Tassos Stevens on making theatre, play and creative processes | Podcast

Tassos Stevens is artistic director of Coney. Prior to Coney, he did a doctorate in Psychology, won the inaugural James Menzies-Kitchin Award for theatre directors, did the NT Studio Directors Course, ran the ROAR platform to support new work and new artists on the London fringe, and also worked as critic, teacher, many flavours of researcher, salesman, and chef.

We chat about pivotal moments of theatre and explore what interactive and immersive mean for theatre.

The importance of play and “making belief’ as opposed to “suspending disbelief”

How to involved audiences in agency and what Tassos advises for young people interested in theatre.

Podcast and transcript below, video above.

PODCAST INFO:

• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

• Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh

• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

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Tassos Stevens transcript, unedited with typos likely.

Ben Yeoh (00:05): Hey, everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking with Tassos Stevens. Tassos has been making theatre and games for over 20 years and is the artistic director of Coney. He's one of the most creative and brilliant theater and play makers I know. So Tassos welcome.

Tassos Stevens (00:23): Thanks Ben. Yeah, nice to be here.

Ben Yeoh (00:25): Over 20 years or so we've collaborated on and off and most lately I've been chair of Coney for the last 10 years and have rotated off in line with good governance. And I think you were one of the first people I worked with in this collaborative centric view of theater making, as opposed to a kind of writer or director as the central nexus over how theater making or play-making should be. And if I think back over the last 20 years, you've had these two threads for want of a better word, the kind of playwright, or maybe a director as the center of theater or more collaborative or playmaking or ensemble styles of theater. I was interested in your reflections of how you've worked over the last 20 years. What's drawn you to one or all of those threads or how have they developed?

Tassos Stevens (01:21): Yeah, I guess in some ways I found myself drawn away from the idea of making plays, making script led work and more towards making the kind of play where I always can take parts or play if they choose, for example Coney. And then the very different demands of making work like that, I think also really lend themselves to something which is much more kind of collaborative because you don't know exactly what's going to happen until you have an audience to play it, you can't be sure. And there's levels of uncertainty kind of inside that and levels of areas where you don't have control necessarily as a maker, which almost by definition means kind of like a singular vision. It's just not a particularly good way of working, I think, with this kind of work and how important it is to have different perspectives to bounce off kind of inside that process, as well as being more fun where you as makers actually kind of enjoy yourself. In all the times I've enjoyed myself the most in a room it's been with other people and it's been with a sense of like, yeah, we've all a common purpose and direction that has emerged, but we're also all free to set as much [Inaudible:00:03:04] as possible to be playing with what's interesting to us and be playing together. I think to be [Inaudible:00:03:12], that's important

Ben Yeoh (03:13): You've used a few times this concept of play, but I think it's maybe a little bit of a concept worth exploring a little bit cause you've worked with the great Bernie De Koven Blue previously kind of on games and that kind of playing and also how this world of play has interacted with your theater creative making or play making. How has that evolved, I guess, over the last couple of decades, in terms of your thinking about how to make creative work?

Tassos Stevens (03:46): It's still evolving. I'm actually at the moment just reading on Kindle a book I should have read 10 years ago by Pat Kane called The Play Ethic, which is a really useful distillation, different theories of what play means. I use play as a kind of a catch-all-- Nouns are tricky, always because it's tricky to be-- Because in noun formats I think we think about kind of experiences in terms of the format, what they ask of me. [Inaudible:00:04:25], we think of going to the cinema in terms of going to go sit in big comfy seats, have some snacks The Film Kind Of Unfolds, It Happens For The Duration. You Know What's Asked Of You When Going To The Cinema And You Know What I Mean By That Noun Cinema And It Might Flex A Little Bit, But The Kind Of Play That Coney Makes, the formats are always varying. We're potentially changing everything at each point, but I found that play fills sort of the best catch and part inspired by a friend of mine, [Inaudible:00:05:10] saying [Inaudible:00:05:12] back in 2008. Yeah, it's all play ain't it. And I briefly had a website called All Play because all play was not available. Kind of like riffing off that. And I think really broadly it's defined as anything that people can take part in a play, but it's a sense of like the kind of the playing audience is more active. I think the relation between games and play in terms of kind of getting serious is super interesting.

Tassos Stevens (05:52): I think there's something certainly kind of my inspiration with any conversations with Bernie De Koven, who I often kind of dub my Jedi master and it has felt like that kind of relationship. The time that I spent with him, the exchange I had with him really sort of opened up the idea that thinking about kind of a game, thinking about it as if it's an object I'm going to hold up. [Inaudible:00:06:25] Made for me by a friend. This is like the game that we are playing. We will change the way that we play this game in order to be able to kind of keep playing well together. If we are more important in the game and that's what happens and in contrast to say yeah, in sport, professional sports, the game is kind of like the most important thing, unless it comes to life or death. So the game will not be changed, but here we were changed because ultimately our relationship and how we're playing together is the most important thing. And you have this kind of like, it gives a loose structure to the game, but then in some ways the real plays and the negotiation that happens between us as how are we going to play and what's going on in the room between us and beyond. So I think about it like that in terms of that yeah, the flexing and fluxing of the loose structure, whatever that might be, but being negotiated always by the people who are playing. I think playing philosophically is also imagining what if. It's pretending, it's making believe and I prefer making belief or performing belief rather than suspending disbelief as we would see in the theatrical sense. But always at the same time remembering what is really there and in some ways then the meaning arises between that, the what if and the what is in that respect as applying and that's true. That's true of all play, even going into the theater

Ben Yeoh (08:24): And another word in your initial answer, which seems intersectional with that is this idea of interactive. So actions have consequences for both audience and players, say all players when the audience are players. So I think it's very interesting that this interactive work with this and that it's very satisfying to see your own actions or actions where you're part of the play have those consequences, is that an important piece of your thinking and making at the moment?

Tassos Stevens (09:00): Yeah, always. I think that it's-- I mean, although, it's also important to note that there'll be different kinds of models of play and there'll be different interactive models and each one is different and it's not that one is necessarily better or worse. It's rather that each one kind of carries meaning. There is dramaturgy to the interactive structure, as much as there is to the story that it might be telling kind of inside that. So it's perfectly possible to have a piece of meaningful play where the consequences to your actions might be obscured because that's the point, but it being the point would be, yeah, what makes that meaningful? But yeah, otherwise broadly, I think that there's something of that sort of like active yeah-- the activation and the sense of agency, the perception of agency that the good play gives to people and I don't mean by perception of agency that it is necessarily like a fake perception, but that's the thing ultimately that kind of gives derive satisfaction, but as well as the potential for connection between people that good plays can spark, as well as the kind of the sense of ones-- the thing is that we're doing that we're good at or enjoy doing [Inaudible:00:10:33]. I use the term talents slightly loosely to define the things that we do, especially things that we do that we enjoy but we also might be good at and how those get reflected and discovered through play as well. I think that's a lot of what's in play and then makes something meaningful and impactful.

Ben Yeoh (10:58): Sure, yes, that sense of agency for sure. And another strand of your work and Coney's work seems to be to use the word immersive, I guess, suggesting that the audience are present in the world of play, but not necessarily in sort of the big takeover, although it could be the big takeover of a building and you create a whole new world and they're in that world, but even in a sort of smaller sense, whether it's potentially almost one-on-one play or that world, but present in this world. My reflection is that's been quite an important strand and a very fruitful strand of sort of artistic practice, both for yourself and Coney and for where actually performing arts has got to. How important is immersive or at least the [Inaudible:00:11:46].

Tassos Stevens (11:46): I would echo the kind of the little definition that you [Inaudible:00:11:53]. I think that, I mean I teach quite often and as part of sort of teaching, offer these little working definitions that I find useful or immersive and interactive. And the definition of immersive of the audiences present in the world of the play. And they might have a role in that as well. That role might also be simply as the audience that they might have actions that they do, which may have some kind of consequence for their own experience or for the overall outcome, it's going to be towards the entire activity. Those actions might also simply be those are spectating or listening and watching but they must be present in order for-- And I think it's kind of crucial for this work and also immersive has become a buzz word in terms of a particular kind of experience probably sort of imagining the Punchdrunk model of a master audience moving through in a very detailed, almost like cinematic level of realization of an environment where they might then interact with performance along the way of that. And it doesn't have to be like that because I think, I mean, also think using that definition, even as an old form of storytelling which I've also been really interested in, and I've also explored more outside of Coney until recently in a piece made out of the pandemic and brought those two things together. And with storytelling, the audience is present, and is very present for the storyteller at every point.

Ben Yeoh (13:49): You have to bring them into the world to be successful as a storyteller.

Tassos Stevens (13:52): Yeah, very often and it's quite literally that you're doing that in order to-- So yeah, I would kind of resist any idea that this is a new thing just so we're dressing it differently.

Ben Yeoh (14:09): And to maybe extend that, I mean, the word we've used in our discussions has been the experience of a play or a piece of theater, but I kind of think that when we think about immersion, yes we've, as you say, brought it to this world, but actually the immersion in a piece of creative work or the experience of that work continues really for as long as it lives in our minds and discussion, which actually in some ways, it's the fully extended piece of where emotion is and I think of work that we did 20 years ago, or some work we did on-- I come back to the pop quiz or quizzing type of work that you've done, which actually has now live with me for a very long time as a form of experience and a form of thinking about how we interact with the world. And I know you've had some reflections about when a piece of work begins, as you hear about it or think about it and where it ends, which can in some way be kind of almost never [Inaudible:00:15:10]. So far for me, some of the work that we've done hasn't ended yet, and it may not ever even be played again, but there is something to that. And I was wondering if you've been thinking about that more of late also going digital online, but this idea of it just lasts a long time with you.

Tassos Stevens (15:28): Yeah. I think it's, I mean, it's the thing-- I joke it's the thing [Inaudible:00:15:34] the same, that the experience of anything begins and ends when you stop thinking or talking about it. And also from the earliest days of Coney, we were considering breaking it down into at least three phases. You might have the play, what happens if the experience is going to the theater. What happens after the curtain rises, before it drops again and then everything that happens in advance of that-- we kind of call the events and this is the space also occupied by marketing, and then everything that happens afterwards, it's kind of called the tail, like the tail of a rabbit. And yeah, I think it's kind of true also and I think sort of the things that Coney was playing with quite early on was particularly with the events and what you can do here in terms of being able to bring an audience also, both literally to the play and as much as that, if it is happening somewhere other than a building, like how we could kind of bring people [Inaudible:00:16:51] to a secret location somewhere in the city of London, but also imaginatively and also to be ready for that and also being able to play with sense of people's anticipations and expectations and what happens here. But I think I'm becoming more and more interested with the tail and what happens afterwards.

Tassos Stevens (17:18): That's something that will happen quite organically because our memories might be triggered by going past the place where you played or you pick up a program. It's usually more around a physical tangible object or bumping into somebody. Actually one of my favorite little stories around Coney [Inaudible:00:17:43] which we made an eon ago, like 12 years ago. Sort of the first finished version was released at Battersea Arts Center and actually from a scratch phase of that, I don't know if you mind me saying, the [Inaudible:00:18:01] came to play and she was the postmistress in small town as you know Ben, but to explain to basically playing audience around 30 are the citizens of a small town, but invited by the historian of the town to recreate the most momentous week in the town's history and a very free annotation of the film, the Corbo by [Inaudible:00:18:29] aka the Raven and mimics kind of within the storyline of the film. The fact that there is somebody who signs themselves the Raven, here in this town in 1940s [Inaudible:00:18:46] France knows all the secrets of the citizens and is busy trying to destroy the town by basically writing poison pen letters, signed the Raven to circulate this and we took that and then kind of adapted it, in a nutshell I would say it's a kind of parable about the rise of fascism. Within this and in the play of it gossip was the thing that everybody in the town does and they can do that in conversation, but there's also a postal service and people write letters to each other. So Lynn Gardner, a brilliant fis critic that time of the guardian comes to play the scratch.

Tassos Stevens (19:29): She's a postmistress, she's written a secret in the advance, which is that-- I think that she killed her baby and buried his body beneath the Juniper tree and we take that, that she's going to create it and break that up into various fragments of gossip, which we then seed amongst the other citizens of the town, along with stuff around the other secrets. And then basically stirring the pot, gossip starts to rise. The Raven knows everything is trying [Inaudible:00:19:56] as well and there's a real risk that there was-- I mean, the way that it went, there was potential. If you ended up being scapegoated, you could literally be executed by the end of it with the threat that's put by a new fascist state against the town. So, anyway, lots of playfulness. Lynn plays a devil, she takes advantage of a job to basically destroy all the posts that's coming in. She opens the letters, reads them and then literally tears up and throws away anything that refers to her secrets. And also, when the suspicion kind of starts pointing her more directly, she's like, "Oh, no, no, no. That's not the postmistress, that's the school mistress," and points the finger the other way. And then the school mistress who was being played by a friend of mine, she's having to manage this to kind of escape, but it's pretty fraught for her. Two years later, my friend who was the school mistress is in the auditorium itself as well waiting for the performance to start and across the way spots Lynn Gardener and screams, "There's the witch," runs across to confront her and they have this really, I mean, joyful confrontation/reunion. And there's conversation between two strangers essentially because of a particularly vivid memory and moment.

Ben Yeoh (21:36): I think that's amazing and I think that's what is really important about your work and maybe all theater. People sense that, oh, you go to the theater and really great theater changes you and you end up different to how you started, but actually the point you're making and I think is maybe the more true one is that the change may often happen in the tail and maybe many years away from that lived in moment of experience, but actually all of these greatest data, particularly if you've been interactive or immersive, all of that, you've sown the seeds because if it's going to be a major change or a change of worldview, or even this nudge, it isn't that likely to happen in that moment of half-hour or that short reflection it might happen, but it's likely to happen in this tale of reflection, what has changed and that can happen. And in a way, in a multiplicative, more powerful than it might seem.

Tassos Stevens (22:29): Yeah, totally. Two things even from that, I think one, there's a piece that at the moment we've just presented as both a scratch, but also as a pilot study like a pilot research study in collaboration with [Inaudible:00:22:48] university, [Inaudible:00:22:49], who's also like post-doc research fellow and impact cause we'd be-- His mission now is making play to spark change and we're really kind of trying to figure out exactly what happens with that and [Inaudible:00:23:05] it's been really key in those conversations [Inaudible:00:23:09] and the magic trick is kind of like a demonstration in practice, in play of a broad strokes theory of change through play. If change happens as a result, what happens? So I would say in [Inaudible:23:27] theater is taking parts that are more likely to promote impacts. We've all been changed. [Inaudible:00:23:39] Reasons why a lot of people work in theater is because they fell in love with how it felt in taking part in theater, like when they were younger, probably school play, youth theater, community theater, kind of, et cetera. A lot of the bigger changes that I think have come through taking part in it, but anyway, you're within the magic trick, which is a performance, but also part of it-- the invitation is to help magic a small change into your life for real, and there's a combination of play and reflection facilitated that helps people for themselves conjure, slight spoiler, though the course of it, you will be surprised to discover and make for yourself a little resolution so that something that would come from reflection over what you've played to that point and a resolution that you feel could make some impact in your life. And then after that and this has been the hardest thing to kind of work on in the Arctic and figure out.

Tassos Stevens (25:02): There is a tale of communications, which happens afterwards for, maybe, I hope for a week, but it might take two to three weeks with a series of messages exchanged with players that are designed to help support them taking that action and integrating it into their life, as well as teaching some of the more sort of both playful, but also I think, importantly fun and meaningful tools for kind of reflection and change, the piece users and these are things hopefully that people pick up through just the practice of playing for the course of it, and then maybe something that sticks with them. But I think you have to sort of-- In order to help make change happen more directly, you have to really focus on how do we facilitate this? And you can still see it, it's pretty much by chance because change is going to happen. From any experience, something that I'm carrying inside myself happens.-- The play, it's like striking a rock. You strike it at the right angle and something will split open then maybe inside, if the rock is opened, maybe there'll be a little nugget of gold that takes the geological metaphor a little bit too far. But maybe not like, and it's kind of chance at the same time whether that's going to meet you at that right moment as to kind of what comes and whether it's gold or whether it's just a pretty pattern and then with the tools that we've got, everybody really enjoys the magic trick and the measures that we've got shows a positive impact on people's wellbeing. Germany is quite small, but positive based on having fun and connecting with different people. That's how usually people talk about it and then maybe later there'll be a slightly more profound change that will happen because of what has happened through the tale.

Ben Yeoh (27:09): And has there been a pivotal piece of play or theater, which maybe happened years ago and has only more recently caught up with you to spark change or maybe just something-- Yeah, yourself or even over the last 20 years, if you think back, are there some moments of theater which have really lived with you and have you now think about them differently or have changed as you've changed?

Tassos Stevens (27:36): That's a nice question. I think two things come to mind: one is a piece by improbable. I know you were saying earlier that you interviewed Lee Simpson, so maybe that's also priming that sort of-- [Inaudible:00:28:01] lane, which was, I think their first sort of piece that kind of caught itself. Certainly early in their careers and there's something, I felt like a piece of magic and it's stayed with me. Every time I see a Fox in the street, I remember that and I think that there's something I'm still kind of figuring out kind of around-- because it literally felt like magic was happening in the room and I don't mean that in elusive-- Like, oh, the magic is [Inaudible:00:28:45].

Ben Yeoh (28:45): David Copperfield or something.

Tassos Stevens (28:48): There's something-- I don't know why and then my brain is actually just kind of connecting up to-- I'm going to see a more recent and probable piece, like the Tower of Glass. They did [Inaudible:00:29:01] and then that really feeling like magic and really feeling like-- I mean, it's something where-- It was like two years ago and that was over a year after I lost my dad and feeling him very present in the room and with me as I was watching it and how for all kinds of reasons-- Anyway, so that's kind of stayed as a very specific thing from a completely different piece that I'm remembering from about a piece that actually changed my behavior. It's a beautiful piece that I experienced in Tasmania in the junction festival. I was out there making a piece for Coney. This was another piece made by an Australian artists, Thomas quirk in collaboration with local teenagers and the form of the piece-- It was called The Packed and the form of it was that you would go to a cafe in the local department store typical teenager hangout, and you'd sit on a table, one-on-one with a teenager. In my case, I would say 16 year old boy and, first of all, we don't ever talk using our voices. First of all, we communicate by passing notes and as I remember, I think on his phone, we just typed stuff up and pass and then when we're ready to play, we both put on headphones and listen simultaneously to a recorded piece by him telling a true story of when he was a few years younger.

Tassos Stevens (30:51): So maybe like 12, 13. His dad had been ill and he go to visit him every night in the hospital and his dad always said, never say goodbye because goodbye means bye for good. So only say goodbye when you know it's goodbye and then one night the boy kind of slipped and said goodbye and his dad incorrect him and then the next day his dad had passed. And as I'm telling the story, the feeling is not easy because of my own lost life a few years ago and it's extraordinary cause it's a recording, but he's present with you as you listen to it. It is a really simple, clever device. So you have that connection without the risk of him-- It would have been really hard for him as a young performer to be telling that story again and again, and again to strangers. It's a way of kind of capturing the impact while making it safe and at the end, will he make a pact? Will you make a promise to me of something? It's kind of up to you and I chose the most obvious thing and I still hold this, I never say goodbye to somebody unless I know it's for good. Always find another way of saying it.

Ben Yeoh (32:16): Wow, that's a beautiful story. I think someone told me once there were Spanish and they don't say adios in that same way because you don't want this finality. It's like hasta manana. It's like tomorrow or see you later or something with that. Gosh. Yeah, very powerful. Thinking of some of the challenges today in arts and theater making I guess I think broadly very immediately of a pandemic and response and building back better. And I also think of climate, two of our sort of biggest challenges. But if I reflect back over the last 20 years, I was trying to explain this to someone who isn't really involved in theater and they commented to me that they don't really think they've ever seen a good piece of work on climate. Maybe in the last two or three years, there's been a little bit more, but it's kind of interesting that they were suggesting that there hadn't been that much climate work or maybe climate work that they hadn't been aware of and they do seem to be particular challenges for climate across all actually industry sectors and companies because of its nature. But I'd be interested to see what you thought about the challenges of climate within theater and I can comment with challenges that I see in climate outside, because it does seem to be particularly challenging for people to grapple with the stories that are meaningful to us. Do you think that's a fair reflection or do you think maybe there's been more which hasn't perhaps surfaced as much?

Tassos Stevens (34:05): I think that's fair. I think it partly reflects the challenge of conceptualizing and making tangible the climate crisis and we are like creatures of story but in some ways, what is sort of the kind of conventional narrative theory can say, kind of hero's journey kind of as one particular model. That's kind of how we like to reflect the world and the climate crisis is almost completely antithetical to that. It's a systemic challenge for one, we're really bad at-- You're dealing with systems and also why I think-- I mean, games are really interesting in the suspect and obviously your fellow collaborator, David Finnegan, particular kind of like interests equities, and [Inaudible:00:35:13], cause games are a systemic approach, all games are systems, even if there are a subset of systems that are balanced and funds apply in a way that-- And more tangible and give us like feedback, immediate feedback. A good game will always give you that immediate feedback on how I am doing in relation to the objective, but then the climate crisis is a system, it's a hyper object and it's Timothy Morton's thing. It's too big. It's a system, it's too big for us to imagine the time span between our actions and then the kind of consequence. In some ways only right now, tragically starting to-- I think there's maybe a shift over the last two years, I've been particularly shaken by the story recently of [Inaudible:00:36:09], the small town in Canada, and what happened there and--

Ben Yeoh (36:15): You feel it more viscerally now. The systems, it's there in front of us.

Tassos Stevens (36:19): But it's starting to sort of happen but this is the kind of consequences in effect, the lack of a positive response 15, 20, 25years ago. We're always a generation behind in terms of what we're dealing with. The time delay and then also, it's so big. What can an individual do? Theater often tells stories about people or individual's particular situations because it's kind of a question of how I should act? I forgot who wrote it, one of the little books of theater and theater and politics, summed it up in terms of that question. I think it's a great question, but actually as individuals right now where we're at, the best things we can do are to try to activate towards some kind of systemic cultural, political change. That's the level of which change now needs to happen at and individual action only matters as far as it helps that cultural, political shift. So I think it's very difficult as well as the problems of obviously if you tell people to do things or you must do things to do things, there's always that.--

Ben Yeoh (37:55): Humans don't really like it. I always remember, the books I was told to read at school no matter how brilliant always kind of fall by the wayside in that same thing. And I guess that's one of my worries about this kind of build back better movement or the build back better and the arts movement. I flip flop on this, I'm currently not feeling that hopeful actually, because I'm actually seeing stuff not that different. So it hasn't shaken us up perhaps as much and we're falling back into kind of old patterns, [Inaudible:00:38:36], so I could see why that happens.

Tassos Stevens (38:39): In terms of different inequalities within the sector and systemic--?

Ben Yeoh (38:44): Well, I guess all of the old challenges that we have, whether you want to talk about inequality or diversity or funding models or funding full stop or involving people in making art seeing how a community-- Well, not even community city say how government is valuing art or not, but how the system is valuing creativity all of that. I'm currently actually feeling a little bit down because I kind of say, well, actually, I'm not seeing the system being nudged that much, even though I do think there's a grassroots kind of cool for it. It's got lost in a lot of other things and maybe it's this well-worn groove. I don't assign no particular one individual apportion blame because there's a system thing, which is always undervalued, I think, arts in this way and creativity in this way, but in the kind of build back better and there's some money and there's some things that I'd actually don't see it shifting that much differently to before and I've got one foot in, but I don't live in the world all the time. So I'm kind of hoping that I'm wrong. So maybe, the reflection would kick me out of my funk, like saying actually no it's as more hopeful or maybe catalyze it to saying, no, actually, you might be right on some things, you've got to kick some bums. I don't know. What do you think?

Tassos Stevens (40:14): I think that there is some shift that is happening, I hope some shift is happening. [Inaudible:00:40:23] I know what Coney is striving to do and we're definitely moving in the right direction. There's also still a lot of work to be done and if we're moving fast enough, I don't know. And there's other organizations moving faster and better for sure. But certainly in terms of diversity and inclusion, I think there's certainly a kind of hope, at least now a shared understanding of what is the necessary direction to travel, how far people can get along with that? I don't know. I think that there is a-- In some ways I think it's a broader question, theater will always hold itself to account and examine itself as a sector, but in some ways it's a much broader issue.

Ben Yeoh (41:28): It kind of reflects society. Theater might be a on one edge of it, but it reflects--

Tassos Stevens (41:33): Broadly.

Ben Yeoh (41:33): --Where It comes from.

Tassos Stevens (41:35): Yeah. I think one of [Inaudible:00:41:39] is certainly kind of in terms of-- instead of how freelancers have been impacted disproportionately, it's definitely true. But in some ways your society-wide solutions are also part-- whether that's a universal basic income. That feels like almost in a way the singular best solution and I've also just kind of been struck by how-- I mean, I think sort of the informal decision-making structures that happen in terms of where the next job's going to come from, which are kind of informal and invisible and therefore prone to all of the systemic biases, but I've also actually sustained-- I've kind of wondered whether it's-- The amount of people who are supported as freelancers, if you were to take all of the work and actually build a structure, which was kind of giving more stable job opportunities to support people within the kind of the system as it is and the sector as it is, actually you might find that by definition, a far smaller portion of the people who would-- You might end up employing 20% of the freelancers some more sustained support basis and the other 80% would be left out. I don't know, it feels like a lot of people-- Because of the informality [Inaudible:00:43:24] a rise, because of the invisibility of decision making structures I think more people potentially float around with hope that something will come than actually what can sector with its current level of resource? What could actually be supported? I don't know, but it makes me sort of feel that in terms of that particular dynamic that there's kind of whether incremental change from within is ever going to make the difference and whether it's the sector by itself so much as program for the whole of-- It's difficult and it's yeah.

Ben Yeoh (44:06): Well maybe turning to the last couple of questions on maybe advice and process. I was wondering, reflecting on your work, what does a good week or good day of creativity look like for you? Or you could talk, I guess-- Cause a week of theater could actually have rehearsal as well as researchers, as well as making. So, there could be a lot in that, but at its very best, what does a good creative process or day or week kind of feel like or what you aspire to like, okay, that's been some great creating work?

Tassos Stevens (44:47): The work I did for Coney is in some ways-- The creative process is a relatively small part of that. What it is in terms of running the company and the business of that and taking care of the team and checking in with people, as well as the conversations and chats with people outside the company. That all feels-- It's much bigger than what a creative process might be. Also feels really important. It's been really nice. Coney has sort of shifted a little bit instead of defining the way that we're kind of like-- Our closest-- We're a network of makers that we can assemble teams from and trying to define the inner rings of that network is going to guilt an associate in being around. And kind of an active exchange of practice and by exchanging practice everybody benefits and I feel that benefit myself in that exchange and in different conversations, different people over the course of it and hopefully that's also something that Coney will freely offer to-- I will have a virtual [coffee] with anybody who asks, if I've got time to do it. Feel that it's going to want responsibilities from being funded in the sector, but it's a mutual benefit. It should be. So that's part of it, I guess.

Ben Yeoh (46:24): Fertilizing a lot of other ideas and people being a part of that ecosystem.

Tassos Stevens (46:28): A lot of work will be made out of -- in some ways be sparked by the possibilities that particular collaborations might offer and then, yeah, and this has a lot to do with the kind of work that Coney makes cause it's not sort of often, it's only when you get a playing audience that you know what it is and a playtest is the equivalent of a rehearsal in many ways. Small town, when we made it, the first R and D week that we had at the national studio, we had a week and we opened the doors to the audience on the middle of day two and then did as many playtests as we possibly could over the course of that week. That was a rehearsal process. That was pretty joyful. But often we're kind of-- It's more devising, it's more kind of creative conversations to get people to a point where everybody can then kind of separate and go off and make the different elements and then bring them back together ready to be played again and within that and also it's to do with zoom as we're largely operating at the moment I find that doing that kind of work for no more than four hours a day. We made a piece last summer of the delegation, that was a collaboration with a Russian theater festival and Russian performers and we kind of devising and kind of rehearsing, but we didn't work more than four hours a day together. And having that breathing space to then take thoughts away, do some writing, other thinking and trying to design interactive structures that you can come back and apply. But then those four hours, the more that could be us playing and trying things out and with time later to reflect on it, that always feels like a nice process. However you can do it, spend the least amount of time talking. Otherwise, [Inaudible:00:48:57], the faster you can make something that you can play and then start to sort of-- It's always sort of sculpting according to what you learn and how that plays and everybody's having fun.

Ben Yeoh (49:14): Spend time playing. Playing, having fun

Tassos Stevens (49:18): Basically. But also, I think the fun-- The more fun we have together in the room in terms of-- And I mean genuinely and everybody feeling fulfilled and safe and able to sort of express their own kind of creative agency in that then that I think more often than not translates into quality to the work for an audience that is tangible and part of what makes it good.

Ben Yeoh (49:57): Definitely one of the things I learned from your work or particularly your work with De Koven, that is actually fun as a huge basis. Not maybe quite as how we thought of fun when we were five or six, although there's elements of it, but what actually fun really means and central to the creative process. Great. So maybe the last question would be what advice or thoughts might you have to young creatives or theater makers, or maybe not so young, just theater makers or creatives in general, people setting out on their journeys or resetting out as we emerge from this period?

Tassos Stevens (50:38): Yeah, I think that it depends on how you want to formulate this. Considering that your career will be a portfolio of different bits of work or resisting anything, which means that you end up identifying and defining yourself by something. So, I can only be an actor if I'm acting, I can only be a director if I'm directing. It's a really hard place to kind of get out of if you fall into that and I think being able to have kind of a portfolio and inside that definitely having space for this is work that I make for myself, whether it's collaborating with anybody else or not, but yeah, doing it. Even if it's your one tiny thing that you do for 10 minutes every month, but that this is just mine, I think that's really important to have that space, but also to-- I was supported for a while, I attempt as a medical secretary and it wasn't that that job gave me anything specifically that fed into the work, but it gave me space and what our sidelines are and our side hustles, I think are kind of actually really important, also like value and so that we're not defining in that way. And the great thing about doing things, having a little bit of space where you're making something for yourself is that you hopefully cut something away from that and I feel lucky that I managed largely dodged by kind of realizing I didn't want to be a theater director. Directing plays was also the sense in which each job becomes-- If every job becomes the opportunity to get the next job and you're always looking to go to please somebody else in everything that you do, I think that can lead to like kind of really difficult, l trajectories and also potentially a sense of competition where actually everybody that you know who's in this field as well should be friends and collaborators. That's definitely the best way to approach it and everybody's successful work by one--

Tassos Stevens (53:20): I think success is made by scenes and work is made by more of a scene than it is by any individuals and then I think the other-- Maybe this is even the biggest thing, it's just being able to kind of constantly be reflecting in your own practice and what is distinctive about what I do, where does what I do fits into to the bigger kind of ecosystem and how do I distinguish my work from other people's in terms of why I'm most interested and what am I most specialized in. I remember years ago having an argument in the [Inaudible:00:54:04], and then I was quite rude to him because he'd written some articles that were to be honest a bit offensive but we had a good argument and then he was coming out a meeting, like let's continue and then ended up talking about what was very early Coney at that point for about three hours and really exciting conversation, really challenging. But he didn't really understand much other than what I was saying, but really was very smart, [Inaudible:00:54:38] kind of beautifully and we kind of left with, okay, there's nothing really directly here between the [Inaudible:00:54:45] Coney and the globe, but it's been a great conversation and I'm leaving and I'm like s**t, at least I used to be a player and I do genuinely really love Shakespeare and [Inaudible:00:54:58] and I love the globe. So I was like, Oh yeah, sorry. I should also sort of say I'm also interested 1in this and he said something which at the time felt really crushing, but actually I think it's one of the best things anybody ever gave me.

Tassos Stevens (55:11): He said, "I meet hundreds of people a month, literally, who are interested in directing. You're the first person I've met that is interested in doing the thing that you spend three hours telling me about, I reckon you should stick with that." And I was like uhhh, but actually, it took a little bit. It's one of the best [Inaudible:00:55:35] give. What's distinctive? How do you distinguish yourself? And that's an ongoing reflection. My answer to that question now is different and more specific in a way than it was--

Ben Yeoh (55:51): Has evolved. Yeah. That seems a really good reflection to have, what's unique about your own practice or how it's evolving and therefore polishing up that and maybe if you've got a decision, you go with your uniqueness as opposed to that powerful or rut, well-traveled.

Tassos Stevens (56:13): Yeah.

Ben Yeoh (56:14): Great. Well, I think that's an excellent thought to end on. So Tassos, thank you very much.

Reflections on story and Lee Simpson

Lee Simpson is a master improv performer and theatre director. I had a lovely conversation with him which left me dwelling on many things.

Notably on how we view our lives. He made the case that when we reflect on our histories, when we go back far enough in time, we think about our lives as stories and we view and narrate them as such. In the present or recent past, we tend to see life as more a collection of facts and this process of making our lives into story is very important to us.

For better or worse, how we view or use that process is seemingly a vital part of being human and therefore knowing, using or being in control of that process becomes important in understanding what it means to be be human and understand ourselves.

Another point Lee made was about status. Status is a useful technique on the stage or improv about knowing which person has a higher status and if someone is trying to overcome that status. Comedy can arise, or conflict when perceived status is being fought over, especially if an audience might have different views than to the performers.

I think this extends into real life. People in general know that status of people in a room through signals or cues, and comedy or conflicts occur when this is not clear or agreed upon.

It’s also why the little signals like women/juniors being asked to take notes, the order or greetings or seatings or speaking are so important and if you want to push back against any of these hierarchies then knowing them and overturning them become important.

Lots more to think about in our conversation here.

How I found my jingle. A story of coding, music synth and Plinky.

The story of my podcast jingle properly starts in childhood.

I had an Amstrad CPC464. This was a UK computer of the 1980s.

Amstrad CPC 464, CC Bill Bertram via wiki

To load a game - and the 1980s childhood game that comes to mind most was the Dizzy series about an egghead character who jump/walks around platforms - took up to 20 minutes of loading a tape into the computer.

The computer came with a language, BASIC and beginner BASIC was taught at my school (via BBC Micro) and magazines provided some tutorials. There was no WWW or internet. You could and did code in BASIC which is a beginner level of computer science but certainly enough to spark interest in a child.

My friend Alex was around. Later Alex is the best man at my wedding, but for now we are children. I show him I have coded a drawing of a square and a triangle in a machine language that is not BASIC. I think it might have been C or possibly Turbo Pascal, some form of Assembly language. Coding didn’t really catch fire in my mind, so I’m unsurprised I have forgotten exactly.

Alex was impressed. Much more impressed that I was expecting. I believe it may have been due to the speed of the drawing which was seemingly so fast as to look almost instant. 

In my mythology this was a catalysing seed for Alex to learn coding (C and Turbo Pascal) as a teenager, become a well regarded part of the music coding demo scene (Statix) and as VJ (BlueSpoon) as a teenager and ultimately with Alex (via Natural Sciences via Maths) ending up in Computer Science with an astoundingly impressive degree leading him to expertise in graphics coding (at one point it was all about making triangles and matrices move faster) and co-founding, and selling a computer gaming company (Media Molecule) to Sony and co-creating Little Big Planet (and Dreams) - two of the most remarkable computer games of their generation.

In these later years, Alex who also used to play cello well enough that I saw an audience member cry (although I think that’s perhaps at least as much due to Elgar) has as a side hobby project invented a music synth maker.

What drives people to invention? Anton Howes, innovation historian (My podcast with Anton) has argued that it takes an improving mindset.

Here Alex wanted something that didn’t really exist, and so, why not make it into existence?

From my limited understanding, I’ve gained a surface understanding of semi-conductors, programming hardware, soldering, electronics - the problems of supply chain; why China is so cheap for manufacturing, why the UK (and even the US) struggles with semiconductor fab manufacturing and the niche world of self-made synth music machines.

On top of that is how online communities develop (cf. Discord communities) and the importance of (what we might consider) weirdness or nerdiness but really is creativity and deep knowledge and art.

Alex who has had to deeply comprehend these factors has crystallised all that work into Plinky.

Plinky? Yes. Plinky.

Plinky is an 8-voice polyphonic touch synthesiser that specialises in fragile, melancholic sounds.

Site is here.

A review from loopop on YouTube in June 2021 has c. 90,000 views and 300+ comments demonstrating to me the strength of this (weird) and wonderful community.

I needed a jingle for my fledgling personal podcast. How could Plinky not give me one? So after a mini-call to the community, and judgement from 9 year old son - we picked upon a short track from Sweet Green Tea, which you can now hear at the start of all my recent podcasts.

And that is how my podcast jingle comes from learning how to code go faster triangles in childhood and showing it to your genius friend.

Lee Simpson on improvisation, story telling and what improv tells us about being human | Podcast

Lee Simpson is a founder member of Improbable (theatre makers and improvisers), a long time Comedy Store Player (since the 1980s) and one of Paul Merton's Impro Chums. He’s also been a croupier, cinema projectionist and breakfast show DJ. He’s written plays, appeared in sit-coms and in some films, been on some Radio 4 panel shows and once did a very poor poodle act at the London Palladium.  That vast range highlights two strong threads one in the world of improv and another in the world of theatre making.

I speak to Lee on his roots in theatre and improv and the importance of  Keith Johnstone’s work.

Lee outlines his thoughts on on his drama school experience, two schools of improv (US and UK) andhow improv and theatre misunderstand one another.

We discuss the  infrastructure (or lack of) behind improv and theatre and techniques on listening to the audience and feedback loops in performing.

We sketch out ideas on structure and story form, on being human and Lee explains status structure as a technique.

We chat about how  humans understand the world and how we view our lives as story that changes through time.

Lee reflects on being part of a comedy group for a long time and shares a stroy on Mo Mowlam.

We talk on how to “build back better” in the arts and what Open Space is and techniques for listening and genuine connections to art.

We end with advice Lee has for young people.

Contents:

• 01:17 Lee on his roots in theat re and improv and Keith Johnstone.

• 04:07 Lee on his drama school experience and two schools of improv

• 09:43 How improv and theatre misunderstand one another.

• 13:32 Lee on the infrastructure (or lack of) behind improv and theatre. On listening to the audience and feedback loops in performing.

• 21:27 Lee on current UK Improv organisations

• 26:56 Money no issue… what the work of Improbable would do

• 29:01 Ben on language of improv and comedy, repetition and twist

• 32:29 Lee on structure and story form, on being human. Explains status structure.

• 36:44 Lee on how humans understand the world. Viewing our lives as story that changes through time.

• 42:47 On being part of a comedy group for a long time.

• 43:00 On Mo Mowlam being involved with the comedy store players

• 47:37 Mo Mowlam’s final months and concerns on anti-democracy

• 53:33 Lee on “Build Back Better”

• 57:46 Lee on Open Space, techniques for listening and genuine connections to art

• 1:05:07 Improv teaching you to listen to yourself

• 1:07:46 More on OpenSpace

• 1:15:34 Advice for young people, Ben channeling phantom Lee

• 1:17:15 Lee’s advice: step outside your path a little.

PODCAST

• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

• Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh

• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

Listen below or wherever you get podcasts. Prefer to read? Read the transcript below.

Transcript:

Lee Simpson Chats with Ben Yeoh on Improvisation, the Future of the Arts and Theatre Directing

Ben Yeoh (00:00): Hello, and welcome to Ben Yeoh Chats, my Podcast. If you're curious about the world, this show is for you. What does Improvisation tell us about being human? In this episode, I speak to Lee Simpson. One of the foremost Improv practitioners in the world. We'll discuss the languages and principles of Improv, the world of Theatre Directing and what it might mean to ‘Build Back Better’ for the Arts. If you appreciate the show, please like, and subscribe, as it helps others find the podcast. Enjoy! 

Hey everyone! I'm super excited to be speaking to Lee Simpson today. He's a long time Comedy Store player. He’s also the Co-Artistic Director of Improbable Theatre. So, Lee, I think in your life's work, you have had kind of two broad strands as I've seen in it from the outside. You've had a kind of Improv strand and a Theatre Directing strand. How have those two strands kind of built together and how do you kind of see them at the moment?

Lee Simpson (01:17): I guess they're built together because they grew from each other or one grew from the other. So way back, in the last century, almost in the middle of the last century when I was at school. I did school plays. Our English teacher who directed the school plays found a book called Improv by Keith Johnston. I think pretty much as it came out in 1979. He read it. He changed his life and he set about changing ours. So we started doing these exercises from his book. Therefore, in that sense, that kind of interest, just as someone doing school plays, grew into an interest in Improvisation. Then later on once I'd been through Drama School. I met Phelim, Phelim McDermott, the other Co-Artistic Director of Improbable. I met him because he'd been on a workshop with Keith Johnston down in Dorset. The people who'd been on the workshop in Dorset wanted to carry on the work, but they needed some people who'd done a bit of improv as we used to call it. We call it Improv now because that's what the Americans call it.

Yeah. We have to do what the Americans say in the end. You know, we hold out for a bit. Yeah, they wanted to do some shows at the Tricycle Theatre. Phelim was part of that group, but I was drafted in as someone who had actually done a few Improv gigs in London, in the mid-eighties, and that's where Phelim and I met and then from meeting in a kind of Improv setting Phelim and then asked me to make some shows with him. From that moment, really the two things coexisted for both myself and Phelim.

