated desire.

They didn't see it in magazines. Obviously, it wasn't something they knew was po- possible, but they were trying it out in the privacy of their own homes. And those people are the, men and women are the pioneers of our scenes, if you like. But there is a question about, it's also relevant for lots of other conversations, things like anorexia, body dysmorphia, fashion in general.

Would, if you didn't see it, would you desire it? And if you didn't, is that a bad thing? I think what Instagram's done, really, all it's done is ... and other people differ on this, and this is a sociological question as much as not a historical one. But I think as an art- art historian, I would say what Instagram's done is speed up the cycle.

And I think that's true of all kinds of other forms of cultural production as well, of music and of clothing and of, everything else.

Matt: Before, I think tattooing was the kind of thing where and again, this is something that I think is quite obvious from historical record, but wasn't really articulated.

People get tattoos that are linked to the visual culture of their moment. So civilian tattooing and, 300 AD, those, the tattooed images they have match the images we find in their metal work and on their leather work. The same is true in ancient Peruvian mummies. The designs we found on preserved mummies in Peru matched the kind of images that we have on stoneware, for example.

And people in the 19th century after the opening of Japan are getting Japanese style tattoos or tattoos of their favorite paintings. And so I think what Instagram does is just accelerate that. Trends that used to maybe persist for a decade or most of a decade and now over in a couple of years, but it's still just like people getting tattoos that they see that are trendy and cool and that feels, some tattooers feel that is a cheapening of tattooing, but I think in some forms, it is just a version of what's always happened, more or less.

Ben: I can see that with a sort of less controversial example, back to my very first one on dancing, like a lot of people have an impulse to dance. You could say everyone, maybe not everyone has an impulse for body art but some do. And then we've gone into these TikTok and Instagram dances.

So- Yeah. ... you do them.

Matt: Great.

Ben: Some people systemize them and, but they live and die very fast.

Matt: Yeah.

Ben: But presumably we've all wanted to dance. Some of us wanna put it out there and then we copy we've copied dances all through the real- ... that they used to last for longer and now a TikTok dance might last for a month or two or not even.

So I can really see that happening. Now, whether it's true across perhaps smaller impulses, it does seem like we've had an impulse to body mod for a while, maybe not everyone and surfacing that this …

Matt: Things become, even if they're not normative in mainstream society, as they as body modifications and tattoos are in certain places and have been at a certain place in certain times in history they will become normative in subculture, but subculture's much more complicated in the age of the internet.

One of the things that happens in the, basically, and one of the reasons why you'll notice both my books slightly cowardly end around the turn of the millennium and I need to start grappling with that really is because after the turn of millennium, the story is much more difficult to tell because ev- I'm interested in influence in a way and stylistic evolution.

And in, in the era of post-modernity in the 21st century, everything's flat and you can't trace ... There's a really popular style of tattooing now that is called cyber sigilism. People call it spiky tribal. And I can't find any ... Someone may know this, but I haven't found anyone and I've looked, I can't find who started that, that style…  It's everywhere now.

It's very trendy amongst young people. People like me hate it. I don't like it, but that's fine.That's good. If I liked it, it would be bad, as I said- Couldn't be cool. Yeah. Exactly. It's the stuff that's very cool or was, probably was until about five minutes ago. But there must have been, there must have been even if it's not one person, there must have been a kind of subculture somewhere.

I think maybe in Russia is my best guess where that came from, but it doesn't, there's not one person that I can identify or happen to yet to identify who is the originator of that style. And there isn't even, as far as I can tell, a mythology for that other styles in Western tattoo history like black and gray, for example, there is a mythology about who invented it.

So this is just what's happening with the internet. It's too fast, it's too diffused, it's too flat and there's less kind of depth. And I don't mean that critically, just as a fact in, where these styles come from. The other thing as well is about removability. And I think Gen Z have become increasingly comfortable with the idea that tattoos are removable, which is more true than it was when I was younger, but certainly not true.

And there's been a lot of interesting kinds of brouhaha recently about ephemeral tattooing and tattoo removal and how much it costs and stuff. So I think that there's something cultural about that's also lends itself to Instagram. I think Gen Z has begun to think about tattooing as less permanent, which I think is a problem.

And one of the reasons why tattooing, one of the reasons people get asked why, what will you think of when you're older is a weird question for a tattooed person because we, I think most of us are quite, especially heavily tattooed people are very comfortable with the idea of being an old tattoo person.

On AI, and this is it fits into a lot of controversy rightly so about AI use by tattooists which I don't think was quite your question. I think the A- the AI, and we did a whole episode of the podcast about this. What's interesting is that there is a kind of aesthetic of AI now and you will see there are some really incredible tattoos clearly done with AI.

There's lot of bad tattoos done with AI by tattoo artists. And I'm really no fan of it. I'm a very, quite military anti, actually. But one of the interesting things, for example, is that if you look at photorealistic tattooing ... So photorealistic tattooing, again, has its detractors. It's incredibly interesting to me as a technical feat because I've just got all traditional, which is just black lines and color in it.

I don't really understand how it even works. But photo realistic tattooing, obviously, up until very recently was limited by what the customer could bring a photo of, particularly if the artist was not particularly skilled in collaging or drawing photo realistically without direct reference, right?

What you see now is really big, very good, well-executed tattoos that have clearly been composed using AI because you can ask it to put photorealistic details into a, that you can give it into a composition that will work. Now, there's lots of really terrible AI tattoos and I don't even like the ones I'm talking about, but technically they're great tattoos.

And but, and of course, we live in an era of the AI generation, so of course, some people like that, and so some of their tattoos are gonna reflect that aesthetic. That seems like quite an obvious question, in a way, as a historian but not something that, for example, the anthropological account has given much weight to.

Ben: That seems fair. On your earlier point about not knowing where things come from and just observing that's perhaps to do with having a flat culture, I have a pet theory of change or pet theory, limited evidence, but some is that some things are almost becoming an emergent property of how people and things get together, because you have this with memes.

Yeah. So we don't really know how memes come about. Sometimes you have got a trace story, but- Yeah. ... often they seem three or four relatively weak stories- Yeah. ... which somehow morphed together and we've taken that as the narrative of how they come or even TikTok dancers. So that's another form of meme.

And sometimes we have an origin story, but sometimes when I look at them, it feels very weak and people don't really agree, but it seems to be an emergent property of these things, Yeah. ... come together.

Matt: I get I've had the, again, this has been something for a long time, and I think interestingly, one of the mistakes that popular culture and even some bits of academic culture have made about tattooing, which is to overdetermine that kind of thing, what does a certain image mean?

You'll see this a lot on TikTok of people saying "if you've got a spiderweb tattoo, it means you killed someone in prison- ... or if you've got a swallow, you cross the Atlantic or whatever." Someone that I know once who had a teardrop tattooed on his face was stopped at immigration to the United States on his way to go to, this was years and years ago, way before the Trump era, on a way to go to Disneyland on his honeymoon and the border guard basically said "Why haven't you declared your, incarceration history?"

Yeah. I know that having the tattoo, tattoo of a teardrop means you killed someone in prison or whatever it might be. And he was like, "No, I'm just a guy with a tattoo from England who thinks that it looks cool." And this is, again, the story of that chapter in Painted People. But yeah, that overdetermination of thinking about tattooing as non-arbitrary, what we might call in art history iconological, is a real mistake.

I also once got, this time how long ago it was because it was on Tumblr. I once got a Tumblr DM a long time ago from somebody that was, like, obsessed with One Direction, the boy band, and was asking me if Liam's tattoos meant he was really in love with Harry, and I had to go doesn't really work like that, not straightforwardly, at least.

But that's, but that, as you said, that's a mistake that people make, I think, are overdetermining origin or making, understanding this, again, what we might call an academic thinking on this topic extreme intentional theory, like this idea that you only communicate what the author intends.

And I don't, this just can't be true can't be true.

Ben: Wrong question.

Matt: Yeah.

Ben: Maybe coming to the last two or three questions, I thought I'd do a very short section and maybe, because I actually got a sense of where it would be of overrated, underrated. So I'll name something- ... And then you can tell me whether you think it's overrated, underrated.

But we have touched on most of these, but just to clarify but overrated, underrated, then AI. So I'm assuming this is overrated for you- Oh, over, yeah. ... terms of AI as a- way overrated AI as a tool- Yeah. ... is that in fact- Yeah, way

Matt: overrated. ...

Ben: even a little bit sus- not suspicious, but that yeah the output of it, particularly in the world with a two is, is definitely overrated.

Matt: Yeah, dangerous. Yeah. Again, that's, I listen to my podcast I've said about that, because I could learn about that for an hour. Overrated.

Ben: And then and then laser removal. So I got the sense that this was overrated as well, or rather the concept of that, I guess the core idea of it too is that it does last through time.

So m- maybe if you get one with the fact that you're going to remove it later, then that's maybe something else. I don't know. So laser removal, overrated, underrated.

Matt: So I think it's ... So I don't know. I'm somewhere in the middle of that. I think actually s- some people do ascribe a kind of moral weight to that phenomenon that you're talking about.

The idea that actually, getting a tattoo removed is somehow a bad thing. I think that the increasing improvements of lasers is actually a pretty good thing. If you've got a tattoo that's bad, if you've got a tattoo that you don't want anymore, if you have a tattoo, if you've just run out, as a friend of mine did run out of space, because she, her whole body was tattooed, like head to toe, and she just ran out of room wanting to get tattooed more.

So she got basically a whole bodysuit removed and is going over it with new stuff. She happens to know the tech- the se- laser technician, so I don't think she's paying full price for those sessions and the tattooers as well. But I think the technology's, it's really interesting. I think there's gonna, I think there's real interesting health implications and I think, I, there are some people, and I probably would include myself in this to some degree, actually who think that if tattoos became instantly or easily in cheaply removal, it would slightly detract from what makes them interesting and important in the first place.

I think I probably would count myself to some degree in that camp.

Ben: Okay. Interesting. So yeah, a bit more pots and takes than that. And then tattoos in museums, overrated or underrated?

Matt: Underrated I'm doing a big exhibition next year in collaboration with the National Museum of Wales about female tattoo artist Jesse Knight who's an incredible woman.

And I've worked very hard over the last five or six years. I did ... I collaborated on an exhibition at the Museum of London in 2017. I did a big touring exhibition between 2017 and 2020 2021, and then I'm doing this show next year at the National Museum of Wales. And I've worked very hard to get collections into museums and archives.

So Jesse's collection, I helped ... I convinced the Arts Council that it was a nationally important ar- art historical collection and was saved for the nation by the National Museum of Wales. And I'm the trustee of an archive called the Bishops Gate Institute which now has two major archives of queer tattoo history that I helped them acquire.

And I think it's important that, especially as actually loads of the big collectors who have big intact contingent collection, con- contiguous collections are starting to die off or disperse their collections, that we find ways to keep tattooing ephemeral history in institutional collections because once they're dispersed to private collections they disappear.

Private collectors are amazing. The reason that, that the history of Western Tattooing has been preserved as well as it has done, but it's very fr- we're in a very fragile moment where most of the big collectors are, coming, getting on in, in age, some have already died, and there's very diff- very difficult in the state of how museums are funded, how museums work to understand what's gonna happen to those collections-  in the next decade or so.

Ben: important to archive, as we said, in, in collect- collect, yeah.

Matt: Yeah, but I, interestingly, I think partly because of my work, but just in general, due to the kind of cultural changes that's been happening in the museum sector around the world, there is an increasing interest in, history be- beyond the kind of standard things that museums have tended to do, and tattooing has felt like something, that, that can attract, and it does work to attract new audiences.

I think it has to be done carefully and properly. But yeah, I think the challenges of actually preserving tattooed skin is a real issue, obviously and morally and ethically and legally increasingly complicated even those human remains that are tattooed that are in museums already. But it's an inter- it's an interesting time and an interesting problem and I think we're trying to find ways to get around these issues.

When I did my exhibition in Cornwall, we worked with a friend and went to Alice Snape who ran a tattoo magazine at the time to basically get tattooers in around the country. We did a hundred tattooers in Britain to tattoo rubber hands-

Ben: Wow. ...

Matt: to create an archival stylistic index, three-dimensional stylistic record of the kind of tattoos that were happening in Britain in 2017 that will now, that are now permanently part of the collection of the National Museum of Cornwall that hopefully will be there for some tattoo historian in a in a century or so to come to go back and have a look at those, three-dimensional objects.

So yeah, it's interesting. And of course now with digital preservation and things, there are ways of preserving this stuff in a way that hasn't been before.

Ben: Last one in this one, just because I listened to your recent podcast on this and was amazed would be eye tattoos, do you think-

Matt: Oh, yeah.

Ben: overrated, underrated.

Matt: Oh, over, overrated entirely, terrible idea. Even people I know that were early pioneers think that they were a terrible idea not really tattooing in a conventional sense. Yeah. Yeah, we did the whole episode about, about t- again, TikTok led trends for Irish tattooing and then subcultural te- tech trends for corneal tattooing, both of which strike me as just a terrible idea.

I've got bad enough eyes anyway- Yeah. ... I'm not gonna risk doing

Ben: Anything. I have to see, yeah, like Franco B- visceral, but it didn't make me queasy. Hearing about eye teas, I don't know whether something about the eye did actually make me feel a bit queasy-

Matt: All people are funny about eyes, aren't they?

Yeah. Yeah. I think what's interesting about that, again, the eye tattooing was something that there was a small group of people in the early 2000s, the same, literally in some cases, the same people that were doing the tongue splitting stuff, who really had a kind of very gonzo attitude that they were at the frontier of some really interesting corporeal hacking, which I find very interesting again, a topic for another day and very brave.

And those guys and gals were, like, they knew what they were doing in some senses, even though their risk reward ratios were calibrated- Yeah. ... in a particular way that I think is good. And there's a difference importantly in a lot of this between brave and reckless, they were brave, not reckless.

I think anyone roaring their eyes or towing anyone else's eyes these days is pretty reckless. And we talked about in the episode, some really egregious examples of that where people have blinded themselves and blinded others. It just doesn't seem like a good idea. And even people I know that have done it, as I said most, nearly all of them would agree that it's not a good idea.

Ben: Gotta know where you draw the line. Okay, last couple of questions. What current and future projects, anything you'd like to highlight? Obviously, you do your lecturing, you still curate, organize exhibitions, not sure if you're working on other book projects or anything, but anything you'd like to highlight for listeners?

Matt: Yeah, there's a couple of interesting things. I'm still trying to nail down the next big solo publication. I've got a couple of things in the fire. I wanna write more about this tattoo and Mr. Sebastian, who I talk about in Painted People and Tattoos, was involved in a really interesting court case called RV Brown in the late 80s, early 90s about gay men and sadomasochism.

So I wanna write a book about that. I'm doing a law degree in the service of trying to write more about that. I'm doing this exhibition with the Nationation of Wales as a consultant opening next year. I'm assisting a p- a a, on a big kind of coffee table anthology of global tattoo practices.

I'm not writing, but I'm assisting on. And with some colleagues in Japan, we're trying to do a kind of almost version of Painted People for Ja- Japan. So we're trying to do a kind of history of Japan told through the history of tattooing books, but that's in discussions at the moment and it requires some thought.

So I've always got more stuff on the go than I've got real time to do, but I'm always trying to keep up with things. There's, and there's lots of interesting smaller things happening as well. But those are the big ones. This summer's gonna be mainly working on the Jesse Knight exhibition that's gonna open in Cardiff in March 2027.

Ben: That sounds amazing. And the last question is do you have any advice for listeners? Thinking about this, perhaps the question I would ask is if you're interested in somebody's tattoos, what should you ask them? Or I guess you could also, we could also do people who are interested in having one.

Are there any reflections- ... that you might have? 'Cause there seem to be a lot of obvious questions that we probably shouldn't ask I think we mentioned a couple d- maybe don't ask-

Matt: Does it hurt?

Ben: Yeah. Does it hurt? What is it gonna look like in 20 years and like all of those obvious ones, but I'd be interested in, what's the question you would like to be asked.

And then maybe one of the people listening to this at night thinking "Oh, I have, I do have this impulse." Yeah. Where should they lead themselves with that impulse?

Matt: I think, so when I started out, and one, again, one of the reasons why I became so obsessed with tattooing anyway is that it was quite hard to find good tattoos to and by that technically and competently execute as much as anything else.

Like when I was in my late teens, the tattoos that I was seeing in tattoo magazines that I was importing from the United States didn't look anything like the tattoos that my mates were getting underage at the local toy shop in Essex. That's less true now. A quick kind of Instagram search will, if you're going to a reputable studio, we'll rev- they're really incredibly good, technically good tattoos in ev- in any, in every town in the country.

So if you want something small or a single tattoo you're really spoiled for choice now in a way that I wasn't before. I think a lot of people imagined, and this is partly, I think also one of the problems with AI, people think you have to bring the thing you want, like the image you want tattooed with you.

Most tattooers are, especially increasingly now themselves artists and are able to draw you something which will work to your brief. So I think the thing is to look for tattooers whose style you like and then just go and meet with them, go and have a, go and have a conversation with them and talk to them about the kind of thing you want, l- look at their portfolios online, look at look for heeled work, because I think a lot of people, particularly if you're interested in very small tattooing or very kind of complex tatting, a lot of the stuff on, online is photo edited these days.

So the best tattoo is all post healed work. So ask to see that. But really find a tattoo who you're comfortable with, whose work you, you're interested in and who who you wanna spend some time with because obviously, every second of every tattoo you get, you're gonna have to be sitting there with them so it's important to get towed by people you get on with.

In terms of asking questions about other people's tattoos, I think those, in a way, these questions are the same. When I was younger, I got groped, even as a kind of man I got groped by people in public. They'd come up and they'd pull my sleeves up or they'd start tugging at my collar.

That happens less now, at least to me. I'm sure there are people who can report this happening to them. But I think if you wanna talk to someone about their tattoos, I think they, I think just say, "Hey, your sales are really interesting or cool, the, I think the best question to ask is who did them," right?

Because that gets you into the kind of questions that I'm talking about, which is where are they based, what kind of styles do they do? What kind of person are they? How long ago did you get it so you can see how things heal, for example, I've got tattoos on my hands, you see online, they say… don't get tattoos in your hands because they'll fade.

These are, like, 20 years old and they're still more or less the same color they were made.

Ben: Yeah.

Matt: Yeah, those faded a bit. But I think that's the thing. And for me, this is also, to circle right back to the start, one of the key insights of my work, which is actually to think about the tattoo artist, because there are whole books, and certainly socio- sociology and criminology less anthropology, really but certainly

Oh, not a bit, but cer- certainly sociology of tattooing was r- and psychology of tattooing was really premised on the person with the tattoo, and I was like, "What about the tattoo artist, who have their portfolios, even back then, had their portfolios in printed form, now have Instagrams." They don't care about what the person's tattoo is, the person on whom the tattoo is, their story or their motivation, they just wanna present it as their interesting artwork.

And so I think thinking about the tattoo artists, their skill, their history, their interests, their style their art, their training artistically all of those things are gonna be interesting questions, or at least, if not questions, kind of facts about them which will help you as a customer find the tote you want, the thing we say, the thing we say in the two inches, go bold go big or go home, bold will hold. So if you want a little tiny tattoo, that's fine, but I'd always say get a big cool tattoo. Yeah.

Ben: Be cool. Oh, that sounds great. So first advice, don't grope anyone. Yeah, don't, yeah. That's

Matt: Just, that's just blanket advice.

Oh, yeah. Throw it here first, people.

Ben: Don't grope anyone.

Matt: Don't grab at people's clothes.

Ben: But the other one that's interesting is to ask about the artist. 

Matt: The artist. Yeah. Ask who did it.

Ben: Yeah. Great.

Matt: Yeah. And some people ... O- o- for small tattoos, people won't necessarily even remember because it was just a little Stevenier tattoo or something that took 50, 50 minutes or something.

And that's fine too. But certainly for bigger work, certainly for more elaborate work, I think the right question is always the first question's always who did that. Then you can ask, does it hurt in that part of the body, for example? And the answer is always yes, right? Of course, it hurts.

Some places are more painful than others. But the first question should always be, I think, who did it. And that's what, when I go to conventions, when I talk to tattooed people that I meet, that's always the first question I wanna know is who did that.

Ben: Great. That's amazing.

With that, Matt I will once again say you've written Painted People, get the book, and also the Untold History of a modern art. And with that, Matt, thank you very much.

Matt: Thanks so much, Benjamin. Before we finish, have you got any tattoos?

Ben: No, I don't. 

Matt: A Blank.

Ben: Yeah, I am blank and no body mods either. I have, yeah, I have been fascinated about it, but I haven't I've like a small impulse, but there's other lots and bits of fear which I've not met I've I haven't crossed the Rubicon yet, but-

Matt: Yeah, the first one's the hardest one. The first one's the hardest one, so that's good.

Ben: My art teacher always used to say that the first stroke is always the deepest.

Matt: Great. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Great questions. It's really wonderful.

Ben: Thank you.

Dan Wang: Silicon Valley Culture, London’s Building Crisis, and China’s Cultural Squeeze

Dan Wang joins Ben Yeoh for a conversation about what different societies are good at, what they neglect, and what that reveals about culture, ambition, and power. Starting with Silicon Valley, Dan argues that tech has become thinner-skinned and less funny as harder-edged founder culture has replaced its more playful countercultural roots. That narrowing shows up beyond humour: San Francisco still has legacy cultural institutions, but newer tech wealth is often far less willing to support the arts unless it can see a direct return.

“You have to have a sense of which rules to break. If you break no rules ever in life, you will absolutely get nowhere.”

From there, the discussion opens out into a broader comparison of California, London, and China. London, in Dan’s view, is almost Silicon Valley’s opposite: culturally rich, socially sparkling, and full of serious artistic life, yet held back by pessimism and a deep inability to build.

“The UK has the housing prices of California and the per capita income of Mississippi State.”

 Ben pushes on whether Britain could reverse that decline if it fixed planning, housing, and energy bottlenecks. China, meanwhile, is presented as a place of extraordinary physical achievement but increasingly constrained cultural production, where censorship, weaker reading habits, and even food delivery systems are flattening parts of public life.

“The discussions on AI seem to have quasi-religious tones. Either this is going to be utopia or this is going to plunge us all straight into hell.”

They also explore why AI debate has taken on a quasi-religious tone in California, with utopian promises on one side and apocalyptic fears on the other, while more immediate problems such as propaganda, low-quality content, energy supply, and permitting constraints receive less attention. The second half of the episode turns more personal and literary: neurodiversity in Silicon Valley, cadet training and discipline, opera, Shakespeare, Tom Stoppard, writing craft, and the underrated practice of retyping great prose or reading plays aloud with friends.

“The immigrants are best able to appreciate what works and what works badly in every particular culture.”

It is a wide-ranging conversation about how people think, what institutions reward, and why culture matters more than technocrats often admit. 

Summary contents, transcript and podcast links below. Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to pods. Video above or on Youtube.

Contents

• 00:21 Why Tech Lacks Humor

• 02:09 Silicon Valley Arts Funding

• 05:28 London Versus California

• 08:31 China Culture Censorship

• 12:56 Food Culture US China

• 18:58 AI Utopia Versus Doom

• 23:04 UK Building Energy Bottlenecks

• 30:58 Fixing UK Planning Housing

• 34:28 Neurodiversity In Silicon Valley

• 37:04 Cadets Discipline Rule Breaking

• 39:15 Modern Opera: Mozart. Verdi Debate

• 42:04 American Shakespeare Picks

• 45:31 Book Tour Reflections

• 48:09 Retyping Great Writers

• 52:56 Reading Plays Together

• 58:29 Playwrights And Prose

• 01:01:38 Overrated Underrated Round

• 01:10:21 Advice For Your Twenties

Transcript (lightly edited, transcribed by LLM AI, so mistakes are very possible)

Ben: Hey everyone, I'm super excited to be speaking to Dan Wang. Dan has written an excellent bestselling book on China and America called Breakneck.

Dan, welcome.

Dan: Great to be here.

Ben: In your recent annual letter, you suggest it's nearly as dangerous to joke about the top Silicon Valley venture capitalist, as is to joke about a Chinese CCP party leader.

Why does Silicon Valley have no humor? And did it ever?

Dan: at one point it probably had a little bit of a sense of countercultural humor. In the days of Steve Wozniak perhaps Steve Jobs, there were slightly playful act personalities back in the eighties up until the nineties.

And then these much harder core nerds took over. Does Bill Gates have much of a sense of humor? Does Mark Zuckerberg have much of a sense of humor? Perhaps so in private but certainly not in public. And so I think that there is this progressively thinner skin where every generation of founders loses a little bit of humor and funny points.

And then they also shave off a little bit more of their skin. And I think that is really well represented now by Elon Musk, who maybe it's not his fault now he's trolled to insanity three times a day before breakfast by all of these crazy people on the internet in a platform that he controls.

I think that this is also, perhaps he is a little bit funny. He certainly thinks of himself as being very funny, but I don't think that there are many sparkling personalities in the tech world such that it is pretty difficult. And I've tried this exercise going up to tech friends and asking who is the funniest founder out there?

It's a pretty thin list of names.

Ben: And they started off in the hippie world. I guess that wasn't necessarily the tech bro. So it is interesting that they do seem to have lost their sense of humor. Also Silicon Valley. And the CCPs seem to me to be less involved in cultural production.

Standup comedy would be one thing, but it also seems to be the case in art and music with some exceptions. So for instance, Patrick Collinson of Stripe fame seems to be very interested in beauty, but do you sense this too, of overall cultural production? And is this narrowness a big problem for Silicon Valley or not really?

Dan: San Francisco has a certain amount of elite culture. And so I am thinking about the art museums. I'm thinking about the opera and the ballet where the old rich, the old money in San Francisco has given fairly generously to the symphony, the opera et cetera. The arts, which makes it look quite a lot more like New York City.

And there is some new money that is also involved in some of these pretty traditional art forms. But generally speaking it seems like these. New billionaires that have been created over, let's say the past 10 years, have become significantly less interested in funding the arts.

Broadly speaking the movie theaters, the indie movie theaters have been closing down in San Francisco. Downtown is generally a mess. There's very little foot traffic. And even the art museums are not necessarily doing super well. And so when you combine all of these things and you have the fact that Silicon Valley billionaires are much more eager to fund the next generation of technology than anything else which has been one of the great factors of Silicon Valley success that you had, the semiconductor people funding, the telecom, people funding the internet, people funding.

Now the AI people. And so I think that has generally been pretty positive. But when creatives go up to billionaires and ask for money for the arts, the billionaires are often asking for a return as if arts could ever be productive. As if the arts could ever be profitable almost anywhere. And so you cannot possibly generate a real return on the arts, whereas it seems like the rich people in New York and LA are quite a lot more forgiving of the fact that if they give money to a documentary filmmaker, they'll never see a scent back of it.

Ben: I think it, Silicon Valley seems to understate that intangible return, the sort of cultural reputational value, social capital, or however you would put it. So do you think if you were to add a cultural institution in San Francisco around Silicon Valley, that would be a good idea and what would it be?

Dan: I'm not sure if I could add a new cultural center. I think it is. It's hard to figure out what the right format is. Could it be something in visual arts? Could it be something in the theater? Perhaps. But I think that something has to grow, probably out of the tech world out of something that the tech world really embraces.

And the challenge is that I don't think that many of these tech people want to go to the opera except as an affectation. Or really see very many plays because the play going audience in the US is generally fairly smaller. Even in somewhat larger cities like Boston or dc or la.

There is a scene, but it is quite a lot more difficult to find than in a place like London. So here's my case to you Ben, that if we had to find the polar opposite in terms of culture to Silicon Valley, is it not London? In Silicon Valley, you speak to a lot of engineers and they don't necessarily have many jokes to tell as I've established.

They don't have much culture that they want to go to in London. It is much easier to find to chat with people where those conversations sparkle. And the plays and the classical music and the visual arts are completely off the charts for even I think for most Americans, even perhaps for a lot of New Yorkers, the cultural scene in London is really amazing.

And whereas the weather in the Bay Area is pretty, pretty perfect the weather in London is by default, fairly gloomy. So isn't London the opposite end of the world from California?

Ben: I think it's, I think that's almost correct. So London or the UK as well, you've said you've argued it's very good at clever sounding industries.

But the offshoot of that is maybe we're overweighted in journalism, also accounting and legal, but we're also overweighted in theater arts, visual arts, music and all of that. So it makes us extremely happy. Culturally rich and actually there's a lot of soft power cultural events. So even nearby there's Glastonbury, you've got the tennis and the rowing and the sporting events and all of those kinds of things as well as that soft cultural power.

On the other hand, we don't build anymore. We've got poorer. Millionaires are still leaving us, although actually non millionaires are still wanting to come to the uk. So I think a lot of Chinese millionaires are leaving China and going all over the place, but some of them are still coming to the UK so that's interesting.

On the other hand, And it also means that I think London in some ways has a little bit like the US some fixable problems because some of the stuff which is around there is more fixable. Then it would seem, but I'm interested. So if San Francisco has maybe this cultural problem, it'd be interesting whether we think that's broadly in some spots of America, and I wonder whether China also has some of these cultural problems as well.

So I'm not sure whether you find, I think in your letter you did say Beijing and Singapore were, Beijing and San Francisco are a little bit similar in that respect, but whether you think that is also a problem of narrowness across a lot of their Chinese cities.

Dan: Yeah there's also something else that Californians have that Londoners and British people do not have, and that is optimism.

And so I think that there is a little bit of this sense. Even among Brits are the first people to say that, yeah, they're all very cynical. There's not that much hope for the future. I find it a little bit odd that there is just this self-professed pessimism gloom within the national culture.

And I think that is probably not a healthy trait when everybody kind of jokes about it. I think I am a little bit more constructive, at least in a lot of parts of culture, in the US relative to China. Chinese culture such as it is, has been very severely squeezed by the censorship apparatus.

Very few art house films anymore. Not that much by way of very popular groundbreaking fiction. That, there's a lot of really creative short form videos and they can AI slop with the best of them. I think in terms of broader culture, I think that China has not done super well, not much in terms of journalism because that has been the part that has been strangled the most.

And so maybe some people are really impressed by dancing robots on really big bridges. But I'm not sure if that is going to be the sort of culture that you and I are very much drawn to. Now, you and I are quite different, but I think that Chinese cultural production has been pretty disappointing.

And I think in general fewer and fewer people read and read books in China these days. That's my sense that the book sales are really falling. At least in the US the book sales have been holding steady over the last few years. Now a lot more people are reading. Romantic and fairy smut, which is fine and whatever.

But I think that it is still pretty striking that book sales are holding up in the US where they're falling in China. So at a first approximation, people are just reading far less in China these days.

Ben: And I think if China does end up stumbling, it will be because they've tried to engineer on the social side, all of their physical engineering, which you described very well in your book, has been so successful.

But the social political engineering has been such a disaster. And I know you're very critical of the one child policy, but reading it over, I wonder whether we understate how catastrophic that could be for the medium term in China. So it'll be interesting to see where that holds.

And I do think you're right that actually Brits in general are a little bit pessimistic for those who've been around, but those who come to London. Immigrants first, second, even third generation, actually remain optimistic. And this is the kind of interesting thing about where they've left and they think of all the great parts of London and the uk and just to really perplex that Brits don't really value that as much.

And I find this is a little bit in Americans as well, they don't quite appreciate what they have yet. The immigrants who come and say this is amazing. Why don't you, why don't you appreciate it? And I'm also immigrant

Dan: immigrants are the best people to assess. I think they're the best people to appreciate local cultures.

The left I think generally is too critical of cultures and the right are too critical of the immigrants, whereas the immigrants are best able to appreciate what works and what works badly in every particular culture. But I do find it a little bit sad.

Immigrants arrive in the UK feeling quite optimistic and maybe that effect persists. But generally the people, the culture around them is trying to drag down their mood or that just happens that most people are, have a bad mood or over the longer term, that feels a little bit sad to me.

Ben: Yeah, I completely agree. I do think London's a little bit of a special exception of, versus the rest of the uk. But I do think that is the general vibe and that it's

Dan: more optimistic or less optimistic.

Ben: It's more optimistic. But then London isn't, probably half of London even something like that has English as a second language or a co language.

It's every immigrant, either first or second generation. So perhaps it's a little bit different and it has such strong agglomeration effects in London, which you really don't see in any other cities, which actually is a real problem for the UK versus even Germany or France.

But particularly versus the us I was in Nashville not too long ago, and Nashville can just go and do their own thing. They're a, I think they were half a million people when I saw them last time, which was maybe 15 years ago. And now they're almost a million person city and growing with their own culture and vibe, and they can stand alone in that.

Whereas a place like Leeds can't even put in a tram or a metro system. And all the best people from Leeds, not quite all, but a lot of them end up in London. So that's one of the UK specific issues. On the other hand, the thing about the immigrants coming in is that means that the London food scene has got, amazingly better over the last 10, 20 years, even the last two or three. I was interested, do you think the differing food cultures coming back to the US and China have anything to explain about how similar or different the US and China are? Obviously China has got quite a monumental headstart on the US which I don't think America will ever close up.

But maybe it might, and I would be interested in what you think the most underrated US food is and whether food cultures explain anything around the US and China differences.

Dan: China has a monumental lead on food production. Perhaps the only other arrival to Chinese cuisine is Indian cuisine.

Now I still prefer Chinese over Indian because I find that there is more variety and better use of better ways to prepare vegetables than Indian cuisine. But I think that China is already at the peak of various ways to prepare, whether these are vegetables and greens or duck and rice and almost anything else.

We care to name the Chinese who have perfected it. Perhaps the only exception is alcohol. They don't integrate alcohol quite as well into the food, but. I think that the Chinese have represented some sort of perfection. On the other hand, if you are in a state of near perfection, it is really hard to grow beyond that.

And I think that there is a little bit of a sense among some foodies in China that food culture in China has gotten just a few percentage points worse over the last five, 10 years. There is just much greater emphasis on these central commissaries to produce food outside of restaurants and then ship it into restaurants for them to essentially reheat.

And that has grown because people value speed over taste. There is just much more of a takeout culture because it's super, super easy to have food delivery. There's something, there's some figures now that the number of people working in food delivery just part-time in China could be north of 200 million people is what I saw in the Wall Street Journal because the job market is so bad.

So what could be really amazing for getting food is not so good for the job market and perhaps not so good for the cuisine itself because people are just so optimized for making food work well inside a box and a container that could be delivered in 25 minutes or less. And as China's grown richer people are more interested in different varieties of foods.

But I think that there has also been quite a lot more standardization within the foods as more chains have taken off as well. And given that the US is so far behind China there's tremendous room to grow. And over the last two decades in the last few years, I think that all sorts of food in the US has grown better.

There is even more of a migration culture into the US where, you know. A lot more Nigerians settle around the Houston area. There's all sorts of different varieties of people bringing their cuisines to the US. I think that Americans are learning to eat better themselves.

They have greater demand for seafood or fruits and the US also has, the US perhaps has very good recreations of let's say a Parisian croissant or anything else. It is just a little bit hard to get to. And so I think that the US has this dynamic churn even though it might perhaps never quite converge to Chinese levels of perfection.

Ben: Yeah, I agree. And I would probably add to that, that I've seemed to sense China because of this. Influenced modern tradition I guess, and the food influencer, they are now slightly cooking to how it looks on the plate over taste. Yeah. So obviously presentation is something. And so that has also maybe taken a couple of points down because they are so good at engineering, like you say, this central planning of food delivery.

That means that maybe the speed and efficiency's gone up, but also at the cost of, at the cost of taste. I also think maybe the most underrated American food for me is barbecue. So they've got this huge barbecue tradition in lots of different ways of doing it. And that seems also to me obviously influenced, but quite quite American.

But do you have an underrated American food?

Dan: I like barbecue, but I think that the challenge with barbecue is that you really should not have it multiple times in a row. Yeah. And for me, that is one metric for thinking about food. I have no hesitation about having Indian food multiple days weeks in a row.

The same goes for many other types of cuisines. If I eat barbecue twice in two days, I think that would be a little bit too much for me. I think that. Probably overrated is Californian cuisine. There has been so much of this emphasis on Californian cuisine, which started with Alice Waters and all sorts of other big chefs in Northern California.

To me that is not very distinctive if we wanted to look at another sort of cuisine. I haven't spent much time in l Louisiana, but I would really like to eat much more in New Orleans which seems to have a very good local cuisine. But just generally, I think what I would bet on is, immigrant cuisines in the US whether that is, the Austin food scene getting quite a lot better, whether that is the Nigerian food scene in Houston. I think that Chinese cuisine still has room to grow. In the US there's a lot of excellent Taiwanese in the, let's say the LA area.

There are all sorts of fantastic Chinese in the flushing area in Cupertino even. I'm getting better and better Chinese food, which is not too far away from where I am at Stanford University. And so I think that there is always room for growth in the US so long as we are still welcoming of people.

Ben: Yeah. Okay. I should move on from food, which we could probably, we should do a long chat just on food. I think we could do two or three hours on that. But I have to mention ai, which is all over everything. And you even mentioned it in your latest letter, and it's interesting when I hear Silicon Valley people or maybe Americans in general they all seem to either talk about existential risk of losing jobs or everything going completely wrong.

Or they talk about a tech utopia where AI solves everything from climate to poverty to manufacturing. And there doesn't seem to be a middle road discussion and maybe not even that much thinking of the kind of economic bottlenecks and things like that. What do you make of this, and do you sense this as well and do you think central planners have any edge in AI because of the energy supply chain and Americans are just too much focused on these kinds of really strange tail risks on either side.

Dan: It is a very strange thing in California. The discussions on AI seem to have quasi-religious tones. Either this is going to be utopia or this is going to plunge us all straight into hell and the machines are going to torture our minds for eternity. And you know what, if we just get a scenario in which which will be amazing in which productivity growth TFP growth goes on for 5% five percentage points for a very long time, I think that would be a pretty positive scenario.

But, when we talk about AI safety in California essentially what that means is how do we stop the machine God from torturing us for eternity rather than, oh how are people engaging with this very strange information ecosystem in which there's gonna be. A lot more slop and perhaps a more adversarial propaganda that is going to turn us all insane.

That to me feels like a very tangible sort of product, that project that we perhaps should discuss and tackle and try to solve. But this might be doing to teenagers. And, but instead, we can only talk about the antichrist. And that feels very strange to me. But tell us about the tenure of AI discussions in London.

Obviously London is one of the big AI hubs in the world. How do folks in London talk about it? Is it more the California variety or in, is it the variety of how do we control the harms and increase TFP?

Ben: I guess there's a little bit of both of that Californian variety and there's a little bit of the harm piece, particularly the bias piece and a little bit we've got a little bit of regulation or start up in terms of regulation in terms of as of now, are there biases?

Is it just gonna do utilitarian decision making? How do we incorporate other forms of thinking in that? But I would say there's another strand which kind of leans towards what I see in Asia, all to do with energy infrastructure and supply chain infrastructure, which slightly crosses over with. The climate conversation, which obviously is really diminished in America for other reasons, but there is this kind of very self-interested saying we've got a real problem if we don't have a supply chain.

If we can't build, we don't have energy infrastructure, and if this is gen, just basically a way of turning energy into some form of intelligence how do we deal with that? Which is this kind of more European wide issue of the fact that we can't build. We can definitely see that China seems to have a headstart in that and America is forming.

So that's the other part which kind of fills in London a little bit. And maybe that's because London is a little bit more connected to old world economies that I guess everyone except the US is underweighted technology versus some of these old world things. And that particularly in the last two or three months has started to come as a conversation, as people go, oh, this bottleneck seems to be these data centers and the energy.

And then they go why can't we produce the energy? And it's not that we don't have the technology as we don't seem to have the permits. We don't seem to have the regulatory things. And they're going, why is that? And why can China build like the equivalent of all of us? Domestic energy in six months or something like that.

And America had taken seven years just to build 10% of that. So those are the questions which are starting to come up, which is intersectional with that AI question. But is coming up with that on the supply chain? So maybe that's somewhere where central planners might have an edge because of all of that?

Dan: Yeah. Generally I think every year China builds about as much as one or two UK's worth of total energy every single year. And I used to collect these figures more actively, but I think that's the rough pace at which they are going. And it, it should, we expect that London can hold on to AI leadership in the longer term if it is impossible to build much more power and really difficult to build transmission lines and really difficult to build data centers because we take a look at some of these headlines around the uk.

The FT has recently written about the fact that home building in London has essentially collapsed. And I wrote this line, which is not quite right, but roughly accurate that the UK has the housing prices of California and the per capita income of Mississippi State. And the third runway for Heath Row, which has been planned for about 20 years now.

Yes. Yeah. It's supposed to cost 30 billion pounds. And so if we can't get the basics right, how can the UK really hold on to leadership for a pretty important technology?

Ben: I think on a 20 to 30 year view, unless we fix a couple of those things leadership will definitely lag. Maybe it's okay being, I think the uk depending on how you score, it's something like.

Number 10 as a kind of power, but slipped. So 10 years ago you probably could have said it was number eight or number nine. And in aggregate it's maybe slipped a place or two, it slipped less than Italy, somewhere like South Korea. Which metric are you

Dan: looking at?

Ben: Which next? You do a blend of things like soft power, GDP education and some of these things.

And if you aggregate it, there's a soft slipping of the uk. Some of it has slipped, more cultural powers probably have probably held on. And so I would see that continuing. But on the flip side, we have got some tail optionality. I wouldn't put it as too high probability, but some and maybe things will still have to get worse to look better because for instance.

If the country changes its mind on things like mini nuclear power or also particularly onshore wind. So we've got the planning for wind, not the interconnections and not the final planning. And actually we've got mini nuclear power SMR technology through British industry. So this is a thing 'cause it can come through some of our engineering, so it won't feel like, oh, we have to rely on foreign technology.

That is possible because you could put mini nukes next to smaller data centers and London could keep up. I'm not sure it will go through with this, but there's been a nuclear power review with, puts it as a possibility. So you really rely on that coming down on the cross curve. Otherwise I Do

Dan: Do you think politically and in terms of permitting people will accept having these mini nuclear reactors spread throughout the country?

Ben: I would say at the moment it's unlikely, but not zero. So we'll have to see where it goes. But there's enough places which are maybe far enough away from cities that it's possible. And also the miniaturization is getting smaller. And there's an argument for building British, there's a couple of British companies which could do that.

So I wouldn't give it a high probability, but I would definitely say it's more than, it's more than zero. I think America's own reassuring attempts are quite Trixie. And so this is where, oh, this is where China might actually have a lead if some of their other things go there.

But there are possibilities.

Dan: Tell me more about a British optimistic case about how they may be able to, instead of slipping through these ranks, how does it regain its position?

Ben: Oh, okay. I guess you would have to have some political consensus. I guess there is a technocratic consensus.

So the number one thing is I think we would need to try and unblock planning both domestically by building buildings. Which we could do. So it's just a legal policy coordination problem. It's not a technological problem. So that's the upside. But we haven't been prepared to burn our political capital to do that yet.

So we shall see. And then on the infrastructure side as well, so this would be building power, putting data centers next to things. So those two things I think are plausible. I also think we might get a one-off. Bonus in our health system because of weight loss medicines, GLP ones coming through.

So they'll be generic in 2031. And we are now seeing there's a lot of second order cost to chronic illness of which the UK isn't quite as bad as America, but it's not brilliant. And that is actually gonna be billions of both first order and second order savings. And if we can use those savings a little bit better, both in terms of making our NHS better and putting a little bit more investment within that and on blocking some of these more pro-growth elements, I think that is actually a possible fix because we've got the capabilities to build more.

And we've all got possibilities of infrastructure and we've got an agglomeration effect of London. Some of our second cities might continue to suffer. So I'm not sure on the UK side whether that is true, but as Americans tell me, the fact that Manchester's only two hours away on, on the train or two, two and a half hours, or even driving, they're like, that's just a suburb in America.

We would, we would drive there. They don't understand why Brits don't drive to like these centers of excellence in that same sort of way. So because it is solvable by political coordination I think there is. And then because there's still a lot of cultural soft power, you've still got finance here, although it's maybe not quite as great as New York or maybe equally as great as New York.

And you've got all of these things where you're second best, maybe not the very best. Biotech, some technology and the like. That still means that you're gonna be a really important non-US hub. And because you're at such a low, because of some of these regulatory issues, you can turn it around.

So that's the optimistic case.

Dan: And are you optimistic about London's agglomeration effects? If millionaires are leaving, is it still going to be a growing city that is growing in population and wealth?

Ben: I'm a little bit more neutral on this. I probably was more optimistic and that has down rated somewhat is not quite as bad as what I think the media has said.

Some are definitely living in millionaire status. But what is also happening is that although they're leaving in terms of permanent domicile, they still come here for three to six months of the year or a few weeks anyway. And particularly actually, if you are in the a hundred millionaire status, who often don't stay in one place that long, they're still passing through London somewhere between four to 12 weeks a year, which actually is enough if you're getting all of these other things going through.

So maybe they come to an auction event, maybe they go to Henley or to. Children go to Glastonbury or they do some of these other things, or they strike a deal. And then if you've got these other things right, they only have to be here a couple of days to sign some kind of check or something like that.

And we've got huge capabilities like around Cambridge, Oxford, there's lots of fields, there's lots of empty fields, which we could build on very quickly if the regulations allowed us to do that. And Cambridge is still only a 40 to 50 minute train ride from central London.

And then that literally is a suburb of the US so you could build out that whole corridor with labs and tech and all that type of thing. And you can get the flying millionaires to visit and you're still getting. The Middle East, some Russia, some China who are still doing business in London and actually in preference to America at the moment because of the politics of the situation.

So there's some hope still for London. I haven't given up my optimism,

Dan: I wanna believe Ben. But let's get building in London started first and then we can build out the corridors. Like why has it that the home building has completely collapsed in London when it is such an urgent thing that we have more homes.

Ben: So the primary reason is our planning system works on a political veto. Actually, this goes back, this is gonna get a little bit boring and technocratic, but post-war 1948 when we put in the British planning system, and you can compare this to France and Germany, which are built more in kind of similar things or even the Nordics.

Their house building is still about double R rates and have always been higher than the British rates. But essentially what happens in France, Germany, even the Netherlands, is once you've passed the planning rules and everyone's got some sort of zoning and guidance, you basically are allowed to build, no one can stop you.

