Alex Petropoulos: Europe 2031, AI, Power, and the Future We Actually Want

October 18, 2026 Ben Yeoh

What happens if Europe gets AI wrong? Alex Petropoulos is Chief of Staff at Arq Foundation and one of the authors of Europe 2031, a speculative story imagining Europe's technological, economic and political future in a world of transformative artificial intelligence.

We start with the predictions behind Europe 2031: from severe shortages of AI computing power to the possibility that compute becomes abundant and today's infrastructure investments lose much of their strategic importance. Alex explains why he and his co-authors chose speculative fiction rather than another policy paper, and the power, and danger, of making people feel a possible future rather than simply understand it intellectually.

Can Europe compete with the US and China? Or should it concentrate on its own comparative advantages: industry, data, infrastructure and supply chains, while accepting continued dependence on American AI?

Alex argues that Europe's deeper problem may be institutional. Its commitment to democracy, consensus and constrained power is part of what makes it worth defending. Yet those same processes can make change painfully slow. Which European values really matter? What trade-offs should we be prepared to make? And can politicians offer a positive vision of the future that brings people along?

We explore the opportunities and catastrophic risks of AI, including why scientific progress might accelerate dramatically in mathematics and other verifiable domains, while biology, clinical trials and the social processes of science remain more difficult. If intelligence becomes abundant, what becomes scarce?

Alex also explains why he has changed his mind about a publicly funded European frontier AI laboratory, the challenge of sustaining successive generations of increasingly expensive AI models, and what we can learn from institutions such as ARIA and the Institute for Progress. We discuss scientific moonshots, tolerance for failure, and why we urgently need better measurement of AI's capabilities and effects.

We then turn to some of Alex's more personal interests. What did captaining a successful university Overwatch esports team teach him about teamwork, learning and comparative advantage? How does he use AI as a thinking partner? And why does writing remain such a painful process?

In our overrated/underrated round we cover recursive self-improvement, universal basic income, AGI, compute taxes, open-source AI, prediction markets, effective altruism and science fiction.

We finish by imagining an ordinary Tuesday in a better future. For Alex, it involves friends, a bakery, a park, good health, affordable travel, meaningful work and perhaps a little whimsy and mischief.

A useful reminder that the point of economic growth, technological progress and better institutions is to make possible lives we actually want to live.

Key takeaways

Europe's greatest risk may be institutional, not technological. Individually sensible decisions can produce collective failure when incentives, bureaucracy and political processes are poorly adapted to rapid change.
AI sovereignty is not the same as AI self-sufficiency. Europe will probably continue importing American AI. The important question is how to retain influence, resilience and bargaining power.
Comparative advantage matters more than winning every race. Europe's factories, industrial expertise, data and infrastructure may provide more realistic opportunities than attempting to replicate every frontier AI laboratory.
Values require trade-offs. If Europe wants to preserve what makes it distinctive, it needs to decide which principles are essential and which existing practices can change.
AI progress will be uneven. Mathematics and other verifiable domains may accelerate rapidly. Clinical trials, physical experiments and the social organisation of science could remain substantial bottlenecks.
Publicly funded AI labs need a sustainable model. A government might fund one frontier model, but competing over successive generations requires an economic and organisational structure that can keep going.
Measurement is badly neglected. Confident predictions about AI are often built on unreliable benchmarks or inadequate evidence. Better policy needs better information.
Competitive gaming can teach surprisingly useful lessons. Teams can outperform by leaning into unusual strengths rather than trying to approximate an idealised strategy.
The ultimate test of technological progress is human flourishing. A better future should mean more agency, more opportunity, better health, stronger relationships and lives that young people can look forward to.

Transcript

AI-assisted transcription; errors are possible.

Ben: Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Alex Petropoulos. Alex works on AI science and the institutions we need to make progress. He's chief of staff at Arq Foundation and one of the authors of Europe 2031. A speculative story about Europe's technological future. Alex, welcome.

Alex: Thank you Ben. Very, very good Greek pronunciation for me.

Ben: I've been practising! Of all the things you imagined in Europe 2031, what do you think is most likely to be true by 2031?

Alex: This is a difficult question because already some things in Europe 2031 have come true. Or rather, small versions of them have come true. You know, we sort of predicted access controls and predicted the US cutting off access. And a small version of that did happen with the Department of War, Anthropic and Mythos. Although I would say it's a hint at what could come as opposed to an actual thing coming true. And the other thing that makes this question difficult is that, in general, when I talk about the predictions we make in Europe 2031, I'm like: don't index on any one particular prediction.

We're not necessarily trying to get them exactly right date-wise. In fact, we fudged dates in, [I ] in order to keep things working in a way that would keep the reader happy, especially certain audiences that we had in mind when we were writing it.

I would say the prediction that I think is still looking to be on track is that we will hit a compute crunch. Compute capacity will just be incredibly constrained. And especially if you hit a capability threshold, people often say that data chips are depreciating in value, but actually in many cases chips have appreciated in value because the AI models have gotten better, which only just keeps pushing demand up and up and up.

And so if we suddenly got a big capability breakthrough, demand could go through the roof and we could be in an even more compute-constrained world than we are now.

Ben: And you can see that in some market prices, particularly upstream of compute. So the bottlenecks you need to make compute are still, I mean, they flip-flop a bit, but they're still going crazy.

Well, I don't know if this will be an easier question on the other side, but what's probably wrong by 2031 or maybe even not the date, but directionally wrong, but still really useful to consider?

Alex: I'm going to be very cheeky and I'm going to give the same answer, which is the compute predictions. In general, I think people should internalise that we might not be compute constrained forever or that compute is important.

The reason we focus on compute is because we talk about ways countries can be important on AI. And normally, to do all this really difficult R&D, you have to spend billions. You have to compete in capitalism, it's difficult. You probably will lose by default. Or you could build a data centre and suddenly you're important.

And so you are, you've got the lowest-hanging fruit possible for becoming important on AI and having some sort of relevance. Great, we should do it. However, we should also remember this relies on compute being constrained. And there are worlds in which even in five years time compute isn't a constraint.

Like Elon could have massive breakthroughs with SpaceX. The cost per kilogramme of launch capacity could come down sufficiently. There could be a couple breakthroughs and suddenly we have orbital data centres and all of your ground-based compute doesn't matter anymore. And all this investment that you did and you're like, 'We're fine.'

We've got the compute, but it doesn't matter any more because now it's all being made redundant.

Ben: That seems like a good idea. Look at, in some ways, the left tail and the right tail: compute is really cheap and abundant anywhere, or there's a crunch and you can't do anything about it. Those seem to be quite useful extremes to speculate about.

And I'm interested, so there is a horizon scanning future scenario-type industry and academic literature out there. But I was interested in what made you think speculative fiction or say scenario planning seemed to be a better way to examine this and potentially examine this for European policymakers rather than just another white policy paper, 40 pages.

I'm going to give you part of the answer already, that no one really reads apart from three people in a little room before it gets shelved. But anyway, speculative fiction: is it a better way, and how did you come to this?

Alex: I mean, in one sentence, you want people to feel the AGI, you want to create an emotional response.

I sort of talk about what we did as wielding a very dangerous tool using scenario writing to create buy-in to a problem that you think exists is epistemically impure. You are violating some of these, I don't know, purist rationalist norms. When you sort of wield this weapon, you have to be really, really confident that your take is correct and that you want to achieve.

And I think that we were confident enough that we're like, 'We're going to do this.' But the point is that it makes people feel something, you know? We had hundreds of people messaging us, having read it, people who said that they were lying in bed, listening to it, and they started crying when they got to the end. We had a mother who messaged us saying my daughter is three years old. There's no way in hell that she's going to wait, be eight years old in the world that you described, what can I do to stop this happening? And so as a side effect, you have this virality, but we never really intended it to go viral. The theory of change behind it was. Convince or sort of be heard by the 2000, 3000 most important people within a country that the elites basically. And that would've been sufficient. I think that it sort of reached an order of magnitude or a few more people than that. But that's the basics of why we chose to use this dark, magic, forbidden weapon.

I would look at it in that sense.

Ben: That's an interesting theory of change. I think there's quite a lot of truth to that from my way of thinking. Obviously you have to feel 110% that you're going to be correct, but on big moments in human history, maybe just taking the last a hundred to 200 years, I always think about the movement, which where society overall went from being pro-slavery or slavery in society to being anti-slavery and the anti-slavery movement started small and had to do these things to convince people otherwise.