Ben Yeoh (03:17): Wow. I hadn't understood that the two are intersectional from such an early stage that brings two questions to mind. One was going to Drama school in the first place, was that partly inspired by the teacher who was inspired and suggested going down that route? Then I wonder at Drama school, did they teach much Improv as it was probably known at the time? Because I had the sense that actually Drama schools were going slightly down this other strand, the kind of Theatre strand. That's one of the differences I was interested in between the kind of Improv schools where Keith's book still seems to be actually foundational after all of this time, rather than a particular school or centre.

Lee Simpson (04:07): Yeah. I mean, the reason why I had gone to Drama school, the teacher at my school, his name was Bob Hewitt. He really inspired me. He lit the fire around Theatre and Improvisation. So I'll be an actor then. Cause that's what you did. I'll be an actor. So, but I was living in a little village called Bradwell within Norfolk, which is nowhere. So I thought, well, I need to, how do I get myself to London? That I felt the neatest way to get myself to London was to go to a Drama school. I wasn't necessarily looking for training. I was looking for a geographical shift. So I applied to Drama schools did a couple of years and eventually got accepted into one. So that's kind of how the Drama School thing happened. The school I went to was a place called Webber Douglas Academy for the Dramatic Arts. We used to call it the Douglas Bader Academy for Dramatic Arts. I'm not sure why. A silly joke but we did. They thought of themselves as giving classical training. So I'm very antique Improv in lots of ways. They were supposed to turn out sort of RSC ready actors. Remember, this is the early eighties. At that school, there was a visiting teacher who wasn't really a member of staff but would come and teach stuff called Andy Harmon. He was an American who’d studied with Paul Sills who was Viola Spolin’s son. I think he had studied with Viola that as well. So Viola Spolin is the godmother of Improvisation. So we have these two parents. The American, which is Viola and Keith, the British. They are different. They do come from different places. Viola's work grew out of Theatre games that she played with immigrant children in Chicago, in the twenties, to promote their kind of social skills and the issues that they were having, being in a strange country. So she was very interested in that sort of thing. Therefore, her Improvisation methods grew out of that, whereas Keith's was a Royal Court Writers' Group that whole story. So, it's kind of different to clearly talk about the same thing, clearly interested in the same things, just arriving at it from slightly different groups. Anyway, Andy Harmon used to come and teach at the trauma school and he would be given the problem groups. 

So the groups who were a bit rubbish as far as the Drama school was concerned. I was in a problem group, and I think I was probably a problem in the problem group. So we were given Andy Harmon. So Andy Harmon did some very different Improvisation and the Improvisation that I'd done up to that point, which had been basically from Keith's book. So that was fantastic! That totally broadened what I thought Improvisation was and what it could be. This gave me a whole set of other things, which hooked me up with Andy. Andy was the first person to give me a gig in London once I'd left Drama school. So Andy was seen very much as an alien in that environment. That was an environment that was very much about the classical tray, meaning the classical actor, voice, speech, elocution, physicality, all of those things we're taught in a very, very, I guess, old fashioned way. For instance, talk like this, hold your body like this, breathe like this. They taught you how to breathe, breathe like this, speak verse like this. We had makeup classes. do makeup like this. So it was that. Then there was this kind of rogue element, which was Andy and the Improv. That was obviously the thing that I was most excited by.

Ben Yeoh (08:06): Going back to the eighties, just thinking about it was the work of Boal also there and interesting for that type of games or community and thinking? Or had it not really infiltrated Drama schools by that time?

Lee Simpson (08:22): I can't imagine that Boal and certainly hadn't infiltrated Webber Douglas at that time, it hadn't been, I wasn't aware of his work at all. It was only much later that I became aware of his work. So, no. There was no Boal. There was no Grotowski. There was no Brooke. There was a kind of passing acknowledgement that these people existed, but it was all ridiculous. I mean, our Acting Coach spent pretty much an entire lesson telling us why Improvisation was impossible.

Ben Yeoh (09:00): Well, that's great. Although, I guess you always kind of want to prove your teachers wrong to some extent, so maybe that's quite a good impetus. I guess if you sort of fast-forward to today, I still think the worlds of Improv and say a more Classical Theatre tradition, even if it has been more infiltrated by Brooke and Boal and the others still seem quite far apart. Is that your observation as well? Do you think it goes to the slight roots of where classical Theatre people kind of either don't do Improv or think it's for games and playing and a serious exploration of the nature of language and the nature of what it means to be human rather than those types of things?

Lee Simpson (09:43): Yeah, I think that's fair enough. I think there is a gap. Wow, what would you call it? I don't know. There is a polarization there and a lack of respect. I think on both sides and a lack of a sense that the other side is not really worth very much. I think that's certainly true that Theatre trivializes Improv or Improvisation and sees it as not particularly serious or worthwhile. But then the Improv world is one that presents itself very often as trivial and not worthwhile. We have a massively long and sort of valued history of Theatre as a kind of subdivision of Literature in this country. Theatre is where people read plays as part of their Literature Studies. So the reverence given to the written word it's incredibly high in British Theatre tradition, much higher is my guess than in other world Theatre traditions. So there's the idea of letting go of that written word is harder, I think. In terms of the tradition of Theatre in this country, I mean, when we were doing, we started by talking about the eighties, when we were doing Improvisation in the eighties lots of Theatre, people were just angry at us and they would say, what do you think you don't need writers? So they thought we were a kind of a movement trying to get rid of writers from Theatre. 

Ben Yeoh (11:47): …No playwright, because it's cheaper to do. 

Lee Simpson (11:51): Well, yeah. They thought we were disrespecting writing. Yeah. We thought we would, that we were saying, well, you need to, who needs a play? Who needs a playwright? You know, playwrights don't need them. Of course, that was absolute. There was nothing to do with what we, and the other, the other approach was that people assumed that you'd worked out beforehand. So they said, "Oh, you've definitely worked that out before". So basically it was to two outcomes. If it went well, they said, “Oh, you must've worked that out beforehand”. If you said, no, we didn't, they didn't believe you. Or if it went badly, they went, “Well, what do you expect is Improvised”?

Ben Yeoh (12:31): You need to write, don’t you?

Lee Simpson (12:32): You need to write, don’t you? Yeah. So there's a real catch 22 around the whole thing, right through the early to mid-eighties.

Ben Yeoh (12:40): I guess Improv probably doesn't help itself because it pokes fun at everything. I guess so many things, it would poke fun at Theatre. So they would give an impression of it not being serious. I guess the impression is that Improv is about being funny and humour and comedy. I sense, particularly if you go back to the work of Keith or from the American tradition, it seems to be many other things. In fact, humour is perhaps one smaller part, although that's the part that people see. Do you think the language of Improv actually does stretch much wider? I think as an area that perhaps you've been exploring over the last 10, 20, 30 years, and what have you discovered or reflecting on the language of Improv now?

Lee  (13:32): Yeah, of course. Yeah. The breadth of expression that's possible with Improvisation is just as it might be for Theatre or any other Art form. I think that's pretty self-evident. However, Improv has, it's very complex because there's an economic situation. So for Theatre, whether it's subsidized or non-subsidized, there is an infrastructure that supports it for its production. However, weak or under threat that may be perceived to be that infrastructure is there. There is a pathway for that to happen. So it happens and there is an infrastructure to support work, Theatre work, traditional Theatre work of all sorts. There is a kind of pathway for that to happen. For Improvisation, that hasn't existed. Maybe only just about is starting to exist, but that really hasn't existed. So it's hard to feed itself if you like, it's hard to create its own world and its own infrastructure and its own support system. Now doing that in this economic structure that we have. This means creating stuff that's going to be immediately appealing to people who are going to give you enough money to do another thing. So the Improvisation, although it didn't begin as comedy at all, or as Keith calls it light entertainment. That's what Keith says. Most Improvisations, light entertainment. It didn't begin like this at all, but to survive, to get people in, to sell itself very often, Improvisation has presented itself and become light entertainment. 

So structures and infrastructures that support Improvisation or Improv have light entertainment started to grow and start to build up. Now, there are some that exist. Now there's an Artistic, I think there's an Artistic reason why Improv tends towards comedy or license entertainment. This is one that Keith identified very early on, which is that Improvisation is very much about a feedback loop with the audience. So the performer does something for the audience, has a response, which the performer perceives, which informs the next thing the performer does, which does it into a response to which the audience space, which the performer perceives and so on and so on. So the feedback loops are happening, not just between the players on the stage, but they're happening between the performer and the audience. That's very, very important in Improvisation. I think it's very important in Theatre, but that's a whole other discussion. Now the most tangible audience feedback is laughter because you can hear it. People either laugh or they don't. Therefore, what happens or what has happened and what happens is performers noticed the tangible response and then that trained them to do the next thing, to get the tangible response. So this feedback loop started to train Improvisers into being funny. Keith talks about performance being trained by the audience to be funny. He speculates about what it would be like if you could actually hear the sound of the hairs on people's arms standing on end, or you could hear the sound of people being engrossed in some way. You don't hear those things. The messages that the audience sends you, that’s what's happening to them, which is much less tangible. It is much harder to perceive and very often to perceive them, you have to almost dream them. You almost have to kind of sense them. So, audiences have trained Improvisers to be funny. Therefore, I think, there's an economic kind of structural part of that story. Then there's a kind of Artistic part of that story. What that means is if you want to expand or re-expand the palate of Improvisation, then you've got to do some stuff to support that, to keep that going. Otherwise, it just disappears, it kind of gets squished. Therefore, I guess that the work that Phelim and I and lots of other people have done is around that. It is around finding ways to hear other responses from the audience, to hear other responses from your fellow players, to hear other responses from the world and to support people, to be on stage and stay awake and listen to all their impulses, not just the impulses, which are around being funny.

Ben Yeoh (19:04): That makes a lot of sense to me, that sort of financial imperative or catalyst that structural underlay, and then that Artistic one with the feedback loop. I was speaking to a games philosopher recently, and he spoke about a term that he considers Process Art. That actually a lot of Art is in the process or in that feedback loop. Actually, that's where it's created. And to be kind of quite aware of that in any of these well, he was talking about games playing on that type of thing, but we extended it to anything where you have that audience-performer, because actually as we know a performer without an audience, isn't the complete work of Art. Therefore, we know something happens in that interaction. I know I was reflecting on that, although there is now perhaps a little bit of infrastructure for comedy or light entertainment, as Keith might say, it strikes me as there are no real great Improv schools in the UK or schools or universities or Drama schools, which you think of as Improv. I guess in Europe, we think of Jacques Lecoq a little bit in that tradition, but probably there seem to be fewer even in Europe. Do you think that's just that economic imperative that you spoke about and therefore, would it be a great idea to have actually at least a centre where people could learn Improv and maybe also learn comedy? Although I, there seem to be two separate schools, I think, although they viewed it slightly differently. I think the Greeks taught comedy as a separate Art. So you would have had a school for it, or at least if you had a school of Drama, you'd have what would we call it nowadays - A tragedy track, a comedy track or whatever would be. So, yeah, reflecting on, should we have an Improv school in the UK? What, what should it do? Should we maybe have a comedy school? Is it just the economic imperative or I guess you hinted at that tradition of the written word being so important to the Classical English Theatre that perhaps it's just not allowed the space to grow something which is from so much more of an oral or physical Theatre tradition. 

Lee Simpson (21:27): There are people who are beginning that process. So there's an organization called Hoopla. There's also one called Free Association. There's The Nursery and there's now one called The Improv Space. So the first three, Hoopla, Free Association and Nursery are actual spaces or buildings. Then the Improv place is an online space. What they've done is, they've adopted essentially the American Model in terms of Improvisation and the American Model in terms of financing and Improvisation organization is workshops and teaching. So you have a part of the organization, which is about performance and performing, and there's a Theatre. But the main income is from people learning about Improvisation, which becomes the main income because the majority of people taking those classes are not professional performers. So it becomes a thing that people do either professional development, personal development, or just because it's fun. This is a long-standing model in the States. So, and things like Bay Area Theatre, Sports, these are multi-million dollar organizations. Some of them like The Groundlings in LA. They have a real kind of structured workshops and courses that you take one after the other. That's how they survive. That's a reality now there's obviously this is a corporate arm to all of that, but I think the basic structure is kind of borrowed from the States. So in a smaller way, they are like Improv Drama schools. They kind of are presenting a series of courses, a curriculum and a set of teachers that can take people through from absolute beginner to someone who's on stage performing. Maybe they will grow. Maybe they will grow into bigger organizations, maybe have a grant to organizations, which have links to actual Drama schools. I don't know when we want to mark the beginning of the Theatre in the UK, whether it's the mystery plays or the pre-Shakespeare. But if that's whatever, five or 600 years of Theatre, I'm not sure when Drama schools appeared, but probably a hundred years ago. I don't know when Drama started or anything. So we went for a long time without any if we mark the beginning of Improvisation, as we understand it in the UK from 1956 then that's what it was 60 odd years old, 65 years old. 

So that's kind of happening already, I think. There is a certain amount. They each have their styles. They each have their own kind of worldview. The Free Association is very American and that's what they say. They say they present an American style training, whereas The Nursery and Hoopla, don't necessarily quite as much. The Improv Place, I'm not as familiar with because it's a little bit newer, but it's an online space that was actually planned before the Pandemic, Katy Schutte and Chris Mead kind of went, “Oh, there's a gap in the market here for some online Improv training”. Then the Pandemic happened. They would have grown up, we've got a deck, we'd better do this then. So that sense and at what those places have done, which I think is absolutely brilliant is they, they engender a sense of community in terms of Improvisation that places for people to learn and perform, but also for places to be able to hang out and for audiences to hang out. I think they are very loyal, I mean, who knows what it's going to be like once we come back from Pandemic and all of that, but certainly pre-Pandemic. I was so struck by the sense of community that you got in those spaces, both with performers and the audience. I thought they were just brilliant! They were wonderful, wonderful spaces. The people running them clearly love Improv so much. It's something that they're all set up by people of a younger generation to me, is something that my generation of Improvisers never did. That's what this younger generation of Improvisers have done. I think it's absolutely fantastic.

Ben Yeoh (26:39): So if funding wasn't an issue and you would say the Director of the next Improv school, what would you perhaps investigate or do differently? 

Lee Simpson (26:56): I think it would be Improbable. It would be, what would Improbable do? What would Improbable teach? How would Improbable approach that? So it would, essentially , be a school or training that was around and didn't look very similar. I think we might create a device piece of Theatre or rehearse a scripted piece of Theatre. So it would just gather together all the stuff that I think we've happened upon and been excited by over the years and the things that we continue to be excited by and continue to happen upon. I think that probably if I was going to, I would say that we'd be looking to create Improvised Theatre rather than Improv. I have to really stress. I'm totally fine with light entertainment. I love light entertainment. I love Comedy. I think Light Entertainment and Comedy are noble pursuits. I've paid my rent. The Comedy Store Players have paid my rent for the best part of 30 odd years. So I know I'm no one to kind of chuck mud on Comedy or Light entertainment. This is not just because it's paying my rent. I think they are absolutely noble pursuits and there's a dignity and a beauty and integrity to Comedy and light entertainment. I think, what can I say, the lack of respect that those disciplines or those parts of Theatre or performance are shown is somewhat classist in my view.

Ben Yeoh (29:01): I think I'd agree. I think Comedy if you think about its ability to change the minds of people, what a good joke does or something, which isn't really a joke, but plays through any extreme ism, or the way that it pokes fun at really anyone, right? There are all of these things. The way it can do it through all of these different devices, whether that's the story, inversion, repetition twist and all of that. I think that's why it's interesting. You can go back to Greek times, at least in the Western Tradition and see how important it is. It is that, and I think there is something about let's call them Populist Arts, which haven't broken through, which I think is in this country classist or something is I haven't quite figured it out. So I want to maybe dwell a little bit on your Improbable work as well, aware of intersex, but just the last couple of bits on Improv. I was reflecting on your comments on the deep language of Improv. I was thinking that actually, it does seem at first glance to be a riff on some potentially deep human processes. I was thinking of just two quite simple ones about how good Improv often uses repetition or repetition, and then a twist and say metaphor and story. You go back to simply, let's look at the WritingTradition where they use repetition and repetition and a twist certainly is a technique for that. Then you go forward in life and actually repetition, or whether it's a power three or something is something which seems to be very deeply universal amongst humans. Then that repetition and a twist aspect seem to occur everywhere. I don't know whether that's, because I now see that as the pattern or the pattern is reflecting me. I'm not sure. I remember seeing many, many years ago, maybe 20 odd years ago, a group sort of showing this reputation. 

That's someone, I think it was a kind of clown figure, essentially walking into a wall and just repeating that. The first time, wasn't that funny near the second time, by the fifth time you had this kind of tragic-comedy thing, because you knew what was happening, uh, by the eighth time, it was hilarious. Then something like the 11th time, there was a twist because it didn't repeat. So your expectations were all broken, which was even more super hilarious. That's really stuck with me because it just seems that there is some deep process going on there. So I'd be interested in any reflections that you have on what techniques or things you've learned from Improv, all this listening and the feedback loop. I was hearing what you said about audiences, and I think audiences know the laughter thing, but we also know the deep silence. That's the other second bit you hear in the Theatre all the time that you're going to think and performance can really play with. Because you can hear the silence because of that deep absence of noise. That seems to be another one, but you must have had sort of several others or maybe some parallels that you've reflected on in your thinking that you'd want to share.

Lee Simpson (32:29): I think in terms of repetition and twist or whatever version of that pattern and structure and story. I mean, patterns slash structure slash story. It seems to me that we, human beings, kind of think in story form. We don't think about data. We don't think in statistics. We think in story form. We hire and fire and vote. We interact and relate and judge in story form. A story is the placing of events in a sequence that seems to be, that seems to make what we would call a story. Now I don't think there were several stories. I think there is an infinite number. But our perception, our sense of what structure does to us is I think physiological. It does something to us. I think we each have our little preferences if you like, we each respond to different structures in different ways, but definitely, that structure is there. Now, when people write, that's sometimes what's lacking. Sometimes that's the last thing that people learn. I think when they're writing, it is that structure and I think there's sometimes the last thing that people learn when they're Improvising as well. What's interesting. I think about Improvisation in that conversation is that structure is sort of more important, but it's not predetermined, not always. In some improvisations, the structure is predetermined, which is fair enough. However, if it's not predetermined, you're then looking at well, what is the structure that is emerging? Is it repetition? Is the game another way of saying it is what's the game, it's the game of this scene that I'm going to do the same thing over and over again? And when does that change? Or I think Keith's great, great, great breakthrough was to say, "Well, let's look at status interaction". That then becomes a language to talk about structure. That then becomes a language through which to describe human interaction. 

So someone starts high status, someone starts low status. Then during the scene, they swap status that's structure. That's a story. We know it’s a story. We know when that transaction is complete, we know there's a kind of ending or at least a punctuation point. So I think structure and that idea of repetition change and absolutely Comedy absolutely has to have a real awareness of that. Even if you're going to have what you would call no structure, then that's a structureexists. An awareness of it is incredibly important and is incredibly important for Improvisation because that's what stories are. In the end, whether you're telling a joke or whether you're doing a sketch or whether you're writing a novel or you're making a film, or you're doing a Theatre. You're telling a story in some sense. Phelim and I back in the old days we would, when we were trying to talk to people about what we do, we say essentially we're storytellers. That can be kind of almost anything I think. I don't know, I've forgotten the second part of your question. That was about structure.

Ben Yeoh (36:26): Yeah. I guess it was any parallels with that deep, deep structural language with other parts of life. But you've touched on that with the fact that his notion of storytelling patterns and that's stories or the way that humans understand the world, I think is what you were suggesting. 

Lee Simpson (36:44): Absolutely. Yeah. We, we, we see our own, you know, we see our own lives as a story. It's hard to see your own life as a story because you're in it. We did a show called life game with Improbable, which was Keith format. In that, you bring someone on stage and you interview them about their life. Very simple questions about their life. Tell me about your father. Tell me about your mother. What's the first thing you remember, tell me about your first day of school or whatever. Then as they answer, you have people on the other side of the stage who are all Improvisers and when you hear something, you think, “Oh, let's dramatize that!” You use either a game or a scene in order to get people to play or to Improvise the story that we've just heard and you get the guests involved in various ways. What's interesting is that the events which are further from where they are now or the events when they were young or them getting older and older, depending on how old they are, tell us stories. Whereas if you talk about events, which are much closer to where they are now, in terms of time or events that have happened to now, they haven't quite turned those things into stories yet. They're much harder for those people to talk about. This makes it much harder to dramatize or to Improvise. So early on we had a kind of rule. We said, no one under 30 because there's not enough gap. They’re still in it. You know, they're talking about their teenage years and if they're 26, that kind of stuff in it. I don't think we would do that. Now. I think we got better at the process. Then we got better, you know, turning these things into stories, but that was the beginning. 

So I think we do that to us, but we certainly do it with other people. We can see it happening when someone dies, whether that's someone we know or a famous person at the moment of his/her death, it's a story. It becomes a story with that. We feel in a position to evaluate or tell a story because there's an ending.  I think that's true on the micro and the macro level. So anything that helps us to understand stories. I think with Improvisation, what's interesting is that you're not thinking about the story and then writing it down or organizing it. You have to understand what it feels like. So I'm in this scene or I'm in this show, what is this thing I'm feeling? What does that mean about what bit of the story we are in, what part of the structure are we in right now? You have to feel it in your body rather than analyze it as an intellectual. I think there's something really valuable in that. I'm not quite sure what it is entirely yet, but I think there has to be something really valuable about that ability or that facility or that opportunity.

Ben Yeoh (40:02): I hadn't heard that expressed that way. That's really resonating with me how you view your own life or others' lives, particularly through the length of time. We make it into a myth -- into a story -- in order to understand ourselves and whatever happened. When it's very close, I think we're seeing this with the Pandemic. We're still living it. We definitely are still living it! So we find it very hard to understand. I'm also reflecting that you're amongst the sort of handful of artistes who have a very long history with other handfuls of artistes. On the one hand, Improv and Theatre are quite ephemeral or in the moment. It lives as its thing. Then if you didn't see it, we recorded it. But the live audience is probably it's sort of clinical form. Yet because of your Comedy store players. The fact that you've done Improv with the same group of people is coming in and out over a very long distance of time. That must somehow change the language that you can speak to one another because although you might not start with a pre-determined structure, you've travelled so many of these pauses before you probably somehow left signposts for one another. You know, "Oh, I've teed this up and Paul will always do this. Or Lee will always do that when I do this". I don't know. I'm interested in that almost as a process of Art form because that's one, which has happened over time. I actually think perhaps due to its rarity or perhaps due to its richness, that is one of the things which draws audiences and communities. It draws these loyal audiences to it because it's a way of us understanding the world and seeing it with this group of people who are telling these kinds of stories now. I guess, through the language of their Improv. Also, we've seen them tell it through time, which just seems to me deeply fascinating and a really important practice. Do you view it as that? Or have I just kind of made this up and it's like a nice thing to look at. Or it's like, "No we just, go on stage and tell jokes".

Lee Simpson (42:17): I think both are true. I think both are true. We just go on stage and tell jokes. At the same time, you can view it as a kind of durational piece. You can say, "Okay, a group of people are going to meet once or twice a week and do a comedy show for two hours. They're going to do that for 30 years".

Ben Yeoh (42:38): I mean, that's outlasted it, friendships, marriages, you know?  

Lee Simpson (42:41): Yeah.

Ben Yeoh (42:42): So many deaths, births, political figures and all of this, right? 

Lee Simpson (42:47): Absolutely. Yeah. It becomes a piece of Art in and of itself, I think. The stories that kind of come off of that. It becomes a parallel. It becomes a story. That's what happens. It becomes a story in it. Who knows when that story, you know? The Pandemic might finish that story. That might be, the end of that story. Who knows, what I think about? We were doing a show just after the Twin Towers came down. We were doing a show just after Diana died. We were doing a show when the terrorists came in in 2010. We were doing a show when the Blair Government came in in '97. That kind of key moments or those standout moments or headline moments. If you like feed into that. We were with an audience through all of that. We were with an audience through all those events and all those years. Extraordinary things have happened, extraordinary. I don't know why, it's coming into my head. So I'm doing it. I'll do an anecdote FSA. That's okay. This is a long time ago. We were doing a show and someone said, “Mo Mowlam is in the audience”. No, no, they didn't. No. I'm telling you, I'm telling you the story all wrong. We were doing a show and it was the news and the tabloids that said that Mo Mowlam had admitted to smoking marijuana. It was probably because Bill Clinton was around and he was denying it or saying he didn't inhale. Everyone was doing jokes about Bill Clinton, not inhaling or whatever. So, we're doing the show and it was Jim Sweeney, I think. This was in the news and he ended up doing some stuff about Mo Mowlam smoking marijuana. It worked. It went down very well. Then, at the end of the show when we went back in. Then someone commented, "I think Mo Mowlam is in the audience". We went, "No! Oh my God! Oh, sh*t! Then they said, well, and then when we went back out. Sure enough, she was in the audience. So we've been doing these jokes about Mo Mowlam smoking weed. She was in the audience. Then after the show, someone had said, "Mo Mowlam would like to come and say, hello". We went, 'Yeah. Oh, sh*t! What is she going to say? Then she came in and she couldn't have been lovelier. We said, "We're sorry about the jokes". She said, "No. That's fine. You know, people doing worse stuff than that". We said, "What are you doing here?" She was the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland at the time or whatever it was she was doing. 

Lee Simpson (45:47): We said, "What are you doing here?" She said, "Oh, me and John", her husband, "were stuck at home. There was nothing on the tele". She said, " Oh, f**k! Let's go to the Comedy Store", which is how she spoke. So she came to the Comedy Store and that stArted a friendship between us and her. She then became our first president. It's not that well known, but Mo Mowlam was the first president of the Comedy Store Players. 

Ben Yeoh (47:08): Wow. 

Lee Simpson (47:15): She would invite us to the kind of apArtment that she had in White Hall. She would have evenings where she would cook a load of sausages in the oven and have several packets of Mother's Pride Bread and some butter. That was the food and you were to make yourself sausage sandwiches. 

Lee Simpson (47:37): We had a kind of close relationship with her. She took us around parliament and into Number 10 and all this stuff. We felt very close to her. Then she got sick. She would talk to us about what they were doing. She would talk to us about how members of the Blair Government were spinning against her while she was being edged out. Before she died, they might not have said it, but she was edged out. She was sidelined. One could speculate about why that is but she was kind of sidelined, after all her work on the Good Friday Agreement. I think the last time we saw her, she was really cross because they'd been spinning, that she'd lost her marbles. That the brain tumour had meant that she was not with it anymore. She was telling us this. Then she died and it was really very affecting because she was such a loved figure. She took us around Parliament. Then she took us to 10 Downing Street. She walked from Parliament to 10 Downing Street and the people would stop her every five yards because they loved her. That wow, that connection that she had with people was so strong. People related to her because she was honest and she had integrity. I mean, I remember we were walking out of Parliament. This has nothing to do with the story. Sorry. This has nothing to do with it.

Ben Yeoh (49:28): No, it is. It's the relationships along with stories that these things build. So please go on. 

Lee Simpson (49:35): We were walking out of Parliament and I was walking beside her and she said, "I've had enough of this place". I said, "Why? You know, people love you. You're great. You're doing great work. We need people like", whatever I said, I can't remember. She said, "No. I've had enough of this place. This place", she sort of pointed at the House of Commons that, "it doesn't matter anymore". What she was talking about was the shift of power from the Commons to the control of Executive power by the Prime Minister, by the Cabinet and that the House of Commons was being sidelined. She hated that idea. She thought that was anti-democratic. That was a process that she saw beginning with Blair and that government. Additionally, it's a process that we've watched happening since then, to the point now, where we have the basic government by edict. Where whatever you want to say, contracts for PPE or nothing. No trade deals are put before the Commons. 

Ben Yeoh (50:53): Yeah. This government can essentially do whatever it wants to do, it can do. So I think that's kind of a really interesting segue to a lot of industries, but particularly the Arts have this idea of let's build back better. This is the kind of phrase I'm hearing, and I'm seeing it in Theatre and Artistic communities. But it strikes me, this is going to be very difficult without much money. We've actually less money than it's ever had before. It also strikes me as very difficult because other very worthy sectors, Education and Health also need to build or want to build back better. It also strikes me as Artistic organizations haven't maybe changed that much over time. If you're a young person wanting to get into this, it's harder than ever before with money and all of that. So I'd be interested, where you think maybe, as a sort of sector we could possibly build back better? Or not or whether the challenges are going to be we'll do really well if we can survive. Then perhaps you could reflect on where you think Improbable or your own work might be taking us to? I mean being part of building back better. Although again, when I look at individual organizations, I think they're going to be lucky just to rebuild back some work and be relevant that actually to build back better is already a hurdle, which we didn't really achieve pre-Pandemic. We didn't achieve it when we had a lot more money. Now you're saying it because of this, we have less money or not. It's interesting. 

Obviously, that ideal has always been around. In addition, I think Arts incredibly undervalued as in all of these things. We've touched on some of the reasons: money, class, where we see the value, business and all of this. I think it is true, but that doesn't change the fact that all of those factors are still true. Now, if anything, in a stronger fashion. So, I'd be interested in inflexions. Do you think we can build better? Are there one or two things you'd like to see? Any work that you or Improbable, you are thinking of doing? Or you'd like to do more of it? And just where we are now? Because I think we can see light at the end of the tunnel, at least for the Pandemic and at least for the UK, but it seems to have concentrated all the problems that we had between equality between class, between inter and intra and all of this. 

Lee Simpson (53:33): I think the ‘Build Back Better’ thing is a symptom of something that was happening anyway, which is a kind of Polaroid. Not a kind of polarization, a polarization around people who genuinely want to create something that's fairer and more equitable and people who don't and either are not interested in that or actively don't want to do that. For me, it's part of the breakdown of consensus. One, whether it was an apparition or not one as a sense of mid-20th century consensus, like wherever you were on the political spectrum, you kind of wanted to make things better. Now that may be an incredibly idealistic, false perception on my part, but even the pretence of that appears to have broken down now. I think that you're going to have some organizations and Artists and people and whoever who are going to just go look, there's no money. We got to do what we got to do to get people to survive. So all this other stuff, fine and not yet. Don't be silly. There's going to be that underneath it. I think there's going to be a hard edge. Another bunch of people kind of go, and we cannot because this is unsustainable. We cannot keep treating this group of people this way. This is utterly immoral, unsustainable. This is part of the reason why we're in the problems. We're in this situation, it's not part of it, this is the reason we're in the situation we're in. I see there's a polarization there. It's very difficult in a polarized situation to deal with that. Because that just happens. That's what happens.

Ben Yeoh (55:33): They're not listening to one another.

Lee Simpson (55:33): No.

Ben Yeoh (55:35): It's almost like that game where you have people in an asylum and one person talking, one thing and another person is talking another thing. Obviously, they're just talking like this. Whereas like you say, I'm not sure, but before it feels like you might've been talking different things, but you're listening to one another and saying, oh, we overlap here. So maybe we can do something. Now you're just talking here and here and well, that's it. Then the polarization increases and you just shout at one another and I don't know how you decide who wins, but someone does win eventually. Then that's what happened.

Lee Simpson (56:14): Absolutely! So what do you do in that situation? What do you do? I mean, you can pick a side. I think, -- I have no educational or evidential backup for any of this, but it feels like the tide of history is driving that polarization. It doesn't feel like it's a thing that's going to come together. It feels like there's a tide, which is driving that division. That division of worldview, it's not even a disagreement necessarily about what kind of world we want. It's a disagreement about what kind of world we're in. So when the whole 'Black Lives Matter' thing happened. Basically, people disagree about what is happening right now. Never mind what happened 50 years ago or how things should happen in 50 years’ time. Like right now, it's a literally violent and fundamental disagreement about what the situation is. That seems to be getting on with all issues. That seems to be getting more extreme.

Lee Simpson (57:46): I have no idea how you do anything about that and I'm not sure you can, or we can, or Improbable can. I know Improbable can't we are a little Theatre Company. We're a tiny Theatre company. We do a couple of things that come to mind. One of them is that  it's sort of holding something. But holding space means something where there's some honesty. There's some humility. There are all the things that you hope to value and whether or not those things have an impact on the world. I mean, they usually don't. Whether or not those things spread to other people and they usually don't. It doesn't really matter. Just, shield the flame, shield the flame on the candle from the storm and keep it alight, if you can. In the hope that at some point these things can be listened to again. Because of these things, they're just not listened to. As you said, nobody's listening, but so let's keep it alive. I think that's one thing. That's what I feel about our open space work. It's like any kind of space alive. Keep a space open. Hold a space where people can come; can be themselves and have a conversation where people actually listen to each other. If nobody else in the world is doing that? Fine. Let's keep a space where that's happening. And of course, thousands of millions of people are doing the same thing. You have to trust that as well. I also think, and this is not very well thought through. I think there's something about Improvisation, which has a role to play in that. It goes back to and again, I lack all the evidence or the education to speak about this in any authoritative way. Nevertheless, I'm a white Englishman. I speak about things in an authoritative way, whether I know about them or not. That's my privilege. When Marx talked about alienation about the different kinds of alienation and he talks about alienation from ourselves. 

To me, that's what I see. I see people disconnected from themselves and because they're disconnected from themselves, they are prey to, being exploited, their feelings and emotions, fears, worries and vulnerabilities being exploited by other people because there's not a really strong connection to their own sense of values. You have people who are beautiful fathers or mothers or brothers or sisters or whatever who are loving and considerate and caring and understanding in their own environments. Then will turn out to the world and start the most hateful, disgusting, vile, rubbish. There's a disconnect somewhere. There's a real disconnect. I think one of the things that Improvisation should do and can do is to connect someone to themselves. Because Improvisation is about people who would say, "Oh, Improv! No". The thing I know about that is you got to say, "yes". Oh no, that's one of the most misunderstood things in the world. Because what you're saying is what you're saying yes to? Are you saying yes to yourself? Are you saying yes to your own compassion? Are you saying yes to your own instincts and your own intuitions? Can you connect? You can't say yes to yourself until you connect to yourself. Most people aren't even aware of what's going on inside themselves. Aren't even aware of the minimal signals that are here. Never mind kind of amplifying them and finding out what's there. Improvisation is a way for people to do that, to connect to themselves. So they can connect to their intuition and their impulses. Genuinely connect to them and say yes to them. So the kind of theory that I bang around is, one of the things I think about is people who are disconnected from Art. Let's say, so my parents, my mum and dad considered themselves sort of people. Art was not for them. So painting, theatre, music, opera, whatever. That's not for the likes of us because we're working class and we don't understand it. Because we don't understand it, that must mean that we're stupid. That's for clever people. That's the people, yeah. 

So Picasso is for people who are clever than us. So we don't understand that. So that must mean we're not. Now that's nonsense! But if you think if, if your own, if your interaction with Art is that it just makes you feel stupid. You also you'll stop interacting with Art why would you go, why would you pay, whatever 30 quid, to just sit in a theatre and made to feel stupid. You wouldn't do it. So they don't. My parents wouldn't and didn't. If they said yes to their own impulses if they saw a Picasso and went well, "That's a load of rubbish! Or I don't understand it, or I'm confused, or that makes me feel uncomfortable or oh, I'd like it, but I don't know why". What they would do is invalidate that response. Because they don't say yes to their own responses because they don't value their own responses. Because their responses are not worth anything and that's what they've been told. That's what has been demonstrated to them for their whole lives. If they valued that response, whether they liked the Arts or not is irrelevant, They value their response to the Arts. So they might go see a check-off play and go. Well, the middle bit was boring and not think I'm stupid because I didn't find it interesting, but go, I found it boring. Isn't that interesting. They could become interested in their own responses to Art. Then that changes their relationship to Art. That changes their relationship to what they perceive. Because as I say, whether there's a positive or a negative response, doesn't matter. They have a response. They value the response. They connect to their own response. That to me is potential, it could change everything. I think the way to do that, the way for people to experience that is through Improvisation. I think that's what Improvisation teaches us.

Ben Yeoh (1:05:07): That's fascinating. I hadn't considered that, but it seems true to me that Improv can teach you a lot about yourself and what you listen to or not. We have all of that status. I guess you could call it self esteem or even just thinking your own thoughts through. This allows you to engage with the wider world and then make those connections with, if I can love my own daughter, why can I not love other daughters or whatever? I'm slightly making it up to that, but that seems a perfectly plausible call for a transmission mechanism. I'd be interested to just reflect on a couple of things. Finally, one was how you came across open space and how you think about that? Because I think you said, "Oh, Improbable can't change the world and being a small organization". Actually, I could suggest that perhaps it has done a lot more, at least above its weight. One is through a devoted and disgruntled D and D. This is a kind of open space conference for people within Theatre, Performing Arts, while holding this space. Nevertheless, I also think to the extent that it will transmit and like you say, there may be a lot of people holding their own sort of spaces where it's a non-hierarchical almost participatory form of conference or meeting where people propose their own idea to talk about. Here they can self-organize, which has lots of cousin parallel with some of the things we're seeing in deliberative democracy or assemblies or essentially these are techniques and tools for listening to one another and finding a way through to put it at that very high level of which this seems to be quite an important part. 

So, I was interested to reflect on how Improbable found open space and maybe to sort of push you the other way to reflect about how it might be having a larger impact than you might think, maybe because we're in the story. So we're not going to see how those effects are rippling back as this pushback. Because when you talk about the candle, a phrase I think about is actually, there is never enough darkness to put out the light of a lit candle. So if you can keep it alight, actually it still seems to replace. It seems that open space has done that for the Theatre Industry and might be doing it more broadly. So I'd be interested in maybe how I came across it and what it's done for you?

Lee Simpson (1:07:46): I mean, Phelim found it. Phelim came across it. He was fascinated by it and said, "Oh, I'm going to do this". Phelim sent out an invitation. We didn't know what would happen. Then 300 people turned up. That's kind of typically Improbable what will often happen is, Fabian will read a book. I mean, I sort of began this by saying, my Drama teacher read a book and it changed his life. So now it's Phelim, we'll read a book and go, "Oh, let's do this". It's some crazy idea. Phelim kind of drove it through, really drove it through. We had no idea what this thing was. He didn't know what this thing was. He thought, well, anyway, I'm going to find out about it by doing it. So we did it. That's a very common thing with Improbable is if we do something that we don't know how to do yet, that's when we operate at our absolute best. That's when we make our best work and our biggest breakthroughs. That's not all. That's, I think, fair. I think Brian talks about swimming out till your feet can't quite touch through the sea bed or something. So that's how we found it. I think the reason why we took to it so enthusiastically is that we saw in it what we'd already been doing but in a slightly more organized form. So we saw it. We looked at it and went, "Oh, this is how we do our rehearsals, essentially. This is how we make work. This is how we work already". But this is it, those sorts of processes given over to a large complex conversation with a large group of people. So it felt very familiar and very, very quickly. 

So we started to bring sort of more open space structures into the Rehearsal Room. I think we take our Rehearsal Room's cells into our open space. It's very hard. One of the things about open space, that's brilliant, but also problematic is it's very hard to track its impact because it's not built to evaluate because it's random and its effects are deep. So it's rather like a piece of Theatre or any piece of Art. It's an act of faith. Sometimes, there are things that come out of it, which you can say, "Oh yeah, that definitely came from the day or that definitely came in D and D or whatever". But mostly you don't know. People meet and have a conversation and something sparks and off they go and they create something or people find a different way of being in a space and may take that somewhere. It's very simple. I think I know that, it's absolutely integral to what we do know. It solved a riddle for us. So we were making Theatre and making work and Improvising. But we hadn't worked out a way to do that without the lights coming on and an audience paying money and, and making a show. An open space gave us that devoted and disgruntled person that gave us that opportunity to take all the stuff we'd learn, making an Improvising into a more direct relationship with people and people's challenges and people's issues.

Ben Yeoh (1:11:45): I think that's great. I think it's okay not to be measured because you've got these two opposing forces. One idea which comes from, I guess, company speaking, which is what, what isn't measured, doesn't get managed. So this is this idea that you've got to measure and impact everything. But there's the opposing force, which is that a lot of things that count can't be counted, which I think is equal and opposing and potentially greater. I think back, if you think about the power of Art or this connection, this language of listening that the Texan lawyer, the white Texan lawyer for Martin Luther King Jr. A key part of his team, which introduced rights for minorities in the US. He joined Martin Luther's team because several years before he had heard Louis Armstrong play Jazz. When he heard Armstrong play Jazz and he listened to it. He essentially said, he wrote down in his diary and this sets him on his life path that, "I have heard genius in a black man. The only thing I can think about is how we need to give these people equality". From that, it all started. This one idea. I kind of turned around the phrase that sort of snowflake has been taken, I guess people are talking about work now, but this idea of a snowflake. Well, a snowflake goes on a mountain and actually causes the avalanche. You don't know which snowflake it will be, or maybe you will melt, but actually, you get enough of them together and you can be very surprised about that, about that impact.

Lee Simpson (1:13:32): Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Ben Yeoh (1:13:34): So perhaps one last question then to surround everything else off, thinking about all of the really amazing, fascinating topics here, stretching on philosophy, games and Improv, and what to think about the world is. Maybe what advice or thoughts would you have for a young person, about going into the world? Maybe not even just the young person, but any person. But maybe a young person, potentially who is thinking about an Artistic career, but maybe not, right? They just maybe finished university or they're thinking about going to university. What would you suggest they think about in terms of what they should maybe do or listen to or think about doing with their lives?

