Listen to the chapter here!
Oliver:
You've got to sort of have the right level of internal non-attachment. Some degree of huge mess is actually essential. The whole act of growth is seeing more of yourself.
There are ways to choose not to be part of this kind of surveillance world today. We want something that will do the living, or the thinking, or the writing for us. And there isn't such a thing.
Neil:
Hey everybody, it's Neil Pasricha. And welcome or welcome back to Chapter 142 of 3 Books. We are delighted to be joined by the wonderful Oliver Burkman today, author of Meditations for Mortals, his new book, and his previous book, Four Thousand Weeks.
And we're going to talk about Oliver in just a moment. But first, if you're new here, or if you're not new here, this is the world's only podcast by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. And we kind of think of it as a hangout, a place of respite, of peacefulness, a way to kind of unplug from the daily grind, and just hang out with a bunch of people who love books and love reading, and like to geek out about literary things.
And so I thought in the intro, I want to do a few things before we get into our guest, and then get into the interview. And I want to kind of experiment with a slightly different interview now. If you want to skip the interview and jump ahead to the conversation, obviously feel free.
There are no ads in the show, no sponsors, no commercials, no interruptions, nothing like that. So it's just going to be us hanging out. Now, a couple of things.
First of all, I want to talk about a couple of letters. You know, I love the tribe, the community, three bookers out there. I feel your love.
A couple of things I want to read to you today. And again, if I read your letter on the show, remember that you can always email me, and I'll send you a signed book to say thanks. I got a note actually from a teacher at Menomonee Falls High School last year.
Hi, Neil. Miss Leonard, right? Ms. Emily Leonard. I'm a high school librarian and a big fan of free books. I'm working on a project for AP students based on the show. Students will listen to one of your podcast chapters, then choose someone in their lives to interview about their three most formative books.
I'm thinking there'll be a writing component as well for the students to reflect on their own most formative books. The goal is to get students to see themselves and the people around them as readers. It's so important for kids to see the people around them are readers, not just their old English teacher or the librarian.
So she asked me if I had any tips for interviewing people that I could pass along. And I said, yes, prepare. Ask for the three books in advance.
Try to read at least one of them or more if you can. Have questions written down before you go in. Ask them to tell you about your relationship with the book.
Maybe make them chronological in their life. Follow the conversation. Don't get stuck on your questions.
Try not to look at the clock. You can always add it later. And remember, you get to do this, not you have to do this.
And then she asked for suggestions on which chapters would be good to start on. And I said, maybe Chapter 26 with Angie Thomas, Chapter 123 with Suzy Batiste, or Chapter 7 with Vishwas Agarwal, which we just released, again, as a classic. And I just heard back a year later from Miss Leonard, and she said that it went great.
She worked with two AP language teachers. She created the project, and they put it together. They made a project guide that she put together, which I will post at 3 Books. And they had so much fun with the project. Thanks for being our inspiration. Thanks again for sending us a couple of books.
Or maybe I already sent them a couple of books. Wonderful. So that's just kind of a shout out for teachers.
If you want to do a project where you ask people to interview a person about the three most forwarded books, feel free. And we're going to post the teaching guide on threebooks.ca as well, which is great. Another quick letter that just popped in that I wanted to read so we could share the love, so we could kind of all hang out together, comes from a show band via our review on Apple Podcasts.
This is not your typical books podcast. Endless curiosity and well-researched questions always uncover something fascinating about the guest. There is a kind and respectful vibe, and the conversations bring out wisdoms and the best in the guest, inspiring a greater love for books and reading.
To pull a quote from Seth Godin, who was our guest in chapter three, kindness scales. It creates trust and openness and truth and enthusiasm and patience and possibility. You owe it to yourself to dive in and listen to an episode in brackets chapter.
You won't stop there. You can join the 3 Books community. We look forward to having you.
Thanks show band. That's very nice of you. Drop me a line so I can send you a book to say thanks.
And if you are thinking about writing a note or review, please do. I always read one or two at the beginning, and I read every single one. All right.
Now I also was thinking at the beginning, I want to do like not like a sermon, but we have a values page for the shows. That's 3books.co/values. I have a whole page of values there, but I don't talk about them often enough.
So I want to just kind of cue into a couple of them here and there. The one value I want to talk about today is humans are the best algorithm. Obviously that's kind of the design of the show, right?
Like I'm interviewing humans about which books they found most formative. I'm not going on to the Amazon recommendation engine or I'm not trying to follow like, you know, some sort of algorithmically derived book recommendation, but I want to ask people. And I thought about that value for a few reasons.
One, Oliver, as you're going to hear, is going to talk about how he gets ideas for his next newsletters from his previous newsletters. He writes a wonderful biweekly newsletter called The Imperfectionist, which I highly recommend that you subscribe to. And then he gets ideas for the next one from responses to that, which I thought was kind of cool.
And it also made me think of Douglas Rushkoff, who you may remember is the author of Team Human as well as our guest way back in chapter 83. And he wrote this little note online talking about the pressure that algorithms put on creators. He says, while I love, this is Douglas now, while I love being able to engage with readers and listeners, I'm coming to realize my sense of guilty obligation to all the people and all these platforms is actually misplaced.
The platforms themselves are configured to tug on the triggers of responsibility, the same way Snapchat uses the streak feature to keep tween girls messaging each other every day. They're not messaging out of social obligation, but to keep the platform's metric rising. It's early training for the way their eventual economic precarity will keep them checking for how much money a medium post earned or how many new subscribers are generated by a sub stack post.
Ironically, the more content we churn out for all these algorithms, the less valuable our own content becomes. There is simply too much stuff. The problem isn't information overload, so much as perspective abundance.
We may need to redefine discipline from the ability to write and publish something every day to the ability to hold back. What if people started to produce content when they actually had something to say rather than coming up with something to say in order to fill another slot? I love that because the other thing is human pace.
Humans live in systems and cycles. We're awake, and then we sleep. We have summer, and then we have winter.
We have work, and then we have rest. I think we acknowledge and understand that intuitively, and I don't think algorithms do. There's an always-on-ness about algorithms, which also aggrieves me.
Humans are the best algorithms, one of the values that underpins this entire podcast. Okay, now, who is our guest today? Well, basically, I want to ask you if you're ready for a writing masterclass for someone who I think is honestly probably the best self-help writer in the world today.
And why wouldn't he be? After graduating from Cambridge University over in England, Oliver Burkeman wrote the popular column called This Column Will Change Your Life in The Guardian for over 15 years. That's like over 500 columns, and they were these wonderful, real-world, real-time, poetic explorations of the entire self-help universe.
And The Guardian is a free website. They aren't paywalled, although they accept donations, so you can still read all of his columns today. It might have a warning at the top, like, warning, 12 years old, warning, 18 years old, but they're really wonderful columns.
And afterwards, he then stopped the column in 2020 and then put out a book in 2021 called 4,000 Weeks, Average Human Lifespan in Weeks. And this is, again, a wonderfully poetic literary examination of how we live today, which Mark Manson, our guest in Chapter 28, called A Reality Check on Our Culture's Crazy Assumptions Around Work, Productivity, and Living a Meaningful Life, and which Adam Grant, our guest in Chapter 72, called the most important book ever written about time management. And I kind of feel like he said that tongue-in-cheek because it's not really about time management and it's like how to live a good life.
That's not really like a systems and acts and tools type of book, you know, the way that like Tim Ferriss' books might be or something like that. But the occasion of our actual first ever in-person connection, I say in-person because we were virtual, but we didn't turn the cameras on for a reason that we're gonna talk about at the beginning, is the fact that he has a new book called Meditations for Mortals, a wonderful follow-up to 4,000 Weeks, which just came out, and offers the reader 28 short chapters meant to be read one a day over four weeks, over 28 days.
So you can read it like that if you want to. I kind of gulped and swallowed and read seven at a time and then didn't read any for a few days. But the design of the book is one where if you were to follow this and have a little quiet downtime each night with Oliver, who is, like I said, poetic and literary and just a wonderful person to be around, then it is meant to be a bit of a trigger to sort of create some new behaviors in your life, which is wonderful.
So what are we talking about? Well, honestly, I feel like this is at a high level, like a writing masterclass here. There are so many systems and tools and habits for how Oliver thinks about writing and how he works that I just swallowed up.
For any writers out there, you are gonna love this. But then, of course, we're gonna talk about formative books. And of course, when we do that, we're gonna have a lot of jumping off conversations.
So we're also gonna talk about things like totalitarianism. How do you know when you're living in a totalitarian state? And Jungian analysis and what Jungian analysis means.
And we're gonna go in a hundred different directions because that's what we like to do on the show, but we go deep, we go wide, we go far, we hang out and stick around at the very end of the show for the end of the podcast, but we will hang out again, play your voicemails, talk about the word of the chapter and have a little bit of a post-party follow-up. All right, everybody. Are you ready?
Here we go. Let's turn the page into Oliver Burkman and Chapter 142. Now.
Oliver:
I'm all for audio only, believe me, but I'll do whatever you want.
Neil:
Why are you all for audio only?
Oliver:
I think it makes for, I don't know why, I think it makes for a better conversation.
Neil:
Yeah, because I can't see you right now. You can't see me. We've never met in person before, face to face, and yet we have had a sort of a letter-based relationship for a number of years.
And I don't know if it's, I don't know if you agree, but I feel like audio only also is just much more akin to reading. Like it's much more, you know, when you're reading a book, you hear a voice, it's in your head, you're in your own self, you have your own surroundings, and you aren't being prompted to try to interpret stuff from a whole bunch of different inputs.
Oliver:
Yeah, no, that's a good point. And I think it's part of why people find audiobooks so sort of intimate as well. Yeah, no, it's fascinating.
Yeah, I'm always happy to have a conversation without visuals. Also, I'm sort of insecure, not about my appearance, although I'm sure plenty of people are, but I don't think I've figured out my video backdrop and lighting and all that stuff, whereas a good microphone near my mouth, that's what I've got.
Neil:
Well, yeah, exactly. Well, it feels more like a phone call too. I was just about to interview Maria Popova a few months ago, who's the author of The Marginalian, and formerly Brain Pickings, and she emailed me probably just a moment before we hit record, and she said, oh, I just noticed you record video.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to politely decline.
Oliver:
Right.
Neil:
I don't do video.
Her argument was that that's not what it's about, and it's collecting something that's kind of like a momentary version of the truth. I said, yeah, whenever I turn on the video, it gives me this internal, ugh, and she's like, listening to the internal, ugh, is one of the best directions in the artistic life I know.
Oliver:
I don't have feelings that strong, and if you wanted us to record video, well, that was what I was assuming we'd be doing, to be honest. So you just tell me.
Neil:
I like it. I want to stick with this. I want to stick with audio only. I also think it's a bit of a, of an F you to the world.
Like everything's oriented to wanting everybody to create video. I even walk down the street now in Toronto, and like, you know, someone holding their phone up above their head or holding it as they walk down the street, people don't blanket that. I'm like, you know, when I was a kid, you can't just walk around videotaping people.
That's not allowed. So I resist the video everywhere culture, and I know all the largest markets in the world, you know, the Joe Rogans and the Mel Robbins and the Rich Rolls, and I know they're all migrating towards video-based consumption, but that's for purposes that are different than ours, which is to have a theater-of-the-mind conversation about your incredible work with this new book, Meditations for Mortals, your previous book, 4,000 Weeks, your books before that, your columns before that, and your most formative book. So I really am so thrilled to welcome you, Oliver, onto three books.