So that has crept forward in all of those nations. But essentially if you pass the zoning and you meet the pattern book or whatever you can build in the uk, not only has our regulations got a little bit quite a lot worse, as has Germany and France. But even once you've passed all the technocratic, tick boxes, you can be called in either by your local politicians, or even worse, even if your local politicians don't call you in or even if they pass it, it can be pulled in by central government. And so your builders can never have a hundred percent certainty. And that is the core is the big difference between actually the British system and all the other systems which are built more.

And I think they didn't realize in 1948 this would be the case when they wrote the law. Any government who really wanted to do this could rip up that planning law and rezone much like Germany, France, or the Nordic countries. So you wouldn't have to go and do it somewhere like Brazil does it, where you wouldn't have any sort of planning and some of that and you could at least jumpstart those rates.

Then there were other issues to do with capital and we had a big fire disaster, so some of our building regulations got tighter and we didn't give it capital. But all of that is actually secondary to the fact that we've got a political veto. The only other way you could do it is you could convince the people doing political vetoes, which are essentially local residents, that it's in their best interest.

In order to do that, you could pay them off. So there are some things like street zones and things like that, where if you give them more money to allow them to build, that is also a possibility. I actually think that's a little bit harder. Some people think that would be easier, but either of those two things could get building going again.

Dan: But the law has been there for a while and there's been like a change, which is that there's basically no new homes in London. I understand that there was this disastrous fire and maybe capital is getting tougher, do you think that, let's say two years from now, that number will be quite a lot higher than it is today of new housing starts

Ben: Not in two years, not on current trajectory.

There is some stuff actually clogged up with our current government, which might pass, in which case that might unclog. I'm currently not too optimistic about that, but potentially after that, if people really sense okay, new young people really can't live where they want to live. And old people are a little bit more willing to give up the fact that they need buildings next to them and that Vata power, again, not high probability, but certainly more than zero.

That's what I would say in that. Anyway, moving on from building, perhaps I'll move on to a couple of other softer things. I have a question here. So someone we're both keen on as a mentor, Tyler Cowen, he once interviewed Temple Grandin in part on the ideas on neurodiversity. And I tend to see some neurodiverse at the head of some big US companies, arguably Microsoft, arguably Tesla, arguably Palantir and a bunch of others.

So there seems to be the silicon subculture which embraces this positive nerd culture. Do you think that explains anything about the US or Silicon Valley, maybe vis-a-vis China or anything out that, or I'm interested whether neurodiversity might be a key unlock for America.

Dan: Yeah, certainly it does feel like there is a lot of neurodiversity in Silicon Valley and not just among these people who make it to the top in terms of these companies, but also just in the rank and file. I think that many more narrow neurodiverse people manage to thrive in the San Francisco Bay area relative to a place like Washington DC or Boston or London or New York City for that matter.

So there is a little bit more of a reward for neurodiversity or at least tolerance for it. But I'm not sure whether it could constitute an unlock. Maybe this has already been unlocked, maybe there are some ways in which the people are able to, people just know that Silicon Valley is a good place for them.

On the other hand, Perhaps the reason that the neurodiverse can't necessarily make it in these East coast cities like DC or New York, is that people generally don't tolerate the neurodiverse very well. Maybe there's a reason that we call Washington, DC Hollywood for ugly people.

We don't have to focus on the ugly, it is like Hollywood, which feels like a much more popular contest from high school. So if maybe most people are intolerant of Neurodiverse, and maybe this is part of the reason that Silicon Valley just isn't very funny, then who's gonna win the neurodiverse?

Throwing their culture out into the rest of America? Or is the rest of America going to engulf Silicon Valley? I'm not sure.

Ben: Yeah, I'm not sure. I guess that's maybe more of a lever for China, not necessarily on neurodiversity, but if they could just loosen up, like embrace some more of their subcultures overall, I think that would be potentially a really big unlock for them.

Obviously that's probably the nightmare of central planners to let loose what your population actually thinks. Maybe turning to a few more personal thoughts. I was interested to pick up that you were a cadet, an army cadet and quite a successful one. So I was wondering what did being a cadet of the year teach you when you were growing up?

Dan: When I was growing up in Canada, I was part of the Royal Canadian Army Cadets and it was a tremendous fun for me. And this is essentially just a big after school program. This is not that much different with Boy Scouts, although we were handed real rifles to do target practice with.

And so that part is a little bit more interesting. And I remember having to go to these drill camps on a formal army basis to run around at 6:00 AM and do a lot of pushups. And so I think that I was definitely more fit in those days than I am today. And I think what the army Cadets Program really taught me was first, you have to have a sense of which rules to break.

If you break no rules ever in life you will absolutely get nowhere if you break the wrong rules. You might be tried for treason or whatever it is. And so you have to have a sense of which rules to break and being in that sort of a formalized system in which rank matters and hierarchy matters, but also moving ahead matters.

I think it is a good thing to have to think about which is the room for creativity. Otherwise I think that it is really good to be part of the Cadets program, just to know, learn a little bit of discipline and I'll learn how to, focus on having a long-term program and figuring out what's important.

And all of these are banal lessons which most of us should not know as an adult. But I, when I say most, there are still many of us who have never properly internalized a lot of these lessons. And so it was a major part of growing up for me to figure out what is important, how do we set priorities and how do we actually work towards them.

Ben: I think SBF should definitely have done that, maybe more effective altruists, but yeah, if SBF done, that would be in better

Dan: shape

Ben: For sure. Much better shape. What do you make of the operas of Philip Glass? Can any modern opera get close to Mozart?

Dan: I guess the only opera of Philip Glass that I've seen on video not live was which is his interpretation of.

The Egyptian Pharaoh. And I've only seen licks and selections of that particular opera. Now has Mozart been superseded? I would argue yes. And I think the peak of opera is represented by Wagner and Verdi. The German great and the Italian Great.

I would say it's mostly downhill from there. And one can identify these perfect in Mozart, but perhaps Mozart is a little bit too now. I see. And perfect. And you have these superior tones of a lot of Mozart, but. But you see a little bit more in Verdi and Wagner is just this total emotional conviction in which they, there is no doubt that the protagonists are feeling as they do, whereas there are some of these climactic scenes in Mozart, which.

Don't feel quite mature. If I'm thinking about something like the marriage of Firo in which the count of ama viva confronts the Countess over allegations of infidelity. And this is a comic opera in which the count is a fearful that the Countess has hidden the page Carino in her closet, and he is trying to identify and find that page this climactic confrontation actually sounds not that he doesn't quite have the conviction in order to not make this as apocalyptic, as it could be.

Whereas there is no doubt if this was in this opera, was in Verdi's hands, the music would be quite a lot more dramatic than faintly comical. There are some things that Mozart could have done maybe a little bit better. I note that the marriage of Figueroa is the first of his three great Italian operas.

Next came Don Giovanni and then came Cozy Tuite. I think that one of these things I wonder it would be, would've been wonderful if Mozart was able to study a little bit more the techniques of Wagner and Verdi and how would he have revised the marriage of Figueroa based on that.

And one of these tragedies is that right before Mozart died for reasons unclear he was supposed to be composing an opera based on King Lear. Imagine how wonderful it could have been to a c one of the c king Lear in the hands of Mozart.

Ben: Yeah, that would've been brilliant. And I agree, Mozart, like perhaps would've been firm or more dramatic would've been really interesting. I think you wrote in your last letter that King Lear is the most Chinese of Shakespeare plays. So I was interested in that comment, but also what do you think then is the most American of Shakespeare plays

Dan: maybe a Midsummer Night's dream speaking to you from California but to be a little bit less glib about the potential drug use there?

Ben: Yeah.

Dan: What could be a very American Shakespeare play? Have you given some thought to this? I'm curious about your review. I

Ben: put it down to two, which may be a little bit more on the nose, but. Being potentially at this point in time Julius Caesar or Corey Elis. So either you've got this tension between like singly an elite or not.

And strong man politics or not. Maybe those are on the nose, but yeah, whimsical, maybe something like Matsu Knight's Dream. I guess you could also make some sort of call for the trading part with the Merchant of Venice or something like that. But as of now, I think he would maybe go for something like Caesar.

Dan: Yeah. It is quite interesting that Steve Bannon in one of his many lives produced this. Was it a Lanis movie that starred? I am Anthony Hopkins.

Ben: I didn't realize that. I'd have to look that up.

Dan: One of these major film adaptations was produced by Steve Bannon, and I believe that he was.

Really obsessed with COIs in particular. Take a look. Take a look with this Anthony Hopkins production. Now, could it be something like McBath? Could it be something like Othello, probably not this. These are not sufficiently political. These are two people. But if we take Tyler seriously, I think that Shakespeare's peak was Henri as a unit.

Now, could that, does that have a contemporary relevance for the US today?

Ben: Yeah, I guess if you take it as a unit for sure it has, for sure. It has some, I'm not sure it's an exact mapping. But yes.

Dan: That's what, and King Lear might have some contemporary relevance for the US as well, which one of the interpretations I have of King Lear is that violence can really spiral and there is no limit to political chaos.

You can have a political figure not really be aware of what he's doing. And then a lot of other people are simply bewildered at what's going on. At least in the case of King Lear. You have these two Dukes, the Duke of cornball, who is married to Reagan. And then the duke of Albany who's married to the other sister, not Cordelia.

And the Duke of Albany seems to be the good guy. He's just bewildered about what is going on and at the very, and come to a census where he has a Cornwall is just a kind of brutal and evil and completely ruthless. And there, there is no limit to the sort of political spiraling of a collapse.

I'm not sure that describes contemporary America right now, but it might, and that's part of the scary part.

Ben: Yeah, and I guess maybe that also shows the similarity between China and America, that actually maybe kingly is also an American play. And particularly you could think about the relationships between the old and young within kingly also could apply to America and actually the politicians in America particularly getting elderly as well across the spectrum.

So it's interesting to think about it from that point of view. Okay. I was also interested in coming off all the book tours and all the many amazing podcasts that you did over last year. Having done all of that, is there anything that you might have changed your mind about in terms of what you've written in the book?

Or maybe not completely change your mind about it, but maybe overweight or underweight compared to when you first rated it?

Dan: I've learned that people can be a lot more kind than I expected, and I've learned that people can be a lot more mean than I expected. There's all of these tanky who love to roast my ass on Twitter, and I think that it is just, there's all this misreading of what I say.

There's nothing an author can do about that. People might say that. Oh, I have forgotten to say that America has been ruled by lawyers forever, but I do say that in my very first chapter that the US used to be a little bit more of an engineering state, which is why I was able to build.

But people either forget to read that part or pretend that I never wrote it. And these are one of these things that authors everywhere have to deal with. And that is just one of these taxes of being of writing that there is just a lot of malicious, creative misinterpretation of one's work.

Now, I don't feel like I have it especially bad relative to a lot of other authors. And it is fine. It doesn't bother me that much. And I also have learned that there is a lot of great interest in this topic. That there are a lot of people who are, who enjoyed this book, who tell me that they enjoyed this book and who are rooting for my success.

And I think that is also a very heartening thing to have. I am surprised that people are still asking me to do podcasts. Generally now I am happy to do podcasts only with people I already know and are friends with like you, Ben. And so all of that is quite positive.

I'm curious for your feedback on my conversation with Tyler. Do you think it worked? What, what did work and what didn't work?

Ben: I thought it was great and I thought you both really enjoyed yourselves and obviously Tyler's got a really large audience, so you did have to cover some of the topics in the book again, I guess in the first half.

But for me, the sort of second half where you both talk about more personal and perhaps esoteric things maybe like this, our conversation here today where we touch obviously on China, but not for the main thing I thought was really interesting and I loved you challenging on, I still haven't heard his list of popes in order which should be, which are the best popes or which not 'cause you could imagine, you can imagine to do that, but I thought it was a very it was a very good conversation.

And I think you mentioned in that one as well as in some of your podcasts that I think maybe you still do this, that you type out. Sentences or write out sentences for writers you admire. So actually I did this with some of your own work recently this week to see what that feels like.

And it was actually pretty good, I noticed. Sometimes you have a good, very good way of using a kind of trilon, a series of three things within your sentences and when you use it, unfortunately chat has made this something that we don't see as much anymore. But you've got a very good use of M Dash generally, and actually when you write that in the pause, it's interesting.

I actually wrote this out by hand because it's not as it's not as emphatic as a, as a.in your sentence, but it is this little dash. I always think of Emily Dickinson within it, but it does punctuate another point. Normally a few words. And then again, I did think that technique was interesting.

I last generally for poems, like writing out poems is really interesting because of where you have the slashes and ate, but I hadn't done it for essays or nonfiction, and I read plays out aloud. I think that's quite interesting. But do you still type out writers that you admire and you still think it's a good technique?

Dan: Not so much anymore, but I keep a running scrapbook of my favorite phrases. And when I sometimes pick up a very nice turn of phrase and either a book or a magazine or wherever else, I paste that in. And every so often I looked through my scrapbook and it. Find some new forms of syntax that I want to play with.

I think it is good that you picked up my tricho as I myself am a Trinitarian, so anything that goes in threes would be really good. Have you tried the exercise of trying to re type rewrite play and has that what has that exercise given you insight into?

Ben: Yes. I haven't done it.

Greatly I've done it particularly on Harold Pinta work and also for some bits of waiting for Gado. And this is because both of them are very interesting, and this is where it started. Essentially pauses and silences, which are quite hard to judge. But in the writing out, and then also when you say it, it does give you this real sense of ah within that pause and what's it be?

And it gives you a stronger sense of the rhythm of language. So writing it, in fact, I would suggest if you're doing this, you actually write it out by hand as well. It tends to be a little bit slower for people versus typing. And then also to speak it, I think for essays and other things, probably not speaking it, but for plays, which will eventually be a vocal form as well, that is quite an interesting write up.

And so you, you are writing the dialogue and then you'll speak it. And it gives you the sense of rhythm and also the pausing. And another thing that shows you both in Pinta actually and in great playwriting overall is punctuation and the use of punctuation. And actually we have some unusual punctuations which have developed over the last few decades, but we use a slash quite a lot as well as hyphens and on and on dashes.

And also this is to try and get overlapping sounds and rhythms. And you only pick that up really by trying to write it or also speak it which you don't. Even just listening or seeing it on the written page isn't quite the same. I'm not sure 'cause I don't really hear music in the same way.

Maybe some people would have the same when they can read sheet music and then also have to play it out or practice it out. But there is something within that. And I also think it's interesting 'cause a lot of art students will, they will have a phase where you just copy what old masters did you, even if you're doing life drawing, you will start out with that to just see, okay, this is what drawing a Michelangelo kind of feels like.

Even though in very modern art, obviously we don't do that, but from that roots. 'cause it does give you that, that sense of feeling. So I think it is an interesting creative practice.

Dan: Yeah, I mean I think it is still a kind of an underrated practice. The reason that I started with sheet music is because I used to be very into reading music and holding a score as I listened to a string quartet or something.

I remembered copying out, I believe it was a Mahler symphony, just like writing a page or two of that out. And you really see what the choices a composer made when you do something like that. And when you retype a story, an article, whatever it is of another writer, you really become much more hyper aware of the choices that they make of particular punctuation or adjectives or syntax.

And you have to start thinking a little bit more about what might you do in that scenario? And that is actually a really good exercise. And it doesn't, it feels surprisingly underrated of a thing to just get into the minds of other people. So this kind of inspires me to ask you.

I've never played, but I haven't really been a big part of my life, although last year I attended I think just two plays. There's a David Henry Huang play on called Yellow Face, which I saw on Broadway. I also saw this new production of Oscar Wilde's importance of being Earnest on the West End, which had this very camp production starring Stephen Fry as Rael the starches of the Victorian matrix.

And I'm thinking of getting into plays more, but is there some sort of analogy where instead of writing out a play can we scare up, let's say two, three other friends to just read out all of these parts and just read these things out and for pleasure? Do you think that is actually a good exercise or that doesn't really work?

Ben: No, it's a really good exercise. Let's do it. So particularly in pandemic times, that is actually what a lot of playwrights and actors ended up doing. So you do it across your favorite plays but it is also the one of the very earliest ways of work shopping your own work is to get people to read it out.

I do these performance lectures, so you like standup. Sometimes you just have to test it with a live audience because you've got this interaction. But certainly simply just reading it out and also reading it out as the parts of others could be can be really good. And I'm sure amongst our group we'll have some to do that.

And then you can do it also. You can go and watch the production or something like that. But yeah, it's definitely worth doing.

Dan: So let's say that I am on holiday next week with three other friends who are as interested in plays as I am. Probably Shakespeare is not the right answer.

But is there some, I don't know, stopper play or something else in which we should just read out the parts to each other? Is there a good kind of starter play if none of us are very familiar with plays to try to have this sort of fun?

Ben: Ooh, I, so with just three, it's interesting that I might start with four, four

Dan: people total.

Ben: I might start with Harold Pinter 'cause they've got really interesting pauses and they're a little bit simpler. And it's also the birth of a lot of. Where Modern Drama goes, or Samuel Beckett, I think I would do Pinter. But actually the one that you maybe do is now, and also 'cause I think it might be his greatest play, although has more characters, I don't think it really matters would be Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, maybe start with Rosen Krantz and Gilden Stern, which is his most philosophical play and actually needs less dramatization for it and has fewer characters.

Rosen Ks and Goldstein are dead, has a slight Shakespeare connotation, not really. And then do Arcadia 'cause Arcadia you get this multilayered time effect where if you are reading it out. And it's really funny and I think it will probably still prove to be as great as play. Yeah, that's why I suggest, what's

Dan: the appeal of Arcadia?

Ben: So Arcadia Whoof. I think it is just a very good reflection of humanity and thinking overall, but also has concepts of time and quantum physics, also chaos. Also maybe the complexity, and then inexplicably inexplicable, of human life. But also has overtones of this reverse of are there patterns?

Are there things which reverberate through time? Are there these narratives that we feel? And he packages up that really well. So not only touches on chaos theory, complexity and quantum ness. So the cutting edge of some science thoughts, which are not fully captured, but also has these characterizations of narrative and pattern and then puts through some of these other obscure things like the patterns of English gardens and French gardens and these other things that humans are grappling with and shows and shows some of that through time.

So I just think it's really neatly wrapped up. And obviously as he's recently died, it's probably the moment of that. So that's why I would highlight that. But it's actually quite quick to do. So Pinta plays are probably, some of them are only for an hour and a half, so you can definitely do that over an evening with some tea.

Arcadia's a little bit longer. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern [are Dead] I think is only about an hour and a half as well [Ed: actually runs 2 hours]. So you could do that quite quickly.

Dan: Let's say that the chaos and quantum and time are just a little bit too philosophical and complex for a starter group. Is there an easier stopper to play?

Ben: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. It's okay. It is philosophical. Comedic as well. So in that sense it could actually be harder than Arcadia because Stoppard  is really good at explaining these concepts of chaos theory and butterfly flaps its wings and things like that. So in that sense, I don't think you will struggle whereas Rosenstein and Gilda and have some of these more philosophical overtones.

But structurally and character wise it is simpler. So that's potentially there, but you could just flick the first chapter or two, or sorry, scene or two. And that will give you a sense

Dan:What about Leopoldstadt ?

Ben: So I think I'll have to see it again. I liked it but I wondered whether the first showing may, or may not be definitive and I think maybe we need a little bit more time as it will prove to be his last great work, whether that will prove to be greater.

I still prefer some of the concepts on Arcadia. I. Your podcast dub obviously had a little bit more of a personal connotation. So I would like to, I would like to see it again. I should reread it actually to make that sense. Maybe actually there's a really good biography of him also by Ion e Lee, so maybe putting all of that together, it would give me a more complete sense.

I think it's interesting because playwrights in general, or I guess right in general, tend to lean a more complicated left, say I know it's more complicated than that, whereas Stoppard lent a more complicated and I would say that just because he was very interested in notions of freedom and liberalism because of where he of how he grew up.

So I think that makes it really interesting. And I do think playwriting is one of those things where even. If you're successful, say leftist or rightist. Most successful plays always have very strong and nuanced arguments arguing for the other side, whatever position you have. And in fact, for some of the greatest, you're not even sure within the play where the playwright's actual position might be.

So that's one of the reasons I still think performance is really interesting on that level. And reading it out you get to inhabit a character who might not think well, almost certainly doesn't think like yourself. And so though I think that is a really good way of inhabiting something else, which obviously fiction gives you performance, gives it to you in a very live manner which I think is one step up in importance.

Dan: Do playwrights tend to write distinctive pros in terms of essays? Can you tell who is a playwright based on their essays?

Ben: Oh, I don't know about that. Some playwrights have gone on to write. Quite interesting essays as well. I would have to think, my guess is maybe yes but I can't think offhand.

Maybe more interesting or equally as like some players, like Tom Stoppard famously wrote some very successful Hollywood stuff. Like I think Steven Spielberg used to ring Stop Pod up when he had a problem in his script and sometimes Stop Pod would say, I think that was fa, I can't remember what film it was some famous film and Stoppard said, no, I'm working on this small play.

And Spielberg says what? But this is a million dollar multi thingy hit. And Stoppard was like that, but I'm more interested in this. But I think that's quite interesting in some of those crossovers. But I have to think about the essay question. I'm not sure about that in terms of essayists.

Dan: I've been reading a little bit of this Auden collection of essays called The Dyer's Hand, and this is his only collected series of his essays. And I'm not sure that one can really tell that, oh, this is a poet. I don't know if when poets write essays in prose it, I'm not sure if it usually generally turns out necessarily very well.

I was also, I also read David Mamet's Was it Three Uses of the Knife? And I thought that was pretty good, but it didn't, I also didn't feel like I learned a ton from it. So maybe we should mostly stay in our lanes. But I am still curious if there is some sort of a distinctive training that they can bring into our pros Essay writing.

Ben: Yeah, I'm gonna think about that. I'm gonna, I'm gonna look at my bookshelf and see some of the essays, because I think of more of their memoirs, things like Edward Alby or something like that. But some of them have written some essays some have written quite interestingly about. Theater, although, and now I'm thinking about Peter Brooke and Empty Space, and that was a director writing about theater in general.

So I'm not, yeah, I'm not completely sure. Unanswered. Okay. Maybe we'll do a short last, final section and then some of the things that you're working on in any advice you have, but I guess in honor of Tyler Cowan, he doesn't do this so much anymore, but I thought we should do a short section of overrated, underrated in terms of the podcast.

There's some quick hits and some on some things so we can give this a go. Overrated or underrated US suburbs

Dan: correctly rated, I think correctly. I think that the suburban life, I think that this is, I recognize that this is the dream for a lot of families. Absolutely. To have a lot of space and then to be able to try a kids swimming pool. That's great. There is a lot more culinary diversity in suburbs because the rents tend to be cheaper.

And the people like Costco and those gigantic super stores. I like Costco myself. I don't mind visiting like once every two months or so to buy a lot of Kleenex tissues or something. I think that these things are quite fine. But let's not overdo our enthusiasm for them.

Ben: Yeah. Great for parents, I think. I still think they are too boring for teenagers, but Yes. I think Tyler likes the suburbs a lot though. Great. Hedge funds, overrated, underrated.

Dan: Overrated. These are compensation schemes masquerading as an asset class. And maybe you are more familiar with this data, but I remember reading a while ago that catch fund, quote unquote hedge fund performance has been pretty bad over the last couple of years.

They're not overperforming. And I think where the energy seems to be for a lot of smart people, they're going into these quant funds, and that seems to be where a lot of them are, where the action is. Hedge funds were never very well defined up until, after you moved on from long, short.

But so it feels like it's mostly a marketing category, right?

Ben: Very good for employees. Yeah. I'm not sure about it, I'm not sure about anyone else. Okay. We, I guess we briefly covered this, but I would say AI existential risk is overrated or underrated.

Dan: Maybe correctly rated may probably be overrated by all the Californians.

If we take this view that, okay maybe we will be tortured eternally in our minds by machine, God forever that seems pretty bad. I wouldn't like that. So maybe it's good that we have some people worrying about this. Maybe it is great that we have some people worrying about biotech security, but let's also worry about all of these other things, like what sorts of harms that this might be doing just to our minds every single day.

Ben: Yeah. I think that's the problem with a lot of these things. Yeah. The people really deep into it could probably do with thinking about some other things, but the people who've never thought about it at all could probably do with at least thinking about it a little bit. Okay. Overrated, underrated five year plans.

Dan: Overrated, the Chinese don't take this all that seriously anymore. Maybe the first two or three, five year plans were important. Right after the first the conclusion of the first five year plan felt that he was being excessively constrained and then he essentially did away with much of this concept.

So the gap between the first five year plan and the second five year plan, they didn't do this immediately afterwards because Mao hated them. I think that they are overrated. The Chinese have never paid that much attention to their own five year plans. I think something like this could be more centrally planned than high-speed rail?

High-speed rail arose in reaction to the global financial crisis, which was outside of the plan. So they built this enormous rail system without even planning for it. Yeah. And so that just shows, it's just this sort of aspirational marketing statement because they have to praise marks on his birthdays and sing the internationale to after the party congresses.

But this is actually not all that serious for, at least for the Chinese. Yeah. And if it's not that serious for the Communist Party, I can't imagine that being serious for anyone else.

Ben: Yeah. Mostly signaling. I think non-Chinese analysts are probably the people who read it the most. Okay.

Dan: It's worth reading.

It's an aspirational document.

Ben: Board games underrated or overrated. Yeah.

Dan: Correctly rated. I believe in the efficient market hypothesis. I think that most things are correctly rated. I

Ben: do.

Dan: And I like board games, but I have, it's been, I think, like years since it's really been part of my life.

I think a couple of board games can be great and perfect, but one doesn't need to keep learning new board games. And so in that sense it's not a very vital industry, just like opera. No, I think that it's good for some nerds. Maybe more people should hang out and play board games.

But people just should just find some way to be more social, whether that's to go to plays or to play some board games or just to go on dates more.

Ben: Yeah. I guess I mentioned it 'cause Silicon Valley doesn't have opera, but it does have more board games. But yeah, maybe correctly rated space exploration.

Underrated, overrated,

Dan: overrated. There's. Basically nothing out there within a reasonable timeframe. It's good to serve as an inspirational device. And I think that, maybe we should go find it. I think it is a scandal that there's very likely life within one of the moons of Jupiter and maybe of Saturn as well.

We're not even really trying that hard to go look for it. Now it's like right here within our solar system. What sorts of Moby Dicks lie within the moons of the Moon of Europa. So why don't we go, why don't we, why don't we go find Moby Dick?

Ben: Yeah. But then we've got a lot of problems on Earth as well, so yeah, I guess there's difficulties on that.

And last one then, venture capital. Do you think overall it's underrated or overrated?

Dan: Incorrectly rated. I think that it has definitely been a major factor in discovering the capital market ecosystem in general. What is venture capital exactly anymore? Maybe these are just marketing agencies with an insurance policy attached.

But I think that the general capital ecosystem has been pretty efficient in the US. But also people love to say that VCs don't work very hard, so maybe they also need to be working a little bit harder.

Ben: Yeah. Okay. That's very good. Yeah, I was interested in financial valuations and BC and the, in your letter you mentioned something you've talked about a little bit for looking at, for instance, the valuation of something like AppLovin, although it's actually fallen quite a lot since you wrote the letter. 

Dan: Really?

Ben: And you compare that to something like

Dan:, I hope it wasn't  because of me.

Ben: No it, there's been this whole revaluation of what software might mean, I think might even be down about 50% since you last wrote it. Wow. But it's still got a larger market cap than Xiaomi, although not by such an incredible amount or more, or something like BYD is maybe more well known for people in terms of EV makers.

But I was thinking that. When you think about it, maybe if you think about it purely in terms of capturing consumer surplus or wealth for the nation, certainly BYD and Xiaomi are doing better for their respective nations than Afin. But that's maybe what the financial shareholder equity people are looking at is that Apple vendor's better for the equity holders, but isn't adding so much more value to the United States.

And so that's part of this disconnect that we have with the financial market cap thing. And where is the actual value going? I think about this a lot in healthcare because actually within biopharma, a lot of the value actually goes into a. Into people, into patients who live longer and some value goes back to the biopharma, but not as much as you might have thought.

And certainly probably less than in, in tech companies. But that's partly because society demands that they might need to capture more of that value. And I think that's an interesting kind of tension between who, who is really getting the value from that.

What are you working on at the moment? Any current projects or any questions you are obsessed over?

Dan: There's two books on my shelf that I really want to read. One is a history of the Royal Navy, actually by a historian named NAM Rogers. It's called The Price of Victory.

This mega long history book and the Royal Navy has inspired a lot of excellent historians. Another is a novel:  Middle March. I'm deficient for being a bad California and not having read George Elliot and I'm also, I've also just picked up Dublin nurse. So I'm starting to read a little bit of the short stories of James' Choice, which are pretty charming and not as difficult as I imagined as something like Ulysses.

Ben: Great. And then the last question for a smart 20 something, deciding where to live and what to learn and what to do, what would be your advice for them?

Dan: I think that it is really important to be with ambitious people. I think that the default is to not be ambitious people. And certainly I've felt that my own ambition has ebbed as I've entered as I've crossed into the wrong side of 30.

Certainly, your ambition will get lower and lower, and so it is a good thing to have when you are younger. And this is, and it seems to me like some very ambitious people are in San Francisco as well as New York City. This is where I am a little bit more glum about London, where.

If the default national culture, it's just this cynicism and cleverness about people who are absent and then there it feels like a country in a national decline, even if London is delightful. I think that it is probably a good thing from a civilizational perspective not to be super cynical all of the time.

And so I have many friends in London. I love visiting. It is a superb city, but maybe it is also good to get some optimism and get some sun.

Ben: Yes. So raise your ambition and surround yourself with great people. I will make one further plea for London, although I do think we are a great museum like the rest of Europe.

Good to visit, but not. I think maybe so percentage wise, like we said, there is some doom and gloom here, but there are. Ambitious young people and then all were young, some are a little bit older and they are forming groups. So there's a big emergent venture cluster here. So this is Tyler Cowen’s venture philanthropy.

You've got British progress, you've got abundance for London. So you have got a cluster of young people who are there. There may be absolute numbers numbering in the hundreds and low thousands as opposed to tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. But I still think you do have it here, partly 'cause of where the agglomeration effects are.

But I do think surrounding yourself, the people you surround yourself with, you tend to go, I think, what's the quote? If you want to run faster, you run with the antelopes. So if you want to be a fast antelope, you run with them some quote like that. That's the idea. And I think that has a lot of truth to that.

Dan: Antelopes may have to run really fast because they're being chased by lions. So I've put more emphasis on the lion rather than the herd. And having a bit more of a sense of threat is important too. And I think it is really good to prepare these lists of ambitions… just in case we have to medevac them into California at some point if the gloom pervades too deeply into their hearts.

Ben: Yes. Although the California's aren't they all going to New Zealand instead? So maybe we'll come round full circle.

Dan: Okay. That's right. Just a global tour of the angles here.

Ben: Yeah. Great. With that, Dan, thank you very much.

Dan: Thank you very much. This was a lot of fun. I'm glad that I got to hear more of your thoughts, especially on place.

Salima Saxton: Cancer, ‘Bad Patient’ Honesty, Estrangement, and Writing Without Waiting

Salima Saxton on cancer, honesty, estrangement, and creative work in real life. Salima is Ben’s longtime friend, and they talk about her cancer diagnosis and what she calls an unexpected new “year of undoing”, a return to herself rather than a neat reinvention story.

“Be the sky, not the weather. The weather passes through.”

They discuss why the language of “brave” can feel wrong, why “What can I do?” often misses the mark, and what Salima means by being a “bad patient”.

The conversation turns to Salima’s Substack essay “Builder Dad” on estrangement and what outsiders routinely misunderstand.

“‘Blood is thicker than water’ is not advice I believe in.”

Salima also shares the hardest things to write in memoir: telling the whole truth, including the parts that do not flatter you.

The chat then touches on anti-heroine storytelling, friendship breakups, social media’s double edge, and what creative work looks like without romantic routines: write where you can, start small, “plod”, find mentors, and build community.

“There’s never a perfect moment. Start with something tiny and plod.”

A lighter finish includes an overrated/underrated game (champagne, dressing up, height, hustle culture, social media, coconut oil), Salima’s plan to audition again, and why dark humour matters when things get rough.

“A sense of humour is absolutely vital. You either laugh or you crack.”

Summary contents, transcript and podcast links below. Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to pods. Video above or on Youtube.

Contents

00:00 30-year friendship,  Himalayas, coconut oil
01:23 Cancer diagnosis and a new “year of undoing”
03:41 Returning to the 18-year-old self
05:07 Illness clarifies relationships, energy is finite
07:29 Why “brave” and “What can I do?” can land badly
09:02 “Bad patient”: performing “good” on an overstretched NHS ward
13:05 Honest female voices, dissonance, anti-heroine truth
15:28 “Builder Dad”, estrangement, and searching for father figures
17:57 What people get wrong about estrangement and friendship breakups
21:29 Hypervigilance and the hidden inner life
23:31 The hardest memoir scene: dad’s death and anger at mum
26:15 Writing about mum: respect, friction, truth
29:44 Childhood contradictions: hippie roots, no heating, love of glamour
30:37 No perfect routine: writing around kids, work, real life
33:09 Ditch the artist romance: money, time, and the true cost
35:00 Tiny wins: one sentence still counts
36:49 Bed writing, socks, and self-trickery
38:06 Overrated/underrated game
41:31 Social media love/hate and quiet communities
43:59 2026 as the “year of saying yes”, auditions, dark humour
46:37 Advice to creatives: start small, “plod”, mentors, community
50:15 Long friendships and gratitude

Transcript (lightly edited, transcribed by LLM AI, so mistakes are very possible)

Ben: Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Salima Saxton. Salima is a brilliant writer, performer, and podcaster herself. She has her memoir the Year of Undoing, which should be out in 2027. She's also my friend of 30 years or maybe more. Before we had mobile phones. She was my friend. She was my first friend I know to actually have had a mobile phone.

I've directed her for the London stage. I've climbed mountains to go and visit her and we still argue about who is taller. Salima welcome.

Salima: Thank you so much. Just to clarify one thing, I am certainly tall now I cannot believe we've been friends for 30 years. That's terrifying.

Ben: Says something about our age.

You are also gonna shrink more than me.

Salima: Oh God. You have to get that in, don't you? All I remember is that you arrived exhausted halfway up the Himalayas very early one morning when I was living there

Ben:  I carried coconut oil. Do you remember that? .

Salima: Yes. I remember that very clearly. [ ]

Salima: As a proper friend, someone who carries coconut oil halfway up the Himalayas. 

Ben: You are having a year of undoing or maybe more than in a year. What are you undoing this year and what are you trying to rebuild in its place and why are we undoing anything?

Salima: Oh, great. Just give me five questions in one, why don't you? So this year was unexpected, so this year I got quite unwell. I had a cancer diagnosis, which  has involved two massive surgeries and a lot of chemo. And I'm on the, I'm on the mend now, so I'm, very blessed in that it was caught in time and everything.

But I wasn't expecting this latest year of undoing the year of undoing that I write about in my memoir, which by the way, you are in was about changing our lives when we left London, when Carl's mental health had gone up in the air, is the politest way of putting it. And we changed our lives radically overnight.

One lesson I have learnt in these last few months with the further I'm doing and I'll get more into what I'm doing actually means in a minute, is not a midlife crisis. Is what? Which is what many people seem to think it means. Is that, I thought that year, that neat little memoir year would be it.

I romantically thought I would get through this year and then it's plain sailing until my hundredth birthday and I'll die in my sleep. The end. And what I have really learned over these last few months, and perhaps a little bit too late in my life, considering I'm in my late forties and I've known you for a hundred years, is that we're constant.

There's going to be. There. There 's that old saying, isn't there about, be the sky, don't be the weather. The weather just passes through, right? We're the sky. So we just have to be, we just have to remind ourselves that we are that big blue sky and that the weather will pass through no matter what.

And I think I've always thought that for other people, but I didn't include myself in that rather childishly. So I always assumed that, yeah, that can happen to other people, all these things, but it's not going to happen to me. And then it did.

Ben: And so are you rebuilding anything or We just undoing like a midlife crisis would've been easier.

That's like standard.

Salima: Yeah. Midlife is just buying a motorbike. Or I don't know. Yeah. Leaving your marriage or just like turning a table upside down. No, this is slower. This is me coming back to myself. This is me coming back to the 18-year-old that, like I feel like I lost that girl for many years.

And that girl who wasn't intimidated by Mark, I arrived at Cambridge, didn't I? State school kid. Wasn't intimidated by the fact that you all knew each other and you did, all of you knew each other and was just interested and you know how I was just curious and enthusiastic and pretty optimistic.

Still always worried about everything as you remember, but I just assumed everything would work out, and I think I lost that a bit over the years and got closer to catastrophizing about everything. You know this more than anybody.

Ben: I still thought you had it, have it even, although, I guess perhaps that's one of the things we're just growing older with all of these things is more, we get more baggage to catastrophize over.

We've got 30, 31 years of it.

Salima: Yeah.

Ben: Compared to when we were 17, 18. But I guess what's, is there any small or maybe weird detail from the last few weeks then, which is captured? How has your life changed from that in terms of capturing back the younger you?

Salima: This is gonna sound quite brutal, but I'm not gonna talk about the beauty of walking through the fields and living in the moment because I haven't found that has happened for me.

And I think for a lot of people when they have health scares, they fall in love with the everyday and domesticity and the normal stuff that hasn't happened for me. What has happened for me though is that I. I'm really aware, first of all, of who I want to talk to or spend any time with.

And you know this about me. I've collected people over the years where I've just hung on to friendships for sentimentality. But over this period, some people you included, have appeared for me and. And just being, and just speaking very truthfully and reminded me of who I was.

Other people have disappeared, have totally disintegrated in these people I wouldn't expect. And in observing all these new dynamics in my life, which I wasn't expecting over illness, I've really realized I've had a, I've got a real awareness of that. My energy is finite and I must only spend energy on the people that I really love or the people that I'm very energized by, or who really see me.

But I used to compromise a lot more. So I've done the opposite. I haven't become like that. Sanguine wise little owl over these last few months. As you know from reading some of my essays, I've become like a pretty cantankerous bad patient, but I see real beauty in that.

Yeah, for my own take.

Ben: I think there's actually really relatively few people who do this mindfulness thing. Maybe they write about it on Instagram occasionally, but that's probably fake, I reckon. You've got a handful of monks dying breed. Yes. And some mothers because I remember now, this is ages ago now, this is over 30.

This is over 30 years as well. When my dad had cancer, he got a bit annoyed when people used to say, oh, you're being brave. And he was like. It's just, there's no bravery stuff about it.

Salima: Yeah, exactly. I can't, there are certain words and phrases that I haven't been able to stand over the last few months.

Yeah, so definitely you are being brave. You are so courageous. You're and also, the, what the famous, what can I do, which I think is the worst question to ask anybody who is unwell, what can I do? Really puts the onus on that person. And I think when, whether you've just had a baby, whether you are unwell, whether you're going through divorce, like you just need people to turn up.

Just to call you or just to check in or just to send the thing or whatever that you haven't got space in your brain to know what to ask that person to do.

Ben: If you'd figured it out, you'd be doing it.

Salima: And I think it's a little bit of a get out of jail card for people because then they feel they can give themselves a pat on the back.

They've said to the person, what can I do? And so they've done their duty, but actually, yeah.

Ben:I don't even remember. In Cambridge one of my close friends Nadia died and it was a little bit like that. Although you're surrounded by 18 and 19 year olds, they don't really know how to react.

Anyway, although it hasn't changed that much in 30 years, 'cause most people don't come close to death for quite a long time. COVID changed that a little bit, but you've written this series, I guess this is your sort of second year titled bad patient. I'm interested, what does being a bad patient mean, mean to you?

'cause it isn't just really being cantankerous, it's like you say, being a little bit more you, but with these different elements to it. Why did you decide to write about being a bad patient and what, what does bad patient mean? Because actually it isn't being bad. It's bad. That sense of, again, when we were young, when bad was actually good.

Salima: Exactly. I suppose a bit of it is like. Because I didn't feel that I was being good enough, or grateful enough, because people told me early on, while I was lucky, it was lucky it's been found, it is lucky that we've, we were doing this. It's lucky this is happening, and I didn't really feel lucky at all, until very recently.

Since I've had, since it's out. There's a bit of me that feels lucky. Now I can see how that is. How I will feel more like that in six months time possibly. But back then I didn't. And also I gave the impression in my NHS ward that I was a very kind and kindly patient, but I wasn't, I was doing that in order to make sure the nurses took care of me.

So I knew I needed to be charming and kind and ask after their son and ask whatever, so that they came back and checked on me because I could see how overworked everybody was and I could see what they were fighting against. So I knew they had to remember me, remember my name, and they had to like me so bad.

Patient was also outta that, in that I was very consciously being good.

Ben: There is no altruism. Maybe we are kind to others, so others are kind to us.

Salima: I was buying biscuits for everybody and everything, but that again, that was to be like, oh, the lovely lady in bed one A, so that they come back and check on me because I could see what happened when you didn't behave.

I am, I had to have this nasal gastric tube inserted, which was horrendous. And another lady in the ward was arguing about why I should get this special window bed because that's like the best bed. And she was so rude about it. But then she effectively got punished because.

The matron came to see her and then like they weren't checking on her as much I could see, so I could really see things, really see, that's no one's fault. It's just natural

Ben: They're all overworked already, right? So

Salima: They're all exhausted. They don't get paid for their lunch break.

They don't get paid for their breaks. As I met incredible gems there, I was also working the system. So I was really aware from very early on there was a real dichotomy between who I was perceived to be and who I actually was.

Ben: But I think maybe you're just being honest about it. I think the majority of us, most of the time are like that and there's only small glimpses of when I think we're feeling particularly 150% good, then we can have that excess and it spills over into the spills over into the world.

Salima: Yeah, because also I was humoring people all the time, but then that's how I got an extra blanket, or that's how I got a bit longer with the consultant or whatever.

And also look, I'm, I was very lucky in that I had a combination of private healthcare and NHS healthcare for all of this. So like straddling the two systems and and obviously I'm incredibly privileged to be in that situation, but, but

Ben: You're also really unlucky that you had to be in that situation at  all.

Salima: Yeah, and also, but just like how much work, how much emotional work I had to do whilst in the NHS, whereas that didn't exist for me within the private sector. I didn't have to do any of that work.

Ben: Do you think there's do you think people are more receptive now to this, I guess honest writing about how things really are, not how we would want them to be or how we wish them to be, but how things really are.

Salima:  I think so. Particularly from women. I think they might have received it from men, but I think it's a much, it's much newer that we'll receive this from. A female voice.

Ben: The lived experience of women. I guess you, you explored this on your own podcast that it's been so undertold for so long. We don't have those boluses of stories and they're not what they tell us in the movies or the books, or at least the bestselling books.

It's actually the range of experience and what you can feel is just it's a myriad of everything. Yes. And that hasn't really been expressed.

Salima: And also that there's going to be a constant dissonance between what you are feeling. There, the heroine doesn't exist.

Like the, he, the heroine is made up of the villain and the heroine always you like for all of us. And I think we've only been ready to hear that. From Women's Voices relatively recently. So I, and for me, is really the cornerstone of my writing. When I'm writing memoir or fiction, I'm just finished I'm just finishing a novel as well about a kind of anti heroine, and that's really important for me because I cannot stand it. That's part of the reason that we get on so well because you are so blunt, cannot stand people, what's the word, Ben? When someone's not ready.

Ben: They're pretending

Salima: They just pretend. That's as simple as that, right?

Yeah. You can dress it up. Not so ways, but like I know if I ask you a question, you'll answer me truthfully, even if I don't like hearing the answer.

Ben: Yes.

Salima: That's right, that's why I married Carl. Carl's similar, right? In that he'll, that's, I always say that's part of the reason I married him, because he'll say things to me and I don't like the answer, but.

Answer, then I feel safe. But I think that is a direct result of having been raised by someone like my dad, where I never knew where I was.

Ben: Yeah. Never got the answer. That's a good segue. You wrote this long essay memoir piece, build a Dad.

Salima: Yes.

Ben: I'm interested in what you were trying to understand in that piece, writing from your perspective?

Salima: I was estranged from my dad for the last 10 years. I chose to be estranged from him. He was a kind of alcoholic, he was an alcoholic. And I had a very difficult relationship with him. Not really, I think anymore because of the alcoholism, but because of who he was, which was an overused term at the moment.

But, a kind of narcissistic self engrossed. Artist who didn't really, beco didn't become the artist that he thought he deserved, he should be, and was very angry and bitter really, and bored. He was a very bored man. And he wasn't really cut out for fatherhood. I can see that really clearly now.

So builder dad has fed really into my memoir. I write a lot about it because in the year of undoing, my dad also died and left explicit instructions for me not to be invited to his funeral, and he cut me out of his will. So it, my relationship with my dad is ongoing, even though he's dead. And

Builder dad. That Substack piece was really about the fact that I have looked around for years. Other examples of father figures, not necessarily even fathers in the traditional sense, but people who are playing that kind of role and were always seeking edges of that even…. Don't you remember that very much older boyfriend that I had?

Like that was definitely part of it, seeking that kind of like male elder reassurance, and trying to work out for me what a father was because I didn't really know what a father was meant to be. Luckily I've married somebody who I think is an amazing father.

And he's had to work it out himself 'cause he wasn't fathered in a traditional sense either. But I am quite obsessed by the ideas of motherhood and fatherhood and what they mean to all of us, and, and what we all come from. They're dominant themes in my life.

Ben: And what do you think outsiders misunderstand about what estrangement is or what estrangement is in, in your experience, although I guess this was two ways you chose first, and then in some ways he was making a point in his will. But is there anything you think on the outside looking in, it's just oh, this, these are the pieces that you just really don't get?

Salima: Oh yes. And I've had many people's opinions over the years. Normally really well-meaning, but just not understanding, so the most obvious. People literally have quoted blood is thicker than water at me so many times, which I don't believe. I don't believe in that. And many people ask me, what will happen to you when your father dies if you don't?

Resolve it. But look for me, and I can't speak for other people, I would say that my father died many years before he actually died. So there wasn't a big moment when he actually passed away, and I heard that he had done. I didn't disintegrate into some big thing and if only, I felt really sad.