Lee Simpson (1:14:20): I mean, my advice would be don't listen to me 

Ben Yeoh (1:14:24): Right. 

Lee Simpson (1:14:28): Really. I'm amazed by young people. I'm amazed by the world that they are having to negotiate. It Feels to me, just maybe a matter of perception, it feels to be more dangerous, more tricky, more complicated or aggressive and the stakes feel higher to me. So I don't know if I would have any advice. It would be sort of stuff that I would say like, "It's going to be okay. You're going to be okay".

Ben Yeoh (1:15:17): Yeah, I think that's important. It's going to be okay. Well, I sometimes have a game where I or we in a group imagine what someone else would say. So we call them like what would Phantom Boris Johnson say here?

Ben Yeoh (1:15:33): Right.

Ben Yeoh (1:15:34): Inevitably, you get that right. But reflecting on this conversation, I would say my Phantom Lee would say, to go out in the world and listen. I think that's one of the themes that come through. However, that means to listen to yourself, truly kind of your own thoughts and views, to the extent that you can get there and listen to others, which would be both your peers. Perhaps, also, the people you disagree with and see whether you can hear the heart of what they're saying, to really understand why you might disagree or not disagree. Additionally, I've come away with the sense that a big part of the language of Improv is this listening. Whether you're listening to the audience, yourself, your players, that you're playing with and all of these other techniques, which can build on that actually fall apart. If you can't get the listening part, right because you can't build on that. I'd obviously thought about that a little bit, but I hadn't put together how many aspects of that tie so many of those things together and actually tie so much of your work together. I think in quite a fruitful way. So I don't know if you agree with my version of a Phantom Lee there.

Lee Simpson (1:16:58): No, I like it. That does sound like it.

Ben Yeoh (1:16:58): Maybe that's probably one level slightly deeper than how most people think about, "Oh, you know, go and get a job or whatever". I do think there is something about that listening aspect, which seems to come through quite clearly.

Lee Simpson (1:17:15): I think you're right. I would not disown that Phantom Lee at all. I would perfectly, I would take credit for what, you have him say definitely. The thing that popped into my head as you were talking was, I guess the only other thing, and that's, I've done this by accident because I was forced into it. But I think it's like, have a think about what your identity is? By that I mean, who are you? Who you are not? What you do and what you don't do? Have a think about what the edges of you are. What are your expectations? Play consciously around those edges. Is it possible for you to go to a place where, whether that's in terms of your views, what do you read? What do you interact with? Who do you interact with? Who are your friends? Where have you been geographically? See what it's like to step outside that a little bit. Don't kind of suddenly jump out of an airplane, but there's no -- You don't. I'm not saying that it doesn't have to leap over the edge without any awareness, but really play and flirt and have a game of stepping into that place where you don't quite know what you're doing. As I talked about earlier, this is when we've done our best work with Improbable when we've kind of gone. Oh yeah. Okay then, okay. We don't quite know what we're doing and it reveals brilliant and beautiful things and it expands who you are. I think I was forced to do that because of where I came from geographically and socially or whatever. But if you'd said to me, before I did my first gig at the Comedy Store. If you'd said to me, do you want to do it? I just said, "No! I'm terrified! If I choose it, I have a choice around that. There's no way I'm going to do that!" But you kind of dare yourself to do it. 

Therefore, you do it and you're alive and you survive. When they asked me to be a member of the company's top players, I seriously thought about saying, “No, because I thought I can't be funny every week. I can't do that. That's not me. Then I went, ``I'll do it". So who, I was just stretched a little bit, just a tiny bit, just stressed a little bit, and then it opened up a whole other story, a whole other part of the world for you. So that, I guess that's another thing I would say, because the forces of the world, trying to keep you on the track, you're on trying to keep you in the space that you're in, trying to keep you as a person that they perceive you to be very, very strong. You have to, I think, take a conscious and deliberate step beyond that.

Ben Yeoh (1:19:28): Yeah. I think that's true that you have to take what you might view as a risk. Albeit not out of the plane, but just off the path. I see this in creative endeavours all the time where artistes or Theatre companies end up going for the safer bet. Actually, it's riskier to play it safe because that is not as creative or interesting to anyone, mostly yourself, but everyone else, therefore, watching to find that. Well, that has been an amazing conversation. So I will wrap up by just saying, "Thank you so very much, Lee".

Lee Simpson (1:20:13): Thank you for having me. I've had a blast. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner on existential risk, German Culture, Valedictorian efficiency | Podcast

I had an excellent chat with Leopold Aschenbrenner. Leopold is a grant winner from Tyler Cowen’s  Emergent Ventures. He went to Columbia University, aged 15, and graduated in 2021 as valedictorian. He is a researcher  at the Global Priorities Institute, thinking about long-termism. He has drafted a provocative paper encompassing ideas of long-termisim, existential risk and growth and blogs at forourposterity.

For some of our conversation we were joined by phantom Tyler Cowen imagining what he might think. 

We discussed Leopold’s critique of German culture and whether he’d swap German infrastructure for the American entrepreneurial spirit. 

Whether being a valedictorian is efficient, if going to University at 15 is underrated and life at Columbia University. 

What you can learn from speed solving Rubik’s cubes and if Leopold had to make the choice today if he’d still be vegetarian.

Thinking about existential risk, Leopold considers whether nuclear or biological warfare risk is a bigger threat than climate change and how growth matters and if the rate of growth matters as much depending on how long you think humanity survives. 

Considering possible under rated existential risk Leopold sketches out several concerns over the falling global birth rate, how sticky that might be and whether policy would be effective.

We consider what is worth seeing in Germany, how good or not GDP is as a measure and what we should do with our lives. 

Leopold has wide ranging thoughts and in thinking and working on fat tail existential ruin risks is working on saving the human world. Fascinating thoughts.

Listen below or wherever you listen to podcasts or watch the video (above or here on YouTube). 

• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

• Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh

• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

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Contents and lightly edited transcript below.

0:35 How to think about a future career (80000 hours)

3:10 is going to university at 15 years old  underrated?

5:22 In favour of college and liberal arts vs Thiel fellowships

8:14 Is being a valedictorian efficient (H/T Tyler Cowen)

12:01 Leopold on externalities and how to sort smart people

14:08 Learnings from Columbia. The importance of work ethic.

18:50 Leopold learning from Adam Tooze and German history

21:16 Leopold critiques German culture on standing out.

22:08 Observations on decline of German universities

24:22 Leopold concerns on the German leadership class

29:25 German infrastructure and if it feels poor

33:13 Critique of too much netflix

34:27 What to learn from speed cubing Rubik’s cubes and weird communities

37:04 Leopold’s story of Emergent Ventures and what he found valuable

39:08 Embracing weirdness and disagreeableness 

41:20  Leopold considering whether US entrepreneurial culture worth swapping for German infrastructure

43:44 Leopold on social ills of alcohol

43:59 Examining Leopold’s ideas of existential risk and growth

47:49 Different views depending on time frame:700 years or millions of years

51:18 Leopold’s view on importance of growth and risk of dark ages 

56:07 Climate as a real risk but not a top existential risk

1:00:02 Nuclear weapons as an underrated existential risk

1:00:45 View on emergent AI risk

1:02:20 Falling fertility as an underrated risk

1:14:35 Mormon and eternal family

1:16:29 Underrated/overrated with phantom Tyler Cowen

• biological warfare

• Inflation

• GDP as a measure 

• Berlin 

1:30:09 What to see in Berlin

1:32:22 Habits, simplicity and anti-moderation

1:35:10 What EA gets right/wrong, EA as religion?

1:43:56 Advice: Being independent, creative and writing blogs

Finding Meaning in life

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Leopold Aschenbrenner in conversation with Ben Yeoh

Ben Yeoh (0:04): I am super excited to talk to Leopold Aschenbrenner. Leopold is a grant winner from Tyler Cowen Emergent Ventures, and he went to Columbia University at age 15 and graduated this year as valedictorian. He is a researcher at the Global Priorities Institute, known for its Effective Altruism philosophy thinkers. He's already drafted a provocative paper and conferencing ideas of long termism existential risk and growth. And he blogs at for our posterity. Leopold, welcome. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (0:34): Hi, great to be here. 

Ben Yeoh (0:35): So how do you think you should assess what your future career should be? I went to Cambridge when I was 17. I finished the top of my year at 20. But I didn't really think deeply enough about what I should do but I actually sense that you have. So, how are you thinking about choosing a career, and did you use any Effective [Inaudible 00:54] thinking in terms of what you're thinking about your next steps? 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:01):  Yeah, I almost think perhaps it's a trap to over intellectualize it, but I definitely have over intellectualized it where you try to think very rigorously about what is it that I want to do, what is it that I want to achieve, what impact do I want to have on the world, what pathway can I best have this impact. And I think it's worth actually trying to think this through. Right. 80,000 hours is the length of your career, so this is really what you're spending a good chunk of your lifetime on. I think this is a valuable Effective Altruism idea. I think the downside of this is that by...you end up always questioning what you're doing because you're trying to do the most effective thing, or have the most impact or whatever, and that way can be almost self-undermined. So, I always think it might be valuable to at some point be like, "Okay this is what I'm doing," and then just have this total commitment to it. I think this is one way which in the Effective Altruism maybe is somewhat a defective religion, or it has these grand ideas of things we hope to achieve, and these are very motivated. But then it always encourages people that question and question and question and then because of the types of people who are attracted to Effective Altruism, they end up undermining their own purpose.

Ben Yeoh (2:29): Yeah, so if you end up thinking about what you're going to do for your 80,000 hours, for all 80,000 hours, you obviously end up doing nothing.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (2:38):  If you think about it too much, you end up maybe losing the motivation because you're really into something, working on it really hard, then you think about it some more and you're like, "Maybe this isn't the most effective," and then you lose the motivation. I think that this sort of motivation and drive and just pure commitment is actually very important to a career.

Ben Yeoh (2:57):  Have you committed to what you're doing for the next year yet? Or are you still in thinking more about it?

Leopold Aschenbrenner (3:01): Next year I'm working as a research fellow at Forethought, so I want to continue some of this work about thinking about the long term and so on. But in general, I've been pretty confused about my career.

Ben Yeoh (3:10): Sure. So, is going to university at 15 years old overrated, underrated, or just an experience that you would recommend or not?

Leopold Aschenbrenner (3:20): I think underrated, or specific types of people. I think people, or at least people I know for whom it would have been good, they tend to discount it, like skipping grades and so on. People look down upon or they think there are all sorts of social difficulties, and it's really not my experience. I mean it worked out great for me. There were no social difficulties or whatever people always talked about. In fact, I ended up being in a better social environment with older students. And especially if you skipped grades in high school, you save yourself a lot of time in which you're not learning anything you're not making any progress. So, for me it was very invigorating intellectually, socially, it was great. But I also think it's probably only a specific part of the population this is good for. Honestly, I think in an ideal world, I would have started even earlier. I think that I got to the skipping grades thing late, but I could have started at 14.

Ben Yeoh (4:31): I think that's fair. It might not suit everyone but for those who it suits, it's very unsuitable to be in a place where you're not learning anymore. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (4:40): Exactly. I think in the US it is a bit different because you have these incredible high schools. 

Ben Yeoh (4:45): Yeah. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (4:46): Some of these private high schools that people go to, or even some public high schools in New York, have these incredible courses, incredible peer groups. But for most people, high school is really a waste of time. And to the extent that especially high schools nowadays they take up all your time. It's not like half the day and then the other half you can do other things. It's just very inadequate. School in general is a very inadequate place to be and I think a lot of people [Inaudible 05:14] dead ends after being stuck in high school or in school for too long. So, I think it's good for people to get out.

Ben Yeoh (5:22): That leads me nicely into, do you think you're in favour of liberal arts education or university in general? because you had a critique about high school and I think if I think about my peers, I would say at least half and not maybe the majority didn't particularly enjoy high school which has to be some sort of critique. And I guess a thinker like Peter Thiel explicitly gives scholarships to people who don't go to university with a strand of thought that universities are too concerned with Credentialism and not learning. But I have the impression you gained a lot from your experience at Columbia and that there is something to liberal arts, particularly if you're going to be a curious generalist thinker, as opposed to, "I definitely know I want to be an architect or a doctor." What's your think about liberal arts and university in general? 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (6:08): I am very pro College, especially the US liberal arts college. One I think the actual liberal arts education is extremely valuable, so I very much appreciated this at Columbia. We have the core, maybe a third of the courses, and we read a bunch of classics and political philosophy and all sorts of things. And if I think back in terms of, what did I get the most out of from college, was it some very advanced math course? or was it one of these core courses? It probably was one of these core courses and in terms of properly being able to really think about the world. That's number one. Number two, I think the difference between college and at least most high schools is that you can take advanced courses. So, it's not like you're stuck doing...Whatever your favourite area of expertise is you can actually do the more advanced courses and I think this is a big difference. And I think the peer group effects can be very valuable. You have the selection and sorting of the lots of smart people who go to Columbia, and it's not just a random assortment. I think that is quite valuable. I think there's a big difference between a US elite university, and say, Germany with German universities. This is my alternative, I'm originally from Germany. They're mediocre, there's not great instruction, there's no sorting so they don't sort by [Inaudible:07:37] and it's also not liberal arts so it's one subject and there's very little choice. So that seems like another dynamic for people. 

In general, I really like for example, Tyler, his way of thinking. He knows about all sorts of areas, he's read deeply in many different areas, and I think that really helps him synthesize different, new ideas and be a very creative and generative thinker. I think that's what a liberal arts college can be good for. 

Ben Yeoh (8:14): Maybe that's a good segue also into a question that Tyler Cowen asked when I put a call out to what questions should we ask you, and he asked, is it efficient, to be a valedictorian?

Leopold Aschenbrenner (8:27): Probably not. I was thinking about this when I got the award in the sense that maybe it just means I spent too much time in school, past the point of optimal diminishing returns. I really, probably should have spent more time and effort doing research, even just like blogging or tweeting or whatever and that would have been more educational. Or just reading on my own would be more educational, more socially useful. And maybe more productive for terms of starting a career later. I think the argument you can make is something that there's an area of utility function that's non concave. Usually going from fourth to third in your class. Very, very little benefit, but going from, say fourth to first is a big benefit because you get this like title valedictorian, maybe they give you some benefits later on and so actually putting in that little bit of extra effort to be valedictorian is worth it. I think there's also the argument you can make that it's not really about the optimization problem but it's about the values or the habits you form. I think I'm a believer in values or habits of excellence. I Am deeply engaging with things and so part of developing these habits and naturally came doing well. I think the other way it's inefficient is perhaps something like the peer group sorting wasn't right. And you usually probably do best in terms of learning, and intellectual exchange when you're not either at the very top or the very bottom of your peer group, you want to be in the middle. And in that way, it would be inefficient. 

This brings me to another thing I've been thinking about which people are talking about the Ivy League, they should make them bigger. There's this argument, "Oh, we should make Harvard bigger so they should admit more people."  I think the opposite. I think we should make them smaller. So, if you think about Columbia there's just a very large variation in the individual ability of the students, and in fact you could probably pre-select for that at the time of admission. Columbia has the Scholars Program, which is maybe the top 10% of people upon admission. And those ended up also just being the smartest people throughout the time at Columbia. So maybe we should create a Columbia that's a 10th of the size. There're only the people that are admitted to the Scholars Program, and then there is actually an even better peer group which has all sorts of benefits in terms of these are the people you take classes with and so on.

Ben Yeoh (11:11): I think that there is a kind of argument for that because I think it's slightly the wrong question although it's the question from an economist mind because efficiency is maybe not the only goal in something like being a valedictorian. But where you would sort say, just that very top, 1% or 10% and to a different class. I think if they're going to make transformational ideas or changes that would work, but also part of what you said is that the top 10% can bring up the median or the mean. So, I don’t know whether it might be more important to bring out more mean or medium or say second quarter students or thinkers, so that they can look at the top decile, and improve or aspire. Or whether it's more important to solve that top decile for them to improve on this by the way, I wouldn't have an answer for that.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (12:01): I think it's really all about the externalities of the world. There are very large externalities in terms of empowering smart, talented people to really fully realize their potential. The new ideas they have, the inventions, the artistic creations.  I think it's actually quite important to realize this. I think, for example, in Germany. People are very on to this egalitarian thing. You can't have different educational institutions for people with higher abilities and so on because that would be unfair, and that's really denying the whole point, or a big part of the point, which is that you want to support talented people so they create these externalities for everybody else. And it's part of the reason why I think this sorting is valuable, the type that Ivy's already does, is when you put a lot of smart people together. Great things happen. They help each other learn and they accelerate their progress but then they have discussions and new ideas come together and think of all the companies that have come out of Harvard or whatever. So, to some extent it already works out where all the smartest people at Columbia find each other.  But I still think there would be benefits to just having an even smaller Colombia with only these people.

Ben Yeoh (13:15): I think this idea that if you look at successful inventions or patents, the originator, whether that's the company or a person maybe gets 5% of the value or 10% of the value, but the world gets 90% of the value. I'm often telling people...

Leopold Aschenbrenner (13:28): Bigger. If you think about social value of research, something like 98% of that is not captured by the inventor.

Ben Yeoh (13:36): It could be even bigger than that, and I still think that aspirin is going to go on for another 100 years creating value and you had a patent on it. Aspirin has a complicated history but for a very relatively short length of time [Inaudible: 13:51] pharmaceuticals. I guess reflecting on your Columbia experience was there anything very unexpected or very much expected from when you entered and left and go, "WOW. That wasn't what I thought it was going to be at all or that was exactly how I thought, American students would be."

Leopold Aschenbrenner (14:08): COVID was the main thing during the four years that was unexpected, but that's not very interesting. I think one of the things I was surprised by was the thing I was saying earlier about just the variation in the students. I think there's incredibly brilliant people who I met. People that are my friends now but there's also actually a surprising amount of people there who are pretty uninterested. They're doing the work because they think they need to get their college degree, elite college degree so they can get a good job or whatever. They're not intellectually, academically interested. They spend a lot of time watching Netflix. I don't know, that's not great. So, in terms of other things that sort of surprised me at the beginning is somewhat opposed to what I just said but I think one sort of culture shock initially coming from Germany was the American work ethic. So, in Germany, university means you're going out, five days a week and maybe you spend one day a week, on actually studying. And in general, despite some of the people who are less academically inclined, the overall work ethic was very high, and people were really putting their heart and soul on things. I think that was quite important for me to see and soak in, at even a young enough age where I could still change my habits or something like that. Working hard is very critical to everything. That was an interesting cultural difference.

Ben Yeoh (15:55): I agree with that conscientiousness part. So, my high school here in London, we had Saturday school for all my high school going through and because I did Sciences at Cambridge, we had to do experiments on the Saturday as well, whereas the guys doing humanities and you only do one thing at a British university. They would have one tutorial or a couple of classes a week and for four days they would really be doing nothing which was surprising. I guess my looking at US university, although maybe this is universities, overall, as I thought they had a very strange and maybe complicated but very strange relationship with alcohol. It wasn’t really healthy at all, and I still really ponder this, and maybe that was 18 or not or drinking and stuff and so it goes undercover but it generally didn’t feel very healthy for a lot of these 18, 19, 20, 21-year-olds. I guess it’s not legal to drink in the US until over 21.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (16:52): I think the people who indulge in that are the sort of type...I ended up not being this type of student that was associated with it. I think there are some unhealthy relationships or something but those generally tend to be the people who are less academically interested. They're there because they feel like they have to, they're not there because they really love it.

Ben Yeoh (17:13): So, you put them in the minority or at least...

Leopold Aschenbrenner (17:16): I don't know. They're probably not a minority, but there's like a lot of self-selections that go on over the four years at least if you're doing it right. And you end up associating with a very particular group of people or at least I ended up doing that and that was great for me. But it also doesn't mean I have a great pulse on what the median Columbia student was doing. So, for example the wokeness stuff that people complain about at campuses. I read about it too and all the things’ people say [Cross Talking]. But I didn't interact with it that much, so it was just my experience.

Ben Yeoh (17:53): You have strong ties to Germany, as does Adam too, and I think you took his course.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (17:58): I took his course, it was great.

Ben Yeoh (17:59): What do you think is most misunderstood about Germany and you can extend this to kind of Austria and Europe, if you have bigger thoughts which I think you do. Well, I would agree. I found this kind of German university...Actually, because they've got the technical university route where you can become a master carpenter or the equivalent, which we don't have in some places which I think is quite interesting. Yet at the same point in time, they have this egalitarian thing which means, the professorships can't sort well as you were saying, as a kind of interesting tension. But I don't have a long view of the history of Germany as you probably do or as Tooze does. So, I'd be interested in what you think is misunderstood and also what you learnt coming to America to learn from someone else about your home country.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (18:50): Well, this is funny. I think in some way, I must admit some of my previous ignorance here where I didn't really have a great sense of German history pre the 20th century. I think the main thing that I took away from the Tooze course is just the richness of German history. The rise of pressure from this total dead end, sort of a stand basket of Europe and how they became this Spartan state and then the unification of Germany under Bismarck. There's a real rich history there and it’s a lot of interesting things. I basically hadn't internalized this at all. So, I think you learn the very basic facts but it's surprising after going to German school for a long time. The main thing I learned about was Order 1, Order 2, the 20th century. I think it's funny, but it took me coming to America and to learn from [Tooze] to appreciate the longer view of German history. Suddenly it's also funny because the pre-World War Two Germany seems very different from the Germany that I know. I guess the Germany that I know I get some very negatives on it. How do I summarize, maybe the best way to say it is this? Every time you have an idea, they come to you with all the reasons it won't work and why it's a terrible idea, and why we should just be passive and never do anything, and very, very sclerotic very stagnant in that sense.

Ben Yeoh (20:31): You've commented, "I think that Germans seem to know more US politicians than German politicians themselves." What do you think of that?  I don't know German culture enough, but we have this expression of almost tall poppy syndrome, whether that's an idea or anything out. Several commentators, you might have mentioned it, I think Jeff Bezos has mentioned it, "Be a weirdo stand up, be individual think of ideas," and that doesn't do so well in a place which doesn't want to have any tall poppies. What do you think? Is that something to do with the political climate or is it just the culture which is built up post that Second World War? 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (21:16): It's worth emphasizing that tall poppy thing. It's really incredible the extent to which this is the case in Germany. They really, really, really hate anyone that deviates from the norm. This is just my constant experience in Germany which is why I had to leave because I did deviate from the norm. And they don't want to acknowledge, for example, that there's differences in talent and that some people are maybe smarter, they need a different form of education and that's completely anathema to their thinking. Or that we want entrepreneurs to create great companies or that we want inventors. This is really contrary to their type of thinking which is very unfortunate. 

Ben Yeoh (21:59): But I have the impression that many have an arts counterculture but maybe that's only in bits of Berlin or bits of Hamburg. So, is that not true?

Leopold Aschenbrenner (22:08): For a bit but not really. Not anymore. I think the perspective shift that I had to do this course is that it wasn't always this way. This is sort of a more recent thing and to some extent it's the cataclysms of the 20th century. Though I think it's interesting to think about when it actually shifted. Did it shift with the Second World War? So, if you think about German universities, for example, there were the premier universities at the end of the 19th century. And I think the naive model I used to have is that with the Second World War, this is when German universities started to decline, and American Universities became great. But this doesn't seem to be the case so there’s a bunch of data, and that was recently compiled by an economist at Columbia, Miguel Urquiola, but he recently wrote a book 'Markets, Minds and Money' about the rise of American universities. And the interesting thing in his data is you've looked at the decline of German universities that happened much earlier. Basically, it already happened at the beginning of the 20th, a very early 20th century. So, what the shift there is, it's not quite clear to me yet, but there seems to have been some sort of shift there that was earlier, and I mean I think his story about the rise of American universities that there's competition in American Universities, and the German universities reduced status. to be able to adapt, to rise to the importance of research.

Ben Yeoh (23:43): I see that there's been a similar critique of UK universities because really, it centres around Oxford and Cambridge. And, there’s some evidence that whether intentionally or not, Oxford and Cambridge have essentially suppressed all other university competitions in the UK for arguably selfish reasons but that is why you haven't got greater...

Leopold Aschenbrenner (24:05): But at least you have Oxford and Cambridge. We don't have an Oxford and Cambridge in Germany. We have nothing! It's a barren landscape, it's disastrous. This is bad because there's also...

Ben Yeoh (24:16): Well maybe that's your life purpose, you've got to go back and find one of these. Not a charter city, but a charter university.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (24:22): I've been seriously thinking about this, and I think this is one of the bad side effects of this, that there's no competent leadership class. There are no good journalists. All the German journalists are just terrible. 

Ben Yeoh (24:34): Although Merkel comes across as competent. Is it notable that she's the only German politician I know?

Leopold Aschenbrenner (24:40): I would question some of her competence. She really wrecked the Eurozone, for example. There's no good economist. You can criticize the extreme American focus on you're going to elite universities and the elite class that comes out of it. I don't deny that there's a downside. But having no competent, smart people who are leading your country, I think that's also pretty bad. Because it is true that Germany is a leadership role in the European Union and European Union still matters. So, in this total denial of leadership, I worry that this will have bad consequences for example if you think about the whole...

Ben Yeoh (25:34): And it's bad for the world right not just them. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (25:36): That's the thing. Think about the rivalry with China right now. If this ends up heating up more, I think it might end up being true that Europe plays a key role. If Europe ends up uniting with the United States that immediately doubles the economic output, the size of the economic bloc that's trying to get from China or something like that. But my impression of European leadership is that all they want to do is sharp back and not deal with it and go on living their comfortable lives. So, it doesn't sound great to me.

Ben Yeoh (26:10): Would your critique of Germany then extend to Austria, also other parts of Europe because I think at least in nominal GDP terms Germany is still richer than say the UK and France and even the Netherlands is richer than the UK. Although the UK has these interesting pockets where if you look at the -- Actually Oxford, Cambridge, London sort of hub triangle, it really bounces up the whole average of the UK...

Leopold Aschenbrenner (26:36): Germany still does quite well but this is another thing. Germany feels a lot poorer than the United States. I think it's also because I was in New York City and New York City is richer. But it's crazy. I think even Germany, which supposedly has the highest GDP per capita in Europe, feels a lot poorer than the US.

Ben Yeoh (27:00): Do you extend your critique to a lot of the Eurozone?

Leopold Aschenbrenner (27:05): Probably, I just don't know that much about them. Germany's the one in which I would know very well.

Ben Yeoh (27:13): Staying in Europe for one touch longer. It would just be hopping over to Switzerland, which does seem a little bit different. Is there something that they got right?

Leopold Aschenbrenner (27:22): [] Yes, Switzerland seems different in culture in some ways. They seem less anti elite. Much more conservative politically but also in a general outlook on things.

Ben Yeoh (27:44): So, it's not a system of the kind of federated central government, tension or not it's more of a cultural issue on tall poppy...

Leopold Aschenbrenner (27:55): I think it's massively cultural. It extends across the political spectrum and extends across different spheres of politics or journalism or universities. I think it's very much cultural.

Ben Yeoh (28:09): You seem quite interested in geopolitics, geoeconomics. Do you have a view of Japan then? 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (28:18): Not really, No. I don't know enough about Japan.

Ben Yeoh (28:19): Alright, we'll skip that one then. Maybe if you'd go back, if you had more time, you could have done a core course in Japan to add to your body of knowledge. I'm not that familiar with it as well, but I think it's very interesting that I think Patrick Collison had one of these as one of his ongoing questions. Why I mentioned it is that he views that built infrastructure/culture/a lot of institutions in both Switzerland and Japan are so much better countrywide than in so many other countries. And so, I would say this interestingly if you want to do this travel trip. I would agree if you travelled and train across Germany as I've done, you will look at the weather or you said that there's some bits which strike, maybe it's rural but actually quite cool, like not that rich. Whereas do you don't get that same sense in Switzerland, or Japan? There are some poor parts of Japan but you go around and a lot of it seems really rather well done. And he comments that he doesn't quite know why this is the case, and their cultures are quite different, so there might be something. It was an unanswered question, that's why I threw it out there in case you might have some radical insight. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (29:25): I think you could say the same thing about Germany. People do idealize it like the trains are nice in Germany, like the ICEs. You ride them and there's no wobble or anything at 200 miles an hour. And a lot of the infrastructure is good. The towns are pretty, the whole medieval style towns. In some way I think this can be delusive though because it's just another symptom of this decadence or however you want to call it where you want to make this life as comfortable and as nice as you can without actually having grander ambitions about creating something. In some ways, you know, the United States is not as pretty. You drive around the northeast quarter and it's pretty ugly, crumbling infrastructure but it's harsher. In some ways this harshness is part of what it's about. And if we made things too nice. If it was all just fun and games, then you would lose some of that energetic spirit.  And this thing I mentioned about Germany being poor. Yes, some towns and so on are poor, but you don't have the same high incomes that you do in the United States. So, if you're a professional in the US, you'll earn pretty high incomes here, this is just not very unfamiliar in Germany. Like the starting salaries, a lot of people out of Colombia are much higher than anyone I ever knew in Germany.

Ben Yeoh (30:55): Well, I think you've got a lot of family's monies. Some of it is connected to family companies [Inaudible: 31:02].

Leopold Aschenbrenner (31:03): If you look at German billionaires, they all have inherited wealth, where the US billionaires which they... [Inaudible:31:09].

Ben Yeoh (31:10): Maybe that's partly VC software and things but it's not only. Some of them are more the industry, or the knowledge industry. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (31:16): A lot of them are. This is a big difference. It's actually a good stat, where did billionaires get their money.

Ben Yeoh (31:24): Yeah. Did they inherit? So, I do wonder whether that is a German problem. And then it’s actually interesting that you are so interested in egalitarianism. But wouldn't want to do an inheritance tax where you give all of that money away to something else to start again, or something like that. I don't view them as that [Inaudible: 31:40]. So, you mentioned that we watch too much Netflix. Is this just a US Columbia student problem? A median student problem? Or is this a broader phenomenon that you think?

Leopold Aschenbrenner (31:55): It's probably a broader phenomenon. It's probably like loss of meaning in the modern world, not just some people but for a lot of people. You have food on the table, and you have a house over your head and things rumble along, and they should have no existential threat to you and so what is it that you have no more religion? You say there's no god you're worship so what is it about. But I think that's the reason I focused on this Columbia type or elite type populations because you're getting externality. This sort of people ends up just watching Netflix then when you could have been using this time to be doing great things.

Ben Yeoh (32:46): Yeah, opportunity costs. Do you think the counter argument would be that of a Luddite fallacy? We said the same about newspapers, we said the same about printing them with the internet. But I think your point would be that there's an addictive quality that is, you might have autonomy when you make the choice to do it, but a little bit like smoking, once you're addicted you've actually lost your autonomy. So, in that way it's more insidious, is that your further argument or is now...

Leopold Aschenbrenner (33:13): I think in general, I’m pretty negative on most of the classic vices, like alcohol or drugs, smoking, or maybe Netflix. And I think most of the time you get some self-regulation where it is looked down upon and then people look down upon taking hard drugs, and socially it ends up working out where people don't do it. Or playing too many video games is looked down upon. But it's kept in check whereas I feel like Netflix has been in a weird way normalized, where it's okay, to spend all your time watching Netflix. 

Ben Yeoh (33:49): Is it a problem of Netflix programs being too good? If they're a little bit brass...

Leopold Aschenbrenner (33:53): I think it's very addictive. I think people are very bad at dealing with addictions. Whether that be Netflix. whether that be drugs, whether that be gambling, like now with Bitcoin and Robin Hood or whatever. I think there's actually a quite negative development, for example with marijuana and so on, people are embracing that 'anything goes' philosophy where it's cynical about human nature. No, people can't handle this. 

Ben Yeoh (34:23): The downside of libertarianism

Leopold Aschenbrenner (34:25): And so, you [Inaudible: 34:25] constrain them or something. 

Ben Yeoh (34:27): Have you watched the documentary, Speed Cubers? What do you think I could learn from cubing?

Leopold Aschenbrenner (34:35): I used to be very into Rubik's Cubes, this is how I met my best friend. He solved the Rubik's Cube World Record back when I was quite a bit younger. I used to be into Rubik's cubes. I had a YouTube channel, and it wasn't that fast but it's pretty good. It was maybe the 60th in Germany. I never got into competitions. I don't know what you get out of it.

Ben Yeoh (35:08): So, you memorize all these algorithms of pattern recognition so that you can insert it.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (35:12): There's basically three layers. The third layer you do with algorithms, the first two you do by thinking about it. It was a fun spatial exercise. like one course I really liked at Columbia was topology, which is very abstractly thinking about space and geometry. In some ways that applied very similar skills like spatially visualizing how you're turning things. I think the other thing about cubing was at the time, there was a good community of people that I didn't have otherwise. It was one of the first things that turned me on to weird Internet communities. 

Ben Yeoh (35:53):  And it's a weird elite sport, right?

Leopold Aschenbrenner (35:55): Exactly and I think weird Internet communities can be very valuable. Now I'm in another weird internet community, which is The Extended [Inaudible:36:02] Universe on Twitter.  I've met a lot of people through that or through emergent ventures. I think that can be very valid but first, inculcating a certain sense of weirdness and difference in you and giving you a broad space of opportunities. I think that's great.

Ben Yeoh (36:25): Sure, well maybe as you mentioned emergent ventures. I get the impression that it was meaningful for you to be able to go at 15 to Columbia and then without it would have been a little bit tricky, and I run a small micro grant thing as well. I'm not as famous as Tyler, but I think it is really interesting that we don't support more individual people, particularly those who might have quirky brilliance, or maybe they're just quirky because you're young and uncertain. Who knows quite how brilliant people will be? So, I wonder whether you'd reflect on funding individual people or the idea of emergent ventures and what you got out of it.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (37:04): Can I tell the story of how the emergent ventures grants happened?

Ben Yeoh (37:08): Sure, please do it. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (37:10): This is great. It also speaks to the unbureaucratic nature of it. A year and a half ago almost 2 years ago. I had written this paper of existential risk and growth and Tyler came upon it and he really liked it and he posted it on his website. So, he said "If you know Leopold, tell him to drop me a line. So, I wrote to him. We were emailing and this is maybe Wednesday or Tuesday, he goes, “Can you come down to Washington DC today we have a conference."  So completely out of the blue. 

Ben Yeoh (37:45): And you were in Germany at the time?

Leopold Aschenbrenner (37:47): No, I was in New York.

Ben Yeoh (37:48): You weren't, okay.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (37:49): Then I came down there. I arrived and he goes "Yeah, so this is the conference for all the emergent ventures granters. To make it fair. We must give you an Emergent Ventures grant too. Think about what you can use this [ ] It was great because it's just out of the blue, very quick and I think almost the most valuable thing I got out of emergent Ventures is meeting all the people at the conference, but then also, most of all, the past year or two, getting to know the community of people online. And because it's a lot of brilliant driven but also perhaps most importantly very quirky people who are trying to create things, but not on the standard career path. I think otherwise you're at Columbia and people are doing a very narrow set of career paths. And I think it's easy to get stuck into one of those dead ends. I'm in the Bay now so I'm actually meeting...this is part of the grant so I can come to the Bay. Now I'm here and I'm actually able to meet a lot of these people in person. And that's been really fantastic. It's a great community.

Ben Yeoh (38:58): I'd say this, your social capital is building up so maybe it was very efficient, to be valedictorian, so you could do that, and you've got all of this building up on the side.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (39:08): Social capital, inspiration, the combustion of ideas. There's a lot of ideas that I think are floating around in space and that can’t read a book about them, but people talk about them.  By osmosis it really shifts your worldview. I think this is here, where it comes in, that it's quite good that I was at Columbia and was doing this quite early because there's still a lot of plasticity and I'm not quite set in my ways yet. And so, for example, coming from Germany, one thing I learned was the work ethic, the discipline. The other thing was really embracing the weirdness and the disagreeableness. Where in Germany it was always about no you should be like everybody else.

Ben Yeoh (39:57): Great I can see that. So maybe picking up on a couple of other things that I've seen that you've done. Do you think subway funding needs to be radically changed? And now that you've been in California a little bit, what do you think you should do about California transport? Is it tunnels under the earth or could a radical different way of funding public transport just change it and they just need to be more radical in their thinking?

Leopold Aschenbrenner (40:24): I think what you're referring to is a thing I did in my freshman year of college. I wrote a proposal for changing the funding system. I think in hindsight, this was a very bad proposal now that I think about it. So, I don't actually have any good ideas for fixing subways, I'm sorry about that. But it's actually funny. I only really encountered economics at the end of my freshman year in college. And this is probably from taking Intro Ecom. It was one of the most world changing courses. Just this way of thinking. And I really encountered it quite late, but it also very much shifted my opinions on other things. It's a very powerful framework to think about, like, what are the incentives? Supply and Demand, and those kinds of things. 

Ben Yeoh (41:10): So sadly, no ideas for fixing US infrastructure. Because I do think they could unlock a lot if they somehow pursued that

Leopold Aschenbrenner (41:16): I think it's overrated. I don't think it matters that much.

Ben Yeoh (41:18): Right, it's the people more than the infrastructure.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (41:20): The benefits of better infrastructure like proper roads are small. I think they matter a lot for quality of life maybe. There's this thing I mentioned about " German towns are pretty or you have great subway systems." I think it irks a lot of people aesthetically. In the grand scheme of things.

Ben Yeoh (41:50): If you put American culture, with German infrastructure you don't actually get that much better thing out of it? 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (41:55): Suppose you had perfect German infrastructure in the United States, then you have infrastructure. It improves the quality of life, but this is not what it's about. 

Ben Yeoh (41:56): It doesn't help to generate transformation.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (41:57): No, the whole point is the things that are advanced or that are important in the long term. And in fact, again, I think there's some value to having things be even harsher because if you make the quality of life too good, you make things too hedonistic then people will spend their 20s going out and hanging out. 

Ben Yeoh (42:15): Watching too much Netflix. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (42:16): Watching too much Netflix. The Berlin version of this is going clubbing every day. I want people to be generative and have ideas and work hard and build a great civilization.

Ben Yeoh (42:31): I was taken back a little bit about the Berlin night club culture. I went to Germany, Berlin, when I was about 14. Reading my age, this is almost 30 years ago, and they let you into nightclubs at 14 there and this is a whole thing. I remember everyone was screaming, drinking these things which are translated as green forest. So, there were these people, and I was going, "Is this really what teenage German kids do?" I don't know but it did seem to be definitely a thing.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (43:03): This is also the other thing. Americans have a lot of weird preconceptions about Europe. Very glorified where my responses were always "You only think it's great if you're earning an American income and then you're traveling to Europe." One of the things that's glorified is the drinking culture. Americans like to binge drink less than Europeans, they start later. My experience in Germany was that people start drinking very early. They drink a lot and it's not that great.

Ben Yeoh (43:28): There's also an interesting study that is done by drinks companies that show there are these moments of drink.  A lot of people drink sorrow, which is not a healthy way of drinking as opposed to, say, for joy, or something like that. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (43:44): In general, alcohol is one of the great underrated social ills of our society. A lot of people die from it. It ruins a lot of lives. Tyler is a big thing on this, but I think he's right about it.

Ben Yeoh (43:59): So, we mentioned long termism so we should talk about your paper which goes to lead to emergent ventures and everything. If I get in a non-technical sense of what you're suggesting is that, while there are some existential risks people talk about such as emergent AI, there are pandemics, there's climate change. Nuclear weapons would be the big one. And for a time because we're innovating and we're creating these new things, new technologies. That existential risk of us deleting human life might go up, but then at some point it might steadily fall because these new technologies, let's extend nuclear, that we had some clean energy, cheap energy source. Would then mean that our existential risk goes down, and therefore our imperative should be on growth, and certainly not degrowth and certainly not all these other things and that would be a follow up on to your thing that quality of life is okay and let's have German infrastructure in America. But if we're not innovating our way away from this existential risk curve, then we're going to fail as a human species. Do I have that thesis right? Would you like to add anything to that? and [Cross talking: 45:09], which I don't quite fully get but how are you evolving your thinking here.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (45:17): The idea of this curve is that you're developing new technologies and new technologies can be risky, think of nuclear weapons or maybe we're bioengineering and that's maybe going to cause a pandemic. Very relevant nowadays. And so, some of these technologies might even be so bad or the risk might be so bad that it could wipe out all of humanity. The question is, how does growth affect that? So, you can imagine a world in which growth, McGregor makes it worse because he developed these technologies, and the underlying mechanism of what's happening in the paper, is that as people grow richer, they care more about safety because they care more about life.  You grow richer, you have your basic material needs satisfied and things like preserving health, avoiding risks, this becomes more important. People invest in safety technology, so you might invest in mRNA vaccine and pandemic preparedness and that means you can counter pandemics. So hopefully that will be enough so we can bend the risk curve, and ultimately risk and follow zero exponentially.