This is the only podcast in the world by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. And we are having this conversation on October 17th, 2024. Meditations for Mortals came out in the US and North America on October the 7th.
I know it came out in the UK before that, and it appears to be a huge hit. I mean, already on Amazon, I see 86 reviews. It's ranked, you know, 554 in all of books, which is, might not sound high, but like, the happiest equation, my most popular book is 178,885.
Okay, just checking. The average rating is 4.6. So, you know, this is like, you're sort of like a week or two after the birth of this thing. How's the book feeling to you right now?
What's the relationship you have with the book? And if you don't mind, what's the relationship you have now with your writing career in general as this is coming out into the world?
Oliver:
Wow, yeah. Lots of questions. You've been paying more attention to my Amazon ranking than I have, which I'm actually quite pleased to realize that I haven't been as addicted as I thought I would be.
Neil:
And I should say, I also checked the amazon.co.uk this morning. It was 110. So it's even higher in the UK.
So it's a hit all around. But it's good that you're not checking. I was just checking for the question.
Oliver:
What happened was it came out in the UK in early September and then in the US in early August. And in many ways, the US launches a bigger deal, depending on how you measure it, and copies available and all the rest of it. But because the UK launch had already happened, it's like that whole sort of emotional psychodrama part.
I'd sort of got through it already the first few weeks of like, you know, waiting on tenterhooks to see how people respond. What I learned from 4,000 weeks, my last book, which did much, much better than anything I'd previously written at that point, was that it really can be quite a slow burn thing. It's a long time before you can really say of a book, even if numbers are what count for you, which maybe they shouldn't be, but even if they are, it's a long time after it's been launched before you can really reach any kind of judgment on that.
So what I love at this stage, honestly, is just sort of hearing from individual people who are sort of making their way through it. That is just like the best. It's very self-selecting because you don't really hear from anyone who hates it, right?
You know, email communication is therefore wonderfully positive and reassuring and interesting. But yeah, it's just such a weird thing, right? I mean, as you know so well, right?
You just sort of, you pour your heart and soul into it and then you stick it out there and then you start sort of talking about it in various contexts to promote it. But that's like a completely different job and I've got no idea whether I'm really talking about it in the same head space almost as well. You know, I don't know.
Neil:
It's a totally different thing. You mentioned emotional psychodrama, so let's hold on to that phrase, emotional psychodrama. You also said the phrase, it can be a really slow burn, so let's hold on to that.
You said in a December 2022 email to me, you said, I think it was Robert Wright who wrote Why Buddhism is True, who described the pre-book launch moment as the calm before the calm. Let's hold on to that. And then I want to just ask you one level step deeper, keeping in mind that the audience here, in a lot of cases, are book writers or book writers to be.
A lot of people who are listening to this show are aspiring writers or are writers. So then using the phrases you've mentioned so far, how might you recommend doing a book launch now? What might be your, and that could be internally or externally, but what is Oliver Berkman, who's had a couple massive popular book launches now in the last couple years, what's your book launch advice to another writer?
Oliver:
Well, I guess the first thing that springs to mind is if there is a point at which you feel like you're completely on top of it and you know what you're doing and you didn't leave anything too late, I haven't reached that stage yet. In some ways, I'm pleased about that because if you do want to talk at all about the substance of the new book, that idea of not waiting until you feel like you're on top of things is kind of a central theme. I think you've got to sort of have the right level of internal non-attachment to it, right?
You can't make it that if it goes, you can't make it that how well the book does is the sole and final judgment on whether it was worth writing or whether it's a good book by some other standard. But equally, I don't know, I have an awful lot of support and help from the publishers. I'm not one of the writers who, and I think there are many, many, who sort of feel that they have to do everything themselves in terms of promoting it.
But I also think you do want to try to consider that that's a really fun challenge, right? It's not some terrible burden. I'm not in the mindset of maybe a previous generation of writers who thought it was somehow offensive that it's their job to spread the word about a book.
I think that can be totally fun. And then, you know, just to get completely down to brass tacks, I think it really helps to do whatever you can to get a lot of pre-orders. People know this.
And a lot may be a very different figure depending on the place you're at in your career. And it's not, you know, it's not the be all and end all. But I think it's very helpful if you can start out of the gate with a little bit of pre-order action because all the different retailers and everybody pay close attention.
Neil:
Yeah, the retailers, we just interviewed our last chapter of the show was with James Daunt of Daunt Books and Waterstones and Barnes & Noble. And yeah, pre-orders signify to publishers and bookstores, even though the numbers might be small, you know, I think the pre-orders, I think the total number of pre-orders I had for my most popular book ever was like 500. You know what I mean?
The numbers don't have to be massive, but they are a signifier that there's built up demand and that it encourages retailers and booksellers to take a chance on maybe a front of shop display. And as you know, from following James Daunt's career, potentially he's oriented these big bookstores in both the UK and the US to be more like independent bookstores where they're tracking and following and choosing their book merchandising based on their individual store, not based on planograms anymore or co-op dollars. So even if the publisher wants Meditations for Morals to be at the front of every Barnes & Noble, that's just unlikely to happen now because it's unlikely to happen for anybody.
So as a result, maybe it's better. You just have to write a better book that wins people over and gets the word of mouth and gets the email you're talking about. So I like that.
All that combined with healthy, non-attachment.
Oliver:
Yeah, I mean, I probably shouldn't, this is probably too candid in case my, you know, editors or anybody are listening, but I did realize I had enough presence of mind to realize this time around that like there was real truth in the idea that as a friend of mine reminded me like whether I'm able to enjoy this process really is the criterion of success. I mean, I know someone might hear that and be like, well, no, like whether you work hard and sell a lot of copies is the criterion of success, but the two are not incompatible. I think if anything, you know, enjoying yourself is going to easily feed onto the motivation to sort of promote books and stuff.
And yeah, at some point in your life, you've got to be able to measure what you're doing by whether it's fun as well.
Neil:
Yeah. It reminds me of that phrase, he who has the most fun wins, you know, that old adage, right? If you can enjoy it, then you've already won.
Oliver:
Obviously we are deep in your ballpark here, right? So I understand, but like that, the question of like measuring things by whether they are, by the feelings that they can evoke in you, I think is quite important.
Neil:
Yeah. So we've, like basically right now we've got like a messy table between us, right? We've got a lot of, there's gratitude, there's imperfectionism, there's meditations for mortals.
We've got this self-help universe that we both kind of sit in, that we both sort of see and are around. We're both trying to have fun in this universe. And in this place, we're going to touch on meditations for mortals a number of times, I'm sure, but you've also given us your three most formative books, the three books that shaped you or, you know, ignited you or altered a direction in some special way.
I've bought all three of those books. I want to say I've read all three of them, but I've read big chunks of all three of them, I will say. Fair enough.
And I'm thrilled and delighted and excited to sort of share them back with you and our listeners and then ask you a number of questions. So we're going to kind of pretend because we can't see each other and nobody can see us that we're all in a bookstore. And I'm going to talk about each book for about a minute and then I'm going to ask you to tell us about your relationship with it.
And then I've got a few follow-up questions for each one.
Oliver:
Great.
Neil:
So your very first formative book is Stasiland, stories from behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder. F-U-N-D-E-R. The cover is a photo of soldiers standing on a tall graffiti covered Berlin Wall with a dark kind of gloomy sky behind them. The bottom is sort of a cream background with a skinny all caps, almost prison bar like font that reads Stasiland with a blurb from Alina Lappin at the Sunday Times ribboned across the bottom in a light blue that reads brilliant. A masterpiece of investigative analysis written almost like a novel with a perfect mix of compassion and distance. There's also a maroon burst publishing term, the circle on the cover of a book that says winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. But what is this book about?
Well, basically in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. Shortly afterwards, two Germanys reunited. East Germany ceased to exist.
Anna Funder's bestselling Stasiland brings us an extraordinary tale of real lives from the former East Germany, including a woman who tried to scale the wall on New Year's Eve. Heartbreaking story of Frau Paul who was separated from her baby by the Berlin Wall. We get to meet some of the Stasi men themselves who are still proud of their surveillance methods. There's a really fascinating kind of Studs Terkel-like kind of on the ground real stories that illuminate a part of history that a lot of people have forgotten. This book was published in Australia by Text Publishing in 2002. Oliver, tell us about your relationship with Stasiland. Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder.
Oliver:
So it's, in a way, it's almost funny to call this a formative book because I feel like formative implies that you have to be kind of like 13 or 14 when you first encounter it. This book I encountered pretty, you know, when it was published pretty near the beginning of my journalistic career but it's not that old of a book.
Neil:
Yeah, so 2002, if you just play this, you graduated from Cambridge in 1996, started writing your column for The Guardian I think in 2006. Is that right?
Oliver:
Yeah, so I was in that period where I was sort of getting, I was getting into a career as a journalist, 2002. I was, you know, that was what I did and how I paid the rent but I wasn't sort of fully immersed in it maybe at that point. Anyway, this book, you know, firstly it's just, on the level of story and the level of its substance, it's a completely fascinating book about this just extraordinary surveillance society that was created in East Germany during the Cold War.
And, you know, I've seen Anna Funder write about it since and talk about it as the most advanced surveillance society that at the time had existed, right? Because it's all pre-internet and it's kind of astounding what these people did in terms of persuading everybody to spy on their neighbours and keeping sort of extraordinary documentation of what was going on. Anyone who's seen the movie The Lives of Others, this is the same, we're in the same field of subject matter here.
And actually there are a few interesting themes in that idea of trying to exert total central control over a society that I think have kind of, whether by chance or not, become quite central to my writing in a totally different way. But what really got to me about that book and where it's placed in my heart is that it's a journalistic account, it's reported, but Anna Funder inserts herself into the narrative. It's about her being on a reporting journey in, overwhelmingly I think, in former East Berlin.
You know, it's kind of funny at the same time as dealing with such kind of serious stuff and such sort of terrible kind of life histories and experiences. And it really just like made me realise that you could do something, there was something you could do as a journalist. I would call it journalism.
I would call what I do very differently, but still kind of journalism. And, you know, I've struggled to sort of convey it, but it's something to do with the idea of the journalist being in the story and the ideas being really serious and very big sort of sweeping ideas being addressed through the granular details of people's lives and feeling yourself to be in the little apartment where the interview is being conducted and all of that. I've always been incredibly attracted to any kind of writing that manages this, right, that puts big ideas into really vivid situations.
When you asked me for this list of books, I was partly minded instead to recommend virtually anything by Janet Malcolm, who's another writer who does this just astoundingly well. So that's my first pass at an answer.
Neil:
Yeah, no, no, it's a great pass. You know, there's a Kirkus review on the inside cover here, by the way, it says, Funder's fully humanised portrait of the Stasi's tentacles reads like a warning of totalitarian futures to come. I can't skip over this book without asking you to comment on our political climate.
Obviously it's, we're talking in October. There's a big US election in November. I'll just give you one more quote from the book here to maybe help inform your reflection, but she describes her feeling for the former German Democratic Republic as horror romance.
She says, quote, the romance comes from the dream of a better world. The German communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs. Yet the horror comes from what they did in its name.
So I just wonder, you know, we talking about totalitarian states, I'd love your views on the political climate and maybe some of the steps you think are necessary to improve the quality and level of discourse as somebody who has been participating in a really healthy way for decades now.