He had just never been able to be the father that I had wanted. But I had been grieving for my dad probably since I was a teenager, to be honest. So I think that's an odd thing to hold above someone's head. It's like holding someone's finger to a flame, but what if they die?

What if they die? I don't believe in mending, fractured and often harmful relationships. Just because somebody might die. That makes absolutely no sense to me.

Ben: And I guess this points to the fact that the family we choose, or the friends we choose in some ways then are more important and could be more painful if friend, I've seen this now, getting a little bit older that I've seen some friendships have broken up, and I look at that and say, actually that's more painful than other things.

Salima: I've had friendships dissolve and it's been really painful. I was very good friends with somebody and. I think I kind of misunderstood that friendship because we became friends when our kids were tiny. And she was a school mom. And I, somebody once said that when they saw us together, it always looked like we were having a party.

Wherever we were, we were always laughing and things. And that friendship, she walked away from that friendship. It wasn't me at all, and I was heartbroken. I was completely heartbroken. I never quite understood it. Nothing there, there wasn't a big argument or anything, and who knows what it would be from her point of view, but I was really blindsided by it.

And, but also look, when you've got tiny kids, I had three tiny kids who knew where my brain was at that point. But yeah. But coming back to people misunderstanding, estrangement, everyone's obsessed at the moment about Brooklyn Beckham.

Ben: Yes.

Salima: And sure, okay, writing on your Instagram stories. And it's all very public.

But even though that's all he really understands, isn't it? That's how he's grown. That's his language. He doesn't understand privacy and handwritten letters. Obviously, that's not how the Beckhams have brought him up. But who knows, who knows? And I think that's the main thing that I would say to anybody who judges quite harshly about estrangement, unless you were there. It's very difficult to know what's happened in the

Ben: Yeah. Understanding that in the li well, understanding one's own inner life is hard enough, right? Like, how am I actually feeling, let alone other people's inner lives?

Salima: And also, Ben, if you think about it, you were around, like you were around when I was 18, 19.

And you wouldn't, I didn't talk about it then. So you wouldn't have seen me, we had that nice house, didn't we? It all looked quite pretty. I dunno whether I did ever mention anything, but I think I kept it all fairly,

Ben: not until we are flatmates in our twenties, then it,

Salima: right exactly.

You do it, we had that lovely thatched house and I had piano lessons and then I went to Cambridge and I was head girl and it all looked very beautiful and in control. But things were very out of control actually. Things were really out of control. That's partly why I loved school so much.

I would never have shown that to people wouldn't have believed it at the

Ben: time. Yeah. Even if you did, it would be like, this is the thing about some nonfiction is if you wrote it as fiction, nowadays, people don't believe you.

Salima: Yeah.

Ben: It has to be written as well, no, this is my inner life. This is how this

Salima: course, what, and also look, I think with alcoholism as well, it was all kinds of things. I became a very hypervigilant kind of kid because I could just sense things turning in the evening or I knew and things wouldn't go the wrong way at home when, when it was all gonna explode. And then everything would be fine in the morning.

Nobody would talk about it. Like I remember going to a birthday party when I was about 10 and my dad was really drunk and I was very upset. And my mom just said, put on a party dress. Here's the present. And we just left. And she called me to blow my nose. And then I went to the party and I was completely fine at the party and I remember enjoying it.

There was a magician, I remember really loving it, but I was very used to, from quite early on, just going, okay, that's happened. Blow your nose. Don't tell anybody. Get on with it.

Ben: Wow. So what's your story? E either bit of the story, bad patient or build a dad or anything which you've most resisted writing down, but I guess have written down or there's something which is resisting at the moment and you think, oh, maybe I'm, it's not even gonna make it in.

Salima: The hardest thing to write about has been the day of my dad's death, not because of the news, but because of my behavior with my mother on that day. So mothers,

Ben: mothers do it to us, right?

Salima: They do. So my mom, although she's been divorced by that point for nearly 30 years, was catatonic with grief and I lost my temper.

And behaved really badly. You'll have to read my memoir to see just how badly, but I just

Ben: but you did manage to write about it then if you're not gonna

Salima: leave it out. No, I'm not gonna leave it out because I think it's a really important thing for people to read about. If you're going to write about estrangement and you're going to write about difficult dads that I think you are owed, you owe the readers like all of it.

Yeah. 'cause if anyone's reading this that has any overlaps with this kind of thing, I want them to know that they're not imagining it or by themselves. I think that's what I felt for years. Oh, I'm making this up slightly. Yeah. Drunks drink whiskey for breakfast and they beat their children, don't they?

Black and bloom. But when it's emotional stuff, like I hit my dad never hit me. When he was very drunk, I pushed my dad. I hit my dad as a teenager in a very out of control way. And know, we hear about the extremes, don't we? We hear about, yeah.

You are beat in black and blue by a parent, or you hear about the other extreme, the kind of like the best of the best parents, but this kind of murky middle, which left me. Pretty I was always worried really as a kid, and you knew me from the tail end of that, where I was so happy to be at Cambridge and be meeting people and doing all these exciting things.

But

Ben: and as part of your point that it's. I guess it's not that it's okay to behave badly, but that it happens and it happens. I'm guessing you're still talking to your mom and life also goes on and we have to admit that these things happen. And put it where it is and potentially learn from it, or at least acknowledge it and see what happens in the future.

Salima: And also look, you know my mom, mommy has had a very difficult life. She came here at 16 from Pakistan Scholarship to Guda and Lama. Amazing, but a fish outta water, obviously. Then even had, got, had an arranged marriage, then left that it was an abusive relationship.

Then married my father and was with my father for years and years. Living in the middle of the eighties British countryside, where she really was like the only South Asian for a hundred miles and everyone thought she ran like the local Indian takeaway. And my mom. I owe my mom a lot.

'cause my mom kept everything going. Always. And you know what she's strong at. She's got some overlap with your mom, hasn't she? Actually. In terms of what they demand of us, what they expect from us. But it hasn't always been easy with my mom, you know.

She's not an easy woman. But I also admire my mother and I do respect my mother. But we don't always get on.

Ben: Is your mother as present in the year of undoing as your father or,

Salima: Yes, she is. Although that's the interesting thing about writing a memoir, isn't it? Because I also feel that I want.

Look after my mother.

Ben: Yeah.

Salima: She's alive.

Ben: She's gonna read it. Probably.

Salima: Yeah. Although I've told her not to read it because of my dad and everything, but no, I, because no more, not because she's gonna read it or even, because even if she wasn't alive, I would feel the same about my mom actually, because for all the difficulties and complications my mom has.

Really, I, I know. My mom would always do anything for me or my sister. We might not agree with it. We might not agree with oh, the way she thinks about it, she is, she's a very strong, a strong woman who's also pretty blunt, yeah, I'm truthful about my mom in the year of undoing, and we went to live with my mom for the first few weeks when we left London, and that wasn't always easy, particularly she's got a much more traditional Pakistani way of like bringing up children compared to my EZ fair, more relaxed way of being with kids.

So that wasn't easy, but

Ben: I still remember. Your mum is teaching me how when you put things in a bin, you can eke out a little bit more volume depending on the way that you turn around your cartons. And I think about that sometimes when I reverse it goes, oh, you know what? That's crazy. Silly was who was, mum was the one who advocated this way of bin filling.

So there you have it. I don't think that says anything about anything, but I do remember it

Salima: also. But you know what, my, my parents were, before it was fashionable, like in the eighties and nineties when all my friends had immaculate Kneehigh white socks and like fabric conditioned, school uniforms.

My mother knitted my brown socks. We lived on dhal and rice and stew. Everything was composted. She didn't believe in heating, so being a child around my parents wasn't the most cozy experience. We lived in this massive house that we couldn't really afford, so we only heated half of it. And the other half was just absolutely, I like, icy basically.

And my dad would run over pheasants and then pluck them at the kitchen table. They were like hippies in many ways.

Ben: Does that make the book? 'cause I guess that's not the year, but that's the background.

Salima: Yeah, it does because it also explains how. Why I am me and what, what creates the contradictions within me.

Like I am more material minded. Partly because of that, because there's a lot of discomfort

Ben: Yeah.

Salima: In childhood. As I like glamor.

Ben: Yeah. We often go the other way, don't we?

Salima: Yeah. So I like the aesthetic is really important to me, I think because my house was just full of books.

Ben: Yeah. Still filling your teenage hole.

Salima: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Ben: And as in your creative process then, are you more of a procrastinator or do you get it all out? Are you a morning writer? Evening writer, 3:00 AM writer. Anything goes. And from your performing stuff, has that informed how your creative process works?

Do you have things or rituals you go to? What? What is your writing process?

Salima: I have no writing process. I, and I think that is informed from being an actor. So I'm really aware that like sometimes you're just not in the mood and sometimes it's just impossible. But you've gotta get, I don't know, 2000 words done by the end of the day.

So maybe we start at midnight or maybe I'll write it in the morning or maybe I like it, so I try to be quite instinctual about it. And obviously I've got three kids. I'm so busy with my family, home life, so I'm not, like I'm not a single white man who can just go to my office. And write for.

I don't… that's nothing to do with being white. 

Ben:  But sometimes I was thinking about this famous sculptor, about a hundred years ago. Giacometti was really famous, but he had essentially two women running after him. So he could do sculpture 12 hours a day.

They would literally feed him and make everything, everything goes, and it can work fine and no. Consensus genius art, but the enablement to have that genius art done to dedicate yourself to art is a strain on everything else around your life. Yeah. And that is really interesting how many artists are like that.

I wouldn't like to say it all because it isn't always like that, but it is interesting when you look at those that there is a cost to all of that.

Salima: And also I'm not willing to sacrifice family life for that. So I could be more boundaried and say to the kids, when you come home from school, mommy's in her office.

I don't know. I have Carl's office. Don't disturb me until 5:00 PM or whatever. But I don't, I just, that for me just doesn't feel right. And I've always wished, like even when I wrote a novel that didn't get published, but they got me a literary agent. When I was writing that, the kids were tiny, so I would just write, I'd write it even in the car at pickup, I would just have my laptop.

I'd get there half an hour early and I'd just do an extra half an hour of cafe bits and pieces like that, so I think also. There's a romance that people attach to writers, to actors, to artists, but I think we need to really get rid of that romance because I think it's quite damaging for a lot of people.

Ben: It's really rare. There's some who have that in them, like Giacometti, but it is really rare.

Salima: I was gonna say, let's say you're a trust fund baby, and you've. You don't have to think about money or anything like that, then of course, great. And then you can go and writers retreats and you can write your novel halfway up, a mountain on a beach, Bali, whatever.

But the reality is 99% of people that I know who are doing anything creative are, if not struggling, are very aware of finances, right? Because increasingly. These kinds of lines of work don't pay huge amounts. And you have to

Ben: fit it in with the rest of your life,

Salima: fit it in. And also if you want other elements of your life, do you want a long term partner?

Do you want children? Maybe not, but if you do want those other things, you also take up time and energy. Yeah. And some days, your 16-year-old comes home, she says, pulls up from her boyfriend. You can't just disappear. And go back to, you've gotta just sit on her bed with her for that.

That's the end of your day. There's no way around that.

Ben: What's the best advice you have that you've subsequently just ignored?

Salima: The best advice I've had, but then I've then ignored why is it the best advice?

Ben: It doesn't need to be best, but there's some, like I'm I'm always ignoring this whole, oh, you've got a show, not tell.

Salima: oh, I see.

Ben: Let's just ignore that, or I don't know. It could just be advice. Yeah. It might be more funnier because it's like classic advice and then actually it's not reality.

Salima: So I think you make a good point about the routine thing. In that, I would say, let's just blast out to smithereens, because you're never gonna start, if you are a normal-ish person, that's just never you.

There's never gonna be the perfect moment and the perfect space to do it. Yeah. But often people write their first novel whilst they're in the office, and then they get, eventually get a book deal, and then they realize maybe they can write full-time or whatever, and that's like the lottery winning writer, so yeah.

Ben: I ignore sometimes the thousand words a day thing in the sense that sometimes I just do one sentence and that's you know what? That's a win. I've managed to even get a sentence like, I was just sitting on the loo and I thought of one sentence. Yes, I'll take that, that

Salima: I've just noticed something down.

Or I just know I noted down something about or what's it called that the Japanese way of repairing things with gold.

Ben: Yes. [Kintsugi]... Something

Salima: like that. Exactly. I just noted something about it the other day and I was like, okay, yeah. And then I will write more on that, but I haven't …

Ben: One day….

Salima: I've just added it to my manuscript and I might expand on it or I might not, who knows?

Maybe that just that thought in a week's time could end up taking you somewhere interesting. So I think that's it. Like not waiting for the perfect. Moment to start anything and also remembering as well, much like we remember as actors, right? Or directors that like when you're in the rehearsal space or when you're in your early drafts, just get something down or just do something.

Just play with some words. Pick up the script that's already written or write your own thing and it can be absolute gobbledy gook, but then that gobbledy go will become something. 

Ben:. Do you have any rituals or quirky rituals or even quirky rituals? Just generally. I still remember, so this is the coconut oil.

Again, it was coconut oil with green socks. Like I don't remember why I remember the green socks, but there was a for skin moisturizing. But do you do anything? 

Salima: These are socks your wife actually sent me. They're very cozy pink socks I live in. I still have to convince myself that I'm not working. I still have to trick… Do you remember when I was revising finals and things like, I was very much like never in the library. Like handles buy cookies, like incense has been in my bed. Like I still write often in my bed under a duvet on the sofa. I've always made it very nice.

So I'm like, oh, I'm just opening my laptop and Oh, I just happen to be writing. Yeah. It would be disastrous going to a library every day.

Ben: Then it feels like work.

Salima: I had to kid myself.

Ben: I remember advising, spending a lot of time just sleeping.

Salima: But you got that kind of super brain for those kinds of things you didn't need, you didn't need to do what the rest of us needed to do…

Ben: Let's do, I dunno if you played this little game, we'll just do, it's, we do overrated or underrated. So I give you a thing and you say whether you think this is overrated or underrated or maybe even correctly rated. And you can just say, you can just say why or not. Okay. Champagne overrated or underrated?

Salima: I think you know what I'm going to say. Underrated, but vintage champagne overrated.

Ben: Okay. And that's 'cause vintage champagne just doesn't taste very good

Salima: Exactly as you found out.

Ben: Okay. Alright. Dressing up. Overrated or underrated?

Salima: Underrated. Always feel better when you're dressing up. You can never be overdressed.

Ben: Never overdressed. Very good. Being tall, is this overrated or underrated?

Salima: Overrated. There's no need.

Ben: Yeah. What is With all these tall people

Salima: There's no need.

Ben: Your head on the doors

Salima: There's heels, there are step ladders. Many ways to get around things.

Ben: Hustling, hustle, culture.

Salima: Underrated, underrated.

Ben: We've all gotta be doing something. Side jobs.

Salima: Yeah. Always. Even if it's just to keep you awake, like even if you don't really need to just, I think it's like you are really great at that, right? If you think about what you cram into your life. You managed to hold down this very serious job.

I don't really understand what you do. And you do things like this. You are always doing creative side projects and things that you always have done right?

Ben: Yeah. So hustling is also underrated. Okay.

Salima: Yeah.

Ben: Social media

Salima: quick aside, do you think that's partly being second gen immigrants?

Ben: They might be attached to it. I think there's also a little, for me, it's a little bit. Money, although a lot of these things aren't money, but it's like you're doing things, then your opportunity might happen. Yeah. You're not doing anything. Opportunity won't happen particularly creatively where

Salima: yeah,

Ben: It doesn't, and then a little bit actually was not quite death, but Nadia dying and my dad dying.

But the little bit, just knowing, if you want to get on and do things, you should need to do it because you don't know. What's, you dunno what's gonna happen. Yeah. And then a little bit I think is the immigrant thing, but I think that just, you just get that from your parents so it,

Salima: Yeah.

Ben: It doesn't necessarily have to be that, but obviously if you think about why people tend to immigrate or tend to leave their home country, there will tend to be a bit of hustle. Because if you were very comfortable where you were in your home place, then usually you don't wanna move. Because it's comfortable.

So why are you moving? So I think there is like a little bit of that and I guess I'm probably, I get bored a bit as well. Yeah. And then it's what do you do with boredom? Am I sometimes being bored for a tiny bit and then it would be like, you gotta do something.

Salima: Yeah, I agree. I think that's heavily linked to the immigrant experience though. Like your mom and my mom, neither of them are still people.

Ben: Yeah, they're not, that's true.

Salima: No. So both of us have grown up with mothers who were like, busyness is a necessary part of existence.

Ben: Yes. I think that's true, although it is hard to know whether that's just our sort of mothers, but then you get them from immigrant mothers, don't you?

Okay. Last couple on overrated, underrated social media. Overrated or underrated?

Salima: I would say neither. Okay. Because I love it and I hate it.

Ben: So it's correctly rated or it's like it's both.

Salima: Both. It's both. Yeah. Yeah. I'm confused by social media. I've met some great friends over social media and actually it helped me get my publishing deal because of that moth talk that I did.

It went viral and then the publishers were very interested in my pitch, I think partly because of that. So it has really helped benefited me. But I'm not immune to comparisons and forgetting. Like you were saying about my bad patient writing and how people write about having realized certain things on social media when they become unwell or something.

Ben: Yeah.

Salima: So often it's just curated.

Ben: We're not immune to the algorithm and the things. I think that's all true. I do think that we do sometimes underrate other communities that it can bring, I see this in autistic communities and other special interest communities and 'cause they're not loud, right?

Yeah. Groups of communities which are interested in street food or buses or landscape or geocaching. And I think so. If you've just got a geocaching Instagram, that's all you are seeing, you don't actually complain about it much 'cause it's doing your thing so it's not noisy. So I do think there are actually, quite a lot of those quiet communities there probably are overshadowed by all of the other noisy stuff, but there are interesting things happening.

So it is, it's a complex one, which just reflects humanity, right?

Salima: Yeah, exactly. Although I love seeing your newest foodie things.

Ben: Yeah. I'm going into food again, yeah, I'm just really interested about food com and particularly London. I think London is underrated for food and if you want to eat cheaply you can, but you generally have to go out of zone one and you have to go for slightly more interesting food.

Okay. Last one, because it's been our recurring theme. Coconut oil. Is this now underrated or overrated?

Salima: Underrated. I still absolutely adore coconut oil. Still good. I cook with it. I eat, make chocolate from it. I moisturize my sculpt with it once a week. I use it as a body moisturizer. I pretend to my kids.

It's a medicine. I'm still pretty obsessed with coconut oil.

Ben: Okay. So it is a magic ingredient. All great. It's,

Salima: Yeah.

Ben: Okay. And so in terms of current projects, you have two books on the go, the Substack, you do your own podcast. Yeah. Anything else you wanna mention in terms of current and future projects?

Salima: Yeah, so I've recently agreed with my acting agent, I'm gonna start auditioning again actually. So although I took a break from acting, with all the health issues, yeah, I've just thought, I'm just, this is the year of saying yes. So I'm just gonna go for everything and see and see what happens.

And also my energy is very up and down. I've still got a few more weeks of treatment, so I'm just trying to say yes to whatever I can and what, yeah, what works. If I have to not be able to do it because I'm still not feeling a hundred percent fine, but yes is 2026 for me.

Ben: What do you think, if you look back on this year, last year, are you gonna look back and find anything funny about this or oh, that was a thing, or you're still too much in the middle of it?

Salima: I sat because Carl, as his sense of humor is incredibly dark, already laughing at lots of it.

Listen, only three and a half weeks ago, I was dragging the drain from my wound along the corridor of an NHS ward to try and get someone to change the dressing. And Cole was just appalled, but I just knew that was the only way to make things happen. So we were laughing about that last night.

So I do think a sense of humor is absolutely vital for life, even more so than I even thought. Like I found, I've had some of the funniest moments. Over the last six to nine months, in really in situations that appear very dark. Yeah. And gruesome. I had some very funny moments.

Ben: Yeah. You either laugh or you crack.

Salima: Yeah. And also, look, I think the funniest things about life tend to be on that kind of precipice, right? Is it horrendous and are you going to sob or is it very funny? Like those. That they're the highest stakes, aren't they? So actually they can be the funniest things about life because actually most of life is pretty ridiculous considering we'll both be forgotten in a couple generations time.

Ben: Yeah.

Salima: We all think we are, these kinds of our egos as humans generally are pretty inflated considering what kind of little dots we actually are.

Ben: Yeah. Who's remembered from a hundred years ago? Like virtually nobody. Yeah. Famous people then. Great. Last couple of questions then. What do you think you've got anything to tell someone who's in the middle of a thing, which they're trying to do?

Find it hard to fix or maybe that they can't fix. And maybe we can broaden this out as also, do you have any thoughts to people who wanna be creative? Or I guess you've got lots of bits to talk about, like being a bad patient or building a dad and estrangement, but is there anything you'd like to offer as thoughts?

Salima: Yeah. I'd like to say plot. I think it's really important. Okay, so let's say you have a burning ambition to write a novel, for example, like lots of people do, they'd love to write a novel. They just dunno where to start. So start with the tiniest thing. So start with like a hundred words a day, like 50 words a day, like whatever, like on your bus route home.

Write 50 words. 50 times, seven times four. Oh God, I don't know. But that's up, that's 1400 words a month. So and that's with barely any effort whatsoever. So these little micro habits I think are really very vital. And like you were saying, you've just written one sentence that day, great.

So I think plot is a, is actually a word that can be used. In a way that we don't normally use. Like the mechanics of creating something are just like habits. It reminds me of how when you were in your twenties, you had on your computer these screensavers. Do you remember?

Ben: Yeah.

These are my, like lifetime goals.

Salima: Yeah. Yeah. Do you remember? Because I really remember that. I won't say what they were, but I do remember what they were.

Ben: I've hit a few of them. On

Salima: done. Yeah. Yeah. I think anything like that appeals to you. We've gone peak, manifesting peak, manifesting boards and all of that, but there's lots of different versions of that.

It doesn't have to be pretty. Collage that you put on your wall. It can be a screensaver or it can just be like some, like random notes that you make to yourself. So starting small I think is one massive thing. Start

Ben: small and plod.

Salima: Plod. And lastly, there's no. I need some help.

'cause I think these things are rarely created in a vacuum. So for example, years ago I did a favor and favor, those courses? Just an online writing course. 'cause my kids were tiny so I couldn't do the one that was like in their offices. And I just did a mini six week course of that.

And that got me, I think that was like how to write the first three chapters of a novel. And I think I wrote a few chapters from that. So whether you have a friend who is a writer or an actor or or you can find a mentor, I think that's really key to, rather than just taking yourself off and doing it.

And it also holds you accountable. Somebody who's gonna check in. It doesn't have to be something expensive. There's lots of versions of this, I think the collective, the community is really important when you're doing something creative.

Ben: That sounds excellent. So just start, plod keep going.

Find a mentor.

Salima: Yeah, exactly. And whatever that person is,

Ben: Excellent. Anything else you'd like to say?

Salima: I want to thank you for being my friend for so many years.

Ben: Let's hope it's gonna be we're, we could go for another 30 that should be within…..

Salima: Come on.

Ben: Yeah.

We'll be approaching 80 then…

Salima: I'm just living to a hundred remember

Ben: Yeah. Okay.

Salima: So I can, we can do another, we can do another 30 to 40. Yeah. I think, 'cause look. On a serious point, it is rare that you find people who then know you in that way. I can use a shorthand with you. We can pick up when we haven't spoken for a long time, and I can speak to you very directly and in a shorthand that I can't with very many people.

Ben: That's true. Cherish your long term friendships. On that note, Salima, thank you.

 Salima: Thank you so much.

Deena Mousa: How Much is a Life Worth? Effective Philanthropy, AI for Good & Global Health ~ Podcast

How do you put a price tag on a human life? It sounds like a cold question, but for grant makers, it is the necessary calculus of doing good.

"Every time you choose whether to take a more dangerous job at a higher wage... or choose a house that's closer to environmental toxins but is a little cheaper, you are implicitly putting a price on how much you value a year of your life."

In this episode, Ben sits down with Deena Mousa, a grant maker and thinker at Open Philanthropy and Coefficient Giving. Deena takes us inside the difficult decision-making frameworks used to allocate finite resources—from the "Coefficient Dollar" to the complexities of measuring pain.

"In high-income countries, the question is 'Will AI replace radiologists?' But in a lot of low-resource settings, the question is not whether AI will replace the radiologist, but whether you can access a radiologist at all."

We also dive into the role of AI, why government procurement might be the world's most underrated problem, and, on a lighter note, Deena’s specific writing habit regarding white noise.

We cover:

• The Calculus of Altruism: How philanthropists use "revealed preference" to value a year of life.

• The Pain Paradox: Why standard health models struggle to account for chronic pain and suffering.

• AI for Good: Why the risks of "AI washing" in nonprofits are real, but the potential for capacity building is massive.

• Systemic Bottlenecks: Why fixing boring government procurement processes might be more impactful than flashy new policies.

• Life Advice: Why you should probably ignore the advice that resonates with you most.

"Often, the people listening to a piece of general advice are exactly the group of people that should be doing the opposite. They are already leaning too far in that direction."

Summary contents, transcript and podcast links below. Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to pods. Video above or on Youtube.

Contents

• 00:00 Introduction

• 01:17 Valuing Life and Health

• 05:46 Challenges in Measuring Pain and Health Outcomes

• 13:32 Creative Process and Research Methodology

• 18:38 Journey and Early Experiences

• 22:23 Debate on International Aid and USAID

• 29:20 Impact of AI in Global Health and Development

• 36:25 Overrated or Underrated

• 44:59 Exciting Projects and AI for Good

• 46:14 Balancing Cause Areas and Funding Decisions

• 58:31 Advice for Aspiring Philanthropists and Innovators

Transcript (This is AI assisted, so mistakes are possible)

Ben: Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Deena Mousa. Deena is a grant maker and thinker on global health and development, as well as thinking on innovation and progress. Deena, welcome. 

Deena: Thanks so much, Ben. It's great to be here. 

Ben: Your work at Open Philanthropy and Coefficient Giving and really in Global Health overall requires making decisions about where to direct finite resources.

So at the heart of that, you have to grapple with the question of how do you value life and health? What is the value of life? How do you think about that and even begin to approach that question? 

Deena: Yeah, it's a really great question and it's a hard one to answer in large part because it is so personal and there are so many different ways of approaching it.

There are. Fortunately, some studies and research that we can ground some understanding in. So there are two broad literature on this. One is on stated preference, which is where you ask a group of people or survey participants in a lot of different ways how much they value in monetary terms a year of health.

and this can be by asking them, for example, how much they would pay for a particular drug or treatment, how much they would pay to avert a particular outcome, how much they value particular aspects of their health. And these kind of converge on. one form of the answer, which is, what do people say when you ask them how much they value health?

Then there's another literature that is focused on revealed preferences, which is what we actually do and how much we actually pay when we have to make the choice. So every time that you choose whether to walk home or get in a car, every time you choose whether to take a more dangerous job at a higher wage premium or choose a house that's closer to some environmental toxins but is a little bit cheaper, you are implicitly putting a price on how much you value a year of your life.

And so there are quite a few papers that take a lot of these decisions and try to back out of them, how much people, implicitly care about their life in monetary terms based on the actions they take. And this sort of leads to another cluster of answers. and by looking at a combination of these two research studies, you can get to a triangulation of what is approximately right.

This is of course a very hard question because when people make decisions, they're not necessarily explicitly factoring in all of these effects, and they might not necessarily be accurately diagnosing them. And similarly, in the stated preference, it's quite hard to know exactly what decision you would make when it comes down to it.

So there is quite a bit of uncertainty around that, but that gets you at least to some estimate of how people feel and react in real life. 

Ben: And so in the US when you are thinking about this, either thinking about grant making or in your research, do you have a range in your head that you're thinking about?

I'm aware that it'll probably be different in us, say to Italy, say Nigeria. but do you have a range on what, let's call it a statistical life, year of life or a life year to differentiate it from some other thinking? What do you say? 

Deena: Yeah, absolutely. So one, upfront clarification is that different institutions have different numbers for this and in large part because they're doing different things.

So the value of a statistical life, quote unquote, that is used for example, in the United States when deciding on, health insurance or, healthcare issues is different from the one that you might use in a different country. But that in turn is a pretty different question from the one that we are answering, which is how to allocate our finite resources across interventions that mostly target health and ones that mostly target income.

So we, when we calculate, the value of a particular grant. We have a metric we call Open Philanthropy dollars or coefficient giving dollars now. And that is used to equalize health and income gains. so that allows us to basically compare across health and income increases to figure out how much you should value one versus the other. Though of course the metric of coefficient giving dollars isn't necessarily comparable outside of the institution. It's, not like a, objective dollar metric, if that makes sense.

Ben: Sure, yeah. You can't compare it to what the US government is saying about anything to do with dollars. But even within that, do you think your order of magnitude is about right when you're using this a hundred thousand and, spreading it, they say, that's within plus or minus 20%, That's the sense I have.

Or do you think there's a risk that you are completely wrong on that? And maybe we can think about that because you had a really, interesting essay on thinking about pain and I think pain's a really interesting thing to think about because on the one hand you could think for minor pits of pain we use say aspirins and things and they're really cheap and we don't seem to value it very much.

And another aspect actually, if you ask doctors and you think, oh, this person's in pain, we've got cheap medications, or they're out, it often doesn't. Get into their calculus that much because we think, pain or maybe acute pain is this is not life-threatening at the moment. You'll get round it.

On the other hand, if you speak to some people, it could be, really valuable to try and avoid or chronic pain is, different and it comes in enough and it's also more nebulous because there's some part of it which is psychologically based, some part which is maybe biologically based and they interact.

So I was interested in, whether you've got your reflections on how you've been thinking about pain and, whether this is the type of metric which could be used at all with this, or whether we should really be thinking about something else. 

Deena: Yeah, absolutely. It's, a really good question because I think pain is an area where DALYs get a lot harder.

In large part because it is quite possible, if not likely, that a DALY is not a DALY in all circumstances. You might care significantly more about alleviating a marginal quote unquote DALY's worth of pain. The more acute pain that you are in. For example, and there was one study, that I referenced in Japan that implied that this might be the case.

That the more serious the injury or illness, proposed to individuals, the more that they were willing to pay to avert the same amount of additional pain. And so we don't necessarily think of pain or negative health outcomes as linear. but we might have all sorts of different curves for how much we value amounts of health at different points in our life and at different, levels of discomfort.

so I think this is, an area where yeah, certainly the model and here is six we are using might be a little bit blunt. With that said, it is, like you said, it's such a hard question to answer because a lot of people might have quite divergent beliefs and feelings about what that, what the shape of the curve is for them individually and It would be quite prohibitively hard, I think, to apply that sort of differentiated DLI metric, especially depending on the disease. And looking at how it affects different people in to different orders of magnitude and so on. 

Ben: So does that mean we just have to be really cautious with these type of models and thinking when we come across something like pain or is it a kind of this is the best we have, so even if we're a little bit unsure, it's gonna give us some sort of answer?

Deena: Yeah, I definitely think it's, a good reason to be cautious and a good reason why. The quantitative answer is not necessarily the be all, end all, it's a good heuristic. It's a good guide to break down a problem. But for example, with with chronic pain or with, areas where the DALY figure that is given appears to be a little bit questionable or potentially a little bit too high or low one thing we often do is compare it to the DALY burden we've used for other diseases and just think conceptually about whether this is reasonable.

So for example, we might say, the DALY burden associated with cluster headaches is x. Now let's compare it to the DALY burden that we've used previously for o other quite, painful diseases, for example, is it significantly higher or lower? and this can help us triangulate a little bit, what are we really saying when we're using this multiplier for this disease?

Ben: Sure. And when you were looking into pain and, doing your research on that, was there anything which surprised you around that? Or do you think is actually, this is really misunderstood, we should really clarify this more. 

Deena: I was very surprised by the degree to which we don't really fully understand pain.

We think of pain as a direct response to the magnitude of an injury we receive. you stub your toe, you feel some amount of corresponding pain, but that's not necessarily always the case. The amount of pain we feel can be very disproportionate, either higher or lower to the actual damage that our body has felt.

And so it is like a much more complicated and psychosocial, fa thing and phenomenon that we experience as well, which I think I underrated to some degree. And for example, also our understanding of like chronic pain and how chronic pain comes about, is quite limited. Our understanding of, phantom limb pain and why it only impacts some people and not others is, similarly a bits body.

So I think I, I underestimated the degree to which there are a lot of open questions around the biological components of pain and how pain literally works. 

Ben: Yeah. Particularly in chronic pain. I think the scientists call it heterogeneous. We really don't know some of the causal aspects. So you might present with these same type of symptoms, but the underlying can be completely different.

And we might not even have that big of a clue. And it's interesting maybe making a segue into something where we might think we have clearer numbers around, maybe thinking about the UK or any system which has got a constrained budget. How would you deal with funding for extra money, for instance, for a diabetic versus perhaps a preterm baby or maybe say a rare genetic disease at birth or something like that.

So the overall disability life years, the dalis come out at maybe 20, 30,000 pounds, maybe a little bit more in dollars for the diabetic. So you go, oh that's really good in terms of, life, but the preterm baby is coming into hundreds of thousands of dollars. Same with genetics.

So we could be talking half a million up, up to a million, million or more. And that under kind of pure thinking, just cost benefit or say this. First or the utilitarian kind of goes, it's the diabetic all the time. But then when you ask people, and here in the UK we try and ask people, although we argue about whether this is it, people end up saying no, we think the baby should be worth a chance.

Or, particularly with the genetic and then there's arguments around that. How do you think we should think about that? And do you actually fall on one side of the fence around, how we should make that decision? 

Deena: Yeah, it's a really, it's a really hard question and an important one. I definitely won't presume to be able to give a particular answer or say, necessarily what the government should do in a circumstance like this.

It's an impossible one. But I will say that, the, allocation methods that I'm talking about are. Something that's like quite useful for us in our context as a philanthropic funder who are, have a particular pool of money. We are allocating it across cause areas we are explicitly going into it being cause agnostic and impact maximizing.

So we know that is our approach and aim going in. Whereas a government is in a very different position to an individual donor or a philanthropic funder. And they ultimately are tied to a social contract with their citizen. They're democratically elected, they're intended to serve the voice of their people.

And to a large degree, I think the sort of bare utilitarian calculus needs to also incorporate what people believe, how they feel what their opinions and perspectives are on how funding should be allocated and what the priorities of the government should be. 

Ben: Excellent.

Perhaps you could talk about your creative process or your research process. Say you're picking up a new topic like AI in health or you're doing some of this research within pain. How do you go about thinking about that? And also you've had a journalist background, so you've been interested in stories and the narrative around that.

So I'd be interested if you've got any particular creative process or anything you'd like to share around that. 

Deena: Yeah, absolutely. I picked up freelance journalism, in large part as a forcing mechanism. I thought it would be a really interesting way to. Create a structure for myself to get myself to explore the questions that came up day to day that seemed confusing or potentially interesting to me.

so it, I think has been quite good in that it has given me another lens such that when I read something that is, seems a little bit contradictory or seems a little bit unexplained or intention with something else that I know I have a mechanism by which I can say, okay, I, actually wanna get to the bottom of this.

and I'll go and interview several people and I'll, if it starts to look like an actual story, put together a pitch to an editor who will then, be able to act as like a little bit of a scaffold for me as I go off and explore the question and distill what I what I believe in writing.

And that has been quite helpful in large part because I, have this strong belief that, writing is thinking and, in order to. Be able to understand something very clearly. You just have to be able to write about it very clearly in a way that someone else will understand. and that process I think has allowed me to dive, shallowly into a lot of different areas that I find somewhat interesting.

And, so I'm, really glad that I've that I've been doing that over the past couple of years. I think it's been a really enriching process for me, in thinking about the world. Yeah, I've, oftentimes the topics that I'm looking at intersect somewhat with the topics that, I'm thinking about in a professional setting.

but it's a quite different lens on them than doing, research or making grants. And so I think it's quite complimentary in my experience. 

Ben: And do you like making notes as you go? Do you read and write? Do you write two three hour chunks in the morning? Are you an evening person? There seems to be 1,001 ways of doing it, but I'm interested in your actual process.

Do you write by hand or you, straight on computer, or is it just all completely random? 

Deena: I tend to type and I usually do all of my interviews first and get a good picture of what I think the story is in my head, and then tend to write the draft all at once. I usually like to leave it for about 24 hours and then come back to it fresh and do the editing then, because I often think that you're a bit too close to it when you've just written it for the first time.

So yeah, that tends to be my process and I like to reserve Saturday, Sunday mornings to, write for a few hours each week, which I think has been helpful for, forcing some cadence and consistency. But certainly everyone has their own sort of writing habits and patterns that I think they're so personalized and individual that, I'm not sure anyone's, writing habits would work necessarily perfectly for anyone else.

Ben: I think there's been a book looking at this. And if you look at people who, are thought to be really great, you can find, they work at every single different hour of the day with every single different habits. Although there's maybe at the meta level some quirky things about them, which seem to have a, pattern, although the actual individual quirk is hard to know.

Do you ever listen to music or things or is it like music or, no. And is there anything about your process you think is perhaps a little bit quirky? Like you don't write with a pet crocodile beside you or anything, or? Really, a lot of people seem to be, at least in humanities creators, a lot of them seem to be high on drugs or alcohol or whatever when they write.

But I'm assuming you are not, but, yeah. Anything quirky or do you think you're just normal? 

Deena: Unfortunately, nothing's so out there. I, I can't listen to music with lyrics while I write. otherwise I think the words will distract me quite a bit. But, I do often put on white noise particularly like the sound of rain, I think is helpful for, just being a little bit more focused and concentrated.

No, I can't think of anything particularly weird. I'm a bit, I'm a bit more of a night owl than most people. And so I think often my in spite of plans usually to finish something early in the morning, usually my, most productive writing comes quite late at night. so that maybe is, is slightly quirky though.

I think that's a bit common with writers. 

Ben:  I think not having lyrics is maybe somewhat common, but actually wanting brain music or white noise is perhaps a little bit more uncommon. So that's that's an interesting note. Maybe that's a good segue into your journey as to where, how you've got here.

Because if I read it correctly, you were a teenage medical inventor of some sort, or at least a kind of social entrepreneur back where you grew up and then you did a little bit of a consultancy gig and then have come into that. I dunno, what did you learn growing up being kind of social entrepreneur like, and, any thoughts of that in terms of how you went from there to here?

Deena: Yeah, I grew up, so I was born in the us and I grew up between upstate New York and Cairo. I spent my summers in Cairo. So usually about three months of each year, I would be there. And I grew up with, yeah, a family of much older siblings who I think, really shaped a lot of how I think about things.

And, I think just being constantly exposed to, adult conversations and like around the dinner table. I think to some degree, shaped my upbringing a little bit. I did work with my sister on a solar energy social enterprise in, in Egypt that distributed solar water panels that, heated water for households and also for organizations, around the country.

So I think that was a particularly valuable experience. given the fact that, like you mentioned, I worked at McKinsey as a consultant and now at Coefficient giving as a grant maker, getting some exposure to implementation and to operations was incredibly valuable because I think it gave me a taste of how.

Unintuitive difficult. It is, in many ways actually getting something done on the ground is quite hard and quite hard in ways that are almost impossible to predict at the outset. so in each particular circumstance, something will come up, but you don't know what it is until it happens.

And, yeah, often things take a lot longer than you project they will at the beginning. And I, so I think, that, that's been a really important perspective for me to have as I've, consulted people from mile High and also given grants to operators to be able to understand a little bit, of what they're going through.

Ben: I guess that will tilt you into thinking about impact if you've done social entrepreneur things as a teenager. Is there anything you've changed your mind about then over the years in thinking about it? you hint at one in the sense of actually implementing things always seems harder than the paper because unexpected things always come up, but, any grand ideas where you think, I used to think this, but now I think.

Really it's that. 

Deena: Yeah, it's a great question. I think that is certainly one of them that you mentioned, that, operations is much harder than it looks. and that strategy often, di dilutes the nuances of the details of actually getting something done. I think in consulting, for example, I went in half wondering whether this this common refrain that consultants are just risk management, might be true.

it seemed shocking just because of the sums that, fortune 500 organizations pay for consultants. But I actually think I, I came out of it more positive about the value of consulting, if that makes sense. I think one thing that surprised me is how. Integrated, a lot of our consulting teams were with the organizations where we worked and how almost over time essential we became.

And I think that the scope and scale of that across, industries, across organizations, big and small, across sectors, I think was quite surprising to me. So I guess I came out a little bit less cynical about consulting than I went in, which I I think might be the reverse of what, what happens to a lot of other people.

Ben: it's good because you actually did go into consulting. 'cause otherwise some people would've said, don't do consulting at all. Go straight to making actual impacts. So I'm glad you got something out of it at the high level, I'm interested in a couple of systems piece. So there's been a lot of debate on, for instance, US Aid or even just international aid in general.

And on the one hand you could say we lose usaid. There's definitely some projects which had high value impact. Those are not happening and there's that is negative versus having it right in that world. That counterfactuals definitely negative. I guess some people would though say that there are some projects which maybe not higher return, and we really wanna build on local infrastructure and local projects for people, because there's a whole set of examples when, foreigners go in, try and give money, with good aims and have essentially messed it up.

It's gone to the wrong people. They haven't understood these things, the unexpected has happened. And so that money has not only been wasted, has been wasted, but has been actively poor. And there's examples like that. I don't think there's a consensus answer with within that aggregation. But I'd be interesting from in your reflection this mean that actually it's more important the work that you guys do in terms of philanthropy, because there's a little bit less international aid philanthropy from the government level, or is just this whole idea of aid has perhaps been a little bit more down rated, so it's making your life harder.

I'd be just interested in any reflections on whether USAID was any good pros and cons and how it's affected your work. 

Deena: It's a very timely question. I think there is a very reasonable argument that usaid would have benefited from reform. there, there is a group of people that is or a sort of line of thinking that is, the bureaucratic nature of foreign aid in the US and in other large countries has overwhelmed, the institution and it needed a significant overhaul.

I think I sympathize with some aspects of that argument, and I think it is re reasonable to say that, even a pretty heavy handed, overhaul of USAID could have been good. There is a version of that could have been, very net positive. I think a version that, some have talked about since of, like massive slashes to foreign aid, that are indiscriminate or, just go across the board pretty heavy handedly are.

certainly not the version of, the overhaul that I think, would have been most effective. And I think that is something to note, which is like, there is a, there is a, good and a less good version of reforming usaid, if that makes sense. And I think in a, just the magnitude of funding that comes through foreign aid, in global health and development is staggering.

And losing a large proportion of that really would, significantly alter the field. regardless of the sort of spread of projects. And maybe you can say that the range of cost effectiveness that, happens within institutions, it is just so much funding that it, inevitably leaves a massive gap and a massive hole.

I do think that makes our work as philanthropic funders, more important and more sorely needed. And often opens up, more opportunities for us to do cost effective work. Though it is also of course much more difficult when a lot of USAID programs were supporting foundational infrastructure that then enabled us to build, for example, on top of them.

when that infrastructure goes, in some cases there isn't an actor who is well positioned to fill the gap. 

Ben: So net, net, although reform of usaid, a reasonable person could have argued for that. What we have now in practice is probably net negative because of the absolute levels of, funding cuts and this issue of some infrastructure with no credible stakeholder or actor being able to do that.

So those, not only those first order projects have gone, but a whole infrastructure layer has been, withdrawn, made, life difficult. Was that a fair summary of thinking around that? 

Deena: I think that sounds right. yeah, there is a version of USAID reform that, that could have been certainly net positive, but I think, a combination of magnitude of the cuts and the way in which the cuts were decided, if that makes sense.

In terms of how to prioritize projects and how many people opined on that and how long that process took, I think, resulted in, in less than optimal implementation. And therefore, I definitely do think it was net negative. 

Ben: Another systems piece. Perhaps this is wider in, in thinking around cost benefit type of analysis or at least simple utilitarian thought.

I still think with suffering in the ecosystem around some of the effects that F-D-F-X-F-D-X and SBF had on thinking about that partly because of funding and partly because they were so explicitly we now think naively utilitarian around their thinking. Do you think there's still an echo of that and do you think I, mean I guess this is on some of this, but I think it's wider philanthropy in general.

And we are probably a little bit younger and a little bit more apart from it maybe. Has it made your thinking around that systems piece change or been influenced at any way? 

Deena: it's a good question. much of the fallout of that happened before I joined coefficient giving, and I was very much looking at it from the outside in.

I think coming into my role, I am less of a sort of hard line utilitarian than maybe some say SBF or pure rationalist or pure effective altruist. And so I think I was already coming from, a little bit of an outside in view, and a bit of a sort of more, more sort of mixed perspective, if that makes sense.

I definitely do see it as having shaken up a lot of the effective altruist or rationalist community and a lot of the thinking around it, I think, a lot of people reflect it after that. Which I think is quite healthy sometimes. For sure. 

Ben: Yeah, I'm definitely an outsider looking in.

I think one of the things I reflected on was, what would they call it? Normy stuff. So I now really understand why you just have a regular independent board if you can do it well, because this is the things which gives you distance over some of the things. And when I see things which don't have that, which I mean there's no guarantee, right?

A lot of those things go wrong. But I now understand why those boring, normal measures are put in and maybe there's too much bureaucracy with some of those. But you can see now the counter examples where they failed because you just went on high trust with a couple of individuals with no oversight accountability.

So it was a, win for normal boring covenants. which is which is weird, which is an interesting meta layer. Meta layer thing. Maybe thinking about a meta layer thing. You've done some work on technology and particularly ai, which within say health or climate or a lot of global development is potentially an enabling layer.

Yes, AI in itself might settle certain projects, but maybe it's more importantly is going to enable a lot of other things. So I'm interested in what you think is actually happening within ai. I think global development and health, you wrote a really interesting essay on sort of radiologists, how it hasn't, for instance, there are still a lot of radiologists.

In fact, we don't have enough radiologists, even though. AI is doing that very well, and that's in a narrow thing, but it looks like it could be supporting quite a lot of a infrastructure layer and then into global development in general. has this altered your kind of thinking, and does this mean we should be in investing more in a metal layer, or at least in transforming that metal layer into something practical?

Or is it really the kind of, yes, this is a new technology, but our old models and our old ways of thinking? Just incorporate that and that will just be the same, but with different measurements. I don't know Your thoughts on ai. 