Now this is a moderate parameter world. There are also two other worlds. There's one world in which the world is really robust. It's not very fragile at all, in which case we would never expect the risks to rise because we always get this downward directory. It doesn't really look to be the world we're in because we are inventing new dangerous technologies that do look like risk is growing.  Then there's another world which is worlds away, sickly in which existential risk is inevitable. There's no way to prevent that even if we put all our society's efforts into it. The danger of nuclear war is so high, or the craziest person who gets access to nuclear weapons and maybe nuclear weapons are eventually $10,000 because we're improving technology, and then there's no way to prevent it. And so, we're going to go extinct anyway. That would be sad and it's actually quite possible we live in that world, but then you have to do the expected value calculations where on a world in which we go extinct anyway, there's not a long future and there's not that much potential human value. Whereas in a world in which we don't and there's a possibility of us not going extinct. That's a world in which we have a very long run potential future, a lot of potential. That's where most of the expected value of the future comes from. I think functionally it makes sense to act as if we're in that medium world.

Ben Yeoh (47:49): Does it make a difference, your timeframe? Let's use Tyler because he's said, maybe we've got a few 100 years to a few thousand years? Like 700 to 3000 years before we faced this existential threat. Whereas if you've got a million, not quite stretching out to infinity. Even if we're still only growing up to 2 or 3%, or even if it goes down to 1.  1% compounded by a million is a really, really large number, with some of these things on growth. So, is there a time set difference?

Leopold Aschenbrenner (48:24): A bunch of thoughts on this. First, Tyler's 700-year timeframe. It's quite funny in a way, this actually bothers me a bit. I'm not quite sure what's funny about this. Tyler is basically arguing that we live in a very fragile world in which existential risks aren't habitable. So, this argument is something nuclear weapons are going to get cheap because of better technology and so eventually they're going to be close to $10,000. There's going to be something like a crazy terrorist attack, or something crazy enough that they're going to destroy the world with this. You think this is basically [Inaudible: 48:59]. This is a plausible world in my paper. this sort of fragile world. But in that world, it's not actually clear if growth is good because in that world the reason that growth is inevitable is because of this better technology that is riskier. Therefore, the better nuclear weapons. That world might want a slow growth so that we can reduce risk and so have longer timeframes. Instead of 700 years, we have 1500 years. I don't actually think Tyler's growth argument is necessarily true in the short time horizon. 

Now I don't think it also makes sense to focus on the short time horizon because I think it is plausible enough that we can contain the threat of WMBs and in general the risk with safety technology. Maybe it means having radiation monitors on every street corner and then we can counter the $10,000 nukes. If you think the moderately fragile world is possible in which existential risk is not inevitable, a very long-time span is possible. Most of the potential value of the future is in that world. And you mentioned growth compounding. If you think about long timescales, this is potentially the idea of long termism. Humanities existed for modern humans for a million years. But really if you think about that, we could have millions and millions of years ahead of us, maybe a billion years of human civilization. Most potential people to ever exist or in the future. And so, one argument is that the most important thing if we care about the future [Inaudible: 50:39], is that we must avoid extinction. That's an existential risk. If we go extinct now, we foreclose this whole potential future. Another argument you can make, this can be a Tyler counter argument you can make based on the zero-source discount rate, is that we should be growing as quickly as we can because of its compounding value of growth. But then the key question becomes how these interact, and that is the goal of what I'm trying to think about in the paper.

Ben Yeoh (51:12): And where do you currently sit between those views as it's evolving?

Leopold Aschenbrenner (51:18): On the growth, I think I'm not as persuaded that the exact rate of growth is the most important thing we should be focusing on. Say we grow for 100 years and grow at 2% instead of 1%. That means a delay. That means colonizing the universe is delayed by some amount of time because we grew slower. The lost value of that delay is dwarfed by the lost value of if we went extinct. We didn't only lose 100 years of delay but also all the millions of years of potential future in human civilization. I'm less concerned about it. I think on the margin, should growth be a little bit faster? Should growth be a little bit slower? The effect on risk really matters. And I'll get back to the effect of risk in a bit. The one thing I am concerned about is what if we don't just slow growth, but we go all the way to zero, similar to a Dark Ages scenario. I've been thinking about this a lot quite recently and I think this is actually quite a realistic worry. 

There is a realistic worry where the Dark Ages shows that something like this is possible. I think that especially, now that people are very rich already. They have pretty high levels of material comfort so there's less incentive to escape. Then there's a few specific mechanisms that I think point to this potentially happening. I think the most important one is declining fertility rates and I'll get to that in a second. In terms of what's the effect on the rest. There's my paper which argues that faster growth is better because we're growing richer earlier, which means we can care more about risk earlier, which means you invest more in safety earlier, which means we should bend this risk curve earlier. I think there's a few good counter arguments to that. One of the counter arguments is, what matters is transition risk. So rather than a certain level of technological development corresponding to a certain level of risk. A relevant risk is something like AI. We live in a world pre-AI and then suddenly AI determines the future of human civilization. There should be a one-time transition and we want to make this transition go well. I think if you believe something like that, we probably want slower growth so we can make this transition go better. It might happen a bit later when we're a bit wiser. 

Something else you could argue is, what matters is political coordination. Political coordination happens at a different timescale than economic time. If you make economic changes go faster then political coordination can't keep up and we won't be able to do the relevant regulations. I think on the margin, I'm probably a bit more convinced by the case of my paper which shows the story of why you want to develop safety technologies. If you think about the pandemic, the way we ultimately conquered it is the mRNA vaccines for better technology rather than like political intervention social distancing. But I think it's still a very, very open question, and I wouldn't be surprised if it went either way.

Ben Yeoh (54:38): Great. Maybe I might ask you that and then the context of climate change. So, I guess two or three points of observation. Someone like Nassim Taleb would comment on climate change being a potential ruin risk. So that's why he's worried because it's an existential threat, multiplicative as well. Again, because there's so many parts of our current economy, which are hard to abate, we're going to need a lot of innovation, probably to combat some of what's happening with climate change. You've also got the problem with whatever it is, there's about a billion people in the world today who are living on less than $2 a day. So, we need growth obviously to bring those up. Then you have all the degrowth arguments about if there are issues on transition or planetary boundaries, or either disorderly transition from late policy change or late technological change or transition risk because something happens to an ice shelf. 

But we don't really have a good understanding of complex systems which could have an upside so it might not be as risky as we are today, but it could have real downsides because we're not able to cope with that. Is this a way where you can think of resolving some of the degrowth arguments with the growth arguments that we need? And does this argue for a certain amount of growth, whether we should be doing more, or at a steady pace, or how? I guess this intersects with both the political, the economic and the technology. I'm sure you've thought about it, I'd be interested in your view.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (56:07): I just don't think climate changes are anywhere close to the most important risks. I agree with...you mentioned you attributed this to Tom but [Inaudible: 56:17] there's a bunch of work on this, and I think perhaps the most important worry about climate change are the tail scenarios, maybe there's feedback loops that are unexplained. I think one thing that worries me here is that we still don't seem to have reduced the uncertainty on this much like the last few decades. There's a lot of uncertainty over the climate sensitivity like sensitivity of temperature to increase the carbon concentration. There's potentially a fat tail there and that can go really wrong. The median scenario of climate change is not that bad, or it's bad if it's a few percentage points of GDP. It's a lot of disruption but it's similar to say pandemics or something like that. 

Ben Yeoh (56:58): We can adapt. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (57:02): We can adapt because it's a big deal but it's not existential. I think the real existential threat comes from tail scenarios. I think based on what people have looked at when they thought about the probabilities, it seems like the tail on climate change probabilities where the risks that this is an existential risk that wipes out the human race is much smaller than the rest that say, the bioengineering pandemic or a nuclear war. People are not thinking about nuclear enough, but a nuclear war can still happen very, very easily. Things like AI can lead to wiping out humanity.  Climate change is still an important thing, but I think it's roughly on the order of national pandemics, bioengineering pandemics. Just as we should be doing a lot more pandemic preparedness, I think we should be doing a lot more climate change. So really this is likely to be on the margins. I think the other thing I'll say is that climate change maybe it's too far to say it's solved, but it seems to be solved like other people are on it. right the reason I'm not personally inclined to work on it is that everyone else is thinking already.

Ben Yeoh (58:10): It's not an unknown risk or a little-known risk.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (58:15): Elon Musk is solving it. He's developing his technologies and then you will have everyone in your office or whatever and all the young people in the US are very politically engaged about it. Is there a chance that things like this happen in sub optimally that were too slow? Yes. Do I think we're going to solve it also? Yes. And I think also that a pretty good insurance mechanism with climate change is carbon capture. So, if things get bad.  we can technically do carbon capture.

Ben Yeoh (58:45): It would cost us a lot...

Leopold Aschenbrenner (58:48): It would cost us a lot but there's an insurance mechanism there. Whereas, if you had a nuclear war. There's not a similar insurance mechanism.

Ben Yeoh (58:59): I get that. So, it's a top 10 risk or top 5 risk maybe even, but it's probably not a top 3 risk, or to your point, it's just not undiscovered or not... The risk of going to the dark ages from it quite de minimis as you were talking.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (59:16): I think it's still a real risk. I think it's worth worrying about. I just don't think it's the most tractable for a young person. They're starting their career and there's enough other people working on it. So, let's figure out something that maybe, I would even say the same thing about pandemics. I think two years ago pandemics was a big thing. I was worried about the people who were working at institutes. If you ask me, should you work on pandemic preparedness now, I don't know.  This seems like other people are going to cover this now after COVID.

Ben Yeoh (59:46): So, what are your top three? I guess it's nuclear. Is it emergent AI or bio-engineered pandemics? Are those your three which would worry you? Or the whole system, like you say that the system is not set up for either innovation or growth or policy thinking around this.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:00:02): I think nuclear is very underrated. There's actually a great book by Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers guy. He was the nuclear war planner, and he recently released a book about Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. I think nuclear is underrated. I think partially the reason I'm very attuned to this is I feel proof from family history, I'm still very rooted in the Cold War or something like that. I think nuclear is underrated. I also think what is underrated is...

Ben Yeoh (1:00:27): Even in Pakistan. I don't quite know the ideal improbabilities in markets all the time. It seems to me nonzero and probably above 1% of a chance of having it. Which seems ridiculously large for an existential risk. That's probably not quite an existential risk but...

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:00:43): It's potentially really bad.

Ben Yeoh (1:00:45): But it puts quite a significant...

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:00:45): There's a lot of uncertainty over what nuclear winter would look like. I think emergent AI is underrated by society at large but is probably overrated by the types of people I talked to. 

Ben Yeoh (1:00:58): Overrated by Silicon Valley 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:00:59): I don’t know, even Silicon Valley but the EA people who are concerned about AI. I think my view on AI analysis is by short timelines like a GPT-3 style language model that's human level. I think that's plausible to come in 5-10 years. I just don't think that will be the sci fi AI that people are very stuck on.  I think the more realistic scenario is this is a human level language model. Computers have always been able to deal with numbers well. Now they can deal with language as well and assist with drafting reports or...

Ben Yeoh (1:01:44): Customer service. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:01:47):  I think it'll be very transformative. Maybe on the scale of the internet. The internet changed everything, and this is going to change everything. But I don't think it will be a fundamentally discontinuous shift in human civilization, where economic growth is suddenly 20% a year. People have these crazy ideas. That said, I'm very uncertain about this. I believe that AI could go lots of different ways. And so given this uncertainty, I think it's still a top thing to worry about.

Ben Yeoh (1:02:13): [Inaudible: 01:02:13] not raising the existential risk probably, did it? Internet. So, you could say, AI probably would not, although maybe [Inaudible: 1:02:19]

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:02:20): I think the issue is the uncertainty over what it looks like. I think the median scenario is something like the human level language models. It's not even just the existential risks, it's just much less transformative than people think. It'll just be through the next set of tools that people have. But again, I want to emphasize the uncertainty, I think the uncertainty here is very long and developing very rapidly. It is possible we just have human level intelligence and the superhuman level of intelligence.  The other thing that I think is very underrated, and I sort of hinted at this earlier, but I'd like to talk about it, is the shift in birth rates. So, all around the world birth rates are plummeting. They've been below 2, which is the replacement level, 2 per woman. In Western Europe for a long time and now they're in America. They've been below 2 in the Pacific. Essentially, the only place in the world where they're almost at two is in India, I think they're around 2, in South America, Latin America. The only place in the world where they're still substantially above two is Africa. But I think as Africa develops, as they get urbanized, they get educated, they're very likely to follow the pace that all the other countries in the world have done which is why the fertility rates are plummeting. They are plummeting, and they'll eventually fall below 2. So, I think within a few decades, maybe sooner, and we already are already facing this within the developed world. We have a situation where having less than two children per woman will lead to having a population decline. This is a dramatic shift from any time in the past, where we've had an exponentially growing population. 

I think this is a really underrated shift in the sense that once you have the shift, I think it gets locked in, in some way. If you think about people who were an only child, most of them also only want to have one child, maybe two children, but they're not thinking about having four children. Whereas people who come from families with four children, five children. They themselves also want to have a lot of kids. So, in some way these fertility preferences are very dependent on the size of family you came from. So, we have this shift where we end up shifting to lower fertility rates. I think it's a puzzle that we stay at those fertility rates. So, why is this bad that we have a population of climb or a steadying population. I think the most worrying thing here and there's great paper by Chad Jones about this, is the relationship to economic growth. So, in the Semi Endogenous Growth Models, which I think are the best growth models we have in economics, as you economically develop such as developing technology, ideas become harder to find and your ideas are exponential improvement. So, you pluck the low hanging fruit, you've invented the wheel, the next invention becomes a bit harder. And so, the way to compensate is that you must throw more and more people at it. This is a Nick Bloom paper; ideas are getting harder to find. It's the same idea as the original Chad Jones paper that was worked on from the 1990s. If you see this from the macro level, US economic growth has been steady, but we now have multiple times more people working on R&D. If you see this at the micro level, think about Moore's Law, chips are improving at a steady rate, but we must throw more and more people at it, 10x or more the amount of research at it to sustain because ideas are getting harder to find.

The flipside is if you stop growing the number of researchers, eventually we would have economic stagnation because ideas are getting harder to find. And so, the only way to sustain exponential growth is to keep growing the population. That's what we've had in the past. But once we get below 2 replacement fertility levels, you don't get a growing population anymore and then the result is what Chad Jones calls 'Empty Planet'.  You have a dwindling population due to the negative fertility and you have economic stagnation. And so that seems like a really depressing future. The future I want is what Chad Jones calls an 'Expanding Cosmos’. We have a growing population, growing economic output then we colonize the universe. I'm pretty worried about what it means to shift to this population declining world.

Ben Yeoh (1:06:39): Sure. So, I guess most countries so far when they tried policies to increase the birth-rate, I don't think any single one of them has worked from what I can tell. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:06:50): I wouldn't say they haven't worked, it's just that the effects are pretty small.

Ben Yeoh (1:06:54): Okay, small effects. But I would say they haven't worked because they haven't been enough to get it above back over 2. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:06:59): Sure.

Ben Yeoh (1:07:01): But I wonder if this becomes a more pronounced effect whether we will do more. So, I think you had an idea, whether you blogged about it or wrote a short paper about using child benefits as an upfront payment. I think if you were to give some populations $20,000, 30, 40, $50,000 to set them up at the start, you might get some sort of...We haven't had the margin thought about it as much yet. So, I do agree that it's an increasing problem, but I do wonder, not necessarily that we have an insurance mechanism, but we do have more, not even that much more extreme policies that we haven't really thrown at it yet because Policymakers haven't quite got their head around it. But you're right, it's definitely underappreciated...

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:07:48): I have a few thoughts on this. It's a good point. So, first, I agree that I think we need to get much more ambitious and in our thinking about this. Right now, we're still in this weird liminal space where for example, Biden passes child tax credit, and some people have these explicitly perinatal rationales for it.  But generally, it has a kind of hidden purpose that people don't want to talk about whereas I'm like "No, you need to talk about."  Hand families a big check like the ones that they have on prize shows when they walk out the delivery room. "Here's $50,000, Thank you for having a child." And you can justify this in very sober economics terms, which is that children have an externality, and in these economic growth models, an additional person is an additional person with ideas. The ideas they generate drive economic growth. So, you could think about this with the sober term 'externality’, but I think that you want to be more ambitious about it. 

Will that work, I don't know, I think really the big thing that is happening is the value shift, which is that becoming secular, educated and urbanized, so children are taught to do things because God wants you to, or you do it because it's economically important. You do it for your own hedonistic enjoyment, and the fact of the matter is people don't know that maybe they want to have one kid for their own hedonistic enjoyment. Once you think your kids are hedonistic enjoyment, you're not going to have a lot of kids. So, the thing I worry about is, I agree if we really went big now, maybe we can solve it. And I think this is one reason to really work on it now when you think about this. The reason I’m worried is if we don't do it now, we end up getting locked in. This is the thing I mentioned earlier, I think there's a lot of fertility preferences that surpass 'dependent', depending on what your parents had, what you're used to, what your culture is surrounded by. Once we have this culture where everyone is only having 1.3 children on average, then that becomes pretty embedded, and I think it becomes much harder to shift upwards again. [Inaudible: 1:09:53] This is on the Chad Jones paper, and I don't know if I'll be able to explain it in a way that makes sense, but there's a funny lock-in mechanism which is, if you have enough population decline, even like a social planner. If you delay implementing your fertility policies long enough, then optimal policy becomes not doing fertility subsidies and letting the population decline. The reason is once you have a dwindling population the per person effort to do research for the next increment of economic growth is high because you have less people. And so eventually the effort of additional growth becomes too high and becomes not worth anymore. This is...sorry I'm bad at explaining this, but the general idea is if you wait too long, you could become locked in. I think the more colloquial version of this is the [Inaudible: 1:10:52]. You have a really aging population, if it becomes too old and you only have a few children for too long, you end up in this very stagnant equilibrium.

Ben Yeoh (1:11:03): Yeah, one way path dependent like a one-way street, or one of those one-way locks that you can get through and then you suddenly can't come back, I think that's right.  I have a semi radical, it's not that radical at all policy thinking about this which solves two of the things that I'm thinking about that you've talked about is, I think you should do a carbon tax, and you should simply give all of that tax money back to people who have children. So, you're almost revenue neutral, but you just do redistribution. But the carbon tax is really a pricing signal because I don't actually think the tax amount is as important as knowing what externality is, and then actually you give it back. Then you have a slightly progressive thing because, typically, I think you might correct me if I'm wrong because I don't know as well. Socio-economically, you tend to have more children, or maybe if you are slightly poorer you can have this child benefit and it will affect you more. So, you just use that as your carbon dividend and have it as an almost universal benefit. It could be universal, and everyone can grow. That could be potentially a relatively popular policy because typically with the tax you don't see it but you're saying [Inaudible: 1:12:14], we'll give it to everyone, just have a child now.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:12:17): That sounds like a neat idea. I don't know what the sort of political manoeuvrings are. It seems, especially in the US, there’s always complicated deals that need to be worked out depending on what the different constituencies are.

Ben Yeoh (1:12:31): But why I think this could work is the whole increasing child thing appeals to quite a lot on the Right and certain Christian values and things like that. The carbon tax appeals to people and things on the left. And, both should appeal to economists of either colour who lose interest when you lean right or left. I think carbon tax is the way to do it. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:12:48): The funny thing though is that the Left is the one who's rejecting a carbon tax.  

[Cross talking 1:12:55] 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:13:00): Probably all economists in favour of carbon tax. In some ways I don't know if child subsidies are ultimately going to get us there because I think this underlying values shift is too large. I think the reluctance of people to have children is too large, and I don't know if people will ever be able to be that motivated by this idea of, "Oh, we should have another child for the economy," Which is essentially what you're saying.

Ben Yeoh (1:13:31): Yeah.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:13:32): You're saying we give them money because they need another child for the economy. And maybe the political resistance to that is too large. So, I wonder if the real solution to this is religion's resurgence. Maybe we all need to become Mormons.

Ben Yeoh (1:13:47): I guess this is the cultural point. So, speaking to Anton Howes, an innovation historian, he's got this thing about, we need to celebrate innovators. But this is the same thing as a cultural shift you need to show that, because you can do it the other way around. The emancipation, slavery became illegal because of the flipping around we celebrated freedom, or rather we thought that's what we should do morally. The same with women's vote or minority rights, and all these other things, there was a cultural shift. Humans decided that, as opposed to an economic shift, and people argue in the literature about the economic value of slaves so I can't quite figure out, but it really wasn't an economic argument either way. It was a moral cultural argument. So maybe you're right, the same would have to be made on the fertility take.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:14:35): Well, the Mormons do this very well. They really celebrate the family; the family is part of God's plan. They also have these interesting ideas. They have this idea of eternal family, so it's not just you're with your family while you're on earth but you're with your family in heaven and you're together forever. So, for example the wedding vows aren't till death do us part, which is the classic thing you hear, but it's for time and all eternity. So, this is part of the reason why there's a whole doctrinal or the logical reason why families are so essential, which relates to this eternal family. 

Ben Yeoh (1:15:08): Great. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:15:09): In general, the Mormon cultures seem to have very salvatory families. So maybe if we can't have everyone become Mormon, we can adopt some of these cultural ideas to celebrate families, like we want to celebrate inventors.

Ben Yeoh (1:15:25): And if we made our living conditions and our technological condition so much easier to have these families than it comes in place for...

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:15:35): I think part of it might be technology, maybe you have technology to make it easier. But ultimately, I think that's probably the wrong way to think about it. In the sense that with having children there's always going to be a certain huge sacrifice associated with it. For a woman it's physically like childbirth, it's insane. Or the way your life shifts once you have this child, all the time and your priorities and money and so on. So, I really don't know if you're ever going to be able to convince people to have children if the framing is just "Oh we're doing this for your own enjoyment," "Oh this is we're going to make it easy for you.". Clearly hedonistic terms. I think there needs to be a higher calling for it or re-emphasize the cultural values of the importance of family.

Ben Yeoh (1:16:29): Cool. In honour of Tyler, we should do a little bit of "underrated/overrated", but I was going to do maybe a little twist, because this is something that you tweeted about, in reference to marginal revolution, which is what does shadow Tyler think? So, we can try that and...

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:16:48): Phantom Tyler, yeah.

Ben Yeoh (1:16:49): Phantom Tyler, what do we think? We'll riff on some of those ideas. So biological warfare, underrated risk or overrated? 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:17:04): Underrated. I think Tyler would think it's underrated too.

Ben Yeoh (1:17:06): I agree. My fans and Tyler also agree. Inflation, thinking about inflation. So, what should we say, whether we should be worried about inflation? Overrated or underrated?

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:17:25): Underrated by the Twitter mob. Probably overrated by certain people and overrated by the Bitcoin people who think that we're going to have hyperinflation.

Ben Yeoh (1:17:37): Okay, so where does that leave you or are you neutral? 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:17:42): Compared to most people on Twitter, or most economists on Twitter, underrated.

Ben Yeoh (1:17:48): What does Phantom Tyler think?  I think Phantom Tyler's may be less concerned about inflation per se but around all the policies which are aimed at it, that's my view about what Phantom Tyler thinks.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:18:05): I think Tyler, and he said this explicitly, he doesn't think inflation will get out of control, he just thinks it'll just be higher for a while. I think the most worrying thing is the underlying dynamic of debate which has led people to disregard these risks. A few months ago, when they were working on the new American rescue plan, the new stimulus package. The general homogeneity of the Twitter debate and not being representative of what actual economists are saying, people being afraid to voice their views. But the Twitter debate ended up driving the policy. It seemed like an unhealthy state of affairs. 

Ben Yeoh (1:18:43): GDP as a measure. overrated/underrated. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:18:47): Underrated. People like to dunk on it and yes it has a ton of flaws. It's a terrible measure but it's giving you a better measure.

Ben Yeoh (1:18:54): It strangely correlates with a lot of supposedly better measures. [Inaudible: 1:18:58] all these other things. So, I quite like the human development index which has life expectancy and education, but high correlation with GDP, as you might expect.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:19:08): In general, this is the thing that Tyler arguments for growth, which promotes moral value so if you're wealthier, you can do a lot more. Maybe it means better hedonistic welfare, maybe it means better Arts and Sciences, whatever you think is important. You can do more with more wealth and so GDP is maybe correlating with better health, GDP promotes that. I think there's some valuable critique to this which [Inaudible: 1:19:39] recently wrote about this. This is a blog. It's not actually true that growth is correlated with or that growth promotes everything that we might think is good. For example, think about religiosity. As we've grown richer, we've become a lot more secular. And so, if you think religion is true and you should all be believing in God, then growth is bad because it's made us all unbelievers.

Ben Yeoh (1:20:05): And growth seems to have reduced the fertility rate. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:20:06): Exactly. So, maybe it's also because we're at this moment of unparalleled wealth, where people are really rich and people start caring about other things like luxury goods and those luxury goods, for example, enjoying your life and not having children.

Ben Yeoh (1:20:29): I was thinking about it. I don't know much about curves, but I was thinking about the up and down curve, and I think that might be true to air pollution. There's a certain stage that has gone up and now it's coming down because we've got technology. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:20:38): There's this idea called an Environmental Kuznets Curve, so it has [Inaudible: 1:20:40] for a bunch of different pollutants.

Ben Yeoh (1:20:43): I'm not sure what my Phantom Tyler thinks about GDP actually. I don't know, I know he mentioned it in Stubborn Attachments as an imperfect measure, but I don't know whether he still thinks is underrated or overrated.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:20:55): I think he would say give me a better measure. I think this would be great to figure out a better measure of something that correlates and is better comparable. One problem with GDP is that...So I think GDP is useful to compare like

Ben Yeoh (1:21:09): Countries.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:21:10): Going from 2015 to 2014, maybe it's even decently useful across countries or something like that. I think it's very hard to compare across long time horizons. If you think 1900 versus 2000. The problem is that there's differences in quantity, and there's differences in kind. And so, GDP tries to put this all-in-one dimension so you can have differences in quantity, maybe you're producing double the amount of stuff which will double the GDP. But most of the economic changes since 1900 or at least these are the most important economic changes are the differences in kind. We have all these new inventions that we can do different things and someone in 1900, even with infinite wealth, they couldn't have gotten antibiotics and the child would die of an infection. Think of how much they would have been willing to sacrifice to get the antibiotics to save the child. And so, this is one question where it would be nice to have a measure that is better able to quantitatively compare these differences in kind across time.

Ben Yeoh (1:22:10): That'd be a huge general-purpose invention, we could think about it, I always think about this in terms of healthcare, in terms of pain. We now have and had for some time, the ability to live the last say four weeks of our life, if we need to, essentially pain free. And if you look at it economically, we don’t value that very much at all such as the price of morphine or price aspirin. If you don't think about it...

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:22:39): But we do spend a lot on healthcare. 

Ben Yeoh (1:22:41): We do spend a lot on healthcare but I'm thinking specifically about the value of being pain-free. Whereas if you ask someone, or their family in their last four weeks of life, how much would you pay to die pain-free. You'd probably give up quite a lot of your wealth, at that point in time to do it and the value of pain doesn't really appear in GDP.  I agree it appears in healthcare, but I think that one thing, which in the moment, you would value extremely highly, and probably would put a price on it, would generally not appear in any kind of economic climate statistics because of the way we measure the anchors. Translating pain into a dollar figure is hard.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:23:21): In general, prices in the economy represent, ideally, items like marginal costs or how hard is it...Water is very cheap. If you didn't have water, you'd be really screwed but they don't represent the consumer surplus or something similar. This is a critique sometimes [Inaudible: 1:23:35] lobbied against, how we measure the [Inaudible: 1:23:38] technology. Google is free to us and so there's a lot of value to get out of it. Maybe even the ad revenues are accounted in the GDP, but we get so much value out of Google, and it barely shows up. Now, again, though I think those critiques can be overstated, which is that if you think about the long run economic history. Most of the time, when you think about the inventions of the first half of the 20th century, for example women had to spend all their days carrying water and then we had running water, which alleviated dozens of hours a week of work. And so, running water only carries a very small amount of GDP.  That wasn't captured either even though that was a huge quality of life improvement. So, we've always had these mismeasurement challenges. It's not clear to me that these mismeasurement challenges are unique thing now, and they can somehow explain the measured growth [Inaudible: 1:24:33]

Ben Yeoh (1:24:35): I get that they've always been about it.  I do wonder about, not mismeasurement. I still can't get rid of having some general-purpose invention. One classic one for me is the double-blind trial phenomena. First, we could have invented it a lot earlier. In fact, there were signs 2000 years ago. They did think about it a little bit, but it didn't stick. That knowledge stayed in the past. And then, ships which had scurvy carried lemons or limes or oranges to prevent scurvy, and they double blind trial found it out. That didn't stick the first two or three times. That knowledge was lost. They knew a cure for scurvy which they lost and then they had to rediscover that. Then it did stick, and they realized that we could trial this and then it spread from healthcare medicine into even economics trials. Therefore, we've made discoveries, you wouldn't have been able to discover otherwise. So where do double blind trials fit into that and obviously you've got it in some way, it gets captured broadly in how we are thinking but I still think somehow, we missed some of that. And then why don't some of these things stick? I have no idea why that is because it's quite an obvious idea. A logical thinker, any of these philosophers, should have been able to think about this 2000 years ago, and make it stick as an experimental technique, but it didn't. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:26:00): A lot of the best ideas are like this. I think they are very different domains, but the best economic theory is stuff that you wouldn't have thought about. If you hadn't used the machinery of economic theory, you wouldn't have come up with this idea, but once you write down your models after you come up with this thing that is intuitive and makes a lot of sense. I also think a lot of the best ideas have this property that they seem obvious in retrospect, but maybe weren't too obvious at the beginning. 

Ben Yeoh (1:26:26): No, exactly. Although [Cross talking 1:26:27].

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:26:28): You see it's easy to launch into this discussion of how GDP is measured. And so, this is what people always do. I think in general...

Ben Yeoh (1:26:35): So, you think it's underrated.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:26:38): Yeah, I think it's underrated because the conclusion people draw to these conclusions of why GDP is flawed is like GDP is worthless, but actually super valuable and actually quite indicative.

Ben Yeoh (1:26:48): Great, maybe the last couple then. Berlin, is this underrated or overrated?

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:26:53): Overrated, very overrated. These people go there on vacation...

Ben Yeoh (1:26:57): You seem to view this as Germany overall, that's probably a better version...

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:27:01): If you're an ambitious young person, you actually want to be productive, you want to create something completely, this is not the place to be. There are a few tech companies, but there's nothing there. You don't have that many smart, ambitious, hardworking young people. But then I would say this about all of Germany. No, Berlin has an interesting history, I will say that. So, going there and soaking in some of the history I think is nice. One thing I very much cherish about having grown up in Germany, is being connected to some of the history. It feels much more visceral. My parents grew up on opposite sides of the wall. My mother grew up in East Germany, my dad grew up in West Germany. 

They met shortly after the fall of the wall. The whole fall of the wall, enter the Cold War, it feels very visceral to me that the Cold War and the very real possibility that this could have exploded, like the Berlin crisis could explode very early. 

My great grandmother who's still alive, she was alive during World War Two. She was just outside of Dresden when Dresden was firebombed. And so, these are the stories that shall tell. I think it's quite valuable to have a sense of just how bad things can get. I think it was partially explained by some of my proclivity of interest in existential risk, and I think that's partially why I think that people very much underrate the risk of really bad conflict with China.  I think it's quite plausible that we see a World War three style event in the next few decades. So, while people don't feel that people don't viscerally internalize that, I think it's quite important to viscerally internalize that.

Ben Yeoh (1:28:37): No, I think that makes a lot of sense. The guy who ended up inventing fertilizer by understanding the nitrogen cycle. Essentially, he invented it because he was starving from famine in one of the Great famines and he said I never want to see anyone go through that again so I'm going to dedicate my life to figuring this out, and he did, but it came from a very visceral sense of this could happen. Phantom Tyler thinks travel is quite important. I don't know about Berlin...maybe this could be my next question...

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:29:13): He might say underrated because people overall still underrate travelling. 

Ben Yeoh (1:29:16): Travel but maybe not living in Berlin specifically. If I were to go to Germany or even Berlin or wherever. What do you think I should travel and do?

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:29:26): Tyler spent a year in Germany already or maybe more than a year in his 20s, and I think he said that was hugely impactful for him. 

Ben Yeoh (1:29:34): So maybe just living anywhere different. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:29:37): Yeah, like setting on his path that he's been doing now. So maybe he would say underrated.

Ben Yeoh (1:29:42): Maybe we'll have to ask him or maybe he'll comment. Say if I go to Germany, what should I experience? I guess I'm most interested in anything.  Should I experience it culturally or maybe even food wise? But what should I do? I've got two weeks in Germany, or even longer, maybe we're going to live there longer, I don't know. What should I try? What's the best of Germany, we sort of critique, some of the bits that could be better but if I want to see the best of what Germany has to offer.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:30:09): I would travel to the former East; I don't think people do this enough. I think it's just very interesting and you also have a lot of weird things that are happening at the same time. For example, you have all these very nice infrastructures that they built right after the reunification, but then you also have these very ageing towns because all the young people left, and if possible, talking to the people is just interesting to get their experience. I think Berlin is worthwhile, the history is worthwhile. 

Ben Yeoh (1:30:43): Okay. All right, so maybe....

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:30:45): I don't know if the food is that great. I wouldn't focus on the food.

Ben Yeoh (1:30:48): You wouldn't focus on the food. So, you're not a fan of sauerkraut?  The two things I remember about German cuisine, maybe it's not a very good choice, is white Asparagus.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:31:01): White Asparagus is great. 

Ben Yeoh (1:31:02): White Asparagus and, I can't even remember the German name of it, but basically stew glutinous knuckle. Pork knuckle.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:31:13): Okay.

Ben Yeoh (1:31:15): Obviously, that's not your thing. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:31:17): I'm vegetarian, I don't know. Maybe this is my problem. 

Ben Yeoh (1:31:22): No, no I'll come to that. Maybe that's because Asian cuisines, Chinese cuisines are glutinous, gloopy and gelatinous. So that leads me greatly to my next question because I think probably my greatest moral failing is that I still eat animals. I know a lot of people in the Effective Altruists’ movement have ended up vegetarian and vegan from an ethical point of view, and I think, in my mind, that I agree. Cultural and other reasons I haven't got there yet but every year I cut out another thing.  I think last year, I can't eat octopus anymore, because they seem too clever and too close to what maybe something might be, even if that's that. But is that how you come to it? Do you think that maybe how we view animals is something that we don't think about enough and I think this is maybe one of the things that EA has, well at least brought to my attention? It was always simmering there in the background but might be something that they’ve added to their canon.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:32:22): I'm a big fan of two things. I'm a big fan of habits and I'm a big fan of if you're going to cut something out basically cut it out completely, instead of trying to sort of just reduce it. I think people are bad at moderation, so this goes for other things for example, Netflix. People tell themselves, "Oh I'm going to watch less Netflix." Never happens. And if they have a habit of Netflix, they're going to keep doing it. Whereas if you want to change a habit...

Ben Yeoh (1:32:42): [Inaudible: 01:32:42].

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:32:46): Exactly. If you can change a habit, it's very hard initially but once it becomes a habit, it becomes very automatic, and you don't have to think about it. With alcohol I think sometimes people tell themselves they'll drink less alcohol, but every time they go to a party they start drinking and they'll drink a lot. The same thing applies to vegetarianism or that's how I got started. I basically don't think about it, it's just a habit. I've had it for about seven-ish years, something like that, along time. I don't think about it. 

Ben Yeoh (1:33:18): Before you moved to the US?

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:33:21): Yeah, a long time. In general, I think it's valuable to think about things once, decide and not have that been the habit. Now would I do it again? Nowadays, I don't know. I think that I've become almost to an extent too total utilitarian and this idea is something like if we didn't eat animals, none of these farmed animals would exist because the counterfactuals are not that farmed animals live a happy life. They just don't exist at all. And so, to the extent that you think some of these farmed animals probably live not great lives but lives that are still above zero utility, lives that are somewhat worth living. It's not actually clear if not eating meat and not existing is good. For example, cows get to go out on the grass. It seems like a decent life. So, I think it might be sort of not negative to be vegetarian. At this point, it’s a habit so I won't think about it.

Ben Yeoh (1:34:26): I think that's interesting.  I think we mentioned right at the beginning that maybe some of the critiques of where EA thinkers get to. One of the ones I hear is that sometimes their thinking is too far away from what people might say is common sense, morality, this idea that effective giving and we can do it more effectively for saving the child's life in Africa. I could see that at the margin, but most people would say well I want to give to my own community or something first because it's closest to me, and I see that. I think that makes a lot of sense to people. I was wondering what you thought about that and whether there were any other aspects of EA that you think are misunderstood or maybe taken too far.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:35:10): EA in its current form is not suited as, if everyone started believing in EA right now it would not be suitable. For example, the local community support. I think it's good to have people be involved in their local communities, give to charity, etc... That sort of basic social ordering system. But if you're the small group of EA, on the margin is it the best thing to give to your local community back? No. So, you want to think about what's most effective on the margin. There I think EA is completely right and what some people call common sense morality, other EAs might call it not actually trying to think things through. I think it's valuable. You see this with the FDA during the pandemic, where they're trying to follow their standard ways of doing things by maybe not approving AstraZeneca, or by not approving first doses first, or by not approving tests. But these are just completely unsuited for the pandemic. They're just not making the expected value calculation and you have to make the expected value calculation. 

Ben Yeoh (1:36:19): They don't do that, although to be fair or showing that it's maybe not in their mandate, but they certainly don't seem to be doing that.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:36:29):

You mean the FDA? Of course, it's their mandate. Their mandate is to do the best regulations for the welfare of the people, 

Ben Yeoh (1:36:35): I'm not sure if it's in their actual mandate. Well, this is a problem [Inaudible: 1:36:38].

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:36:39): Well, this is their responsibility. It's a pandemic, it's a public health emergency. They're key people and they're making it all worse. So, their mandate is not to have insane bureaucratic procedures that they follow no matter what, this is not their mandate. Their mandate is to do what's best for the people. And so, for that you need [1:37:00 inaudible]

Ben Yeoh (1:37:01): That's definitely what their theoretical mandate would be. I'm not a defender of the FDA but I think that is maybe what they would think.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:37:09): It is interesting to consider what we would make an EA look like that could spread it as a religion to everybody. I mentioned this at the very beginning, in some ways EA defuncts religion for example with the career advice, but people keep questioning it in some ways that undermines the motivation. EA seems surprisingly anti-natal, a lot of people don't want to have kids, or they have a weird reasoning about how I can have a better impact if I work instead of having children. I don't even know if that's a correct argument, but definitely if we wanted to spread EA as a religion, then it needs to be much more pro-natal to encourage people to have kids. It's a very important value. In general, if you think about which groups are going to win out in the future, there's a whole interesting argument that it's going to be fundamentalist religious groups because they have the highest fertility rates. They're also pretty heritable because they're fundamentalists, so people stay in the religion.  You think Israel, Orthodox Jews used to be a very small percentage of the population and now they're 30% of elementary school aged kids because they've had much higher fertility rates and then the rest of the population.

Ben Yeoh (1:38:23): And they can defend themselves, whereas 2000 years ago, Romans would wipe you out if you were a cult and you weren't going to assimilate. But today we don't wipe you out more or less so actually you grow.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:38:33): Thank God.  I don't know if this will actually continue. For example, Mormon fertility rates have been falling, and they're still somewhat above two but they're not that far above two anymore. So, the Mormons used to have this big fertility advantage and grow quickly and it's not clear if that's the case anymore. So, I will be somewhat sceptical of some of these long-term predictions that like "Oh, like the Amish or religious people are going to take over the world." But I do think it's actually an underrated component of who would...If you're thinking about the trajectory long term trajectory of human civilization, who determines the future? What are the values that are going to survive? What the different groups' fatality rates are, is quite important and liberalism fatality rate is low and falling.

Ben Yeoh (1:39:21): Existential risk to liberalism-particular humans in general. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:39:25): No but seriously, right? 

Ben Yeoh (1:39:27): Yeah, I could see that. Thinking on the EA thing on donations, I think at the margin that decision framework to think about how you're going to donate, and not enough people do, do that. Although, therefore I came around to micro grants because slightly, my theory is we're going to have some of these ideas generated by individuals or individuals with projects and there's not enough funding going into that, which is essentially some of the Emergent Venture type of stuff. But I think if we're not going to think about it and default to giving well or whatever, because if you just want to spend 30 seconds thinking about it, then don't because someone else has thought about it for you and this would be effective. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:40:06): I think EA has a bit of a problem about not being weird enough. They are very weird in certain ways, but they're sort of weird in homogenous ways in their community. So initially the big thing was to give well and effective donations. The problem with that was probably too oriented things that you could quantify, and then people realize now the big thing is long termism, and we should care about existential risk. These are very worthy causes, but I think there's almost too many people marching in lockstep and I think you want to diversify a bit more or you want to fund your things which is exactly why you're doing it, we're trying to do what Tyler Cowen is doing. And I think that's [Inaudible: 1:40:43].

Ben Yeoh (1:40:44): Although homogeneity could probably be quite good if we want it to be a religion. So maybe that's the way.

[Cross talking: 1:40:49]. 

Ben Yeoh (1:40:52): Slightly in jest but yes.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:41:00): I think maybe you need to have enough epistemic humility to recognize that. Even EA has already shifted a lot of priorities so to some extent we should be encouraging diverse and weird things. I think to some extent EA is doing that. I think something like Emergent Ventures or micro grants is a good idea.