Oliver:
Ah, that's fascinating. You know, I mean, I do think that there are sort of totalitarian aspects to the culture that we find ourselves in. In my understanding, what really makes, what really marks out totalitarianism from other concepts like fascism, dictatorship, tyranny, all this rest of it, is that notion that there's no part of your inner soul that is beyond the reach of the central authority, right?
It's that. I think this is what makes sort of North Korea sort of a classic modern day example. It's this notion that there's no private sphere.
There's no private space. And to me, when I think about that today, I go primarily to sort of the tech culture that we live in, the voluntary ways in which we offer up our most intimate lives on social media, the ways in which kind of we are surveilled through our purchases and our movements and everything that Shoshana Zuboff writes about in her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
Neil:
Yes, I have that book written down here for that exact reason.
Oliver:
I don't go immediately quite so quickly to sort of the politics of extreme partisanship and Trumpism and all the rest of it because I think that while, of course, you can see aspects of that, you know, debates over reproductive rights are absolutely debates about the most basic parts of your inner and private world. But generally speaking, I feel like that is the emphasis there is on sort of chaos and disorder and certainly the harnessing of the energies of disorder to sort of feed authoritarianism. I think that that's true.
But it's different in interesting ways as well as the same. And I don't know, it still feels to me like maybe this will prove deeply naive in hindsight, but it still feels to me like there are ways to choose not to be difficult, but ways to choose not to be part of this kind of surveillance world today that maybe were not available in the GDR just because of the fact that it used more lower tech means to achieve it. And then obviously, you know, the Chinese social credit system and all of that is a very important example of this kind of technological totalitarianism.
And in the interests of seeing the whole picture, let's point out that there are plenty of people on the sort of MAGA side of the American polarisation, which is of course not my side, who would see this kind of... who would see their opponents as being the ones trying to exert ever greater control. Right?
Through the COVID lockdowns, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, it's all very sort of current and alive, this material.
Neil:
Yeah. And one of the things that Shoshana Zuboff talks about in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is the distillation of all of our behaviours into sort of zeros and ones. You know, we were talking at the beginning of this conversation about, OK, not turning the video on because of course the internet wants us to have video on so that we can have a YouTube video of both of our heads talking so that that can be sliced and diced into endless little kind of 30-second snippets, or not even 30 seconds, more like 5-second snippets.
And I think about that because Jonathan Franzen, a past guest on 3 Books, has said the middle has been shown to be unprofitable. And yet your work, both in 4,000 Weeks and Meditations for Mortal and your column in The Guardian for a decade, you know, is a thoughtful, nuanced, both sides kind of way of talking about issues. And you've been successful doing it.
So in a way, you're almost like the counter culture to what I see as the algorithmically defined behaviours that we're all encouraged to live in now. You go on Netflix, you watch what the thing tells you to watch. You know what I mean?
You are driving with a map app. You stop at the place that pops up. You check the Google review.
You distill down any review of any food you ever eat to a number out of five. It's like we're living in this increasingly black and white, zero middle ground place. But yet you've been able to hang out in the middle still.
So I don't know how you're doing it, but you're pulling this off. And I thought you might have some advice for how the rest of us might choose to live like that too.
Oliver:
You know, it's interesting, and I do have thoughts about this. And I mean, they start off in a self-deprecating way, because I think the part of the answer here is that success for a writer is not the same thing as success for a movie studio. So yeah, I'm really enjoying the state of my career, and it's great, and I make a living from writing.
And it's all kind of, I understand that it's wonderful and from many people's perspectives, enviable. But the sort of scale at which this is happening is not like putting out a movie, you know? It's not millions of dollars investment, and then you have to make it all back, otherwise it's all like lots and lots of people lose their jobs, and et cetera, et cetera.
So I think one of the things is that, you know, and I think this is a positive aspect of the digital revolution, a really clearly positive one, is that it's the thousand true fans idea of Kevin Kelly, right? You can connect to that slice of people who are into what you're doing, and you can connect to them globally, so there's going to be enough of them to sustain a career, or at least there can be enough of them to sustain a career, without them being a remotely large percentage of the world's population. So, you know, as you know, a book can be enormously successful.
It doesn't really mean that like the majority of people if you walk down a street...
Neil:
Yeah, sure, it might sell 50,000 copies, and that'll be a bestseller for six months, right?
Oliver:
Exactly, and even the books that sell like a million, the very rare breakout, incredible big successes, and, you know, that's a minuscule percentage of the population of North America, for example.
Neil:
Exactly, that's less than the number of tickets sold to the 10th most popular movie of the last weekend.
Oliver:
Right, so all those blockbuster dynamics, all those algorithmic things that sort of take everyone to the extremes or to the lowest common denominators, like they almost create this shadow world where I think a lot of creators are working, and I'm not suggesting it's a sort of age of great plenty where anybody can make tons and tons of money. That's probably overstated as well, but I think it really does mean that you can get a lot of sort of... There's something to be done if you're someone like me who doesn't want to be sort of fueling those dynamics or whose ideas just seem naturally to feel like they're not at one polarized extreme or another.
And doing my email newsletter has been just like the biggest revelation in this regard. It's just a sort of complete...
Neil:
Oh, say more about that. So for people listening, you created an email newsletter called The Imperfectionist. You've been doing that, is it like a biweekly?
Oliver:
Yeah, it's roughly every two weeks.
Neil:
And you've been doing that for how many years?
Oliver:
Since just after 4,000 weeks came out, I think. So it's like three years, really, four years, maybe four months.
Neil:
Right, so three years of biweekly long-form essay type reminds me of your Guardian column type of reflection. And then I'm assuming what you're saying is that's been a reminder because you're noticing that the community kind of comes up, people forward it around, you get notes, and then your community grows organically around the work you're passionate about.
Oliver:
Yeah, and you just, you know, obviously the people who respond to me are a tiny fraction of the people who read it, and they themselves are a pleasingly large percentage, but still not 100, of the people who receive the email. So, you know, it's not representative, but I just have this really strong sense of, you know, the things that I write resonating with people or people adding new suggestions and taking my thinking in new ways. I've absolutely had ideas for further newsletter essays or for parts of books, parts of the new book, from emails that I get sent.
Neil:
And you send the introduction to Meditations for Mortals that the book largely came from your emails. Like, you also got a book out of it too.
Oliver:
Yeah, no, exactly. I made a lot of, you know, there's a lot of new stuff and it had to be adapted in all sorts of ways, but it has its origins there completely.
Neil:
Sounds similar to 1000 Awesome Things. File, print, here's my book. You know, I mean, this is my, I'm joking, but like, I wrote a daily blog and the great thing we're both talking about is that it can add up to something more substantial later if you ever wanted to.
Oliver:
No, I certainly didn't file print, but yeah, I knew that I was onto something. I knew what sort of ideas connected with people and what ways of expressing things connected with people. And right, to the extent that someone who's very, very, like someone who's really closely read all my newsletters picks up this new book, they will recognise certain stretches as being related to stuff they've read.
But another great thing about this kind of, you know, corner of the economy, it seems to me, or corner of the cultural industry or whatever, is that they will be the people for whom that's a welcome thing. Oh no, I really would like your greatest hits in a nice bound volume that I can go back to.
Neil:
And I will throw myself there too. I read, I have been reading your biweekly newsletter since it's come out and I often respond to you when reflecting on it. And I read this book and I did not notice like my own brain was not smart enough to remember anything that you'd written a couple of years ago if even you had.
So yeah, I can relate to that completely. And it's great that you're opening up kind of writing, like the writing side of what you do because I want to hang up there for a second as we transition into your second book, which we're going to, for the Dewey Decimal fans at home, I'll include myself in this, we're going to go from the very end of the Dewey Decimal system, 943. So your last book was classified History and Geography slash Europe slash Germany and Central Europe.
That's 943. Now we're going to go all the way down to 071 for Information slash Journalism and Publishing where we're going to talk about your second form in a book, which is The New New Journalism Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers On Their Craft by Robert S. Boynton B-O-Y-N-T-O-N published in 2005 by Vintage.
I'm holding a cream paperback with an up-tilted, splashy newspaper headline type in like a white and black kind of sans serif, all caps font that says THE NEW NEW JOURNALISM and there's tons, well 19, I'll be specific, there's 19 red, blue and yellow bursts filled of the names of famous authors like Susan Orlean, Michael Lewis, Gay Talese, John Krakauer, Eric Schlossler. Robert S. Boynton, by the way, he was an editor for The New Yorker and Harper's and director of Literary Reportage at NYU's Journalism School.
Basically, 40 years after, he argues, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and Gay Talese launched the New New Journalism movement, he sits down with 19 practitioners of what he calls the New New Journalism to discuss their writing methods, outputs, and careers. As I mentioned, follow this one under 0.1071.30 for information slash journalism. Oliver, tell us about your relationship with the New New Journalism by Robert S. Boynton.
Oliver:
I mean, in some ways, this kind of intensifies and doubles down on some things I was already saying about Stasiland. I think that all of these interviews in this book really speak, well, speak to two things. Firstly, my kind of obsession with other people's writing routines and everything, which we can totally talk about because it's like a glorious topic for some of us anyway to sort of discuss how the day unfolds for people in doing the kind of writing that we want to be doing ourselves.
But also, it's that question of a sensibility. It's the idea that you could be a journalist and not be trying to just take yourself out of the story, not be reporting solely on kind of day-to-day events, but reporting on big, big ideas and making ideas vivid and accessible and funny and all the rest of it. you know, I'm thinking, I mean, John Krakauer is one of these interviewees and he's brilliant at it, but that's a very sort of, to me, a very sort of concrete kind of writing, that sort of adventure writing for which he's best known in the mountaineering books and things like that.
Neil:
Into the wild, into thin air.
Oliver:
Yeah. And then at the other end of the scale, perhaps, I'm just looking back over the list here, but I see Ron Rosenbaum wrote a huge book called Explaining Hitler, which is about explaining Hitler. And then Michael Lewis, possibly of all these names, I'm just trying to see if I'm slandering anybody, but he might well be the sort of currently most high-flying name.
Neil:
I think so. Him or maybe Susan Orlean too.
Oliver:
Right. Writing in this kind of extraordinarily fluid, very, very sort of makes it look incredibly easy manner about very complicated financial transactions or about sort of the deepest workings of the federal government. I know he's been criticized for swallowing Sam Bankman-Fried's stories too credulously, but, you know, whatever. I don't know if that's fair. But there's a real sense of all these people sort of taking potentially very obscure ideas and putting life into them. If magazines had been allowed in the format of your podcast, Neil, I might have also mentioned here a magazine called Lingua Franca, which doesn't exist anymore.
It's one of those if you know, you know kind of things.
Neil:
I don't know.
Oliver:
Which was a relatively short-lived, I think it was monthly publication. Which is, it's very hard to describe. It was essentially a magazine of academia, of sort of largely American and Canadian sort of academic life.
But it was coming at the ideas as if it was a soap opera, right? It was about, it was about feuds between scholars and scandals, not of the kind that, you know, not HR scandals, but sort of intellectual scandals. It's just really hard to kind of convey what that is.
But it's something about the life in ideas. It's the complete rejection of the position that some people sometimes have that like, I just want to hear about a philosopher's ideas. I don't want anything about his personal life or her personal life.
You know, it's the sort of, it's really just the sort of humanising of really obscure ideas. And there's something almost just intrinsically funny about writing, about, you know, disagreements at the core of metaphysics or of Heidegger studies or of existentialism, partly through the kind of enmities that arise in the senior common room at the university. Anyway, I've gone off the topic of this, but it's the same idea.