Deena: Yeah, it's a big question right now. maybe I'll start with some things that worry me and then some things that I'm excited about in the area.

So a few concerns I have upfront. One is this idea of using benchmarks to determine how much AI can do in the field or in practical terms. for example, looking at AI performance on a benchmark, or a test related to a particular job. And then to say this means that AI can replace.

87% of people who do this job, oftentimes the map is not the territory with benchmarks. And so there's quite a big difference between the questions on a benchmark and the true process of actually doing a job or doing a role. And usually it is quite hard to come to a like detailed and nuanced understanding of what it really means to do a job and how people spend their time in that role and what are the long tail outcomes that are, come up very infrequently, but are actually quite important to get right.

So I think that is one worry I have with ai. another, I have with AI in development in particular is incentivized AI washing. people are very excited about. Potentially implementing AI in a lot of new contexts and settings, which I think is, great. And I'll, also get to that in a moment.

But I worry about setting upfront too much this idea of we would really like to fund AI related projects. So we really like to invest in AI related projects. And then encouraging, nonprofits, organizations that are doing great work by default to feel pressured to incorporate AI where it doesn't necessarily make sense or it isn't necessarily adding much impact so that they can then say, yes, we are AI enabled, we, qualify for this particular program or this particular incubator.

I think there is always a danger with technology of, implicitly shoehorning it into processes where it is not quite the right fit, because it is the next really exciting thing. and I think, in part, in particular, we wanna be careful as funders in terms of how we are shaping the field in that way, and whether we are driving incentives in a negative direction in that sense.

But with all that said, I think this is quite, AI and development is quite nascent, and this is a really exciting moment for it. and I am quite excited by the potential for AI to increase capacity and throughput at, almost every level of development. I think often, human capital is a constraint for a lot of different fields from everything from, do you have enough doctors to do you have enough people to run the government properly?

And if AI can act as a multiplier on people's time, for example. Increasing diagnostic throughput for every doctor by making them a few seconds faster with each patient. Then I think it could have, significant positive effects in low and middle income countries in particular where, that is really the key blocker.

You mentioned, a piece I wrote about radiology, that was really focused on high income country settings, where the question was will ai, replace radiologists and therefore make, radiology interpretation much cheaper and much faster? But in a lot of, low resource settings, the question is not whether AI will replace the radiologist, but whether you can access a radiologist at all and whether AI might act as a sort of better than the default standard of care option for you.

So I do think the questions are quite different in low and middle income countries, and I'm very excited about, the potential for AI to increase capacity in lower resource settings. 

Ben: So that sounds like we should move quite fast and hope not to break anything as opposed to moving very fast and breaking lots of things.

Deena: that's a very good question. I think I mean I think that there is also obviously a reason for caution in particular because there, there is a sort of paradigm in which if you believe that AI as a technology will get significantly better in the next, let's say one to three years, implementing a, very imperfect solution Now could, this is an example, but could, lead to mistakes that therefore eliminate trust in AI that will then be very hard to win back. Even if in say, three years the models that you're working with are significantly more accurate or significantly better in a healthcare setting, for example.

So I think that is like one consideration, which is that, when you're introducing a new technology, you are setting the terms of people's impression of that technology. and in a lot of cases right now, AI is people's, most people's interaction with AI in some countries is simply as a tool that spams use to send them a lot of, scam text messages on WhatsApp and scam phone calls.

And I think it is important to consider like the. The relationship that you're creating between the technology and the people and to a, I think to some extent the more that you force technology in where people do not organically see a need for it, the more you can sort of risk creating this negative impression and those impressions can be sticky long after the technology itself has changed significantly.

so I think that's, maybe one reason for caution, particularly right now. 

Ben: Sure. I hadn't thought about that. It's very hard to recover from a bad first date is what you're saying. 

Deena: Exactly, yes. 

Ben: And I guess we also potentially move through some one-way doors, as in you do X and it's quite hard to row back from X, but maybe there might be some two-way doors.

I find it's really interesting that the technologists have a. There are different clusters of them, obviously, but they have a different view, from what a lot of the economists and sociologists think around this. And it's really interesting that they're so far apart. But yeah, when you don't have that consensus, it is a little bit tricky.

Maybe we should do a little short round on overrated and underrated. So I'm gonna give you like a little topic. you can pass or you can say neutral but you can say, yeah, I think this ideal concept is underrated or overrated, or we should have more of it, or less of it or something like that.

Yeah. Are you good? 

Deena: Yeah. Happy to do it. 

Ben: Yeah, let's do it. Okay. so the comedy one, malaria nets underrated or overrated. 

Deena: I would say in general, underrated, still, underrated 

Ben: even though we've been going on about them for so long. 

Deena: I think so. I think we are in a bit of a bubble in that, within the world that I'm in and that to some extent that you are in as well.

people take for granted this idea of malaria nets are the canonical, reliable, cost-effective intervention. But I think one that's not necessarily really like common knowledge beyond this sort of corner of the world. And two, there is still quite a lot of need for it. Like it is still, an intervention that can absorb more funding.

And I think, until we reach equilibrium with that, I guess by nature or almost mechanically, I would say underrated. Yeah. 

Ben: So hundreds of millions of dollars of capital could still flow to mal nets and we're nowhere near, reaching that. Okay. Interesting. Good. Climate net zero. Underrated overrated.

Deena: It's a good question because this is such a polarized one. you have almost, I guess in the US at least about half the country feels extremely negative about this and about half the country feels very positively about this. And I don't know, I would almost say as it nets out neutral yeah, I think when I think about each half, I would say, has been overrated maybe in the past 10 years, but in the last, like year or two, I think that has, like the pendulum has swung and it's pretty sharply corrected.

So maybe I'll say neutral on this one. Okay. 

Ben: What, so your, observation is that the US or the world is neutral in it, but are you yourself now neutral or, actually you were saying that maybe the pendulum has swung. Too far. although the world is maybe balanced that actually because of where the pendulum sung, it's a little bit underrated.

Deena: I think. I think, where the pendulum has swung recently, maybe, makes it underrated, if that makes sense. 

Ben: Yeah. It's, definitely a tricky one. I would probably say it's overrated for environmentalist and it's underrated for the average person in America, but, yeah, that's, the difficult one.

Universal basic income. Overrated. Underrated. 

Deena: Wow. Such a good question. I would say almost. Not discussed, if that makes sense. Really, it's gone. I thought this was 

Ben: the Californian solution to everything. I've obviously been misled. 

Deena: I think it disappeared. it had, it's had its moment in, the, presidential campaign a few cycles back.

But I, my understanding is recently, like UBI as a policy proposal has fell out of the popular zeitgeist. I suspect as we think more about AI, labor market disruptions solutions like UBI will have their day in the light again. and I'm quite interested to see how different the reaction is this time around.

So I guess I would say, yeah, perhaps for our current like labor market structure and where we are literally today, slightly overrated, but for potential AI labor market disruptions in the future, potentially a little bit underrated in that yeah, there's not, there's, there aren't a lot of, concrete policy proposals around that yet.

and I'm, I think I'm excited to see more thinking around it. 

Ben: That's very, well hedged on that one. It's interesting to see that it's actually completely di disappeared from the debate from what you said, or in which case, that would make me think it's a little bit underrated, even if it might have been overrated before.

I was reading that in Ireland, they're gonna do a small version of this, aimed at artists. So if you can get on this list, there's a few thousand artists which will have a small artist, UBI. And to your point about job disruption, maybe this is the offset about, okay. Put all of your work illegally into l and s because it's out on the internet, but maybe we'll give you a UBI instead.

Okay. Long-termism or thinking maybe about the very, very far future, is this overrated or underrated? 

Deena: I think in non rationalists and effective ultra spaces, as in for the average person? I think somewhat underrated. I think it's just very instinctively much more salient to think about things that are impacting us today.

Even if, when you truly consider it and when you think about, future generations of, the people you know and your family, you would care significantly more than you do today. I think the average person likely might care significantly more than they do today. if like properly framed about longer term impacts, if that makes sense.

Ben: Yes. But the rationalists themselves maybe think about it a little bit too much. 

Deena: Yeah, I think, it's a a concentrated dose of something that is, not popularly considered in, in most of the rest of the world. 

Ben: Sure. I think they might just go too far. They just, maybe if you get us to think about 100 to 200 years or 500 years, that's something useful.

Once you go out to say a million, all of the math seems to get really screwed because when we're very, not very good with large numbers anyway. Definitely. But very good. Yeah. Okay. Overrated, underrated direct giving. So this is direct giving of cash transfers. 

Deena: Oh, good question. I, guess I would have to say similar to my mechanical answer on bed nets underrated.

Yeah. Build demand in general use. Exactly. still lots of demand and, and not enough supply. So I'll say underrated. 

Ben: Great. Okay. AI existential risks. So a GI risk. Do you think this is overrated or underrated? 

Deena: it's really interesting, like some of the other questions, it depends radically on who you talk to.

I think, if you spend a few weeks in the bay, it will feel like there's almost nothing else happening in the world. Whereas, if you spend a few weeks. Many other places in the country it's a non-issue or not barely something that's even regularly discussed. So I guess I would say, I wish it were more evenly rated.

If that makes sense. 

Ben: Sure, that makes sense. Okay. And Cairo, do you think that's an underrated or overrated place? 

Deena: I would say underrated. I think yeah, often, people don't don't manage to get out there themselves, but I think it's, a city with so much rich, with rich history and on top of that it is a city that is just incredibly alive.

It reminds me a lot in some ways of New York and I'm biased because I've spent, quite a bit of time in both cities, but it is one of the few cities that I think compares in terms of sheer, like volume of people and energy and, like the idea of the city that never sleeps and the 24 hour city.

Ben: Yeah, very intense. I was there once for a little while to go to a friend's wedding, and it did ha it did actually have that New York vibe of everything happening all at once everywhere. yes. and last one on this philanthropy in general, do you think it's overrated or underrated? 

Deena: Yeah, I, again, am biased, but I will have to say underrated.

You go, you're gonna have to say 

Ben: that otherwise you're in the wrong career. 

Deena: Yeah, absolutely. but I truly believe it. when you think about the volume of charitable giving each year compared to, for example, like pledges that have been taken or the amount of money people, intend to give, I think it is quite low.

And yeah, I think it's underrated and I think I am excited over time to see more. Very high salience and very visible and easy, ways of giving charitably for people who, maybe are stopped by a form of decision paralysis or uncertainty. but who would like to give, which, I suspect is, is, quite a few people.

Ben: I'd accept that effective philanthropy is definitely underrated, but I still think it's a potentially a bit more of an open question than I was hoping for about overall giving, which seems to have, a little bit more of a, more patchy history. Although I guess that's why places like co giving and open philanthropy come about.

And so any current projects that you're working on that you're particularly excited by, or things that you have granted to or looked at and when these are really great projects and have now come by because you are, because you've been working on them. 

Deena: it's a good question. one thing I really love about my job is over the past year I've been able to look at such a wide variety of cause areas.

I think I started the year thinking about antimicrobial resistance and, I'm, ending the year thinking about AI for good and I've hit, many, cause areas in the middle. I think I'm, I am quite excited about the potential for AI, for Good. In particular, I think it's a very nascent field and one where it's possible that a lot of the problems that implementers have are shared even across verticals.

whether you're doing AI for health or. AI for agriculture or weather forecasting? I think there are maybe some common needs and challenges. And I'm excited about, continuing to learn a little bit more about the field and thinking about ways in which we might be able to support that, though, that's quite uncertain right now, so I don't, wanna make any particular promises around.

we, don't have an existing program in the area yet. 

Ben: Sure. And so how do you balance out between looking at something like, antibiotics, a MR and. Climate and AI or systems, pieces and things. And you said that the own internal sort of metric is this a hundred thousand in coefficient dollars, which you, seem to be able to, go to, and I guess you're looking for 10 x, five x, a hundred x, that type of, that type of return.

And I guess that's it. You just have to, whatever area you are doing somehow bring it back to these are the inputs and the costs and get to those sort of figures or how do you think about weighing it up and at the strategic level, I guess you've gone development health, ai, also existential risk and some other elements where you're talking about maybe not, some other people aren't looking at it so much and have ideas about tractability or other, but I'm interested in how your own thinking is shaped about what should we work on and then when we work on it, how are we really thinking about whether this is a good idea to fund.

Deena: Yeah, it's a great question. in large part because by nature our time is limited, which means that we can't investigate every cause area. And so making prioritization decisions based on relatively little information upfront, is quite difficult, but a necessary part of the process. I think we often try to split the process of investigating an area into, parts that will allow us to pivot quickly and frequently.

So we might start, for example, with a two day investigation into an area that focuses on one particular crux that could basically suggest that we shouldn't look into it at all. So for example, if there's an area where. It seems really important and really neglected, but we're quite worried that there are basically no solutions and therefore it is totally in intractable, in which case we shouldn't do a full investigation.

we might just spend two days specifically looking at tractability and solutions. so I think that helps quite a bit. And then in terms of prioritizing cause areas, for funding, we do rely quite a bit on this framework of disability adjusted life years and percent increase in income as the sort of north star metrics or heuristics.

and we try to consider three factors, importance neglected is and tractability. So importance represents the overall magnitude of the problem and how many people it impacts. so this can often be dollies in terms of, health issues, for example. but might, go by other metrics depending on the area.

neglected is a measure of how many other funders are working on it and how many dollars are chasing the problem with some sort of adjustment for, what in particular they're working on. And tractability usually focuses on a few specific things that we could hypothetically fund if we were to enter the area.

So we'll try to do direct models of the impact per dollar spent on a few hypothetical grants that we might make in the area to understand whether they might be comparable to the rest of our portfolio. so that is, often how we try to make comparable judgments across very different cause areas, though, of course that is very tricky and there's a lot of, uncertainty there.

Ben: That's a really detailed level of analysis. Do you think it's worth, if you are an organization or even a startup thinking of applying to funders or even thinking of submitting to you guys that they already start to think a little bit in these terms? Or is it just more useful for you to do the analysis on what they would give you and not necessarily say that they've already started to try and translate it into a market size or impact size or a probability of success?

Is it actually helpful if they've already tilted it into your language and thinking, or is it. Better for them to just do their purpose and their things and you do the analysis on top. 

Deena: Yeah, certainly the vast majority of grantees we work with, will not have used exactly our model or not be thinking about things in exactly the same way we are.

So I think that's something that we understand. And so therefore, it's quite important for, us to be able to convert even very different materials into something that makes sense within our framework. I think it is often useful, when, organizations have thought about things in, somewhat similar ways though, if that makes sense.

When they've thought about, this is a really big problem. here, we know the shape of the field and what other funders are doing. we know why we think what we're doing is particularly, effective at solving this problem relative to other potential solutions.

things like that doesn't necessarily have to be. very, quantitative terms or in exactly our language. But I think the general mode of thinking of, here's why we think what we're doing is quite effective is, often helpful for us to know. 

Ben: Great. And couple of final questions leading into the end.

If you are the Ben benign dictator of the United States or the world, you can think about this globally or the us. what one thing, or I guess if you've got loads of ideas, you could do two or three things, would you implement in the world today? 

Deena: Very hard question. As in, any sort of like law or regulation.

Yeah. You're 

Ben: the ruler of the world, so I guess it'd be a law regulation more than more than anything else. But yeah, you can make this law and let's assume people are gonna even follow it or policy. or maybe you could, go the other way, right? You could take away a policy which you think is so bad that actually the, most net benefit we'll get is if this thing disappeared rather than this thing came in.

Deena: Yeah. Is it, too niche and boring to say I would fix government procurement processes in the US and in other sort of high income countries? 

Ben: No, but I guess the, challenge then is, so you think government procurement A is not a, is first of all probably a pretty bad, but b would probably have an impact which is much larger than the average person might think.

Deena: let me caveat that with saying I've certainly not done a cost effectiveness analysis and I've, definitely not even it was just a thing that immediately jumped to mind. I'm certain there are many other much more cost effective things you could do if you were a dictator of the world.

So this is like quite a small petty thing to be considering. But yeah, in large part, I think our ability to, 

Ben: I mean in some ways the US government did have this in mind ish. When they came up with Dodge, they thought, there's something going on here. I know that was only a part of it, so not completely crazy.

Deena: I think it's, certainly at the core of a lot of our ability to get things done. And, maybe this is also maybe again, I'm, biased here 'cause it's something that I personally experienced. For example, when you take public transit and you think about that the magnitude of the budget of the MTA and yet how expensive it is to do any particular project or process to improve the subway system.

and I think this goes not only for transit, but for things like construction, for for almost anything that the government, procures or does or has an RFP for. I think it's a wide ranging problem that impacts a lot of different sort of verticals that we experience day to day, if that makes sense.

Ben: yeah. So when you talk about procurement, it's not just buying supplies it's the building side of things as well. 

Deena: Yeah, exactly. So any sort of like contractor agreements or RFPs. 

Ben: Yeah, I guess that doesn't have a single bullet to it in a way that say if you propose a global carbon tax might or something.

So if you had 10 minutes with the president and they were gonna do the thing, you would implement that, this is the thing you would say, you'd go fix your procurement, fix your building. 

Deena: Yeah. I, don't know. I think it's in part a sort of a funny answer. and in part something that I think is like quite important.

I don't know how much that I would stand by, if I spent 10 minutes thinking about it, which I certainly hope that I would, if I, were, to be dictator for. For a day. I'm not sure that's what I would come out with, but I, do think I do stand by that. It's quite an important problem.

Ben: Yeah, no, I think that, I'm surprised you didn't go for health though, but you won't. Procurement maybe maybe health is even too complicated. Not as tractable 'cause it's too many bits to it. Okay. I'm gonna ask the question in another way, but bring it rather than at the policy government dictator level.

If I give you a billion dollars, which actually might sound like a lot, but actually we know is not a huge amount in the context of the world. And I say, you have to spend this, by the end of the call you have to decide how are we going to do this billion, what would you what would you allocate it towards?

You've got a billion and you can do anything with it. But it disappears unless we use it. So we can't like invest it and save it and do something even better in 10 years time. But what would we do now? 

Deena: Yeah, it's a good question. It's a hard one in large part one because often the answer might be divided into many little grants, but of course if one person is trying to think about how they would spend the funding, then you really just have to pick a few organizations or just a handful of, places to direct the funding. and then the second problem comes in of you get pretty, potentially pretty strong diminishing returns as you give the extra marginal dollar to the same organization, if that makes sense.

so the first, a hundred million, they might spend extremely cost effectively, but the further you go, the further down of the list of projects they have goes and, the more you start hitting constraints, sometimes thinking about like these very scalable opportunities I think there are certainly some organizations that that could take a large chunk of that billion and use it well.

again, bias, but organization, give, I think, would definitely be on the list. give directly thinking about, Gavi, for example. that could use a huge amount of funding. yeah, thinking about like organizations that are, Able to take a quite a large budget and have limiting diminished return as they move down the next dollar.

so I think ideally I'd split it up to at least five or 10 organizations, but I think something like that. 

Ben: Sure. The effective giving organizations like your own and, but then if you had a pet project, so you're not allowed to give it to an organization. And maybe this would be a smaller amount of money and maybe this isn't first order the most effective thing.

What sort of project or areas would you fund about? I think about this a little bit because one of the criticisms around some of this line of thinking is it never really works on the systems level. Although we've slightly negated that with AI and policy and, the things that they're like and sometimes I talk about, or I think about where we've had great social progress, like over hundreds of years progress, Slavery, women's rights, disability rights have come from this systems level change. And this is my art or your storytelling hat on. Because if you don't have a storytelling narrative for some of this, then you don't have that enabling layer at all to get change. But then, maybe that isn't that effective and we have to do it in a different way.

But I'd be interested in your thoughts of that. And did you have any other smaller pet project that you would want to fund? 

Deena: Yeah, it's a, good question. I think abstracting away from. My day-to-day role here a little bit. I think one area that we've looked at this year that I think has seemed quite timely and important is health system strengthening.

And in particular helping, low and middle income country governments allocate their health budgets and their budgets more generally as effectively as possible. I think this is particularly important now given, the perspective aid cuts and potential reductions in budgets for a lot of these countries.

And so it feels quite salient. But I do think there is a lot, of potential benefit in allocating those budgets a bit more cost effectively. And also in terms of, helping with budget execution, for example, ensuring that the budget can be spent, and can, and the money can get out the door each year which is almost an interesting and opposite challenge.

Ben: Excellent. Okay, last question. Would you like to give, any advice to people, listening? So this could be life advice or people thinking about how to give money or perhaps thinking about going into a career, either in terms of innovation research or grant making research, or your thoughts on where you've got to today.

life advice from Deena. 

Deena: Another tough question, I don't know that I could presume to give personal advice. I guess I will say one meta observation that has been interesting and helpful for me is that often some subset of people listening to a piece of general advice, should take that piece of advice and sub subset actually need to take the exact opposite.

Okay. and often it's reverse correlated with who is hearing it. usually the listeners of a particular, or the readers of a particular outlet are quite similar to. The person giving the advice. And so they have like similar inclinations. And so they're exactly the group of people that should be doing the opposite.

They're already leading too far in that direction. So maybe my, meta piece of advice is try, to collect advice from pretty disparate sources and from people that you maybe don't necessarily normally interact with and from different bubbles of the world. I think, it's very easy to end up in like a sort of, relatively small intellectual circle that thinks relatively similar in relatively similar ways.

But, I think one benefit I found of living in New York is that I am constantly exposed in a way that I might not have been in SF or DC to people who are in completely different industries who, have never, heard about a lot of the things that, that I spend my days thinking about, but vice versa have a lot of pretty interesting and pretty different robustly different experiences.

Ben: Excellent. So that sounds like if you are looking for the advice you want, you should actually ignore it and go the other way. 

Deena: Yeah, in some cases I think that's right. 

Ben: advice is overrated. Great. on that note, Deena, thank you very much. 

Deena: Thanks so much, Ben. It was a lot of fun.

Social media bans for children: do they make sense?

Social media bans for children: do they make sense?

Governments are beginning to reach for big levers to deal with the perceived harms of social media. Australia’s decision to bar under 16 year olds from major platforms is one of the boldest examples so far. The intention is clear enough: protect children from an environment that looks increasingly hostile to their attention, self esteem and mental health.*

This essay looks at three questions:

1. What does the evidence actually say about social media and youth mental health.

2. How different philosophical traditions would think about this type of regulation.

3. Whether a blanket under 16 ban is a sensible policy instrument, even if one accepts the aims.

My conclusion is that the evidence for serious average harm is weak, the harms are concentrated in subgroups, and that this specific policy is an extremely blunt instrument compared with the alternatives.

1. The evidence: how harmful is social media for adolescents?

The political story is simple. The data is not.

There are now several big reviews and meta analyses of the link between social media or “screen time” and adolescent mental health.

A widely cited review by Candice Odgers and Michaeline Jensen concludes that most studies find “a mix of often conflicting small positive, negative and null associations.” The most rigorous large preregistered studies show small associations between daily digital use and well being that are “unlikely to be of clinical or practical significance” and do not distinguish cause from effect. (PubMed)

Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski use specification curve analysis on three large datasets of around 355,000 adolescents and find that digital technology use explains at most about 0.4 percent of the variance in well being. (PubMed) That is trivially small. You can detect it in huge samples, but no clinician would treat it as a major driver.

A broad 2022 review by Patti Valkenburg and colleagues sums up the field in almost comically cautious terms. They note that most reviews interpret the association between social media use and mental health as “weak” or “inconsistent”, a few call it “substantial” and “deleterious”, and they spend the rest of the paper explaining why the same underlying numbers are being described in such different ways. (ScienceDirect)

More recent meta analyses tighten the picture without really changing it:

• A 2024 meta analysis by Ahmed et al finds weak but statistically significant associations between social media use and depression, anxiety and sleep problems in young people, and stronger associations for “problematic social media use” that looks more addictive. (PubMed)

• A 2024 JAMA Pediatrics meta analysis by Fassi et al covers 143 studies and more than one million adolescents. In clinical samples they find a correlation between time spent on social media and internalising symptoms of about r = 0.08, and between engagement based metrics and symptoms of about r = 0.12. Community samples look very similar. (JAMA Network)

Translate that: r = 0.08 means that about 0.6 percent of the variation in symptoms is associated with time spent. r = 0.12 gives around 1.4 percent for engagement. That is measurable, but tiny.

There is stronger evidence that teens with existing mental health conditions use social media more and experience it differently. A 2025 paper by the same group shows that adolescents with diagnosed conditions spend more time on social media and are less satisfied with their online friendships than peers without conditions. (Nature) That is compatible with a story where vulnerable teens are drawn into patterns of use that do not help them.

On top of the correlational work there are a handful of randomised experiments, mostly in young adults, where people are asked to deactivate or sharply cut back on social media for a few weeks. These tend to find small improvements in life satisfaction, loneliness or depressive symptoms, especially for heavy or distressed users, but the effects are modest, the time frames are short and the participants are volunteers. (sarahdomoff.com)

Across this literature, there are consistent methodological problems:

• Almost everything is correlational, not causal. Depressed kids may be more likely to spend time online.

• Measures of “time on social media” are mostly self report and inaccurate.

• “Social media use” lumps together very different behaviours and content.

• Many studies are low quality by basic survey standards and are not preregistered. (NC DOCKS)

The one place where the signal looks meaningfully stronger is for clearly “problematic” or “addictive” use. Systematic reviews of problematic social media use in adolescents and young adults find much larger and more consistent associations with depression, anxiety and stress than for simple time based measures. (mental.jmir.org)

So a fair reading of the evidence is something like:

• For most adolescents, total time on social media has a small, probably trivial association with mental health.

• For a minority of adolescents who use social media in compulsive, distress driven ways, the association with poor outcomes is larger and may be clinically relevant.

• We have some experimental hints that cutting use can help, but not enough to support confident large scale causal claims.

By contrast, the evidence linking alcohol, drugs and gambling to harm in adolescents is overwhelming. There is no serious debate about whether heavy drinking, early drug use or adolescent gambling increase risk of bad outcomes. The argument is about the best mix of taxation, regulation and treatment, not about whether the harms exist.

If you are ranking risk factors purely on evidence, “time spent on social media” is not in the same league as alcohol, drugs or gambling.

2. Philosophical lenses on social media bans

Given that empirical backdrop, how should we think about something as heavy handed as an under 16 social media ban?

Different philosophical traditions put the emphasis in different places. Three questions keep coming back:

1. How bad is the harm, and for whom.

2. How much do we trust the state compared with parents and platforms.

3. Do we want to train citizens for autonomy inside a flawed attention economy, or shield them and hope to fix the system before they enter.

Classical liberalism.

On a Mill style harm principle view, the state should step in only to prevent serious harm to others, not to protect people from themselves. Children are a partial exception, since their autonomy is limited and the state already sets age limits for alcohol, sex, driving and so on. A classical liberal could accept targeted rules that deal with clear harms, but a blanket ban on whole platforms interferes with freedom of expression and association, and overrides parental judgment. Given that the evidence points to small average harms, it is hard to argue that the high bar for coercive state action has been met.

Child centred rights.

Taking the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child seriously means treating children as rights holders, not simply as passive objects of protection. They have rights to seek information, express views and associate with others, as well as rights to protection. A ban can be cast as a right to protection from manipulative platform design. It can also be criticised as sacrificing the rights of competent 14 or 15 year olds to participate in online culture and politics, and as cutting off lifeline communities for queer or otherwise marginalised teens. On this view, the state should be very reluctant to impose blanket restrictions that do not distinguish between different young people.

Strong paternalism.

A more paternalistic philosophy is comfortable with the idea that the state should sometimes override individual or parental preferences “for their own good”, particularly for vulnerable groups. If you see social media as the new tobacco, the temptation is obvious: just keep children away until they are 16, whatever clever workarounds they manage. This view puts less weight on fine grained evidence and more on a general sense that the environment is toxic and that firms will not self regulate. The cost is a long list of knock on restrictions, since once you admit broad paternalism it is hard to draw principled lines.

Consequentialism.

A consequentialist asks only: what policy optimises overall welfare. If you assume that the ban sharply reduces harmful use, reduces anxiety and self harm, shifts kids toward healthier activities and does not create serious new harms, then you support it. If you accept the small average effect sizes, the likely workarounds, the privacy costs of age verification, and the loss of positive online communities for some groups, the picture flips. On realistic assumptions, the net impact of this particular ban is at best unclear and quite plausibly negative compared with more targeted design regulation plus mental health support.

Virtue and autonomy.

A virtue ethics angle is interested in the kind of character we are helping to form. Constant algorithmic stimulation is not a neutral backdrop. It shapes attention, patience and self control. You can argue that a period of protection from the worst attention factories during adolescence gives young people room to develop better habits. You can also argue that a pure ban denies them practice in managing temptations and learning to live well with technology. Either way, if the policy simply delays exposure until 16 with no education or scaffolding, it is an odd approach to cultivating responsible digital citizens.

Across these perspectives, there is no single correct answer. But they sharpen what the real disputes are about. This is less a fight over whether children deserve protection, and more a fight over how much power the state should wield, how much respect we give to child and parental agency, and whether we think design level interventions are preferable to blunt prohibitions.

3. How well does an under 16 ban actually work?

Even if you think the harms are serious and the state should lean in, you still have to ask whether the instrument works.

There are several obvious problems.

It is easy to work around.

Any enforcement scheme relies on age verification. Platforms will use self declaration, age inference, selfies, third party age assurance services or some combination. Tech literate teenagers will route around this with VPNs, burner accounts, older friends’ details, or by moving to smaller, less regulated platforms. You end up in the familiar pattern where compliant families follow the law, non compliant ones exploit loopholes, and the most vulnerable teens are often the most determined to find side doors.

It has privacy costs for everyone.

To keep under 16s out, platforms have to get better at knowing who is under 16. That pushes the system toward more pervasive data collection and profiling. The state can prohibit mandatory use of government ID, but the pressure to build or contract age verification infrastructure is obvious. There is a real risk that a policy justified as “protecting children” accelerates a wider surveillance trend.

It undermines parental agency.

Parents already have direct control over phones, devices, app stores and home rules. They can deny smartphones entirely, delay social media for their own kids, or allow carefully supervised access. A ban removes the option where a thoughtful parent allows their mature 15 year old to use locked down social media for specific purposes. It also encourages a culture of quiet evasion, where parents and children collude in breaking rules they consider unreasonable.

It ignores the design problem.

The deeper issue is not simply that teenagers exist on social media. It is the recommender systems, infinite scroll, notifications and engagement incentives that shape what users see and how long they stay. The ban hardly touches the design of the system. It simply says “come back when you are 16.” That might delay exposure for some. It does nothing for 16 to 25 year olds, who are also vulnerable, and it does not reward platforms that redesign their products to be less predatory.

It has opportunity costs.

Political and regulatory bandwidth is finite. A big symbolic ban that dominates the headlines can crowd out quieter but more effective reforms: algorithmic transparency, ad restrictions for minors, design standards for feeds and notifications, funding for school based digital literacy, and expanded youth mental health services. Once the government has “done something big”, the temptation to declare victory is strong.

None of this means the policy has no upsides. It probably will reduce usage for a segment of younger teens whose parents are not particularly engaged. It sends a clear signal to platforms that governments are willing to take tough action. It may shift norms so that parents feel more confident delaying smartphones or social media and can say “the law is on my side.”

But if the underlying empirical signal is small and highly heterogeneous, and if the harms are concentrated in subgroups with problematic use, then a policy that is both crude and easily circumvented looks poorly matched to the problem.

4. Where does that leave us?

Start from the evidence. The association between social media use and adolescent mental health is real but small for most, more serious for a minority with addictive patterns of use, and entangled with a long list of other social and economic changes. It is nowhere near as clear or as strong as the evidence for harms from alcohol, drugs or gambling in adolescents.

Layer on the philosophy. If you care about child rights and liberal freedoms, you are naturally wary of blanket bans that override parental judgment and erase the difference between a competent 15 year old and an 11 year old. If you are strongly paternalist, you may be more comfortable, but you still need a policy that works in practice and does not generate worse side effects.

Finally, look at the instrument. A national under 16 ban on social media is easy to explain and politically attractive. It is also leaky, privacy heavy and tangential to the core design problems of the attention economy.

A more proportionate response would focus on:

• Serious enforcement of under 13 rules that already exist.

• Tiered protections for 13 to 17 year olds that change how platforms can target, recommend and notify, rather than simply whether they may exist.

• Binding design standards for addictive features when minors are present.

• Investment in digital literacy and mental health support rather than only constraint.

Personal addendum

On first principles, I lean toward child centred rights and liberal freedoms. Children are not simply passive objects to be protected. They are emerging citizens with their own interests in information, expression and association. Parents are not simply obstacles to be bypassed by the state. They are usually the best placed to calibrate what their particular child can handle.

From that perspective, I am sceptical of any blanket ban that excludes all under 16 year olds from major online spaces, regardless of maturity, context or parental consent. When you add in the weakness of the average evidence, and the practical workarounds, this particular policy looks like a bad fit: rhetorically strong, empirically underpowered and structurally clumsy.

There is a serious problem to solve. But if we care about both children and freedom, we should spend less time congratulating ourselves for simple bans, and more time doing the harder work of reshaping the digital environment they are growing up in.

*Note. Drafted with input from GPT 5. I have not double checked the evidence review but aligns with what I have read. Also see Peter Gray for a child rights centred view and critique of evidence.

Deirdre McCloskey: Liberal defence of queer, Permission to be queer: the case for liberty

McCloskey on liberal defense of queerness

Summary of McCloskey’s lecture and the Q&A, focusing on queer issues, liberalism, and the state. My bullets edited by AI and summary (end), and long form start.  (Based on YT )

Deirdre McCloskey talk about queerness and liberalism at the LSE. It was part memoir, part political theory, part hand drawn graph in the air. McCloskey is funny and sharp and also quite blunt about who scares her.

She used to be Donald. She transitioned in the mid 1990s, in her fifties, and became Deirdre, keeping the initial D so librarians could follow the trail. Economist by training, historian and philosopher by practice, she situates herself with Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine rather than with modern technocrats.

The talk was anchored around a simple phrase she is turning into a book for Chicago: equality of permission.

Equality of permission

McCloskey’s claim is that the best version of liberalism is not about equal outcomes, and not even about fully equal opportunity, which is impossible to deliver in any serious sense. It is about equality of permission.

Everyone should be allowed to have a go. The law removes formal obstacles. You can speak, trade, worship, move, love, change your gender, write obscure economics papers. The state does not promise you a result, it simply gets out of your way.

She calls this primary liberalism and dates its breakthrough moments to Jefferson’s 1776 “all men are created equal” and the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. She reads both as demands to be allowed onto the pitch, not demands for the state to fix the scoreline.

Then comes a second wave in the mid nineteenth century. On the Continent this shows up as European socialism. In Britain and the United States, as New Liberalism and Progressivism. It is the moment when people become proud of using the state from the top down. Clear the slums, rebuild Paris, plan the city, regulate the poor. Urban planning and social engineering are born.

The first liberalism is bottom up. The second starts to say, we know best.

You do not have to guess which one she prefers.

“Do anything you want, but do not spook the horses”

She grounds this in a line from her grandmother that she clearly loves:

Do anything you want, but do not spook the horses.

In other words: be queer, transition, live strangely, write odd books. The line is not drawn at what offends taste, it is drawn at serious harm. No dynamite in the town square. No big externalities.

She links this to her Christianity. She became Anglican in 1998. She quotes both Jesus and Rabbi Hillel. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Do not do to others what you would not want done to you. Very basic ethics. She is happy to say this is not sophisticated political philosophy, it is simply “let us just get along”.

The obvious problem is that this kind of liberalism can be vulnerable to people who are perfectly willing to use free institutions in order to destroy them. Liberties for those who want to end liberty. She knows that, and still thinks the liberal starting point is right.

The personal story

She does not just argue from theory. She anchors it in her own body.

At eleven she says she fell asleep praying for two things: to wake up a girl and to stop stuttering. Roughly two percent of boys stutter and around half a percent of girls, the ratio is surprisingly stable across cultures. At fifty three she jokes that she got half her wish. She transitioned in 1995 in a liberal enough society that she could.

Her mother’s reaction matters here. You have had a man’s career, which was an advantage, she told her, now you get to be an old woman, which is better. McCloskey repeats that line a few times, with a certain relish.

She also pushes back on a neat narrative that she was always an obviously feminine boy. She presents herself as macho. Captain of her high school American football team. Married to a woman for thirty years. Attracted to women. Gender identity sat underneath that life, not on the surface.

One of the biggest discoveries after transition was female friendship. In her view, men think they have many friends but mostly do not. Women form lots of light friendships quickly and then a small number of very deep ones, which are emotionally costly. Transition changed who befriended her and how. The social pattern shifted along with the hormones and clothes.

Queer life, DEI and the state

On queerness she is clear. Contact with “the queers, the immigrants, the others” is one of the gifts of the modern world if we let it be. Reading queer memoirs, or simply having queer colleagues and neighbours, expands our sense of what a human life can look like. It makes us wiser.

She defends diversity, equity and inclusion as practice and ethos. She also draws a line at state enforcement. She wants universities, firms and individuals to practise inclusion out of ethical conviction. She does not want a bureaucracy writing quotas and detailed mandates into law. It is very McCloskey: change hearts, remove legal barriers, be wary of giving the state more coercive tools.

Here she moves into economist mode. She draws a graph in the air.

On the vertical axis: human flourishing. Income, wellbeing, spiritual growth, however you want to define it. There is a zero line. Below it sits Orwell’s boot on a human face forever. Above it sits ordinary decent life. She adds Cadbury’s Whole Nut as a small but important component of British flourishing and complains about what Hershey has done to the US version.

On the horizontal axis: amount of coercion, especially state coercion.

Her argument goes like this. At zero coercion, life is not great. If your three year old runs into the road, you physically restrain them. You do not hold a seminar on autonomy. Some state coercion is essential. Police, courts, basic criminal law.

The problem, she says, is that many economists and technocrats behave as if you can keep adding regulation and nudges and always climb higher up the flourishing axis. More tricks, more programmes, more control, always more.

A liberal who believes in diminishing returns should be sceptical. In her picture the curve rises at first, then flattens, then turns down. At some point extra state power starts to reduce human flourishing. For her, using the state to police bathrooms, clothing, pronouns or consensual sex is well into the downward part of that curve.

She is also insistent on a bright line between words and violence. Harsh speech and physical coercion are not the same category. Words hurt, of course. As a trans woman in the Netherlands who could not pass well in early years, she knows what it is to be read as “a man in a dress”. It is painful. But she can live with insults and misgendering. What she cannot accept is being arrested for using the women’s loo. The legal system should focus on actual violence and the threat of it, not on policing speech.

Where she draws lines

She spends time on Kathleen Stock. McCloskey treats Stock as intelligent and as a friend, not as a cartoon villain. They have debated on trans women and single sex spaces at the University of Austin.

McCloskey disagrees strongly with Stock’s view that trans women should be excluded from women only spaces such as changing rooms and toilets. The implied logic is that you end up with a police officer and some kind of gender inspector outside every public bathroom. She finds that absurd and dangerous.

On elite sport, though, she draws a different boundary. She agrees that post puberty male bodies should not compete in women’s events. Physiology matters. Heart size, muscle mass, frame. If you care about women’s sport at all, you have to protect the category. Her compromise is that someone who blocks puberty early and never develops male secondary traits is a different case from someone who transitions at eighteen and wants to race in the women’s 100 metres.

Bathrooms yes. Women’s Olympic finals no.

On affirmative action she is blunt. Programmes are easy to start and hard to end. The better route is to remove explicit legal barriers and then let people compete. She uses Ruth Bader Ginsburg as an example. Ginsburg graduated near the top of her class and still could not get hired because she was a woman. She became a professor and then a lawyer who spent decades chipping away at formal barriers rather than lobbying for engineered outcomes.

Equal outcomes are impossible. Perfect equality of opportunity is impossible. Equality of permission is feasible. Let women be pilots, lawyers, MPs, and stop the law saying no.

Queer rights, populism and making liberalism cool again

A student asks what really shifts queer rights: culture, law, or economics. McCloskey points to same sex marriage. In 1990, in the US, gay marriage was politically unthinkable. Within about twenty years it was law. Spain, not Britain, was first in Europe. The key, in her view, was framing it as equality of permission. Your soul and my soul have the same worth. You marry the person you love. I marry the person I love. The state should treat us on the same terms. Once phrased like that, change can be fast.

The end of the session turns to the backlash. In the US, MAGA politics has made trans people the new hate target. In Britain she sees hostility to trans women more from some segments of the left. She thinks the United States is now sliding down the wrong side of the coercion curve toward more authoritarian reflex and less liberal instinct. She calls Trump a bad man, quite straightforwardly, and notes that he is not even a particularly clever authoritarian. The smart ones raise the temperature on the frog slowly.

How to respond. Her answer is mostly cultural. Make liberalism cool again. She jokes about calling it adultism. Other ideologies treat the state as parent and citizens as children. Liberalism treats people as grown ups. Invite young people into that. Do not just write papers. Ask artists, musicians, filmmakers to tell stories of freedom and responsibility.

…for McCloskey queer lives and liberalism are not in tension. They belong together. Let people live as themselves. Change hearts faster than you give governments new tools. Watch the state like a hawk. And, in the background, keep her grandmother in mind: do anything you want, just do not spook the horses.

This is bullet point version.

1. Who she is and how she frames herself

• Trained as an economist, now works as historian, philosopher, social and political theorist. 

• (I found it interesting, she started as a socialist, and now would be a Christian liberterian or liberal - as opposed to Randian. Difference, she cares about the poor (like she did as socialist), but Randian’s dont so much. That why she would defined capitalism, as good for poor people)

• Self description:

• “Once a man until 1995”, previously Donald McCloskey.

• Transitioned in a liberal society and chose the name Deirdre to keep the initial D for librarians and because of its Irish roots and feminine connotations.

• Jokes that she is “Donald’s smarter sister” and that she has become wiser through experience.

• Strong identification with classical liberalism in the line of Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, Thoreau.

• Calls herself a “classics groupie” and positions herself explicitly as an eighteenth century style liberal.

2. Core thesis: “Equality of permission” and primary liberalism

• She is finishing a book called Equality of Permission.

• Key idea:

• Liberalism at its core is about equality of permission, not equality of outcome or even engineered equality of opportunity.

• Everyone should be “allowed to have a go”, to try things, without artificial obstacles.

• She calls this “primary liberalism” and dates its political breakthrough to:

• 1776: Jefferson’s “all men are created equal”.

• 1789: French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

• Primary liberalism:

• Bottom up.

• About removing legal barriers and giving people permission to act, speak, trade, migrate, love.

• Not about micromanaging social outcomes.

3. Secondary liberalism, socialism, and progressivism

• She distinguishes a second wave of liberal or progressive thought around 1848:

• Continental revolutions and the birth of European socialism, including Marx but not only Marx.

• In Britain and the United States this second wave appears as “New Liberalism” or “progressivism”.

• Features of this second wave:

• Top down use of the state to “help the poor” and redesign society.

• Urban planning and clearance (for example Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris).

• Strong belief in state capacity to engineer better outcomes.

• Her verdict:

• Primary liberalism is bottom up and permission focused.

• Secondary liberalism and socialism are top down, state heavy, and prone to overreach.

4. Her grandmother’s rule: “Do anything you want, but don’t spook the horses”

• She builds a lot on a family motto:

• “Do anything you want, but do not spook the horses.”

• Interpretation:

• People should be free to be queer, change gender, write economics articles, live as they like.

• The boundary is significant external harm to others, not mere disapproval.

• No metaphorical “stick of dynamite in the town square” that panics society.

• She treats this as a simple, humane formulation of liberal ethics.

5. Christianity, Rabbi Hillel, and the ethics she claims

• She became an Anglican Christian in 1998.

• She anchors her liberalism in:

• Jesus’ formulation: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

• Rabbi Hillel’s older formulation: “Do not do unto others what you would not want done to you.”

• She calls these “gospels of love and justice”.

• Political ethic:

• “Let us just get along” is how she characterises modern liberalism at its best.

• Minimal, non sophisticated politics that simply aims at peaceful coexistence and mutual respect.

6. Personal narrative about gender and stuttering

• Childhood:

• As an eleven year old, she prayed at night for two miracles:

• To wake up as a girl.

• To stop stuttering.

• She notes that about 2 percent of boys stutter and about 0.5 percent of girls do, across cultures.

• At age 53, in 1995, she transitions:

• Interprets this as finally getting half of her childhood prayer.

• Credits the freedom of a modern liberal society for making transition possible.

• Her mother’s reaction:

• Mother viewed it as Deirdre gaining both experiences, a career as a man and old age as a woman, which she presents as a kind of enlargement of life.

• She emphasises:

• She was a very “macho” man, captain level high school football player, straight, married to a woman for 30 years.

• Transition was not about being a feminine gay man, but about something more basic and persistent in gender identity.

7. Discovery of female friendship

• One of her biggest surprises after transition:

• She claims men rarely have many true friends, even if they think they do.

• Women often have many light friendships formed quickly and a small number of very deep friendships, which she found “costly” but profound.

• She paints her transition as a revelation in social and emotional structures, not just clothes and pronouns.

8. Queer people, DEI, and diversity as human enrichment

• She defends diversity, equity, and inclusion in a “sensible” form:

• Accepts that DEI can be taken too far, as can drinking water.

• Argues that contact with “queers, immigrants, other people” enlarges our humanity.

• Reading queer autobiographies, novels, and meeting people different from oneself helps produce wiser adults.

• She jokes that “DEI” is literally her first name, so she is sensitive about attacks on DEI.

• Crucial distinction:

• She wants individuals and institutions to practice DEI out of ethical conviction.

• She does not want the state to coerce DEI policies as a direct programmatic mandate.

9. The diagram: human flourishing vs coercion

She presents her central policy intuition in a simple diagram:

• Axes:

• Vertical axis: human flourishing, which can mean income, spiritual flourishing, or broader welfare.

• Horizontal axis: amount of coercion, especially state coercion.

• Starting point:

• Some coercion is clearly necessary and positive, for example grabbing a three year old child away from traffic.

• She accepts police, criminal law, and the state’s monopoly of violence as necessary.

• Main claim:

• Most economists act as if more regulation and coercion always increases human flourishing.

• In that view the curve keeps sloping upward as you add regulation.