Ben Yeoh (1:41:19): I was thinking of one of the critiques I've read, although I have to admit I didn't fully understand from Amia Srinivasan who's a philosopher and now at All Souls College. One of the critiques did seem to centre around the fact that it did seem quite homogenous to her as a group of thinking, although she also had other things which she talked about on it. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:41:40): Maybe homogenous is the wrong word, in some way weirdly unambitious. EA has these non-profit research institutes about existential risk, and these are great, but it seems sometimes for some EAs, this is the end all be all. It's like, "We want to fund non-profits." And sometimes EA says something like "We're not funding [Inaudible: 1:41:58] anymore. We have enough money, we're not [Inaudible:1:42:02]."  I say, yes you have enough money to fund your little non-profit...

Ben Yeoh (1:42:07): But you're not saving the world. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:42:08): Yeah, you're not saving the world yet and it's you're being unambitious. So, I think EA in a weird way is a bit European. It's founded by the Brits, also Australians maybe, some are in the middle. And they have this scepticism or pessimism about technology being embedded and the lack of ambitiousness. 

Ben Yeoh (1:42:41): Great. I could go on for a long time but I'm going to try and do these last three questions for you on that. We can do another part two someday. I'm just going to ask, what does a productive Leopold day look like? Are there any things about personal productivity or maybe productivity you, see? I was quite taken by the fact that you thought, coming to the US, there was this work ethic conscientious thing. I also see this were Chinese students, so anyone who's really studied in China, and they come to Europe, and they meet Europeans, they can't believe how little Europeans worked from the age of four to 21. I was probably a little bit in the middle but even I look at that Chinese work ethic and go, oh my god you were studying from 7 to 7 in the day, six days a week right, from the age of 4 to 21. That's a lot more studying than the average Western. But anyway, what does a productive Leopold day look like?

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:43:43): To be clear, I don't want to glorify rogue studying. This goes back to being valedictorian efficient, that's not actually the best thing to do. 

Ben Yeoh (1:43:53): Would it be better if you could be more independent led and not have to take all these courses?

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:43:56): Being independent and creative. You don't want to just be studying for the Gaokao. You want to be creating a start-up. I think the general thing of the US is people are driven, they're ambitious, and instead of this being cut down, people are encouraged to do it. They dedicate their lives to really creating something and I think that's admirable. In terms of productivity, I don't think I have great tips. I would encourage people to read a lot. A key part of continuing to be productive is taking out a lot of time to read, even if during the time you're reading you're not reading a lot. Then, I think one thing I struggle with, but a lot of people struggle with, is minimizing digital distractions. But I don't have any good answers.

Ben Yeoh (1:44:36): Great. And do you have any advice for young people, people your age or maybe a little older starting university or just getting into university, about what they should think about doing with their lives? I'm guessing be weird, follow research questions which aren’t as researched. I don't know if you have anything else you want to add.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:44:58): Maybe write a blog, or good Twitter but ideally a blog. I think you'll end up meeting a lot of interesting people on the internet this way. It forces you to develop your thoughts. Somewhat ironic I'm saying this since I've been somewhat delinquent on my blog because I've been spending too much [time] on the end of semester, but I realized this too late. I think this can be quite valuable and I think you need to just apply yourself. Figure out something to do and apply yourself and figure out something to do that isn't just studying for your classes. 

Ben Yeoh (1:45:34): Great. I'm going to end with a couple of...I guess these are philosophical questions. Plato Socrates asks, how should you live? Have you had any thoughts on that, partly because of your long termism and everything else? Would you have an answer for how we should live? While you dwell on that, I think it's a little bit intertwined, for instance, to what it is to be a human being. What could you hope for, what should you do? It ties back to the original one, deciding a career. What should we do?

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:46:18): Find something that gives you meaning, whether that's making this long-term imagination come true, whether it's family and children, whether it's being engaged in your community through church. I think the biggest downfall of modern civilization is that people lose all sense of meaning.

Ben Yeoh (1:46:42): Meaning and connections.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:46:43): And it's like a hedonistic treadmill.

Ben Yeoh (1:46:46): Great. Well, I think that's a really great place to end so Leopold, thank you very much. 

Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:46:56): Thank you so much. This was great.

C Thi Nguyen on games philosophy, agency, real world gamification | Podcast

I chat with C. Thi Nguyen who used to be a food writer and is now a philosophy professor at the University of Utah.

Thi thinks about trust, art, games, and communities. We discuss his first book, Games: Agency as Art. The book is about how games are the art form that work in the medium of agency.

We chat about the difference between play and games and wider games philosophy.

Thi worries about the problems on trusting experts, if oneself is not an expert and how none of us are experts in most domains and how he’s been influenced by Elijah Milgram (also a philospher at the University of Utah).

We discuss making tea, process art and how we should be thinking about making food.

Fascinating topics across food and philosophy.

Thi’s book Amazon link. His website. And Twitter.

Contents:

06:13 Thi on Gamification

12:15 Thi on Trust and what to be worried about a gamified system

16:25 Thi on philosophy of expertise and the challenge of finding experts to trust

20:58 Thi on board games recommendations

26:05 Is “play” better or “games” better? Thi answers on how games are different from play.

31:20 The importance of drinking games

34:13 The four types of games

36:35 How constraints are useful

45:47 What is process art

50:02 Games and cooking

57:39 How to make tea

1:02:16 Thi on creative productivity (don't kill the weird ideas)

Listen below or wherever you listen to podcasts. Transcript below and video on Youtube (above).

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Transcript: Games philosophy, process art and food writing.

Ben Yeoh (00:05): Hey everybody, I am super happy to have C. Thi Nguyen, a professor of philosophy at The University of Utah. He's written a fascinating book on the philosophy of games called Games: Agency as Art; you should check it out. He's been invited to lecture at The Royal Institute of Philosophy here in London and he used to be a food writer, games, food philosophy. What more could you want? Welcome C. 

C. Thi Nguyen (00:30): Thank you so much for having me.

Ben Yeoh (00:35): So, I've heard a complaint about gamification recently. There's this app that we have in London UK, where you can donate unwanted food and ingredients to people. When you do you gain stars and reviews. The way you increase your reputation on this app is by playing a five-star review game. You have to review quickly. Someone who was commenting felt she was being forced to play the game. She was going to stop using the app and donating food because she felt that she was essentially being gamified. So, is this a problem of over gamification where game rules have been brought in to substitute for some other social value and essentially our agency, our feeling of choice in it has been taken away? What's your view of this gamification aspect of our world?C. 

C. Thi Nguyen (01:27): It is funny because you tell me this and I thought "Oh, it sounds great" and one of the things I keep finding with gamifications is from the outside, when they're described on paper they often sound great and then when you actually live with them, you realize something was wrong. There are two problems. The description you gave is actually the thing that I'm not mostly worried about. I think some people feel that the game is getting addictive and their will is being pushed against so they find themselves doing something they don't want to, but they have an addictive relationship to the game. That can happen but that's not actually the thing I'm the most worried about. I'm most worried about cases in which people go all in. Cases where the gamification is so seductive that you don't feel like the game is pushing you, but you've just fully internalized the point system of the game. 

The reason I'm worried about this is because I've written a lot about games and a lot of people think that "Oh if you love games you've got to love gamification too" Like people that love games love gamification. I think understanding how games work shows you what's really creepy about gamification. So here's one way to put it, and you can tell me if this fits the sense of your app, because I mostly think about this in terms of apps such as Twitter and Fitbit which are the ones I'm familiar with. The metrics of publishing in philosophy. For me one of the great pleasures of games is they simplify the meaning of life. They simplify the purpose of an activity. In our normal activity, there are all these incredibly rich possible values like I'm a parent, I'm a researcher, I care about climbing, I care about aesthetics and I care about my children's health. 

All of these things are: 

1): Often really hard to figure out how well they've done.

2): They are so hard to square off against each other.

Like, how do I measure the value of a week in which I do research versus a week in which I split time between research and taking care of my kids. 

But in games, for once in our lives we have an experience of knowing exactly what we're trying to do, exactly how well we've done and in order to do that you have to simplify it. You have to make the values clear and explicit and mechanically countable. So, the things that really worries me are cases in which the gamification gets in us and it feels great to us but it's done so by simplifying the target. And we internalize a simplified target. So, I'm really worried for example what happens on Twitter. You might come to twitter for these rich, complicated values of connection, understanding etc. but if Twitter gets under your skin and if you buy into it, it points you to what Twitter measures and what Twitter measures is popularity. 

So I want to ask you about your app, which I've never touched of course.

Ben Yeoh (04:44): Not mine, In London here we have it.

C. Thi Nguyen (04:47): I mean the one that you're familiar with. Do you find a simplification in that system to make something measurable?

Ben Yeoh (04:57): Yes. So there is this idea that you can trust. Someone has come down to this five star review, and then also the speed. So there's this sense that if you don't put a review quickly for one another, that you're there, but to your point, the underlying intention is noble. Whereas, I can see for something like, Twitter, Instagram, some of these things, the underlying attention could be ... and we'll maybe come to this sort of outrage because we know anger, divisiveness pulls in eyeballs and eyeballs pulls in profit. And maybe in something like Twitter, it's also slightly less obvious that you're losing your autonomy. I think that might be our argument. Whereas I guess for this app, it's so simple that you should be able to see through it. What was quite interesting is that this person saw through it and therefore didn't want to play the game. Whereas, I guess in Twitter you get sucked in because seeing the follower account you're like "Oh my God, I got to tweet" which went viral could have such a thrill to it that you then playing that game and you lost the initial impulse, which is I wanted to see reasons rational other viewpoints to my own work.

C. Thi Nguyen (06:13): So I want to talk about two things. First, the easier examples are the ones in which some corporations give your attention for money. Like, people are really familiar with that. I'm actually worried that there is a logic of gamification that underlies even well-intentioned efforts. And it seems like, for people in academics in this space to be like, "oh, it's capitalism companies trying to make money off it." But I think that there are plenty of cases where what it looks like is entirely well attempted to measure something in a public way and motivate people publicly. But the very fact that there needs to be a publicly accessible measure, forces simplification. So I've written a paper that is not out yet called Transparency of Surveillance. And it's about all these cases where you look at something where transparency goes wrong. And the way that transparency often goes wrong is there's an overall attempt to get a group of people to do something good, and to do this you have to create a quick and easy measure that everyone can immediately see and catch onto that can be quickly tabulated. And the gap between that and what's really important is often huge. 

One of the examples I've been looking at is; a lot of charity oversight. So it seems like a really good idea at first. Isn't it great to have transparency, for a lot of charities for a lot of times, the oversight measure they were using was something called Throughput. So Throughput is the amount of money the people donate, how much of that emerges from the other end and the charities just got ranked on Throughput. Of course, the Throughput measure catches really wasteful charities, but once you get rid of those, you get a situation in which most charities are increasingly cutting the way to increase Throughput to cut internal costs. And if anyone in any kind of organization knows, you're not going to get the most efficient and powerful organizations if you're constantly forcing all of them to cut as many internal costs as possible. But once there's a ranking out there, then people seem to respond to the ranking. I've actually confused the issue, I realized because there are two things that we should really be worried about. I don't think anyone in the charity space has internalized the Throughput measure. But there are a lot of other cases where people do seem to internalize these measures. The ones that are in my life, of course, are academic ones. Like, which articles get excited for the most.

Ben Yeoh (09:15): And I think a lot of times GPA.

C. Thi Nguyen (09:17): Yeah, I was just about to say GPA.

Ben Yeoh (09:20): That's a great point average for our non-US. 

C. Thi Nguyen (09:27): Right, GPA actually is one of the least useful measures of a student's success. There are all these other things that seem really important. Like how curious are they? Are they reflecting about what they're doing and why they're doing it? How much are they enjoying or thoughtful about their materials and what they're learning? But that's very hard to measure. So, because of the nature of large-scale institutions, the most pervasive and salient measure that surrounds everyone is GPA, your grade point average. And if students internalize that as the primary goal for their education, then there's this enormous thing that's been lost. And one of the things that's been lost is control over what you yourself want as your value. So the big worry for me is that in a lot of these cases, we have used vast pervasive Metro fire systems. They're clear, they're crisp, and they’re appealing. But if you internalize them, you don't figure out for yourself what you should value about the thing you're doing. That's my big worry. 

Ben Yeoh (10:49): It seems to me that that's a second order or an unintended consequence of simplified game systems or point systems that they miss a lot through the fact that they are simplification, that sort of analogy to get to something, but they miss all of the new ones. 

C. Thi Nguyen (11:03): Right. 

Ben Yeoh (11:04): And we can see that. But I kind of got the sense that there could be something even deeper and darker than that. Meaning, we know there are problems, sometimes regarding regulation and these unintended consequences, although this is particularly something quite addictive. But I was thinking, trust is ailing in a lot of developed world democracies. And sometimes these systems, you could almost design them that there's almost whether it's intentional or not. That is actually undermining a lot of our trust systems. And you could be designing these games almost intentionally in some way to simplify this in a way that you know won't point people in the way that is actually most value-add. Do you think that is also a deeper causal thing to where the system might be alongside a lot of these kind of unintended consequences, because like you say, Fitbit, they're obviously aiming for something relatively positive and you get lost in the game, I could see that. But then some of these systems might be even more pervasive. Like, oh, we go for GPA, but we're not going to go for broadly what education might be. That seems to me even potentially darker.

C. Thi Nguyen (12:15): Right? So I think this is exactly the thing to be worried about. So this paper I was telling you about, Transparency in Surveillance, It started with this line from Onora O'Neill. Onora O'Neill is one of the great philosophers of trust and her BBC rifle lectures. She has this paragraph that I think most people have ignored where she says, "yeah, most people think trust and transparency can go together, but actually their intention" And her version of the argument was, transparency asks experts to explain their reasons to non-experts, but an expert in reasoning is actually an expert. So you're going to force experts to deceive and make up reasons that aren't really theirs for public consumption. So I was thinking about this and I think there's something that might happen that's even worse, which is, experts might become motivated to hit targets that are available and legible to non-experts. I'm not a person to say no, there should be no transparency. Transparency is important because people might be corrupt. I think you can see this clearly in the early political philosophy attempts to transparency arise from distrust, right? You're afraid that your politician is going to do something crappy, out of sight. So you make them be transparent. Here's the worry, there's actually a tradeoff between trust and transparency. The more transparency you have, the more you ask your experts to align their action to a metric that's comprehensible and give reasons in a way that's comprehensible to non-experts right? So you bring experts to interview. So that will eliminate the possibility of corruption, but that's also going to eliminate the possibility of experts acting on expert reasons and expert understandings of value. 

I see this in my life as an educator because a lot of the time what it looks like is there are all these things that I want to teach students in philosophy class. Critical reasoning, thinking, curiosity, self-reflection none of that is measurable in a way that's available to the legislator and the public. So, we have to justify our actions in terms of our graduation rate, graduation speed and post graduate salary. Those are really publicly available measures. So the worry is, there's this trade-off and the more you move towards metrified publicly available systems, the less you have access to the wide range of expert understanding of their domains. I guess we're really far apart from games.

Ben Yeoh(15:15): And the less help for students. That has brought to mind two particularly important domains where I think we've actually seen this in action. So one is on the COVID pandemic response and the other could be potentially on climate science. So, on the COVID response, we now have kind of quite tidily articulated that the experts decided to communicate in a way that they felt non-experts would understand, but which weren't actually what they were thinking or wanted to happen. And it seems to potentially be happening over climate. You do something because asking about climate science scenarios is way beyond. There’s maybe 20,000 people in the world that really understand that, right? And they can talk amongst themselves. There may be one degree but so few people end up with these simplified ideas, two degrees in 2050 or whatever it is. I'm kind of making it up to, to say that which doesn't represent that whole entirety at all. And then we make our problems for ourselves. COVID is another example. Sorry about that, I cut you off and you were going to say something.

C. Thi Nguyen (16:25): Oh yeah, it's funny. I thought we were here to talk about games and aesthetics, which is one side of my research, but now we're talking about the other half, which is the expert stuff. So, I genuinely think there's a problem here that no one has solved and that deep problem is the right balance of exactly the situations you're talking about. My intellectual life was transformed by a book by Elijah Milgram, a living philosopher called the Great Endarkenment. And Milgram's view is the primary epistemic dilemma of our time. The primary knowledge dilemma of our time is that the state of human knowledge is so huge and so fast that no one can master even a tiny fragment of it, which means that we're in this incredibly complex relationship of trust and vulnerability. So in that buyer, who's one of my favorite philosophers, she is the great philosopher of trust that kicks off the conversation about trust in the eighties. So the essence of trust is vulnerability. Here's the scenario: Any action we take involving any technology or any science involves trusting this massive network of experts that none of us can actually ascertain for ourselves, right? So here are two things we don't want to do. We don't want to trust without any management at all. If you just trust whatever you're screwed. They're going to be calm people and there is going to be corruption. 

On the other hand, if you demand that you understand everything, that people will be able to explain themselves, you're not going to have access to the full richness of science, the full richness of humanity's knowledge. The fact that any interaction with science involves not only trusting people who you can't understand, but not knowing who you trust, right? So the massive dilemma I think of our time is how you manage who you put your trust in when you have to trust people that are beyond your comprehension and understanding because of the hyper specialized nature of science. And I think people who work on this stuff have barely adjusted to this. A lot of philosophers who work on knowledge are still working under this frame of "A single person should be able to know everything and understand everything for themselves." How do they know for sure, but that's not the right question anymore.

Ben Yeoh (18:53): So what do you think from your reading of the state of the philosophy or even your philosophy? What does it have to say about this situation? Or this is a question that you think the philosophers should be tackling but haven't tackled successfully?

C. Thi Nguyen (19:11): There's a really small literature in this, mostly the philosophy of science. So this is a puzzle I've actually been obsessed with for a huge amount of my life. This is a puzzle as old as Socrates. Socrates' version of it is if you don't know anything about a domain, how you pick a good teacher instead of a con person. Same problem with a scientist. So some people think, oh, what you are searching for is good people because goodness is unified. I don't think this solution works at all, because I think there are plenty of expert scientists and there are plenty of good hearted people. So, the closest answer is Phillip kitchen's answer, which says something like "you might be able to trace lines into more esoteric sciences from sciences that you can judge." So I know that I can trust aeronautical engineers because planes don't fall out of the sky. And so I can trace who they trust back. But how I am supposed to treat that as an individual is really, really tough. This is a real dilemma that people in philosophy and people in science communications are working on right now. I think it's kind of the dilemma for our era and I don't see a great solution yet.

Ben Yeoh (20:35): Great, well, social scientists out there that are listening and watching this is a dilemma for you to solve. Perhaps leaping back a little bit then into the games. Well, let's ask a simpler question. You've been playing and reviewing board games for, it seems, many, many years. Can you explain the best kind of games for you? What do you recommend?

C. Thi Nguyen (20:58): I've been playing board games my entire life. My board game interests have gotten super esoteric, but I can say a few things. So I played board games, role playing games and computer games for much of my life. Right now I'm seeing fewer computer games that excite me. Most of the computer games I'm seeing do the same things as [Inaudible 21:23] was doing 10 years ago, but with better graphics and more complicated mechanical systems. But a lot of them seem like addictive grind machines. So the board game world on the other hand is exploding with innovation. So I'm really interested in these very complex, incentive manipulation games. So one example is Imperial; Imperial is a game in which the theme is truly nasty. It's world war one, the countries are at war, you don't play one of the countries. You play a shadowy investor, changing your investments in the countries, and you can control whichever country you momentarily have the most investment in, but the point is not to lead your country to victory. The point is to get the most money in the end, which you often do by dumping your country on the next stockholder or playing the Alliance structure. So that kind of structures, or the interesting to me. One of the most interesting board games out there right now is Root, which is called Whales game in which each of the sides is completely asymmetric and has different roles and different goals. One of them is like trying to build an industrial build network. Another is a warmonger trying to conquer everything. Another is basically the proletariat revolution. And you have to watch these different sides play out with different mechanics against each other, which is incredibly fascinating.

Ben Yeoh (22:56): I think board games are incredibly rich at the moment. I'm not as expert as you to sense that actually, maybe this is a golden age of board gaming. Do you think that in some way a counterpoint to what we're seeing on social media and some online that actually it's forced us to this is almost a counter-culture to that was that too soon.

C. Thi Nguyen (23:16): Oh, I don't know if it’s the relationship to social media. I'm seeing explosive innovation in the Indie Tabletop role-playing scene. And I think one of the things that's happened is it's really an age thing. So two things happened at once. One is this enormous flowering of board game innovation in the eighties and nineties, starting in Germany and leading to what we call the Euro games scene. Why that happened is really interesting. One theory is that post-World War II, Germany in particular became culturally uninterested in war games like chess, where you played head to head. And Germany has a really long history of family board gaming. I think the last stat I saw, German families were still 10 on average playing more board games and watching TV, but it's like, so you have this incredible instead. So in America you have a lot of crappy family games and you have this incredibly esoteric war-gaming culture that's built for hardcore hobbyists. But over in Germany you have this board gaming tradition that is made for families and it's also trying to find ways to make board games not just about war. They've been uninterested in war. So there's this theory that since the accident, American board gamers made these first like market manipulation auctions and bidding games. And so the German board game designers seemed to have seized on this stuff and realized, "oh my God, auction gets me really interesting," it's a way for five people to play against each other, always be in the game instead of like, one person makes all their moves. So there's this flowering in Germany and then people in America pick up on it. And I think the thing that's really driving it is a lot of people like me, my age, my wife grew up as computer gamers. Now we work full time. I don't have time for an 80 hour computer game. Melissa and I both grew up on civilization games, which will suck your life away.

Ben Yeoh (25:30): Your whole summer holiday is gone. 

C. Thi Nguyen (25:32): Yes exactly, And so now, like you have people that have grown up playing games like Civ and Warcraft and StarCraft, but now we want to do it together. We want to be social. And so, that's driving, I think this huge market, incredibly rich innovative game for people who grew up playing games, and are a little burned out on hundred hour crafting video games. Anyway, that's [Inaudible 26:00] that's too long. That’s even more interesting. 

Ben Yeoh (26:05): Because I think games reveal a facet about what it means to be human. So I think this is quite interesting and we can explore this a bit. So, a friend of mine who is the artistic director of Kony, did a lot of work with Bernie Dekoven Blue on game theory and games practitioner. And he makes the point that Dekoven had quite a lot of emphasis on play rather than games. And obviously there is this overlap and a lot of what we talked about are kind of these, and your book talks about mostly striving games for this. But I think one of the points that Dekoven was kind of making was this idea that cooperative games or games which don't really have any points scoring or things which are involved in play can be more fulfilling or somehow say more about this. And I was interested in what you think about play over games or even the making of games in play rather than perhaps even the games themselves.

C. Thi Nguyen (27:07): So this is actually to me, one of the things that really pushed me to write this book, because there's a standard view that a lot of people have that play is better than games, especially free and creative play. So, a little bit of background, what's the difference between games and play? I think the clearest version of this is for Bernard Suits. So Bernard Suits is a definition of a game, voluntarily taking up unnecessary obstacles for the sake of the possibility of the activity of struggling to overcome them. So any case in which you have clearly specified obstacles. So a game is really something where the rules tell you what you're trying to do, how you're doing it, and exactly what obstacles there will be in the way often those obstacles are created by specifying which abilities you're allowed to use and not use. So for example, soccer, the obstacles are created because you can't pick up the ball with your hands mostly. Rock climbing; what I do, a lot of the obstacles are creative because you're not allowed to use a pick or a helicopter. A lot of the time these constraints are so obvious we miss them. For example, running a marathon has a constraint. You're not allowed to take a taxi or a bicycle, right? That creates the kind of activity you're doing. So in student’s point out that look and play is something really different. Here's a kind of play: wasting resources is normally instrumental for pleasure or fun. He has some great examples; so here he thinks sometimes you play games in this way, but there's some kinds of games that are not played. 

So he thinks a professional boxer wearily checks in because that's how they make money, that's a game and not a play. He thinks kids rolling around with no rule, just wrestling in the mud or flipping things around that's play, but not a game. So they're different. And there's a bit of a standard view that pure game-less play without rules or points or scores is the highest form. And my book was trying to mount a defense, not saying that games are better than free play, but trying to say that there were different things that had their own different value. 

So play offers you creativity and free form. Games for me are the specific thing where the specificity of the rules and the affordances create for you a specific sculpted experience of practicality. So the way I put it in the slogan of the book is that a game designer just doesn't tell a story or create an environment, they tell you what your abilities are, what your environment is and most importantly what your motivations are in the game. Another way to put it is the game designer sculpt the form of agency. And then when you play different games, you pick up and learn different kinds of agencies. I kind of think games are more structured experiences and that's what art is, right? You could say, why read a book, just make up your own stories all the time. Then you'd never read other people's stories. To do that, you have to have a much sculpted, structured, roulade and experience. Similarly, you can make up activities, but you'll never experience an activity that someone else sculpted for you. So my view here is that games are the special things that let you record it, communicate forms of agency and free play doesn't do that, right? So those are two really different, valuable things. Games are more forms of communication. 

Ben Yeoh (30:49): Great. No, I think that's very clear. Hopefully we'll have some time to talk about process art over object art of which I think that tally somewhat. So, again, a simple question on that. What do drinking games about this or the designers of drinking games? And I actually think drinking games in some ways do maybe create some sort of process art, but, maybe with your idea of the rules that game designers create as well. What's the drinking game say?

C. Thi Nguyen (31:20): Drinking games are so important. Here's something really interesting. I should say drinking games and party games are the most important things in my book. There's really little scholarship about them. One of the things that frustrates me in the game space is how many people would it be like, "oh my God games can be real art too" And what they do is they create mechanically dole games that are like anything else you've seen. But they put important thematic stories on them about big topics, ethical issues. And this is not exciting for me as the development of games as an art form. What's really interesting to me is the creation of new and novel forms of agency. So, drinking games are fascinating. I should tell here for your audience who hasn't read this stuff. My favorite part of the book is a discussion of drinking games. So for me, there are two kinds of play: achievement play and striving play. Achievement play is playing for the value of winning while Striving play is temporarily adopting an interest in winning for the sake of a struggle. So Achievement plays, you really care about winning. Striving play, you just basically get yourself to care about winning temporarily for the thrill of a struggle. And some people are like, "of course they're too difficult to play." And a lot of people, when I presented this stuff, would say stuff like "you're ridiculous, there's no such thing as striving play that is not a thing people can do. Achievement play is the only thing that makes sense." So I had to come up with an argument. So here's the argument. Consider the category of a stupid game. A stupid game is a game where the fun part is failing, but it's only fun if you're trying to win. So my favorite examples are Twister and most drinking games. The whole point of a drinking game is that you really try to do this silly thing. And when you fail, everybody laughs together. But it's only funny if you fail and it's only a failure if you're actually trying to win. So drinking games illustrate this weird capacity we have to get ourselves soaked so much in the attempt to win, when even what we wanted to do fails. But if we intentionally fail it's not funny. If you intentionally fall over and twist it's not funny. So the demonstrating game I know you just go around and everyone has to name a candy bar that someone else hasn't named. And when you can't do it, you have to drink. And of course, it's funny because it's the silliest little task, but you're, cognitively just frozen in the moment, that’s what's funny. So drinking games are super interesting.

Ben Yeoh (34:03): It makes philosophy a lot more interesting to most people if they did more philosophy on the games of drinking and the study. But yeah, I think you have a really good point.

C. Thi Nguyen (34:13): Yeah. One of the great writers about games says there are four types of games, to translate from fancy Latin there's competitive games, make-believe games, luck games, and then vertigo games. It's like kids spinning around and roller coasters. And I think drinking games actually are often a vertigo game. Like a lot of is by the experience. So a lot of games for me are about the experience of changing how your mind works. Like suddenly my mind is focused on, look ahead. Suddenly my mind is focused on balanced challenges with climate and taking games directly to change your cognitive experience of the world while you're trying to do something. It's not just being drunk. It's trying to do a simple task as you get drunk. And that gives you a direct experience of your mind and flux. And I think that's one of the really interesting things about drinking games. That's why I think there are processors.

Ben Yeoh (35:19): Great. I'm thinking on my feet on that. So that's really fascinating. So only one kind of element specific that drinking games that came up which I thought was potentially looping back, was the only issue being that when you choose to do drinking or choose, say to go ahead on drinking at a certain point, do you lose a bit of autonomy because of what the drink does to you? And I thought that was really interesting because to me that was a little bit like Twitter. At some point you go into really good intentions and then at some point you've lost sight of it because of the whole moral outrage thing, or you want the follow a thing and you're sucked in. Now drinking games does have a nice end point because you will always either collapse or stop at some point in which Twitter doesn't. But I was wondering, where we can see that you might lose autonomy in something, is that a danger flashpoint for you in any systems [Inaudible 36:15] or not, or it just occurred to me that there's a specific issue maybe with alcohol, although not with the whole sense of vertigo games.

C. Thi Nguyen (36:26): There's a bunch of interesting philosophy and rational choice theory about this. So I've been really influenced here by Jon Elster. Do you know Jon Elster's work? 

Ben Yeoh (36:35): No. 

C. Thi Nguyen (36:35): So basically I think there's a really simplified view of autonomy that says the fewer the constraints the better, the more the constraints the worst. That can't be the right theory of autonomy. It has to be that you can take on constraints to increase your autonomy. So for one thing, if you believe that the more constraints, the more freedom, and then all governments decrease your freedom but that's a ridiculous theory of freedom and autonomy because governments can, through the creation of constraints, create new categories and new possibilities. So you can actually see this really clearly in games. Let me give you the simplest example. Imagine you're in an open field and someone proposes to put up some walls and a roof. You might think, "Oh, I've lost freedom, I used feel to walk in every direction and now I can't. But the real answer is no, you've lost a little bit of freedom, but you gain a different, more rich kind of freedom. You're given the freedom of having the choice to be inside or outside. So similarly game rules work like this. The game rules constrain you in a certain way. And if you have this really simplified notion of autonomy, you would say "oh my God, well, the game rules are telling me what to do. I can't do anything I want, that's destroying my freedom" but now you think, "no, no" Especially since the rules are voluntary. The rules of basketball enable new kinds of action that never existed before, without the rules of basketball, you couldn't pass and you couldn't dribble. You couldn't make a point. You couldn't play basketball. So, I mean, for me, [Inaudible 38:37] is my favorite philosopher in the space of games. What's interesting for him, but it's interesting for me, for what he's doing is he is saying that because games are activities that are literally constituted, they are made up of constraints. It's a clear case where constraints make us freer. Because they invent new activities. We could never have done it before. But I think that argument can easily be applied to governments. And I think one of the interesting things I find with my students is a lot of students can't see that when you talk directly about governments, you can see it with games. 

So far as new activities are created by constraints, games and governments, both can make us freer. If the trade-off is worth it. If what you lose is counterbalanced by gaining a richer and more valuable set of options. So Jon Elser had a bunch of great examples about this. So in his most famous book called Ulysses and the Sirens. You think about Ulysses, right? So, you know the story: Ulysses has himself tied to the mast so he can hear the sirens. Because he knows he'll be weak of will. Here's a case where the constraint being tied to a mast that he entered into voluntarily let's have an experience he couldn't have had before, which is hearing the sirens. So, what I would say is given the fact that a drinking game is a impairment on your cognition that you enter into voluntarily and lets you have any experience and you didn't before, then if you did it knowingly and voluntarily, then it's increasing your freedom. It is a decision that you make that takes on a temporary constraint that increases your range of experiences and your range of knowledge.

Ben Yeoh (40:05): And that would be a similar argument that people who take psychedelics would say. I would actually extend this further into a lot of creatives and artists would tend to say this about art. So a poet would say by putting these constraints on, I want to write a sonnet. I want to write a haiku that you actually more creative, particularly when you say, I want to write a sonnet and then I slightly change what a sonnet means to me. You couldn't do that without the form of the sonnet to be able to do so. And actually that's true across artists and painting and segue into our other conversation, potentially was around the food. I would say these constraints around how we cook might be similar. If you can cook with anything available, then that actually isn't necessarily a sort of cuisine or a cooking or a thing. But if you say I'm going to use salt, sugar, these types of ingredients, and I'm going to create something from that, that says something more about the constraints that we put on food to make a meal. Do you think philosophy says anything particularly about food or the constraints we have about food and maybe let's touch upon. I think you send and I think I agree that actually cooking either for ourselves or friends and family or cooking on a stage for a restaurant of people is a lot of the time a form of process art. Something actually ending in an object art as well, although we eat it, but it certainly seems to be a priceless art with a history and a culture and everything about that. So I don't know comments about the philosophy of food is art [Inaudible 41:45].

C. Thi Nguyen (41:46): So the constraints question, the process, our question are really different. So the constraints are super interesting. There's a lovely little conversation in the philosophy of art about this, that centers around the paper from Kendall Walton called Categories of Art. There's I think a simple view that's like why have all these rules about genre and form? Why not just do anything? I think you said exactly what a lot of people in the space thing. The rules are ultra-binding. There are rules to what counts as a Western. The rules can't have sonnets. You don't have to write a sonnet. You don't have to make a Western, but once those rules are there, then you can do really subtle things. So my friend, Matt stroll, who works in the philosophy of film convinced me that one of the nice things, but incredibly specific genres like zombie movies, Westerns or Kung Fu movies, is that as the sonnets would so much as be fixed, you pay a lot of attention to subtle variations. And the subtle variation becomes incredibly important. What Walton's whole theory was that when you fix certain things, the audience knows what to pay attention to and what to ignore. So one of his examples was, so you know, busts like a thing, that's just the head and the shoulders, a statue, but no arms. We need to know what counts as a bust. We need to know the standard bust doesn't have arms because otherwise you'd walk around being like, "wow, there's a bust of Socrates with no arms. What a bold choice? What did that mean? What are they trying to do?" But when you constrain the space in a certain way, people know where to look for the meaning. They know that when you break this little rule, that's really meaningful. They know that if it's a Kung Fu movie and then the main character just stops fighting in the end, that something really extraordinary has happened because that's not part of the conventions of a Kung Fu movie. The view is kind of like when we have these constraint latent structures, they make the possibility of meaning because they give you the background against which variation can happen. That's a brief thing about constraints.

Ben Yeoh(42:27): No, I think they're great. I guess they're underappreciated and they are underrated. And also, as your earlier point is, we don't appreciate them sometimes because they're so soft there. A marathon has lots of constraints, but we somehow don't think about them because we realize it's all about the running.

C. Thi Nguyen (44:44): Yeah. I mean, people are always like, there's this standard argument. People are like, "Well, games can't be art because there are rules." And I think if you do philosophy of art, you're like, "wait, no, that's nuts, Like every single art form has rules for consumption that stabilize our relationship." So here's a simple one. The rule for novels is to read the words in order. So, if you like, I read Moby Dick. First, I had a computer program, alphabetize all the words. You haven't read the book, right. There are every art form. If you're like, "yeah, I had a great experience with Van Gogh's Irises. I closed my eyes and I just licked the back of a canvas, and it was so musty." You're like, "No, no, you did something, but you did not experience that." So, should we talk about process art?

Ben Yeoh(45:47): Yeah, Let's talk about process art. I have a question which might introduce us to a little bit, at least within cooking or something. Is there any dish which you've been trying to perfect? Maybe trying to perfect your whole lifetime, or feel you have perfected and what are you doing with this dish?

C. Thi Nguyen (46:07): It's funny, a lot of the times when you cook, I've noticed that when people come over, you want to cook something new and exciting. But once in a while I get lazy and I cook one of my old, simple standards and people freak out, they're like "oh my God, this is so good." My centers are like omelets and Sichuan mapo tofu. There's this really simple dish I found, an Okinawan dish of turmeric miso, bok choy and tofu, over sweet potato rice. And I make this stuff for myself all the time. And I realized it's not that I'm consciously trying to perfect it, but when I make it for people they love it. And I realized it's because of fancy new dishes I've made two or three times in my life. Like Mapo tofu, I've made it like a thousand times in my life. I think a lot of us are very cosmopolitan about dishes we cook and then we always talk about, grandparents cooking was so good, there's something in it. A lot of people like my mom make about 20 dishes over and over again. She cooks mostly Vietnamese Chinese. When I talked to her about how she cooks, she doesn't have recipes, but, she knows all of these like micro variations that are like, "oh, well, if the fish is a little bit drier, you should up the temperature of the oven by five degrees and when it's a little humid, she actually has like different spoons that she uses to prop open the oven, like a tiny bit. And she has that master because she's doing that thing over and over again. But I haven't [Inaudible 47:56] except for like the stupid dishes I make for myself when I'm lazy. And of course the stupid dishes I make myself when I'm lazy are the best things I cook because I made them a thousand times. I wasn't trying to perfect them. Mapo tofu is the thing that I can make best in this world.

Ben Yeoh(48:23): Great. So I have a seminar, so my mum makes chicken rice, a kind of Singapore-Malaysia dish that's all around Southeast Asia. Vietnamese have one as well. And I think when you watch her cook it in all circumstances, it is a form of art. I think something that you alluded to is what also sends it to me, takes it to art for all participants, but also kind of one is artist or cook is the state, or the physical motion. All the emotion that you have through this, obviously when it's shared with an audience of more than just one. You mentioned this, I think in a blog, but I agree that this is an underappreciated form of this art is what you and your audience go through. So I have a particular art practice which I picked up a little bit, which we call in theater, a performance lecture practice. It is actually when I was reading your work, I realized it was a type of process art because the art is often in the place between the audience and the performer. These types of performance lectures don't work because the audience has to participate. So there's a little bit of games and rules, and it's oddly most successful when there's more of the audience or the space between where the audience and performer live, which I think is one of the elements of process art. And so I was wondering, how do you feel about that in terms of cooking and whether we really understand what we go through within that?

C. Thi Nguyen (50:02): The stuff I've written about processors actually started in two different places. And I didn't realize until I saw in the end that they intersected. One is games, the other is cooking. So let me give you the different threads and then we can talk about theater. So with games, one of the things I think is really interesting is if you look at scholars and critics and people talking about how games can be great art, they tend to constantly have the fixed features of games that are like written into the script, graphics, music or the dialogue. But if you look at game reviewers and game players kind of in the wild, what they talk about is the gameplay. Basically I started thinking that people, especially people trying to defend games and art form or scholars, or do it by making games too much like fiction or movies by concentrating on the fictional or movie parts of it. So here's the theory. I think their aesthetic qualities in the object [Inaudible]. So, the novel is thrilling, the movie is beautiful, the painting is amazing and then there's another thing that I want to call processes, aesthetic qualities. And those are the qualities that are in you, the audience member interaction. So, so with the game, right? So take super Mario brothers, the object aesthetic qualities are the things that are in the program itself, the graphics and all that stuff. The process aesthetic qualities are the aesthetic qualities in you and the player as you interact. So how it feels to make the jump just in time or slide or time to thing, just right. It is the beauty that is in your body, your movement and your decisions. So my theory is that in games process or process aesthetic qualities are actually most important in natural practice. And then when people are worried about it being art or something, they concentrate on the object aesthetic qualities, they concentrate on the fixed qualities in the work, but think that's what games are for. And one of the big things that makes it difficult is that sometimes object aesthetic qualities are kind of the same between us, right? Like we see the same. 

If you're looking at a movie and the aesthetic quality you're interested in is like, say, the cool jump cuts. Those jump cuts are the same between us. But if we're both playing a game and what's interesting is how it felt to execute a jump, we executed different jumps, we had very different solutions. And so you don't get this precise sharing. And I think a lot of people in the art world really want this precise, they want to be like, we have to be talking about the same novel, but you're playing and my playing are different. And trying to find the sameness there. I tried to say that the most important things about games are things that are the same between all experiences. What's really special about games? Games are emergent, interactive qualities, and the game designer skill isn't making this thing that makes for so many people have these interesting aesthetic qualities that emerge in their own mind, in their own bodies as they play. So that's the game side. On the food side, I had this thing where I got really interested in. So there are some cookbooks I love to cook from like Marcella Hazan's essentials of classic Italian cooking, where everything is just elegant and lovely. And then like a lot of people, when I started to learn to cook, I would buy fancy restaurant cookbooks and the food would come out good. But the process of cooking was miserable. And I think the reason is they were never made for one cook. They were made for a working kitchen where there's the person making the stock, and so when you boil that down to one person, it asks you to do things that are impossible or incredibly awkward and there are like 15 things coming off the stove at once and they all need to be dealt with simultaneously. 

So I got really interested in the fact that the cookbooks I was drawn to are ones that had this elegant process of creation. But when you look at cookbook reviews, they concentrated on how good the dish was, but they never talked about the process of cooking. So, when I'm cooking, I'll often be cooking for an hour or two. Most of my engagement with the cookbook is in the cooking process. But the most important thing is to find a cookbook that gives me an elegant, lovely process. And yet that's elided. I think again, because people are obsessed with these kinds of stable object qualities in the finished dish. John Thorne has a really lovely comment here. So he's my favorite food writer. He's an amazing writer. And he says something like "we become hyper obsessed with the product of cooking and making it perfect that we are willing to sacrifice pleasures and joys and aesthetic qualities and the process of cooking it." In this version a lot of the time people cooking now like to shut their friends out and try to cook by themselves to get everything right behind closed doors.

Ben Yeoh(55:00): But they have these second kitchen, where they do the cooking and then present it in their main kitchen.