It's that kind of thing that I've always been, that I've always just been kind of addicted to. And I think that is the through line maybe to some of what I do.
Neil:
I like that. I like that. Addicted, my obsession with other people's writing routines.
I have your rough writing resume as something like, 1994, you graduated from Christ College, Cambridge. From 2006 to 2020, you wrote this column will change your life at the Guardian. I think over 500 columns.
You published two books over 10 years ago, 2011, a book called Help, How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done. 2012, The Antidote, Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking. Then nine years later, 2021, 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals.
And 2024 now, Meditations for Mortals. And so you're prolific. You've obviously been writing through your university career, but also writing as, for one of the most prominent newspapers in the entire world, four books.
And so I thought we would take your obsession with other people's writing routines, I would actually borrow specific questions from this book, and then I'll turn them onto you as if you were included in the book, but I'll tell you who the questions are from, and I'll ask them of you now, so you might illuminate and help us all become better writers. Does that work for you?
Oliver:
I will happily try, yeah.
Neil:
Okay, so John Krakauer, who you mentioned, author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, has an incredibly juicy interview from page 154 to 182 in this book, kind of gives you the idea of how long these interviews are. So I'm going to give you the five questions I pulled out from his interview. Number one, what kind of ideas are you drawn to?
Oliver:
I think that I am drawn to stories that sort of capture the excitement of ideas, the excitement of figuring out how the world works and the personalities behind those, but I think I'd also have to be very honest, certainly in my recent writing, I have to say that I'm also very much drawn to ideas that I think might kind of help me directly, personally, internally, you know, live a less anxious, more focused, more fulfilling, and sort of richly relational life. It's funny that we've got to this point in the conversation and not really talked about the fact that on some level it's self-help, right? I don't have a great objection to that label, at least not anymore, and so I'm drawn to the ideas I think might help me.
Neil:
Yeah, okay. So then the next question he was asked is what kind of research do you do?
Oliver:
Yeah, and this is where I diverge from a lot of the people in this book, and probably John Krakauer too, and you read some of them and they're like, well, first of all, I spent two years just walking around, like, you know, I think Ted Conover's in this book, and he spent like a year and a half riding the railways as a hobo in America before he even thought about putting pen to paper. And of course, the absolute classic of this, he's not in this book, but the absolute classic case here is Robert Caro, who's monumental and brilliant multipart biography of Lyndon Johnson initially just entailed moving to the area where Lyndon Johnson grew up as a boy and kind of not even trying to write for some time as I recall, just sort of living that extraordinary level of fidelity to your subject, and I'm not quite sure how the economics of that would work out these days.
Neil:
That's The Power Broker, which was mentioned on our show in Chapter 63.
Oliver:
No, The Power Broker is about Robert Moses. Yeah, right.
Neil:
Oh, it's not Power Broker.
Oliver:
And then the rest, I forget what the sort of umbrella name for the multi-volume, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, I think it's called. There's been three of them and there's one still to come.
Neil:
Oh, no way.
Oliver:
Anyway, no, I am much more of a...
Neil:
So what kind of research do you do?
Oliver:
I'm much more of a person who is just sort of researching and living and writing all of a piece. So, you know, I'll certainly read a lot of relevant books and I'll certainly track down a lot of relevant pieces of interviews. I'll go and interview people about the ideas that I'm writing about and I'll go on sort of reporting trips and spend a few days somewhere trying to sort of be able to tell a story about my engagement with that place or that idea.
But I will also just absolutely use stuff that happened to me anyway that wasn't part of a... that wasn't part of a planned sort of reporting trip. And I also feel like there's a much shorter term...
like sometimes I'm writing about something that I first thought about or first read about or first discovered, dug out some information about like hours previously. It might not be. It might be things that have been simmering on some level in my mind for years.
So I'm very sort of eclectic. This is what I think part of what sort of British journalism experience means to me. It's the ability to sort of go out very quickly and find like a huge variety of little morsels that you can build into something.
So I'm... you know, people sometimes remark in reviews and stuff on how like I can... I'll include like quotes from an ancient Greek philosopher and quotes from an interview in a magazine with Danielle Steele as if this is kind of a surprising kind of juxtaposition.
But I'm just like a magpie, really. I'm just sort of going out and sort of vacuuming it all up. Magpies don't vacuum things up, you know what I mean.
Neil:
Well, Seth Godin, our guest in Chapter 3, once described himself as a whale sifting around the ocean soaking up plankton. So we'll use that metaphor if you like it. How would you define your reportorial stance?
Oliver:
That's a great question for some of these writers. I'm trying to think about what my answer to that is. I mean, this is where it begins to stretch a point to call what I do reporting, right?
Neil:
You're definitely... I've read so many of your columns that you're always like exploring like a productivity tool, a hack, a suggestion, the parado principle. But I think...
Oliver:
Yeah, no, totally. Okay, I see that. I guess what reporting connotes to me in some sense is that you sort of go to a place and you talk to a lot of people and the question is are you on their side?
Are you deeply sceptical that they're trying to mislead you? Are you there with a thesis you have to prove? You know, there's all sorts of different...
that sort of classic kind of reported journalism. But yeah, I suppose my stance is that I am deeply invested because I'm not going to be pursuing an idea unless I think it's something that could make a big difference to me as well as to the reader. I think I definitely have a sort of knee-jerk tendency towards being charitable, right?
It's more interesting to me if I do end up interviewing somebody who I don't like on some level to try to figure out what makes them tick from their point of view, the kind of thing that Robert Wright, who we mentioned earlier, calls cognitive empathy, not necessarily feeling their pain, but trying to understand why they could have ended up being the person that they are. You know, I think it would be a fair thing to say about my books that I am often in the business of trying to establish a thesis. So, you know, in the context of the new book, if there are a lot of people out there who really want to make the case that perfectionism is an extremely good and motivating and wonderful value to live your life by, then, you know, I'm not going to be spending an awful lot of time with them.
I think it's good to pressure test your ideas a bit, but, you know, when it comes to your basic thesis, you know, in the same way that if you felt that human happiness was completely impossible and beyond reach, I think you might have approached some of your inquiries into it in a different way as well. Yeah. You know, so it's definitely sort of, there's no attempted objectivity.
Neil:
No, I like that.
Oliver:
I hope I'm being accurate when I'm talking about the actual side of things.
Neil:
I like all these words you mentioned. Invested, charitable, thesis establishing, subjective. Yeah, these are great.
So these are all informing your reportorial stance. And then the last question I'll ask you from John Krakauer and then we'll jump over to some questions that he asked Michael Lewis. But the last question for Krakauer is, what kind of notebooks do you use?
Oliver:
My sort of main work writing doesn't unfold in notebooks. So, I use the I use the digital equivalent and just recently I've I've really started using Scrivener properly. I'm sure there'll be many people listening who Yeah, that's what I use as well.
are much more familiar with it than me. But I've whether it's because of its newest iteration or my attempts to find something somehow cooler having all failed, I don't know. But I'm there.
And then I do write, you know, in a journal I would always write in a how is this word pronounced? Leuchtturm? Leuchtturm?
Neil:
Oh, yeah.
It's like the competitor to Moleskine.
Oliver:
It is. I'm on the I'm on the Leuchtturm side of that.
Neil:
So you've got the Leuchtturms with you, kind of like pocket size. I'm assuming you're carrying them with you to jot stuff down if things come across your mind. But you've got Scrivener as
Oliver:
If we're really going into the weeds here, jotting things down I do on scraps and on index cards because something weird in my still recovering perfectionist psyche doesn't like just jotting things down in a very nice notebook. The ones I'm talking about are A5 and I use them I write sort of morning pages type stuff in them almost every day for several pages. And then if I'm not always first thing in the morning but it's for journaling really.
Neil:
So when you say this is a lot here sorry I know I know I know we might just pause here for a second. So when you say you write morning pages do you mean like in the Artist's Life by Julia Cameron that idea of sort of like expulsing from your body you know whatever kind of crap is in your mind and your brain and just sort of getting your writing muscles working like that type of morning pages or am I interpreting that wrong?
Oliver:
Well I mean certainly the phrase comes from Julia Cameron I'm trying to remember whether that that sort of um you gave a very sort of expulsive definition of Yeah I thought it was meant to like just get stuff out of your head that nobody ever sees that you're just like kind of getting your kind of like stretching before you do a workout or play sports that type of stuff. Maybe that is right about what she what she means by I don't know to me it's more it is about getting my head straight for the day but it's but it's but it's and it's not that I go back and refer to them and use the material but it's more constructive than you made it sound I think it's more in my case it's more sort of I'm you know honestly it's sort of therapy type writing right? It's like me writing about my how I'm feeling and what I'm how I'm planning to do things and what's going on and it's not it's not a diary in the sense of recording all the main events of that take place but it also isn't just a sort of cleaning out the cobwebs thing it's also not really creative writing in the sense that I'm not trying to phrase things that I would then write about later that day or anything it's just sort of I don't know it's what I think journaling means but maybe that's true
Neil:
How many years have you been doing that?
And do you keep all your old journals? Do you have them like on a bookshelf somewhere?
Oliver:
That is the one thing that I've really been doing consistently for a very long time I mean there are interruptions and I'm you know even when there are even when I'm in a period of really doing it it's not going to be every single day but I must have been doing that since since my early 20s
Neil:
Wow that's amazing That's great so you have this as a great deeply ingrained kind of multi-decade habit now I'm assuming you've got like shelves of journals somewhere
Oliver:
I have although you know half of them are in our basement in Brooklyn and some of those are on legal pads and probably too damp to see anymore and you know there's a little it's I'm not I'm not lovingly curating them for the Library of Congress but
Neil:
Yeah yeah yeah I know but it's also helpful for yourself though I mean for yourself for your own personal like when I pick up an old journal I've only been doing it really for about 10 years myself and the problem for me is that I turn to journaling as a practice when I'm usually in a negative state of mind so when I flip through my own journals it sounds like someone who's kind of dour and negative all the time even though that's just when I turn to the practice you know what I mean like if I'm in a good mood I kind of just jump out of bed you know what I mean or or I turn I turn in I tuck in for the night I don't need to like write it out for three pages right so there's a bias in my journals
Oliver:
no I mean to some extent that's sorry go
Neil:
no no no just that's my own perspective but I still love looking at the old ones because I'm like oh man I got through that you know or I can't believe I was all bogged down worrying about that I was worried about making revenue in 2020 or whatever it was when the that was an unnecessary worry like you know what I mean like it's just you get that kind of feeling a lot you know what I mean
Oliver:
yeah no absolutely I mean I don't go back and refer to them like it sounds that you do I have done it but it's not really part of it but yeah I think there's a real just you know putting it onto the page is an act of sort of disidentification and then yeah even within the spate of even within a week you know a lot of the things that it sort of calls to mind and makes you conscious of how swiftly one problem is replaced by the next that is actually quite that is quite freeing and then yes the other thing I have done occasionally the reason I don't go back and look at them too much is that if I pick a journal from five years ago it's a little alarming sometimes how how I just go back round and round over the same the same issue but I don't think I don't think that that I genuinely and sincerely don't think that that is because I am sort of frozen in place I think it's like it really charts the very slow drip drip drip process that that real change and growth actually actually is
Neil:
right right which is why the design and structure of your new book is so wonderful how it's 28 essays meant to be read kind of one a day for four weeks I think that's just a lovely kind of it just really nicely paces the feeling of the writing and also doesn't encourage people to kind of read too much too fast or feel overwhelming now I want to give you some questions from Michael Lu oh wait one last question on the lectern sorry to bog you down here whenever I buy a lectern or a moleskin I have the option of grid lined or blank which of those three do you choose and why
Oliver:
they have dotted as well now don't they yes they do
Neil:
have dotted that's right
Oliver:
lined I'm a lined.