But obviously you're going against the majority grain. So if you're wrong, you can do a lot of damage. So it's kind of interesting. So maybe taking some of your premises within that. I guess in my mind the paper argues Europe has been making several misjudgments around how fast AI is advancing.

Maybe we could say almost everyone is making these misjudgments also misjudging its impact and the ability for Europe or maybe even countries overall to catch up. We also make the point that a lot of people on the frontier of say policymaking and government or even the person in the street is not actively using frontier models.

They're not solving Millennium Prize Problems. They're not solving [ ]. So we're a little bit behind the curve because the curve, or the frontier, is going so fast and we are ahead. [ ] I'd be interested to think, has anything happened in the last few weeks, few months since you've written the paper, which has made you change your mind on any of that?

Or if anything, has this emphasised the arguments that you were making? Speculatively, even if the dates are wrong or at least in the direction of travel.

Alex: A couple of things. On the high level, people sometimes ask me, 'Are you optimistic, Alex? Are you pessimistic?' And you know, we wrote quite a doomy scenario. It's doomy for me under the assumption that we do nothing. And I've never believed that we will do nothing. I've always believed, we like to wake up and smell the coffee.

The question has always been: how quickly do we, how fast do we sort of viscerally internalise what is going to come or what might come and then act in accordance. And so I think there has been this visceral reaction faster than I would've expected it. So, bullish. You know, Ursula von der Leyen in her state of the Union, this is the EU version of the US State of the Union.

She gave it to me on Wednesday. She talked about recursive self-improvement and the possible risk that this could bring. And the fact that our enemies might have this technology and we won't. If you told me a year before that she'd be talking about that, I would've, I would've laughed at you.

That being said, I think that, you know, that there are these three assumptions that we talk about, right? Miscalibrating how fast it's moving, how important it'll be, how well positioned we are. But then there's this third meta level thing, which is at play, which is at every step in the scenario, everyone takes what feels like to them, the sort of locally rational action.

They sort of act within the limits that they perceive themselves to have. And the incentive structures within, like the bureaucracies within the institutions are set up in such a way that people aren't able to take the correct action. And not much of that has changed there.

Things that would make me maybe be more optimistic would be people who really get it, choosing to go into government, choosing to put themselves into these positions of power and next to the people who take the decisions to help inform them. And then also like broader reforms to how these institutions work.

And this is, this is by and large why I'm more bullish on European member-state policy than EU policy, if that makes sense.

Ben: Yeah. We can come to that maybe Europe has to be a tiny bit less consensual in terms of getting all member states around and have, well, what I would say is perhaps a tiny bit less democracy even though there's this strange paradox where in order to defend democracy, maybe you have to be a little bit less democratic.

And I see some analogies with climate movements, maybe even within COVID pandemic, particularly within climate. It's interesting, if you go back 20 years, the median, in fact even maybe 10 years, the median scenario was looking at perhaps a four degree world. And today we're looking at between a two and three degree world and still on a downward trajectory you can argue about speed.

So that's one of the really tricky things. Because humans generally moving at speed is not our default scenario, but actually we've done quite a lot within climate and certainly within climate have now taken out a lot of the negative tail risks. I mean, there's not exact analogy because of the tail risk in AI, so I kind of get a little bit cautiously optimistic around that given some of our other complex wicked problem type things.

Bringing it back to Europe, I was interested if you think it, well, for Europe it should not really become simply a slightly worse version of America or China. That seems to be, again, what the paper's suggesting. It can't really be America or China in terms of compute or frontier labs and things like that.

So I'd be interested now also a few months after the paper, what do you think Europe should optimise for or Europe should be doing if it can't be America or China? Or do you think it genuinely should try and catch up in certain domains?

Alex: So, on catching up, I think it has to just be really realistic about where it can and where it can't catch up. And then you maybe take a calibrated bet and say, I'm going to put a bet on this moonshot. I'm going to put some amount of money. Maybe it'll work, maybe [ ]. By default it won't.

You should be aware that it's like a big risk. What should Europe try to emulate? I think that Europe needs to have like a conversation with itself about like what makes Europe great and then how is that a threat and how is that at risk? And I think in general, I sit in the position of why care.

I guess that's a question one might ask, which is why are we even talking about Europe? Why do we care about Europe? And one reason I care about Europe beyond the fact that my friends live here and my family live here is the fact that I think the US have a set of values and these values are quite good and Europe has a set of values and these values are also quite good.

But I think that regardless of whose values are better, I think there is some weighted combination of both of those values that is superior to either. And I would like to see a world in which those values are represented into the future, if you want to say that, or at least represented within AI systems and within the way we develop this technology.

And so then you should be really okay, you're, you need to do a better job of exporting your values. But then the question is which values are you willing to give up? Which values are you willing to import? So it's sort of like a question of what do you want to take from the us?

Like what actually matters where are your trade-offs going to happen? And I think that for all the talk that people in Europe do about values, I think it's quite an immature conversation still because there's never any conversation about trade-offs and what they'd be willing to give up. Like where, what is the ranking order?

You can't value them all equally. That doesn't work because you're going to lose them all. A bit of a fluffy answer. But I think it's like a prerequisite to actually be oh, why do we care about this? What model are we going to follow? What should we do? We can still be good at many things.

Ben: I, in some ways that echoes just overall thinking around industrial plans. Like should you have them, you've got to figure out, you can't do them for everything. You need to figure out where you are good or not. But specifically for AI. But I guess one, if you're quite purist about some of these things from say a market or say your anti industrial plans at all, you'd maybe argue why can't Europe simply just be very good at using American AI or Frontier AI?

I guess I already think of one of the counters because of what's happened with defence or defence pacts recently. But you could maybe say, well, we become really great at something else. We keep mostly European values and we just import American AI and that's it. Spill below has happened that way. Is that not a cogent argument because of all the other European values, things that we need to maintain or argue for.

And also, I guess, the specific different industries and values that different countries have.

Alex: So I think it's first important to acknowledge that some version of that will be the version we end up in. There is no world in which we don't import American AI just as there's no world currently where we don't import part of the US security umbrella, right?

Europe isn't independent, Europe isn't sovereign. It shouldn't pretend that it's totally sovereign. And so I think it's silly to pretend that we could get there on AI within 10 or 20 years anyway. I think that there are like two stories that I tell when I talk about, AI policy.

The first is like if AI timelines, the pace of AI progress is sufficiently long. If AI is a sufficiently normal technology, whatever that means nowadays then what you should be doing is basically just copy progress studies and just look at what, like the [Rhine Group] people, look at what Mario Draghi is doing.

Do the Draghi report. Listen to Patrick Collison probably, like read Works in Progress. And just do all of that. And you'll probably be fine. And that's like your normal baseline. If AI were a normal technology, if timelines are really long, you have your adoption, you have your market effects just like unfuck the European economy, great.

I think the disagreements in AI policy come from okay, but AI isn't necessarily like perfectly normal technology. First, it might be very important. It might be securitized and treated as a national security asset and there might be a US administration which isn't operating in a perfectly positive sum view of the world or you know, willing to take very negative-sum trades with partners, even allies.

And two, if AI progress moves really, really quickly, these reforms take five to 10 years to kick in. So you need things to bridge that gap. And so you have to be thinking about okay, I'll do these reforms, I'll fix my economy, I'll be fine in 10 years maybe. But what are you doing over the next 10 years to make sure that you're relevant?

Make sure that you're not slapped about by the US or China.

Ben: And what do you think European countries should do, either as a European blob or you could choose one or two countries, UK or Greece or, maybe one of the bigger ones like Germany and France. I get the reading from the paper. There's some suggestion that potentially industrial AI, whatever that might mean, might be an area or robotics or some other part of applied AI.

But then I was wondering, is there a European comparative advantage in any of that compared to American or Chinese companies capturing most of that value. But I guess Europe has got to place some of its bets somewhere within that. So I'd be intrigued if there are any suggestions that you feel Europe can explore or is it still at that higher level where they have to just figure out what it is they're not sure and they're just too slow and figure that out.

Even if they don't get all eight correct things, if they get two correct, that's going to be much better than where we are now.