C. Thi Nguyen (55:05): Right, exactly. What happens when you invite your friends and you cook with them, you improvise on the cooking, you taste things together, you drink together. The final product can be significantly less perfect but the entire process is imbued with action and collective choice and all these wonderful, mixed, socialist aesthetic qualities. One of my big worries these days about cooking culture is the rise of the scientifically perfect cookbook that says, if you do exactly this exactly that and you make sure that perfect French fries and I'm like, yeah, but that was no fun. That was like me looking at my watch that wasn't me smelling, tasting and stowing them around. It was me just anxiously looking at my thermometer until it had exactly the right point. And so again, I think not always, but for a lot of these cookbooks, they arise because we're so laser-focused on the object qualities in the finished product that we're willing to sacrifice all the pleasure along the way. I mean, one interesting thing about cooking without a thermometer is a lot of the time, the way you're judging it is by smelling the food and making a judgment based on the smell of the food. And that's incredibly aesthetically pleasurable.

Ben Yeoh(56:28): Yeah. and there's all of the elements of your environment, your friends, the time, all of those elements, which go into eating. So, I have a question for you on tea, which is how best should I make my tea? So I like oolong tea and I've paid a little bit of attention, but actually I've realized after reading some of your work far not enough. So consider me a great beginner. I've never really heard of a Gong Fu style. I like complexity, I like oolong tea. What should I do and what should I be thinking about making tea?

C. Thi Nguyen (57:04): Yeah. This is interesting because this is very processing. So going from the style tea comments through China, and Taiwan. The way you do it is you take a guy wun, which is like a covered cup. And you put what'll seem like a lot of tea. This is like an eight ounce cup, or less often maybe a five ounce cup. And you'll put in like a teaspoon or two of tea. So first of all you need high quality tea. I'll send you the link.

Ben Yeoh(57:35): [Inaudible 57:35] leaves, but you got actual leaves at the end, right?

C. Thi Nguyen (57:39): Yes, you definitely need something that has whole leaves. Most of what Americans drink is the equivalent of particle board. It's like the sawdust from the bottom of the factory that they've packed in bags because that's the cheap crap. So real tea should be whole leaves. Some of it is rolled up tightly into balls and they'll open up. And the way you brew it is, you'll put a lot of tea in a little cup, and then you're going to brew it for a short amount of time, but you'll brew the same leaves a bunch of times. So for example, I will typically brew some of the tea I have five or ten times. The first brew is five seconds long. The second brew is seven seconds long. The next brew is nine seconds long. And good Chinese tea is really made for this process. So you get to glimpse over time, the changing quality of the tea like each little snapshot is a little evolution and that's what you want. That's the glory. And also you're smelling it the whole time you're adjusting in response. So yeah, this is a case where I think the enjoyment is actually inseparable from the process of making, as I find it really meditative. I write a lot with my tea set up right next to my computer. And the fact that you're constantly pouring a little bit in making it up. I also think you are micro adjusting your caffeine dose because the first few doses off of any tea have most of the caffeine and then it goes down, down, down. It's just a complex, lovely process that involves a lot of intimate interaction with some leaves and it's wonderful. It's so aromatic, deep and changing.

Ben Yeoh(59:39): That's great. And we'll put the link in the description below for those who want to explore more about the tea making process. So I've never been to Salt Lake City or around there. If I had sort of five days, three days, or maybe one day. What restaurant do I need to go to? Let's, let's maybe cut out the Western Canon, unless you think that's going to be the one I'd be interested in, But where should I go? Or maybe we can have one from here. You can have one or two.

C. Thi Nguyen (1:00:17): Salt Lake is a really good place for growing, it's interesting farm land and it's grazing territory. Culinarily, the most exciting thing for people coming to Salt Lake. This is not a restaurant Deltek's Meats is a butcher and truck caterer that does extraordinary work. Cafe de Bola is this wild intensive coffee master who does siphon service and he understands his coffee so profoundly and it's worth doing his siphon service. Interestingly it's like, you can get normal coffee at normal prices, or you can get his special siphoned service for like 12 bucks. And it's funny that people will freak out. People who are totally willing to pay like 10 bucks for a glass of crappy wine will not pay $12 for an extraordinary perfect coffee service.

Ben Yeoh(1:01:18): That actually feels cheap to me, $12 compared to master sushi chef and things like that. Okay. I will definitely put that on my list. Well, maybe we're in around Utah. What do you think is most misunderstood about Mormons? Is there something people kind of think, and then we just really don't understand about Mormon culture? Is there a Mormon cultural food? I suspect there isn't, I don't know.

C. Thi Nguyen (1:01:43): Oh yeah. There's some Jell-O and scallop fried potatoes. I'm going to decline to answer your question.

Ben Yeoh(1:01:48): That is fine. Okay. Let's move over that. So coming to the last couple of questions. What makes a productive day for you? So we had a little bit of it. It seems like tea is an important part, but, what makes you think this is your productivity, or you're feeling most creative and what's a good day, in terms of productivity for you.

C. Thi Nguyen (1:02:16): I think you're asking about creative productivity. So I'm going to leave aside the sludge of like grading [Inaudible 1:02:23].

Ben Yeoh(1:02:24): Yes, Some really good hacks like one of my teachers always used to joke, but I think he did it for real. He would just get your essays and throw them down the stairs and rate it that way, because he says that was just as useful. This is your whole thing about it. He was not a believer in the whole GPA thing. It was everything else. So he said, "I'm just going to throw them down the stairs, but I hope you got a lot out of the process of writing the essay" but no, yeah, creativity.

C. Thi Nguyen (1:02:47): So I went through a big thing in my life where at one point I was writing really boring stuff, because I thought that was what you're supposed to do. I got professionalized in this discipline and a part of the discipline that wrote a lot of very tiny technical papers that I ended up finding really boring and I was doing boring work. And so for me, one of the most intriguing things is figuring out a new idea that excites me. And so the best days are when I actually managed to grapple together some big connection between different ideas. I find it really easy to bog down in boring ideas that you can write a little bit of something about. So here's my productivity tips for creative writers. I often write down every single weird, bizarre idea I have. And then I'll sit down and try to develop every single one, at least a little bit. This might mean just taking a one sentence scribble and trying to turn it into like a few paragraphs or taking a few paragraphs and trying to turn it into an outline for a paper. And what I often find is the really bizarre ideas that seem silly if I give them a little life, if I breathe into them, they'll suddenly flourish. And so what I often do is instead of immediately for each idea, picking which one seems most likely to work, I will try to breathe life into everything and then sit back and be like, wait, which ones are the most interesting. And what this looks like for me is I often have a notebook with like 50 different ideas. Then I will try to turn each of them into a couple paragraphs. And in the end, I'll end up writing papers out of two or three of them, but it's not the ones I expected at the beginning. It's the ones that I let sit around for a few weeks and try to expand and let sit around again. And then suddenly like, oh, that idea isn't silly. That actually is really interesting. Most of my good ideas started just like silly, probably drunk one-off jokes that lived.

Ben Yeoh(1:04:57): Cool. So don't kill off the weird impulse, nurture them.

C. Thi Nguyen (1:05:05): Then kill them later.

Ben Yeoh(1:05:07): Yeah, That was really crazy, but yeah.

C. Thi Nguyen (1:05:12): If the idea is not right, don't turn everything down, but give it a chance for a while.

Ben Yeoh(1:05:16): Yeah. Give it a chance to breathe. I guess you could give advice to young food writers, also young social scientists or philosophers about what they should be thinking or doing or questions or curiosities they should be exploring.

C. Thi Nguyen (1:05:32): Totally different answers for food writers and philosophers. Food writers are curious. There's been a transition from a more professional food writer class who worked for newspapers to a very blog driven food writing world. And one of my concerns with the blogger written food writing world is…

Ben Yeoh(1:06:05): It's gamified.

C. Thi Nguyen (1:06:06): Well, that's part of it, but I'm not sure how to say this politely, but a lot of people from that space don't spend a lot of time researching the cuisines and learning about the details of the cuisine.

Ben Yeoh(1:06:25): Understanding the language of the food that they're talking about.

C. Thi Nguyen (1:06:27): I see, not all, but a very large number of the modern food blogging and Instagram world are easily captured by very Americanized foods that have been tuned for hipster, Instagram ability and missing out on the weirder stuff. I thought as a food writer, a lot of my mission was education. So I had to educate myself first. If people need to understand about how to appreciate social and cuisine, and it's really different for American cuisine, then you need to communicate the difference to that sensibility. So people can learn to do that. You have to learn by yourself and that's actually a fair amount of work. So that's the fundraiser for philosophy. The humanities are not a comfortable place to be in professionally right now. Like the world is against them. I think the only thing I can really say is that the world is huge and full of incredibly interesting topics and a lot of fields that specialize in a very narrow set. But if you keep looking around for the weird, interesting stuff of the borders, I don't know, you might do something as bizarre as writing an entire book based on analyzing the philosophy and proofing games and people might find that interesting

Ben Yeoh(1:07:55): And the world would be a better place for it. So follow the weirdness, I guess. Which then becomes not as weird as you might think. So thank you so much. Please check out the book which I have linked below and thank you very much for coming to chat with me.C. 

C. Thi Nguyen (1:08:15): Thanks so much. Bye.

ThenDoBetter Grant winner: David Blanc

I’ve awarded a ThenDoBetter Grant to David Blanc to help writing a book of chronicles from Mexian police officers (see below for an outline of the project). His twitter is here and he writes a regular newspaper column and his web page is here (mainly Spanish)

Details on the ThenDoBetter microgrants are here.

Book of chronicles from Mexican police officers

It still remains unclear the motivations that leads people to become a police officer in Mexico. On average, they have a monthly salary of 540 dollars. They also have to pay essential material for their duty such as boots, uniforms, bullets and even gas for the patrol. Some have never received training on how to use a weapon or driving a car. All of the above, added to the fact that every day 1.5 officers are killed in the country, and that they usually don´t have a life insurance. Despite this dramatic reality, thousands of police officers risk their lives and work under precarious conditions to protect citizens and provide in a certain way security. Certainly, there should be something praiseworthy.

Behind these statistics there are a lot of stories untold. Everyone tends to forget that police officers are humans too and they are actually the most affected. Therefore, I want to write a book of chronicles to visualize how being a Mexican police officer is one of the most dangerous, underpaid, intrinsically corrupt, and discriminatory profession, and raise awareness of how they manage to address major security problems with scarce resources and training. This project aims to change the citizen bad perspective of police officers and try to empathize in order to start reestablishing communication between both.

The book does not have the objective to justify police abuses nor say all police corporations are good. There are bad police officers. There are bad corporations. Any abuse should be investigated and punished. The book will focus on giving a different perspective and a new narrative on police perception, by outlining some experiences they face during duty.

Anton Howes on innovation history, the improving mindset, and progress studies | Podcast

Anton Howes is an innovation historian and policy thinker. He’s written a brilliant history of the RSA - the royal society for arts, manufactures and commerce - arguably Britain’s national improvement agency over the last 260 years - and is the RSA’s Historian in Residence. I recommend you check out his book, Arts and Minds. He writes a substack newsletter blog on innovation thinking that has won an award from Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures. He has a day job as head of innovation research at the Entrepreneurs Network think tank and in my mind is an all round excellent thinker on innovation. His paper on re-thinking copyright here.

We discuss raising the prestige of innovators today, but consider it easy to say but harder to enact.

Anton argues for the benefits of a “great Exhibition” as a direct mechanism to inspire an “improving” mindset - the type of mindset that leads to innovation.

Anton shares what he has discovered about how invention has happened in history; and whether stagnation has happened or not recently, that it might be good to send a signal on the importance of innovation in any case. Why incremental innovation might be underrated, and why the process of innovation (ideas, iterations) is not publicised more.

Anton discusses evidence that formal education has not been needed for historic inventors (an improving mindset being potentially more important) and whether there are more than enough innovation prizes currently. 

We have a strong section on problems with copyright and how rules around copyright might not be fit for purpose today and how to pronounce “gimcrack” - a useless invention - and why having more gimcracks might be a sign of healthy innovation.

A fascinating walk through innovation history.

See the podcast below, video above and unedited transcript below.

Transcript (edit light):

File Name: Anton Howes chats with Ben Yeoh on innovation history, the improving mindset and progress studies

Length: 01:26:11

Benjamin: Welcome, everyone. I'm super excited to have Anton Howes with me today. Anton Howes is an Innovation Historian and Policy Thinker. He's written a brilliant history of the RSA; the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. That's arguably Britain's National Improvement Agency over the last 260 years and he's the RSA's historian-in-residence. I recommend you check out his book Arts and Minds. It's a great read. He writes a Substack Newsletter Blog also on the ideas of innovation thinking and that has won an award from Tyler Cowen's Emergent Ventures. He has a day job as Head of Innovation Research at the Entrepreneurs Network, think tank and in my mind is an excellent all-round thinker on innovation. Anton, welcome.

Anton [00:00:45]: Thanks for having me on.

Benjamin [00:00:47]: Alright, so let's go straight in. So, productivity and innovation; when you think about value and welfare and maybe items that are not easily recorded in economic measurements. Do you think the decline in productivity or this period or possible innovation stagnation that some people have argued for recently has been perhaps somewhat overstated or not? And do you think we're entering another era perhaps now of an enhanced invention and innovation?

Anton [00:01:17]: Yeah. So, I tend to take the view that if it has been overstated, it's perhaps in particular realms or particular industries. My view is that there's actually more innovation than ever that the acceleration of invention has only accelerated all the more to the extent that in the past would have been considered quite groundbreaking stuff. Nowadays it seems boring. The 10% improvement in the textile industries doesn't have quite the impact that a 10% improvement in the textile industries would have had 200, 300 years ago. We see ever more diversity in products, we see ever more changes to logistics, to transport infrastructure, to the kinds of foods that we can eat to the kinds of experiences that we can purchase, what we can do with our leisure time in constant changes to the quality of the kinds of goods that we use, the materials that we use for them, and it's become so common for us to get. We're so used to those sorts of changes that I'm not convinced that we've had any kind of particular stagnation. Now, where I can concede a point is that perhaps in the really big headline stuff, the sort of things, for example, that Robert Gordon might point to. Maybe there've been slowdowns in particular realms or the introduction of radically new household items, for example, that everyone's going to use. Perhaps there's been some kind of change, but by at large, I think we've had a continued acceleration of invention. 

That said, and this is a point I make quite often; it's no bad thing to be worried about it. Even though I might disagree with people who think that there's some kind of stagnation, I can see it being a good thing to say that there is a stagnation because if we do get the technology of the future a little bit earlier than we would otherwise have done, because of that concern, then that sorts the good. I'd rather have the future faster than have the future now if that future is one of technological progress and continued improvement and so on. So, a useful myth perhaps, although I think it’s well worth promoting and to a large degree, it has a big impact in the creation of this progress studies banner largely. Thanks to Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison, you know, others that have been working on this, or they've been kind of circling around this idea for a long time. The big impact that we've had as a sort of lightning rod, is that suddenly people who were already working on this sort of thing, but kind of circling around and, or didn't have a name for it, now have got a banner under which to do those sorts of studies and that's been useful.

Benjamin [00:04:02]: Yeah. And fast forward to today, there's some evidence that they slightly changed their minds. That actually a lot of innovation is happening, or rather we've seen it maybe in some fields like Biomedical. Your comment that leads me to think also around the difference between incremental innovations or things we kind of think of incremental and those transformational ones, and maybe also specific versus general-purpose, but maybe on the incremental versus sort of transformational. Do I sense that maybe we underwrite those five to 10% incremental innovations? The ones which might not even be worth a patent or something like that, but slowly improves over quality and it is quite hard to measure.

Anton [00:04:45]: Yeah. I think we generally do. We like to focus on the headline stuff. Partly because it's sexy. These exciting new products that kind of come out of nowhere and we think of the first big apple; showcase events with Steve Jobs standing in front of those people, wowing everyone. We think of these big launch events, but the reality is even if we look at those inventions or those innovations, when we boil it down to it, it's actually a collection of small improvements that have just been kept under wraps for a long time. We've allowed those margin improvements to accumulate to this point where, when we reveal it, it appears as though it is magic. And that, I think, is something for all of history as well. The steam engine is another great example. If you look at the development of steam engines, it is a story drawn out of decades and even centuries of margin improvements to its efficiency, margin improvements to the ways in which it can be applied, and so on. Margin improvements turn our understanding of how it works, then over time it results in this transformative technology, but there isn't any single inventor who kind of had 'the' one big breakthrough. Now, even when we talk about that, we actually have to split the credit across a small number of people. When we actually start to look into the very details of their invention, we actually split the credit even further. But even with any particular adventure in that regard, it's not necessarily that they had some kind of annus mirabilis, the sort of thing that people think of. When the pandemic started, a lot of people noticed that Newton seemed to have his plague. He was particularly productive. That's not really the case.

He writes a lot during that year, but it's actually still as a result of the accumulation of a lot of work that has been going on for years. So, that I think is what's happening. Then there's another thing worth mentioning, which isn't just that margin improvement is underrated. And often, not even measured, right? When we think of inflation statistics, for example, when we talk about real GDP, we're actually often discounting quality improvements because we're trying to equate the television of today to the television of yesteryear. Even if we actually compared the two side by side, they're obviously not the same. So, the money we're paying for these things, no inflation statistics are supposed to look at a set basket of goods, but the basket of goods that we use has changed radically. It has to be rebased every few years because of the changes to the diversity of products that we purchase and to the quality of those products as well. I think that often we understate in our statistics just how much improvements are going on there but the other point is that each of the industries that we have; this is what I call the Paradox of Progress. Each of these industries we have has become smaller as a proportion of the economy as a whole. I mentioned textiles earlier. Textiles used to be massive. We're talking at least 15% of the economy in Britain in the 18th century, but today, in the major textile exporter in the world, China, it's less than half of that. It's about seven percent based on the kinds of estimates that I could find. Now that's a massive industry today and we're talking all aggregate. Many more textiles have been produced, millions and possibly billions more textiles have been produced each year, but as a proportion, even of their economy, it's shrunk. So, any improvement that you have to this smaller industry as of; the industry itself is bigger, but the smallest proportion of the whole industry is going to have less of an impact on the economy overall. But, if coffee were something like 50% of the British economy, then the arrival of Starbucks and all the increased improvements for the autosomal coffee makers would put them on par with James Watson, John Kay, and Richard Arkwright. … or whoever you want to mention, right? Because of the impact that that would have had, but it's become the smaller thing and I think the paradox there is that through invention, we actually create new sub-specialism out of previous specialisms. Textiles have gone from overwhelmingly in England, let's say, being well to adding things like silk and linen and cotton, and then you've got all of these newly invented artificial fabrics; the nylon and the various kinds of polyesters, and so on. That there is invention. That's creating these improvements or creating that diversity. And as a result, any improvement to the sub-fields has a smaller apparent impact than an older invention of a very comparable sort would have had before.

Benjamin [00:09:21]: That brings to mind two reflections. One is on your first point about people not understanding incremental innovation and I'm sure we've talked about this. It's because the person in the street doesn't have a very good idea about what innovators do, how innovation actually happens, you know, small teams, big teams, corporate, and the like, so that will come out of there. They missed the incremental because they don't know it's kind of happening. And then on your second point about essentially the challenges of the mismatching of inflation, big TVs versus other TVs. I felt this generally over welfare. So, my example within healthcare is how we view pain. Now, we have ways of managing pain and, you know, talk about something extreme, like terminal illness in your last couple of weeks of life. You can now spend those last couple of weeks pain-free. I don't exactly know what the value of that is, but I'm guessing it's pretty enormous to you, if you could particularly last two weeks, you could have exchanged half your worldly value to be in your last month and to know your family is pain-free. You would maybe be making that decision, but because we have very cheap pain medications which being around all the time that nowhere in our measurement do we say, "What is the actual welfare value of being pain-free?" And that's one small example of where I think some of these general inventions or even that are quite hard to measure because actually, the value to us is extraordinarily high, but not in a dollar way.

Anton [00:10:58]: Yeah. Or, even on a societal level, I think medicines have a lot of really useful examples there, and that there are all sorts of drugs that have been developed year after year. Which are treating very specific diseases which may be a handful of people in the world suffer extraordinarily from. This is like debilitating stuff. It's the sort of thing--

Benjamin [00:11:16]: It gets narrow and narrower.

Anton [00:11:18]: It gets narrow and narrower but we've actually seen extraordinary improvements in the treatment of a lot of those diseases. But just because there are a few people, I don't think it means that progress has slowed down. Maybe on the big stuff, you know, the cancer research and the Alzheimer's and so on that affects millions of people worldwide that have been slowdowns of some sort. And even then I'm actually skeptical because it seems as though there has been dramatic improvement in the treatment of even the headline diseases. But the fact that we're having this incremental improvement that's still ongoing and actually sometimes even accelerating in these kinds of smaller cases. Their smallness is only comparable to looking at society as a whole and thinking things in this kind of frame metal way.

Benjamin [00:12:00]: Yeah. I look at healthcare quite a lot, and I agree that healthcare biomedical progress is still happening at a reasonably fast clip, obviously quite hard to measure. They maybe argue about how much we're having to spend to get that progress. But even there, I think it's a little bit unclear. So, you have this idea or a vision for a kind of grand or great exhibition as a mechanism for people to understand invention and innovation closer and maybe be inspired to invent and fix problems for themselves, but almost as a direct mechanism. Would you like to elaborate on why you think a great exhibition is such a good idea and actually maybe what you would do if you're organizing one? This in the UK has got a kind of mini one may be in the offing, but you know, how should we really think about the great exhibition both in history and what we should do now?

Anton [00:12:52]: Yeah. So, a lot of people think of the world's fairs and they'd be right in doing so, right? They camped at the Great Exhibition of 1851. The famous one for Crystal Palace as being the first of its number. Not that there was this idea of world's fairs coming out of it. It's just, that was the first one and they've kind of backdated the first of their number to that one. The problem is that nowadays world's fairs, I think, have become very much a national branding exercise. They're highly curated. You've got conference designers putting together exhibits that they think the public will like for a sort of mass market. You've got country stalls, but the country stalls are going to be the sorts where Britain is trying to show off particular things that it wants to show off at the time. I don't know. It's got buzzwords that some ad agency has come up with that it wants to promote. Various other countries will have certain cultural things they want to do. They're trying to get tourists along. It's a PR agency kind of-- I'm trying to think of the word that it's kind of delightful … They're kind of a grand international and they get lots of visitors and some of them are extremely popular, but that's not what the original exhibitions were. So, the Great Exhibition of 1851 is copying the French model of the industrial exhibition. Which is a highly commercial event in the sense that you have lots of businesses, but also individuals and scientists and whoever else all over the country and who are producing things. These producers should have this opportunity to showcase the best of what they're doing. By showcasing the best you do two things: you allow producers to educate one another by sharing best practices.

So, if you are a cotton manufacturer and you get to see what your rivals done in the south of the country and you're in the north of the country and you're like, 'Wow, this stuff is amazing, here's where I needed to catch up.' Here are the inventions I need to adopt in order to raise my game, then that sort of does it. So, it becomes an engine of invention in that respect. In another respect also, you've got the fact that by putting everyone in the same room or in the same building and in just the space of a few months, you're potentially going to create all of these connections amongst people. The Great Exhibition of 1851 happens to coincide and it's not a coincidence at all with the First International Chess Tournament. Now, World Level International is one that they're trying to organize and likewise with all sorts of other initiatives for international standardization. You start to get the first proper conversations about standardizing things from the postal service to telegraph rates too late with the later world's fairs, including things like musical pitch which hadn't been internationally standardized before. So, you've got those kinds of conversations that might spark further invention and then from the consumer point of view, if you are just an ordinary visitor to these things, you might be exposed to products that you hadn't even realized you wanted. In the same way, that constantly happened through advertising today is that often the main effect of advertising is just reminding you that you might want something already or just exposing you to a product that you had no idea was there. So, the highly commercial things, which I think nowadays a lot of government bodies will be uncomfortable with, perhaps explains even at the time, why the Great Exhibition despite the fact it has this Royal Commission that set up to organize it is still ultimately a private event. It was a for-profit event. The profits are reinvested in the creation of what ends up being the kind of museum model.

I think that rollout the other memorials; the Victorian Albert Museum, the Science Museum, all of that. That's a kind of cultural hub known at the time as Albertopolis, named after Prince Albert for being the kind of national head of this project. Ultimately, it's a for-profit thing with these nonprofit kinds of aims. Very strangely organized, but also the funding doesn't come from the government. It comes from subscriptions. I think today you'd actually have to probably copy that model fairly closely because it probably has to be something that's crowd funded to a certain degree that has private capital going into it to a certain degree that allows you to then do those quite commercial things. Like have people sending their exhibits and be able to use it as advertising and not get uncomfortable about you tendering processes and fair treatment and so on from the use of that event. I think it's the sort of thing that requires some kind of government involvement. Certainly, you're going to need permissions, you're going to need perhaps policing, you're going to need insurance kinds of questions that need to be sorted out. There are all sorts of things that need to be solved, but the way I like to think of it in modern terms is if you imagine some of the great big industry fairs that you see often for specific industries. Imagine all of those rolled into one super event. So, not just seeing the very latest in drones or software, but also the very latest in bathroom design, arts in general, sculpture, pottery or building. Just absolutely everything that you can think of jammed into this super events. The kinds of things I'm envisaging would include; if we do manage to genetically engineer dinosaurs and so on. Those would be featured if we do manage to sort of-- This isn't the right thing to say because I'm kind of going to raise Jurassic Park kind of concerns. Whatever is the next level of technology that we're just about to hit, it should be showcasing that like everyone doesn't see robotics.

Benton [00:18:26]: Robotics! Yeah. People moving things with their brain.

Anton [00:18:30]: People don't realize that today people are going around in mixed suits lifting heavy objects in factories. This is happening already and it's the sort of thing that is otherwise consigned to fiction. Like Iron Man kind of suits sort of exist in some very specific ways.

Benjamin [00:18:49]: Yeah. Although, I think to some of the other work you've been doing, it's sort of a bit of a false presumption that you've got this kind of rich Tony Stark, which is going to make an Iron Man suit in terms of how invention actually happens. So, I think that's a brilliant idea. I do think there's a touch with a huge big tech conference, which happens in Spain every year. I don't know. You might be fascinated to know when we do the real person in life thing again.  Amazon, on their AWS side, have this big conference and I went around to one of them. This one is free with this idea and thousands were there, but it was really just the people who were interested in Amazon tech and it's open to the general public, but it wasn't. This is the problem about the fact that we've had advances in so many areas. This is just the little pocket of Amazon world. Like you say, "Where's the medicine? Where's the engineering? Where's the networks of fact? Where's the deep mind? Where are all of these? I think it would be a great thing although, I wonder about the scale of it to really happen. We need to cross all of these things, but it would then show that actually, we've made progress in so many of these different fields compared to where we were and that's part of it.

Anton [00:20:00]: Yeah. I think there's the benchmarking, right? With the original industrial exhibitions that are copied to the great submission. In France, they start these off in 1798 and every few years they have a new event. The idea at the time was that, out of patent fees that would be funded. The French ones were state-funded ones from this particular accrual of fees and then they were kind of holding the vendor for a few years. And then you have this benchmarking process, you're able to see how much has this particular industry progressed in the country versus where it was before and people started to get worried. The reason the Brits copy it is because they start to look at the levels of mechanization that are being achieved in France and starting to worry that France already has this lead in fashion, but if it also catches up to the lead that Britain had in any kind of mass production of things, then from an international trade perspective, the competition is really coming in and something needs to be done about it. The idea behind having the international exhibition was not just to celebrate British accomplishments, but actually to reveal shortcomings and it's used as a tool by reformers to point to things that need to be done by the government from a policy perspective. That's again, another very valuable thing about it. Which I think it can reveal who's ahead and who's behind along these certain metrics is I think often very valuable information that you just don't otherwise come by, right? Especially when it's in this kind of qualitative way. You can do all of the quantitative studies you like, but ultimately seeing is believing. Especially for policymakers.

Benjamin [00:21:32]: Yeah. For certain. That's one of the things I got from your book Arts and Minds; were I hadn't appreciated in the early history of the RSA and actually its whole history into the modern-day. This idea that there was a nation-state element to it is like, we will better the world as a sort of side effect but we should definitely better our nation. And then if what we do spills over to the rest of the world, that's great, but we need to ensure British inventions or British things don't fall behind. Therefore, this is why we're going to gang together and do that. This is what you might call an enlightened self-interest. It was seemingly quite a large driver which could kind of remain today and be utilized. You do not think even in a globalized kind of framework.

Anton [00:22:25]: I think there's actually a globalized justification for this kind of nationalism. In a way that if you have lots of countries like Britain; Boris Johnson said, "Oh, I want this country to be the best place in the world for scientists and inventors or something to that effect." I can't remember the exact words but that's a useful thing to what every national leader can say, right? We should be encouraging every national leader to do that because then we can get a race to the top of the kinds of institutions, the kind of support that invention gets worldwide. Some people often say, "Why?" But then given the agglomeration effects, given that usually the real driving force happens in the place. It's where people are most concentrated. Surely, we should just get everyone over to the kind of valley or whatever is the latest version. I don't know. Miami or there'd be lots of new ones lately, right? But to the Silicon Valley or newer Silicon Valley, we should just get everyone there and have the kind of agglomeration effect from everyone being so concentrated. But in actual fact, we want other countries to be the next place because that way, even if that particular hub starts to fail or starts to decay or starts to decline in some kind of way, then there's going to be a new place for them to step to.

Benjamin [00:22:31]: Most countries should be able to sustain at least one, if not more than one type of hub. It's kind of interesting that there are so few hubs of Silicon Valley's nature....

Anton [00:23:43]: Yeah. I mean, I suspect there were more hubs but for small specific industries that we give credit to. Think of Nokia and so on coming out of Finland and I think there were particular industry hubs of certain ways and Silicon Valley makes a big headline impact because of the fact that you've got these very successful companies making a lot of money and kind of attracts people to that as well.

Benjamin [00:24:05]:  What role do you think innovation prizes should play or not? Because also, when I was reading your book, I was sort of struck by how many essential innovation prizes, all those types of things, seem to be around. And when I look at today, there are some, but don't seem to be the level and scale, also adjusted are the money and prestige available versus that. Do you think we should be having maybe more innovation prizes? I guess it's gone down the world of VC and accelerators in a different form of funding. But, I was intrigued by how many innovation prices there seem to be about versus today. Or maybe.....

Anton [00:24:47]: Well, today it seems like there's loads more. It's just that there's certainly a lot more money available by prices. I don't know about prestige available by prices and that's a slightly different thing. Now, certainly we're not talking here for a kind of more general listeners about things like the Nobel prize which is sort of lifetime achievement of prize, but more for a specific longitude style prize. Here's a particular problem. If you find a solution is 'X' amount of....

Benjamin [00:25:14]: That would be a more environmentally friendly cement or....

Anton [00:25:17]: Right. So we've got the 'X' prices. Elon Musk has got his various prices. I've seen all sorts of other particular ones. I think Prince William just announced a new prize with someone else for environmental purposes. I actually remember at one point even the RSA did a study on the number of environmental prices saying, 'there's too many and we need to start kind of...'

Benjamin [00:25:38]: Okay. Alright. Well, I take it back. There's not a problem with the number of prices, maybe it's the prestige essentially.

Anton [00:25:44]: Yeah. Or, perhaps the money is too spread out along between too many different prices and that actually is not sufficiently motivating. Now, the problem with prices I think is that just like a lot of innovation policies in general, it affects the direction of invention, but I don't think it actually does much to increase invention as a whole. If we think of there being a kind of pool of inventors; they have limited attention spans. There's only so many things that they can be working on at once. And what prices do is, people follow the money generally speaking. So, if you attach pools of money to particular activities, they're going to direct themselves towards those sorts of things. Now, that can be extremely useful. And one of the valuable things, I think that the Society for Arts did was it often tried to have prices that will be available to people who otherwise wouldn't have access to sources of funding. So, there might be people who are too poor for patents. They might be too gentlemanly too grubbing themselves with commercial things hence, the kind of prestige elements or they might be for prizes that aren't worth patenting because they're either too niche or they’re not for profit things there might be safety improvements where the profit-making isn't as obvious as a kind of, lying to them or they might use them to direct people's attention to the sorts of things that people were working on.

So much more humanitarian kinds of things to do so it includes how to rescue someone from a river who's drowning? Improvements of how to prevent carriages from overturning? Improvements of how to put breaks on steam engines? Improvements to the lifeboat and so on and so forth. All niche which actually often does have this hidden humanitarian aspect to them but isn't as obvious in hindsight like, improvements to carrying fish over land rather than sea so that you could break the monopoly of the Billingsgate Fishmongers because there's this social concern that monopolies are taking advantage and raising prices of basic commodities and so on. You have all of these. I think those are the particular uses of prices that I think people should focus on when designing them is that they should be about directing people's attention to things that aren't already being done. I think there's a lot of work on environmental stuff. I can see why they're environmentally focused prices, but the more specific they are the better. So, something like, I want a price that's going to take carbon out of the atmosphere is much better than a general environmental prize nowadays, given the value it has at least getting existing inventors to look at particular problems. The other lacking thing is definitely prestige. I think sometimes the prestige comes with the amount of money that's given out.

Benjamin [00:28:26]: Sure.

Anton [00:28:27]: Nobel Prize being what is it, a million dollars I think, or equivalent there too is a big deal. And so, the larger the prices, the better. Probably Elon Musk's one will have a big impact for a similar reason. Given the kind of amount of money that can be winnable, but even then, I worry that it's just going to be people who already were working on those problems just applying for the grant or applying for the prize money rather than it stimulating other people to work in.....

Benjamin [00:28:55]: New people, which is one of the good effects of a Great Exhibition. You might get a general public person thinking, 'Oh. I could do this. I've got this problem I might want to......'

Anton [00:29:05]: Prices can be combined as well. The Great Exhibition had a prize jury, right? That would look and try to find the best of the best within each category. Internationally drawn group of experts and they would give out prizes. In France, for the National Level Ones, they would hand out to Alicia and Donair to someone who happened to be the best of the best within some of these categories. There're ways of combining those two which might actually make the price stand out even more by being associated with the event rather than having a price and building things around that.

Benjamin [00:29:41]: Sure. I think one argument I've heard you articulate is that formal education may not necessarily be a good predictor for invention, which I think is quite interesting for people who aren't going down a formal routine; I can be an inventor. Do you think this is still true today? And, why might that be? And you have a small movement say, "Peter Thiel has these fellowships where you're purposely not allowed to go to university because it might open up different avenues of thought." So, I'm interested in whether you think maybe formal education is not needed for being an inventor today and perhaps why that might be?

Anton [00:30:24]: Yeah. I think invention itself is more of an attitudinal thing. I like to describe it as an improving mentality that the people who do invent things are people who see room for improvement where other people perhaps don't. Then, they work at solutions to the problems that they've created. So in a way, the first step is kind of whining and complaining about things saying, "Oh, this could be better. It's not so great after all." And not being satisfied with the way things are but what makes them much more interesting than just people complaining about things is that they actually try to find the solutions as well. It's those two things combined which I think is the most interesting thing to look at. But, the first step really ultimately is against people who are saying it is broke and I want to fix it rather than kind of being satisfied saying that, 'if it ain't broke then don't try to fix it.' The problem identification is the crucial thing there. And then what happens after you've identified the problem is that actually you don't necessarily need to have been skilled in the industry that you're trying to improve there. That's typically inventors. You just self-educate which is easier than ever today. Thanks to the kind of information technologies that we have.

To the extent that things like YouTube have opened up tacit knowledge to us in a way that wasn't really there before. It could be getting the expertise to solve a problem that used to involve at least spending a few years with you doing an apprenticeship, copying someone else, and trying to get those kinds of tacit things that can't be written down and communicated just through the written word or text. Nowadays, I think video is breaking that barrier to the extent that you could effectively do an apprenticeship with someone a million miles away and it would be just as good or close to as good. Or, they rely on other experts in the same way that for you to have a life-changing app idea, you don't necessarily need to be a software engineer. You can rely on other people and as long as you've got a clear idea of how you're going to go about all of the improvements that are being envisaged there and that you can still be an innovator in that way, but with a bit of a division of labor going on. And that's where I think teams when they innovate, they actually do it properly. There are people who are doing different stages of the invention process; the ideation, the implementation, the iteration, and then improvements along certain lines alongside that as well. I have forgotten the original question, but that...

Benjamin [00:32:59]: It was the formal education that was needed and basically your answer is no because mindset is more important. Which means...

Anton [00:33:07]: It could help, right? So, it's yeah. I qualify there is, but obviously if you are a software engineer, you come up with an app idea that is helpful. If you already know about the process and you know what's possible, for example, you know some of the limitations and with that said, sometimes the only limitations can be a bad thing, right? So there are cases in history where sometimes the complete novice actually had an insight into these things or not so much had an insight, but was willing to waste their time in experimentation in a way that the experienced person wouldn't be. So, Bessemer and steel is a great example of this, where he was told by all of the IMS legit, 'Don't bother. It's not possible.' And he says, "Well, I wouldn't have a go anyway, because that's just what he'd been doing for decades." He's already been an adventurer in all sorts of other ways, but he says, "You know, I had nothing to unlearn," and that was the benefit there. And that he was kind of rebuilding something from scratch. Now, not everyone's going to be a Bessemer. Some people might kind of listen to this and start to reinvent a field and discover that actually, the experts were right all along for years. But eventually, it's inherently wasteful in many ways, right? Experimentation is inherently waste...

Benjamin [00:34:13]: A lot of failures or…

Anton [00:34:16]: There is a lot of failure or...

Benjamin [00:34:17]: ......or learning. "Fail attentive learning," they say. F-A-I-L. This is why I'm really excited by your idea about this mindset. First of all, it goes into all of these books where you had the growth mindset. Now, I know you've got the scale mindset and things, but it is not just curiosity. Although, curiosity has a problem complaining as an element, but then going to do something about it and maybe this idea of stamina, like keeping at it as well. So, these qualities, which are just subtly different from just being curious about the world. I'm curious. You can read a lot about it, but then you have to do something and then not quite give up, you kind of keep going on, which I think is really interesting.

Anton [00:35:01]: So, I think there's one thing. This is a really important point that you're raising here. I know I haven't even let you finish the question, but there is an important point here which I want to tease out. Sometimes out here, kids are naturally innovative. The problem is the education system has stifled kids. They're naturally experimental, they're natural thinkers. Now that's true. I think kids are naturally creative and a lot of us are in general. And that sometimes, we learn conformity in some ways or sometimes our creativity is poo-pooed enough that we kind of give up on certain elements a bit, or we kind of restrict ourselves in terms of the kinds of things we reveal. But that's not quite what I'm talking about when it comes to the improving mentality. It's that yes curiosity and the kind of creativity is maybe extremely useful in finding those solutions, but there's a lot more direction going on, right? There are a lot more kids who are experimenting with this stuff aren't necessarily identifying problems and then finding solutions. I don't think that's going on. They're just tinkering and creating random things, but they're not necessarily thinking about the applications of those things or their usefulness. Now, maybe once in a while, maybe one in a hundred inventions turns out to be the reason that way. Where someone just kind of randomly doing something and through the kind of natural bubbling up of their creativity that they create something that they then think, 'Okay, it solves this problem.' But that I think is actually one of the problems with how the public at large thinks about the invention is that we almost have this idea of maybe, it is used to be people in some R&D Lab in some major company like Xerox or something or Bell Labs. Nowadays, it's just a bunch of people in smart suits sitting around a whiteboard and, or maybe not in smart suits but in t-shirts and shorts sitting around a whiteboard and coming up with ideas and brainstorming. But in actual fact, I think when it's people just noticing the problem and saying, "Let's find a solution." That's when creativity comes in. Perhaps as useful as a kind of means to an end, rather than the engine itself.

Benjamin [00:37:03]: Yeah. As you hinted to earlier; the sort of ideation or the idea, but then whatever you're doing. Say modeling, prototype, testing, iterating, an idea it's like, 'Oh, maybe we need to shave off this, move that, do this prototyping, iterating and measuring. Oh, it may be that went the wrong way so, maybe we need to do the reverse.' That sort of effort involved being directed much more than just, 'Oh, genius. I thought about that idea.'

Anton [00:37:30]: I've been calling it the optimizing mindset in some ways. It's like people have these-- who's your friend who has an Excel spreadsheet for like a particular activity that they do. And that optimizes the efficiency of that particular thing. I know a few people who have applied that to like going to the gym or something, right? That's self-improvement, it's actually still an improvement. It's the same mindset at play there. It's that they've realized there's a particular activity they do but they also want to make sure they do it as efficiently and as best as they possibly can.

Benjamin [00:38:01]: Yeah. I agree. I guess the one extra I would add is if you're working in a small team or large team, you don't need necessarily everyone to have that. Because you might have the one person who's working much more on the ideation or how to tweak it. It's still their underlying current because that's what your team is working on, but someone's very good at the kind of recording, measuring, iterating and someone's kind of very good at like, 'oh actually maybe we should try this or maybe we should try that.' Actually, that leads me onto this sort of follow-up about how invention works, because I guess when you go back 300 years ago maybe you did have these kinds of singular inventors. They do worth speaking to a lot of other people, but maybe it was just them and some of their assistants, but today it very much seems to be more small teams, large teams. I'm interested in whether we should back the person or the project. What do you think works best for innovation? What are the strengths and weaknesses between smaller teams, larger teams, iterative teams, and all? Do you think this is a myth? I've said its myth, so maybe it's not of just the lone inventor. How true does that actually happen and how important is teaming and thinking about that for innovation?