Neil:
okay that's funny that's what I do too grid is too overwhelming and blank is too under like it's like I'm all over the place okay there's a boxer brief metaphor in there somewhere okay so Michael Lewis I want to ask you a few questions you kind of called and I agree like you know he wrote liar's poker he wrote moneyball he wrote the big short there's a 22 page interview in this book from 248 to 270 so here are some of the questions I pulled from Boynton asking Lewis that I thought we could ask Berkman so do you prefer writing books or articles
Oliver:
I think I prefer writing books but the way that I approach them is as partly as sequences of articles that then need to be sort of molded into a coherent whole yeah I think ultimately I'm sort of proudest of books and there's a chance it feels like there's a chance to really sort of burnish and polish a book that there often isn't with an article
Neil:
oh that's nice chance to burnish and polish with a book that there isn't an article like that how many projects do you work on simultaneously
Oliver:
if we're talking about writing projects yes then it's and then it gets very quite weird what is simultaneous is it like they're on my plate at the same time or I work on them within the space of the same day I mean I'm always I'm always writing my newsletter right every week or two or right now week or three but never mind and then there's been a book for in the recent times and there'll be another one of those and then I might also have a article here or there so I guess it's two to three is the answer to that question okay that's great I think it's good to have more than one so you can sort of you know keep the variety up when you need to
Neil:
yeah right what is in front of you when you begin to write
Oliver:
um
Neil:
so we want like a visual image
Oliver:
right yeah I mean if we're talking about beginning to write as in begin to write things that actually look like something like the sentences that will be uh in the finished thing as opposed to capaciously defining writing so that it involves all the stages of the process then by the time I'm sitting down to try to write a section of something I have various pages of notes of sort of firstly of just sort of brain dump notes and then secondly of research notes depending on what it is printed out around my laptop because being printing them out seems to really help and then I will for that um that little section have some weird little geeky diagram that I have drawn while probably on a walk up the hill between behind our house um which will consist of sort of little boxes each being one sort of block of the probably for a small thing it would be like each paragraph but for a bigger thing it might be larger chunks I think in diagrams a lot when people say are you a visual or a verbal thinker I'm like I'm kind of a diagram thinker um and so I'll have that in front of me and that will be the little almost you know literally map um and then
Neil:
Are those boxes labelled?
Oliver:
Yeah or they might have the trace of the beginning of a sentence or something right it's just I think of it as like blocking the thing it's not a detailed outline it certainly doesn't have I have never been able to handle some of the writers in that book have definitely the kind of people who like outline every single detail
Neil:
it's full of cue cards on all the walls and so on
Oliver:
right right right
Neil:
but I'm still curious about this process I haven't heard this before I find it really interesting so you'll block out with images the rough structural outline of the piece you're about to write and in those boxes you're writing the beginnings of sentences or themes so it's providing a little bit of a route map of the article or chapter is that right?
Oliver:
Yes I mean images is pushing it these are just like I just you know it's a diagram in the sense that it is words inside squares or rectangles or with arrows connecting one to the next or something as opposed to anything else but I do at some point usually while walking kind of see the progression that an idea needs to make it feels quite sort of magical in the moment that it happens although it may well be that it's on some level quite formulaic right? I think if you're writing an email newsletter or you're writing a short section of a book very often there's a sort of journalistic formula that will emerge where you sort of have a vivid introduction a nut graph where you establish the point of reading the section a couple of paragraphs where you unpack the main idea and then a couple more paragraphs where you kind of take the idea into some unexpected places so it's not necessarily anything that special once I've gone through it but going through it feels quite important and yeah I will have that little one side of paper probably folded 100 times from walking around with it or whatever and that will be the guide I might you know it often doesn't work out that way because it turns out that something I thought would be one paragraph needs three paragraphs to be unpacked but it gives me just enough like security that I know what the hell I'm doing
Neil:
well yeah this sounds really fascinating to me but also when you say you fold in like say the epic t-disc quote or the daniel steel quote are those coming in like are those like coming just from your mind while you're writing or are you using any kind of like additional classic you know the note card system that Ryan Holiday is often talking about which I think is from Benjamin Franklin or somebody like that
Oliver:
yeah so the answer to that is that some of them some of them really do just come from my my head I've collected them in my mind some of them will have come from research that I've done just before you know that day or earlier and then some of them come from my what passes for my version of what gets called a second brain right which I think is part of what you're referring to yes I've gone through a long set of iterations of this there's a there's an approach I'm sure you're aware of called the Zettelkasten which is a kind of densely cross-referenced system of of of sort of permanent notes that you keep and that you add to. And Ryan Holiday's index card system is somewhat similar to this.
I have, after all of these processes come back down to one very big file where I add snippets of things and I try to give a bit of time, you know, for half an hour, several times a week to just sort of, you know, nurturing that garden and and sort of adding bits to it from scraps of notes that I've taken or from books I'm reading and have piled on my desk. So I try to have a conscious process where I'm, where I'm adding a little bit regularly to that big file, but it is like a word document on your desktop kind of thing. I mean, currently it is two fairly disordered folders in Scrivener.
So that's the thing. And a box of printouts from an earlier version of it. So, you know, it's a huge mess.
But one thing I'm pretty confident about is that some degree of huge mess is actually essential for me. There is a, I mean, I'm not saying I'm not condemning people who are more sort of organised in their systems. But for me, I have discovered that, and this does speak to some of the themes of Meditations for Mortals, actually, I have discovered that the mess, leaving them messy is what is what keeps them juicy, really.
And I agree also with Cal Newport, who's, who's written very, spoken very interestingly on this, that there's a strange idea around that, that if you have the right kind of note taking system and the right kind of second brain, then the books will almost write themselves, that'll just sort of pop out the other end. And I think that for me has also been a very, that's that doesn't work. This is, this is, these are ingredients.
So if I have a big, if I have a several big files with a lot of disorder in them, that's fine, because the process of going through that disordered file, seeing what pops out, pasting it into a different file, you know, that's all, that's the process. So I don't really want to eliminate that.
Neil:
I love that. I feel like that's a following the energy type of system. I love the way you described it.
And one degree of huge mess is actually essential to me. Cal Newport was our guest in Chapter 135. And I also want to point people to your wonderful conversation with him in Washington, DC, which came out this morning, and I listened to this morning before talking to you, which is
Oliver:
I didn't even know it was out!
Neil:
It's out today. Yeah, it's out today. I listened to it already. Yeah, it's, it's a great, it's a great chat.
I mean, I didn't get through all of it yet. But I like it was my bike ride. Listen, and just to play back to a couple things on this, if it's interesting or helpful.
I asked James Clear once how he came up with the two quotes he uses every Thursday and his 321 email newsletter, which goes out to like, something absurd, like 3 million people. And he said, very similar to you, I keep one, I think it's a WordDoc or like an iPhone note of every interesting quote, I come across, I throw everything in there. And every week, what I do is read through that entire file, and just keep cutting and pasting the ones I like the most and putting them at the top.
So that therefore, what you're really getting are like the top two quotes from my like, gigantic document each week, which I thought was a kind of a neat visual. And then for me, you know, I've been writing awesome things now one a day for 14 years. I keep an awesome things iPhone note, because the iPhone note connects from my computers to my phone and anything.
I collect them also on scrap pieces of paper like you, but then there's a pile of scrap pieces of paper on my, my white cabinet, then I put them into the iPhone note. And then I want to have another batch due I go through Simr sort, and then from there kind of curate. So very similar.
But But yeah, I thought that I'd play those back to you for interest.
Oliver:
No, absolutely. It's funny, isn't it? It's like, it's like, and it's fascinating to me also that you can systematise too much.
I mean, I know James Clear is obviously, you know, he's very much associated with the idea of the benefits of systems and, and, and that is a system. But you can, you can definitely be led into the misunderstanding of thinking that rigidity is your friend, that there's a way of doing I think the sort of appeal that a lot of these very rigorous approaches have is it's the same as any kind of productivity technique or life rule, right? We want something that will do the living or the thinking or the writing for us.
And that there isn't such a thing. And it's, and so these systems that seem to work are the systems that like, offer up the best terrain on which to then do some work, but you do have to do some work.
Neil:
And the key part about all of this, I say this to my kids is like the difference between writers and everybody else's writers, write it down. Like my parents, my kids will say to me like, dad, I thought of an awesome thing. When you think it's going to be really hard.
And so I'm like, great, write it down. And then I'm like, well, just the writing down of it is the, it's the thing that 99% of people skip. You know what I mean?
Like that's the easy to skip or just pause and write it down. Because otherwise it's gone forever. Like I've determined this so many times, like how many good ideas have you had?
You're like, Oh, I know I had a good one, but it's just gone now.
Oliver:
You know, I feel like I got to add one more thing about eccentric writing techniques. Just what, just since you seem similarly up for talking about them as I, which is that, that sometimes during that process of collecting ideas, but, but more so in the final sort of writing of something, a thing that I have always done and continue to do. And that strikes people as odd, I think sometimes is to print out what I've written and then type it back in to a blank file.
And I have found that editing in this way, rather than futzing around just on the screen, it seems to me to, to lead to all sorts of improvements in the writing almost without my trying, right? Because I sort of, I start from the beginning again, I get some momentum and it just seems to be natural to make something a little bit better or to cut something out or to unpack something in more detail. So, it's probably rather old fashioned of me at this point, but I'm always like, you know, if I ever travel somewhere and I'm planning to write for a few days, like, or I'm on a business trip and I hope to get some writing done in the hotel or something like that.
I'm always like, okay, I got somewhere I can print things off.
Neil:
Yeah, I think that's really smart. And for the first couple of years, I was doing my birthday advice, which I also borrowed from Kevin Kelly, who you mentioned earlier. A thousand true fans.
And by the way, for people, we have this group called the cover to cover club listens to every chapter of the show. He was our guest in chapter 110. But the first few years I was writing that I had to transcribe them into Twitter and Twitter still had like a capacity limit.
And I found that was super helpful because then I was like, oh, I can shorten this one. And then I was always feeling bad about my, you know, kind of thing I'd posted on my blog, which was longer, but yeah, that's writing it out. I mean, Dave Sedaris says he writes out great phrases.
A lot of writers do this from other books. I asked him, does it work? And he said, no, but, but, but no, it doesn't work.
But, but that writing, doing it yourself is great. The other thing just, just to throw in a little bit for writers is reading it out, you know, the reading it out loud part. I don't know if you did the audio book yourself for Meditations for Mortals, but I'm guessing if you did, you found that when you read it out loud, there was shit you wanted to change then.
Oliver:
Yeah, I mean, I, I'm not as, yes, I did record it myself. I'm not as disciplined as I should be about reading out what I write before I submit it or before, before the final proofs go in. I yeah, no.
So I wish I did more of that. I think it's a really good skill. I don't think I encountered too much in the recent version in the recent book where I'm like, sort of, oh, I should have phrased that differently.
But there were definitely a couple along with like names of writers and philosophers that I have never had to pronounce out loud.
Neil:
Oh, yeah, that's always fun and embarrassing. Well, we could go keep going down this rabbit hole. But you know, this is a really wonderful book, The New New Journalism.