Alex: Yeah. So three things. First, you got to do the reforms to make sure you can actually do all this properly. You got to set the groundwork such that a trillion dollar European company can be created in the future.

That's your long-term play. Get that out of the way. Second, I think that some of these things you mentioned are up there. There are some competitive advantages. It seems like Europe does actually have quite a good data advantage. There are just like European data sets. We have big European companies, we have industry.

We still are, we haven't completely deindustrialised. We still have lots of factories. So there are lots of places where we are strong and have valuable things to offer. I guess the question is can you use that well enough to ensure that you are, that if access is what you are worried about, ensure that you retain access.

I guess an example is: make yourself the person that produces and builds things for the Americans. If you think the Americans will get to do powerful AI systems very quickly, we can be the ones with the factories, right? It is a version of that world. But then the third thing I will say is Europe 2031 is a, go, to go back to the analogy like we use the dark magic. We dabble in ideology. We point all of these faces and attention towards a problem. It is an exercise in problem defining. There is some amount of work and we've done our best to think about solutions.

But I will just say the field of people solving this problem, there are two bottlenecks and one of those bottlenecks is ideas and just people, like a community of people thinking about solutions. I don't think we have very good solutions at the moment. I think our solutions are, to be honest, crap.

And I would like to see more people, more ideas flooding in about what we can do. Because I think that, yeah, we just haven't had enough tokens on it, so to speak.

Ben: I think you're going to make a very good policymaker or politician because that is a three-point plan, right? They like that. I think there may have to be an odd number, like a seven-point plan or 11-point plan, but that's not quite as sexy as a three-point one.

So we need more people thinking about this. Not enough people. Because we can see that not enough ideas at the moment might be happening. I feel the vibes are there, but I guess we're a little bit slow. Europe may have some comparative advantages though. We have to think about that. Maybe supply chain into America, something like that.

And then the long term reform, which is kind of win-win. Even if you think this AI stuff, they've just gone completely crazy. Yeah. What are they doing? Well, this just, you should have it found foundationally. And actually it's an interesting edge, just the glass half full is because Europe can potentially unlock that more than say, some places in the US and potentially unlocks maybe more easily.

There's a, there's a chance that it can actually jump up. Like some parts of America can't actually deregulate that much more. They've reached the frontier of that. Whereas I don't think you could claim the same in Europe. But it's interesting on that first and third point, maybe to some degree there seems to me a little bit of a tension in terms of, and I mentioned this before, the argument essentially is Europe's consensus and procedures are somewhat too slow that needs unpicking speeding up more people in it.

But part of the European values of all of that seems to me that they have this: liberal democracies constrain power. Now you can see that's tipped too far and Works in Progress are very good on this, where you've seen like it's really reasonable for the fire department to say we need access for our ladders to go into the buildings.

But when each individual stakeholder does that, it means you can't build any buildings, or they're not really suitable or are very expensive. So I'm interested is at that higher level, do you think there is this throughput where we can become dramatically faster, we can get more people within this new industrial AI policy or long-term reform without destroying enough of these European liberal values that actually we so and I got the impression from your answer earlier, is that yes, there might be some trade-offs within those values, so we do need this hard conversation.

But if you come with a call, I'm going to make it up to 10 or 20 of them, you know, a good eight to 15 of them survive and that still feels sufficiently European that's what we should do. Is that the right way of thinking about it and that there is a tension there? Or actually is there some other through line that we could pursue here?

Alex: I think there is a tension. And if you don't do this right, you fail. An example is look at the way that the US have done their data centre policies. And they've had this laissez-faire approach and now they have this massive backlash. And so this is an opportunity for Europe. Because Europe hasn't built as many.

They've imported a little bit of the US data centre politics, but it's still very nascent. We can take a lot of lessons, we can learn how can we do it well? So you bring people along so that you are actually making sure that the communities benefit from the data centres being built, that they get some of the tax revenue that the data centres are building in electricity production and not using water even though that's, you know, made up. But in general, I think this touches on what you said, which is glass half full. I'm an optimist. I think you have to take many of these things and frame them in the optimistic sense. There is a world in which you can say, Tyler has this saying, you know, what is it the Europeans are so culture, they can tell you about porcelain.

They can tell you about all this and that, but if the world was run by them, negative 1% growth rate and we have all these bottlenecks and if AI sort of becomes so important, the bottlenecks means Europe is doomed. And, then that's the reason to freak out. It's like also, ah, if we get rid of all these bottlenecks, Europe has so much to gain.

Like there is quite a strong compelling win-win of oh, we can get the growth in the short term from doing the deregulatory stuff or, and whatnot. And then we get like the AI growth in the long term. Or maybe the AI growth kicks in first and the long-term reform. So there are some interesting political economy packages that you can put together.

I think the ultimate question is, are you presenting a compelling vision of the future that is positive, and that you can bring people along with, because I think it's fair to say that people, I think most politicians have failed at this and, most politicians are like failing to rise to the challenge of like presenting a vision to the people of the future. And saying, this is how your life is going to be better because of this thing. I think this is especially true with young people. And they sort of have this negative-sum view of the world. Because the world has been negative-sum towards them. Now you have to do politics. There's like the difficult stuff.

And find ways to create your coalition to take, pick the set of policy choices that give you wins and give you win-wins across the board. Make some trade-offs. I think that's possible. I think I've seen a way that you can do that. I don't think necessarily politicians are catching up to this quite yet, but I think that there's a festering, I think something's festering in regard to youth politics and disenfranchisement and that this will extend and sort of blow up around AI. And so I think if you don't sort of get on this early as a politician, it will sort of consume you.

Ben: We

Alex: Need, or how does that relate? Yeah,

Ben: I say we need the storytellers back. Well we need in some ways like the force, the Jedi side of the force because you're probably going to dabble in these dark arts. So yeah, you might fall the way of the Sith with these very charismatic storytellers, but you are going to have I guess the Yoda-like characters hopefully coming through and saving us.

Well perhaps zooming out. I mean we can come to other policy bits if they occur to you or come up. And I do wanna talk about the opportunity side as well as the risk side, but maybe touching on the risk side first and zooming out because I think that's what, a lot of things came very cogently in 2031.

I still think we need some good positive speculative futures and I know people are trying, but we're just not coming towards it. I don't know why. Maybe, maybe humans are just inclined to look at dystopian sci-fi more readily. But in any case opportunities and risks. Maybe on the risk side I tend to hear two different categories of catastrophic risk arguments.

So one goes, we create intelligence vastly beyond our own and we can't control it. It's like we are humans or, and they are mice or I prefer to think like octopus and you just can't understand it. Like the mice don't know what's going on and they just all disappear because humans don't really care about them.

And it'd be the same for this vastly superior intelligence. That seems quite sci-fi to a lot of people that I know. Some people take that argument seriously. The other which seems more cogent to sort of everyone is that you just get a very powerful AI tool, say, and it gives certain humans, maybe quite a few humans who may want to do harm or some version of evil, much greater capabilities at much lower cost.

And they can simply just do that. So you don't even need to get super intelligence of any form to just kind of see okay, that could be quite a bad risk. And so that comes in a cluster of manmade pandemics or all of these other things that you could do with super intelligence. I'm interested, do both of those categories of risk worry you?

Does one of them worry you more? Should we be thinking about that in the AI risk world? Do they worry about certain things too much? But how should we be thinking about AI risk and what some people would call X risk or existential risk?

Alex: Maybe I should start with an epistemic status. I don't think about this maybe as much as I should in terms of I'm quite pragmatic and I think about things through the lens of what could Europe do? But I'll, I'll like to indulge the question. And I think on like the first and octopus risk if you wanna call it, I think it would be foolish not to hold some amount of huh, we should think about this. That I'm not confident that this is impossible. I think I'm more optimistic in the sense that I can definitely see or smell like technological pathways that lead to good outcomes there, right?

it is not like I'm oh, any possible version of like super intelligence or like powerful different intelligence you build will always, do you, I think that you have a lot of agency over like the direction of the technology that you, build, but you have to exercise that agency and you have to be really cognizant of it.

These are like my priors and I sort of see like most of my takes, like informed by tweets that I see, but it seems that we have taken decisions in different directions that have been both negative and positive in terms of our ability to shape these intelligences in the way that would be desirable.