Anton [00:39:17]: Yeah. I think if there's a division of labor amongst people, for me, it kind of brings to mind as though invention is something that happens by committee. The people sitting around the whiteboard; I don't think that's what happens. I think it is much more divided. There's a lot more individual effort that's then combined in the same way as science overall, right? And you have lots of scientists doing their own thing and then through their interaction we get science, right? This kind of thing which is accumulated and kind of, not even accumulated, but often being tested kind of knowledge. Where there's a lot of individual effort then through various other impersonal mechanisms combined into something else of its own. I think that's what happens with technology as well. I think what happens with invention is that we should think of it as something that happens on the individual level and we should seriously take the fact that people who work in teams are definitely individuals doing a bit of invention. But it's through their combined marginal improvements that we sometimes get for the invention, right? If we want to start putting it into a box. That again, is why this ultimately comes back to focus on marginality. Let's focus on the small tweaks and implementations and small changes. We were right to say that an invention isn't just the product of a single genius necessarily, although it might be. But even that thing is drawing upon prior improvements, right?

Benjamin [00:40:57]: Sure.

Anton [00:40:58]: Newton famous said, "He could see further because he stood on the shoulders of giants, right? That's something that all inventors must do. There's no way that they're not doing that. They're building on previous improvements that other people have done. That's either something that happens outside of a team because you've got some inventor down the garden shed who is working on a thing and has read about something that comes up with their own improvement. But I don't think them doing that is actually that much course, it's qualitatively different than if they'd been in the same room with the person, they just read about their invention. They're kind of bouncing ideas off one another. Perhaps bringing the inventor from their garden shed and into the room will speed things up a bit. And that's perhaps where the team comes in useful, but ultimately, it's still individual.

Benjamin [00:41:42]:  Do you have a view? Some of the literature suggests that at a certain point a certain size of team doesn't work as well when you're working on a project. In extremist, I think if you're getting 300 people to work on something, it doesn't seem to work as well as three to 12 people or teams. Although the project is a bit mixed, you are going to have many experiments on it. Do you think you'd have a view there or is it hard to say? 

Anton [00:42:09]: I don't know much about the intricacies of innovation management, but where there is a problem often is in what you might call the research element that you have to do to prevent yourself from doing any wasted research of your own. If you are someone who comes up with some improvement to the mop and you're going to get your patents on that, even if you're not, it's not necessarily going to exploit it. That commercially is going to be your proof that you are the inventor of this margin improvement. You're going to have to go and do a whole lot of research before you even start...

Benjamin [00:42:52]: I think...

Anton [00:42:54]: ...doing much of the tinkering to work out if your things are original, and someone hasn't really done it. Now, when you have hundreds or thousands of people all working on those sorts of improvements, that becomes a bit of a slog and requires wasted effort, almost doing research for people to even kind of do the search before they even start doing other stuff. That's where I can see is being the problems today, that there's such a proliferation of stuff. There's so much going on that it's difficult to know where to put your own intentions. There is this very harmful idea that there's nothing new under the sun. In actual fact, very often, the sun has not seen a lot of interesting things that you'd think were quite obvious. But I think having that extra bit of self-confidence to be the person to say, "No. This is actually regional and no one else has done this." I think a very useful attribute of inventors is what some inventors are accused of and the innovators accused seem to be quite egotistical. Maybe there's a kind of correlation there between the people whose bold enough to say, "This is brand new." That someone who would...

Benjamin [00:44:02]: There seems to be a partial element of that. You think of someone like Elon Musk, who thinks of himself as an engineer is just somewhat off mainstream, can sometimes seemingly be helpful. Actually, large teams and small teams are what people are conflicting theories over, I do think there is a duplication element. There's also an element of potential. You want to follow the person rather than the project and if you have 300 people, not all of them really want to be on the project and just things like that. But I was interested and didn't have a view, but if you were then in charge of a corporate R&D lab, or maybe say in Tech or Software or even Biology. Do you think there's a way of organizing or having an insight of over history that you think maybe they could do a little bit more and therefore be a bit more effective? Or, is it too unique to the culture and projects of the actual organization to have any insights?

Anton [00:45:00}: That's a really interesting question. Now, what's interesting about my own research is that it's almost the wholly concentrate over the pre-lab era where it's the overwhelming individuals doing stuff often in concert with one another. And, they're a part of communities of engineers where they're all working on their separate thing. Yeah. I guess...

Benjamin [00:45:19]: ...don't have. Yeah. That is interesting whether the modern world has something to learn from how we did it before. I'll re-ask the question, which was if you're in charge of a corporate R&D lab or thinking about R&D today. Are there any learnings that you might've had from your historical perspective on innovation?

Anton [00:45:42]: Yeah. It's an interesting question because largely the period I've studied is that one before the rise of the corporate R&D lab. Which is kind of in the late 19th century kind of thing, it really takes off in the 20th century. We've seen a decline since then in the mid-20th century and late 20th century in particular. A lot of my insight is from this era of individuals. Now, they're not necessarily just people who just work on their own in isolation. They're certainly a part of communities of engineers; London engineers. The people who were starting the kind of standardization that you have of mechanical parts. These are the people who are doing their individual stuff possibly with their own individual companies. It's their apprentices who are going off and setting up rightful companies that are using other kinds of machinery, but it's still improving on the standardization, that's taken place at the parent company, where their previous masters have been doing stuff. Ultimately, it was something that was done by individuals there. So, in terms of lessons from it, it's hard to say. Now, one possibility there is that over the course of the late 19th century, we saw the improvements in the process of invention which then gave rise to the corporate R&D lab. I think there's possibly something to that, but again I couldn't say for sure. That's kind of an open question for me. It's still something I'll have to work on, in the future.

Benjamin [00:47:17]:  Well, if we'd solve this, then progress studies would not be such a hot topic, in terms of how we think about progress. You might not have anything to say on this one either, but I will ask it anyway. So, that was on the corporate R&D lab, but then here in the UK we're about to launch ARIA, which is modeled on the US DARPA or ARPA-E. It's aside from NIH, but I guess we're talking about government-funded innovation labs. I was just thinking if you were going to give a bit of advice to the new executive director, or maybe you would be the new executive director of ARIA yourself. What do you think it should be doing or not? And, given maybe another preamble to work into this because there is this idea now that maybe we should be sponsoring more people rather than projects. And, if you look at little labs at the moment, they're often led by a lab leader who's having these ideas, and then they have three to 12 people or teams working under them with their own kind of research projects which they are feeding into and then constantly talking with the lab director of thinking, let see how we do this. Actually, even in corporate R&D labs there is a touch of that. Although it's changed a lot. The UK R&D seems to be going to do a program management approach, but it does seem to be quite open. Executive director, UK ARIA, is there any advice for them?

Anton [00:48:50]: Yeah. So, I guess the question is about the model that's going to be adopted here. I think one of the things that you often hear, at least within the mythology of DARPA ARPA is that it's funding; if the kind of blue skies research that doesn't necessarily have a particular application yet, and you just want to see where they throw some money at people doing all kinds of research without having to answer too many questions and have too much oversight and see what happens and then perhaps start looking at applications. Now, maybe there's something to that. I guess, I still think an organization like that needs a kind of framing of problems. In terms of strategic oversight, I think I've always assumed that there's a problem in the back of people's minds. Perhaps, another model that we need to look at here is what happens during World War II. Where you have in the UK and the US you have these kinds of defense, or you have experts in various fields brought into close proximity and asked to find things that will help the war effort. So, you've got some framing of problems there, and perhaps you have specific problems identified for them to solve, and then that's the kind of research model that the individuals through conversations and through just their own research would be coming up with solutions to work on. There was a book I read a few years ago. I'm not sure how historically accurate a lot of it is because it was a biography. It focused on the achievements of an individual. It was called Churchill's Iceman.

Someone who works in one of these World War II British laboratories and is coming up with ideas like, instead of building these fast aircraft carriers why don't we use icebergs and create artificial icebergs, and then you can land planes on them. Now, I don't know how feasible that work is, but he also comes up with all sorts of other ideas which do have interesting applications, like trying to draw the Germans out into Norway. Through the use of troops on what would be later become snowmobiles. This is pretty interesting fun work, but again, even though it sounds quite random and sort of out there, it still has that basic purpose that the application is actually at the forefront of their mind, not even at the back of their mind. This is the strategy that we should use, and here's a way to solve that strategy, even though this means that is quite creative and out there. I think there's potential that ARPA or ARIA ends up giving a lot of funding to people who are working on interesting things and just for them to carry on doing those things. But, where I think things get really interesting from the kind of state-funded model isn't so much the blue sky stuff, but it's actually, which I think a lot of the universities-supported sector really does. But it's more in solving particular challenges where a lot more investment in solving those challenges could be very useful. So, perhaps something to do with climate change. I don't know. The governments all have their strategic kind of ideas about things they want to have improvements in.

Benjamin [00:52:01]: Yeah. I have a personal view that they should be looking at some of these things where there's a lot of public goods, but private companies might not necessarily be looking into it. And, some things which are sort of controversial or anecdotal which could just do with better study, like personal productivity. If it's really true that if we can work in psychological flow and be that much more productive, then surely, we should be doing lots of research on something like that. Or, if it's really true that intermittent fasting is really going to work for you? That's not something that a private company is really going to ever make that much money from to be interested in. Therefore, we should look at it like, people think educational mastery may or may not be a thing, but actually the work is quite patchy and no one's going to really look at it. We should really look at how progress studies or how we teach these things which could be studied. But I think you're right. That it would stem from having a really interesting program behind it. Like, this is the application, this is how we're going to learn better and then get some kind of people thinking like, 'Oh wait, that's the problem. I really kind of want to work with them.'

Anton [00:53:12]: Yeah. The interesting thing is that ultimately, it's going to come down to who is chosen to work for those projects. So, even if we take the people; not projects approach, which I think has a lot of merits. Especially, probably more than most, I think that approach have a lot of merits. Then, which people are we choosing because they're going to have their own projects in mind that they're probably already working on and they probably want to get a bit of funding for. It's the strategic direction there. It's going to be very important. So, whoever's in charge is going to be having to make some hard decisions because whoever they don't choose, perhaps it's not going to be working on this thing at all.

Benjamin [00:53:47}: Yeah, that's true. Then, there's that mystical but very important culture piece which I think goes back to your kind of inventing mindset of having a culture of rewarding or thinking about like this and the tension between not knowing what you're doing so that you can do something a bit different and new, but then working in the field. I think about Paul Graham's Y Combinator, and that part has seeded this whole model of seed in VC, which has been really important. The way he tells it is, he partly did it because he didn't know he couldn't do it. Right? So, that model came from that. Although obviously, he had all of these other things, but then the other thing about why it's been very difficult to replicate in other countries is because there's something particular about the culture and the people that you also form, that makes it work. Y Combinator really works for that, but essentially you haven't, although it's seeded a lot of other ideas in that whole thing, you haven't actually had a UK Y Combinator, for instance...

Anton [00:54:49]: Yeah.

Benjamin [00:54:51]: ...or actually any other one really. So, it's this really weird blend which I'm hoping progress studies make some insights into, but we certainly don't seem to have the...

Anton [00:55:01]:  Yeah. I think in that case, success breeds success. There is two steps. If you had a lot more people in the UK who get very rich and successful off of their innovation in particular, and didn't just retire to the home counties to some big match and not talk to anyone ever again, but then decided it's up to them to also give back to the community and inventors in particular, not even necessarily giving back a lot of money to charities, but decided that the thing they want to do is raise the next generation of themselves in some ways. Then that's what you require for that to happen. For it to be bottom-up, I think you...

Benjamin [00:55: 43]:  I think this is the bet which we touched upon. The reputation or prestige, or want to call it life purpose. This kind of intangible thing to touch upon about why you might want to do something right...

Anton [00:55:57]: People going to VC is crazy financially, it makes very little sense, I think. There's much more kind of secure things you could do with your money. I suspect throwing money at some crazy ideas, but the fact that it's a very prestigious thing for a successful entrepreneur in California to do is what's helpful there. Again, invention is wasteful. I think that the question is, how do you create a culture that can accommodate that waste?

Benjamin [00:56:21]: Yeah. I...

Anton [00:56:22]: And that's perhaps the key thing there.

Benjamin [00:56:24]: I'm going to say I learned a new word reading your book as well. I don't know how you pronounce it correctly as a gimcrack. Is it a practice gimcrack or a [Gimcrack]? [Different pronunciation] 

Anton [00:56:35]: That's a good question. I think it's a gimcrack... [inaudible 00:56:36].

Benjamin [00:56:36]: [inaudible 00:56:36] Yeah. I actually thought that gimcrack is quite a good sign because if these are useless inventions coming out, which is what a gimcrack kind of means. It was kind of used in a slightly derogatory rate, but that's quite good because you're getting this flow of ideas coming up and you can recognize them as gimcrack, which is great. For every hundred, as you say, you're going to have 99 gimcracks to get one which isn't, and we don't have that...

Anton [00:57:03]: Yeah. It’s a sign that something that is working.

Benjamin [00:57:06]: It's a sign of something working...

Anton [00:57:07]: When there are bad ideas coming to you as an inventor, then that's actually a sign that there's enough people who think that being an inventor is a good thing. That you're getting the crazies and the cranks and the people who don't really know what they're doing, but they kind of have the wish to identify as an event. Yeah.

Benjamin [00:57:24]: Great. Okay. Actually, I got a few more questions. We'll see how we do in time. One of those is that success breeds success; is kind of what you said. I was really interested, particularly in history, which is probably different today; but why certain inventions didn't stick or also to your point that actually there were some small things or even not so small, which in some respect should have been obvious to a lot of people, but didn't. You give a lot of examples of small improvements industrially. One I've always think about is this idea that we've talked a lot about within healthcare now, but also in other fields of the double-blind trial, which seems to have to be rediscovered. We think that may be Captain Cook did one around scurvy. He gave some people lemons or citrus fruit. But it seemed to be rediscovered over the ages, but as a concept that maybe that was also prevalent in Babylonian times. But the idea of a not testing and trialing with one group and the other and comparing is actually the idea which could have happened and probably did happen quite a lot, but didn't really stick until relatively recently. And actually didn't move away from healthcare into economic, randomized controlled trials that we have today until relatively late. So, I'm interested in dispersion of invention and what makes it stick and is that a mindset cultural idea, or is it that something more complicated going on there? This is probably quite a difficult question to come up with, but I have thought about something like double-blind and then my follow-on thinking while I'm just talking is that the value of the double-blind test. This is going to the stuff you can't measure. Has been immeasurable. You couldn't do any pharmaceutical development until you understood that and that's something which doesn't go into measurements; some of these journal purpose ones. It's also going into economics and all of these other fields, because of that. So, that's another element, but I was thinking, what makes certain inventions stick or not? And has that changed? Is it to do with the mindset where something like double-blind or in your book, you have a lot of these things where you kind of look at it and go, Wow! They could have invented this a lot earlier and then someone did at this point in time and it stuck.

Anton [00:59:46]: Yeah. The question of, why certain things don't get adopted at certain times? Isn't a particularly fascinating thing. I think there's a certain kind of activation energy to adopting an invention and that can be the biggest hurdle because adoption is costly, right? The double-blind trial is a good example. If you're in a field where you're reasonably certain that something is true and you're probably not bothered to subject to this gold standard; very costly way of doing things versus the other things that are available to you. In medicine, obviously, the risks of creating something that then does something awful is perhaps higher than it would be in another science or in another field. I can see the kind of cost-benefit analysis for some of the same whether or not you adopt to something is perhaps very different there. I don't know the specifics of that case. One thing I have been looking into is the printing press and its spread. This can have advanced notice here. This is my next substack piece for me. A very long investigation of why the Ottoman Empire for about 300 years doesn't adopt the printing press for Arabic script in particular. So, that's Arab in Turkish. Both of those languages at the time haven’t been written in Arabic script and it's a kind of interesting question. In 1727, you get this official Ottoman Press. Before then, it's done by minorities but never in Arabic script. You've got Jewish printing presses in Istanbul. You've got Armenian presses being set up in Greek presses. There seems to be a few even Protestant presses in the kind of Ottoman-ruled Hungary. There's use of this technology, but it, for some reason isn't adopted by the majority or even by the kind of ruling majority in particular and you think that's kind of crazy. That's a very useful thing to have the printing press. Now, the thing is there are obviously counter arguments to it. You've got lobby groups against it, scribes, even in Western Europe. They were opposed to the introduction of the printing press. There were stories of scribes perhaps burning down the printing house in Moscow because they were angry at the printer who had set up there in the 16th century. I'm not sure how much to credit that story. At the same time, there are potential political concerns. Having seen the wars of religion in France, the ultimate emperor's probably like, 'Well, I probably don't want to introduce new ideas and new religious ideas into my country that might spread as a result of printing.' It has to be something that's either I have to have a lot of censorship or maybe I don't bother with censorship at all, or there's an even more present kind of boring view which is probably the correct view based on what I've seen so far which is that it's actually just a very costly thing to do. You require a lot of paper, you require metals. The printing press itself is a very large cumbersome piece of equipment, it weighs a lot. There were very small technical problems to overcome when it comes to Arabic scripted ligatures versus the kind of plain alphabet. We don't have to connect up the letters in particular ways. 

Now, that's something that could be overcome either through adopting a script where you don't bother using ligatures anymore which is something that is possible or, you have to come up with improvements to solve it. There's another hurdle to overcome that, but enough of those small costly hurdles means that perhaps it's just the sort of technology that requires some kind of direction from the top. It requires patronage. Another interesting thing about the printing press even in Europe is that very often rulers in a country actually took active measures to introduce the technology to their country. They used patents and monopoly. They used funding and acted proactively to giving money to the potential person who's going to bring the printing press over from France or Germany or wherever, in order to spread this thing. I think very often a failure of adoption of certain things isn't so much that there's any particular blockage; so much as it is that there's just someone not taking the proactive steps to do it. That's what you see in the 1720s, is someone who goes on a visit to France in a period where there's also a kind of shoe-lift period in an alternate history. Where there is this kind of pro-Western approach amongst certain factions and the ultimate's court. Where they're looking at the Western saying, “Look at what France is doing.” We should have gardens and canals and printing and observatories and all these other things that, for some reason, our quarterly culture hasn't adopted for a long time. Even though it's had very strong economic and diplomatic ties to countries that have had all those things. I think very often it's nothing to do with a barrier per se, but just that you actually require an inventor to take a very simple idea from one field to another.

Benjamin [01:04:43]: I like your idea. You said earlier in our conversation that you need activation energy and that activation energy has to partly come from a person because it's maybe cost money technically and partly reputational, like someone's doing something new. Someone's got to take the reputational kind that's a bit weird, that's not what we do, right? So, you're doing something new and that almost always has to come from a little body or a person to go on. I'll do this, I'll normalize it and if it requires a little bit of technical or money; those are the extra hurdles on that. So, pivoting very slightly or not really because it's on type into this idea of copyright. I've read your very interesting paper on the idea that a copyright today is maybe not quite fit for purpose. This is a way that copyright things have evolved over time, but there's also an intersectional idea of that. I think risen from time to time, Matt Garcia said it more recently that copyright might be too long in the trade-off between inventions and that which is actually not a new idea. I think Milton Friedman also argued that maybe copyright is too long. And certainly, if you look at patents which are generally about 20 years, copyright is at 50 years plus that definitely seems long. I wondered whether you'd maybe sum up these ideas. Is copyright too long? And where are we going on digital as well? Have nations governments not really thought hard enough about the complications that will bring to copyright?

Anton [01:06:14]:  Yeah. I think there's a whole load of this in a real thicket. I think in terms of intellectual property, copyright is the one that's most in need of improvement. Now, I do personally think the copyright is too long, you know, 20 years is a pretty good time to have a monopoly on things. Having your entire lifetime plus 50, sometimes even 70, sometimes even more years is ridiculous, right? I can see the case for being able to pass on ownership copyright to your children, but to your great-grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren. This is getting a bit out of hand especially if we have this idea that copyright should be a temporary monopoly. With the idea that it should strike a balance between promoting creativity, by giving an artificial monopoly at the start. Also not getting in the way of people improving further on the things that you've done and taking those things and running with them.

Benjamin [01:07:10]: It doesn't incentivize your children to write anymore.

Anton [01:07:13]: No. Not at all, actually it probably does exactly the opposite because they can live off those proceeds. Now, on the other hand, there is obviously an argument that the market around copyrighted works can emerge when it is property, right? So, you can have licensing regimes. Now, some of the things I pointed out in that paper is that for example, it's very difficult to actually often identify the owners of works simply because they're so old, right? So, even if you could work out who the original artist of something was; to work out who their great-great-grand child who happened to inherit the rights is actually almost impossible sometimes. Particularly given nowadays, that the process we have is that a copyright is vested in you. The moment you create something, the moment you have a fixed form. So, the moment I write a doodle down on a piece of paper, that's my copyrighted work. As long as it is original. Now again, the other thing there is I can simply assert my copyright all the time and just say, "This is mine." The only way we're going to ever test that is in court because there's no way of registering and then having the registration being contested like you would with a patent or with any other trademark or anything else. There's this great deal of strength in copyright. Now, the thing is a lot of that emerged in the context of the weakness of enforcement. Now, ultimately it comes down to the person who is claiming ownership of a copyrighted material to enforce their claims and to find infringes and to bring them to task and say, 'Look, you need to pay your license fees,' and to bring them to court. Now, I've noticed that in the past few years, the ability of bonus to enforce copyright is getting much easier. I think in the next decade or so you'll have a situation where we've got near infinite copyright, at least in terms of from the perspective of any creator with extreme strength. That is extremely easy to enforce because we've got so used to this idea that you can rip off CDs and have torrents and download all this stuff. Okay. We'll give the creators a SOP in terms of legal powers to try and prevent this stuff, but let's imagine a case where we can effectively automate. We can scrape the web for infringements and have automated services that will send subpoenas or whatever you require just like that without you even having to really go through the task of doing all these things. We're already starting to see these things emerge. I've noticed that people have been paying back license fees for using some stock photo that they just found. They've put it on their blog and they're getting emails; five, six, seven emails from some companies saying, "On behalf of the owner of the photographer, I'm trying to get him £ 10,000 off you for using this thing once," and then forgotten about it many years....

Benjamin [01:10:13]:  Even worse than patent trolls.

Anton [01:10:16]: Yeah. Even worse than patent trolls in many ways. Now, the US system is kind of interesting because on the one hand it encourages some forms of creativity because there are all sorts of ways in which you can claim fair use. Now, the problem with fair use is it is self-contested. So, you see all sorts of different legal cases in the US where the next legal case can have a huge impact on what counts to be incorporated or not. Things like Fan Art; that a lot of people who upload Fan Art based on the copyrighted material will claim fair use for that. Now, in a country like the UK you just don't have that. We have what's called fair dealing which is basically just a few rules set out specifically that are exceptions to copyright. Ultimately in the UK, unless you happen to be within these very few five, six, seven exceptions, then whatever you're doing is almost certainly infringing copyright. If you happen to write some doctor who fan fiction and upload a book somewhere. You have broken the rules in the UK. Now, in the US you might be able to claim your fair use and maybe there's the chance that the BBC or whoever owns the copyright is not going to come and pursue you through the courts and try to get you to pay up. They may just simply ask you to cease and desist. But the fact that they can is worrying for the future. Now, the big worry is going to be video games. Right now, you see mods of sorts of kinds. I've seen popular games where there's like the Lord of the Rings Mod and the Game of Thrones Mods. These things are not licensed as far as I can tell. I can see no way that these things have been licensed and people are putting enormous amounts of creativity and energy into these things. For the better right, they're creating things that most people like. The meticulous things that load of people have put a lot of effort into and a lot of people are benefiting from, but they haven't paid for it. Often times, they're doing this thing not even for the profit themselves but they haven't paid for it and there's a very real risk that maybe not this year, maybe not next year, maybe not in next 10 years’ time, but maybe in a hundred years’ time; the children of the people who we're the owners of this original property is going to start taking those people to task for it.

Benjamin [01:12:42]: Yeah. Now, I agree. I think there's use to the other phrase. I don't think there's enough activation energy about wanting to try and look at this, but I do think so. There are a couple of ideas you propose, which seem really useful to take up. One idea is that maybe the patent office can be extended to rule on when a transformation might be a failure. In advance, that you can know these types of things; you found out five poetry transformations or fan fiction. Now, the only way we're going to accept those because they trade-off the other way. The other thing is when you get author copyrighted things. You can't find the original author and let's say it lapses after 40 years and you can get another 40 years if you relicense it. If the presumption is after 40 years, then actually it's lapse because actually 90% of the work doesn't have a value after that. It's something like maybe 10 or 20 cents, so the orphanage put it into that. Now, if you want to claim it at that 40 years, and you're active it should be very easy for you to continue that, but then to put the presumption within that.

Anton [01:13:45]:  Yeah. So, with author works, the presumption at the moment is on the potential user. They need to basically pay a license fee and then it seems to be license for some reason will go to the person who claims it many years. Hence...

Benjamin [01:13:57]: For the sake of invention, it seems to be the wrong owners, right?

Anton [01:13:59]: Yeah. I think it should be on the owners to say, "This is ours and if you want to use it, here's where to find us now." That's the main thing. The analogy I like to use is imagine we had a property system where you literally didn't know who owned what and you tried to have a property market where something that has happened. While we don't have a centralized land registry, or it has all sorts of problems in the UK. We still at least could find out with a reasonable degree of certainty who owns the property through a bit of inquiry. But imagine you have some kind of artwork or when you have very complex media video games being a great example of where it's actually a combination of lots of different copyright rights. Now, on the IPO, being able to rule on stuff. This was me proposing that the UK has something like the transformative use defense or acceptation like they have in the US, but one which isn't going to be one that's constantly litigated over and where the boundaries of it are going to shift over time, but where the IPO can rule on these things and at least publicly say, " This is what we think it is." Now, that's giving a regulator a lot more power than they currently have, but it's potentially a good thing if it reduces the wasted resources that you might have on disputes.

Benjamin [01:15:20]: Yeah. You don't get the path to the regulator. You're essentially doing it to judge who are making common law and there tends to be more important cases like a Harry Potter fan fiction thing which may not be then readily applicable because you're only talking about these really high commercial level things.

Anton [01:15:37]: Well, the other thing is there is actually very little law to draw upon. So, what happens in practice is that loads of countries all over the world simply copy the US because they have a more contested system. Where people are claiming there's copyright and they're claiming it fair use and they're battling it out in the courts all the time. That results in a lot of other countries especially even the UK where there's actually very few copyright cases that even make it to court. Now, there's probably a lot that settled out of court, but because it's settled out of court, we're potentially seeing cases where people are paying non-owners for copyright stuff, but there's no president being set that people can then site. So, we're often following the US president. I think having proper guidance on these issues is better. Now, there are certain things in that report, were it say we should copy the EU in some respects. In other respects where we should definitely not copy the EU where they've strengthened copyright owner's rights in a way that you will have much bigger ramifications for other things. One that is hotly contested right now is whether or not internet platforms should take responsibility to basically filter what's even being uploaded. As to whether or not that's copyrighted before it's even put up. And, there's all sorts of controversy right now on YouTube about people getting stuff taken down and their entire channels deleted because they were playing something by Bach or Beethoven, which is obviously........

Benjamin [01:17:12]: Yeah. With a clip of five seconds of a little happy birthday in the background or something.

Anton [01:17:17]:  Yeah. But, like the background where it isn't actually copyrighted, but someone is claiming copyright for a particular version of it that they're saying is being copied because a particular performance of Beethoven can be copyrighted, but obviously Beethoven is so long dead that this is in the public domain. Now, the fact that they're getting like the onus is on the person to prove that they haven't infringed is kind of interesting there. At the moment, it's much too geared towards the people claiming ownership. Now, the fact that the EU and a lot of other countries are proposing that it actually should be up to the platform to even filter stuff before it's put up. I think we're going to see some really horrible things as a result of that. Particularly, when you've got things like parody, for example, being at the moment exempted, like there's a real mind field of cases that at the moment I think are just waiting to blow up. But again, because the durations, it could be decades and it lowly become a scandal many years from now. We haven't designed these things for the long-term.

Benjamin [01:18:21]:  Yeah. Now, I would agree and I think just too sort of finish off on this. When people are not aware like the US, they didn't have copyright on international works. That only came in the early 1900s. I think it's very interesting that there's an argument that you have two large biopharmaceutical companies based in Basel, Switzerland today because of where French dye patenting laws or process patents happened a couple of hundred years ago. So, you should look that up. That's really interesting about how nations use a patent laws defensively or offensively in that time. Also, in Germany and in fact, there's arguments that Japan itself only has a semiconductor industry because it held up IBM's semiconductors patents in the patent office for many years. Allowing their own home industry to essentially copy the patent before it's being issued to get them up to the scale and then issuing the patent when actually it was already not necessary. There's a lot more which goes on with IP copyright patents than perhaps it would seem I had lots of second order and third order effects.

Anton [01:19:36]: Yeah. How interesting. The problem with copyright actually is it's so internationally regulated. There are a lot of international treaties that you can't implement a proper registration system. Some countries do anyways. Like, the US has a sort of orphan works type get around where it kind of requires that registration be done for certain legal rights to be used, but technically the treaty forbids any such thing. So, any change that has to happen is now very difficult. It has to happen at a global level.

Benjamin [01:20:04]: Yeah. 180(+) country negotiation.

Anton [01:20:07]: Yeah. It's one of the very few things I can think of where the UK can actually take a different copyright regime...

Benjamin [01:20:13]: Yeah. Actually, post-Brexit is one area that you can actually do something different.

Anton [01:20:18]: But even then what I propose is a bit of adoption and a bit of difference it's....

Benjamin [01:20:24]:  Cool. Yeah. So, definitely check out that paper. The last two questions would be, what did you learn from the US university system? I think you spent some time at Brown. Do you think the liberal arts way of doing everything is superior to the more narrow way of UK or is there a different culture? Any thoughts on your US University experience?

Anton [01:20:53]: Very different. Yeah. It's very interesting teaching students who are drawn from a lot of different fields versus people who are already hyper specialized from actually late school level. I think they're different systems, but they have their advantages. They have their pros and cons and it'd be best if there's just a mix of different systems that people use and I think it's good to have that diversity of systems. That's what I think the US is so interesting in. There are so many different university models coexisting which is less common in the UK.

Benjamin [01:21:33]:  Yeah. My parallel thought is that the diversity of innovation organization and innovation funding is also something that maybe we should explore a little bit more. Not just one way of doing things, but because of where it plays.

Anton [01:21:48]:  Yeah. I think more models is better than fewer...

Benjamin [01:21:52]: This is it because we get the flow of ideas. We get more of these gimcracks. Okay. Then, last question and in a personal productivity note is, what does a productive day look like for you? Or, do you have any sort of ideas on personal productivity or also any advice you'd like to give to independent researchers or who want to be inventors?

Anton [01:22:17]:  A productive day for me looks like a lot of writing typically. If I was in, I'm usually listening to video game or a kind of epic movie soundtracks because they're often optimized. I think for concentrating on something other than the music and also being quite of an enjoyable thing to listen to, in getting into some kind of writing flow state typically for a few hours or so. That's a pretty good day for me. It's getting some writing down because writing is a very difficult thing in general. Even when you've done a lot of it, it doesn't quite get any easier to formulate things and put them on the page.

Benjamin [01:22:59]: Do you write every day?

Anton [01:23:01]: No. I definitely don't write every day. I know people like Tyler Cowen; I'm very good at somehow finding the time in the mornings to do that. I'm very much evening and night person though. I think that's a part of the problem. It's that evening and night is also like hanging out and watching TV kind of time. So, there's the two things initially exclusive. If I may be over time, I've become better at getting up in the mornings but I still find that a morning for me will go by very quickly and then I'll actually start writing a bit later on, once I've managed to let things go a bit. That said, I think bums in seats is the main way to go as long as you're certainly at your workstation doing something, even if it's reading before writing that's important. The other thing I find well in a good day is one where I've done a lot of writing. Sometimes, you've only been able to do that writing because you spent the entire previous few days just reading and taking notes and not actually doing any kind of writing for popular consumption or for wider consumption than your own. That's the thing that I often lose sight of and it can be a bit of anxiety-inducing, but actually is completely necessary to the whole project.

Benjamin [01:24:17]: Yeah. You need thinking time for sure. Any advice for others? Except these seems to be definitely keeping an idea on an innovation mindset, something like that. Is there anything else you'd give as advice?

Anton [01:24:32]: Yeah. I think the main message I have for people that are evangelist is that it's worth adopting the improving mindset. I think it's trying to find problems in whatever and wherever, even if it's not something you're particularly concerned in and think of solutions to it and it might be that you become particularly obsessed with particular solutions that can have an impact. Even if that impact isn't profitable, even if that impact is for just a few people, I think that's a useful thing. Self-improvement often affects you yourself, but it's still a thing that's worth doing all of the time. The more people who are affected by it the better or by any kind of improvement that you follow, and then once you've done those improvements, if they are particularly successful, I think the most important thing is then giving back to the next generation of people who are going to do those improvements. This isn't just something that I think is unique to Silicon Valley today and things like Y Combinator like we discussed earlier, but it's also the reason why Britain becomes the kind of initial Silicon Valley in London particularly in the late 16th, through to 17th centuries becomes the initial hub is because you have inventors kind of not just being invented but also using the proceeds of invention, or even the proceeds of other things they're doing to then promote invention still further. And it's creating those institutions and those norms and that kind of culture of being pro-invention as well as being an inventor yourself which I think are very two distinct things is the most important thing. So it's a sort of adopt the improving mentality and then actively try and pass it on.

Benjamin [01:26:05]: Great. Anton, thank you very much.

Anton [01:26:09]: Thanks for having me on.

Jonathan Meth on disability arts, dramaturgy and asking questions | Podcast

Jonathan Meth is a dramaturg, extraordinaire, director, curator, very involved in the European theatre and disability arts. He's a lecturer at Goldsmiths. He's worked with many of the major theatre organizations in Britain, and he's a fascinating theatre thinker.

We speak about dramaturgy and theatre as playwright lead and theatre as colloboration lead. We discuss disability arts and a little about what autism has taught us. Jonathan looks at theatre funding and infrastrucutre and what it might mean to build back differently.

We discuss his work with Fence and what he has learned teaching a wide mix of international students.

Jonathan makes a case for the power of questions and curiosity.

A fascinating, wide ranging conversation. See his webite here.

Podcast version below and unedited transcript below.

Transcript:

Benjamin [00:00:06]: Hi everyone. Thank you for joining. I'm really pleased today to have Jonathan Meth. Jonathan is a dramaturg, extraordinaire, director, curator, very involved in the European theatre and disability arts. He's a lecturer at Goldsmiths. He's worked with many of the major theatre organizations in Britain, and he's a fascinating theatre thinker. Welcome.

Jonathan [00:00:32]:  Ben thank you very much for that charming introduction. I'm not quite sure I can live up to all those epithets, but I'll do my best. Lovely to see you.

Benjamin [00:00:42]:  Great to see you. So, we'll go straight in. Do you think Britain has produced relatively little European theatre over the last 20 years? And if so, why do you think that is?

Jonathan [00:00:54]: Well, it probably won't surprise you to know that dramaturgically, I'm going to need to just spend a little bit of time with some of those terms because I need to kind of have a little look at what we think we mean by European theatre. And the reason why I do that is because I'm a huge Europeanist. I am kind of unapologetically in the process of renegotiating my own formal status since the Austrians very kindly changed their laws last September, enabling me to apply for dual citizenship. Previously, I was entitled to the Austrians, that I would have to stop being British, but I quite like the possibility of being both Austrian and British. At the same time, I'm on the course of moving from London, a city that I spent most of my life in up to Florence in September because my wife Debbie has a new job.

And so, the European question immediately speaks to me in a very personal way for those reasons, but also because of the Fence network, which I hope we will come to later. I've got to know a little bit about continental Europe, I'm going to call it because of course two here in blighty are European as well, despite all those Brexit shenanigans. But the reason really seriously why I want to interrogate European theatres is because I don't quite know what it means. They don't make theatre in Romania the same way that they make it in Ireland or the same way that they make it in Portugal. And the idea that they would or should, or could, it seems to me to be slightly far-fetched and not terribly helped. And I wonder whether it's a kind of hegemonic hangover of the tyranny of the English language and its sort of global supremacy.

But we still allow ourselves to kind of in my view intellectual laziness of this notion that there is European theatre but let's stop berating the Brits for a moment and kind of go maybe what we mean, do we, is the theatre that doesn't have the playwright at its center, is that what we mean? That isn't about the playwrights as somehow semi-protected species but actually it's about theatre making presents a different set of hierarchies or collaborative relations in different European countries. And because they don't share with the exceptions of Morton Cyprus in Ireland and Anglophone impetus, shall we say that they occupied a different space than we do. I'm much more sympathetic to that as a working definition. But it's just this idea that we in Britain seem to think that Europe is somehow that place over there and that largely we cannot refer to it as the same. And I think that's one of the reasons why, which some people might think, well, that seems to be a paucity of poverty in that. And I think it begins with the nominal culture and the thinking.

Benjamin [00:04:18]: Sure. I am going to unpack a couple of things there because that's already pretty deep for us. One is this idea of the theatre where the playwright isn't at the center. But I think there is also another idea of a simply call it theatrical or dramatic work made outside of Britain and which comes to Britain in some form. And I hear people speak that both that type of work actually from any country. So, we could almost go globally or things. Maybe there's been some more from America or not. And so, there's the question of that essentially, I guess you could call it foreign work. And then there is this second question of the work of playwright at the center of not. So maybe you can think about both of those things. I get the impression that maybe you think that perhaps there has been more work where the playwright isn't necessarily at the center, collaborative work, other sorts of work or community worker, and perhaps it's a little bit unfair to say that that hasn't, and then maybe for work, which wasn't necessarily produced or originated on sort of British soil as it were.

Jonathan [00:05:31]: Yeah. I suppose uniquely among European countries, we have a West End and the only analog to the West End is Broadway. And so, if we look at the major theatre-producing countries outside of Britain the logical comparator is the German-speaking countries we make theatre for a hundred million people across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland with more money, more investment, and better infrastructure, and so on. I make those observations, but partly because I think it's also important that we're aware of a sort of economic picture in all of this, but I do think it's partly our insularity with our language. So, I do think it is about non-English language originated work and because there is a simple equation in people's minds. Well, of course, if you're not making work in the English language then it's going to be work that doesn't center language per se.

I would say that there's truth in all of that, but it's not the full story any more than the royal court story is the story of British theatre since let's say, John Osborne in 1956, it's a great story and it's a very important story, but it's only part of it. So a lot of it depends on where you look and I think there's always been another and indeed other traditions of the theatre-making in this country, they are very rich, but because of the way, the structures of commentary and criticism work, which are fundamental about at least previously the selling of newspapers now, I'm not quite sure, worked out what that looks like in a digital realm, but set that aside for a moment, you can see that there was a kind of hierarchy first, second, third stream critic. And the job of the critic was to communicate with the readership and so to some degree that starts to frame what we might or might not understand about theatre practice. So, I would say that as a rich theatre culture, we have always attracted and generated very diverse theatre-makers. I don't think that is on the reign. I think probably the opposite is true. I think there is a rich complexity of theatre being made in this country. But I would like to imagine that we could talk to a different sort of discourse about how it does or does not speak to theatre made in the German-speaking world or in Romania or in the form of Yugoslavia or in Portugal or anywhere else. Because I think also, we might challenge ourselves to know those theatre cultures a little better than we probably do.

Benjamin [00:08:26]: That's a really fascinating observation. In fact, interestingly, I was speaking to Rishi Dastidar, one of the leading British poets we have here, who are making similar observations about poetry, not in the English language. We don't read enough in translation and it doesn't come here, but that's only again to your point, part of the story and that actually there has been a lot of other kinds of arts happening if you go and look for it. Dwelling on that point for one moment, before I think we'll come to the Fence was, I remember perhaps 10 or so years ago, a very running dialogue in the heyday of theatre blogging, I would say between Chris Goode and David Eldridge which is actually somewhat resolved in the last year or two, which is quite interesting on another podcast, but where Chris Goode would talk about a lot I would say the kind of collaborative devised, very different way of making theatre from the playwright center and David Eldridge coming more from a playwright centric kind of viewpoint. But interestingly, when I was hearing the conversations in the margins, in the commentary, as we were talking about it, particularly as a younger theatre-maker, doing some work in kind of both ways, in some ways I thought there was actually a lot more in common from what they were saying than perhaps that which separated them, but that dialogue has been going on for a very long time seen with those two and you could see it today. Do you think that's as lively debate today as it's kind of ever been between those different kinds of theatre-making?