And perhaps part of the reason that you don't find you have to change a lot when you read your stuff out loud is because very similar to James Hollis, you have a very poetic literary style. And so I wanted to save a chunk of time to talk about this third and foremost formative book, which I believe you have the most to share. You told me in advance and I found this book.
Wow, like this is a this is like a punch in the face this book for me. And it is indeed finding meaning in the second half of life by James Hollis comma PhD on the cover in a red ribbon. There's nothing else on the cover except a picture of a butterfly and the in red sub headline how to finally comma really italicized grow up across the top Lisa my version is a blurb from the plane dealer from Cleveland.
That's a that's a newspaper you don't hear about anymore. That says nourishing like a master chef James Hollis knows that good food for the soul cannot be ordered to go. Well, what is this a book about?
Well, what does it really mean to be a grown up in today's world? We assume that once we quote, get it together with the right job, marry the right person have children and buy a home all is settled and well, but adulthood presents a varying levels of growth and is rarely the respite of stability we expected. Turbulent emotional shifts can take place anywhere between the age of 35 and 70.
When we question the choices we've made realize our limitations and feel stuck, commonly known as the midlife crisis. Union psychoanalyst James Hollis believes it is only in the second half of life that we can truly come to know who we are and thus create a life that has meaning James Hollis is 84 years old today, born in 1940 in Springfield, Illinois. He is as mentioned a young and psycho analyst, author and public speaker, formerly of Houston and now based in Washington, DC.
While this wonder 155 we're back in the middle here now point six six for philosophy and psychology slash psychology slash developmental and differential psychology slash adult slash midlife. Oliver, tell us about your relationship with finding meaning in the second half of life by James Hollis.
Oliver:
This book was Yeah, I mean, it, it really marked a threshold or turning point or something in my life. And in my sort of psychological life, I guess. It's one of those rare books, even though I'm a big fan of ebooks, really, it's one of those rare books where I needed to make a second purchase after encountering it in electronic form first, so that I had it in them in physical form.
And I nominated it because it was the first of James Hollis's books that I encountered. But really, this is an entry for all of James Hollis's books. And you know, there is definitely something about his writing, which is about returning to the same ideas again and again and again, and it's no bad thing.
This was my introduction to the whole kind of way of thinking that I have Jungian thought, you know, work associated with Carl Jung, and just a real sort of deepening, I suppose, in my understanding of myself, etc, etc. So how can I put some flesh on those bones? I mean, I think the thing about the second half of life is a good place to start, because I have wondered whether this was an unwise title for the book, because it sort of requires you to accept the possibility that you might be in the second half of your life and there's a slice of the readership who are going to rail against that idea.
But firstly, it's not chronological, as what you read suggests, right? This can be something that people in their early 30s start to reckon with and one hopes for them that they're not in the second half of their life yet, sure. Secondly, maybe it self selects people who are willing to sort of deal with the knock to their pride that is implicit in that title.
And it's really a book for people, I think, who are beginning to find that ways of living and working and relating that did serve them perfectly well, you know, and maybe very well, in young adulthood are beginning to seem like played out, are beginning to not carry on working. There are a number of books, most recently, I think David Brooks's book, The Second Mountain, that sort of play to this same thought that there are sort of meaningfully two stages, at least to adulthood, the stage where you're sort of driving forwards and building and trying to establish yourself as somebody who's independent of your parental family of origin and all the rest of it. And then there's the stage where you're like, well, okay, now what?
And there's just, I don't know, I'm struggling to talk about it just because I think the Jungian perspective and Hollis' writing, especially is just so rich and multifaceted that you don't really know, one doesn't really know where to begin. But I suppose one big part of that attitude towards psychology is the idea that symptoms, things like depression, things like anxiety, things like feelings of meaninglessness are not things to be got rid of by the quickest technique or medication that you can come up with, but messengers from the unconscious that there is some aspect of your whole self that is not getting its opportunity to be felt and to live.
So that's a good place maybe to try to sum it up.
Neil:
No, that's a great setup. And it was a hard book. I was kind of expecting it to be a little lighter.
The font is small, the pages have very small margins. And I was like, this is going to take effort to kind of read this. You wrote in a 2015 column for The Guardian, you had a title, Misery, Failure, Death and a Slap in the Face.
Great Advice for Life from James Hollis. I thought I might just ask you why Misery, Failure and Death would be Great Advice for Life?
Oliver:
Well, in some ways, James Hollis' writing and Jungian perspectives in general and then my own thought have sort of become so entangled that I don't know who to attribute what to. But he was definitely the sort of doorway into a lot of this for me. And I would say that there is this focus on human limitation and finitude on the idea that we spend a lot of our lives trying to sort of escape experiences like misery and failure, probably ultimately because we're trying to escape the fact of our mortality.
And that there is a much sort of deeper and more capacious way of being that comes from opening up to them and asking what they have to tell you about how you're living. Jungian psychology is characterised much more, I think, than the sort of classic Freudian stuff that it originally grew out of by a focus on sort of constant growth on things going somewhere. It's not just about if we unpick your childhood issues, maybe you can be delivered from neurotic misery to ordinary unhappiness.
I do like that quote a lot. It's wonderfully downbeat. But I think there's something a little bit more optimistic in Jungian, that there is some kind of unfurling of your innermost self that is something that is with us throughout our lives, and that you can keep growing and keep getting deeper and keep doing that.
But that it might require midlife some fairly significant changes in direction. Yeah.
Neil:
Well, let's rappel one level deeper. I'm going to give you some actual bits from the book here. Actually, let's go back to your Guardian article in 2015 for a second, because you said in that article, Hollis does not reveal the meaning of life, but, to use your phrase, quote, he does drop hints.
At any major juncture in life, Hollis argues we should ask, does this path, this choice make me larger or smaller? I thought I would just ask you to give us your interpretation of what that question means for you and how you might use it in your life. Does this path, this choice make me larger or smaller?
Oliver:
This has been huge for me, and I have sort of written about it. And even though I have always attributed it to James Hollis, I now see things floating around on social media sometimes suggesting that I came up with it. This is a great kind of question that sort of, there's something about it that connects me to my intuitive, felt sense of what is the meaningful and enriching and generous to other people direction to move in, in a way that the question, will this make me happy or not, or will this help me reach my goals or not, just can't do, because we're very bad at predicting, as all the research shows, we're bad at predicting what's going to make us feel happy. And even beyond that, we all have these experiences of times in life when we were not happy, because what was happening was not enjoyable, but we did know and feel deeply that we were in the right place. I think people often get this experience, if you've ever had the experience of sort of, not of a terrible crisis or tragedy happening to yourself, that's a slightly different thing, but of helping a friend through something like that.
Maybe you're just doing their dry cleaning or fetching a takeout. It's not necessarily that you're the person who is guiding them with great wisdom and emotional intelligence through a very dark period. You might be doing errands, but there's something about that which is just, oh yeah, this is actually why I was put on the planet for these hours anyway.
And that sort of enlarging versus diminishing thing can help in that respect. It also helps a lot, I think, in trying to disentangle good difficulty from bad difficulty. By which I mean, there are kinds of negative experience that you encounter in, say, a relationship, although it could also be in a job or place that you live, which are really red flags to get out of that thing.
But there are also kinds of difficulty which just are the very substance of growing into that thing, right? There are difficulties and ways of dealing with your own triggeredness that are just fundamental to getting better at being married, right? Just as there are things that your partner could do, which you should take as an urgent warning sign that you shouldn't be in that relationship.
Does this enlarge me or diminish me as a way to get to that? Because you can usually tell, oh yes, this is bad, this is hard, but it's enlarging me. I always think, just to finish that thought, one example in my life that always surprises me is I've had, I don't particularly need to go into detail, I don't mind doing, but I've had two moments in my adulthood where I faced exactly the same question, which was, should I leave the United States of America and go back to living in the United Kingdom?
One time in my life situation, it would have been diminishing. It would have been running away from things that needed to be faced to do that. Then the second time, even though quite a lot of me resisted doing it and couldn't quite bring myself to get around to doing it and relied on my wife being more proactive about these things, it was the enlarging choice.
It's just interesting to me because it's the exact same movement, but with a completely different answer to that question.
Neil:
Right, which is why the question can be so helpfully guiding. Our guest in chapter 66, Vivek Murthy, who is now the Surgeon General of the US, but he wasn't at the time of the interview. At the time of the interview, he was between stints.
He said that he is guided by the question, is this driven by love or fear? He uses that as a kind of moral compass.
Oliver:
Yeah, that's another closely related. Yeah, absolutely.
Neil:
Okay, now let's go into ego. Hollis calls the ego a thin wafer of consciousness floating on an iridescent ocean called the soul. The quote continues by saying, the vast forces of the unconscious, the psyche or the gods, you say when Hollis is feeling more lyrical, have their own plans for us.
So, you know, I'd love to talk about this a bit more. Jonathan Haidt, who I'm sure you know, he's most recently written The Anxious Generation. But in a previous book, he has that metaphor called the elephant and the rider, where he says, you know, our mind is what we perceive to be the rider on the elephant, but the actual vast animal below us is almost imperceptible to us.
If that is true, and it sounds like many people agree, how do we seek to be more aware of our soul, of our unconscious, of the elephant under the rider we are aware of? And do you do any, do you take personally any actions or practices to try to uncover and kind of work the subconscious part of your mind more?
Oliver:
Well, I think, you know, in the Jungian perspective on things, I'm not a qualified professional at all, I should be careful, but in my understanding of it
Neil:
Much more than me and most of us.So we'll take it, we'll take what you offer us.
Oliver:
The whole game is, is bringing things into consciousness, right? The whole act of growth is seeing more and more of yourself. And that's what, there's a big, this is what sort of shadow work is.
It's suddenly, it seems extremely fashionable on social media, YouTube and places to talk about shadow work.
Neil:
There's a big popular journal, right? The shadow journal or something.
Oliver:
Right. I think so. Yeah.
But that's always been a part of it, that the shadow being the parts of us that are sort of not just not just sort of slide out of consciousness, but are kind of actively kept down in the unconscious because they feel difficult or anxiety inducing to face. I think anything that creates a sort of space in your life for letting those, any sort of frame that lets those things bubble up and be looked at that they will sort of, you know, getting a little bit supernatural, but it's almost like they will, these things will poke their noses out into the light of consciousness once they feel that they can do so. So the journaling that I spoke about, I think is absolutely a form of that.
And therapy itself is the obviously the most obvious case of that. Good therapy is all about and I've got, you know, quite a bit of experience of that.
Neil:
Me too.
Oliver:
And, and then, and just reading, right? I mean, on some level, you read a book by James Hollis, and it triggers certain things in you and you don't shy away from them, partly because he's got such a gentle and humorous and, and, and friendly and warm tone that you don't feel you have to and then it's surfaced a little bit.
Neil:
Yeah, yeah. So this is great. So it's like, paying attention to what you're journaling about, you know, seeing what you're talking about in therapy, my therapist often says to me, like, if we have nothing to talk about, which doesn't happen very often, but if we do, he says, Okay, let's go to your dreams, then what have you been dreaming about lately?
Like, he'll kind of kick that off, which is kind of a famous way to get into some of the things, right?
Oliver:
Yeah, Jungians are very, very much into the dream analysis. And I would also say that, you know, if it's, if another another great resource here is a spectacularly good podcast called This Jungian Life, which is presented by three Jungian analysts. And I did, full disclosure, did go on an episode of that podcast.