And the misuse risk, I think this is basically a force multiplier to possibly other misuse risks. Like if you're already worried about bio risk, many of your friends who were worried about bio risk, they're now just really, really worried about bio risk.

I think it's something that we should clearly pay attention to. I think maybe the thing that should make you worried is the pace and whether or not you feel like your governments are sort of on the ball and whatnot. But, you know, in this State of the Union address that the president of the European Commission did, she talked about how she opened her AI section talking about risks and talking about loss of control.

The equivalent of the Secretary of State for technology of the EU has talked about loss of control multiple times before. I think they think about this, they think they care about it alongside a bunch of other things they care about. The question is what can Europe even do about that?

And that sort of gets you towards I guess some of the things that we work on and whatnot. But that's, I sort of employ some of these like mental tricks in terms of I don't think about the fastest possible takeoff scenarios because there's nothing Europe can do about those takeoff scenarios.

So it's not useful for me to think about that. And I sort of limit the amount I think about certain risks because I'm more focused on what is within the realm of pragmatic and the possible within this operating theatre that I exist in.

Ben: Sure. What is tractable? What you can only control what you can control, even if you can distantly control it.

I mean, I remain pretty optimistic on that. Part of it is because actually we've had pretty terrifying capabilities for quite a while. And actually, I don't wanna give too many hints, but you could think about it and you, if you wanted to do evil, evil people could have actually done quite a lot more devastating things in the last 10 or 20 years than even that they've managed to achieve.

And they haven't for a complicated set of reasons, which I think should still hold. But maybe let's flip to the other side. So, AI optimists, and the opportunity side. What do you think AI optimists are getting most right, or what should we be hopeful about? And there's a lot we could cover.

Everything, I think around science is pretty good. Second order things. I actually think that because I do some work a little bit in climate and health, all of the climate people are underestimating what kind of gains this could give us in solving some climate things. The health people actually are beginning, they're actually already beginning to see it, so I'm not sure they're underestimating it.

They're kind of seeing it and not sure where that goes. But I'd be interested in your view, what are AI optimists getting right? I guess you can lean to Europe if you but it could be anything in the world that you are seeing.

Alex: I come from a maths background, so I'm just like incredibly excited about everything happening in maths at the moment.

It's just: wow, what a time to be alive. Right? We're like solving all of these. I mean, we solved the (I can't remember the name) the [Millennium Prize Problem], Navier–Stokes. We solved Navier–Stokes. There's like rumour that two and a half other ones have already been solved.

Ben: P versus NP or whatever it's called.

Alex: P versus NP. Yeah. You know, like register your predictions now. You don't have much time left. So incredibly exciting time, to just be a nerd like mathematics. And sort of you can extrapolate along. I do sort of hold this opinion, you know, like the verifiable areas will move faster than anyone thinks they will.

And then the non-verifiable stuff will move slower. So I think on like the, health side and on the biology side, I think all of this really sort of annoyingly just reinforces like how important all the other sort of science reforms you're going to make will be of like our clinical trial reform now actually is like a lot, lot, lot more important because you could do so much more with it, but it's still going to be the bottleneck. And so I'm curious where the bottlenecks end up arising in science. physics will pop, like maybe with physics we'll also see some crazy progress. But I sort of have an ongoing debate with colleagues and friends about how much transfer you will get from the non-verifiable domains.

And I think even in, even within mathematics, it's interesting because there are branches of mathematics that have easier to formalise than others, essentially like it within Lean. It was written by algebra people. It's written in a way that makes algebra very easy to formalise. I have friends who are like graph theorists who are this is very annoying.

I can't write my stuff in Lean because it's written by people who speak like a slightly different language. It's it's like your alphabet was written in French and you're Italian, you are like Greek or something. And you're trying to use the programming now because you're well I don't speak Italian or French.

And so I'm paying attention to will the AI model solve problems in those? Like the AI models have been trained in French for maths. Will they solve problems in Greek as well for maths? And this is like a thing that I'm paying attention to. And maybe I'll get a hint of whether that happens then I'm way more excited about the future of science.

Ben: I think there's something with that point in particular, I agree, they, the AIs, the code will have to, I think, invent the French. So they'll have to do their own version of lean, which isn't for algebraic things, but I think they're now fully capable of doing it. Even my sense, this is just vibe really, but if GPT-6, [Astra'] has already trained seven to be able to do Navier–Stokes and we've got some self-recursive, then it seems to me that seven or eight is going to be able to build those things.

But I'm then interested just to dig one level deeper. So if AI is really good at these verifiable domains as you call them, and if intelligence becomes really abundant, what becomes scarce or what do you really think are the bottlenecks? So we, you've kind of blobbed it as non verifiable, and I'm going to expand that to say some of this, what I guess the economists or social scientists would call tacit knowledge.

Some of it is called Polanyi knowledge. So these are things like how a carpenter builds or all of the things you get in a meetup as opposed to what's written in code. I guess all that goes into Polanyi-type domains is the type of stuff which becomes scarce. And I guess the bottlenecks, if we talk about clinical trials, I as yet don't quite see how you're going to get around putting the drugs into humans to make sure they are safe.

And actually some of this efficacy and clinical trials are quite a big bottleneck, although I do think we should be substantially faster. Clinical trials take on average eight to 10 years from first in humans, six to eight years should be, I mean, should be a no brainer. And we should have already gotten there in one to two years.

Seems to me like a very big jump, which is where we ought to go. But I'd be interested if you've had any thought when you've seen about that, about emerging bottlenecks or because your bottleneck is still, ah, we haven't got enough people in policy thinking about this. This might not be a domain you've thought about too much, but interested in bottlenecks or what becomes scarce in a high intelligence world.

Alex: Yeah, I have a colleague who's thinking about this. I should talk to her more often. I think even though you talked about this like tacit knowledge, I think even the non-verifiable stuff is stuff you are just trying to learn about like biology and stuff and you have to prepare everything.

Like you don't have a fully self-driving lab. Even within, like, I am still deeply confused about recursive self-improvement and whether that's actually happening and whether you've cleared the bottlenecks. Because I'm not convinced that you haven't cleared all the bottlenecks and there might still be some bottlenecks.

But on science itself, I am.

I think that, and maybe this is just from like a metasciencey direction, but there's a lot like the way that. Scientific information is communicated between scientists and the way that the social dynamics of science that seem like hard to replace and hard to get that serendipity from.

But maybe we'll get there. I sort of find myself often thinking oh, I'm so grateful that my job is safe because all I have to do is talk to people all day or have face-to-face conversations. AI's not going to take my job.

Ben: Yeah, communications. I actually think humanities in some ways should be less worried than they are.

I mean, they're, they're really not going to disintermediate theatre for instance, or albeit not many people actually make that much money in theatre. And yes, maybe you will speed up some aspects of script writing, but people really don't like that. I mean it is half of art, or at least some bit of art is all of the tacit knowledge, which comes with the artist and everything around that.

That's let alone before we get into questions of or style and taste on that, about whether it can do that. And even when it matches that, I think human audiences will not find that as satisfying. But I'm interested then also in what you maybe changed your mind about, we could do this on any level. Because I think you're involved in this proposal for a type of CERN for AI and institutions and kind of how institutions work and then subsequently you've kind of moved away from that form of thinking. So perhaps specifically on that, what changed your mind and then anything else over the last two or three years that you think that you've changed your mind about or as they say in some communities updated your priors on, but anything you've changed your mind on.

Alex: Yeah. I changed my mind so many times, like the whole CERN for AI journey. Like the main one is like any sort of publicly supported effort, needs to answer, answer the question of okay, you train like GPT-N, what's the plan for GPT-N plus one? Because you can corral all this public funding.

You know, in the most recent transformative AI strategy for the EU that a bunch of these experts, some of my colleagues included, published, they're to train a competitive model to get to the frontier now would cost 780 billion euros. Okay, you spend the 780 euro billion, now what?

Because do you have a competitive company? Are you going to create like the revenue loop that OpenAI, Anthropic have to train the next model? It just all falls apart if you are trying to directly compete at the frontier. So then the idea evolved more and I think the CERN idea evolved more into like what sort of R&D areas you could work on that could still be quite important.

That could still be quite important for resilience and still be quite important for competitiveness. And I think there are versions of these ideas that I'm still standing behind and still keen to push and you know, I'd be very keen for the EU to do something like a DARPA, maybe.