Jonathan [00:10:01]:  I think because we've had a year of theatre online and not at all largely, I don't know those debates. My sense of the way in which the debate was played out, let's just say in the 90s when it was new work versus new writing as a kind of shorthand. My sense was always that was about access to resources in the end, and the perception or misperception by one camp that the other we're getting the toys and that they will not. And that's why I'm always prone to mention the economics within conversations around trends, nomenclature in interesting aspects of central development because I think it's always lurking there and it needs to be mentioned. But in the end, I'm with you. I mean, for me, it was always a forced dichotomy and the playwright is here is a wright a W-R-I-G-H-T they are a maker and whether they are the kind of the soul scribe romantically pictured in the attic on an old Olivetti typewriter or whether they are in the rehearsal room, making work collaboratively with other people in real-time in real space seems to me to be only modestly important to the kind of literary sense, but a lot of it is about the way in which we encode and enshrine things, in things like legal or economic structures or in the way in which companies operate rather than actually about the work or the way in which the work might work.

And I suspected, that if a plurality of possibilities were encouraged systemically, as opposed to what I think often happens, which is we'll know you do that thing in that way and they do that thing in that way then I think we might begin to see the work for what it is, which is hopefully constantly cross-pollinating, cross-fertilizing, looking across stealing, borrowing, interrogating.

Benjamin [00:12:20]:  Yeah. I didn't come to understand that for instance, the funding system in France, the Netherlands, Germany is very different from here and actually influencing the way we make work, and even America obviously very different again. Maybe this is a good segue to tell me about the Fence how it came about? What it is doing? How that is? And actually, I guess its funding comes about from quite a different route as well.

Jonathan [00:12:46]:  Yeah. So, the Fence came about in part when I was director of Writernet, which itself had grown out of new playwrights’ trust. And I was director of those organizations for about 15 years from 1994 to the beginning of 2009, so a while ago. And what I noticed and, in a way, it speaks to what we've been talking about was that the playwriting culture. However, you wanted to see it in this country. In so far as it looked beyond these islands at all. I talk about these islands because we are two members and we would look to one of them very obviously for that rich cultural tradition in terms of writing, but we would look to America and occasionally to Australia, but very seldom would we look at anything that wasn't anglophone. And I wondered about that and I thought, is this really good for us?

Is this a way in which we enrich ourselves as a playwright culture? Are we talking to the rest of Europe let alone the rest of the world, other than in that kind of West End Broadway axis with the exception of a few great playwrights like Ravenhill and Stevens, who would have been networked into the German-speaking world by their agents, because probably there was an economic imperative to do so on the one hand and also creative opportunities to work in different ways with both of these artists would have been embraced and that's well documented? And so, I thought, what if we set up a European network for Playwrights? Perhaps not just playwrights, but people that are interested in the playwright and prepares to encounter and engage with the playwrights so maybe dramaturgs, translators, directors, producers. So, what if that network, I thought was relationship-focused rather than transaction-focused?

So not being market-driven, which is please produce my play, or will you read my script, but rather can I get to know you as a fellow artist. Can I get to find out a bit more about how things happened where you are, and perhaps if you're interested, tell you a little bit about how things happened where I am? And could we do that in a multilateral way as a way of recognizing the crouching hidden tiger in the room of colonialism. So that in that kind of binary exchange, we weren't simply unconsciously replicating those colonial paradigms. Oh, this is how we do, but rather in a spirit of curiosity, interrogation mixing with each other, encountering multiple different versions of how things may or may not happen. And out of that encouraging people to come up with their own ideas and their own forms of collaboration, but also how they might then see themselves back home, perhaps in a slightly different way, having glimpsed other landscapes and other possibilities within.

Benjamin [00:16:11]:  What is the Fence up to today? You've got some relationships and things going and seems to be quite a lot of interesting work bubbling out. And I think this is sort of central to a lot of the work you do is actually centered on people and relationships. So, is there anything you want to comment on, and maybe this intersects with your move to Italy coming up and being back in Europe?

Jonathan [00:16:38]:  Yeah, sure. So, we are still planning perhaps foolishly on two network meetings happening next month. The first in the second week of June in Graz in Austria by coincidence as part of Dramatikerinnen, a festival held jointly between Chargeball house, Graz and [inaudible 00:17:05] which is attached to the university there and run by the redoubtable Edith Draxl who has been a long-time Fence member. And the second being at my [inaudible 00:17:20] south of Paris as part of that rather glorious little towns festival [inaudible 00:17:29] four corners of the world and we have no idea whether you'll be able to get there or not, because at the moment, of course, you can't, you are not allowed to, but we hope that in the intervening month there will be some shifts in what is possible.

And so those network meetings, like all network meetings will have their own particular characters both in terms of the people that go to them and host them, but also in terms of how they function. So, the Austrian one will very much be here as a festival, come and participate, watch some work, be part of the festival debates, encounter some playwrights, meet some new and young and emerging artists. The French thing will be, come and participate. We are going to focus around the theme of Burlingame which is a very particular concept, which is a little bit like sailing into choppy waters, but nonetheless going into those uncharted areas and meeting them with our full face to the wind in a kind of French way. And I still don't quite know what that means in terms of what people will actually do, but there will be three afternoons where we will present to a festival going public, socially distant, et cetera around those things, either through practical workshops with them or in creative presentations too. Well, I suppose those two snapshots, hopefully, give you a quick idea of just the different qualities of advanced network meetings and local characteristics.

Benjamin [00:19:17]:  Sounds amazing. And obviously, I've been tracking it over the years, and if people are interested can they reach out to have a conversation with you to be involved somehow?

Jonathan [00:19:27]:  Yeah, it's difficult, isn't it? Because I'd like to be able to say yes, because of course one wants to be welcoming but you can't and although the network is informal as much as it can be, I mean, post-Brexit, we needed to move it to Stockholm. So, we've moved it to Stockholm and have been headquartered there for the last three years and we have a board and we have a bank account there. And so, in the lightest possible way, we formalized ourselves. But in order to make sure that we don't flood it, for example, with grits I have a tacit quota system where I kind of go no more than 20% work. And so, the way the Fence developed, it started with 25 people, and it's now upwards to 250, a third of whom are really active, a third of whom I like lurk on a happy lurking and wants to continue lurking, and a third of whom really could care less and should be off the books.

But because we deliberately stay open and wait for people to ask to say, no please, no more Jonathan, I'm good, thank you. And there's a reason for that because its relationship focuses to come back to your observation that is an important thing. I also wanted to do something that reflected the life cycle of people, where they go off and they change jobs. So, they go and have kids, or they move countries. Well, they change their circumstances. And that might mean as, which has been the case with some Fence members. They disappeared for 5 or even 10 years but then came back because they found a different way to engage, a different proposition, a different need. And I wanted to remain open to that because everything else in our culture seems to me to be short-term focused on the transaction, the here, the now, and the immediate future.

And I wanted to do something that is a little bit different, that had a different kind of quality, a different texture, and that was sort of open and flexible to them. But what that means is that the way it grows is through recommendations of specific people from within the network. And then I try to curate that by making sure that we don't have a sudden influx of one particular kind, we might pick up individuals along the way, we might notice gaps, or we might be encouraged to fill those gaps, but certainly, the bricks are well-represented at the moment.

Benjamin [00:22:08]:  And that's certainly something I've been more of a lurker, but I'll come in and out as actually as my own theatre and creator practice is also coming in and out over the last 10 or 20 years as you say, children, challenges, jobs, and there is something nice to an informal longevity. I think it's sometimes I find it's a cousin relationship to the nature of friendship. Like friendships can form, they can ebb and flow. They can break. In fact, broken relationships can be more devastating than broken romantic relationships, which have a clearer arc, I guess, in our perception of what they should be and how they break up, and how we move on. I mean, obviously, it can be very catastrophic as well, but we don't actually have those same arcs and friendship because they are gray hair and looser and ebb and flow.

But when they break can actually be even more devastating and to have doors or windows for long relationships over time, maybe this is quite a good segue back into perhaps Writernet that because that's where we might have first met with some interaction there, but that's probably about 15, 20 years ago. I guess my question there is, that was quite interesting because it had a life, right. It started, it did really great things and then ended. And I wonder what you felt about that. Maybe any learnings you had from that? In some ways, I think back now that it lives on the memory in some ways at a lower ebb than it was at the time like at the time, I think it was very influential and that influence, perhaps hasn't lost it so much, at least in an obvious way and partly in a less obvious way, but maybe that was part of its purpose and point. So, I'd be interested in your reflections on that and obviously Writernet has grown into these other things as you've mentioned.

Jonathan [00:24:12]:  Yes. I mean, the concrete legacy of Writernet is, of course, the Fence, because without Writernet it wouldn't have been born or indeed incubated and developed in the first place, and having a formerly constructed parent company, we were able to capitalize on two bits of European funding A at birth and B an incubator, which meant that we were able to grow some very well-founded and rich tendered comparatively to the foundation. And I think it was on that secure basis that we've been able to build and develop in the kind of casual and informal way that we have. So, I think it's important to acknowledge that but my intention was never that Writernet should be legacy focus. It was always about what were the present needs and how might they be supported.

And when we knew, we were going to wind down, wind up I was very much committed to the notion that our task was to simply as it were exit stage left and leave a space, and then into that space would come something else. That was for others to determine and that my job was to not get in the way simply and a very good way of doing that was by having a single different legacy vehicle to preoccupy myself and therefore that seemed to make sense to me in terms of what it was. Well, I think what it was if I include it was an antecedent new playwright's trust founded by Susan Croft and then taken on further by Polly Thomas before I came to it with other important people like Ben Payne also along the way contributed. It was kind of 20, 25 to 30 years of grassroots support for a playwriting culture, in what was already playwriting rich, but while narrow in the 80s, in terms of what we might understand by diversity. And I think we expanded, we helped to expand that base. We helped to create opportunities for more different people to access them. But I was always more interested in the doing of that than in shining a light on it and going, oh, look what we've done, bits of that. And so, I'm not troubled by whether or not people remember new playwrights’ trustees. We were part of a culture that included all sorts of the different parts of this. I mean, Charles Hart was the new writing officer at the Arts Council in England in the days when there were such things for long enough to make an impact because he was very committed from the policy point of view to literary managers as being the structural device that would help to cement the place of the playground and a new playwriting culture within this country.

And if you look at the development and growth of playwriting in the 90s and the early 80s, you could see literary departments flourish. Now, if one takes a quick temperature test of the waters today, one can see that that model is no longer the model of choice because it's been left to a much more sort of Darwinian self-selection process. Some have stayed, some could not, some have been by the wayside. In those days, the very word dramaturg was not used. It wasn't in my view until Paul Cyrus left Soho to join the RSC and insisted that he had the word dramaturg in his job title but we saw one of the major companies begin to embrace that as a thing. And subsequently one can perhaps see this sort of relative success of dramaturgy and the concept of dramaturgy and a move away from the literary department to some degree.

But also, we were part of a group of different regional organizations. Some of whom had grown out of the trade union movement. One thinks of Northwest playwrights in Manchester, for example, that was a theatre writer union-initiated grouping that was very much grassroots locally based about promoting them. But I think what happened was that a range of different ways of doing things came through in that period. And so, in the same way that you have that organization at that time, and again, that would have lasted probably well into the late 90s into the early teens, but mostly those kinds of organizations have gone now. You still got new writing north in Newcastle, and you still got new writing south in Brighton, but on the whole, they're much fewer and far between. And that might be a good thing because needs change, structures change, systems change. Obviously, a lot of those systems and structures predated the online world, predated the world of social media and you need things to change. They shouldn't be kind of an instinct in my view.

Also, I was happy with the work that Writernet and new playwrights did particularly in the world before the internet, around information, advice and guidance, when that was a necessary and important contributor to enabling greater access and greater diversity to the playwriting picture, but also subsequent in the days of the internet before the prominence of social media when the transfer of information advice and guidance opened up things I think opening up things is what we were really about, whether that was the four-day extended program that we did in 96 or 97 with Jack Bradley at the National Theatre Studio, where we invited around a 100 different theatre-makers, either to give workshops in real-time or to make presentations on how they did, what they did. At that time, you didn't know what people's practice was because you didn't get into rehearsal rooms unless you were in their show.

And there was a sort of mystique somehow around how people work. And I think either in those live events, or through the systematic organized presentation of information, advice, and guidance online, which we now take for granted because we can look at it in seconds on the phones, but in those days you couldn't and there was a certain basic level of value, but you can't really trace that back. You can't really go and say, well, you know, 10 years on, do you remember getting that piece of information? Did it change your life? And your kind of going huh. It's very hard. You have a sense that you're hopefully just part of the fabric in a sense of the culture, but as the fabric shifts, and needs emerge that you shift and change a little bit with it, but at a certain time, it seems to me it's absolutely fine to go well, that was great, but now they're going, let's leave a space.

Benjamin [00:31:44]: Yeah. And I am a very important part of the ecosystem then that's interesting and fascinating that history and legacy, which I think is maybe one of the things that at least for me in British theatre, maybe it's of every generation, but we don't have actually that same sense of our own quite modern theatre history have just gone by in the last kind of 5, 10 years before, which I think is quite interesting. There's a lot of talk about build back better. And I think a lot of people have talked about building back better within theatre as well with very many different lenses from your point of view, what do you think this might mean for theatre and what might we do? I guess there's a European lens. There's a kind of lens about the people who come into the theatre. There's the economic lens, which actually now that you mentioned it, a couple of times, I think is potentially underappreciated, but I would be interested, build back better. What should we do? Can we do anything actually with it? And how are you thinking about it?

Jonathan [00:32:55]:  So, I suppose anything I would want to do is go well before we do any building. Can we have a little look at the landscape? What might our analysis about landscape want to tell us? Well, so far, I think what it tells us is that the Arts Council says, well, we think we got this largely right in our response to the pandemic, says Nick Sorelta to the government. In terms of spending your money, the government aka the taxpayer well but perhaps our trickle-down thinking didn't really get as far with freelancers as it might've in an ideal world, but we are very convinced that without the built infrastructure, there is no work for freelancers and therefore we were right to prioritize that. So, I think that needs a little bit of challenge, doesn't it? A little bit of unpicking and unpacking. And you go well if everything is geared towards the infrastructure, and to what extent does it trickle down, and does it trip you up? And if you want to build back better, do you start with the brickwork and the masonry in your flagship institutions, or do you have a different concept of what it is and how you might not go at all?

And so, I would hope that work might be done, that one might need to involve perhaps looking into some different places because if you go back to the same builders' merchants, you're probably going back to the same kind of building materials and the same kind of architecture and the same kind of way of thinking about what it means to build a tool.

Benjamin [00:34:47]: Yeah, I think that's quite an astute observation. I hadn't heard it put like that before. And I do think now that I'm kind of moderately distant from a lot of practitioning theatre, but having read and spoken to people, I'm actually not convinced there is going to be that much of a difference in this build back. But I think it is to that point that you've raised is because you're essentially going to the same builders' merchant. And so, it's completely unsurprising that you're going to get roughly the same type of things coming out. Now, some of the people are somewhat different and maybe they have somewhat different ideas, but they are dealing with approximately the same infrastructure and building blocks. So, with that sort of analysis, I do think that actually that probably doesn't come across too much change actually.

Jonathan [00:35:39]:  Well, there's that, and then I kind of go, well, in a discourse about building back better, who is talking to whom about what? And it seems to me that this government is kind of saying to the Arts Council, you're talking to us, and in talking to us, we are telling you what we would like you to do. Now, of course, the DCMS has a contract with the Arts Council, there's nothing new in that. There's nothing totally specific, but I do think that in assessing the landscape, as well as looking at builders’ merchants and the contract, but the time it would also be kind of illuminated to ask, well, how does the Arts Council see itself in relationship to those discourses? How does it parlay, on one hand, its obligations to the government through its contractual obligations to the DCMS, but on the other, how does it speak to and listen with the sector?

Benjamin [00:36:44]:  Yeah, no, I think that's really fascinating. And in fact, opening up to sort of wider than just theatre arts and arts or creativity in general, there is this move by the government to have that level of board and trustee sign up to government policy, my history of this is not very good, but as far as I know, at least in the last two or three governments of different colors, I don't believe that was such a thing that they got trustees to sign up to. So, I think that's quite interesting. And then, one of the things over my own work over the last 10 or 20 years is actually, I was going to say subtle, but it's not that subtle, the enormous influence that board and trustees has on their own organizations and the ecosystem it's mostly unpaid, but it's probably the loadstone that these organizations kind of worked with and all of that tricky negotiation, Arts Council, government policy funding, money, economic, could you alluded to obviously I think the vast majority of people who think independent trustees are the thing kind of like, oh my gosh, where does that lead? But it's a thing today, we have had two or three resignations, some high profile already and it's going that way. So yes, interesting that if we go to your thesis, if we want to build back better or differently, you have to take a pulse of the landscape, check where it is, and then check who you are speaking to or with. But I'm not so very sure that this government is very allowing of such a thing to happen.

Jonathan [00:38:32]:  Oh, no, I'm in quite the opposite. I think we can see that if you look at the Arts Council guidance it's kind of saying we need to lean more heavily on boards and I've got a problem with that because boards should be accountable. It should be responsible. I remember a rather wonderful publication, probably 30 years old now, of care, diligence, and skill that I think came from the Scottish Arts which was a tremendous little pamphlet, which basically set out really what it was to be a good accountable trustee. I've got no problem with that at all. I think good governance. It's fundamental to help many sectors. So absolutely but if you're saying to a community of artists. Well, it's the boards, these people who were appointed that must shoulder the responsibility. The subtext is because you pesky artists are children and we don't trust you, and so we're going to infantilize you by not respecting you. And we're going to twist the Arts Council's arm to simply say, now you must be the bearers of this news and you must enshrine it in the next 10-year plan and make sure that you deliver, and this is not just structural and then we've seen a different high in level of appointments. As you can see, where the government's going, no, we're not renewing you, you're from Goldsmiths, we really don't like them and we really don't like you. And so, you're gone and you're thinking, well hang on, where's that in the care diligence and skill manual around good governance. So, there's a kind of profound paradox since on one hand, we're being asked to organize ourselves in a more disciplined and accountable way, but we're being met with no accountability and the imposition structural and individual. From a top-down government that frankly is prosecuting a kind of active cultural vandalism. It seems to be on our culture systematically.

Benjamin [00:40:45]:  One way someone explained it to me is that they just view too many organizations, as the majority of them make up being at least not aligned to where government thinking is. And that's too big of a gap for them.

Jonathan [00:41:02]:  I don't even think they care about that in the same way that they haven't bothered to replace creative Europe funding. I was called in as a group of people to go in and talk to some people in government and basically be asked the question, by civil servants. The government's looking at different options, this is two or three years ago looking at different options about Creative Europe. Can you say, why Creative Europe has been a good or bad thing? If we were to replace it, what would we replace it with? And so, when we get thinking and we came up with different ideas and we advocated as to why something multilateral had a different kind of value and they all went, well thank you very much, that's really useful. But I don't even think the government kind of goes, we don't have to care about that and so we won't.

Benjamin [00:41:55]:  Yeah, I've got increasingly skeptical over Britain has this almost consultation culture, and I'm now no longer certain of what the consultation actually ever achieves.

Jonathan [00:42:12]:  It feels like. The simple question is, do you matter? We don't think you do, but we really just like to test that so that we don't get too much flack. And wheel you all in and we'll listen carefully to what you said and we'll feed it back up to the powers a bit. But they'll blink at it because, for us, we give it hours, days, weeks, months of thought because it means something to us. To them, it's a line in the briefing document that is taking up time that could be spent on more important things. And really all they're doing is going, do I need to blink at this? No next, and that's important. So, I think that for me is the reality rather than, oh, well, these are a group of naughty left-wing people who really need to be re-educated.

Benjamin [00:42:58]:  Sure, well maybe riffing on the theme then of visibility, we talked a little bit about European or say playwright versus collaborative theatre. The visibility, I guess, of what we might call disability arts or theater has perhaps also been neglected over the years, but maybe not so in community arts and some other creative practice. So, I'd be interested in what you think and perhaps you could also tell us a little bit about crossing the line.

Jonathan [00:43:31]:  Sure, well, to answer your wider question first. I did a little piece of the guardian, I think, five or six years ago in which I tried to set out my sense of the landscape at that point in which I was celebratory of what had been achieved in the five years previous to that but also slightly warning that the flowering might not last unless we continued to do the tending work.

But I also recognize that there might be a growing appetite for the expertise that this country was able to produce in terms of disabled arts and disable artists elsewhere. And if I think about, what has happened in the last five years is the macro-economic situation has simply continued to get worse for disabled people. So, nothing to do specifically with the arts and culture, everything to do with much more basic human rights in terms of the law. In terms of access to support, access to be able to have paid support to be able to continue working all those kinds of things that disabled people need in order to even begin their day, practicing as artists let alone in anything else have been either demolished or partly removed all problems or we can see now for example with the last few days, the news on plans for judicial reviews, one of the last bastions that disabled people and their allies could get hold of is itself under significant assault.

So, whether economically or legally the position of disabled people in this country has continued to be, I would say murderously bad. Despite that of course, there has been some fantastic work, we've still got unlimited funding to make commissions and interventions strategically within the landscape. You've still got great work coming from artists and arguably we're kind of well beaten, but the way that just tells you how poor everybody else is doing. There is a recent report called "Time to Act," which “On the Move'' we've just published for those of you who don't know "On the Move," let me commend it to you. It's the kind of European entity that is really about mobility. And that includes mobility disabled people and together with the "Europe Beyond Access” project funded by Creative Europe, led paradoxically by the British Council, they've investigated what the current temperature is in 40 different countries across the world in relationship to disabled artists and disabled audiences. And it doesn't mean you won't be surprised to hear.

So, there's a kind of paradox, which is even though things are worse than they have been here, even though things are particularly bad outside the arts of disabled people, there's still some fantastic work being made. And to some degree, we are still the envy of many European countries. I think it's interesting that Germany has just acknowledged Claire Cunningham with a dance award. And I wonder whether Germany, which is an economic superpower when it comes to the arts, by comparison to us, whether Germany is now starting to get disability in a way that it's taken them a while. And that might be an interesting development.

Benjamin [00:47:24]:  Do you ascribe, we'll come to crossing the line, do you ascribe them at all to one of the theories that actually adversity or oppression sparks this kind of creative resistance at all, or I mean I have a little bit of credence to it, but I feel very worried by it because it's also like let's just treat you extremely badly because then you make black, which is like, obviously seems wrong, right?

Jonathan [00:47:54]:  It's the whole romantic, the dignity of labor thing, and you kind of go, yes, of course, there's always an element within everybody whereby if someone says what you can't do that we'll turn around and go, well, I'm going to anyway. And you go nothing wrong with that, perfectly healthy, but that's not specific to disabled people. It's about everybody, what I would say is that disabled people have, have been innovative since day one because they have to encounter a world that is not designed for them and on the whole, not prepared or even aware that it might usefully make some adaptations to comfortably accommodate them, participating in the life of society. They've had to innovate their way out of that either noisily or quietly or seamlessly or individually or collectively forever and so they're natural innovators. So, what we should be doing is placing them in the center of the crucible, if you're talking about, what would you want to do in terms of build back better? I'd abandoned the building merchants entirely and I kind of go diversity is the crucible of future culture and society. So, let us be gathering ourselves and let's begin with them because they are going to innovate in ways that us in the mainstream don't even imagine. And that's about it, that might be equally romantic, but we're due a little bit time to just test that, it seems to me.

Benjamin [00:49:26]:  Yes. Let's give it at least one shot at some point. And so, what have you learned from crossing the line? Maybe tell us a little bit about it and the possibilities that it's opened up.

Jonathan [00:49:39]:  Sure. So, the crossing line is now partnership currently with six European theatre companies who all make professional Touring Theater with learning disabled with more artistic artists. The partnership is behind the gap in Bradford in the UK [inaudible 00:49:55] in Malmo, Sweden [inaudible 00:49:58] in Blue Bay, France, Blue Teapot in Galway Ireland. Theatre 21 in Warsaw Poland would get a bubble in Rotterdam in the Netherlands and since 2014 we've been working on three projects funded either by Creative Europe or [inaudible 00:50:15]. What have we learned? Well, I think we've learned quite a lot, partly because two of those projects were with the Brits, the French and the Swedes were the original three partners we have subsequently grown to 6 and we hope to grow again in the future.

And they've all been working for between 30 and 40 years, but they've all grown up almost as autodidactic companies. They had no peers, they kind of pioneered the way. Obviously, you've got hi-jinks in Wales as a sort of analytical of more than a gap in the UK, but certainly nothing like [inaudible 00:50:52] France and Sweden. And so, they've never really had an opportunity to come together and look at somebody like them over a certain period of time, either to exchange artists or to interrogate the company's culture structures practices. And that's been incredibly useful, I think both for the companies and for me as the project, dramaturge kind of looking on and looking in. And as someone that also has a kind of foot in the cultural policy camp, which I work on at Goldsmiths it's always been important to me to try to understand the wider cultural context in which things do and don't happen.

And so not surprisingly the differences between how things happened in England, France, and Sweden are enormous. So even though we're all part of Europe, and even though we're all part of wealthy northwest Europe, there are still some huge differences that take some time to negotiate and figure out. The work has been fantastic in its difference. So, the French will not have an artistic lead in their company and they will be a producing house with wonderful facilities, a company of 23, but their whole way of doing things is they get guest directors in and every show is different. And so, the audience never knows what to expect and that's exactly as they think it should be. Because of [inaudible 00:52:26] translated probably rather badly as secularism. They don't have the same attitude or discourse around disability as we do in this country.

And so much of the disability arts landscape has come out of the kind of political movement over the last 40 or 50 years in this country. That's not the same in France at all in some ways they kind of jumped over that and gone absolutely towards the mainstream. Disability isn't part of the dominant aspect of their discourse. It's all about audiences, it's all about the quality of the work and the variety. So that's been incredibly useful and illuminating for me. Then again, opening things up to particularly Poland and we tried to extend an invitation to colleagues in Serbia, but actually, they've become part of that Europe beyond access partnership project, which is great, which means that they're moving forward. But it is very interesting to look at how things happen outside wealthy Northwest Europe as well, where they don't have anything like the same level of infrastructure support, but nonetheless making some very interesting work, both [inaudible 00:53:45]. The crossing the line partnership, as well as being about exchanging artists and learning more about other companies' systems and structures also comes together to present work at festivals.

And we began this with the first festival in Ruby in 2017 which went tremendously well and we had hoped to follow that up with a second festival in May last year in Galway, as part of that city's European capital culture. But of course, despite enormous preparations and extensive work by our colleagues at Blue Teapot, six weeks before opening the festival, we had to stop everything. And so, we haven't been able to do it and we won't be able to do it because the Galway European capital culture extended for a further three months, the first quarter this year, but has gently wound up its windows kind of pulled in its forms. And so, we will have to think again, once we're able to get back to face-to-face working. Well, what will be the next incarnation and manifestation? Instead...

Benjamin [00:55:03]:  Thinking of Florence.

Jonathan [00:55:05]:  Well, I don't know. Certainly, we need Italian partners and I have been down not to Florence but to lecture to see the wonderful work of the company who did lovely [inaudible 00:55:20]. But marvelously, I managed to sneak away last October during the pandemic fly to Italy and get to watch and meet them, which was one of the highlights of my working year. So, I'm hopeful that there's an Italian conversation to be had. I don't know where it will be. We'll do something online as part of a kind of digital program later this year just as a way of saying, we are really sorry we couldn't bring you all together. Please don't forget about us, we're still here, we're still working. Here are some examples of all that let's be keeping in touch, but the commitment, I think more widely is very much to continue to grow that work and to grow the platform for it and the profile of it.

Benjamin [00:56:06]:  So, yeah, that's a pretty exciting bunch of things, maybe we'll wind up with two or three sorts of final questions. There's so much still to cover actually, but one would be that you lecture Goldsmith and it would be interesting to know what being a teacher lecturer or sort of getting somewhat academic has also brought to your work or your understanding of the world.

Jonathan [00:56:30]:  Yes. Well, I have a kind of culture of a job at Goldsmiths and in that sense, I'm a culture of an academic. I would say that I lack both the knowledge and the credentials and the expertise to be anything more than a part-time academic but also chiefly the design because I enjoy all the other things I do outside the academy and they do too. And that's why I'm in the department in the way that I am because they value the fact that I'm working in all the other ways which I am and that will inform not just the presentations that I can give but perhaps the way I'm able to engage with students. I think particularly the fact that much of my work is international because so many students are international in the department and particularly on the programs in which I work, which are all master's programs.

In terms of teaching, I did a year as a school teacher in 1983 immediately after leaving university and that was my formal experience of teaching. It was a kind of baptism of fire in that I learned far more in that year of course being a school teacher than I had in the previous three at university. So, I had a sort of little mini-introductory crash course to what teaching was per se, but I guess if you're functioning as a dramaturg and you're working in the center of those that do, in a way you're constantly operating in a mode that is not quite teaching, but it's similar in that you've got to prepare your lesson and then be prepared to abandon it in favor of something better that presents itself at the moment. And you've got to hopefully develop the skills and practices to know whether you need to retrieve a bit of your lesson in the ensuing improvised chaos that you confront or not. They're not quite the same thing, but I think there's a link. What I think I've learned is that in a way I see my Goldsmith work in several ways but in some ways, I see it as paid professional development for me. I see it as a way of undergirding all my freelance work because I'm paid to encounter almost invariably younger. 

Let us say, usually considered the main minds across all subject areas, because in working in arts-administration, cultural relations, cultural diplomacy. We have students all over the world whose backgrounds are in every art subject imaginable, museums, galleries, or none. And they are all writing about things that are as different as you could imagine. So, I'm getting a continual feed of their thoughts, their ideas, their questions, their challenges, their investigation but sometimes, occasionally, intersect and overlap with my areas of specialism, but fundamentally don't. And so, I'm getting enormous generalist input from all those younger minds which enables me to start making different kinds of connections in my own head, asking different kinds of questions in my own head. If one of the functions of the dramaturg is to try to ask timely, salient, challenging, productive questions of a process of a group of people to be catalytic and to add fun. It seems to me that there is a relationship between some of my work at Goldsmith is contributing and supported. And of course, yes, I have responsibilities. and so, it's not simply paid professional development. I wouldn't want people thinking that.

Benjamin [01:00:41]: What do you think is maybe the most misunderstood about dramaturgy or maybe your practice of being a dramaturg?

Jonathan [01:00:51]:  Well, I think hopefully the word has started to gain a little bit more widespread engagement. And we've moved beyond the sort of skepticism of the new. Or the idea that the officer class is somehow being challenged by these upstart enlisted men, and what's going on, of course, they're largely listed, women. So, I won't pursue that analogy any further, but you get the idea it's a different kind of power and energy. One that perhaps shapes us transforms, it's not designed to overpower or to overcome or to supply. Now often the dramaturgical function is delivered perfectly well by the extant team in the room and there is no need for any kind of dramaturge person because the directors, playwrights, actors, anybody else in the mix is all doing that beautifully. But sometimes particularly if you're working in very different contexts or with very different audiences or very different ways, sometimes, having someone who's got that focus on the catalytic a little bit like my work with the six companies, my work isn't necessarily about getting the work on stage or even looking at it in script form. It's about being the person that's paying specific and focused attention to the fact, the partnership, the program, the collaboration, the work, that, without having to worry about all the other aspects of what a director or a company might have to think of. And so that concentration on the catalytic seems to mean to me the specific function of dramaturgy where they can now [inaudible 01:02:37] but not always.

Benjamin [01:02:40]:  Yeah, and what do you think you learned from your work with Ambitious about Autism? So, one tiny other pivot before we come into the home stretch.

Jonathan [01:02:51]:  So 'Ambitious about Autism' is the national charity for children and young people with autism or autistic people, depending on how you like to formulate that. And the organization grew out of the treehouse, which was a school at which my son went from the ages of 4 to 12. And that was my connection into the organization, but being Ambitious about Autism, they grew from 1 school to now 3 and a couple of colleges a research and advocacy facility, a wider community facility because all of those things contribute to hopefully improving the quality of autistic people's lives and certainly their education. They've realized that if you are going to do that, you've also got to think about employment and employability. 

I learned a great deal from my time of being a trustee with them for 7 years, partly because I haven't worked for an organization at that scale either as an employee or in a governance role. I've been vice-chair of the playwright studios Scotland or vice-chair of ATC, which is fantastic, but it's a much larger organization. And so, you're having the same conversations, but you're having slightly different conversations too. I think I learned more about potentially what I could bring because I wasn't in the same kind of art media. And so, I could well I can bring some sort of authentic experiences as the parent of an autistic boy. I'm not going to try to speak on behalf of the parents because we don't agree and there's no point in pretending that we would. Where I think there might be common goals, I might advocate in certain areas. But fundamentally 

I'm going to try and see what the bigger picture of the organization is and bring me and my sensibilities of what I know from the areas that I have worked in and what I have learned to bear to that as part of the united team. I was able to, in a sense extrapolate the basic experience that I've learned from the back to care diligence and at rather wonderful Scottish arts slim publication, that's 30 years ago. Simply to a wider organization with a different ecology I hope to operate in a media that wasn't full of people like me. I had to find a way to engage with people whose backgrounds may be politically very different.

Benjamin [01:05:51]:  Fascinating.

Jonathan [01:02:40]:  And I was trustee from 2006 to 2013, so we moved from a labor administration to conservative administration and that brought very specific challenges and opportunities, actually. And so, looking at that was incredibly useful to me because I was able to A: look at things and B: used lenses that were not afforded to me within the arts sector. So, I was very grateful for that. I learned a great deal from the other people who were there, I learnt a great deal about the culture of organizations, I learnt a great deal about autism and just how different people see it and different people think about it. I was very pleased to be involved with them in certain areas of their work and so they began a program of moving beyond focusing on the schooling of autistic young people with quite considerable needs. To also including youth voice and so work...

Benjamin [01:07:07]: And employment and all of these other areas.

Jonathan [01:07:09]: Indeed, and I remember going to a presentation from the state department, U.S state department: the ambitious facilitated, which was tremendously useful. In terms of a really, really good history of all the interventions and changes and successes within the American education system, since America started paying attention to autistic people in education in the 70s. And it was a series of fabulous kind of graphs that were fundable and to me, upward diagonals in terms of all the milestones, all the progress, all the outcomes, all the increases in advances in educational offer and attainments to, and for autistic people in the United States in the 45-year period. But there was one slide that she showed that struck me and that was around employment and that was a horizontal line. And I've never had that quite so starkly presented to me before that it flatlines completely. And so, it caused me to rethink the way in which I thought about the education of young people is not starting at 2, let alone 5, but actually starting at 25. I'm kind of going, but then you've got to reverse engineer, you've got to start at 25 and reverse engineering back to 2 and that's the way you've got to fundamentally think about it and construct it and work towards it. Because there is absolutely no point in all those fabulous graphs with all those wonderful diagonals, rising diagonals if in the end, they fall off a cliff because of the employability when they stopped being quote and quote educated.

Benjamin [01:08:50]: Yeah, I haven't seen it as a flat line but it doesn't surprise me. So yeah, I mean, and it's interesting because more so a very say market-orientated government or some stripe would actually think, well at 25 or 30 or 40, we want these to use their language people to be productive and so not a net cost to society. And so, you would actually think that wire everything in if you think of a government entity as this sort of selfish thing, if they're trying to balance these things, that that's where they would head to because then they would think, oh, all of this is an investment because suddenly they're not a cost on our books, right? But obviously, that's not how we think of it, but it's how these entities could do. So, it's kind of almost remarkable that we haven't got to that place, but actually, strangely I could see that maybe we will do because it makes sense to that market machine. It could make sense under that framework, as well as any human framework that you'd want to do. It's a strange way where they could marry.

Jonathan [01:09:54]: Well, I think that you've hit the nail gloriously on the head. It's that idea about how do we characterize those two pictures? How do we characterize those two lines? In the fact that they are profoundly different angles and, in a way, they're two different worlds and perceived as two different worlds. But of course, they're not the same world because it's the same person stepping, stepping across the threshold at 20 something. So, they're not different worlds at all but how to reconcile the two worlds seems to me to be about, can we on the one hand value human capital, for life, that isn't just saying, let's keep finding ways to invest in them in the first 25 years, and then let's please God, not have to do anymore investing for the next 50 and that's not a way to do anything with anybody ever.

Benjamin [01:10:47]: Yeah, exactly. I make an agreement with that. Okay, final two questions, because I've taken up so much of your time. So, if we continue them in order to do it again[unclear], is what does a productive day look like for you? I think people find this very interesting to sort of say what works and what doesn't, it's quite individual. And the last one would be any advice you have for creators or artists, I guess, particularly young creators or artists, or maybe disabled ones too, but generally thoughts over your long career. So, what does a productive day look like?

Jonathan [01:11:19]: It never looks like the day before; it never looks the same. And there's no romance in them because it's in avoiding the tyranny of repetition? I think Beckett said, "Habits is the ballast that chains the dog to its vomit." And you can kind of go, yeah, God forbid I should be sat in front of my desk doing this day in, day out. But of course, if you're not going to do that, you've got to invent every day a new. And what I would say is a successful day, might be a very productive 40 minutes. Sometimes it's 10 hours of battering because you just have to do that, you have to get something done on a deadline and you have to do it, and you cannot either distract yourself or delegate it or for somebody else to do it, you just have to do it. And so occasionally there are those days and you kind of slide off the chair at the end of them, completely exhausted into bed. And you're not even aware that it's been productive, you're just grateful that you can stop, but on the whole, it's not that it's the 40 minutes. It's looking back and going what have I done today?'' And it's not a great, big, long list of things. It's actually, yeah, that was a really rich 40 minutes and sometimes it's just because I have a thought that I haven't had before that unlocked something for me and enabled me to move something forward. That was joyous because I felt like, I didn't know I was going to get that, I didn't know that was coming, and that was really nice sometimes. I put my hand on that person's shoulder and I know that made a difference and that's enough, that's fine Sometimes it might be just stopping in the street and having a conversation with a neighbor. I'm not one of these people that has five-year plans and that kind of...

Benjamin [01:13:36]: Three-hour writing day.

Jonathan [01:13:37]: No. I'm just like that, I don't do eight-hour days, usually, there are exceptions. But there's seldom a day that I don't work.

Benjamin [01:13:51]: That's something, yes.

Jonathan [01:13:52]: Because those are the rhythms. It is occasionally, there'll be a Saturday where I don't do anything. But, on a whole, I kind of like I dip in and out, I like a lot of my work and so it's not like, well, why are you working? I like it.

Benjamin [01:14:07]: That aphorism, find a job you love and never work.

Jonathan [01:14:11]: Yeah, something like that. I mean, it isn't always like that at all, but on good days, it is. So that was that one.

Benjamin [01:14:21]: Nice, as for creatives, young creators maybe, but as you said, that's actually and I've had this now young creators are useful, but actually older creators or just creatives generally. I end up talking about, actually, you can restart at 40, 50, 60. I mean, we should -- That kind of statistics suggest that today we should be living well into our eighties.

Jonathan [01:14:52]: I'd be wrong if I can't characterize that bit of it, anything other than this I'm 60 next year. So, I vacillate between on the one hand passionately believe that my best work is ahead of me. And at the same time going, oh, another 20 years of this, surely not. Right? And in a way, my task is to try and creatively inhabit the space in between. The advice I would give to anybody is ask and it sounds really simple, but it's really hard, it's really hard. And it's a skill, it's a life skill that people have to keep working on, but largely I do things not always, but largely I do things because somebody asks me.

Benjamin [01:15:42]: So, never stop questioning. Is that ask as in ask for a mentor, ask for help, ask to do things, or is it also ask as in unpicking the curiosity of why something is, how it could be, or is it both? I guess it's the whole package.

Jonathan [01:15:56]: All of that and more, I mean, it seems to me that mostly what we can do in our allocated full school years is to try and ask slightly better questions.

Benjamin [01:16:09]: Great, okay. Well, thank you very much, I don't know if you wanted to end on any future upcoming project or thought for us at all? I think you kind of ended it by saying ask.

Jonathan [01:16:22]: I think so, I mean I think that trying to find the pleasure in asking rather than the fear. And I think that may just be something that is a benefit of being 60 and 20 because I just don't care anymore. It's like if you don't like me, you think I'm an idiot, that's fine. You could say that, but let me try and focus on asking things of myself, asking things of others. Can I ask in a better way? That kind of a question may seem like a modest ambition, but I think it's probably a good place to be. But to ask you Ben, is there anything that you would want to say to me.

Benjamin [01:17:13]: Thank you very much for the whole conversation. I think that was very rich and I look forward to hearing your sort of niche adventure episode from Florence. So, we should definitely speak again and I kind of hope that maybe we might be able to get at least one in-person meeting before September. If not, I'm sure we will continue these conversations, over the years

Jonathan [01:17:43]: I look forward to them. On this, I'm hoping you would want to know that one of our nicest conversations was in New York and so there is...

Benjamin [01:17:52]: Yes. So, that was where we reconnected after 5 or 10 years or something like that.

Jonathan [01:17:58]: That's right, and so there's a long and noble tradition of these conversations taking place in other parts. I hope you will join us at future Fence meetings when your circumstances...

Benjamin [01:18:07]: Yes, I hope for another opportunity at some point, yeah.

Jonathan [01:18:17]: And thank you so much for asking me and for facilitating this conversation.

Benjamin [01:18:19]: No, that'd be great and so you'll have links to Jonathan's website and all of that on the blog and that just leads me to thank Jonathan once again for being dramaturg extraordinaire. Thank you.

Jonathan [01:18:34]: Take care.

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