• Her liberal view:

• There are diminishing returns to state coercion.

• The curve rises at low levels of coercion, plateaus, then falls.

• Past a certain point, additional regulation makes things worse.

• Application to queer and gender issues:

• Using the state to police bathrooms, dress, gender identity, or consensual sexual behaviour is beyond the optimal point.

• That kind of intervention is on the downward part of the curve, reducing human flourishing.

10. Physical coercion vs words

• She rejects the idea that harsh speech is “coercion” in the same sense as physical force:

• Argues for a bright line between physical coercion and verbal persuasion.

• Says equating “verbal rape” with physical rape trivialises actual violence.

• Uses the childhood line “sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me” to capture the distinction, while admitting words do hurt.

• Practical implication:

• She can tolerate being misgendered and insulted.

• She cannot tolerate being arrested or physically coerced for using the women’s bathroom.

11. The state as a danger to queer people

• Cites political philosopher Judith Shklar’s “liberalism of fear”:

• Liberalism centrally concerned with fearing the state’s coercive capacity.

• Historical examples:

• Northern Europe had a century long terror against male homosexuals, with criminal sanctions.

• Southern Europe often treated homosexuality as a sin but not a crime.

• Central argument:

• States get captured by hate coalitions which then use law against Jews, Catholics, blacks, queers and other minorities.

• Therefore a liberal should be deeply wary of giving the state new tools to regulate queer lives.

• She stresses that states have “never been the friend of queers” in the long historical record.

12. Trans issues, Kathleen Stock, and “the bathroom problem”

• She credits philosopher Kathleen Stock as serious and intelligent but disagrees with her on policy.

• Stock’s position as she presents it:

• Trans women should not be allowed in women only spaces such as changing rooms, possibly toilets.

• Stock worries about safety and violation of sex based boundaries.

• McCloskey’s critique:

• Says this would effectively require a police officer and a “gender assigner” outside every public toilet, which she finds absurd.

• Sees it as an unnecessary expansion of state coercion into intimate life.

• Her own position:

• She uses women’s toilets simply to pee, not to assault anyone, and sees herself as no threat.

• She does not want the state involved in deciding where she may urinate.

• Thinks gender issues for children should be handled by families and professionals, not parliaments.

13. Sports and fairness: where she agrees with Stock

In the Q&A, she draws a clear line on elite women’s sport:

• She fully agrees with the view that:

• Post puberty male to female transitioners should not compete in women only elite sports such as swimming or running.

• Male puberty creates lasting physiological advantages in heart size, muscle mass, and frame.

• Her principle:

• If a child has consistent cross gender identity and uses puberty blockers early, and thus never develops male traits, they might fairly compete as women.

• But allowing a mature male body to enter women’s competitions destroys the point of women’s sport.

• She calls this “a no brainer” and treats it as common sense fairness, separate from bathroom and changing room issues.

14. United States vs United Kingdom, and the new “hate group”

• She claims in the United States:

• The MAGA movement has made “transgenderism” the new hate target.

• She explicitly likens the pattern to the classic “first they came for the Jews” escalation sequence.

• She distinguishes:

• Conservatives she respects (for example George Will).

• A “hateful crowd” currently wielding power who use trans people as scapegoats.

• In the United Kingdom:

• She says hostility to trans women currently comes more from segments of the left, especially some feminists.

• She sees both right wing and left wing variants of illiberalism that weaponise queer issues.

15. Affirmative action, DEI, and changing hearts instead of laws

• Question on affirmative action for women and minorities:

• She opposes affirmative action as a permanent state policy.

• Argues that once a program starts, it rarely ends, even when no longer needed.

• Uses Ruth Bader Ginsburg as an example:

• Ginsburg faced direct discrimination as one of a tiny number of female law students and could not get a job.

• Ginsburg’s legal work sought removal of barriers, not guaranteed equal outcomes.

• Her distinction:

• Equality of opportunity in a strict sense is impossible, because humans are varied in talents, preferences, languages, and histories.

• Equality of outcomes is impossible and undesirable.

• Equality of permission, which focuses on removing legal and institutional obstacles, is attainable.

• On DEI:

• She wants DEI to be practiced voluntarily by institutions and individuals, not enforced top down by the state.

16. Family, gender, and power

• She emphasises the importance of the family as:

• The place where we learn love, care, and basic social relations.

• Also a possible site of serious oppression.

• Examples:

• Romanian dictator Ceaușescu forcing women into the labour market and placing children into state orphanages to raise GDP, which she calls devastating for mental health.

• The Roman paterfamilias having legal power of life and death over his children.

• Bolsonaro’s remark that he would execute a gay son, which she treats as an example of family based cruelty.

• She insists:

• Liberal analysis cannot ignore the family simply because libertarians often focus only on state and markets.

• Care work and parenting are real work and central to human flourishing.

17. Queer rights traction: culture, law, and economics

In reply to a student asking why queer rights rise and fall and what drives progress:

• She argues progress is highly culture specific and can change fast.

• Example of same sex marriage:

• In 1990, the idea of two men or two women marrying was completely off the table in mainstream US politics.

• Within a short time, reframing it as a simple matter of equal civil permission transformed public acceptance.

• Spain is noted as the first European country to legalise gay marriage, ahead of the UK bureaucracy.

• Her view of drivers:

• Cultural frames and narratives are key.

• When queer rights are framed as basic fairness and equal soul value, they become more acceptable.

• This is aligned with major religious traditions that treat souls as equal.

18. Access to hormone therapy and who should pay

• Question: should state provided hormone therapy be seen as equality of permission or opportunity, and should the state fund it?

• Her answer:

• She does not think the state should pay for transitions.

• Believes transition is cheaper than many imagine, roughly comparable to a small car.

• States that female to male transitions are particularly inexpensive in biological terms because male hormones quickly change voice, muscle, and personality.

• Male to female is harder because male secondary characteristics cannot be fully undone.

• Her principle:

• Gender change should be a private matter financially.

• She does not see a strong case for transition as a public expense, in contrast with her strong case against the state banning or obstructing it.

19. Populism, authoritarianism, and “making liberalism cool again”

• She worries about:

• The decline of liberal norms in the last 10 to 20 years due to populism and anti liberal politics.

• Citizens losing “popular liberal consciousness”.

• Response strategy:

• Change hearts, not only policies, by making liberalism attractive, especially to the young.

• She jokingly rebrands liberalism as “adultism”, since other political philosophies treat citizens as children and the state as parent.

• Argues that many young people want to be treated as grown ups, not as dependants of the state.

• Role of the arts:

• Calls for artists, novelists, filmmakers, musicians to carry messages of freedom and adult responsibility.

• Cites Mick Jagger as a symbol of cultural influence and jokes about his LSE connection.

20. Trump, the US, and where she thinks the curve is now

• She is explicitly alarmed by Trump:

• Says he moves towards authoritarianism with new outrages almost every week.

• Believes he has a strong instinct for exploiting resentment among Americans who feel bossed around by the state.

• Calls him “a bad man” in straightforward moral language.

• On the coercion curve:

• She believes the United States is currently on the downward part of the curve, where increased state coercion reduces human flourishing.

• She compares “smart” authoritarians, who move slowly like the metaphorical frog in heating water, with Trump, whom she calls not smart but still dangerous.

• Prescription:

• Maintain a single, accountable state with a monopoly of violence, but watch it very closely.

• Resist expansions of coercive power, especially those targeting minorities like trans people.

That is the gist: McCloskey mixes personal trans narrative, queer experience, Christian ethics, classical liberal theory, and a blunt distrust of state power. Her through line is simple: let people live as they are, do not bring coercive law into toilets and gender, accept limits on what the state can fix, and fight like hell to keep the coercion curve from bending downward.

Clearing the Air: Hannah Ritchie on Climate Honesty, Hope, and the Future

Hannah Ritchie, one of the most lucid and data-driven voices in climate and sustainability, returns to the podcast to discuss her new book Clearing the Air: 50 Questions and Answers about Climate.

Together, Ben and Hannah explore how honesty builds trust in climate science, why the 1.5 °C target is probably out of reach (and why that’s not the end of hope), and China’s complex role as both the world’s largest emitter and clean-tech powerhouse.

They dig into how abundance, not austerity, could define the next phase of climate progress; how to handle renewable energy variability and mineral demand; and why “net zero” may need a more realistic framing. Hannah also shares personal reflections — what she’d say to her 16-year-old self, how she balances optimism with realism, her daily running routine by the Scottish coast, and advice for those hoping to make an impact in sustainability.

The conversation closes with a look at smart philanthropy, innovative climate projects, and the creative habits that keep her hopeful, curious, and effective.

Expect an hour of evidence, insight, and grounded optimism — a conversation about how to think clearly, act practically, and stay inspired in a warming world.

🎧 Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on YouTube.

What We Explore

Honesty & the 1.5 °C target

• Most scientists quietly accept 1.5 °C is out of reach. Pretending otherwise risks trust when “nothing magical” happens the day we cross it.

• Better framing: climate risk increases gradually; every tenth of a degree still matters.

China’s climate paradox

• China burns coal but leads the world in renewables, batteries, and EVs (over half of new car sales are electric).

• Coal capacity ≠ coal use: many plants run fewer hours.

• When China peaks, the world peaks—and that moment may be close.

Population and the “should I have kids?” question

• Fertility changes now barely affect mid-century emissions; per-capita emissions must be near-zero by then anyway.

• Humans create solutions as well as problems—population fear is misplaced.

Abundance > Degrowth

• People want prosperity and clean air, not enforced austerity.

• Electrification flips efficiency: combustion wastes ~80% of fuel; electrics convert ~80% to useful work.

• More energy services with less energy use—a politics of optimism.

Can we transition fast enough?

• Not for 1.5 °C, but likely for ~2 °C.

• Unlike past transitions from one fuel to another, this is a move from commodities to technologies, which scale exponentially.

Intermittency & minerals — the pragmatic view

• Short gaps in renewables handled by batteries; longer ones by mixed low-carbon sources, grid links, and storage.

• Most nations can hit ~80% clean power; multiple paths exist for the last 20%.

• Mineral scarcity fears are overstated: exploration, efficiency, and substitution will keep supplies stable—and clean energy extraction is orders of magnitude smaller than today’s fossil mining.

Rethinking “Net Zero”

• “Net zero” has been politicised and sounds implausible to many.

• A realistic goal: 85–90% cuts by 2050, then solve the remaining 10%. Honest ambition still changes the trajectory.

AI’s energy footprint (and upside)

• Chatbot energy use is trivial compared with daily habits (like eating a steak).

• AI could speed up climate solutions—from better weather modelling to new materials and drug discovery.

Philanthropy that moves the needle

• High-ROI causes: global health and direct cash transfers, which show dramatic real-world results.

• Ben adds: fund long-term health studies, decision-making research, and “venture philanthropy” that backs thousands of risky ideas—most will fail, but the outliers can transform the world.

Summary contents, transcript, and podcast links below. Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to pods. Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Contents chapters

00:33 Why honesty matters in climate communication
03:51 China’s role in climate progress
09:34 Population growth and climate impact
13:38 The concept of abundance in sustainability
21:15 Hope and optimism for the future
26:50 Can we transition fast enough?
35:17 Decarbonising electricity and transport
41:03 Cement and other climate challenges
45:28 Rethinking “net zero” goals
49:09 Individual action vs systemic change
52:26 AI’s role in sustainability
55:48 Personal insights and creative habits
58:20 Philanthropy and high-impact giving
1:11:50 Current projects and career advice

Transcript (helped by AI so errors possible)

Ben: Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be welcoming. Back to the podcast, Hannah Richie. Hannah is one of the most thoughtful, smartest, and lucid writers on climate and sustainability matters. She has a new book out clearing the Air, which looks at 50 questions and answers around climate. It's available in the UK now and in the US from March, 2026.

The book, just like her last one, is Excellent. Hannah, welcome. 

Hannah: Thanks very much. That was a very lovely intro. 

Ben: You are most welcome. How important is honesty? I ask because one and a half degrees, which I'm not sure is properly understood as a point target, but in any event, one and a half degrees when I speak to a lot of scientists seems to be off the table, but a lot of them seem to be really reluctant to be publicly talking about it.

And there's a question of sort of white lies and things like that. And the first question you tackled in your book is whether we are too late and what does it mean to be a three degree, four degree, five degree, six degree world. But I'm almost interested in also how important you think honesty is among scientists when communicating and what do you think about our communication around the one and a half degree target?

Hannah: Yeah, I think that, I mean, I. I would obviously say, I think honesty is, is, is very crucial here. I think that, um, I think especially when it comes to scientific communication, trust in science, especially when you're talking about issues like climate change, where there are the risks of climate change, but on the solution side, you know.

That requires large investments, that acquire, requires large policy changes that requires large, uh, behavioral changes from individuals. And there is a sense that you people need to be able to trust in the science and, and what is being told to them if they are to back the solutions and policies that are needed for us to actually tackle climate change.

And I think when it comes to the one and a half degree target, I think you're right that if you actually ask most climate scientists, is this in any way plausible that we manage to stay below one and a half degrees? The vast majority would say no. Right? The reality is it's too late for us to reduce emissions quickly enough to stay below one and a half degrees.

And from my perspective, I think we should be honest about that and I think we should be honest about that for several reasons. I think one is that the way that often that the one and a half degree target has been framed is that I think now many people in the public having their heads once we pass one point.

Five degrees, you know, there's this cliff that we're gonna fall off, right? And something really dramatic is gonna happen 'cause they see it as this kind of threshold that we should never, ever pass. And the reality is, I think from a public trust perspective, the reality is that we've all passed one and a half degrees and nothing dramatic is going to happen, right?

Climate risk will gradually rise as we increase in temperatures, but nothing huge is gonna happen exactly as we pass one and a half degrees. So you're gonna have the situation where the public who starts to believe, um, that, that, that something dramatic is gonna happen, um, is living in a 1.52 degrees C world.

And they're looking around and they're thinking, we were told this is gonna kind of be the end of the world. And it's not. And I think that there is that risk that they start to lose trust and credibility in science, which is so crucial. If we, again, if we were to get people to, to actually act on this.

Ben: Agreed. I think that seems really sensible. And, and I think without honesty, 'cause we get enough about people not trusting experts or not trusting politicians. So the more you damage that, the, the harder it gets in the book. You answer 50 questions, but I was wondering, is there a favorite question you like to be asked or is there a question you always want to be asked but no one does?

Hannah: I'm not sure about the latter one. I think the, the one that I think is most interesting when people ask it, because there's so many tangential questions and, and and discussion points that come off of it is what about China? Right? So, uh, often it is a very, very common in countries like the UK actually there are two questions in the book that are linked.

In the UK for example, what's often brought up is that, you know, the UK is now only 1% of the world's CO2 emissions. What we do doesn't matter. Why should we really do anything at all? And the follow up to that is. Yeah, that's because China is emitting so much and it's purely on China to, to, to reduce and tackle this.

And, and those two questions are very much linked. And I think the question of what's happening in China is so rich in detail and, and tangential discussions that I think it's, it's, it's always a, a good one to get asked. I think we can, we can go into more detail here, but I think the, there's just an interesting paradox of China where, um, the reality is it is by far the world's largest emitter.

Um, it does burn a lot of coal. It does still build new coal plants. So on the one side, it looks like this kind of climate villain, if you want to frame it that way. But on the other side. You could argue that it's one of the countries or the country that's actually taking clean energy deployment and decarbonization, uh, the most seriously.

So domestically, the rate by which it's deploying solar, wind, electric cars. So last year more than half of new cars sold in China were electric. You know, that's way ahead of many countries in Europe, way, way ahead of the us. So it's, it is moving really quickly domestically, but is also really seeing the energy transition and clean energy as this kind of, uh, I guess new economic transformation for, for its economy.

So they're, they're really leaning to the manufacturing of the minerals. We'll need the solar panels, the batteries, to also export to other parts of the world. So there's this very, very interesting dynamic in China where it's this paradox where, uh, on the one hand it looks like a climate villain, but in the other maybe looks a bit like a climate savior.

Ben: We might as well touch on China as you've raised it up. I, I think that's a really interesting framework and they do seem to be committed. They have targets and they're doing things. My two kind of little interesting factoids is, although they are building new coal, they have stopped funding, uh, new coal outside of China.

So they used to be one of the largest funders of that. And that's, uh, gone away and actually regular, uh, finances don't really wanna finance that all, so that's disappearing. And then I was just looking up, I think in the first six months of this year, so 2025, they built over 200 gigawatts of, um, clean power.

And that's more or less, I think if you translate to that's 200 million households. So it's kind of a small country that, that they've powered. And it's about the same amount that the US wants to build in the next five years. Um. On the other hand that is actually just enough to offset the growth in energy that they need.

So they're doing it, but it's only just, uh, it's just bending, which is this, uh, push and take that you have with China. But I do think, the question I always ask myself is, at the end of the day, do we really think that China's gonna be part of the problem or part of the solution? And I think in the round you are tilting it to being part of the solution and you need to try and nudge it even further along that path.

Hannah: I think there are a couple of like interesting points again to elaborate on China. So yes, China's building new coal plants. What's interesting and people under appreciate is that coal plants. Are running less often. Right. So the reality is I actually don't, just don't care how many coal plants China builds.

I just care how much coal it burns. Um, and the reality is that even though it's building new coal plants, those are running less often. So you can have the scenario where it still is adding new coal capacity, but actually it's burning less coal and nicotine less CO2. And as you said, part of the challenge here is that.

China's electricity demand is growing so rapidly, even though it's building huge amounts of clean power as just about making up that entire growth. Um, so over the last few years there's been this kind of, it's always kind of just been on the edge where solar and wind deployment are just about enough to cover electricity demand, but not quite.

So that's why coal has increased still. But as you see in the last year, in particular, in the last six months, um, actually that has outpaced electricity demand. So there are estimates that that China's CO2 emissions have actually fallen from, from power in the first six months of this year. Um, and, and I think, I think in terms of a, a really key, I think, I think often it's useful to have a kind of pivotal.

You know, point, milestone, point at some point. And I think that will be, you know, global, a global peak in CO2 emissions where we can say, this is peaked, let's now get emissions down. And what's absolutely crucial to that is China's emissions peaking, right? Basically when China peaks, the world will peak, right?

Um, and it's very hard to predict peaks, but I think people are now starting to get a little bit cautiously excited that we could be on the brink of this, this peak in, in, in emissions. 

Ben: Yes. So part of my job is forecasting, and I would say that within five to 10 years, my probability of peak is very high.

Maybe not one, two, and I can't name you the exact year, but if you say five to 10, uh, it, it does very much look like, uh, we are gonna peak and, and potentially, uh, sooner. Um, I was trying very hard in the book to find a question that I'm asked a little bit, uh, which you don't address, and it was really hard.

So those both 50 are really good. But one, which doesn't appear in the book, maybe it's slightly sociopolitical in some regard is about whether our decision to have children should be influenced by our thinking on climate. And I think to some extent this is actually mostly an accounting quirk or static models that people don't quite understand.

But I also have a kind of pragmatic technologist answer. That's what I call it, about how that humans are the ones which will need to create the systems and technological change. So we really shouldn't be, uh, worried about that. Um, but I was wondering what do you think of this question and human flourishing and, and whether it should, uh, whether decision to have families or not should be influenced by any of our thinking on climate?

Hannah: Yeah, so I think there are often two reasons that people bring up if they are concerned about having children, uh, as a result of climate change. And one is like an input and one is an output. So one of the key concerns is that by bringing another human into the world, they will increase environmental pressure.

They will use energy, they will. Uh, consume fossil fuels and they will just increase amount of CO2 emissions and, and the, and the challenge with climate, um, and, and this often leads to the notion that, you know, actually the root of the problem here is population growth. And if we could dramatically reduce population growth and that would lead to individual decisions to have fewer children, then we would be on a much, much better path going forward than where we are.

And I think the reality is, when you break down the numbers on this, any demographic changes we make today will have almost no impact on emissions and global temperatures going into the future. And the reason for that is if you change fertility rates today, there is often. Quite a significant lag before that actually has a meaningful impact on total population numbers.

Right. Um, and and the reality there is that by the time we've reached a stage where it has a significant impact on population numbers, emissions will be extremely low, or emissions per person will be extremely low, right? So let's say we change fertility patterns. Fertility patterns today, it takes by 2050, for example, or 2060 for that to have a meaningful impact on the total size of the global population.

And the reality is that by 2050 or 2060, um, emissions per person should be extremely low, if not close to zero. Right? And if we're not there, then we will have failed quite badly on our decarbonization. So at the point by which. Population could have any meaningful impact on emissions. Uh, total emissions and per capita emissions should actually be very, very low.

So, and, and the, and, and I actually covered this on a post on my substack looking at, uh, there was an interesting paper that came out trying to model this and, and I think the, the, the end result was that, you know, a change in many billions of people in total population, um, by the, by 21 hundreds would have a, I think it was 0.1%, oh, sorry, 0.1 degree, uh, change in global temperature.

And that was for, you know, having billions of people difference in the total population. So I think we're actually past the point by which. Uh, demographic changes are gonna have a, a meaningful impact. And that also goes in the opposite direction, right? I think there are projections that global population peak might not be that far away, right?

Mm-hmm. The timeline keeps coming forward and forward, and I think some people see that as a kind of, again, a kind of climate blessing that if, um, population peaks way earlier than we thought, then, you know, we'll be able to drive down emissions much more quickly. And again, I think that's not right. I think any other direction, I don't think at this stage population is gonna have a huge impact on, on emissions.

Ben: Yes. And it's a really interesting observation that our consensus models for that comes in and in and in. And I think I also point that to one of the issues, or, or just one of the challenges, the fact that we are, we are using models and models aren't necessarily the world, and you've gotta take a lot of these things into account.

But I'm, I'm very much with you on, on the population front. On, on the flip side of that, in the last year, one of the most talked about ideas, I guess particularly coming out from the US but is going around globally, is this idea around abundance. So, Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson have been talking about it, but it's been floating around for a little bit.

Um, they kind of really talk about the abundance of everything really. But for sustainability, in particularly in particular, they talk about the abundance of clean and green energy and electrification. What do you think about the ideas of abundance? And I guess on the one hand some critics would say, uh, this is too, uh, techno optimist.

Um, that would be one sort of criticism. On the other hand, people might point out to say, well, actually this is a way that you can kind of raise everyone and get a kind of consensus coalition for the things that we need to do. 

Hannah:  I think there's a, a question of whether I think that's a positive and something we should aim for.

And then there's a political angle of, um, you know, is that the type of, I guess, messaging and narrative and goal that is most politically salient if we want to tackle environmental problems and climate change. And I think my answer to both is, yes, we are. I think if you are to. Look at the political situation today in terms of how people think about climate change, how leaders talk about climate change, um, how people, what people's concerns are about the climate solutions.

And I come to I go through many of them in the book. I think the reality is that for a lot of people, the sense that in order to tackle environmental problems, what we need to do is, um, cut back. We need to reduce our standards of living. We need to go back to a way of living that we had in the past.

'cause that's when we were sustainable and now we're unsustainable. I think the reality is that to most people, that's just not that appealing, right? I think the reality for most people is they want to live a good life. They want cheap energy, and you generally get cheap stuff when you have abundant stuff, right?

That the, those tend to go, go hand in hand. And, and they are, uh, looking for credible alternatives to many of the technologies and stuff that they. They use today rather than just saying, let's just cut that out completely. Um, and I think the way you do get there is by emphasizing the, not just the climate benefits of this transition, but importantly the economic, the lifestyle, um, uh, and, and, and knock on benefits that that, that this transition has.

And I think the reality, I think when you're often talking about, you know, energy, I think what a lot of people miss is how much we can increase energy services to people while also reducing energy use. At the same time, I think people conflate these two, and I think that's a mistake to conflate these two.

So I think the reality is when you blow up what the global energy system looks like, most of it is just wasted energy, right? And that's wasted in two ways, right? When we burn stuff. We just chuck away a load of energy away, right? So when you burn coal, only a third of it actually gets converted into electricity.

For gas, it's maybe half, right? So you have huge losses in that part of the system, but then you have huge losses and basically in using fuels rather than electricity, right? So for your petrol car, 80% of the petrol you put in your car. Is actually what we'd say is wasted, right? Because it's actually not delivering energy services.

Only 20% is delivering the energy services, which is moving you from A to B, right? With electrification, you get rid of huge amounts of those energy losses. So for an electric car, it's basically the inverse where 80% is going from moving you to A to B, and only 20% is wasted. So when you blow it, when you blow this up and then look at the models for the the energy transition, what you realize is that we could get rid of huge amounts of that energy at the top of the chain, which is not doing anything for us or proving our lives in any way.

And you could keep the energy services the same or actually increase the energy services while still reducing that bit at at the top. So I think that's one one key thing to get across is that, you know, trying to provide more abundant energy services does not necessarily mean you need to use more energy.

You can actually use less energy and get more output. 

Ben: Exactly. Um, and this touches on, I mean, we spoke about this in our last podcast, so we won't rehash it. So if anyone can go this about that, um, this is one of the, uh, critical things you pick up in kind of degrowth ideas that actually by focusing too much on that you miss all of these things.

And I, I would assume you still have the same, uh, critiques around, uh, the ideas that they had, that you had last year into this year. 

Hannah: Yeah, I mean, I think it's actually just got stronger based on the political situation where I think there is. May, I don't, I actually don't think this is necessarily reflected in public opinion, but at least in kind of political rhetoric.

Um, I think there, there, over the last year or so, there has been a shift to what, less away from climate change to either not talking about it whatsoever or talking about climate action in a more negative framing. Right. And I think that's true of many countries. It's obviously true of the us you even see it in the UK and many other countries in Europe.

And I think the, the notion that, you know, the way we should try to progress and push climate action more is therefore to say, well, we should just shrink the economy or, uh, um, even just reduce energy consumption. Like even if you just put that message, we should just reduce and do less, um, in order to tackle climate change.

I think there's just politically, it's just a non-starter, even more so than, than when we discussed this last time, uh, last year. 

Ben: Yes, I would've probably said, uh, a few years ago, I was 99% sure of that. Uh, position for forecast is really never like saying 0% or a hundred percent, but it even in increased.

And the thing which switched me was actually, uh, the pandemic because essentially we did have a version of Degrowth during that time and everyone found it really awful. So, uh, I just don't think, well, and emissions  just dropped (only) five or 7% or something?

Ben: Some something tiny, right? not of the scale required.

Hannah: I mean, I think one, when there's been discussions on Degrowth previously, I think, um, there's a criticism that, uh, actually not what de growers are not advocating for is reduction in GDP or necessarily like economic growth. Uh, it's aimed at particular sectors and in particular reducing energy, right? So shrinking energy and resource consumption.

And I think my response to that is that, you know. Trying to be, I guess, pragmatic about it. The, the easiest way or the, what I see as the most effective way, if you want to actually just reduce energy, again, that energy at the top of the chain is just to promote decarbonization and electrification. To me, that seems a much more effective route to reducing energy use than to tell people that they should cut back on energy use.

I think the last one, you might get marginal gains from that. I don't think they're gonna be dramatic or across whole populations, just decarbonizing and electrifying, uh, gets you much, much further, and, and to me just seems much more politically feasible. 

Ben: Yeah. Much, much better tool. Exactly. Um, okay, so before we tackle, um, a handful of questions from the book where I ask some people about which are the ones that, that come up, um, I thought we could do a, a kind of past and future, um, exercise slightly.

Um, although I guess this one's also a little bit answering the climate anxiety question, but if you could speak to your 16-year-old self, um, I guess the Hannah who loved, uh, science but was worried about the planet's future, uh, seemed to really love water. Um, what would you say to her now about hope via finding your voice, what to do about climate anxiety?

Hannah: Um, I think I'd tell her first, I would tell her to, I guess go wait and look at some of the trends in. Human's ability to solve other problems. Like I think the, my, one of my issues at the time, I was very concerned about the environment, environmental, uh, change and I think quite rightly, um, but the issues that I conflated that also with human development challenges.

So the environment stuff was getting worse, but also all of the human development challenges were getting way worse. And we were kind of living in the worst times on almost any dimension. And the reality is, if you look at the data, especially on human development measures like health, child mortality, poverty, hunger, et cetera, over long time scales, you know, we've, we've made huge amounts of progress on that, right?

So humans are capable of solving problems when we put our minds and, and resources behind it. So that's one, one thing. And I think on the kind of emotional side, I think I would try to get across that a balance of. Concern and hope is good and fine. Um, I think often we are told to push in either just one or the other direction or that's the way, at least the way it's framed.

So now I'm relatively optimistic and you could call me hopeful in some sense. Um, but I think people then conflate that as me being unconcerned in some way or not taking the problem seriously. And I think the reality is you can actually, being hopeful and optimistic about our ability to solve challenges has a prerequisite that you have to believe in the challenge in the first place, right?

You have to acknowledge there's a problem or an issue or to solve, but then also, uh, have some sense of optimism and hope that there are things that we can do to tackle it. And I think at the time I was only in the, the fear anxiety, uh, there's no way we can get out of this box. And I would try to, to instill that, that bit of optimism, that there are things that we can do.

Ben: And let's take Hopeful Hannah and put her into the future. And now hopeful Hannah is maybe 70 or 80 years old in that is likely to be 90, uh, 90 to a hundred years with the kind of life expectancy cohorts that we're looking at now. Uh, what do you think Future Hannah, future Hopeful Hannah, say write, write back in a postcard to us today?

Hannah: Oh, that's a very good question. That's one of those kind of end of history illusion questions, right? Where, when maybe not quite, I think people assume that they're, they're growth trajectory is finished and I'll be the same when I'm 90 as I am now, and that's obviously wrong.

I would, I can tell you what I'd hope we would write. Yeah. I hope what I would write back to my. Current self is, is, is trying to instill how much awe and wonder is to come. Um, I think, I think a lot of people, if you ask them now, have very much lost any sense of, I guess, excitement about the future that lies ahead, right?

Like it's either things are gonna go backwards and we're gonna regress, or we're just gonna kind of trundle along and muddle through. And it seems like there's very little to be excited about over the, in the coming decades. And I, and I don't believe that to be true. I think there's lots that we can be excited about, whether it's technological change in energy, whether it's innovations in health, which we just discussed off the podcast, uh, prior to this.

I think there are huge amounts that we. I, I would like us to be excited about and hope that we make huge amounts of progress on. So I guess when I'm 90, I hope that we write back to ourselves and I write back to my current self and say, you were right to be excited, but actually you should have been more excited.

'cause what's happened in the next, uh, 50 years has just been absolutely incredible. 

Ben: Yeah. That's a, that's a really good, um, a really good way of thinking about it. I was thinking about this question as well, and, um, I have a similar, similar view. I, I guess I do a little bit unfortunately about thinking about risks and opportunities this life to too much.

And a lot of people worry about what I would call these left ha risks, so something really bad happening. Mm-hmm. Which is possible, but quite small. But I don't think they think enough about the equal and opposite. Well, I think equal and opposite and potentially bigger and larger, I'm gonna call them Right.

Tail risks. And my example for this is actually in, in both AI and obesity, whereas if you went back 20 years ago. You ask people about the state of where we're probably talking about peak obesity and you describe what some of these AI things are doing today, they would've said, well, that's kind of fantasy and actually we have it today.

And that's actually even 10 years ago you would've said this. So when you, when you go forward, you're gonna have all of these positive surprises that we don't know. Yes, you are gonna have probably some negative ones as well. Um, but like you say, the awe and wonder of some of those positive ones, um, at least hopeful, Ben, uh, is very much hoping that I'd be writing back to talk about that.

So I was gonna ask, um, from some of the questions, um, which comes up in the book. So I sort of took a small sample and said, oh, what are the questions, uh, which you are, you are kind of asking, and one which came up, which was essentially, can we transition fast enough? So what's your thoughts on that? Um, I guess you answer it in the book, but I dunno if it's been updated and, and what would you say to that question?

Hannah: Yeah. So I think, um, it's maybe worth thinking about what enough means, right? Like everyone, like it's a very subjective term and everyone will have their own definition of what enough means for some people. Um, actually the answer to that is just no, because enough for them was steam below one and a half degrees, and we're obviously not doing that fast enough to, to achieve that.

So I think that it's, it's a somewhat subjective question. I guess my, part of my opinion on it is, you know, could, can we potentially transition quickly enough probably for around two degrees, right? So for me now, two degrees is the kind of. Ambitious, but potentially achievable target. And that's kind of what my enough is kind of measured against.

And I think the, the, the, the, the framing in the background here is that, you know, we do need to undergo these huge, or actually several huge energy transitions, well that's moving away from fossil fuels and electricity, but also the kind of electric electrification transition in industrial transition. So a huge range of different transitions.

Um, and the framing here and argument put forward is always that, uh, historically, if you look at the long run data, you know. Well, some argue that there's actually never been an energy transition. 'cause any fuel or energy source that we've used in the past, someone in the world today is still using it, right?

So, uh, we've not even passed, uh, the transition away from wood because some people in the world, that's their main source of energy is wood, right? So that's the first argument. But the second argument is that even if you do look at, um, uh, energy transitions in different regions, you know, it takes 70 years to transition from coal to gas, or it takes, uh, another 50 years to transition from, um, gas to oil.

So these tend to take, you know, half a century or more in the relative. We don't have that amount of time. And I think the, like even there is, if you look at the speed of the rollout of. Clean tech today is much, much faster than the rollout of any of the, any of the fuels or technologies that came before it.

Um, so solar in particular is, is, is, is accelerating extremely quickly. Uh, wind is in second. Nuclear is now not growing very slowly, but it did in the, uh, kind of sixties and seventies. It was growing extremely quickly, and then you got coal and gas, which were rolled out much more, more slowly. I think the key point there is that we, as part of these transitions, what we are doing is we're transitioning from.

Our energy source being commodities. So coal and gas or oil is stuff you dig out the ground that has some sense of fixed economics behind it. It has some sense of fixed, um, speed behind it, and we're transitioning to basically. Uh, from commodities to technologies and technologies follow learning curves, they can follow much more exponential rates, um, of growth, both in terms of drops in prices, but also the speed by which you can can roll these out.

They're much more modular, right? So you can deploy them much more quickly in many different places rather than waiting for this, you know, one coal plant or one nuclear plant in a given location. So I think we, I don't think it's appropriate to necessarily use the models of transitions in the past to therefore say, because it took 70 years, um, to transition from one fossil fuel to another.

That means it's gonna take another 70 years to go from fossil fuels to, to clean tech. I don't think that's an appropriate, uh, extrapolation to make. 

Ben: Yeah, I think that's really clear. And I think you also make the point that, you know, again, depending on what you think is, is enough, it's still that every point, 1.2 counts over, over that, you know?

Yeah. It lowers your risk. Uh, and for all of those type of things, there was, there was also a set of questions in the book, which essentially, um, was around resources and, um, sort of, um, the technical capacity of, of things. Um, I'll put them together. And so one was what happens when the wind doesn't blow? Is there even enough land for the wind turbines?

And what happens if we run out of, uh, resources like minerals or things to build the wind? Is, isn't that a huge, um, challenge for us? 

Hannah: Yeah. So the, the first one that comes up is, well, it's fantastic to move to solar and wind, but like sometimes it's night and sometimes the wind doesn't blow. And what you're gonna do when that happens and.

I think what's key to get across here is the different options we have at different timescales, right? So we actually have now very good technology, IE batteries, just standard lithium ion batteries, um, to basically store energy and dispatch it over the timeframe of maybe errors, right? And the reality is actually when you look at models across the world, many countries, especially those closer to the equator, can actually get extremely far if you just do a pairing of solar, wind, and batteries.

And there's much less variability across the year. And also there's a, there's relatively abundance on such that, uh, that combination can get you extremely far right. That is much trickier in a country like the UK for example, where we have less abundance on, and we do have quite abundant wind resources, but we have what's called.

The Duncan float, um, which is basically these much longer timescales where, uh, the amount of wind produced can be extremely low, right? So there you could be talking about days to weeks with very little wind. And the question is, what do you do to fill in the gap there? And there are a range of different options for this longer term, um, kind of intermittency or variability problem.

One is just to fill in the gap with other low carbon technologies, right? You can fill the gap with nuclear or geothermal, um, biomass that has mixed reactions, but there are other low carbon fuels by which you could fill that, that gap and build in more diverse electricity mix. Um, there is the, the opportunity for long range transmission, right?

So, uh, even if it's not windy or sunny where you are. There is somewhere else where it is windy and sunny, right? So, um, there is this possibility, especially across the US like large countries, you know, even, uh, domestically can, uh, dramatically increase internal transmission and, and trade of electricity.

But even across Europe, like I think there's lots of scope for Europe to do a much better job of managing this load across the entire country rather than every single country building an energy system purely for themselves. There you, in that scenario, you massively overbuild, right? So you build, if the UK was to, or any country was to only build energy supplies to power itself and it couldn't trade with anyone else, you would build more wind and more solar and other, uh, resources than you actually need, right?

So that's one option. There are other forms of heat storage. Um, uh, um. So thermal storage, for example. Um, there's storage in bricks. There's lots of different longer term storage options. And then there's options like hydrogen, um, which is a relatively expensive option relative to batteries, for example.

But for these longer timeframes would be necessarily that you just cannot build enough batteries to cover this. So my, my, my main point is that there are a range of different options to manage this variability. And I think the reality is, again, is that most countries can get pretty high rates of penetration, of renewables, 80% or more.

And then there's the question of how do you fill in the final 10% or 20%? And I think the, the, the not knowing exactly how we're gonna do that shouldn't stop us from getting to 80% now. And, and I have a lot of confidence that we will solve that final 10% or, or 20%, um, in the future. 

Ben: Yes. 80% extremely plausible.

And the last 10 or 20%, um, pretty likely. And you have also a sort of set of questions around the hard to abate sectors. So, uh, cement, I guess you could put aluminum fertilizer, maybe long distance flying. Um, you know, and what are we going to do about that? Isn't that too large a residual? And how much of a problem is that?

Hannah: I'm gonna come back to the, I'm gonna come back to the resource one 'cause I didn't properly 

Ben: Sure, yes. On the minerals, the resources. I guess that's also, yeah. Are we gonna run outta minerals? Well, we can do that either, either way. 

Hannah: Yeah. 'cause as a question I get a lot, like, are we gonna run out of minerals and, you know, aren't we just substituting one problem for another because we need to do huge amounts of mining for clean energy.

And I think on the first question, are we going to run out in the long term? Almost every, like long-term analyst says no. Right. So whether it's the i a or the Bloomberg or like a range of, of, of, of analytic organizations that say basically, no. And there are a couple of reasons for this. One, we can model basically how much of these different minerals we're going to need under a range of different decarbonization scenarios.

And for some, it's already very clear that if you look at how much we have and how much we'll need. We have enough, right? For, for, for many of these minerals. And then there are, there are a couple of other things that play into that dynamic, which makes me, uh, not that concerned that in the long term we're gonna run out.

And one is that, uh, we are extremely good at finding new stuff when we are motivated to find new stuff. Right. And this has been part of our, I guess our, our, um, you could call it our course or our benefit of fossil fuels, where we just continue to find more of them. So every time there were lots of projections about peak oil and then we just found more oil.

And I think that's the case for many different minerals, whether it's lithium or cobalt or any of of them, I think we will. Continue to find new resources. Um, there's another dimension to this is that we get more efficient at using these resources for these technologies, right? So a solar panel today does not contain the same amount of silver or silicon that it did 10 years ago.

It uses much, much less. So we become much more efficient. It uses these materials and then if you look through history, when there have been, I guess, resource constraints, we've been actually very effective at substituting one for another. Right. So you, you could see some plausible scenario where cobalt constraint, uh, resources are very constrained for batteries, but that obviously will result in a price increase in that.

And then there's the motivation to switch to alternatives and naturally have an alternative in its, uh, it's either cobalt free, uh, chemistry of lithium ion batteries, so nickel, uh, nickel, uh, or, uh, sodium ion batteries, which is another potential solution. So we are, we're very good actually being quite innovative in shifting to alternatives when, when supplies are constrained.

And then finally there's a question of, you know, won't this put huge amounts of pressure on mining and, and environmental pressures? And I think the reality there is that. Yes, we will need to mine quite a lot of new, uh, minerals for these technologies. But when you compare it to the energy system we have today where we're extracting and burning fossil fuels, uh, we will need far, far, far less minerals, uh, for the energy transition.

So to give some perspective on this, the amount of minerals we'll need across the entire energy transition over decades is something like hundreds of millions of tons in total. Right? Compare that to the fact that we extract 15 billion tons of fossil fuels every single year, and we'll continue to do that every single year, if not more, if we continue with a fossil fuel based system.

So, you know, we're actually talking about orders of magnitude less mounting by transitioning to clean energy than sticking with the, the status quo. 

Ben: Yeah, that makes, that makes a lot of sense. Um, and so that's actually probably quite a good segue into the, into the hard to abate sectors as well. 

Hannah: What was, sorry, what was the specific question?

Well, so 

Ben: I guess the set of questions is, oh, what are we gonna do about the heart to bait sectors like cement, aluminum, fertilizer and the like. Um, you know, we can't seem to do anything about it. Is it going to be too large of a, of a problem? Um, and I guess adjacent to that is like, all feel really uncomfortable about carbon sequestration.

We don't have this technology coming out and you, you have a kind of cluster of questions around, um, the, the ones you get around hard to abate sectors. 

Hannah: Yeah. So I think, um, I think. When people think about hard to abate, they're often thinking impossible to abate, right? So they're often thinking there's just absolutely no way that we're gonna be able to tackle cement or steal or aviation.

And I think increasingly, especially in the last decade, I think it's moved from being a possible impossible to abate, to actually being like quite hard to abate, or I should frame it expensive to abate, right? Often there is some technical solution there. And actually the block is that it's, it's expensive and, and people won't pay for it.

Um, maybe I can take an example of where, um, I think the solution space has moved. I should make clear there. When you look at the solutions we'll need, there are some that we can do today. We are, we're already doing today at scale, we're doing it rapidly and it's very cost effective. So the decarbonization of electricity, uh.

Electrifying roads, transport, uh, they are solutions that, you know, we know they work and they're becoming increasingly, uh, competitive and they are being deployed at scale. These hard to abate sectors are, are much earlier in the kind of technology readiness level where they're often, uh, have some smaller investment, but it's still in the kind of piloting type stage or innovation type stage.

But if I take the example of cement, right, so the challenge you have with cement, um, is twofold. One, you use, um, coal, uh, energy in the actual manufacturing process. But actually the, the, the, the key challenge there is that in order to make cement, what you do is you take limestone. So calcium carbonate, you basically heat it up, uh, to extremely high temperatures and you get calcium oxide.

And the calcium oxide is basically the stuff you put in cement. But if you have fallen the chemistry, you know. Also at the end of that chain, you get carbon dioxide directly, right? Um, and the reality is there's no way that you can convert limestone to cement without producing the CO2 directly from the process, right?

So the question is how do you get rid of that? And I think the fallback solution often in the past was carbon capture and storage. So what we'll do is we'll just stick a big thing on the end of the plant that will capture the CO2 and we'll like store it underground, the, that works. And we could probably feasibly do that.

Just the reality is that it makes cement more expensive, right? If you add carbon capture storage on the end of anything, it automatically makes it more expensive. So that's been the, the challenge there. But there are like very interesting solutions coming through, which take a different approach entirely.

And um, one of those is basically saying we. Rather than starting with limestone, what we'll do is we'll start with calcium silicate. Um, and calcium silicate comes from basalt, which is an extremely abundant rock or on earthborn. No chance that we're ever gonna run out of that in any way. So we have huge amounts of this, and rather than using coal, we'll basically use this electrolysis process and that way you can convert that calcium silicate into cement without the byproduct of of, of CO2.

Um, and I actually think this is probably the cement solution. That I'm, I now, I now get very excited about cement, which I, I didn't have on my play card a decade ago. Um, but this is probably a solution that I'm most excited about because it takes a different approach entirely. Um, gets rid of the CO2 from both parts of that, right?

You're no longer using fossil fuels to process the energy, and you don't have this, uh, CO2 emitted directly. And to me that looks far more credible to get it to a cost competitive level than it does by using carbon capture and storage. And when you look across the different sectors, other hard to abate sectors.

We are kind of in a similar-ish position where, again, we haven't deployed any of these at scale yet, but there are, um, quite promising solutions coming through a range of different companies working on, you know, different I guess solutions. And it is, for some of them, it's hard to pick a winner at the moment.

Um, but I have quite a lot of confidence that, you know, within the next. A decade or two decades, um, we'll get there and, and, and these solutions will start to scale. And of course people will say, well, that's far too late. You know, we can't wait 10 years to get this. And I think the reality is that we should, or, or, or at least I think we might need to just wait 10 years or so.

And I think that's fine. I think if we make huge amounts of progress on the stuff that's easy to do today is cost effective and cheap to do today while building up these, these other technologies. The reality is that by 2050 or 2060, they'll be in the position where they're at scale and they're drastically reducing emissions.

Ben: That makes a lot of sense. And I like your phrase, hard to abate, but not impossible to abate. So that's a, that's a good one. Um, well that's great. I mean, we're not gonna have time, unfortunately, to go through all 50 questions, but that'd be great. 'cause then listeners can buy the book. Um, but it was interesting you mentioned that cement wasn't really on your bingo card a few years ago and, and now it is.

I would be interested in say, over the last year or two, um, whether you've changed your mind about anything in the sustainability space, either something that you've got, oh, I guess it was a bit like cement. It's like, hmm, don't see anything on the horizon. Oh, now I do. Um, maybe one kind of hopeful, or you could also go one the other way where you just changed your mind and thought, oh, that looked like it was gonna work.

But maybe, maybe now it doesn't. But have you changed your mind about anything in the last year or two? 

Hannah: I think the main thing. Is actually less about a specific solution or technology and is more a more conceptual level of um, actually how we frame the climate change challenge or what amount of missions reduction we should be aiming for.

And I think previously I was, uh, very much in the kind of, what you might call it, the net zero crowd, where it's like, what we need to do is we need to get emissions to zero by 2050. Right. And I think the, I think I have swayed slightly away from that. Um, and I think the reason for that is, one, I think net zero is a concept has being quite weaponized in politics and I think it's maybe not a particularly useful term.