But usually, it's not interviews. Usually it's the three of them talking about some issue, and then they analyze a listener's dream at the end. And it's like, oh, that's great.
The dream analysis is fascinating to me, because it's so, you know, I'm primed to think, come on, dreams are just random neural noise. What good can come of treating them like they carry deep meanings? And while your average Jungian therapist will, I think, say they really do carry deep meanings, that's why we dream.
There's a sort of middle position here you can take, which is like, kind of who cares? If you treat them as if they do, you will surface important things from your unconscious, even if they were random all along, you know what I mean?
Neil:
Exactly. It's even like, what do you pay attention to from your dreams? What do you remember from them?
Like, that's telling you something about your conscious mind.
Oliver:
Right, right, right. If something gives you goosebumps, it gives you goosebumps, even if it was created by a random image generator. Yeah.
Neil:
Right. That's an interesting observation. Okay, a couple quick things here.
When I talked to Jonathan Haidt about this, by the way, Elephant and the Rider, a big part for him was LSD. So he talks openly about how when he was doing his PhD, I believe in Virginia, you know, there's he said has the date and like firmly, I think it's like June 6 1992, like the day before the day after, I decided not to be angry again. So I was just curious with the amount of work and research you've done, if you have a perspective on psychedelic therapies at all, as we continue to uncover kind of the depths of our soul here, do you have a current view or experience that you want to talk about in any way?
And if not, no problem?
Oliver:
No, I don't. I don't have the experience. I kind of, it's not because I think I think I'd quite like to have that experience.
That might be my next project. But I've, I'm definitely sort of, you know, a bit cowardly about such things.
Neil:
But yeah, I think there are definitely ways right now, it just seems like it's out of nowhere, you know, Michael Pollan's book, how to change your mind, which I think was about four years ago, then the Netflix special of it. And Canada, where I live, you know, cannabis has become legal five years ago. And now psilocybin is a appears to be on the precipice of legality here with kind of micro dosing.
This is all coming fast at us. I want to Yeah, no, absolutely.
Oliver:
I mean, my, my, no, in terms of in terms of the psychedelic side of this, my experience is, is, is, is not there. And I know that there are people who sometimes contact me as if that basically invalidates everything, because it's like, yeah, you're struggling to I get a certain kind of email from people who sort of imply in a slightly patronizing way that I'm struggling towards insights that can be obtained much more swiftly by other means. But then I also am aware from reading and talking with people that that's not, that's not the whole story.
It's not It isn't a sort of total alternative
Neil:
Quick fixes are rarely quick nor fixing in general.
Oliver:
Right?
Neil:
Right.
So that's something I'm butchering a quote, but there's something like that. Okay. There's a couple more sentences from Hollis.
I'm wondering if we want to just reflect on them. Yeah, I think I might just I know you're a father, and I cannot remember the age of your child, or if I know and that's okay. But I just want to read you this therapeutic line that I sent after reading it from this book.
I've now emailed it to my wife, we've printed it out. And we've stuck this on the wall of our kitchen. Okay.
Like, since, since you tipped me off to this book's existing, I'm just going to read it to you. I love your perspective on it. He says, what would it's about family?
What would happen to our lives? Our way? No, it's not.
You know, this, if the parent again
Oliver:
I love it. Yeah, sorry.
Neil:
I won't. Okay, sorry to read it to that. You know it?
Oliver:
No, no, I love it. I want to hear it again. I'm looking forward to it.
Neil:
Okay. What would happen to our lives, our world if the parent could unconditionally affirm the child saying in so many words, colon, you are precious to us, you will always have our love and support. You are here to be who you are.
Try never to hurt another, but never stop trying to become yourself as fully as you can. When you fall and fail, you are still loved by us and welcomed to us. But you are also here to leave us and to go onward towards your own destiny without having to worry about pleasing us.
I mean, like, I want to say that to my kids every day. And I want my parents to say it to me, even though I'm 45. I don't have to please you.
You know, yeah.
Oliver:
I mean, I, I think it's so true. I think that anybody who's listening, who is thoughtful, and who also feels that it's true will also probably then immediately think, Oh, but I'm not doing it well enough. Right.
Or, you know, and there, I think it's aspirational in a way. Well, and there, I think it's really critical to, and reassuring to remember something that Jungians like to say as well, in my experience, which is that it's half the battle, maybe more than half the battle that you're thinking about these things, that you're working them through. It's not that you should be in a situation where you are not putting any of your issues onto your children.
It's that you should be seriously thinking about that idea and working it over in your own time and in your own space. There's a lovely quote from Jung, which is roughly that the greatest burden the child must bear is the unlived life of the parent.
Neil:
Oh, I have that pulled out here to talk to you about as well. That is so interesting.
Oliver:
Right. On some level, it's the same thing, right? It's so natural and easy to try to get what you want in your life from your kids.
And that sounds awful, but it could be something very simple, such as the reassurance that you're being a good person in the world or something. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to sort of push them into careers that they hate just to make you feel like you realised your ambitions by proxy or something. It can be very gentle and subtle.
It strikes me as almost impossible that I don't respond to our son, who's seven, in ways that convey my feeling that being good at writing and being in academics is more valuable than being good at sports or something. I don't want that to be the case. If his strengths are not the same or his passions are not the same, I want him to really deeply know that it makes zero difference to the sort of fullness of how much joy I take in him and his being.
But it's probably impossible for none of that to be true.
Neil:
Yeah, but it's certainly worth thinking about. And the quote I have from page 127 of the book is, and he ascribes it to Jung is, what usually has the strongest psychic effect on the child is the life which the parents dot dot dot have not lived. Yeah.
So yeah. Okay. Wow.
Okay. So we somehow, an hour and a half has flown by. And we're gonna wrap this all up.
This has been a delight, by the way. I could just listen to you forever. You're so, you know, it's funny when I talk to you, because I'm like, and I listened to a lot of podcasts with you before this interview, but I was like, you really do write like you talk like it just, it just sounds like complete, full, thoughtful paragraphs at all times.
I'm, I really...
Oliver:
It's a trick created by a British accent, I think.
Neil:
Oh, no, no, no, don't. No, you have a really big and vast and complex mind. And it's really beautiful to, to be able to interact with it like this.
I really appreciate it.
Oliver:
That's very kind and the feeling's mutual. I have been aware, traveling in the United States sometimes of being given an enormous, I know you're not in the United States, but of being given an enormous benefit of the doubt because of my because of something that I can neither help nor chose.
Neil:
Yeah, it does. Well, just the fast money. It's just the fast money round. Like, so basically, it's like, I'm gonna set a timer here for like one minute, because I know you want to kind of wrap things up here.
And I'm just going to go through a series of fast money round questions. Try to just give me whatever comes to mind first. They're all about books and writing.
Okay. Here we go. Hardcover, paperback, audio or e?
Oliver:
Paperback. You want to say why? Or am I just answering?
Neil:
No, say why if you want.
Oliver:
Oh, right.
Because I do ultimately prefer the physicality of paper. But I also want to be able to, like, stuff it in a pocket and write all over it. I feel inhibited with a hardback.
Neil:
Yeah, exactly. I understand that feeling. You feel like you're wrecking it.
What's the perfect background for you while you are writing? Whether that's music or noise or a view?
Oliver:
Oh, sound wise, there has to be silence probably. I write these days in a little sort of one room studio just not far from my house in the middle of the hills and beautiful village. It's silent, but I still put earplugs in my ears because I've become conditioned to the focus that I get from putting earplugs in my ears.
I used to have to, you know, to block out the traffic noises. I certainly don't anymore, but I still do. I love being in this rural environment.
I don't find beautiful views sort of distracting like some people sometimes do.
Neil:
I love the earplugs in a silent room. That's good. I'm going to try that.
See if my productivity shoots up. Okay, we'll find out. What time of the day do you like to write?
Oliver:
If I just ran my life, I would be writing from about six till 11am. I'm in a family, so it's much more likely to be something like nine to two. That is the focus point.
Neil:
Okay, great. Still a good chunk. That's great.
Oliver:
Oh, I didn't say I write without distraction for the whole period. No, no, no.
Neil:
I hear you. I hear you. I hear you.
Do you have a favorite children's book or a favorite book you have bought multiple times for a child?
Oliver:
Favorite book I bought multiple times for a child. I mean, I loved a whole bunch of almost the books you would expect as a child, you know, the various works of Roald Dahl. I remember reading the Just William books by Richmond Crompton, which were already many, many decades old by the time I read them. Okay, maybe that's more of an English thing.
Neil:
No, no, I want to grab it though.
Oliver:
They've got Ian and Blighton famous five-esque aspects to them.
Neil:
Yeah, okay, I know Ian and Blighton.
Oliver:
Yeah, I think that's probably the answer that I give. My son has been absolutely wrapped up in a series of unfortunate events, Lemony Snicket. From what I've read of them and from what I've seen of the TV show, that's brilliant.
I'm so happy he's into that.
Neil:
Oh, that's great. It's always the unlived life of the parent. You get so excited and proud of your kid for reading a book that you like, for sure.
Do you have a favorite bookstore, living or dead?
Oliver:
Bookstore?
Neil:
Yes.
Oliver:
When I'm in London, I'm a bit torn between multiple options. But I could mention there's a little bookstore called Watkins off Leicester Square in London, which is an esoteric bookstore where Alan Watts and all those kind of 1940s, 1950s English spiritualist types used to gather. It's very weird and eccentric, but I always find something fascinating on the shelves there.
In New York, when I'm visiting back again, which I know is an amazing, has such a plethora of wonderful, independent bookshops, though I don't want to insult, but I do I usually end up at the huge Barnes and Noble on Union Square.
Neil:
Well, that's becoming more... James Daunt, who's our guest right before you on the series, says that bookstores offer the serendipity of illogical choice, which seems to tie well in with your comment on Watkins and how Barnes and Noble is reinventing itself. So, okay.
Do you have a favorite library, by chance? Or is there a library that you really enjoy going into for any reason?
Oliver:
It's quite a while now since I've been into any sort of academic-type libraries or big, big sort of capital city libraries. I'm much more likely to be taking our son to the local library, which is great, but it's not what I think this question really...
Neil:
No, no. There's no book shame, no book guilt. I just, sometimes people say...
Oliver:
No, no, no. I mean, they're just, you know, they're small local libraries. There's a library buff that comes to his very rural school and they get to go on board and check out what's there.
Neil:
Oh, that's cool. That's neat.
Oliver:
Yeah. So, I mean, I have got some good writing done and found some fascinating stuff in like the... I somehow wangled my way into the Columbia University libraries while I was writing 4,000 weeks.
And that was...
Neil:
It comes through.
Oliver:
I had some pretty long corridors to wander down.
Yeah.
Neil:
What is your book lending policy?
Oliver:
Oh, I lend books. I sort of optimistically write my name in them to think that I might sort of back them down and keep them going. But I then make no effort whatsoever to get them back.
I want to be clear about that.
Neil:
That is so funny. I do the exact same thing. I optimistically write my name in them.
I love that phrase. How do you organise your books on your bookshelf? Like all the books you own, I mean, on your bookshelf?
Oliver:
Well, we're sort of, we're in house renovating at the moment. So they're in literally in teetering piles. But when they're not, I either...
we've tended to have a big shelf of sort of fiction in the house organised roughly alphabetically but everything else, pretty hodgepodge. I did go through a phase of doing it by spine colour, which I kind of... it looks very nice to have your books organised by...