Other things that changed my mind on that. Just like priors around like centralization of power. I used to think within the terms of like one big AI, like the big super intelligent AI and I'm much more like actually that's like there's a cognitive bias that you're employing there when you think about that.

Like it doesn't have to be that we don't have to build the technology in that way. We could have multi-agent systems and have lots of different personalised AI. And so that's like another place I think. I think I've softened and nuanced my opinions about governments and bureaucracy and there are good people within the government who are trying very hard, but incentive structures that allow them to do the things they want to do.

And then there are also some people with just some horrendously outrageously wrong opinions. And if I was a dictator, I'd send them to [ '] or whatnot. But, so people contain multitudes.

Ben: Yeah,

I heard Tyler Cowen recently somewhat defend bureaucracies, which was quite interesting.

He was taking the other side of the view and said, well, maybe they're doing something that we don't know about it. I think this was more like in America saying, well actually, the fact you've got to fill in a lot of bureaucratic forms means that some aspects of fraud go down. Because if you want to claim benefits and you're on the margin, you're not going to put all of that effort in until you're really doing it.

I mean, I guess that was on a, on a different level and we spent quite a lot of time, I guess, softly critiquing institutions and bits by that not understanding your little softer aspect or some good people working on that. But maybe taking the flip side is there any institutions or organisations that you've accounted for that you think work surprisingly well and can we learn anything from that?

I mean, and on the other side, I do think institutions have been surprisingly robust or even anti-fragile in this current world of geopolitics that we've seen that, not many of them have imploded. Not as many of them as I thought could have done. I'm not sure whether that says that they're good, but they certainly seem to be somewhat resilient.

But I'm, I'm interested if, yeah. Do you think anything has worked really well and can we learn from that?

Alex: Be really bad if I didn't have an answer.

Ben: It might be you've not really come across one, which has worked super well. I mean, I guess in governments, people sometimes say Singapore or Estonia. I think they have advantages of working really on a small city state level. So that's kind of interesting.

And then some other organisations tend to have been maybe shorter lived or more nimble or specific small institutions. And I think it's interesting that I've detected actually, I guess from some of these foundations, which are actually being funded with AI money that they're starting to do institutions, which are just tackling one particular subset area.

I can't even remember the areas, but it's something just health data or that's it. They wanna solve Alzheimer's, so they're not going to do anything else, but they're going to start an institution and foundation just on that because they've thought that those sort of more time limited, purpose-driven, mission-driven, driven, but with a more well-defined mission have gone well.

Although I do think you can still critique that, I'd be interested. Have you seen anything?

Alex: I think that my interactions with the Greek state have been like much better. Everything's been digitised. You can get every form online. Previously you'd have to go to some dusty office.

You'd have to go to the thing. no, you need this form. You have to go to another office, the other side of Athens to get this form. And then go back and no, you also need this form. Spend hours and hours going back and forth. There was a minister, Pierrakakis, who championed a lot of these digitization reforms.

And now he's the governor of the European Central Bank, I think. And so, yeah, they can make your life better, make the burden on your life less bad. Another example is, is it Taiwan that have little lottery tickets on receipts so people hold onto the receipts?

Alex: Is it cheating if I just fanboy about the Institute for Progress for like 30 seconds?

Ben: You can do that.

Alex: Sure. I just think they seem to have just been insanely impactful and both in sort of very short term, let's do a thing. And in these like long term bets and building something of like over five years that has been really, like long lasting and has moved the needle in a really positive direction. I sort of look at them, and I'm like, 'That's ambitions for what we could be doing in like five years.

And then yeah, so I think that they make me bullish that you can do things that are like sort you know, they're, they're, they're basically an extra branch of government and, whatnot. A meta branch of government. And then there are things within the focus research organisation space.

Like ARIA has good vibes. I don't know if it has more than good vibes, it's like it's still too early to tell. In some sense,

Ben: You've got to start with the vibes, you've got to start from somewhere. Yeah. I mean even, exactly. Even if they all fail. And in some ways, I think actually it'll be fine if every single one of their projects fail at the meta level.

Just saying we are going to actually try some moonshots and things is, I think, I think good. And I also do think they've taken Economics 101 and they are funding things that private markets basically can't fund as in private capital. They still won't be that. So I think if every single one of those fails are that, and also I know people complain, but actually in the grand scheme of things, it isn't actually even that much money.

Alex: Marginal.

Ben: Yeah. People really struggle with hundreds of millions and billions. It, you know, we're fine in the thousands of pounds and even tens of thousands and whatever, but once we get into the millions and billions people just, that's one thing that investors and markets do have a sense for, because we have to wrap our heads around billions and now actually trillions.

But it's a completely different scale of things.

Alex: Yeah. I am also an ARIA fanboy but I, you know, I will say the vibes are immaculate and one should be careful as to whether that is, how much of that is motivating your enthusiasm.

Ben: Yes. That's true. But I also think, so this is, some, so, you know, I've had a podcast with Alec Stapp and we talked about startup things, and I've also had a podcast with Stian Westlake who's talked about funding and how you make decisions and actually Michael Nielsen on metascience and how to make decisions.

So putting all of that together, one of my things is that people claim they do high risk things and then they go, oh, look, two thirds of these projects worked out. Actually, that must mean that your first statement was wrong. Because if you have even moderately high risk, then you cannot be more than a one out of 10 success, which you can see in biopharma and you can also see in VC.

So I do think that most of those projects should actually fail, or at least only advance a little bit. So I think maybe we will only have vibes to go on, but at least as we said, the vibes are good.

Alex: And it's so weird when you get to politics. Because if you're like a political operator, nothing is guaranteed, right?

You have to hedge, hedge, hedge, hedge hedge. You try like a bunch of things. You put in all this effort and it fails and you put on. So in some sense, like people working in bureaucracies, people working in politics, are operating in this high risk environment where lots of things fail and only few things succeed.

But they seem to have internalised it in the wrong direction. I haven't thought enough about what's going on there. But you would think that. That it would maybe go in the opposite direction.

Ben: Yeah. I think in my mind there's a mismatch on the timing of when you get feedback. So Mm-hmm.

The thing about at least shorter term R&D projects, or even within biopharma, which I know quite well, and this is your whole point about what is verifiable or not, your trial fails after a year. So you get quite good feedback quite quickly in the political cycle. Not only would you maybe not know within your political cycle, but your KPI might not be that clear.

So you start something you vaguely think you want GDP to go up. I'm going to slightly make it up, but you have no idea really what your intermediate KPI was pointing in that direction. In any case, we've been talking for a while like people who spend far too much time thinking about AI and policy. Maybe my pivot question should be to the person in the street who probably maybe doesn't even particularly care too much about AI or policy or any of this stuff. What should maybe be one thing or something that they should be thinking about here?

Alex: Interesting. Because the person on the street now comes up to me and asks me about AI safety and I went, I was in my dad's office the other day and they're like, 'Is AI going to kill us?'

And I went to a wedding and two people asked me, is AI going to kill us? So that's the wrong question.

Ben: And what data? The wrong water and data centres is also the wrong question. So what are the and that's what, and that's what obviously the mainstream media or even not even the mainstream media, media is all around that.

So yeah, we get a chance to communicate maybe one or two things that they could be thinking. And I also, I would quite like it to be not, oh my god, they're going to take on jobs as well, which I don't think is helpful. I'm not quite sure why they focus so much on that. You might not have anything, but if you do, what, should the person in the street maybe be thinking?

If it isn't worrying about data centres, isn't AI's going to kill us or take our jobs?

Alex: I think it's bottlenecks and sort of reiterating this thing of if something is automated, it just moves to the bottleneck. Please think in terms of bottlenecks and start thinking about where the bottleneck is, and it's sad that you have to do this. Because the government shouldn't have to be thinking about where the bottleneck is because that means the system's broken normally. Like the market does that. But, I digress. So bottlenecks are probably one comparative advantage. And this notion that even if AI is much better at you than something like at everything, if it's much, much better than you at something else, it will only do those other things, right?

And so, comparative advantage of countries and different countries should do different things. And then finally like we are not measuring enough, like nearly enough. Like everyone, everyone who's talking to you about AI's going to do this, AI's going to do that. Like we have no numbers.