Anymore to try to convince people to take, um, climate action. But again, I think a lot of the challenge and the framing of what we need to do to tackle climate change is that when you focus on getting to absolute zero, I think for many people it becomes totally unbelievable that we would be able to do that.

Um, like I was having a conversation with someone about Net Zero. Well, not net Zero. I was, they asked what I did and I tried to explain, I struggled to explain what I did, but I kind of talk, yeah. I did stuff on climate and, and that brought up the conversation of like what they thought about climate. And, and they're not immersed in the space in any way.

They're just, again, a regular person that's mildly concerned about climate change, uh, and doesn't have a particularly strong opinion. But what they were saying about Net Zero is like they're not in favor of net zero because they don't know what we'll do about plastics. Right. But I think if you were to hear from that person, they're not in favor of net zero.

I think immediately in people's mind when they hear that phrase is they think, well, you know, they don't care about climate change, or they're not in favor of clean energy, or they're not in favor of, you know, electrifying transport or any of these solutions. And their answer is that was really not the case for this person.

They were in favor of all of the above, but the reason they weren't in favor of net zero is 'cause they didn't know what know what we would do about plastics, which is like 2% or something. Right? And I think this, this like narrow vision on how we get completely to zero, I think in some, in, in, in some sense, um, blocks people from engaging with the, the, the issue and is maybe a bit of a distraction from the stuff we can really have a go at and dramatically do to, to reduce emissions today.

You know, I think the reality is, um. Again, coming back to honesty, I don't think we'll be at net zero in 2050, but I think we can get to 85% reduction or 90% reduction even if we go quite quickly by by 2050. And you know, if there's five to 10% of emissions left that we're still struggling with and it takes us another decade or two to be able to solve those, I actually think that's fine.

You know, once we get emissions that low, the rate of warming will be so low that we won't be under the huge amounts of pressure we're under at the moment because we have really quite rapid warming because our emissions are the highest they've they've ever been. Like. I think once you get to those relatively low emissions levels, which is like.

The remaining 5% or so, you have more time to work out what you do about plastics or what you do about aviation, which is again, just a few percent of, of the world's emissions. So I think that's been a bit of a shift for me is, uh, being less narrowly focused on how do we completely get to zero and be like, how do, how do we get nine emissions 90% down and then we'll work out the rest.

Ben: Yeah. That would be significantly good. I mean, in, in reading your book, at least in the first part, I thought, I don't think this is a change in your view, but the, the clarity of how you wrote about the interplay between, um, personal change and the system change and how yes, we need the system and so you can do your personal things and they happen and you know, there signals to the system via our consumers and the votes and all of that, but not to essentially get hung up about it.

And I know I varied, sort of simplified that, but I thought the clarity of how you wrote about that, uh, this time round was, was particularly lucid. 

Hannah: I think, I mean, I, I frame it in this way and I think it's true that I think they're often two extremes when it comes to these discussions. Like on the one hand you have people that say, you know, this is all about individual behavior change.

And you know, as individuals, if we all do our bit. Then, you know, sum it all up and we all have fixed it. Uh, and I think that's just not realistic. That's not gonna happen. Um, and at the other end of the spectrum, there's this sense that this is purely a systemic problem. And actually, um, it's, it's basically just on fossil fuel companies and some governments to take action.

Um, and, and, and if they do that, then the problem is solved and they bear all the responsibility. And again, I think that extreme is also incorrect. Like I think that's a false dichotomy that is either an individual, uh, change issue or a systemic change issue. I think the reality is the role that governments, companies, investors, et cetera, play, um, is absolutely crucial.

But what they, I think what their role is, is to make sure that there are. Low carbon alternatives available, um, that they are affordable and cost effective for people to, to adopt. And that it's made, you know, easy for people to do that, right? The infrastructure's there, if infrastructure's needed, um, that the, the, um, the grid system is stable so people have, uh, stable clean energy supplies, et cetera.

Um, but the reality is, is that that's not gonna happen. And I don't think we can expect that they're gonna put in all of that effort. If as individuals we're completely unwilling to change, endure a bit like that, of course that's not gonna work. Right? We can't expect, the example I use is on transport, right?

We can't expect governments and companies to, you know, either invest heavily in public transport and make that available or make really good cheap electric cars available and build out a whole uh, charging network so people have access to it. They're not gonna do that and there's absolutely no point in them doing that.

If we are all stubborn and say, no, I would like to stick with my petrol car. And of course I'm not gonna take the bus or the train or move to an electric car. Like very clearly, if individuals are not willing to change, that system just doesn't work. So to me it's just a false dichotomy and both matter.

Ben: Sure. Yeah. That was very clearly expressed. Um. So 50 questions. Uh, fast forward to today. Is there a 51st question that, oh, you couldn't quite fit in, or you're now getting asked and you think like, oh, if I could do the next 50, the 51st one, this would be the one, uh, that I would answer for people. 

Hannah: Um, not an additional question, but I think the, there was a question in the book on ai, and I was very honest in the book that in the first draft of the book, there wasn't a question on AI and its energy impacts.

And the reason for that is that, especially when I wrote it, there was basically no data to go on. Right. And I felt like it would, like, there was. Nothing valuable at all that I could possibly add there. So it would just be a blank chapter or just a, a kind of nonsense chapter where I wasn't saying very much over the course of writing it.

I think some of the data solidified a bit so that I could say something about AI that I hope is reasonably useful in, in framing the issue. But I think, I think my, uh, perspective on that, uh, shifts much more quickly than it does for any of the other questions, just because ai, uh, and the discussions on that are moving much more quickly.

So I think I maybe would've written the AI question a bit more differently than I did. 

Ben: Yeah. And it, and it continues to change. And I think, I guess it depends on who, who you are asking things, but I think there's a little bit too much focus on AI risk, although I guess it comes in so many different forms.

'cause you've got existential privacy data, resource use and things like that. But certainly, and you've answered this in your substack, um, over time, the resource use is really, we shouldn't worry about it. And then on the flip side, I think this is the, is this the question you flipped to Bill Gates as well?

AI's gonna enable I think a lot of technology things. I was, I was looking at the climate models that Nvidia, um, are helping, there's been this, uh, Google's stuff on protein folding within health. I know that's not directly sustainability, but it was going on to do all of that. And that's really hard to predict as well 'cause it's more of an enabler.

But I, I do think that that could, um, that could really be impactful. 

Hannah: Yeah, I think the, I mean, we didn't, even at the time when I was writing the book, have very good estimates for like, everyone's interested in how much energy a chat GBT or Gemini or one of the chatbot queries uses, and we really didn't have very good data at all at that time.

We have imperfect but slightly better data now, and I think my, uh, view on that has, has even more solidified that, you know, especially for individual. AI chat bot use people vastly overestimate how much energy it's using in the environmental impact. You know, it's really, really very tiny. Like even if you are asking chat GBTA hundred questions a day, which most people don't, um, it's still a tiny, tiny fraction over your overall energy footprint and your overall carbon footprint.

And I think to many people, you know, uh, seeing the environmental impact of, uh, asking cha GBTA hundred questions seems incredulous, right? They would think that that's, you know, absolutely horrendous for the environment. Like why on earth would you, how could you possibly ever do that? I think the, the reality when you break down the, the numbers, especially for individual use, it's, it's extremely low.

Ben: Yes. I can't quite remember it, but something like eating a steak is 10 to a hundred times worse or something. Something like that. Yeah. I mean diets, yeah. Whether 

Hannah: it's water or carbon footprint diets or, yeah, like huge in comparison. 

Ben: Great. Um, maybe turning just to, uh, a couple of more, um, personal adjacent things then.

Are you still getting time to run by the coast? How do you deal with the Scottish weather? You know, is that still part of your routine in terms of writing and and running? And, uh, do you listen to, uh, books or music or, or things to inspire you? So are you still getting time to run and what else inspires you?

Hannah: Yeah, I still run basically every morning. Um, I find it very relaxing. Uh, partly very relaxing. At the same time I find I often half draft things in my head when I'm running. Like I, it helps me kind of clear my thoughts and like sometimes I start thinking about, oh, I'm gonna write this, or, so I think that's, it is like a very sacred time, time for me.

Uh, yeah, we're coming into the like, not so nice weather in Scotland and winter, which makes, I think it's actually the darkness that makes it worse, right? 'cause you're basically going out to run in the dark, which is not that fun. Um, uh, but it's fine. Uh, I do enjoy it and I'll continue doing it throughout winter, even if it's extremely icy.

I keep that up as a regular part of my routine. I'm not really an audio book listener. Um, I. And I hope you all listen to my audiobook, but I tend to find, I find podcasts much easier to engage with and listen to than audiobooks. I don't know, it's, I think it's the back and forward discussion keeps it more dynamic than just hearing someone read something.

I tend to find, I don't really take the information in when. When I'm listening to an audio book, so that's not really an option, but I do listen a lot and inspired a lot by, by podcasts. 

Ben: Great. Um, last time we had a mini discussion around, um, essentially kind of charitable giving and, and how to think about that.

Um, and you really influenced me. So, um, I, I have, um, already sort of from many years back tried to give sort of more and kind of aim for sort of 10%, um, post-tax of, of thinking about that. Um, but you made the point that actually giving to global development and healthcare, you know, could be seen as part of the solution and things.

And I had always felt a little bit bad that I'd, I actually, although I do some work within sustainability and, and think the sort that, that more my, uh, giving was weighted that way, that way and always felt a little bit bad that maybe I hadn't done that. So I went to re-look at that. And that made me feel quite good that a lot of the human development stuff that I'd, um, decided to support, um, was quite good.

Um, but I wonder, may, maybe we can frame it the other way around this time is, uh, maybe if we gave you, um, a billion dollars or maybe 10 billion, which actually in the grand scheme of things, it sounds like a lot of money. And it is a lot of money, but it isn't actually an astronomical amount of money. But if you had say, a billion or you, you could go up to 10 billion if you like.

Um, how would you think about directing, uh, that money today? 

Hannah: Oh, that's a good question. I mean, yeah, a billion. Or even 10 billion. Sounds like a lot. I, I think on the topic of giving, I mean the reality is what was the us uh, aid budget was something like maybe 60 billion or so. Uh, so like even putting that, and that's been like mostly cut this year.

So yeah, my 1 billion or 10 billion would, would still only be a small debt. Yes. In their moment to be lost. You only get 

Ben: to do a project or two. You don't get to save a country. So, yes. Yeah. 

Hannah: Um, that's interesting. I think I would. I think people would expect me to say I would invest it in solar panels or something.

I don't think I would do that. 'cause I don't think that's where the highest cost benefit for charitable giving here would be. And a lot of people 

Ben: are working on solar panels already. 

Hannah: Yeah. I think, uh, yeah, I think again, I mean in on clean energy, every year we invest and now it's over 2 trillion. So again, my 1 billion would be a tiny, tiny fraction of that.

I think again, I would either direct it towards, uh, very, um, high, high ROI health projects. Um, or I think one thing I've become, I guess a bit more. Enthusiastic or convinced by, in the last year or so has actually been just, um, give directly. So giving money rather than saying, you know, I'm gonna spend 1 billion on, uh, high, uh, value seeds or malaria bed nets or tuberculosis, uh, medications.

Actually what I'm gonna do is just give the money directly to people on extremely low incomes. And some of the results, especially in the last year, have been extremely positive. Like, I think what there was maybe a study in Kenya where actually, and I can't remember the amount that was given to particular households, but some, the, the, the drop in child mortality rate was like quite stunning from just giving people money directly.

Um, and the argument there of course is that, you know. People, people in particular situations know far better than you or I, what it is that they need to improve their living standards or, or, or what they need from, from a health perspective. So you should just give them the money and they will make very good decision on how best to, to use that.

So I think, um, I would actually like to see, I know I couldn't save a whole country with this even, uh, a small, low, low income one, but I think I would like to see more projects where actually quite significant amounts of money are given, um, in a particular region of a country or even a, a very small country to see, you know, overall if you just give people money directly, like what are the knock on impacts and are those impacts sustainable?

Um, and I think that you could start to see extremely positive results from that. 

Ben: Yeah, and I think I was just looking it up, I think give directly, uh, which GiveWell has, uh, looked at, does that, and, and they do seem to see quite high return on, on investments for that things. Yeah. It, it is interesting some people who, who think about this particularly in philanthropy, uh, you know, look at, um, you know, whether as something is underrated and also how tractable or not it is, those are the terms they use.

And when I've been thinking about it, I've actually get, I get less, um, I'm now less worried about so-called tractability. Like, so how feasible this is because I've now seen so many things, which I would've thought were. Infeasible now happen. And so now I slightly wait is if the people or the organization or whatever seem to have a really committed, passionate idea and it makes some sense and, and then it's still underrated as in it seems to be an underfunded, um, area that people aren't looking at.

Then actually that's maybe a, a plausible, you know, for people really thinking about how to give, uh, way for that. And they shouldn't worry too much about tractability because we are very bad at trying to assess probabilities of some of these, um, technologies and things. 

Hannah: Mm-hmm. Great. How would you wait, how would I'm gonna spend on you, how would you spend your.

10 billion, 

Ben: how would I spend my 10 billion? So, um, I do think, um, direct giving is quite good. I do think, um, um, a little bit more, uh, long run health interventions, so I'm still a little bit on, I guess people talk about this kind of the, the meta layer of things. But for instance, uh, I don't think we've got a lot of data on, um, you know, how people track over time.

So these are kind of longitudinal studies or there's actually all sorts of things. And the reason for this is that, um, normal companies can't make any money outta this. And governments, because it's a long range thing, can't, don't have anything to show for it, even actually in a four to 10 year cycle. So I do think there's a, there's a lot of more long run research that we could do about what's best for us over time and, and how, and how that's followed.

Um, so that's one. Um, and then a little bit also in, in, in. So that's particularly actually in health. 'cause I think there's some of these long run health interventions, which we've got some quite strong, feasible, um, hypotheses about. We just can't test them. 'cause no one wants to track this even for 10 years.

May maybe not a lifetime. And actually there's also a little couple more on how we do, um, organization. Uh, so this is a little bit odd, but I think it's really intriguing to me that for instance, um, boards, committees are how a lot of the world's decision making is done. And actually we know very little about how to make good decisions.

You know, why is it in the world of sustainability that a lot of the. Sort of technocratic experts, people deep in the weeds actually have quite a lot of consensus on what we should do. Um, but it can't transmit into actual, um, practical action. Um, and it's just not simple. You kind of think, oh, well why can't we do that?

And it that. That seems to me a layer to slightly unpick. So I'd probably do a little bit for that 'cause I don't think it's too expensive. And then this other area, which I think is a bit, um, underserved, I guess comes on this, this idea of, of venture philanthropy. So again, it's this slightly higher risk, normally smaller amounts of money for people who, I guess they come across as these kind of moonshots, um, slightly quirky ideas.

Uh, to borrow phraseology from venture capital vc, that's kind of like a pre-seed or seed. So kind of quite early. But actually when you look at the history of how really great ideas have come about, even even things like AI and things, um, it seems to be overweighted in people who, if you looked at it, you just thought, well, that's a crazy idea that we shouldn't back.

Uh, so if that was what we thought, then actually we, we should probably at the margin be backing maybe 10,000 more of those ideas with just. A million dollars say or right, or a hundred thousand. Because if, if only just one or two of those happens to be really transformational, then you, then you've made a really big ROI, even though actually 9,000 of them, uh, are, are gonna, are going to fail.

Uh, because I, again, I thought about this. People say, Ooh, we are investing in something high risk or government say, or we, we've done this in high risk. Uh, but actually, uh, a lot of them kind of succeed at the end and they have like this written report. So it shows to me that we're not really doing high risk.

'cause high risk would say like 9,000 should have a high failure 

Hannah: rate. 

Ben: Yeah, you should, you should see a high failure rate if you were really properly doing it. And for all, all sorts of other agency problems. I mean, I don't think government's ever gonna do that. It's like, oh, well we just spent your billion and nothing happened, which is the median scenario.

But you know, there's one thing did happen and it transformed our world. And I, and I feel we're a little bit. We're a little bit light on that. So those are my quirky ways of doing it. But my base layer probably still actually is health, uh, health interventions. 

Hannah: I mean the UK government, like quite strongly backs this area program you, you're familiar and that is kind of framed around this, like, we should be going for kind of moonshot big risk things.

I dunno what your perspective is on that. 

Ben: Yeah, so I'm, I'm, I'm really, um, positive on Aria. So they talk about things like moonshots and things and they have got a lot of these interesting technologies. Uh, you should. People listening, you should look it up. They've got these program management developers and there's, there's lots of live projects on, um, and it's relatively small amounts of money.

So this is it. There's only hundreds of millions. It's not even in, in, into the billions for very underlooked at um, areas. But they also see that small things, things which are really potentially quite transformational. So I'll just talk about one small thing 'cause it talks, uh, about a lot of sense. Uh, so this is a project which is the, this round is closing in October.

So if you're listening to it later, you're gonna miss out. But they call them innovator circles. And the idea was if you look at the history of innovation, you often had tight, tight knit circles of let's say 80 to 20 people who really, um, encouraged one another in kind of an honest way of saying, this is what we know, this is what we don't know, and this is what where we could potentially do better.

And they did really transformational work, actually, not just in technology. You saw this in humanities as well, so you see it in writing circles and why is it all of these philosophers seem to get together in these small circles? And so they thought, well, maybe there isn't, that doesn't need that much money, but maybe we should try and do that.

And they did a pilot project with, um, with a couple of circles and had really, really great outcomes. People said, we've really pushed our ambition. We've started more projects. It was really great that we had open honesty with what's in the field and what's working. And they're now gonna seed with, with not that much money.

People who want to do other innovator circles in, in technology and, and the like and funding that. And so that's exactly the kind of thing that isn't really getting funded. Anywhere else with this sort of idea, a very plausible, tractable idea, which is already kind of working. Um, and then they have that on, on very many fields.

So, um, yeah, I still really positive it kind of gets a bad press because you kind of think, oh, these are the moonshot ideas. They're spending money thinking about the philosophy of Jira engineering and solar shields. Is that really a good use of our, our money and, and that type of thing. And you do have to think about it and cost benefit, but it is only a small amount.

And if some of these things really hit, they could be very, uh, transformational. So yeah, I'm, I'm generally positive on Aria and the equivalent in the US is, is these DARPA or, or particularly arpa e around, um, energy. And, and I think even Bill Gates's thinking was slightly, um, influenced by thinking around how you, how you do it and how you fund, uh, innovation and, and breakthroughs, uh, for his breakthrough energy and the like.

Yeah, I 

Hannah: was gonna say there's breakthrough energy. I mean, his. I think I coming back to the like stuff we know how to do now and do very cheaply, like, I think my, my point there is that, um, that that's where most of the money at the moment should be going. But the reality is for these hard debate sectors and stuff that we were discussing earlier, um, for them to be ready in 2040 or 2050, right?

You need some amount of investment now and it is that early stage kind of seed investment that gets innovators going. So I actually think some of the kind of calciums, so look at cement solutions we're talking about, um. Was initially, uh, funded or backed by Breakthrough Energy, uh, kind of Bill Gates as kind of incubator for energy Solutions.

I think he does a lot of this focus on this kind of hard to abate stuff or stuff that, uh, uh, is, seems less tractable. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. Um, but does need some small amount of funding Now if you want it to be at all a reality in 2040 or 2050. But the the point is that you don't need to be investing trillions in it right now.

'cause there's actually nowhere for the trillions to go right now. It needs start. Yeah, exactly. 

Ben: It's probably just tens of millions or whatever. I'll tell you my two other left field intractable, not tractable ones, but the, the things in that is I do think. Long distance electric airplanes are more viable than people think.

Half the issue is, is regulatory. And, and yes, you're gonna have a heavy battery and, and fly it. Um, but I do think we could do more to speed up that. I definitely think short shorthaul is, is plausible in early 2030s. I think the regulator actually is gonna be the bottleneck, not the technology, but we need something for long distance.

And I would really love it if we could also get a, um, cellular steak, which isn't a steak. 'cause I think if you, I know they're doing it in chicken and other things, but I think if you crack a ribeye steak for people and they did not know that it was not a ribeye steak, uh, and I know you kind of think, well, well, beef consumption should be down on things.

It's just not gonna happen in America. So what you need to do is give them something, but they didn't know it was a ribeye steak. Uh, and then, and then you would be there. But there are some people working on the food issue. But I, I do think that that may be one area where someone could do it. 

Hannah: Agreed.

Ben: Great. Okay. So la last, well maybe last couple of questions. One would be, um, any other current projects that you're working on? Obviously busy, uh, with, um, book tour and speaking, and you have your substack and you have all of the great work that you do in, in world, in, in data. So you probably don't actually have time for much else, but it'd be interesting in, in, in other, other current projects.

And maybe you could also give some thoughts, um, to advice for people who might wanna work in sustainability or even life advice, uh, generally thinking around, uh, you know, what you would, uh, advise for listeners to think about. So current projects and any advice that you have. 

Hannah: I'm not sure that would come to me for life advice.

I'll try. Um, no, yeah, I, um, at the moment I'm like always working on a range of things. Um, like obviously the new book is just out, so a lot of my time is, is doing stuff on that. I keep getting asked, am I writing another book? Not, not yet. Like I. I hope I will write another book at some point. I do enjoy the writing process and really going through the process of writing a book really clarifies your thinking on a given topic and challenges it, right?

Like once I. I think that's the case with writing in general, not just writing a book, which also comes through again, I think in my, my substack and stuff when I sit down to kind of take on a question on my substack, I think the process of going through and trying to explain it to someone on paper really clarifies or challenges what you're thinking.

Like I think it's very easy in your head to think, yeah, I understand that, and then. You go to write it down and you realize you don't understand it. So I think, uh, I find that process in general quite rewarding. So I hope at some point I'll write another book, but I, I haven't started yet. Um, I'm, yeah, I have the Substack, which I kind of do in my free time.

Again, it's. I find it fun. I find I learn a lot of stuff and clarify my thinking, doing that. I also have a, a podcast, um, where we solving for climate, where we talk to a range of people like innovators, entrepreneurs, people in policy, um, academics about different parts of the climate challenge and, and, and what they're working on, uh, and what we can do to solve it.

Like the emphasis is not on just talking about climate change, it's solving for climate. So we try to focus on the solution lens of the problem. And then my, my full-time job is at our own data and they are, uh, I work on like a very, very broad range of stuff like. Still quite a lot of climate and environment stuff, but lots on health and foreign aid, um, and, uh, demographics, like very broad.

And I really enjoy that process of being able to explore and engage with a range of, of different topics and, and, and, and work on interests outside of climate and environment. And I think on top of that, I have very little time to do much else. Um, but yeah, I like the having a diversity of things. I think in terms of like advice, I think, um, I think it's.

I think it's easy to then index on your own experience 'cause that's all you can really draw from in a real way. But I, I think based on my own experience, I think one thing that's been really key in a kind of professional level, or like finding my place in the world where I feel like I can have some impact has really been, um, finding that combination of different skills that in some way carve out a niche for yourself or make yourself a little bit unique.

Um, and that kind of niche for me has been this mix of the kind of environmental, scientific background. Um. Enjoying writing. I think the enjoyment of writing is, is a, is a key part of it, but also being okay at writing, um, and, and explaining things to a general audience. And then the kind of data science, data visualization dimension of that.

And often people working in the space will have like one of those, right? So like of there are obviously many, many goods environmental scientists and, and people, um, working on the science. There are often extremely good and beautiful writers and there are people that are fantastic at in depth data analysis or, uh, making beautiful data visualizations.

But what's quite, uh, rare is like trying to somehow combine all those free into a particular kind of career trajectory. And that's kind of where I think I've landed. I don't know if it's been deliberate. I don't actually don't think it's been deliberate. And I think that's another key part of my advice there is that like if I look back.

On my kind of trajectory. I think at no point was it really obvious what the next step would be. I think what's been really key has been, uh, it's often talked about as like trying to, um, increase your surface area of opportunity. Um, where, and a big part of that I think is actually putting yourself out there.

I think a big part of that is, uh, working in public or writing in public or building a public portfolio so people can see your work, they can judge your work, they can engage with your work. And I think, you know, if you do that and, and do that quite well, uh, stuff tends to come at you. And then you have often have like some, uh, capacity to be able to pick what you want to do.

Like that's not for me, but this is for me. And I think that's the kind of bumpy road I've been on in my. Career so far, but it's been enjoyable and I think, um, um, I hope that it's made some impact, I guess. 

Ben: Yeah, that sounds great. Uh, try and find out what you like. Don't be shy to share your work in public.

You might find, uh, some good things happen. 

Hannah: Yeah, exactly. I think another way of framing it is like, this is often talked about in kind of impact circles or kinda effective, effective altruism, uh, circles, but like trying to find a particular area where you have a very clear, like comparative advantage, right?

So like try to find an area where if you weren't doing that particular role, would someone else be doing it? Right. And I think there's a lot of kind of traditional careers where you can be fantastic in that role, but there are loads of other equally fantastic people doing that. Um, kinda, uh, um, kind of standard role and I guess this comes back to like finding a particular niche.

Often if there's no one, if you don't fill that particular niche, there's no one else that will film that instead. So I think that's another way of, of framing it. 

Ben: Yeah, for sure. And you can combine them, at least this is talking from my experience in the sense that, uh, I dunno, many other people who are an investor do podcasting and right place for theater and suddenly each one of those things are not necessarily super unique, but when you put them all together, uh, you turn out to be an an odd shaped thing.

Hannah: I didn't know you did plays for theater! 

Ben: So on that note, Hannah, thank you very much. 

Hannah: Thank you very much Ben. Really enjoy our chats.

Rob Beckley: Insights from a Policing career, Hillsborough & Civic Service Lessons | Podcast

Insights from a Career in Policing: An Interview with Rob Beckley

In this wide-ranging and engaging conversation, retired British police officer Rob Beckley reflects on nearly 40 years in service — from community policing in Brixton after the 1980s riots, to leading the investigation into the Hillsborough Disaster, and later serving as High Sheriff of Somerset.

🎧 Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on YouTube.

We explore:

• The misunderstood role of policing: “Policing is about being there in a crisis — when someone needs action, and needs it now.”

• Rob’s early career in Brixton and how his experiences in Sudan shaped his views on culture and policing.

• Honest reflections on institutional racism and sexism: “Institutional racism isn’t about bad people — it’s about systems and processes that have disproportionate impacts.”

• Hillsborough: what really went wrong, the persistence of false narratives, and why “we can never afford complacency in disaster preparedness.”

• The evolution of crime, the importance of community policing: “Community policing works because people trust officers who know their area and take ownership of local problems.”

• Rob’s year as High Sheriff of Somerset, his advocacy for volunteering, and the civic glue that holds communities together.

• Advice for aspiring public servants: “In public service, you may never know the lives you’ve touched — but the impact is real.”

This episode provides deep insights into policing, society, and civic responsibility — offering lessons not only for those in public service but for anyone interested in how communities can thrive.

Summary contents, transcript, and podcast links below. Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to pods. Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Contents:
00:00 – Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:32 – Misunderstandings in Policing
01:57 – Early Career and Reflections on Brixton
05:18 – Experiences in Sudan and Cultural Insights
08:51 – Institutional Racism and Sexism in Policing
18:14 – Hillsborough Disaster: A Deep Dive
33:30 – The Evolution of Crime and Policing
37:20 – Community Policing: A Proven Strategy
41:30 – Challenges of Modern Policing
51:05 – The Role and History of the High Sheriff
54:06 – The Importance of Volunteering
58:16 – Advice for Aspiring Public Servants

Transcript (helped by AI so mistakes possible)

Rob Beckley

Ben: Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Rob Beckley. Rob has been a distinguished British police officer for almost 40 years, working across, amongst other things, the London Metropolitan Police, the Met, the Avon and Somerset Police, as well as leading the investigation to the Hillsborough Disaster and advocating for citizens in policing.

After retiring from the police force, he has been the high sheriff of Somerset. Rob, welcome. Thank you, Ben. It's a real pleasure to be here. In terms of policing, what do you think is the most misunderstood thing about being a police officer? I, 

Rob: well, there's a range of things where people don't always fully appreciate what's going on and why is it going on.

But the most misunderstood, I think, I would say, is that policing Is there, when somebody faces a crisis and somebody in authority needs to do something about it now and that goes back, that's a philosophy of policing that goes back many years. A fellow called Egon Bitner thought that one up.

But it is, it captures really what people really want the police to be there. They want them there when they face a crisis and they need something of done about it. Now that's misunderstood, not just outside of policing, but inside of policing as well, because I very much do think that if we have, if we fail to respond to that crisis, it actually affects confidence.

A lot in policing. And we need to be geared up to meeting people's real anxieties in an urgent situation. Whether it be shoplifting or a car accident or somebody with mental health problems on the street. We can't just say that's somebody else's responsibility, that somebody's facing a crisis, somebody needs to do something and needs to do it now.

Ben: And I think you started off in your early days of policing around South London in Brixton and went on from there. What are your reflections about your time in Brixton, in policing, and did that shape your kind of overall philosophy and thinking about police? 

Rob: I joined the police having worked a few years overseas, in fact, in Sudan.

And I was really anxious about joining the police because I was worried it would be a. Both a sexist and a racist organization. I was worried about the cultures, but I also felt policing needed to be done well in our community. It's really important that you have good people do difficult jobs serving our public.

So I was anxious about joining the police. Actually, I joined, there were very many good people in it that there, there were some dreadful people as well at the, at that time, and as there always will be in every profession. But in Brixton in particular, it was quite. Tense a lot of the time because it was just after the riots.

It, in the 1980s, it was difficult. But a lot of effort was going into bridging communities and getting to know the communities well, community policing listening, responding, because, that a lot of lessons had been learn because of the, those riots back in 1981. And I saw a lot of real effort going into that community rootedness, a lot more people of color joining the police, which made a difference.

And you could feel that bad behaviors being challenged within the police. And there were a lot of attitudes then that I didn't like. Thankfully many of them are even rarer now. But, cultures have changed a lot. But on the whole though, it was still an organization where many people cared about what they did and tried to do their best.

And Brixton itself, goodness I go back now. I just wish I'd bought some of those houses, right? Yeah. That were for sale when I was a. Constable and sergeant there, because my goodness, I would've done well out of it there. There were places where that you could buy places there that the council couldn't give away.

Now, they're beautiful Georgian houses worth millions. I've been curiously, Brixton is so much more diverse. Even when I was there, there was very much an African Caribbean community and a white community. Not a lot in between. Now it's so diverse. It's so mixed. It's such an interesting place.

It was an interesting place then. But now when I go back and I have been back a few times for different things I really, it's got a real buzz. I, but I do worry. Where do people live? 

Ben: Yeah. There was so much in that answer, which I wanna reflect on it and come back to. So one is. On Sudan.

The second is this some of the criticisms about sexism and racism and I guess Brixton talking about its wealth. The opposite side of that is, is I was just looking up, crime rates have really fallen and in Brixton crime rates actually over 20, 30 years have really fallen. And I don't think the public really really see that.

Yeah. But perhaps circling back to that first one. Your time in Sudan and your time in Africa, how did that shape your kind of thinking? 'cause Sudan, obviously now, back then, I guess still much poorer than this country has conflicts and has things like that, did that shape your outlook on how to think about Britain?

Rob: It did. I think everyone should go and work for a few years abroad in, in a very different culture. It forces not for, but it helps people realize that the norms and behaviors and attitudes we all hold, many of them are shaped by the culture we are in. And it's important to see people think differently and recognize that sometimes the words we put on it.

Are not sufficient to describe what we are experiencing. So for example, in Sudan, a lot of people who visit Sudan fresh visit will say, people are so generous and open. They are, but it's not quite generosity as we understand it, or openness as we understand. There's lots of cultural norms around that of behaviors and expectations.

And you know what it did, it really gave me an insight into the fact that the world is very diverse, very mixed that people's. Behaviors and attitudes can be seen in lot through lots of different lenses and prisms. And I think that helped me actually going into a policing world because I'm very interested in different races, faiths, backgrounds and people's views and attitudes of policing, but also norms and laws and things.

It's, there's, it's never. Always a very clear right or wrong, there's lots of grays in between. And while, the law tends to be fairly right or wrong at least understanding where people are coming from helps you manage the situation, the problem the concerns better. So I, I think my time in Sudan definitely gave me that sort of international perspective, which is why I spoke a bit of Arabic.

So it got me involved eventually in counter-terrorism and issues around that. I genuinely, I'm interested in different communities and cultures. So I ended up becoming when I was an inspector, the lead in the Metropolitan Police for Race and Minority matters. And that was before Stephen Lawrence.

It was just me and a couple of other staff. Now it. Much bigger departments dealing with all those issues, quite rightly, because they're very complex. But in those days, I was a bit of a pioneer actually of trying to consider how policing can adapt to different communities and to the modern world.

Ben:

I was speaking with a friend.

Recently, and she was interested in policing. But she was worried about a couple of comments that you mentioned that you were worried about all those decades ago around these criticisms that the police force is potentially racist, institutionally racist, sexist or, looking at the, the primary stats of the balance on that.

But there have been other people saying wherever you put the bar, it's definitely improved. You obviously need good people to improve it. It's complicated. And actually there were a lot of good people trying to do good things as, as well as bad apples. From where you've been all the way from the beginning to that and obviously trying to grapple with these issues what do you see as the problems are?

Where maybe are some of those criticisms? Correct, or maybe where they overstated and do you really think at its heart the these are racist or sexist organizations? 

Rob: I'm going to qualify. What I'm now next going to say with the fact that the vast majority of people in any organization, the police included, and very much in the police are well motivated, a good mean want to do their best.

That the workforce itself is an extremely well motivated and positive workforce, but institutional racism and sexism exists. It is, if you take the description of what institutional racism is from McPherson the McPherson report into the Stephen Lawrence death it is about institutional ways of operating that the, it's ways of process, of doing things that has a negative impact upon different communities or different races or people.

That absolutely is the case. That it isn't that people in the organization were going around with a racist bent themselves, and that's where there's it's a very difficult phrase, institutional racism because it, the people within the organization feels, they feel they're all being tainted by it, and they feel hurt by that.

The reality of it is, it's not about them as individuals, it's about the way the organization has set itself up and runs itself. And, and an example I used to be when I was at Brixton, a good big example of institutional racism in a way was the way that policing mostly focused on street level dealing, which was mostly done.

Certainly when I was there by young black men, and so the focus of our efforts and activity was on young black men. The reality of it is, 'cause I know this for a fact, there was a range of dealing that was done by white people to white middle class houses. That was almost like a milk round going around Briston.

We never touched that. We didn't even look at it. It wasn't on our radar. Nobody ever complained about it to us, so we didn't bother with it. The reality of it is that organizational focus. Has the impact of puts of, in effect criminalizing more black young lads than white people who are doing a very similar role in the community.

But when noticed that is institutional racism, it's not, nobody's consciously sat there and thought this is what we're gonna do. It's just that we've responded to calls about bit of street dealing. We've decided we would focus on it. We'd put in a, a an, an operation. But the bit that wasn't, didn't seem to bother anybody.

We weren't getting any complaints about, we didn't really bother about. And so that's an example for me of institutional racism and the way it has a disproportionate impact on a certain group of people who, who are predominantly black in, in, in that example. So I think institutional racism.

Definitely sexism when I first joined was writ large. In fact, that was the thing that shocked me most. I think it was a much more sexist organization than it was actually racist. I the curiously in terms of help for victims and support for communities. Many of my colleagues were very colorblind. But there was a little bit of a sort of sexist, very male or organ organization, very macho in its own way.

And the way it treated women in those days I think was really dreadful at times. But. We've, we now have a position where getting close to half the chief constables in the UK are women. That's unheard of. We just wouldn't have been dreamt of when I first joined. At one point, the head of the Met was a woman, the head of the Association of Chief Police Officers or the National Police Chief's Council was a woman.

And the head of the National Crime Agency was a woman. It's, it the tone of nature eternally to women has just changed beyond all recognition, which is a real positive,

Ben: it is a problem, but it has got better over the decades and it's important to understand that it's around the system of which society, culture, everything into place With that, I think it was a very adjacent example, 30 years ago, hardly any buildings would've been adapted for wheelchair use, right?

You think well. We can't understand why that is. In another context, you could just say that that institutionally discriminates against disabled people who need a wheelchair. You wouldn't have thought any building owner, particularly individually, was gonna be against disabled people. But the system was not set up to think about, oh, there are these people who for very minor adjustments, we could include them into that.

I think it's obviously a lot more complicated with communities and race, but it shows just an example that it's a systems thinking   rather  than an individual.

Rob: It is. You've got to, you've got to lift yourself up above, above pointing blame at individuals and to say, what is it about the organization that encourages it?

For example, in the police world, we're it, you can't have somebody going out and dealing, say with a car accident on the street and say and have a nice facilitative discussion. You, they've got to be quite directive, quite controlling, and controlling in a positive way. Control a crisis, a situation put order on chaos.

That's what people look to the police to do. But it means that you tend to get people who are more directive, people who are more who have that command about them. Which you want them but you don't want them to be like that all the time. And that's the challenge.

Trying to find a balance between what you need for the role, but also you can't have them going. Into some communities and just being directive to them all the time. And hence sometimes, cops can rub other people up the wrong way because they do go and do that. It and one thing I wouldn't, there, there are still far too many instances of racism or sexism in the organization that are actually very personal.

There are people doing it but I would say compared to when I joined it's such a different world and a positive world. I'm pleased about the progress, but there's more to be done.

Ben: And. What do you think we could do about it Now given all of these programs and things in it, is there, I guess there's never any kind of magic bullet around it, but what are your observations about the things which need to improve?

Rob: Very interesting this because people have heard, perhaps of Louise Cases report. She wrote a report recently that talked about the misogyny and the homophobia and the racism in, in, in the organization. But her, what's worth reading in her report is the first third analyzes the systemic managerial issues.

That create more problems. So bit of like your example about how if people putting up buildings are actually required to, to address these points, then actually it would make life so much better for somebody with disabilities. And her point was, and I wholly agree with this, that actually there's a lot going on in the way policing is organized and run.

For example, those people who deal with the crisis, those response officers are often the newest people. In the organization, the least experienced, and yet they do the most critical job when somebody needs it. And she quite rightly reports that leads to sometimes bad or certainly inadvertently bad behaviors that could be prevented if you just had more experience there.

But we take the more experienced officers off and put them off to counter-terrorism or to serious and organized crime because, they've, they're experienced, they can deal with it. But actually the most critical stuff for the public. At the ground floor and needs, that needs to be done really well.

And she, she made the point that if you do the basics really well, if you've got the experienced officers doing that, then a lot of the rest will fall into place. And if you've got good, experienced supervisors dealing with those response calls and those day-to-day grind of things, actually they'll make sure that behaviors are right and that police officers don't feel beleaguered and therefore start behaving in ways that cause more problems than they solve.

So I think it's, it, there's a lot in. Valuing those who did the most difficult role in policing, which actually is the response role. 

Ben: I guess there's an issue there in terms of money and experience. 'cause you see the same in, in doctoring and nursing actually junior doctors need that senior doctor for quite a while.

So 1, 2, 3 years. So they can look at all of these cases and incidences in the same as the nursing, but senior doctor's time, they're more expensive. Do they wanna do the ward rounds rather than the con consultation? Yes. No, that's a good parallel and where that is. But I take that point that maybe if we could draw for some time some of the, those really experienced a police to then mentor the more junior ones to see some of these, because you don't have those incidents so often that they're not necessarily happening every day, but over a month you have a handful, which then you could go.

I think coming back to the systems piece, I'd be interested in your observations about all of the work you did around Hillsborough. So obviously you learned a lot and there was a systemic failure around that. I'd be interested in your reflections about perhaps what the public should know and what perhaps the public has missed from that, the learnings and the reflections over that time that you saw and maybe for those who you know are listening outside of Britain who might not know of of Hillsborough that much, you can offer a little reflection of how it came about and what we've learned.

Rob: Hillsborough was a dreadful football disaster where 97 people. Lost their lives back on the 15th of April, 1989. It it was at a football match at semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest Shefield Wednesday, football ground, Shefield Wednesday being a neutral venue where the two teams could meet for that semifinal.

And and it was held a lovely sunny April day. There were there, there's a lot of issues that weren't dealt with at the time that caused much grievance to the relatives and friends of those who died and wholly justifiable grievance. And at the time. After the disaster, which was had, was multifactorial in its causes.

And I'll come back to that in a second, but I'll just say what happened after the event where 97 people died through crushing. The very early on the narrative was that the fans had exacerbated or caused it themselves. The one thing I can say and that narrative well partly dispelled over many years because it's been very well reviewed, very well looked at by inquiries and investigations.

What I can say though is while there's absolutely no evidence to show that fans contributed to the disaster, and I'll explain a bit about that in a second. Then that narrative still persists and so unfairly persists. I think it's dreadful but even today, despite everything, I will sometimes meet people and they'll say, oh, what were, what were you doing?

And I'll say then towards the end of my time as a career in the police, I've investigated and followed up all the Hillsborough things. And they'll say, oh yeah. But it was the fans, wasn't it? And I still get that even today all those years later 36 years later, where when it's been gone through with the tooth comb.

But the causes were as I say, multifactorial, the main one was a failure of policing. It was a failure of command, a failure of knowing about what, what had gone on in previous years and managing that. A failure of recognizing some of the risks and the issues a failure of experience.

The person put in charge had virtually no experience of doing it. And a deep complacency. South Yorkshire Police who were policing it. Felt that they were experts in policing football. Frankly, they weren't, they were fairly poor at it in, in, even by the standards of the day. And it was a number of turnstiles had been closed, and this is, the club had did this, had done that.

They hadn't properly talked about it through it with the police. The police recognized those turns, styles had been closed but didn't do anything about it. And what happened, because those turns styles were not open that year, and they had been the previous year, you had thousands of people trying to get in.

Through a lot less turns stars and actually physically they couldn't have gotten in time. It wouldn't have turned through and turned around quick enough for people to get through the maximum rate's, about 700 an hour. And it would've required towards about two o'clock. It would've still taken almost two hours to get everyone in.

So from two o'clock onwards, the. The crowd built up at that end of the ground, which was called Leins Lane. It was it was a problem growing in plain sight and nobody did anything about it. It was ignored. There were assumptions made that it's it's just Liverpool fans coming late. It's their fault in effect.

And no consideration and no planning was done before or at the time to manage that. And eventually it got so bad. The crush outside the ground got so bad they just opened the gates and let everyone in again, taking no. Plan or contingency to do it. They went in, there was structural failures in the ground.

Again, another factor that was beyond the police, but the police had a bit of engagement in that, that exacerbated those problems. The sign signage in the ground was dreadful, so everyone who comes in, rushes in when they opened all the gates, let them all rush in, and everyone went straight down the tunnel, straight onto the stands.

And there was a significant crush where people died. The response afterwards was. As poor as the management of the game. And the the, it was headless chickens, in effect. Nobody took command. And that ran throughout the night when the loved ones were looking for their, the people who had passed away and were trying to find them and going to the hospitals and heading back.

And it was it's heartrending, absolutely heartrending to hear the stories of the families and what they went through. And so in effect, it was a multiple failures, the ambulance service didn't cover themselves in glory. The the fire service did very well. The but the police service in particular failed the structural engineers for the for the stadium.

There were some significant failures there, and the club itself were failure. There were failures. And but the complacency and then the force narrative and the lack of command and ownership and accountability for it has exacerbated that cri, that disaster for many years. And the fact in effect, the establishment doubled in on itself.

And I don't believe there's an entity such as the establishment, but what. But it was a time, 10, 20 years earlier, you had the avan disaster and nobody was held to account and there was no, there was an inquiry, but it was, there was no accountability there at all.

By the time this disaster happened in the late eighties, there was a lot more accountability, but it wasn't ingrained in the system. And generally because it was seen as Liverpool's Liverpool problem happened in Sheffield, I don't think it was dealt with particularly well. Certainly not by the coroner, certainly not by the some of the people who had to investigate it, and at the end of the day, it wasn't dealt with.

And the wounds remained for many years with the families who campaigned to reopen the inquests, which they did. And that happened. And then I got engaged back in 2016 after the new inquest gave a unlawful killing verdict and they needed an a senior officer to lead the investigation into the unlawful killing.

And that's when I came on board. 

Ben: So it seems very fair that Liverpool still to this day, really ban I think it's the Sun newspaper, but certain newspapers for peddling that false narrative for where it is today. And I'm intrigued, obviously with all of those failures and then your investigation.

Do you think today we have learned from it and what are those learnings which are maybe part embedded or maybe if there are any learnings that we could take to heart more than we do? Interesting. 

Rob: You, you say this is what I've been, I'm still engaged a bit in trying to shape up a document that, that that we put back to policing to, to say, look, these problems could, might still exist.

Let's be clear. An awful lot has changed since 1989. All the disaster. Issues have and now so much more sophisticated and organized the football, if you go and command a football match, you have to be accredited, you have to have a lot of experience and have done it and been tested for it.

There's a lot that's moved on since then. But I think one of the dangers as we saw, so there'd been two recent, relatively recent instance that ring the alarm bells. One was the Manchester Arena bombing where frankly the response was seen was dire uncoordinated no real command and control.

And many. Mistakes that you saw at Hillsborough reemerging after the Manchester Arena. And the other one was the Euro Cup final. Back in, was it 2020 when there was a near miss that was a near miss at Wembley That could have been a similar Hillsborough type event with crushing and death.

And actually for that matter, people say it was in France and it's the way the French do it. But of course, the French game where the Liverpool crowds were treated dreadfully as well was another example. I think there's still a danger of complacency. There is a challenge. That because events where there are deaths of say, up to a hundred or even more, are so vanishingly rare.

We don't practice it, we don't try it out. And I think we need better peer review and inspection of our ability to respond. It's like pandemics, you have to prepare for a pandemic because if you don't, as we discovered you're right, you can be right on the back. Foot.

And so that investment seems like lost investment. But when you need it, it's ideal. The same with disaster management. You've got to try it out. You've got to test your procedures. And I think we need better ways of testing our procedures for big disasters, because one day it will happen.

Ben: I think that's your point, that it is rare, but it is going to happen. As opposed to some things where you can think, okay, there's vanishingly rare. Yeah, but like you say, we're still seeing. Near misses. And the magnitude of when it does happen is not only for the people involved, which might be in the hundreds, but these, all these follow on facts both to sort of society and how we think about that.