Neil:
And are you familiar with the Japanese term, Tsundoku? T-S-U-N-D-O-K-U?
Oliver:
It's something to do with unread books, right?
Neil:
Well, it has to do with leaving teetering piles of books everywhere.
Oliver:
Oh, right.
Neil:
Yeah.
So you're not leaving teetering piles, you're practicing tsundoku.
Oliver:
Oh, brilliant. Yeah. At the workspace that I used in Brooklyn, I had one of those great bookshelves that looks like the books are all just stacked in a pile, but it's actually got a...
it's actually got little shelves behind it and a spine. So that was kind of...
Neil:
Very cool. Okay, last question on the whole bit. What is one hard fought piece of closing wisdom around writing that you would leave our global community of book lovers, writers, makers, sellers and librarians?
A bit of writing advice to close us off.
Oliver:
Yeah, I think the hardest one part of it for me really is that you as a sort of recovering perfectionist is that you really do have to be willing to kind of make a mess first and then clean it up as the process of getting your ideas out there. You have to be willing to write whether in a journal or in a first draft or however you work, you have to be able to write in a way that involves writing first and then maybe there'll be some good ideas in there rather than figure out a very good idea before you dare write anything. And that is a sort of constant struggle for me.
I'm still winning that knowledge. But I think it's really important.
Neil:
Ah, beautiful. That's a really, really wise way to put it. Oliver Burkeman, this has been a real pleasure. I am so grateful to have this come to life finally. And thank you so much, so much for coming on 3 Books.
Oliver:
I've really enjoyed it. Thank you.
Neil:
All right, everybody. It's just me, just me, a little fast reacher, hanging out in the basement with you. Formerly Oliver, but now it's just me, you and a couch or a chair or a dog you're walking or a flight you're taking or a truck you're driving.
I don't know where you are, but I'm where I am where you are. I don't know where you are, but I'm where you are with you. I'm hanging out.
As you can hear in my voice, I've got a bit of a cold. One of those colds that just kind of seems to go on and on and every day it's like a different version of the cough. So apologies for my voice in advance.
There's a lot of colds that jumped out to me from Mr. Oliver Burkeman. So many, so many. I think I'll choose six.
I usually choose three, but six is a nice multiple of three. This is a bit of a, this quote is a nod to the value I talked about, which is what I love at this stage is hearing from individual people who are making their way through. Because I said humans are the best algorithm.
And I said in chapter one of this podcast, you know, the way that we will measure success in the show is with letters, with the voice notes. It's with actual human feedback. It's not with downloads and ratings, although those are nice.
And those are helpful. I want the actual letters that get in the mail to mean something more. And if you want to be part of a letters in the mail club, you know what to do.
Call the phone number 1-833-READ-A-LOT. We would love to hear your voice notes. Tell us, tell us about a formative book, a dream guest, where you are, something that a conversation jogged for you or made you think about.
It's wonderful to hear from you. Okay, you've got to sort of have the right level of internal non attachment to it. Right?
And he said that like a pithy kind of throw off phrase when I was asking about like book launches. But just the idea that there is a right level of internal non attachment is a phrase I think I'm going to hold with me. Because internal non attachment, I like that very Buddhist, you know, very like, you know, pebble dropping in the ocean type of thing.
You're the ocean, that's the pebble and you want to sort of live life that way at some level. But when you're launching the book, if you are totally not attached, you won't try very hard and then you won't do any interviews and then you won't promote your book and then it won't do it very well. So you have to find the right level, basically, of internal non attachment.
Think of that with any big project you're working on today. I kind of like the conversation about totalitarianism. It was a bit freaky, but and especially after reading Stazzyland, which I really recommend.
It's a great book, really good book, really readable and really kind of eye opening. And it wasn't that long ago, really. But he says what really marks out totalitarianism from other concepts like fascism, dictatorship, tyranny, etc, is the notion that there's no part of your inner soul beyond the reach of the central authority.
And I think that's so important, because, you know, we have these phones, we keep them in our pockets. That means that Apple or Samsung knows where we are at all times. And that means that the apps that we use know where we are at all times.
Okay, that's fine. But then they also know what we're doing. So if we are on listening to a specific book or a specific piece of music, or texting with a certain friend, you know, all that stuff is available, it's information, it's gathered by companies, and that it can be shared.
And it can be used to, in the words of Shoshana Zuboff, who wrote The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, nudge our behavior in different directions without us even knowing it. And that's the kind of scary part to me, is that like, you know, when I was a kid, people used to say like, oh, they're sheep, they're sheep, you know, they just follow the herd. But now it's like, to some extent, unless you are untethered completely, a lot, or at least a portion of what you do is algorithmically dictated.
And how do we preserve the parts of our inner soul, that we want to be kind of garden-like, that we want to be open to us only, like, it's just an interesting thing to think about, especially as technology gets just kind of so deeper and deeper inroads into our lives. Okay, I loved his comments on writing so many good quotes on writing, and all the kind of masterclassy stuff he was sharing. But a couple things jumped out for me, some degree of huge mess is actually essential for me, he said that.
Then he also said, jotting things down on scraps and on index cards, because something he kind of said it apologetically, something weird of myself for covering perfectionist psyche, doesn't like jotting things down in a very nice notebook. And I love that he said both of those things. Because I require a degree of huge mess as well.
And I like writing stuff on little pieces of scraps, as well. And I feel bad when I see blank notebooks. But then, as he points out, perhaps this is just part of the process.
The process doesn't work when it's crisp and clean. It's got to be a little bit messy and untethered, right? All right.
Lastly, let's close with a banger. The whole act of growth is seeing more and more of yourself. He said that near the end, the whole act of growth is seeing more and more of yourself.
Mr. Oliver Berkman, thank you so much for giving us number 586, Stazzyland by Anna Funder. Number 585, The New New Journalism by Robert S. Boynton.
And number 584, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life by James Hollis. Three wonderful books that we will add officially to our Top 1000, which is over at threebooks.co slash thetop1000. All right.
So that's all, I think. Goodbye. It's not all, I don't think.
It's not goodbye. If you made it past the three second pause, I'd like to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club, where we always kick off the after party by going to the phones.
Kathy:
Hello, Neil. This is Kathy from Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. And I'm calling to wish you a happy birthday.
I have called before to let you know how much I love three books. I have been listening from January of 2019, when David Sedaris was the first chapter I listened to. And I am definitely a member of the cover to cover club.
I listened to everything, not necessarily in the order that it was laid down according to the moon. But I do listen to everything I skip around. And I want you to know, I definitely read the back of the shampoo bottle.
I love the word clouds. I love the lightning round where you ask, how do you arrange your book? Do you loan books, different things that people have in their own personal library collection?
I love three books. I passed it on to so many friends, you're doing a great job. And thank you so much to Leslie for being a part of this, and giving you the space and your family to put out this wonderful three books podcast.
Most of all, I'm calling to wish you a very, very happy birthday. Aloha from Hawaii.
Neil:
Aloha, Kathy, it's great to hear your voice all the way from Honolulu, Hawaii. Thank you so much for calling 1-833-READALOT. This is wonderful to have you as part of the three books community.
David Sedaris, I just checked, as you mentioned it, that has closing in on 200,000 downloads, making that the number one most popular chapter in three books history. I'm pretty sure. So you started off with the banger, and I'm glad that the quality was up to snuff for the rest.
You know, if you start off, sometimes it's like, oh, yeah, I listened to like, Dax Shepard when he had on, you know, Kamala Harris. Well, it's gonna be hard to top that, right? The next one.
Anyway, back of the shampoo bottle, shout out, yes, for anyone that's read the three books FAQ, that is the little Easter egg I threw at the very bottom. And word clouds, since you love word clouds, why don't we cut over and to Oliver Burkeman and jump into a Kathy-inspired word cloud right now.
Oliver:
Waiting on tenterhooks to see down to brass tacks, technological totalitarianism, level of fidelity to your subject, burnish and polish a book, capaciously defining writing, human limitation and finitude, pretty hodgepodge.
Neil:
Oh, there was a beautiful word cloud there from the wonderfully literary Oliver Burkeman, who talks the way he writes, which is why it's so wonderful to read his writing. Tenterhooks, technological totalitarianism, hodgepodge, which by the way, was a really interesting etymology. I kind of went down a rabbit hole on that one.
But it is the one I want to focus on. But hodgepot, like a pot, like a stew pot, and hodge, like a mixture, right? Hodgepodge, a mixture in a pot, kind of makes sense.
Beef or mutton cut into small pieces, mixed together, boiled together, a hodge or a group. Anyway, we're not going to focus on hodgepodge. Instead, we're going to focus on brass tacks, as in get down to brass tacks.
Very interestingly, there is no consensus on where this phrase comes from. The Belleville News Democrat newspaper had an article written six years ago, almost seven years ago by Roger Schluter, who went into the deep origin of trying to figure out where this phrase came from, because the question came in, when people prepare to discuss serious business, they often say they're getting down to brass tacks. Why tacks?
Why brass? And apparently he traced it all the way back to Abraham Lincoln's assassination, which was in 1865. Afterwards, there was an article on April 17, three days later, in the Washington Star that said the outside of the coffin is festooned with massive silver tacks, representing drapery, and each fold of which is a silver star.
There are eight massive handles to the coffin, four on each side, and it goes on and on and on. And basically, using tacks was a popular method of decorating, you know, coffins, and people use them to spell out initials, etc, etc. And so silver normally was too gaudy or too expensive for average families, so typically brass tacks and baster materials were used for everyday average people.
As a result, etymologists argue, getting down to brass tacks became synonymous with getting down to serious business. Like if you were discussing what you want to spell a loved one's coffin out of brass tacks, then that's serious business, the serious business of death, right? So that is maybe it.
But then again, there's another blog post on the Oxford University Press, which as you know, is kind of famous for the Oxford English Dictionary, the OED. And this blog post come from nine years ago, by Anatoly Lieberman in 2015. And it goes all over the place.
It's like a gigantic, long winded article. And basically, it doesn't have a conclusion. It does not say where the statement actually comes from.
It just has all these references. In the 1940s, it was this, 1930s, it was this, it was 1910s, it was this, none of which is about Abraham Lincoln at all. So two of the hypotheses are around the fact that, you know, let us get, it used to be, let us get down to tin tacks was a wartime phrase.
And so they think it was maybe a kind of a muddled up military idiom. I don't know about that. So then I went over to like the Trusted Wiktionary.
And basically, they say, okay, it comes from 1863 in Texas. One theory is that it comes from brass tacks on the counter of a hardware store that are used to measure cloth in precise units, rather than what people used to do, which is holding the cloth up to your nose and stretching an arm to make approximately one yard. If you actually use cloth, measuring tacks on a countertop, you're being more precise, you're being more detailed, you are kind of doing it exactly.
Right. They also mentioned in 19th century American practice using brass tacks to spell out people's initials on dead people's coffins. Was it Abraham Lincoln or just every everyday dead people?
I don't know. Getting down to brass tacks probably is related to spelling out people's initials in brass tacks on coffins. So when you get down to brass tacks, you were getting down to serious business.
Okay, that's as far as we got. We're tracing it down as far as we can go. As always, an enriching and lively conversation that goes everywhere.
Thank you so much to the wonderful Oliver Burkeman for coming on 3 Books. Thank you to all of you for listening. You made it all the way to the very end.
And until next time, remember that you are what you eat, and you are what you read. Keep turning that page everybody, and I'll talk to you soon. Take care.