We don't know, like we don't know how many jobs, all vibes, like taking away all vibes. It would be great if we had some numbers. But we don't have any numbers on the safety front, numbers on like the employment front numbers on like even the capability front. I don't know if you saw how Epoch AI did a benchmark.

They basically evaluated, meta, evaluated a bunch of benchmarks. And more than 50% of the top benchmarks are dubious and 20 to 50% of them have false positives and false negatives. The answers flipped the wrong wave round. Like there's data contamination so we're operating with a bunch of bunk numbers or could be better numbers.

Ben: Yeah, what's the aphorism? You only manage what you measure but if you're not measuring it right. But we've got this whole thing because the UK has just come out with new data from our statistical agency and it turns out productivity wasn't quite as bad as we thought for all sorts of reasons. And they don't even really know what's happening in the job market.

So there's definitely something on the measurement front and I like the comparative advantage, which I guess is Economics 101, but with this split between the tacit knowledge bit or the non-verifiable bit, which humans are still going to be somewhat good at to maybe very good at. And there's definitely going to be a comparative advantage versus AI and other people.

Great. Well I'm going to pivot to maybe some more personal thoughts or personal creativity thoughts before then going to a more quick fire round and rounding up. So you were also Cheese Lord, captain of Warwick's Overwatch team. So, yes. Why Overwatch? Why not Valorant? And what do you learn from being in competitive video games and being a captain?

Is there anything we could learn apart from the fact that it seems to be fun or maybe stressful?

Alex: Fun and stressful and very rewarding. Valorant hadn't come out, up until that point, but I really don't like Valorant. I really dislike games that require you to stand still while you have to shoot.

It's just a very, there's something about me that's no, why am I standing still? I want to be jiggling left and right. What's the, where's the fun in that? I quite enjoy games with movement. And so that's why I guess Overwatch drew me and I had to be, it was again one of those things where a friend would be you have to play this game.

You would love it. You have to play this game. I ignored them for so long. They eventually bought me the game just so I'd play it and I was oh, I love this game. On like the esports side ka there's like this whole like video games and being good at like competition teaches you a lot about starting in a domain, being really shit at a domain. Starting off and being like bronze or silver or gold and slowly you'll kind of like platinum and then diamond and masters and Grandmasters and maybe you'll now like top 500, you say I am one of the top 500 people in my country, in my region. And you have this very clear reward signal and that I think you can generalise out from that and be ah, I can like get better at things.

There's also a lot around it like team competition and being able to. So I think what's really nice about university esports is the fact that you play with what hand you're given, right? You have a bunch of students that show up. You have to find the best that you can get, and then you get like a freaking Roadhog one-trick, and you get a Symmetra one-trick, and you're like, 'What the fuck am I going to do with this?' And you make it work. And I think that we were very successful. We went back to back years. And what made us successful was playing to these strengths and being a really weird team that was very okay with the fact that we are not playing perfectly. We wouldn't be world champions, but we can be good enough to beat every other student team by leaning into these weird niches.

And I think that in games and in life, if I'm, if I dare to philosophise, briefly, like the people haven't explored the space of ideas nearly enough and haven't sort of tapped into the market's not efficient. They haven't tapped into like all the alpha and how far you can take an idea and how far you can stretch and optimise something. So have you just tried winning?

Ben: Yeah. It's amazing that I'm going to loop together so many of our thoughts with that because leaning into your team is essentially leaning into your comparative advantage. If you've got some oddball technique, which I, that's they're the best at two things.

They can't do anything else, but you're going to have to lean into that. So that's really interesting. And I only discovered a few years ago that Elon Musk, for instance, still plays a load of video games. I was seeing him play the recent Diablo game, which isn't even that complicated game. And then I don't, there was something else, which I thought was really fascinating.

And I do think generally I've, I've got a bit old, so in my youth, the first-person shooter was Doom came on. It was like the first thing within that and it seemed so incredible, but it's gone down a little bit. But parents still, I think, fear too much about children in gaming because they are learning an amazing amount of things, particularly if they're just something on like Minecraft that they're doing all of this stuff.

Yeah. We haven't pushed the frontier of this. So, I was listening to a philosopher who was making some very, leaps of faith arguments around what can speedrunning games teach you. Mm-hmm. Because you're losing all of these. I never, I'm, you are obviously we would know, but people who speed run these Mario games or these quite complicated games where.

A standard person would take a standard, really good gamer should take days to play through these like hundreds of hours and they cut it down to four hours using these like crazy methods of which we're definitely not on the frontier of what all of that. So I think that's all really fascinating.

So, I mean, maybe putting it together, what, any games that you would, you, like playing now or you would say, oh, if you, if you've never really thought about video games, this is, something that maybe you should, you should trial. And maybe while you're thinking about that, because I think games is another aspect where we don't have to be that worried about AI.

I mean, AI [is] kind of solved chess and go, or in the sense that they are now much better at chess and go than the very best human. And chess is at an all time high in terms of people playing. I mean, people didn't play that much go, but I'm sure AI is much better. I mean, obviously it can control other, other things.

If you had an AI bot it would be better at the shooting game. So that's not why we're going to play shooting games. But anyway, any games on your mind at the moment or anything we can learn.

Alex: A few different directions. It feels more like a puzzle person. Like another thing I put in a variant of Sudokus in my free time because I don't do enough maths-y logic-style stuff.

So I just like to sit and I play my Sudokus. They're very satisfying. There's this YouTube channel called Cracking the Cryptic. They blew up in the pandemic. There's a game called Blue Prince, which is like a puzzle game, if you like puzzles at all. It's an, it's a phenomenal game. I'd recommend it.

I think as I've got less time, older and I can't, I don't have time to be good at muscle memory or grind away. I'll play more strategy games on my phone or whatever. My vice is Clash Royale, but I would not recommend that there's a game called Super Auto Pets, which is an auto battler.

It's a bit like chess. I still think Overwatch is fun as like a competitive game. I think that there are games like Civ VII or like Age of Empires. I can't play those games anymore because, you know, I stopped playing them and I recently picked up Civ again. I played it for a day. I was oh, I'd love this game.

Why haven't I played this? And then after like 14 hours of sitting in my chair, I realised why I don't play that game anymore.

Ben: Yeah, more addictive than anything else. That's a bit dangerous. Yeah. I, in general, there's I think there's a lot you can explore whether you wanna explore like the pure one-v-one nature of there is no outside force that I can blame for this.

Alex: This is either my skill difference or your skill difference. Versus like the team based games where it is like, you enter with a suboptimal hand and it's, 'How do you play this suboptimal hand?' And lean into the comparative advantages, like you were saying.

Ben: Yeah. That's all great.

So maybe thinking about your own personal creativity. So you wrote this 2031 with a team of, maybe it's about eight of you. I can't quite remember the count eight in total.

Alex: Yeah.

Ben: So, and

Alex: Many reviewers and many people behind the scenes supporting.

Ben: So do you write, so there's no correct answer to this at all, but are you a morning writer, an evening writer?

Do you write in bursts, do you think in the shower or in a coffee shop? Or do you think best through a conversation? Do you feel like you have to write it all down? Do you write long hand? Do you write straight onto the computer? Do you even voice type? How? Yeah, I'm thinking about what makes you productive or creative and, how you think about your own processes.

Alex: So I definitely enjoy a long ramble to Claude or like put Wispr Flow up. It's like working in an office. I'm able to do this less. It's quite annoying. But I usually like being able to ramble about a difficult topic for like 15 minutes to Claude and then have it chug away and process that and think through.

I've made big progress on difficult problems before doing that. So big fan of that. I'm someone and that's

Ben: Because Claude is prepared to listen to you more than a natural person or can also digest what you actually said in a more legible form back to you, which probably an ordinary human can't.

Alex: Many things. One, you're just able to provide so much more, and richer context.

Ben: Yeah.

Alex: Like the amount of context you can provide 15 minutes spoken to Claude is and it's like

Ben: Days.

Alex: Yeah. An hour. Yeah. An hour of typing at least. And you wouldn't spend an hour typing your prompt.

Maybe it would. So first context is just like so much better second, yeah. Through the process of talking. You know, you talking is a version of thinking. It's like prompting is a version of thinking. So it's more like a rubber ducky or a thought partner. And you're able to iterate on the thoughts.

While I'll sometimes talk through a problem or and, through the process of talking through it, I'll end up with a skeleton in my head. But the process of writing itself I was actually on a writing retreat recently in Barcelona. I sort of have close fresh experience.