So I think that seems really right, that we maybe should test the procedures more. And again, when he hasn't happened for a while, that sense of complacency, which is probably a human nature thing, but we need to perhaps build in against that. So I'm interested so that plus perhaps some of the public perception on crime, even though as we noted the large crime statistics are down in London, there is an issue on knife crime and the things has called in recent years.

Critics, which have called for a kind of defund the police type narrative. I'd be interested in what you think is maybe fair about that and what do you think people get wrong? I think at the very high level, obviously if police have less resources, you're gonna get less policing, which is actually not the intention.

But it does hint at some of these things around maybe complacency or problems with the system, or some of it is perception because actually if crime's down, why do the public not feel safer? They actually, if they were more say, rational or the news was different, they perhaps should feel safer. So I'm interested in what you think of that of those critics and what we should do and what we could learn from it.

Rob: Going back to what, where I started about policing actually from my perspective, hinges on a good response to somebody's crisis. Now that can be a crime, but it might not be a crime. And. Police while they have an impact on crime, if you arrest the right people, that takes 'em away and it stops 'em committing crime.

But on the whole, the causes of crime are much more embedded in society than things the police can deal with. And I think I think crime, if you really want to deal with crime and reduce it, it's not just the police by any stretch. And it's not the criminal justice system. It's actually society, it's communities.

So going back you mentioned Brixton and you were dead, right? When you said to me a few minutes ago that Brixton crime levels have dropped dramatically in 30 years. They have, when I was there patrolling, we had about a hundred robberies, street robberies. A week. A hundred. Can you imagine street robberies?

That's people being robbed often at night, knife pointed their wallets and their less mobile phones in those days, of their goods. And and. Now it's a handful. It's, I dunno the exact figures now, but it's, at one point I did meet somebody from Brixton and asked him, I said, oh, we have about one or two a week, some, a maximum.

So it, the scale is different. What's gone on there? To a certain extent it's a slightly more affluent society, but it's also, schools are better now. Those schools in Brixton have improved dramatically in 30 years. Thankfully, inner city schools are better kids necessarily better behaved in general.

But I do think kids get a bad rap. I think generally kids as a whole, not a, not always a popular thing to say because people don't want to believe it, but kids are more respectful, they're more thoughtful, they're more polite than they were when I was a lot younger. I was probably contributory to it when I was a young person.

They, it's a, it's, I think we've gotta be really careful about demonizing young people, 'cause most of them are really good kids. And there is a problem with knife crime. There was a problem 30 years ago that wasn't recorded. Because when all those robberies were often involved in knives and we never ever recorded it as a knife crime we do now.

So you've gotta be very careful about saying, oh, it's got worse. It might, we forget how grimy the eighties and nineties were when I was, the graffiti, the fact that your car, if you left it anywhere, would be broken into, that the experience of the general public back in the eighties and nineties in inner city London was dreadful.

And fearful. It's actually a lot better now. Peop but I think it gets amplified and it gets amplified through social media. It gets amplified through newspapers, it gets amplified through people with. Agendas no pe that sort of dispassionate, thoughtful analysis is gone.

People want to shout from rooftops and create an agenda. So my, my, so crime, I think we've gotta be really careful. Crime on the whole. Certainly the crime we experience in a day-to-day level is so much less than it was when I was a junior police officer. That's not to say crime doesn't exist because of course it's gone onto different platforms.

It's gone on to the internet, it's gone on to fraud. There's a lot more of that around. But I, and that, we can discuss that further if you want, but because policing isn't well set up to deal with that. So there is a gap there. There is crime. It's actually not on as much in the public sphere as it used to be.

People believe it is, but I think that's a nature of some of the public discourse. And I do think we need to pause and ask ourselves what sort of society we live in. We live in quite a good society. In the decades I've been a police officer, some things have got better, some things have got worse.

But overall, I don't think we're any worse. The, as a society but people feel more anxious because I think it's being amplified so much. 

Ben: Yes. I would go so fast to say versus the eighties and even the nineties, that things have got better, things have got worse, but on net things have actually got better.

And although there's been challenges, and I don't want to diminish them, but I think we see that in crime overall, it's down. We see that in health overall, we're living better. We even see that in poverty. Yes, there's still. A lot of poverty and far too much, but actually the rates have gone down. Education scores are up.

So I, I actually think there's that, and to your point, when I was growing up in London I was probably allowed out into the late eighties and the nineties. My parents would definitely have said, oh, like Shaw Ditch Hackney. Nope. Brixton Really? Maybe Nope as well, unless you had a really good reason.

It's unless you knew Brixton, I didn't grow up South London, then it's no reason to go there. You'd look obviously outta place and you'd be a target. I'm interested then maybe putting it all together a little bit over your 30, 40 years, what do you think has worked?

And why, and what do you think maybe today if you had an opportunity to change or improve what would you do? And maybe you could do this in the context partly of policing. Like what are the things which have worked to get actually those crime down? And where do we still have to go? And perhaps you could also bring in some of your work on.

Civil society or thinking about that, because that speaks to the point that you mentioned of well, policing can perhaps get better and needs to still a lot on the crisis part and we, we should address that. But the causes of that crisis are these other aspects. We can talk about mental health.

I dunno where you draw the line. Obviously if you've got something having a mental health crisis on the streets, then yes, the police probably should be involved at that level, but they're not gonna necessarily solve someone's chronic mental health issues over built up over decades. That's an example.

And I'm interested in that because there does seem to be at least in this country. A feeling still of civic pride, I think. And there is perhaps more engagement than the critics might say, but it is also a little bit disjointed and hard to bring together. So anyway, policing what's worked?

Rob:  I think in, in describing what works and what could be better, in a way I'm reflecting trends in our society as well. That cause challenges for policing as much as everyone else. So what works for me is. And has a very strong academic evidence base is local community policing, neighborhood policing, that link with communities does work.

It's not cheap, hence it's been willow out in recent years. 

Ben: How does neighborhood policing work?

Rob: Neighborhood policing is where you have police officers who own their patch they're there sufficiently consistently in order to deal with the problems, to pick up problem solving to pick up an issue, not less, let it lie.

So if you've got a shop that's constantly getting kids in nicking stuff, it can actually the local officer. Would feel sufficient ownership and be regular enough in that community to be able to say, yes, I'll do something about this. I'll know who it is. We'll deal with that. And and it, it, lots of people ask for this.

They say, we want to see a cop on the streets. They often don't quite know what they're asking for, but I think what they really want is somebody who knows their area, knows what the problems are and is doing something about it. And that seemed to work. That does work. It brings down crime. It increases confidence.

And it works effectively, not just with police, though. You, it works really well when all the other agencies. Are aligned similarly you, there's some, been some fantastic work over the years. Again, very evidence based where team, multidisciplinary teams, it sounds a bit medical, doesn't it?

But it is, you've got the housing officer as well as the police officer, as well as the the local council and others all working in an area and deal with. Both the police or the offenders or the different problems that might be developing. And one of the big real pluses, two of them actually, one was the Crime of Disorder Act in 19 80, 19 98 that gave a responsibility on all those different agencies to work together to prevent crime that was a sea change and made a big difference.

All the reduction in crime that was claimed by others in the two thousands in the late in the 2010 to 2015 period when crime was really seemed to be re, re reducing, I'm convinced, came about because of the work that was kicked off in the late nineties about local problem solving, community policing.

It, that made a big difference. Sure. Start the, which was a multi. Disciplinary response to young families and kids and helping people regardless of your background, regardless of where you are helping you in sort of your kids grow up in the community with lots of support. That was, that I think made a fantastic difference to communities.

You could feel it in communities where Shore start was operating, where there was good neighbor policing all of that. I think the lesson is that worked and the lesson is that was all dismantled just as it was about really kicking in where the results were starting to show. And politicians unfortunately have very short term agendas.

They have a, have look. I know it's a bit of a cliche, but it's true. They're not there thinking this investment will get crime down in 20 years time. But that's the way you do it. You get the kids now and you work with them positively, constructively. Not because they're troubled or problematic, but because as a society we want to bring them up.

And that will make a difference to crime because believe it or not, the peak offending age is 15. That's when most people will commit crime in the, in, in society. So get the kids at five, at three, at one and help them grow up well and you'll prevent crime. So that's the positive, which sadly has been a bit dismantled in recent years.

Budgets and other things. But the other reason it's been dismantled is because we are policing and this is where we could improve. But it's less about improvement is about us thinking differently. We I'll give you an example. When I was in, in Brixton, I was, I remember having to be supervise an investigation in the academy in Brixton, which is a large nightclub.

About 5,000 people go there. There was a rape there. And I arranged to have a an appeal. We had about 10 maximum witness statements. We had a VHS tape from the entrance to the to the academy. And we had the forensic medical examiner's report. And we did a bit of local inquiry. On foot in the area.

And that probably took me and a couple of other people a week or so of investigative effort. On and off we're doing some other things as well. A similar crime. Now, every single person in the academy might have a mobile phone, ev that's potentially 5,000 pieces of evidence to examine and to collect.

You won't, but you do need to, you need to assess and judge and work out how you're gonna manage all of that 5,000 pieces of evidence. There will be about 600 hours. Of video, DVD, footage to, to view potentially. You've got masses of information from oyster cards, from other digital information all in our, in the environment that could all help you with that investigation.

Now that's helpful because it's probably more chance of arresting somebody, but it's also deeply problematic because it would take, it does take many people, many hours of work, days and days to go through it. Now people say, oh, AI will do that. It's not doing it at the moment, and it's soaking up hundreds of hours of work.

So at the same crime today. Is exponentially more costly in time and effort and money than the one I dealt with all those years ago. And people don't realize that that when I say exponentially, I really mean it. It's by factors. Hundred. Of time and effort. And not just of the officers in Brixton, it'll be lots of other departments having to get involved.

Departments that never existed in my time. All those departments need staffing and need experts and people who can do stuff that we never had the forensic examination now so much more thorough and could, will involve many more hours of effort and time. And as for the interviewing, interviewing the victim is so much better but time consuming.

And it is better, people will be put through a better experience than they did when I did it, if I'm honest. But it's just costly. It's time. So when people say we don't see any officers and stuff, I can tell you they're all beavering away, but they're beavering away on stuff that didn't exist when I was a lot younger and.

We are not geared up yet to managing that deluge of digital evidence. We don't, we still struggle to wade through it. A simple shoplifter, people say, what's going on about shoplifting? I could deal with arrest and deal with a shoplifter in an hour and a half when I was a pc, arresting straightforward one.

But, do all the way through to charging and being out the cell. You'll be lucky to get it through in two days of one person's work. Lucky and probably longer of things. So when people say the police aren't dealing with shoplifters any longer, if you arrest a shoplifter, now the amount of work involved is again not exponentially, but certainly scale of 10 times what it was when I was a young officer and that.

Is costly, and we haven't increased the numbers of officers proportionately to that demand. And that's why when people say We don't see a cop, I can tell you why not. It is not that they're twiddling their thumbs. They are, they're chasing their tail often. You I believe me, and I've tried it, you try going to say what looks like a straightforward job, but actually it turn, you've got to chase down, say, an internet provider to get an email trail or something like that.

Ben: That’s a fascinating observation, which I wasn't aware of, but makes complete sense, I guess at the, that society level, putting your two observations together. A society has to ask a question as to where it wants to spend. Its limited. Time and money. If, maybe take the slightly easier example of the shot lifter versus the more, more serious Brixton crime you were there before.

If it's going from two hours to 40 hours of time, say something like that. Maybe some of that time is valuable, but certainly the extra 38, maybe not, maybe an extra two or three perhaps on that, and that extra money, it sounds would've been perhaps better spent over a longer term basis going into.

Community policing where those two police officers, rather than having to wade through all of this extra paperwork and evidence would be walking the shop speaking to people and being a presence. But we can't necessarily rebalance that. But that seems to be a very intriguing kind of double observation about where it's gone.

And actually that reflects a lot of other things in society. Like you say, our paperwork and our trends of that, and we are not yet, and we may never get to the state where AI can actually do that for us. There will probably still need to be human judgment and maybe they can make it. 50% better. But if you've got a hundred times you are coming back down to 50 times, that's still quite a lot more effort.

Rob: And we've developed for understandable reasons, some quite complex legal processes. One that is very arcane to people not in the police, but is critical to what I've just been discussing is disclosure. You have to, because of things going wrong in the past, there's now a very strong requirement to.

Put as much give the defense as much evidence as both that, that has any bearing on the case. And to also to explain a little bit why they have, why you've done stuff and why you haven't done the stuff. Of course, why haven't you got all those 5,000 phones and tapped into them?

Because that would tell, find, you'll find out my client's innocent if you did that and that sort of thing. So you, you end up with this massive information with people spending days and days. I had in my team for Hillsborough, almost as many officers. Dealing with disclosure for court as I did, dealing with the investigation itself.

And these are experienced cops doing it. Now you could argue it's non, but you do need the investigative mindset to be able to work through what you disclose and what you don't disclose and understand the investigation well enough to make those choices. But they, they went through half a million documents and pieces of evidence to, to be able to say that you can have that and you can't.

It's got, again, as I, I use the word exponentially, but it's true, it's exponentially greater now with so much digital evidence and people having to wade through it and decide what's gonna be disclosed. You're right. There's that nirvana of ai. But I've yet to see it emerge. Lots of people say it will, and I think it will in some respects, but it'll create its own challenges.

Ben: Yeah. Actually that disclosure point's another really. Really hard one because we can see there's been miscarriages of justice. 'cause there weren't disclosure, I don't know what the number is. I'm gonna make a guess that it's that it was a small number, but obviously to any one individual case, it's extremely important to try and get it right.

But then the amount of disclosure that you've then had to do versus those numbers, miscarriages of justice. That's a very hard thing to balance. I can see, yes. And I can see how it's hard to roll back on some of that disclosure, but this is, I dunno what the economists would call it.

Not quite the opportunity cost of things, but. Those a hundred hours spent on disclosure for a little bit of benefit, maybe no benefit. If it was there if it had been spent on say, community policing, you'd actually get a lot more bang for your buck. But you can't do that because those are the missing.

Police hours, which we don't see any more

Rob:  Yeah. And you say right, Ben, actually, that there's so much about our society where we wouldn't want to roll it back, but we undress, we, we fail. I think sometimes take into account just how much that costs us. There's no way you'd say that.

You just can't do vettings say of people. But the amount of vetting and the complexity of vetting at times can feel a bit overwhelming. And yet you do need some safeguards. Yeah, you need safeguards because of stuff that's happened but the safeguards can also paralyze. So it's finding that balance all the time.

Very difficult. Yeah. 

Ben: And maybe there's some evidence that it's gone slightly too far the other way and in, in many domains. This is, like you say, it is interesting when we talk about the police, about its challenges and opportunities. 'cause actually that broadly reflects a lot of other things in society because actually policing reflects, the problems and challenges of society today.

Great. Maybe moving on to our last couple of questions. You spent the last year or so or a little bit further back as high sheriff, perhaps you'd like to comment on that, and I think your theme was around civic engagement, so you get a very intense year of doings and things around that.

Yeah. But would you like to reflect on that and then any other current projects that you'd want to highlight? 

Rob: Thank you Ben. I'm what a great conversation, roved across so much and I feel we've only scratched the surface of some stuff. But yes, I've, I was very fortunate and honored to be invited to become the high sheriff of Somerset.

For those who've never heard of a high sheriff or just think it's something with Nottingham and Robin Hood. The high sheriff of sub set, the high sheriff in general, the, it goes back actually to King Alfred's days. The sheriff was the Shire Reeve, the representative in the Shire of the Monarch.

And that's where it started from. It's the oldest secular role, civic role in, in the uk. And as a sheriff in, back in the sort of late nine hundreds, thousands, 11 hundreds, 12 hundreds, in those times you were in effect, the kings. You acted for the king in the community. So you raise taxes.

You, you did law and order. You generally, often, the, in effect the police, the judge, jury and execution all in one. There's lots of it. It you exercise the king's power and. That ran for many years, albeit it gradually diminished because of course, the King, king Henry the second brought in juries and judges and things like that.

And so gradually over centuries, the role of high sheriff changed dramatically. That you weren't, that they brought in Lord, left tenants in 1585 in order to because actually the high sheriffs were meant to raise the army, but weren't doing a very good job of it. And so Lord left tenants were set up in effect to raise the army on behalf of the king.

Occasionally queen, and it was a queen then. So it's, it. So over, over the years, the role is much less. In fact, it was, and it was made a year only by Henry III in 1258 because he felt. High shares. Were getting a bit too powerful. In fact, in, in, in the Magna Carta 69 of the 121, I might be just slightly wrong on those numbers of clauses in the Magna Carta were about high sheriffs, and most of it was about their overreach and about using their powers arbitrarily and things like that. High sheriffs weren't always popular and certainly when they were collecting taxes, Stephanie weren't. Now it's a very honorific role.

All of that responsibility for law and order and tax collecting and everything else is long gone, but it's still, you're the monarchs representative for law and Order in the, in, in the county. But also you're asked to support civic society and volunteering in the community. And that's the thing I particularly focused on in my year was volunteering.

The people who give up their own time, particularly young people because we face in this country might not realize it, but a real crisis of volunteering. In there, there is, it's the lots of figures I could quote, but the stark one is, in the last decade, routine involvement in volunteering has gone down from 27% to 16%.

People who would routinely volunteer as measured by the British Attitude Survey and British the through statistics. And on the whole, many counties like Somerset still do well because there's a lot, an elderly population who volunteer a lot, but a lot of the older people having to look after grandchildren or, bought dogs and having to walk their dogs and things and time, that time they used to spend volunteering has definitely diminished.

So we face a bit of a crisis in this country on volunteering and I I use my year to promote both awareness of that fact, but also what could we do in Somerset about it? And you, I convened a volunteers Faires. I convened a volunteers conference where Deborah Mead and the Dragons Den star, she came along and did a fantastic skit on how businesses can support volunteering.

And she and. Somerset has a strong approach to try and counter the trends in volunteering. But that's, it, I did my little bit for a year, but only a year because Henry iii limited my time. And but I've, I got enormous. I, it was a privilege but I got a lot out of it by just being able to know, you can, just saying thank you to volunteers and sometimes being able to give them a high sheriff's award for what they've done.

Lifts, lifts them. You can see such and it's glue in our community. There's it I'm still in awe of just how much people do in our community. The statistics can be a bit depression, depressing. I think they underestimate what people do. Because lots of people will say I don't volunteer.

And then you discover actually they go and clean the church every week or they or they go and help their local neighbor and take her or him to hospital. Every week and things like that lot, it's the glue that holds our society together. And long may it continue and I think we should really celebrate the fact people participate and do stuff in our community.

Not put up too many barriers. We talked about bureaucratic barriers. There's a few there as well in volunteering. People are worried about taking on young volunteers, sadly, and yet youngsters need to get the volunteering habit. And people get anxious about safeguarding and I say no.

Safeguarding should not be a barrier. It's something to be aware of, but you shouldn't prevent you from doing stuff with young people because young people are our future. We need them to volunteer and participate in our community. And I will continue. Post my high share of review, and I do continue to try and support that work.

I do a few other things as well. I've got a Bishop Tutu Foundation, I'm a trustee of I, I do some work in Northern Ireland with the Independent Commission on Reconciliation. And I've got I've now, because of the work I've been doing on with the high shares on the High Shares Association, council su trying to support this continue and roll out some of the thinking that we brought in Somerset more widely.

So I've got some great projects and work on the go now, not least all being able to come and talk to you, Ben, this is a real privilege and a joy actually. That sounds excellent. I, 

Ben: I really concur. My, my mom volunteers and we try and do things and things, and it is one of those things, you can't really force it.

I guess that's the thing. There are some people say, oh, should we bring back national service and the like. And I don't think that really works. It's if you ever forced to read a book it never really works that way. But if there's things that we can do by engendering leadership and showing that actually the value that can bring, I think that's incredibly important.

Yeah. So last question, we can maybe split into two parts, and this would be around any sort of life advice. Thoughts that you have in your career, in life. And maybe one would be if you had any advice or thoughts to someone who was interested in joining the police or maybe has just joined the police.

What would you say thoughts to a young police officer or someone who was interested in joining? Or we could also widen that out to not just the police, but anyone a young person today, obviously we have the call to do volunteering, but any thoughts that you would want to share?

Rob: That's a big, an open, yeah, an open field there. Ben I think I have had a career that I've got so much out of, and I think policing is a really important public service. So to, is teaching, so to, is. Being a probation officer or a prison officer or a a, a nurse, a nursing assistant, or a doctor or, those public services are critical to our society.

I think public service itself it's important we honor it and respect it and encourage it. And I think in, it costs, that's the challenge. And people you've mentioned that a bit earlier. You've gotta cut your cloth a bit around stuff. But nevertheless, I think as a society, we've got to recognize that if we want good public services, we need good people doing it.

We need to encourage them in. And you can make a difference. You, there's, for me, a. There's loads of people I will have touched in my policing life, who I will never know. I will never know the impact I've had on them, but I've had enough people talk to me about things I've done to realize I have had a bit of impact on some lives, and probably many more than I'll ever know.

And I would say that about anybody in a public service, you make a difference in people's lives. Most people you'll never know you've done that. My dad was a teacher. It was only after he died that a number of people came to me and said, oh, he really turned me around. He got me to understand maths, which was no mean feat.

And and I think I, in a way, you need to be self-reliant. You need to be self-motivated and recognize that you're never gonna get patted on the head all the time. But actually just have that sense yourself of what you're doing is important and good, and do it to the best of your ability. And I think that's driven me in my career.

I've not really. Spin there thinking somebody must come and pat me on the head. Although when it happens, it's nice. I do very much think, I think that's a decent enough job. I've done my best there. And I think that's what should, you need a lot of that self actualization I think in, if you're going to succeed in many public service jobs because people aren't gonna come along and pat you on the head all the time.

But nevertheless, you can make a difference. And so that's driven me and I think could drive anybody else. And don't get put off by what you read in the papers. All organizations are much more complex and diverse than they appear in the way they're sometimes presented. Policings definitely like that.

It's a very. Interesting organization in so many ways, and you can make it better in your own way just by being there and part of it. So I would encourage anybody and also encourage anybody do recognize you're part of society and you have a responsibility in society. Pick up that responsibility and do something about it.

Ben: That makes a lot of sense. So public service, you may not be immediately rewarded, but you will touch a multitude of people. Those that you will never know. And organizations are complex, but by stepping up and being part of it, you can definitely make a difference. 

Rob: Perfectly summarizing.

Thank you 

Ben: On that, on that note, Rob, thank you very much.

Rob: Thank you Ben, and I've really enjoyed it and thank you for giving me the opportunity to give you a bit of my philosophy of life, but also I'd be very interested from anybody who listens to this, if they ever want to converse about any of this.

Very happy to get in touch. Always happy to discuss these things.

Tim Mak: War Reporting Journey in Ukraine | Podcast

Tim Mak moved to Ukraine in 2022, a day before war broke out. Tim, a former US investigative correspondent, decided to stay and start up his own reporting at Counter Offensive. He now reports from Kyiv. 

“People didn’t connect with my coverage of war crimes — they connected with the dogs I saw in the street. So I built a publication that leads with people, not just news.”

On the podcast, Tim discusses the day-to-day life in war-torn Kyiv, focusing on the chronic stress rather than immediate physical danger residents face. He recounts his critical role in documenting human stories from the war front and shares his personal journey, having moved to Ukraine right as the war began. We  touch on the operational challenges and ethical considerations in war reporting, the importance of human interest stories, and how new technology like AI affects journalism.

“We misunderstand the cost of war because we’ve lived in peace for so long. But if we go back — which is far more common in human history — the devastation will be immense.”

Tim talks about the broader geopolitical implications of the conflict and his hopes for the future of independent journalism.

Summary contents, transcript and podcast links below. Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to pods. Video above or on YouTube.

Contents

• 00:25 Life in Kiev During Wartime

• 03:10 Tim's Arrival and Early Experiences in Ukraine

• 04:57 Launching The Counter Offensive

• 05:24 Human Interest Stories and Subscriber Growth

• 09:50 Challenges and Ethics in War Reporting

• 14:14 The Power of Individual Narratives

• 25:42 Independent Journalism and Future Prospects

• 34:55 Geopolitical Reflections and Ukraine's Needs

• 44:34 Final Thoughts and Advice
  
  

Transcript (AI assisted so mistakes are possible)

Ben: Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Tim Mak. Tim is in Kyiv in Ukraine. He left his role in the US as an investigative res correspondent and started the counter Offensive, and this essentially is a war correspondence, open notebook reporting live from Kyiv on the human stories from the front.

Tim, welcome.

Tim:  Thanks so much for having me

Ben: Tell me, what is a day in the life of Kyiv today? What does that feel like?

Tim: It's an interesting question. I think when friends and relatives envision what I'm doing in Kyiv, they think I must be dodging mortar shells on the way to the bakery to grab a loaf of bread or something like that.

But the kind of average. Life in Ukraine and the cost of it during wartime are a little less physically violent and a lot more chronically stressful, right? And so what I mean by that is the real kind of physiological and mental strain comes from not knowing whether you'll be safe over and over and over again.

Until you leave the country, if you get the chance to leave the country, it's the strain of anticipating the next raid, anticipating the next round of gunfire, anticipating the next explosion or drone kamikaze, drone bombing, missile attack, and so on. And that's the real strain. We know that, for example sleep deprivation can be considered on par with torture when done in a long term, on a long term basis, has been used as a tool to torture in warfare.

I wouldn't say it's as acute or or as as deliberately used in this fashion, but it is the effect of living in a war zone long term is never really feeling safe, never really getting a good night's sleep, and that really drags out. And it's, I don't say this to put it spotlight on me in particular because this is millions of people all across the country that are experiencing a very similar phenomenon.

Ben: Sure. So it's tilts towards a slow drip water torture than a kind of acute, or there's more of a series of acute, which makes it feel really chronic,

Tim: there are acute experiences, obviously for those who are at the very sites of the attack. But keeping a city about the size of Chicago, if there are several dozen attacks, as devastating as they are, they may maim and kill people, but the chances of you being in the particular spot where these these explosions occur are not extremely high. O obviously it's life changing and for some wor life ending and terribly traumatic for the people acutely, specifically at the places where these missiles and drones explode.

But just by the law of of num of large numbers, it's very unlikely to it's very unlikely to hit you in particular. It's the strain of it, the, it's the not knowing, it's the uncertainty.

Ben: That makes a lot of sense on that front. You landed in the Ukraine just as the war was starting. What was going through your mind just before an Intuit and I guess that kind of changed Yeah.

Your outlook on the World, on Life,

Tim: I got tapped to come to Kyiv. I was working for a major American News at the time as an investigative correspondent, and I got tapped to come to Kyiv because of my military background. I used to be a US Army medic and, i, I got sent to Ukraine in case of war might break out.

You may remember in 2020, late 2021, early 2022 that the that the Biden administration had been very public about what it expected to be an invasion of Ukraine. But but they had also said that it would happen in mid-February. So by, by the time the invasion actually occurred, there was a lot of skepticism that it would ever occur.

So I arrived as it happens the night the invasion began just a few hours before the bombing first started. And I remember getting a call at 3:00 AM from my editor saying, you better get downstairs. Something is happening. And I was just so beset by jet lag and confusion that I did the only thing you'd really ever do when you wake up, which is I remember walking into the bathroom and beginning to brush my teeth and looking at the mirror and thinking what is happening?

I remember just brushing my teeth and thinking what is going on? And that's how my Ukraine experience started. I thought that I would be in. Ukraine for two weeks. And now I've been in Ukraine for, about almost three and a half years now. And so it totally changed the course of my life in ways that I didn't expect.

After covering Ukraine for a year for this American media company I I left and I started my own company called The Counter Offensive, which as you mentioned, covers human interest stories of the war, and then. Nine months ago, we launched a second publication called counter Offensive Pro, which covers Ukrainian Defense Technology and Regulation.

So two very different publications taking two very different aspects to reporting and writing about the war. 

Ben: And on the human interest story, which I guess is the kind of more person in the street, consumer orientated one. I think I saw you're up to definitely over a hundred thousand subscribers.

Now obviously there's a free and a paid sort of version, how has that gone and how's that accelerated

Tim: 152,000 and change, but who is counting? How's that going? It's interesting it's been a real struggle. I didn't ever get into this thinking that it would be a business, that it would be successful that would, it would have any longevity.

I launched it thinking it might be a side gig that I would do as I freelance for other, major American publications. But it took off, I think because it featured a kind of war correspondence or foreign correspondence that was a lot more personable, was a lot more intimate and included all the sorts of things that typical, quote unquote serious journalism or mainstream journalism would've left in that reporter's notebooks.

That there was a, that for me. There was a real intent to pull back the curtain and I'll take a step back. During the first year of the war while I was covering covering Ukraine for NPR, what I found I. I would tweet out all sorts of things that I saw, even dogs that I saw on the street and how they were being treated.

And with apologies to all the serious journalism I did about war crimes. About about the battlefield, about the siege of Kyiv. People seem to connect with the human characters and the vignettes and the people who illustrated the news stories more than the news stories itself.

And so that was the whole concept that I brought to the counter offensive, is that we're not gonna tell you the news. IE what happened and leave it there. We're gonna introduce you to someone who went through. Through the news and by learning about this person, by, by profiling this person, you're gonna read this and learn the news itself.

That the human side gets elevated and the who, what, when gets put in a secondary position. And it's been really interesting to see it. Now we're the number one we're the number one substack in the international category.

Ben: That's amazing. From the feedback you were getting via social medias and the like, and what made you decide to stay in Ukraine? Jack it all in, stable or as stable as any kind of journalist job might be in, in the us I. Stay in Ukraine, report this way, change your life. Was, were there other elements which went this is reporting on this human interest story is I'm in the right place at the right time, if not me, who or what went through to say, okay, this is it for the foreseeable future, I'm here.

Tim: I think the answer is a lot less heroic than that. I think. I think it's a lot of it had to do with. What I wanted to do with my life and the trajectory of my life. And I remember after the first year of the war, or close to the end of the first year of the war, was wrapping up. And I I I moved to Los Angeles, which is something that I had said I wanted to do for a long time.

I loved to surf and I I love the beach. And I remember sitting there. And being able to surf as much as I want or sit on the beach as much as I like, and just being miserable, reading about all these things happening in Ukraine, knowing that my colleagues and friends were out there and me not being anywhere near it and not being done with telling the story and feeling like I had other ways to to bring attention to what was happening and.

So I thought, this is about the time in my career. I was 30 35 or 36 at the time and and take a big risk. And if it all fails, I can go surfing for nine months. That seemed like not the worst plan. And that's what we ended up doing.

Ben: Wow., I guess there's always that option to just break free and go surfing.

What are surfing is relatively cheap, which makes it a perfect hobby for employed. What are the stories that have stayed with you? 'cause as you note you've covered so many in and many individual narratives, you track down this. Anti-aircraft missile brigade. I think it's the Russian 53rd, which was pretty notorious.

You covered a jazz club in Odessa, which decided to stay open. Syrian doctors who've come to Ukraine and could go on and on. But I'd be interested in any of the stories either of now or those which have stayed with you or you'd wanna comment on.

Tim: I think the one that that I'll never forget is this 10 month odyssey that I had trying to illustrate the difficulties to solve war crimes during this war.

So I basically, there have been tens of thousands at the time, there were tens of thousands. Now we're well into the six figures. Many thousands of war crimes that have been committed since the invasion began. So many. So that there's a real question I think, about whether or not these crimes will ever be properly investigated, adjudicated and the perpetrators brought to justice.

And what I wanted to do was see if. On my own, I could solve a war crime, highlight a single incident of injustice and see if we could find the perpetrator as an exercise for demonstrating how difficult and solving all of these war crimes could be. So we ended up focusing on, someone named Alexander Brazos, who was someone who was killed in the very early stages of the invasion. And when we first heard about it, we didn't know who killed him. We didn't know when he was killed. We didn't even know his name. All we knew was that he had been killed on the side of the road in a very small village, two and a half, three hours outside of Kyiv.

And no, no one even knew his full name. We started from the beginning and we tracked down his name, his family. We figured out what he was doing. We figured out where he was going, where he was driving. On that fateful day, we figured out the Russian units that happened to be in the area at the time.

We narrowed down the various commanders that were in charge of that unit and ultimately were able to present something of, of a kind of theory of the case about how all of these events occurred. And this took 10, this took 10 months for a single case, and there are tens of thousands, over a hundred thousand now cases.

And so this exhaustive effort that needed to be taken just to address one particular. Issue of injustice has always stuck with me. The thing is, I'm a former a former medic and an EMT, and so I don't really get that shaken up when it comes to images of blood, gore medical trauma, that sort of thing.

The thing that has always stuck with me is the grieving people who. Who carry their kind of liquid sadness around with them. And as they tell their stories, they pour a little bit into your cup as well. And I've never really shaken the emotional impact of meeting the family, understanding their story, trying to do a little bit to.

Shift the thing forward and understanding how much of that grief and sadness has proliferated to millions of people across this country as a result of war. It really put home the costs of invasion of violence of, of these state sponsored. Attacks that occur on a regular daily basis in Ukraine.

Ben: It was a really moving piece where you can see a lens of the whole through the individual story. Any listeners wanna look it up? I think there was the, it was the village near Nova Bassen, wasn't it? That's the piece. That's the piece you are referring to. Yeah. And with that, I have this thought on your focus on human stories.

It seems to me your. Almost making an argument that these individual narratives might matter more than the frontline maps, or there are, obviously the big agencies are doing the frontline map stuff and you get that and that's, important mix, but that these individual narratives are underrepresented.

They get lost. They will be lost. There is no way with hundreds of thousands of crimes that even as. Significant. Probably only ever, probably no small percentage will ever really come to light or get prosecuted. And yet people want to hear, or we maybe need to make, need to hear those type of stories.

I'm interested in your, that sort of theory of change, I guess on the power of the individual narrative and how maybe we are now set up for a time to do that. There's. Adjacently citizen journalism, I guess is a little bit, okay, you've got kind of social media, but this ability to actually report on the ground if you want to do the startup costs from doing that is possible and you've shown that.

So I'm interested in that. So it's the path of individual narrative, but mixed with the kind of technology and platform and ability to actually showcase that now.

Tim: I think those there, there are a couple separate but obviously as you point out related questions, so let me take them one by one.

It was obvious to me even two years ago. It was obvious really to most people. I think that as time went on the news of the, and the shock of the war in Ukraine would pass on, and that people would, I. Tire of daily reports in which they were told, oh, the frontline has moved from this village you haven't heard of to another village that you've never heard of.

But human beings are storytelling creatures. What we wanna hear is that interesting. I. Yarn not a yarn, an interesting story, an interesting narrative. One that touches us, that moves us, that interests us, that saddens us or makes us a little bit smarter or wiser. And mostly that comes through stories about people and being able to introduce you to characters.

Thousands of of miles away. Much of our audience, the vast majority of our audience is outside of Ukraine. 86% of our readers are Americans, Canadians, or in the uk. Introducing you to someone. Giving you a reason to care about them or relate to them in some way, seeing yourself in their shoes and creating this connection of empathy is a much more compelling way to bring people into a story than saying on Thursday afternoon, the frontline move from X Village to Y Village.

And that was always my approach. I think we're a very. Character led news organization. We introduce you, a person that went through this thing by learning about that person. You learn about the news rather than the other way around.

Ben: But your analysis is also through that lens quite deep and insightful and brings through.

Nuance I mean something adjacent. For instance, your recent piece on how Zelensky uniform changed to go and meet Trump. I think in the mass media outlets, there was a line or two on it. People would notice it, but you have a whole explanation for what this really means, and we know actually that fashion and these statements and symbols are extremely powerful.

When people meet, it's weird that today the global power symbol of important men is wearing a suit and tie actually, whether you are the Chinese leader, the Russian leader, the American leader, you, you have. Honed in on a suit and tie. And so the fact that Zelensky has a black T-shirt thing is that, but you provide that analysis.

You put it in the context and things, and I know that's not the character led one, but that's the sort of analysis that seems to me that comes through and, is enabled by independent journalism to do that. It would probably be a bit odd for the front page of the FT to have. A thousand words on fashion.

Although actually I think maybe that's what should

Tim: I think the ft would devote 2000 words on this, but it would run like a week later or something like that. Like I wouldn't put that it past the ft a at all to do something about, zelensky chic and the new power outfit being much more casual and, during wartime, because I've observed that in Ukraine, by the way, which is a separate point, but it's a good, it's a good point, right?  I was first made aware that Zelensky had shown up in a suit on social media, and I thought that's interesting. And I shared it with my team and we started making all sorts of jokes in our kind of WhatsApp group chat.

And the next thing I think is like. Why don't we, why don't we run something on this? It's super interesting. It gives you a window into into both cultural differences and diplomatic power and how that's expressed through fashion. It's this exact sort of thing that you are, as you point out, you're free to do when you are not.

When you like, like I'm sure it could be done for C Nnn, but it's just, it's not it's not what they would focus on. The CNN would lead its coverage with the NATO summit, the diplomatic implications the statements and speeches deals made. But we have the freedom to take a totally different look at it and explain what what zelensky.

Decision to wear what that means for the state of us Ukrainian relations. And not in a petty or trivial way because I think it's not petty or trivial but in an interesting way that kind of chose how diplomacy and geopolitics is evolving.

Ben: And I wanna pick up on the story I mentioned earlier as well of the jazz club.

Odessa, because that's another theme through your work of the struggles of normalcy in a time of war and chronic stress. There's other things around I was reading the stories on the dog and the things, but I was really interested in this jazz club in Odessa. But just the sense of how.

How do you try and be normal with a sense of chronic stress over you? What are your reflections on normalcy or not?

Tim: What do you mean?

Ben: In terms of how you see Ukraine trying to be normal and what those efforts look like and how you, I guess how you feel being normal or not, or, maybe you wanna reflect on the jazz club.

Tim: Like when people ask me what it's like in Ukraine the easiest ways for me to try to describe it is it's that you have to try to get used to it. That you have to find some sense of normalcy in your life. And the easiest analogy I can make is the way that we all adapted after the COVID pandemic is that first, the first.

Period of time was super alarming and isolating and confusing and anxiety raising. But over a period of time, over a period of months and even years, people just got used to putting on a mask and people just got used to fewer public events that it just became interwoven with our daily lives.

And in the same way. Jazz doesn't stop. Pa I live near a basketball court. Basketball games don't stop. People continue to date. They continue to be passionate about the things that they were passionate about before the war. But in the context of. The ever present threat of violence?

People change the nature of their lives, whether they have to move their they're internally displaced or persons or refugees abroad. There's a ton of dynamics. But one of the things that keeps us grounded and connected to other people who are not in a wartime situation is the normal things that we try to do.

To grasp onto to feel like there's still some hope for the future. That there's still some way for us to return to entire normalcy.

Ben: In fact, you might date more fiercely in a time of war. I think that's perhaps a trope with it. I wonder, do you ever have to come across around, I suppose I would put this in the ethics of war reporting and how those ethics, have changed over time with.

Social media with misinformation, with the ability to also, people to take photos and post it. And that I guess I always saw that through the original lens of war reporting, particularly through photography, where photographers really had to in the olden days say do we take a picture of this?

And if we have taken a picture of this, does it really get reported? And then that's exploded. And I'd be interested if you and your team have had to think about that in times of the type of stories that you wanna cover or how you cover them. And is that still a changing landscape in the face, of social media and disinformation?

Tim: I think it's absolutely a factor, particularly in the age of both social media and in the age of, of camera phones, right? That you can capture things all the time, many times without asking for permission. And the appropriateness of using that information, whether in text or in photos is questionable.

I'll give you one example. We've had a lot of debates among me and the reporters on my team about whether to use photos of grieving mothers at funerals. Is it appropriate in such an intimate and and it's a revealing moment of course, but it's also, a very private moment for some and the opinions on that run the whole spectrum.

Some families encourage the posting of such photos. Other families really object to it. Some families. Approve of it, but then reject the captions or some wording. All of this is grounded in grief and so understanding the appropriateness, and there's no easy answer by the way. There's no easy answer at all.

There's a question of whether we should include, we're doing a story right now about about the Ukrainians whose job it is to prepare children for burial. The question is, should we post? Photos of of dead children. Even if they were professionally done and with permission.

These are all difficult questions. To which there are no easy, and these are the kinds of questions, by the way, I'd expect it to be had in any professional newsroom. But it is I'm afraid not one of those things where I can give you a easy up or down, but these are the kinds of ethical conversations we're trying to have all the time.

Ben: I'm glad you are having them and that you echo that other news organizations are having them. I think there's a suspicion sometimes amongst the general public that perhaps our organizations have let slip slightly on how they think about reporting and the even though there's some resource there.

I'd be interested in what you think your biggest challenges are as an independent. War reporting body, is it funding access, safety and that type of thing. And I guess this intersects with one of our threads as well, is. How good a place do you think independent journalism is in, have platforms like Substack and things enabled this to flourish or Actually with the squeeze that we've had in all across media, people don't get newspapers the same anymore.

And you could talk about local news has gone down. I know this isn't really local news, it's a different niche. It was that, although you've got little other niches coming up as well, so I'm interested in what you think about that both. From the lens of an independent war reporter, but then also what it just means for independent journalism.

Tim: Yeah, I think the there are a lot of great news concepts that existed 15 years ago that if Substack had been around these publications would still exist, right? There, there was and the I think the concept now for creating sustainable media operation is to provide exclusive information that people are interested in paying for.

And thinking of this as the primary lens through which you think about, should I open a publication if it's meant to be? A sustainable and break even to profitable organization is do I have exclusive information that is unique from everything else that is out there and that and would people be willing to pay for that information?

And if so then maybe it's a good idea. Or at least it's the, it's got the markings of the beginning of a of a good idea. You and I talked a little bit when we. When we saw each other in London about about the future of AI and what this means for writing and information gathering in general and, the key the key role I think for for reporters in in a kind of large language model world is information extraction and presentation. With a huge emphasis on the extraction part is are we asking questions other people aren't asking and delivering answers that other people aren't getting.

And if you're not doing those things, it's gonna be hard. Sta Substack you already see due to its success is becoming both very popular, but also very very heavy. And there's going to be some moment, I don't know. Whether we're at it, whether it will be some moment in the future at which it, it will hit its kind of apex inability to support writers.

And at that point people will have to make hard decisions about who, who to support and who not to support. And, I think it's absolutely gonna come down to uniqueness to creativity and to having exclusivity over information that you alone will have that is valuable to the people who are paying for it or interested in paying for it.

Ben: Yeah, I think, I guess if you chart this. You had the days of blogger, you had the days of WordPress, and they peaked with them. And I can see Substack doing that. And it's interesting this idea of, is it a unique information? Is it a unique view? Would people pay for it? I have a few thousand on my personal substack.

It's definitely unique and it's definitely interesting. I'm never gonna ask people to pay for it because there's no way I can switch on the last bit. It's oh, this is interesting. Spend the thoughts for free. I'm not sure I'd pay a. A pound for them or a dollar. But yeah, there is that. I think it goes into the ecosystem.

I'm interested in what your own writing process is like, or I guess you can also take it from the editorial writing process of the team and on. Counter offensive, but you could also take it as an individual level. When you're doing investigative work, do you write in notebooks? I guess you've got long form and shorter form as well in long form investigation and things.

But are right by hand, put it into computer. You like writing in the morning. There's obviously no good there's no consensus way of doing that, but I'm interested on personal view and then the editorial view is. This long form you're trying to hunt down these personal stories, things which capture your mind, like a case or an animal or a scene.

And then these slightly longer things you must discuss it in team and then you decide to go. So I'm just interested in how that whole process works for you guys. I.

Tim: Let me start by answering a question you asked earlier, what are some of the main challenges of being an independent journalist?

And one thing that I didn't realize was that I was starting a business. I thought I was getting into it to I. To do some journal to do journalism. But what I ultimately accidentally did was I launched a new startup in a war zone. And and what I'm sure you know is that when you launch a startup, you are in charge of marketing and the big legal questions and the accounting.

If you have time, you get to be involved in the core actions of whatever business that you're in, right? You are you're dealing with the landlord for the office space, and you're sweeping the floors and you are, I. You, you are in charge of every little detail because of the size of the team.

And you don't realize when you work for a large company just how much stuff is taken care of for you without you, you're noticing it. And so that, that is a huge challenge. That is a huge challenge that if you become an independent writer, you are suddenly responsible for it. Every part of the production process.

And there are lots of parts of the production process you have taken for granted. You didn't realize were being taken care of for you by people unseen and unknown. So that's part of the answer to the question, but, to answer your most recent question, I think so we have a team of about eight people right now, and we meet in Kyiv for editorial meetings on a regular basis.

And we'll just shoot ideas back and forth and try to decide what stories interest us, which stories should be put on hold. It's a kind of back and forth of this is something that, that I'm pitching, sharpen this, drop that it's a really dynamic. It's a really dynamic phenomenon that most news organizations are have in some way, shape or form.

Ben: And ultimately you say go no though, or someone does.

Tim: Yeah. Basically I'll, so we have some left the role of an editor. And I'll have a final say, but we also have someone whose role it is to vibe check. So we have someone who we call the vibes editor who basically makes sure I.

That the idea is good enough to pitch that the resulting story has the key elements of human interest and narrative and and kind of strategic importance. And then and then it eventually makes both the idea, firstly and then the final copy makes its way to me eventually.

But to answer your question, one thing that I explained to. Our mostly young reporters is that there used to be a day where you would record your interviews on this. There was even analog, but I, by the time I started reporting in 2009, it was mostly digital. This digital device separate from your phone, and then in order to get the quotes and information off of it, whether it was 15 minute interview or one hour, you would have to listen to the entire interview over.

As long as it took, and then manually write out every quote and actually oftentimes double checking these quotes for accuracy. An hour long interview would often take two or two and a hours to transcribe, and this is the way you would, this is the way you would produce journalism. That it was not at all glamor and black tie outings.

It was mostly listening to your tape over and over again to make sure that it's right. Nowadays we just use AI and we double check it, and we click on a bunch of spots on the screen and it's reverts back to the, to that place. We make sure that the transcript is correct. We pull out we pull out the things that interest us.