It's laborious and painful for me. It's excruciating. Maybe it's because I get distracted all the time, but like,

Ben: And it's not just being in Basel. Too boring. Yeah. I'm just joking. Sorry. Basel, Swiss people.

Alex: No, that's really funny. I was in Barcelona, not Basel.

Ben: Oh, okay. All right. Oh, that Barcelona, you can't, you can't blame for being unfun except that the vibes I get is that they don't want any more tourists coming in, so, yeah.

Alex: Yes.

Ben: So definitely. Sorry Basel and sorry Barcelona. But anyway,

Alex: Beautiful architecture as well. But, there is, it is useful, like the pain is useful, both in terms of informing: is this actually a tweet, not a blog post. But also in terms of why is it painful? Like what is the idea that I'm trying to articulate that's like struggling to be, born.

And. I think I'm, the one thing stuck with me was there's like this curve of like enthusiasm about an idea. And you got to start writing about it at a very specific point on the curve. Because if you start too late, you're going to be fall off the curve. But if you start too early, like you haven't had the process.

So being able, like if you have the flexibility to clear time, you're like, 'At this point in the curve, I'm going to write about it now.'. Otherwise you ends up in like draft jail. Yeah, but the writing retreat was great. I showed up to it thinking I was going to write about Europe and AI and ended up writing about my feelings.

So yeah.

Ben: That's great. I like your sense of that curve. It's a little bit similar when I do playwriting in some respect, which is if you show it or try and edit it too early, you definitely kill it. But also if it's too late, sometimes it's bored, like you said. Well we might touch on the end about feelings about what we might think an ordinary Tuesday might look like or what the future might hold. But we'll do maybe a little section of overrated, underrated, and then finish with a Mm-hmm. Couple of questions. So, you can go overrated, underrated, you can even go correctly rated. You can give a little thought on it. You also don't have to. We can, we can pass. So we're going to go overrated, underrated recursive self-improvement,

Alex: Overrated.

Still might happen, but everyone is way too confident. I don't know how they know. You're not in the lab, you don't see what's happening. You don't know what the bottlenecks are. Have good epistemics.

Ben: Yeah, that seems fair. I think a little bit of it's happening, but way, no, over, like I would not put it over 50% at all.

Like probably 5% or, something like that. Great. Universal basic income. UBI overrated or underrated?

Alex: Overrated. I used to be in the Yang Gang. But I think the political economy of it breaks. You know, a new politician comes in and says, I will raise it. I will raise it. I would be happy if we could magically fix it at the optimal threshold.

I mean, I don't think you can do that.

Ben: Yeah. Not protect from politicians. Also the latest small trials haven't been quite as good as we thought they were. So disappointing, but, okay. Overrated. So, AGI, although I guess we don't even know what it is, but say artificial general intelligence or I guess we could do ASI artificial super intelligence.

Either one of those, some something like that. Overrated or underrated?

Or no

Alex: Rating. I have conflicted views. Overrated in the sense that I think that there are some wrong—overrated in the way that most people talk about it. Like constrained to the set of people who talk about AGI and ASI overrated because too confident about certain ideas, too confident about like the nature of intelligence and whatnot.

Underrated in the sense that not enough people are talking about this and everyone, everyone should be talking about this if this is even remotely possible.

Ben: Yes. I think that's fair. I have the same view on expected value. The people who think about expected value think about it way too much and apply it to too many areas of their life, but an ordinary person doesn't think about it at all, and so they need to think about it a little bit more so it becomes both overrated and underrated.

Okay. The idea of taxing compute or taxing tokens underrated or overrated?

Alex: Super overrated. I think it's a terrible idea. I think we should just tax consumption and tax land in Alex's utopia we tax both these things we're fine. Maybe, we're fine ongoing debate, but I think the burden is on the tax compute people to really rebut why we can't do those other two taxes first.

And why their taxes are better than those.

Ben: Sure. Consumption taxes. Pigouvian taxes. Very classical Economics 101, right. They still argue for that. Hasn't been put in. Great. Open source AI. I guess this could also be open-weight, open tokens, but open source AI overrated, underrated.

Alex: I think that the people who boost them are overrating them. I think the reason they're doing that is because they haven't realised just how much they are at the whim of the direction of technology. Like the people who want open source to be prolific the most for that world to exist, we have to develop a bunch of technologies that improve resilience, that improve safety, that make this open stuff deployable.

And these people are the ones who are least caring about this stuff. Guys, come on.

Ben: Yeah, that's fair enough. Prediction markets overrated, underrated. I mean, I guess you can, normal markets are forms of prediction markets, but I guess overall prediction markets.

Alex: Does sports betting count?

Ben: Yes.

You could put sports betting in that. So you could do a sub, but I, this is more, I guess, political and other betting Manifold or Kalshi and things like that.

Alex: Yeah. Without the sports betting underrated. With the sports betting overrated.

Ben: Yeah. We don't need more sports betting. We have all of that.

Great. Final couple, I guess, effective altruism has a probably slightly bad rap at this very moment in time, which is where September 2026. But generally, do you think overrated or under—

Alex: Overrated. Definitely within the European continent. Like the version of EA, the sort of continental EA, which is, a specific shape of EA that I, that I think we need to move past and, build something else to replace it.

Ben: Yeah. Overrated. Great. And then last one, science fiction. I guess you could do science fiction as policy, but science fiction. Overrated or underrated?

Alex: Saying underrated because I've been, I've been reading some Harry Potter fan fiction recently and I've been enjoying them.

Ben: Yeah, it's got to be underrated, right?

Anything which makes us think more broadly. Although I do think we do need to shift as I was, we talked earlier about to the Jedi light side rather than any more dystopia. But I guess, we'll have, we have something, we've got to have our villains as well as our heroes. Great. So, we spend a lot of time imagining a future Europe, particularly a future Europe, that we should avoid.

What's the future that Alex actually wants?

Alex: Vending machine on every street corner. No, I think the future I want is one where young people can like look into their own future and be ah, this is a future that I'm excited about. This is a future that I want to live in. And for that to happen, we got to radically restructure the way that society and the social contract has been like playing out.

We've got to get a bunch of things right on technology, because this is like the most important thing that is important for young people's futures, but also government in the way that government has like stacked the book against them. And so I think about the future, like within the frame of what would an a, would an 18-year-old Alex be happy to live in like 20 years from now or 30 years from now?

And currently, no. Because I don't think 18-year-old Alex would be happy to live in like right now. And we keep going in the wrong direction then, but we're going to fix it and we're going to we can fix it and I believe we have to fix it. Sorry for vague bursting.

Ben: Yeah,

no, I'm optimistic on that as well.

Well, maybe I'll push them one. Maybe you could think about a detail. So we assume we have fixed it into, I don't know, 2050, or you can go even further if you want 2100 sometime in the future. And we can forget GDP and compute and geopolitical power. We've somehow solved that at least. To Europe's somewhat satisfaction, we've, we've got to somewhere.

What does an ordinary Tuesday in that future look like? What are two or three things that ordinary Alex, 18— So this is a really interesting dilemma because it's your future self, but you're back at 18 years old. So what does, what does that look like?

Alex: I think it doesn't look too much different from today in the sense that that Alex wants to wake up, wants to go to the bakery, wants to walk to the park, wants to see his friends there, and bump into his friends on the way to the park and the bakery and then they go to the park and they eat their croissants or whatever. And in this future Alex has received a magic like engineering shot that makes him able to consume lactose and he is able to enjoy his croissant in the park. And he feels safe. And then maybe like he's then able to hop on a really fast train and pop over to London for the day and visit all his friends there. And it's really cheap. And he's able to have that lifestyle and I think that lifestyle is just like ludicrously out of reach and then live close to where you want to work. And I think that life and your friend, that lifestyle is likely out of reach today that feels like fantasy.

Ben: Yeah, good health.

Good health. Being with your friends. I guess just on that one you mentioned in that, do you still have a meaningful job in this? Was it just a choice that people will want to have to pursue to what sort of meaningful job for them and therefore they have the opportunity space that if they want that they can pursue it?

I guess I speak to a lot of young people who feel that is diminishing. So that, you know, that is of now, there's only a small segment which have the right opportunity space to kind of do the meaningful work they do, which is kind of interestingly why medics are still quite popular and also teachers and some others.