We leave the things that don't, we double check the things that interest us or we'll use, we leave out what we don't. And the process is extremely streamlined as compared to what we used to do. And, I think we're a lot better for it. Let's, lets you focus a lot more on the creativity element, getting new stories, finding interesting characters, and a lot less on the mechanics of and the logistics of putting a story together

Ben:

Upload on the sub stack and just press go. So there's also less, you don't have to do newspaper, rollers and all of this type of stuff. I don't know how old….

Tim: You think I am Dld, Ben, but I never had to do newspaper. I got into journalism in 2009, which was well into the, my first jaw was at a vlog.

So it was always, it was it was always. It was always that way for

Ben: me. Yeah. I last kind of few questions. I would thought we'd do perhaps just touch a little bit on crystal ball gazing. Maybe just taking the whole of. Geopolitics from your point of view, I guess this is a cluster of questions, which I think, what do the people of Ukraine need and where that might go?

And I guess if you talk about today, with the end of June you have more wars going on, obviously you've got the Middle East. The US under Trump is still being the us You've still got China, Russia and all of that. And I saw somewhere, it's slightly hard to count, but if you look at geopolitical conflicts, I.

They're at an all time high on a kind of 10, 20 year view. They may be slightly lower than a hundred years ago, depending on where you do that. I was also looking at somewhere that the small conflicts, I say small, but they seem probably pretty large to people there in Africa kind of considered civil wars and the like are also at all time highs and those type of things.

And there is a perception that the world has become. More fragile, a little bit more splintered. And you have got a kind of deglobalization effect at least versus the last five years, maybe not, versus the last 20. I'd be interesting on what your vibe take is, and if you have any particular views on what is needed what we could do with needing, and then what is maybe the thread of where we're likely to end up.

Tim: A lot of, let me take your questions in order. So what does Ukraine need in the near term? Two things, people and air defense. One of the one of the great advantages that Russia has in the, in, in strategically is that how much bigger it is, how many more resources it has, and how many more people it can draw from in order to engage in this war of aggression.

And Ukraine is desperately suffering for people. Is that and it's hard to judge anyone for not wanting to die or risk their lives. It's a real, it's a real challenge right now. Ukraine is trying to deal with that in some part by technology. But ultimately you need people.

And Ukraine has had there are all sorts of domestic politics involved in why, for example, the conscription age is at 25 and not at a lower age. But that's one thing that Ukraine needs is more people. Another thing is Russia has, is now producing 500 drones per day that can attack Ukrainian cities.

It can produce many more, missiles that will be launched at Ukrainian Cities. Cities. What it needs is methods to shoot purely defensive weaponry to shoot down these drones and shoot down these missiles before they kill innocent civilians on the ground. That's a technology that Europe and the United States has.

But a lot of Europe. And many officials in the United States have been reluctant to provide that kind of those stocks of weaponry to Ukraine. And that leads to the broader question, which is I think the the war in Iran and other conflicts is they're, they seem to be proliferating around the globe.

They're making countries wonder maybe I need to keep. Additional stocks for myself should things go really bad. All of which is bad news for Ukraine as it fights an ex existential war. And I think that's what Putin is fundamentally counting on is that people get distracted or otherwise worried about other things and and leaves Ukraine.

To fight on its own, which will be a very costly thing for Ukraine. I don't think ultimately Russia will succeed, but Ukraine's defiance will come at much higher cost if it's not supported by its allies. And the world getting a lot more dangerous. I think. I think it's obvious that it is it is becoming more dangerous.

I think that, Amer that America pulling back from World Affairs as it is trying to do now with some limited, with only limited success is is a net negative for the world. I think that American leadership led to a much safer world than a world without American leadership. And that the rising.

Polls of Russian power, Chinese power those are very dangerous things for all of us. And some confrontation between these polls is gonna be very is likely to be very, violent and unpleasant and traumatic for millions, if not billions of people. I think we can all see in slow motion the world is becoming a more dangerous place.

There are of course things that we can do to pull back from this, but I don't see us working really in that direction. I'm hoping. I'm hoping that Ukraine can serve it as an example, both technologically and economically and politically as to how, as to what you need to do to survive and retain your sovereignty.

I hope that people are learning lessons from what's happening here. But I'm worried that they're not taking seriously enough the risks and they're not getting prepared fast enough. I don't. I don't say any of this to say that that global conflict is at all inevitable, but I see us going down a very dark path.

Ben: Let me ask a question on the kind of ups and downs. What, if anything, gives you hope or sparks of hope? And on the other side, is there a risk or a factor that you are seeing, which you think is really being. Underestimated or misunderstood by people at large.

Tim: I fundamentally believe that the same country that elected Barack Obama is the country that elected Donald Trump. We're speaking today on the 10 year anniversary of a very famous speech that Barack Obama gave in Charleston after a white supremacist, walked into a black church and shot a number of people during a Bible study.

And I rewatched that speech today. Because it was the 10 year anniversary and it popped up in my feed. And and I realized that there are some deeply unifying forces in America and across the free world. And it's not so far removed from us to, to find those things that unite us against tyranny and authoritarianism.

I think we, you and I have both grown up in relatively peaceful times and the people we grew up with may have. Not realized what a blessing it is to live in peace and to live in a time of relative economic prosperity and innovation. If we go back the other way which has been far more prevalent in the history of human affairs, it's gonna be devastating and destructive and and terrible for us all.

But we don't have we don't, many of us do not have a living memory of these these kinds of events. And I do think. There are ways for us to impress upon others, and my project is one very small sliver of trying to bring you into what it's like to deal with war. And what I hope is not only for people to support Ukraine, but also to understand these are the consequences that have come on a personal level, not just the war moved from this village.

To that village. I want you to understand the village. I want you to understand people who were in the village. I want you to understand the culture that was destroyed and the lives ruined as a result of that, in hopes that it not only spurs you to some action with regards to the present situation in Ukraine, but also understanding the cost of war so that we don't head down this dark path.

Ben: That seems very clear to me. We misunderstand the cost of war because we've lived in peace for so long, but actually there's. Perhaps you can make the argument that in the free world we have more in common with what one another than our differences. Even that, although it might not seem like that, I would ask maybe for the final couple of questions I.

Anything you wanna reflect on in terms of current projects? Obviously this seems to be all consuming, but there might be other kind of seedling, current projects you want to mention and maybe current projects into the future. Where might you be in a few years? In 10 years, or maybe even next year as perhaps, or you can think about?

Yeah. Anything you wanna talk about? I hope I'm surfing. I hope I'm spending a little bit more time surfing. Yeah. On current computer projects. I'm I really hope that I can devote more times. There's no surfing in Ukraine, otherwise I'd never leave. But on a more on a more serious level, we're expanding our coverage into into u both Ukrainian defense technology and European Defense Technology.

Tim: What we've done is create a trade publication here in Key called Counter Offensive Pro, and we cover. The latest battlefield concepts, the regulatory environment for western investors and defense companies and allied governments. And so we do very technical in the weeds reporting on on cutting edge.

Technology from the front lines. What we're planning to do is bring this concept to the rest of Europe with a focus on Brussels and national capitals to help understand the huge generational problem and and promise of European re armament as it spends. Hundreds of billions of dollars trying to make itself too resilient to invade in the future.

And that is a real challenge and a part where, you know a project which I hope to be of some very small use in providing some information that will make that process a little bit more efficient by doing journalism and reporting on the tech and on the regulation, that's something that I hope to launch soon.

Ben: Excellent. And final thoughts. This is the open last question is do you have any thoughts or advice for people listening? This could be advice for people who might want do a startup or a career or journalism or might be thoughts or advice to politicians of the world or anyone about what they should think or do or any form of life advice.

Any final thoughts from you?

Tim: I guess I just but I try to chat with young journalists and folks, especially if they reach out and ask for some time and that they're frequently asking for advice. And lately I've been thinking a lot about what what AI will mean for for the field of journalism.

We talked, we touched on it very briefly, and. For people in these sort of white collar jobs. I think the kind of key question career wise is what can I do that AI can't do now or very likely in the future? And I've been spending a lot of time thinking I. What can I provide? What kind of value can I provide?

How does my career look in a career where, I've been very pride. I've had a lot of pride for the way I write, the way I put together sentences and paragraphs that's going to diminish over time. The uniqueness of that or the value of that. So what's the point of having a reporter around what's the point of having a.

News publication around what can I provide that no one else can that, that adds value to people's lives. That is gonna be a big question for, not only writers, but accountants and paralegals and all sorts of other research types or p people who did work that is now easily replicable by by large language models.

That's something that I've been thinking a lot about and encouraging others to get well ahead of now before they're forced to think about it.

Ben: That seems like excellent advice. Think about the things that you can do that no one else can, or perhaps that you can do and you can do easier and that everyone else might find really hard including the AI. So with that, Tim, thank you very much. 

Françoise Girard: Feminism, Activism, and the Power of Storytelling | Podcast

Françoise Girard is an activist and founder of Feminism Makes Us Smarter. We discuss Francois' journey from studying law in Montreal to becoming a feminist activist in New York. Francois shares experiences from her work with the Open Society Institute and the International Women's Health Coalition, elaborating on the critical role of grassroots feminist movements in effecting societal change. 

“Taking a feminist, intersectional lens helps us understand the world better. You can see trends before the regular commentators do.”

The conversation touches on misconceptions about feminism, the interconnected nature of various justice movements, and the importance of long-term, flexible support from philanthropists. 

“If you want to track the health of a democracy, look at what’s happening to women’s rights. They’re the early warning system.”

Francois also highlights the power of storytelling in activism and reveals her creative process behind her writing. 

“When we walk out of a play, we’re more in touch with our feelings. That’s how movements grow — through stories and emotion, not just policy.”

“Each of us won’t solve it all, but if we all do something — even something small — that’s how things move. That’s what gives me hope.”

The discussion concludes with insights into successful campaigns, including the decriminalization of abortion in Ireland, and practical advice for individual contributions to social change.

Summary contents, transcript and podcast links below. Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to pods. Video above or on YouTube.

Contents

• 00:18 Francois' Journey to Activism

• 01:50 Working with International Organizations

• 03:39 Founding Feminism Makes Us Smarter

• 04:54 Understanding Modern Feminism

• 05:41 Intersectionality and Feminism

• 10:35 Theories of Change in Activism

• 22:54 Challenges and Learnings in Feminist Movements

• 31:45 The Role of Art and Opera in Life

• 32:17 The Power of Storytelling

• 36:14 Creative Processes and Writing

• 41:51 Successful Movements and Campaigns

• 49:41 Current Projects and Future Plans

• 54:38 Final Thoughts and Advice

• Transcript (This is AI assisted, so mistakes are possible)

Ben: Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Francois Girard. She's an author, activist, and founder of Feminism. Makes Us Smarter, Francois, welcome.

Françoise: Thank you very much, Ben. I'm really pleased to be talking to you today. 

Ben: How did  your journey to become an activist come about?

Françoise: Ah if you'd do me when I was 15, whether I'd be doing what I'm doing today, I would've thought it would be very cool to do what I'm doing today, but I don't think I would've imagined it. I would've said, how on earth do you become a writer, someone who works with feminist movements globally? I wouldn't have known how this happened.

So basically, I. I studied political science and then I be, I studied law, became a lawyer. I was working in a big law firm but I was always interested in human rights, women's rights, justice, fairness. And throughout my journey as you call it, I did get involved in student politics.

I was the president of the Law Students Association in law school at the University of Montreal. I was, always involved in organizing, with events and year books and plays and, I was always active but when I had the opportunity to move to New York when I was 34, I got married and decided to move to New York.

My husband was already in New York. That was the moment I left Montreal and decided that this was the time for a change. I didn't, I wasn't gonna join a big law firm in New York. I was instead gonna go into, international human rights, international affairs, New York was the place, right? So it was the opportunity.

So I did do that after a while after knocking on a lot of doors. And this was Prego, you couldn't look up people the same way. You had to knock on doors and meet people. I ended up hired by the Open Society Institute at the time the Soros Foundations and I started working on human rights.

In Eastern Europe not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall and. Gave away George source's money to human rights groups, women's rights groups independent journalists. We just did a lot of work on democracy. Promotion was very exciting and I learned a lot. And after that joined the International Women's Health Coalition.

'cause my passion was always feminism and women's rights. And I went to see my boss at Open Society and I said, I'd like to. Be on the front. I wanna go on the front lines. I, it's nice to give money to groups, but you're removed and I am gonna leave a comfortable world, leave it behind the world of philanthropy and join a frontline organization.

So I joined International Women's Health Coalition, which later on ended up leading for eight years, and got connected with feminists from all over the world. Working on sexual and reproductive health and rights, in particular, abortion rights, contraception, sexuality, education, violence against women, some of the most difficult, quote unquote issues the most culturally challenging issues in a lot of contexts.

And met all these amazing that I'm still in touch with and just had. An amazing time of it. It's hard but so rewarding and five years ago now, I left the coalition and four years and a year later, so four years ago, I started, feminism Makes us Smarter, which is a communications platform where I have a newsletter.

A podcast. So where I talk to feminists from all over the world about their work, their journey. I also review books and evidence about, what works to combat violence against women, or what works to advance abortion rights. And just putting out there, more voices and more experiences, knowledge that's not often found in the mainstream media.

There's. Not a lot written about feminism in general. Even when women march by the millions, the mainstream press writes very little about it. They just don't find it interesting, or important or I don't know. And and so I felt that it would be a contribution to, to put that additional content out there in the.

In the sphere, in the internet sphere.

Ben: That's amazing. So how do you think we should think about feminism today? What? What do you think is most misunderstood by most people when we think about it? And I think there's some talk about also the intersectionality of it. It doesn't live in isolation, but to your point, there's a lot of talk about what.

Works there are these intersections with wealth and poverty or the fact that, feminism makes us smartest. Societies which are more equal seem to be doing better and all of that. But I'd be interested in your take on what's most misunderstood.

Françoise: I think that when I chose the name, feminism makes us smarter and I like the acronym FMUS because I pronounce it famous, 'cause we're the famous feminists, of course.

So you gotta have a bit of fun. But what I wanted to say is that. If you take a feminist lens, and it has to be an inter intersectional feminist lens, so we can talk about that. But if you take a feminist lens to the world, you start to see things much more clearly, right? Things that seem perplexing or become clear.

When you take a feminist lens, you also see things coming with much more. Preview, so to speak, like for example, I think it's. In my world, it's well known. The connection between author, authoritarianism, fascism, and sexism and the repression of women is that's always gone together, right?

So if you pay attention to anti-abortion movement movements, fighting against gender equality against the whole idea of gender, even then you can see that. Fascist movements are on the rise, right? Because they're connected. And in a way, issues like abortion, control of women's bodies control of women's fertility are canaries in the coal mine of democracy and human rights.

So it does make you smarter to adopt a feminist lands to understand even politics, because you can see. Trends before, like the regular commentators will see them. That's what I've observed. Now, what's misunderstood about feminism, one is the typical trope that feminists hate men. You know that it's a man hating movement.

That we wanna abolish men and so on. And that's of course not true. Many of us have men in our lives, men we love men we spend our daily lives with. What we don't and or what we hate is patriarchy. Like the notion that there's should be a social order that elevates one. Sex, the male sex, or people who are assigned male at birth above everyone else above, above females.

People who are assigned female at birth or people who are non-binary and so on. Like the, this idea that, the male should rule is the problem. And it leads to many other problems including violence, war, domination, extractive capitalism control over nature by, by, by man. That is, there is some of the things that we wanna fight against.

And the other thing that I think is misunderstood is that if we adopt a feminist approach, I. We, everyone will benefit. Like people assume that only women will benefit, but in fact, men also are oppressed by sexism and patriarchy, right? The idea of being a man today is very narrow, right? You must be strong and domineering and you must be.

Taciturn and stoic, and you must resolve all your conflicts through violence and domination. And for a lot of men, of course, this is very oppressive, oppressive of their own nature, their own sensibilities. It's of course very destructive. Because then, anytime there's a problem, you have to punch the other guy or, lobb a missile, whatever.

It's not conductive conducive to, to, to peace to building society, harmonious society. So I do think for a lot of men becoming feminists would actually be empowering for them. So that's one thing. Then the intersectional part is that of course, because when we say patriarchy, the patriarchy as its practice now is not to elevate all men.

Although all men can, participate in the patriarchy. But the patriarchy that wants control over our society is the white patriarchy, right? The white, cisgender, straight. Patriarchy and the Christian patriarchy this is what in the US for example, we're facing, these are the people who wanna dominate and they definitely are of a certain makeup.

And so our feminism has to be able to analyze that. And it's not just okay to say, we wanna abolish patriarchy in general. We have to really analyze the relationships between. Racial justice, environmental justice gender justice, economic justice and feminism to be able to have a proper analysis of what's really going on here.

Ben: So activists often talk about a kind of theory of change, the mechanisms that they think they, the levers that they can pull in society today to impact some of these changes for the better. And like you've alluded to some things over history seems to have worked, some things have perhaps not worked as well.

We can learn things from other. Types of activists, like disability rights activists, and you've said race and all sorts of things. So I'm interested in what you think the main theories of change you have at the moment. What you think is working or maybe should work or you're interested in.

Françoise: Yeah, the one thing that's. Always been my guiding light is the notion that, the famous quote by Frederick Douglas, the 19th century African American writer and social reformer that he fought against slavery in the US in the 19th century. And was someone who worked for rebuilding, reconstructing the US on equality principles.

And he had this famous saying, power concedes nothing without a demands. It never did. And it never will, right? And so what that says is that we have to organize in movements and, in community-based groups and so on to demand. Equality and justice. It's not gonna happen without a fight, and it's not going to happen without us demanding our freedom and our and demanding justice. So for me, my theory of justice is really grounded in social movements, in community organizing. And there's. Have plenty of evidence that's what really makes a difference for change.

Certainly in feminism there's been a lot of interesting research on violence against women and what has worked in various societies to move the needle on violence against women. What has spurred governments actually act on violence against women, which is so pervasive and there's this fabulous research by a professor.

Called Laurel Weldon. She's at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and Canada. And she and a colleague Malan, Toon put out this research where they looked at data from 70 countries around the globe. And what were the critical factors that got governments to actually do something about violence against women.

And after they took away all the, left-wing governments presence of women in parliament, whatever, they controlled for all the variables. The one factor that was critical to moving the needle on violence against women was the presence of independent, organized feminist movements. Right? When you had a feminist women's rights movement that was pushing the government to act on violence against women, that's when you saw action.

Without that, it didn't matter. What philosophy the government espouse, and what you know, whether it was a developed capitalist economy or a socialist country, a richer, poorer, it didn't matter. The one thing that mattered the most was the presence of feminist movements pushing government to act.

So that's, it's not just my say so, my belief or what Frederick Douglas said, it is actually. Evidence-based that with social movements change is possible. It doesn't mean it's inevitable, but that is the critical factor that must be the secret sauce that must be there.

Ben: In an ideal world, how would you think about shaping society?

So if these movements are successful or is there any particular. Policy or idea now. 'cause our utopia might be a little bit away. But policy or ideas now you think would be, are really vital to think about enacting and how do we get, from there to our ideal world?

Françoise: Oh my goodness, there's so much that's on fire right now, literally and figuratively that.

It's hard to pick one thing I just wanted to add, because you mentioned disability rights, that I do think the disability rights movement. Has said something, one of their slogans is very profound and important, which is nothing about us without us, and that's also then been adopted by other movements including the HIV and AIDS movement.

And the feminist movement, of course, believes that deeply. You cannot. Make the change without the people most affected at the table. And bring them in and actually give them leadership. Not just bring them in as a token or listen to them on the side, or, consult with them, but the, the decisions being made over here.

It's really. Co-creating the solutions with the communities in leadership. And so if I had to change anything, it would be that, to really take that seriously, like really bring people in to co-create and imagine solutions and enact them long term and really stay the course tho that would be one of the things that I think we.

Make the biggest difference and there's so little of that being done. It's pretty shocking. But of course there's many other things. Healthcare, of course, that's been my beat. Sexual and reproductive health control of women's bodies, ensuring that half the population can control their body.

Fertility are not subject to violence can make decisions without coercion. That would be hugely important, including, girls, early marriage, forced marriage. The gamut of things that happen to girls at an early age is. It's just terrifying. So if I could change that, I'm sure we'd be in a better world, but that's the not the only thing we need to do, obviously.

Ben: Sure. And but to your point you'd need to include everyone and then downstream these things happen. If you can't get that level of inclusion with all of these groups, then you probably don't even get any of these downstream and they wouldn't be sustainable. Yeah. So we could go on and on about the things on fire, as you say, but maybe we should just flip it and.

And look at some of the silver linings. And maybe I would ask what are the things which give you hope right now? Are there things that you find inspiring or things which you think okay, here's a little spark. We should continue to work on that?

Françoise: Yeah. I'm always inspired by feminist from all over the world and their bravery and creativity.

A few years ago I was impress. Many of us were by the Argentine women's movement fighting for the decriminalization of abortion in Argentina, which was a tall order, right? Argentina was very conservative, macho, historically Catholic country that had lived under dictatorship.

All that leaves a lot of. In society if you want. That leaves a lot of things. In the political apparatus that, that make it difficult to advance women's rights and equality, gender equality in general. And they campaigned for years and we, when we were at the International Women's Health Coalition, supported them even when it looked completely farfetched that this was going to be possible.

And they came to us. Yeah. Again, like listening to people, they came to us and said, we wanna. We wanna campaign in in the Congress for decriminalization of abortion, but we are from all over the Argentina and the provinces of Argentina. And it's hard for us to come to Buenos Aires.

We need a small apartment in front of Congress that we can use as a base. But no donor wants to fund rent, because the donors have all these ridiculous rules. And they said, would you do that? Would you. Find a little apartment that we can use as a touchpoint. And we said, yeah, sure. Yeah. And this was years before the decriminalization actually happened and we said, yeah, we'll do that.

Yeah, we understand what you're talking about because we're activists ourselves. We know what it takes, what kind of sustain action and presence and lobbying and how you need. And so we did that. And in December, 2020. Congress voted to decriminalize abortion in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy, and then the president signed off on it.

Then it was after, terrific mobilization that basically took over the whole country during the pandemic no less. They were amazing. And they had the green scarves and they did all these marches and it was super creative, also very visual, very. With music and singing, and it was intergenerational.

You had older feminists, like what they call the historical feminist, less historic as the older 85-year-old feminist with the young teenagers marching together. It was beautiful and moving. So that gives me hope. The creativity and the ingenuity and the. Patience and determination and fierceness of feminists from all over the world.

And then of course, today what we're seeing rise up in the US this movement against fascism, which comes out of all, many previous and existing social movements, including Black Lives Matters and movements for environmental justice. That's all. It's all coalescing and then re reorganizing and morphing.

But that's where we saw we had the No Kings Day in mid-June. That was incredible. Impressive. Big all over the us, not just in one city, but all over the US in places where you wouldn't expect people to come out and say, no Kings here, fascism is un-American, where, it was beautiful.

So that gives me hope. Yeah.

Ben: And like you say, you started your own podcast not too long ago. How's that been going and what are some surprising things or anything that you've learned from doing your own podcast?

Françoise: Oh, I, first of all, I love it even more than I thought I would.

It's so much fun because you can talk to many people you wouldn't talk to otherwise. And a friend of mine a few years ago told me, Francois, of course, because I was surprised people would agree to talk to me. Even people I didn't know. He says, but of course they'll talk to you. You are now the media.

You're the media. When the media calls you, most people are flattered and they're like, you wanna speak with me? Oh, great. And people have. A lot to say incredibly rich experiences of activism, of, or, they know many things about what works on the ground, what change is possible what bravery there is out there to advance women's rights.

And so there they've got a lot to say that you would never read in the regular media. There's very little in fact about women's rights, even when, the women's march happened in. In 2017, there was really not that much reporting on it, considering how big and transnational it was. So it's it's important I think, to put that out there in the internet, in the conversation, more voices, more experiences, things that regular media would not pick up otherwise.

I learn and people have amazing stories to tell, and the part of it about storytelling I think is really important. They will talk about their journey, what they learned along the way. People are quite candid also what things didn't work what they wish they'd done differently. It's a real learning experience for me as well as I think for the listeners.

Ben: That's, yeah. That's a good question about what what we would've done differently or any learnings that you have. So maybe I'm gonna pass that one back to you as well, is over your feminist journey, are there any things you really wish had gone a different way or some sort of learning that you'd, you'd pass on to future generations as to how to think about this movement building?

Françoise: There's a couple of things. One, I, on the, per my personal level, I wish I had. Listen to myself a little more, like when I was getting tired as a leader, I wish I'd passed the baton sooner. That would've been smart. And I think there's, in any social movement or any, like in politics, in, in business, there is this.

Sense of, being essential, irre, irreplaceable, critical. I think we have to do away with that, the pro protagonist moa, as they say in, in Spanish, which is the idea that you're such an important figure that, if you lead, it's gonna be devastating and, maybe not right? If you pass the button in there.

In a responsible way maybe sooner would be better, and we could use, different leaders at different times. So that's the one thing person. And

Ben: the system and the organization has gotta be able to survive beyond the founder, otherwise yeah. Not there, right?

Françoise: That's right. And so of course you've gotta lay the ground for that, but don't assume that. They can't do without you. Don't assume you're so indispensable. Put the conditions in place and then pass the baton. Also because this work is very tiring and you have to realize sometimes you do get depleted and maybe you're better, your best ideas are behind you, and be honest about that.

The other thing on a totally different level for funders of feminist organizations and of any social movement is we've gotta learn to trust. The movements much more than we do. Like funders, please. We need to trust the organizations, the leaders. We've gotta give them long-term flexible funding.

Stop trying to control things that you can't control. It's the illusion of control, of course. 'cause you're not on the ground and you cannot be there to. See what's really happening and most of if you've done your due diligence and you've, the organization, they're not there for nefarious and they're there to advance a cause often that great personal cost, so trust them, right?

Don't micromanage them. Give them the five year grant. General support and just send us your annual report and we'll visit you once a year and we'll chat with you a few times a year on the phone and we'll get out of your way. And that's been one of the biggest problems. I think our side, if you want the progressive movements have had to contend with is that there.

Philanthropic sector and the government donors, the overseas development assistance is way too micromanaging, controlling, asking for interim reports all the time, et cetera. Which, with key performance indicators and log frames, whatever, that don't mean anything.

Honestly, there's such a waste of time that's not. That's not productive. When you're leading a campaign, let's say to decriminalize abortion in Argentina, you have a lot of twists and turns, you know you have a defeat in parliament. Then six months later there's an opportunity again, the road comes up again where you know, if you are having to report on very tight metrics that don't allow you flexibility, the ability to.

Once again fund, the lobbying effort, even though you've already funded it once, you know that if you don't have that kind of flexibility, you won't be able to pivot and do the things you need to do when you're really pushing for change. And if I look at the right wing in the US and globally, the same is true in Europe.

Their donors get that. Their donors give them 20 year support. Help build institutions, give them lots of money to try different things and fail. And they trust them, like they trust them, that they do wanna bring on, authoritarian and Christian role and they're all on the same page and, and give them room to experiment and try different things and it makes a difference.

That what we're seeing now in, in. The Western world is and elsewhere is the result of that trust by right wing donors. For our right donors, we need to learn those lessons. Yeah.

Ben: Yeah. I think there's a lot of. Elements of truth on that, particularly when you take a movement, which has got an end goal.

How useful are KPIs? What are you gonna do Num number of calls on politicians. That's not gonna be a useful metric for them. And I think if you have a guiding purpose, a guiding North Star, then there is and I think there is a little bit, there's two things I picked up is particularly with smaller.

Organizations or grants. And, smaller can even be few million or tens of millions, but they're not actually that large in the grand scheme of things.

Françoise: No.

Ben: We're not talking about billions that the paperwork surrounding it is just. Outta proportion to getting on the work that you have to do.

So that's a number one thing. But the number two thing that I picked up is the people who are super great on all the kind of paperwork stuff at the margin, and it's slightly less effective than the people who are just really useless at the paperwork stuff, but are going out enacting whatever it is the thing that you want to enact.

Yeah. And so by putting such high paperwork burdens on people, either you having to hire. Specific people to just do the paperwork thing, which isn't the active purpose that you want to do. Yeah. And then it slightly tilts to the less effective people, maybe even on the borderline of fraud, because you're very good at just doing the form and you end up having to spend 80% of your money on the form, which is then you go why wasn't the majority of our money spent on this other thing as well?

You asked us to do all of the Yeah. Forms and said, this is what you have. So I,

Françoise: that's right. There were grants that at the International Women's Health Coalition we were contemplating applying for, but then we found out that from other people who'd received funding from that donor that if you did take that money, you'd have to hire a full-time person just to deal with them, deal with the donor, fill out the forms, and, send them their, log frames with their.

Indicators filled out. And and when you accept that kind of funding, you also end up inevitably passing some of that onto your grantees. We were funding grassroots groups and we thought, no. Are we gonna keep calling the group in northern Cameroon that's fighting against child marriage to ask them, how many meetings have they had and how many girls were there in these meetings under the tree in that village?

And is this. Reasonable. And frankly, no. So we had the luxury of saying no to some of these donors. But it's easy to get trapped into that as a, as an activist group, and it does take you away from your core purpose.

Ben: And the last one, I would say that on the grant giving side, for philanthropists or organizations listening in, is that the decisions take too long as well.

Yeah, like a by committee, and B you had the information you needed. You probably had it over two coffee chats and a call. And then you asked them to produce this 10,000 page, 10,000 word. Probably not quite 10,000 pages. Feels like 10,000 pages, but 10,000 word. Form or whatever, and you're getting no incremental value for that.

So I gave some a micro grant program, a thousand pounds, a thousand dollars to individual activists or people trying to make a difference, and I have a call and decide within 24 hours and you give them the money and then we're like, oh my God, I just can go and do it.

And then I say. Tell me in a year whether that worked or not, and yeah. Yeah. A good half of them. It hasn't really worked, but it's fine. They tried something. Yeah. And another half actually they went in, they went and did something and they did it fast. It either works or it doesn't.

You're, a report's not gonna help us like that.

Françoise: That's so true. Yeah. No it's just mind boggling sometimes. Yeah. And then they say, okay, then we have doc dockets only twice a year. I'm like, where's the urgency? Yeah. There's no urgency. The world is literally burning in you all, are very comfy, meeting twice a year. Oh, wow. Yeah. No, yeah, exactly. There's a real disconnect.

Ben: If there's things happening, you should, you can make these decisions fast. Good people can make the decision fast. And I think we can we can and should learn from that. So we met through art and theater.

We have a, yes, we do. We have a theater company, improbable, which does operas. As well as improvisation. So we have that in common. So I'm interested in what role does art and opera play in your life? And we touched on the role of storytelling in general, in movement building and in, in convincing people.

So you could touch on that, but I'd be really interested in how art has influenced your life and opera, and how does that kind of intersect with everything you do?

Françoise: Yeah. Getting back to storytelling. Years ago I had the privilege of spending time in workshops by a man called Chris Rose, who actually lives in Britain, who used to work for Greenpeace.

And he's a campaigner and trains people in campaigning. And he's the one who made us understand those of us working in the public health program at the Open Society Foundation that. Facts don't move people or very little. And people, you can give them all the statistics in the world.

What moves them is stories stories that connect with their own values and their emotional, makeup. And that's of course, again, you know what people like Joe Rogan and all these guys on the manosphere understand. They really are very adept at telling stories that connect with the grievances that some men feel, right?

It so storytelling and narrative. Is what people remember. And then you can hook a few facts to it, to the story, but it's, the frame has to be the story and the emotion and so on. So that's how you move people on political issues, for example. And so I think that's where arts and opera and theater connect for me, because that's often how you can pass if you wanna use it for political purposes.

Of course. How important message is important. Stories are conveyed. And I don't know that's always the reason. Let's say Puccini wrote an opera but often we, when you read the story of how the opera came about, it was about, the revolution in Italy and wanting to fight authoritarian kings and wanting to support.

The movement for liberation and democracy in Italy, so there's several of it, of the operas like Tosca that are, that have the subtext of liberation. So it, it worked that people went to see the operas at the time and they understood what he was saying, even though it was a story that allegedly didn't have an immediate political purpose, but they understood.

They understood the message. And I think music, bypasses that sort of rational side of us and really reaches us in parts of our brain that are truly connected to our emotions. And so opera and I found in particular is something that really will bring out an emotional connection to the story at hand.

And often you'll find yourself. Crying, sobbing in an opera in a way that if you listen to facts about tuberculosis, you wouldn't. But when you see Mimi dying in lab, you know she's dying of tuberculosis. You do feel, my God, we can't allow people to die of tuberculosis.

This is too cruel, right? So there is lots of way in which opera like conveys messages. Very powerfully and directly to people. And it's, it brings up, I think, our humanity, our compassion, the our connection with each other. When we've been at a play, with we, we've both on the board of Improbable and we've been to the place that they put on we come out feeling like better people.

Now we're more in touch with our feelings and our. Or Yeah, or dignity or humanity or care for others. It does make you a better person, I think, to engage in the arts and to open yourself up to the range of emotions that theater and music, connect you with. I do think it's. It's a plus in the world.

So

Ben: it allows us to engage and imagine other world and other people, I think. Yeah, very much agree with that. Yeah. And you've written, I think you've written your own book or books and been involved in creative projects, so I'm interested, do you have a particular creative process or when you are creative do you ride in.

Notebooks and think over the day or your morning or evening person, or do you use post-it notes or how do you do it? I like asking people there, there seems to be 1,001 different ways of doing creativity, but I'd be interested if you have a particular process or things you like to do.

Françoise: Yeah I haven't written a book. You know me, there's a book somewhere in there, but it's not yet a reality. What I write is a newsletter which I write every month. I used to write it twice a month, but now with podcasting, I do it once a month and I. It's about different things. It's about a topic in women's rights.

Could be something very current the battle over abortion rights in the us or it can be something that's more of a feature. So I went to The Gambia last month to meet the activists against female genital mutilation, and it's a battle that's been going on for years now, and, I wanted to hear how it was going, so that's more of a feature piece. I also review books that I find inspiring writing about feminism. I. Or stories about women that I find inspiring. So sometimes I'll put out a digest where I've said, I've read this book, I just wanna share it with you on here's some of the things I'm thinking about.

And I've done a few of these on the writings of Bell Hooks. The African American queer writer professor who who died a few years ago, who wrote about feminism, about love about. Community about organizing, about what it's like to be a black woman. She had a lot of incredible writing that feminists will know, but a lot of other people will never have heard about her.

And so I wanted to put that out to, connect people to it so that, so my process is it's painful until I sit down, but once I'm at the table, it's fine. Once I start. No matter how I start, I'm good. Yeah. Then I can just write, I get in the zone and I'm writing and it takes, it takes to write one newsletter will take days.

I, I spend hours on it. It must be 20 hours, 25 hours on one piece. That's 3000 words. Because you really wanna. And there's so many things I could be saying that I've gotta take out and just keep my story, my narrative, more simple and keep out all the intriguing details I would like to bring in.

So it takes a lot of work just both to put it together in a way that makes sense narratively, but also then. Pair it down to the core and then, work on all the sentences. And English isn't my mother tongue, so I've gotta do some work, additional work to make sure it, it's okay.

And then there's, the dreaded typos that are always creeping up and so it takes a lot of work, but. Once I get going, I'm okay. What I do before that is often I've been reading something and so I just take notes and I put it in a FA folder. I write the notes or a copy, a link or a paragraph from something that I find interesting.

I put it in this folder. So I've got a few things to get started with, but after that, after I've read that, I just start, I just start writing and then,

Ben: and you go immediately. To digital, essentially you're taking digital notes and straight onto that, or do you do a little longhand piece? No

Françoise: I love longhand, but I just end up doing digital even though I'm not a good typist.

And I, I wasn't an early adopter of anything, but yes, no I do it.

Ben: And do you general, do you generally edit sentences and paragraphs as you go, or you're a little bit more we need to get the flow out and then you edit sentences and paragraphs? Once it's all written or is it a mix?

Françoise: It's a mix. Like I'll write, three, four paragraphs, then I'll stop. Then I'll go back and rewrite, reread, and then fix it a bit. And then leave it, then continue, then go back. Then I, this paragraph needs to go first and then, it's it's written. Yeah. I go back over and over to make sure it's exactly what I want.

So that it's easy. I was very impressed early on in my student life by George Orwell's essay on the politics in the English language when he said, you've gotta do all the work. Like your reader should just, read it and it's easy. You've done all the work, you've taken out all the difficult, the difficulties.

It's gotta be smooth. And your point has to just. Pop, right?

Ben: Yeah. That's the, and

Françoise: so that's what I'm trying to do.

Ben: That's the great problem with the vast majority of philosophers actually, and also economists. I think Not all economists, but most, they don't write with that clarity, so we can't really understand, what it is with their ideas even.

Yeah. If they had it.

Françoise: Yeah. Great.

Ben: I agree. Last last few questions. I wanted to go back to your thought on what makes successful movements. And I was very intrigued. You're talking about the feminist movement, particularly in Argentina, but maybe you'd wanna highlight a movement or two, or a campaign or something which you thought was really successful and what really made it successful.

And I can see probably a lot of it. Is in the context of the people in the place that might not directly read from things to things. But having looked in the inside of some of these things and I think people looking on the outside don't get to see how well A, how much effort was in there, and b, the sort of.

I guess operational groundwork about how these things come together, and I just wondered if you had any insights to offer. Having seen some of these things about you know how the movement comes together. Yes. They do seem to be points of leaders. They do seem to have these messages. A lot of it is about the storytelling and emotion.

Sometimes they have these symbols. Green scarfs, rainbow colors, I this and that interplay between the storytelling, the leaders, but the community a as well. I'm just fascinated if you have any observations on what makes successful movements or activism and and insights you might have.

Françoise: Yeah, since, I've worked a lot on abortion I'll mention another such campaign. But you know what I'm saying I think is applicable to other topics. The campaign to remove the prohibition against abortion from the Irish Constitution. That a few years ago that was an incredible.

Efforts by women in Ireland, women and men. There were men involved as well. And it really, it was sparked by the death of Savita Halvar that young dentist who went to the emergency room because she was miscarrying in Ireland and was denied, an abortion because there was still some fetal activity even though the pregnancy wasn't viable at that point.

If you're miscarrying at 18 weeks, there's nothing to save, right? But the Irish medical establishment denied her an abortion and she became septic and then she died of a massive infection completely unnecessarily with her husband by her side, pleading the doctors. And the medical personnel to do something.

And that was a very tragic story in 2012. That, was a shock, I think to, to Ireland, frankly, and to the Irish women's movement. And they, they realize this is the moment, like we need to act because this is intolerable. It's been intolerable for a long time, but this is intolerable, but this is also.

A symbol of everything that's wrong. So they, you gotta recognize the moment when there is that spark, right? You have to have preexisting organizations able to take that forward. To donors. We were speaking earlier about donors funding long-term general support. If you don't have organizations that already exist and already have been funded, who can grab the opportunity, seize the moment, it's not gonna work.

It's gonna be very difficult. Because set, setting up an organization. In the middle of a campaign is very hard. You need to have some preexisting structures, plea again for finding structural organizing. But there were some feminist groups and groups working on abortion and, in despair for a long time in Ireland.

And they saw the moment, okay, this is the moment that will, it's a story, it's a narrative that is very clear. It's outrageous, it's unacceptable, and we can use that to make change. And then what they were very clever doing is. Starting to get testimonies from people who had been forced to travel to Britain or who had been prevented from traveling to Britain to get their abortions, who had to give birth.

As teenagers people really scrambling to get, put the money together to try to figure out how they were gonna take the boat. The difficulties families face with. Children they couldn't take care of. They really managed to get all the different stories of people who had children that they couldn't take care of.

Those that were able to obtain abortions in very difficult circumstances. And then also the people who needed the kind of care the maternal care, the miscarriage care that were being denied that care because of these abortion laws that became all encompassing and. Prevented the proper practice of.

Obstetrics in the emergency room so that lots of these stories were gathered. Then they organized these actions, like for example, they started marching to through towns with suitcases, to, to demonstrate the need to take a boat to, to go to England to get an abortion because you couldn't get it in your own country as a citizen of Ireland.

And so they, these women would march through villages with their suitcases, their wheelies behind them, and. Very powerful stuff that people just, oh God, yes. We're doing this to our women. This is not, this isn't, okay. I. Then apparently they also created these knitting circles where they would knit these little flags, with, a, a ban.

The eighth Amendment was the provision of the constitution that needed to be repealed the eighth, and they were knitting and bringing people in who might not have thought they were abortion activists or that they. We're prepared to campaign on this, but they could join a knitting club and be educated, so this, they had many creative tactics that led to this campaign.

And they brought men in. They had men groups of men campaigning to repeal the eighth Amendment. One of the, 'cause they, it concerned them too. Obviously they're, they're very concerned. In fact,

Ben: one of the things I heard also around that is that they used a process of a citizen's assembly to try and draw in and say, look, if you ask.

A hundred people or a thousand people just drawn from our population, this is what we think now this, time has moved on.

Françoise: Yeah. Yeah.

Ben: I was wondering how you think about that. Did survey as well and things did.

Françoise: Yeah. They did a lot of surveying also to show the change in opinion.

They used all the tactics and when people say, what's the one tactic, I would say, you gotta use a range of things. 'cause some things will work with. In some contexts and some things will work in others, and that's why they gathered a lot of evidence because for the lawmakers they needed to put the report together.

The book report with the stories and the. The consequences. Economic, medical, psychological consequences, the cost to the system. They did all those things. But then they also were able to do the part of it that was public campaigning, which was the visuals the events, the, the gatherings, the marches, the rallies.

They did it at all, right? And and it worked. And it was an incredible event when it happened that, when people were actually going to vote, no one. Could say they didn't know what the issues were and why this mattered.

Ben: Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. Moment in time. Okay. Yeah, very move. I'm very

Françoise: moving too, honestly.

Yeah.

Ben: Great. Last couple of questions. So one is are there any current projects or doings that you'd like to highlight that you're currently working on?

Françoise: Yeah, I've, I'm writing right now about. Control of women's bodies, which is one of my topics. I wrote about female genital mutilation in The Gambia.

I wrote about early enforce marriage, child marriage last year. And I'm gonna keep doing some things on violence against women. There's a couple stories I wanna put out. One about the story of gi, that French woman whose husband was drugging her to offer her to. Random men, and who was raped by at least 50 men without her knowledge in, in that small village in the south of France.

And what I'm interested in, the story is known and these men have been condemned including her husband. He's in prison for doing that to her. But what I'm interested in is the testimony of the man. 51 of them I think, testified at the trial in the, in most of them did testify in their defense.

And the reasons they gave for why they thought it was okay to rape that woman is just remarkable. I think that's a story that I was able to read in the French press, because I speak French and that I don't think people in the English press have. Know about because all those testimonies were not translated.

So I wanna write about that. It's pretty shocking, including lots, several men saying it was her husband, so I had permission.

Ben: Wow.

Françoise: yeah, you, it's okay. You can rape a woman if you're her husband. Tells you it's okay. It's just in today's world, in France,

Ben: yeah. Could definitely have a documentary piece on that.

Françoise: Yes. It really makes you think, it's hard it's not cheerful, but I think we have to look at it straight on, this is what we're talking about, what we're talking about. The need for feminism. Yeah. And then on a lighter note, I'm interested these days in the question of fashion and politics.

There's a really interesting book I'm I wanna get into about how the French Revolution fashion changed overnight because you couldn't wear. You know that the court used to wear, so that brought in the black suit for men, and the cotton clothing for women. And because you could no longer.

These expensive silks, even if you could afford them, it just wasn't done anymore because, politics had transformed what you could wear and not wear. It's really interesting. Yeah. So I wanna look into that.

Ben: Yeah. I, fashion has a, much bigger say as well, like movements and things and symbols and like you say, in the knitting.

Yeah. And the one on the politics front, which I've always noted I have no huge insight as to what it. What it means. But for instance, if you are broadly speaking a powerful male world leader today, you pretty much wear a suit and tie. There's a little exception. So in India you might have a near suit.

Yeah. But that, but like all of, so whether you are Xi Jinping or Putin or Trump or any of the European leaders, they're all in a suit And Thai, whereas. 200 years ago. Even if you think of elite males or just elite court, I mean they were all males mostly. The range of fashion was very varied.

And in this globalization effect, we now think that the pinnacle of male power is a suit and tie. Get up. Yeah.

Françoise: Yeah.

Ben: Which is extraordinary to think and, but also it's un, I find it's really interesting that both China and America and Japan will wear this as their things. There's a little bit more variety in women's dress.

But even there, it's narrowed and it's just interesting thing. Over four, 500 years that would not have been the case. The most powerful people in the world all dressed very different. The same, there was a nation state thing, but yeah, so it's, yeah, you show

Françoise: up in your national but there is an exception to that, which is the tech folks, so that's how Elon Musk can show up in a, the black T-shirt and, the tech lords can wear.

Something different. That's the new power uniform, new.

Ben: Exactly. I I guess it isn't counter-cultural, but it's counter something that, that simple and in fact those sort of statements are worth something. Anyway,

Françoise: we're thinking about yeah, exactly. We're thinking about

Ben: W with that and, how Yeah.

Those symbols that where people wear them or not, and then conform or don't and what it means. Last question. Do you have any life advice, career advice, or thoughts that you wanna share with listeners?

Françoise: I've been interested in the book by Rutger Bregman, the Dutch historian who just put out a book called Moral Ambition, which is, don't waste your talent.

He says, make something of your life. And I think that's something I really agree with. In other words, we can all make a difference, for the world, for better, and. And we shouldn't all just be bankers and consultants and, tech people, although that's, you gotta earn a living.

And that might be your calling. But think about what else you can do to make the world a better place. And we can all do something. We can do a small piece, you can do a bigger piece. It can be your life's work, it can be your side gig, but what are you doing to, improve? The conditions of the most unfortunate, what are you doing for the unhoused?

What are you doing for people who are face discrimination? Per pervasive discrimination? Are you working to, green the economy? We can all do something. And when people say to me, ah, it's overwhelming, I don't know what to do. Look at the situation of women's rights or democracy in the us.

I go, no, okay. It's all right. We. None of us will solve it completely, but each of us can do something every day. And we should. 'cause if we all do something, that's how things will move. That's what gives me hope.

Ben: That seems like a great advice that we can all do something, think about what we might want to do.

And we'll do a little something. So on that, Fran, thank you very much.

Françoise: Thank you so much, Ben. It's been a pleasure.