I guess the small niche of policy, also people going into it and, things like that. But I think this is one of the bits that some of the UBI enthusiasts have also got wrong is that they don't understand that people actually jobs have always been meaningful for humans. And it might not be this artistic creative job where you sit around and paint all day or even make video games, which will be a portion of it, but it's actually something else connected with human flourishing.

But I'd be interested if you think you've still got this meaningful job and actually what your 2050 meaningful job for 18-year-old Alex would be, assume you've solved policy, although I guess policy will never be solved. Maybe you're still in policy, but you'll, you have to do something else.

Alex: Yeah, I have two, two senses of like what 18-year-old Alex wants.

It's like part of me wants to have agency over my own future and over like the collective future of society and humanity and be able to meaningfully improve and contribute to that future and make it marginally better. I don't know, send me up, on the space elevator. I want to go supervise asteroid mining Belt 12.

Another part of me really just wants to create whimsy and joy for other people and see smiles in their faces and just have lots of bits. And lots of like stupid jokes. And pull a bunch of pranks on people all day. And that also sounds quite nice. I would be miserable without either of those.

Ben: They sound like two great things to have. Great. Last couple of questions then. Anything you are working on now, current projects or future projects that you'd like people to know about?

Alex: Yeah. I don't know like when this will be ready, but I can tease it. I talked about how we, don't have ideas.

Our ideas suck. So we want to fix this. So we're, we're doing an essay competition or writing competition or something of that sort. Basically okay, you read Europe 2031 or something else. You care about this problem now you want Europe to be prepared for transformative AI, whether it's for its resilience or it's flourishing or its agency what you're going to do about it. What should we do about it? Write a letter to someone who has have like an audience or recipient and outline your idea of how we should get out of this mess. I don't know when that will go live. Probably not for a while, but you can already start thinking about your solutions.

Ben: That sounds like a good idea.

I do think you need to get a celebrity to front it. So I've seen a couple of writing ideas, this year. In fact, there's one which has Neal Stephenson and Gwern on GPU.

Alex: So there's, you've got to write a story It has to be AI-generated.

Ben: Yeah. Or no. I think

Alex: The Gwern one has to be an AI-generated piece of literature, I think.

Ben: Does it have to be AI? I thought you just had to disclose it.

Alex: I think it, I think it has to be fully AI-generated. [Ed: No, only disclosed]

Ben: Interesting. But regardless, so that had some publicity. So when you do send it out, that would be my, but I think it is quite interesting. I do think we need to incentivise the storytellers to be involved.

For sure. And so then the last question is, do you have, I guess we have given quite a lot of advice out for listeners, both the ordinary person or the person being involved in policy and you have a big call to just get involved and do more thinking on that. But any other advice that you wanna leave for listeners? It could be, what character they should choose in Overwatch or more general life or career advice or any final thoughts that you want to leave

Alex: Arq Foundation/careers we're hiring.

Ben: That's a good one.

Alex: We also have referral bonuses. So if you find someone we should hire, we'll pay, we'll give you a thousand euros.

Maybe it'll be more my generic career advice. Write, please have a Substack. Even if there are only three posts on it, I want to see the way you think. I think the agents would also appreciate seeing the way you think. I think people need to be founding new things. And you don't necessarily have to have a good idea. There are [fuders / organisations] that can bring you money. So, don't let that shy you away from founding something cool and impactful.

Ben: That's great. So do build, write in public, check out Arq Foundation. Apply if that's a good job or make your friends apply even better, and get a bounty.

And with that, Alex, thank you very much.

Alex: Thank you.

A carnival medal run

October 7, 2026 Ben Yeoh

AutismAwareness. I made a mistake. I thought we could go from Westbourne Grove to Ladbroke Grove during the carnival.

We ended up at Westbourne Grove underground station because JP insisted that we could not go to Latimer Road. Latimer Road station was the better choice in every way except that one day many moons ago he had to get off there when he didn’t want to and so he bears an almost-phobic grudge.

Press of bodies. Half the people barely swaying with a stoned-eyed gaze. The other half begrudging our need to press through. JP his hands over his ears, releasing screechy yelps to compete with the carnival blare.

We are running our own Olympics. Hugging him from behind and slowly pushing him forward, creating gaps with our screeches. The minutes seems like hours as we make it past the sound system. Now we have to wait for a bus to pass. The bus is out of place and JP must photograph this curiosity. Perhaps this is our medal. It feels like we are in a different world, playing a different game and dancing a tune few people hear.

Spectacular number of maths proofs and what that might mean

October 7, 2026 Ben Yeoh

When proofs become abundant…OpenAI's 722 maths manuscripts, the argument over what counts as progress, and what this might mean beyond mathematics

These maths results seem pretty spectacular even if not all will be proved out. This event raises questions about the human endeavour in maths which I'm pretty unsure about (Terry Tao is worth reading here). Maths specifically has a language, Lean, which can help verify results, so it doesn't necessarily read across to all other human endeavours. Still, it seems to me to be a clear indicator... worth pondering.

This is what happened, what's important, the critiques, and what it might mean. (LLM assisted)

First: what actually happened?

This week OpenAI released an extraordinary quantity of mathematics in one go: 722 manuscripts, grouped into 372 families of related results, spanning number theory, geometry, theoretical computer science, analysis, probability, mathematical physics and much else. The work was produced mainly by an unreleased internal frontier model.

OpenAI says it posed roughly 4,000 research problems to the model. The retained results used, on average, compute equivalent to about three hours of ChatGPT Pro thinking each. There are important exceptions: the quasi-Riemann work and the CM Hodge result did not follow exactly the same procedure. OpenAI has also released ten abridged reasoning summaries and machine-checkable Lean formalizations for many of the papers.

The first thing to resist is the headline 'AI solved 722 open problems'. The 722 are manuscripts, not 722 independent discoveries. A family can contain a main theorem, a companion paper, consequences or a different proof. And the release deliberately contains work at different stages of verification. OpenAI itself says some unformalized results could have issues.

Even after applying that discount, the list is startling. Several of the claimed results concern questions that would normally deserve their own major announcement. Here they arrive as entries in a catalogue.

I am not going to pretend I can referee any of the deep proofs. What one can do already is separate three questions that are too easily collapsed into one. Is the stated result mathematically important? Is there a machine-checked formal proof of the central claim? And has the human mathematical community actually understood, stress-tested and accepted it? Those are different thresholds.

The findings that look most important

My provisional ranking is below. 'Importance' is the significance the result would have if it survives in essentially its advertised form. The last column describes the public checking I can see at the time of writing. Lean is powerful evidence, but it is not the same thing as expert community acceptance. For the unformalized blockbusters I would keep a large discount until specialists have gone through the papers.

Here’s a list:

Rank / Finding What it says / why it matters

Importance / Evidence today

Quasi-Riemann: zero-free half-plane Re(s) > 7/8

For the zeta function and all Dirichlet L-functions, no zeros in a fixed strip to the right of 7/8. This is qualitatively stronger than the classical zero-free regions that narrow with height.

5/5

Lean formalisation; zeta theorem independently replayed through Lean and a second Rust kernel. Human expert digestion still early.

Hilbert's tenth problem over Q

Claims there is no algorithm that can decide whether an arbitrary integer-coefficient polynomial has a rational solution. A famous open problem in logic and number theory.

5/5

Preprint claim; no central Lean formalisation located in the release catalogue. Needs serious expert scrutiny.

Rational Hodge conjecture for CM abelian varieties

Claims the Hodge conjecture in every codimension for all complex CM abelian varieties, with major Tate-conjecture consequences. A very substantial piece of a Millennium-problem landscape.

5/5

Preprint claim; produced by an exceptional workflow. No central Lean proof located in the catalogue.

Unique Games Conjecture

Would settle a central problem in theoretical computer science and pin down optimal hardness thresholds for many approximation problems, including Max-Cut.

5/5

Lean formalisation of the central gap reduction and several consequences. Independent expert review is only beginning.

Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer in low Selmer corank / density-one twists

Claims the full BSD leading-term formula in coranks 0 and 1 and, combined with another result, full BSD for a density-one set of quadratic twists of every elliptic curve over Q.

5/5

Headline manuscripts; I would treat this as unconfirmed pending specialist review.

Mahler conjectures

Sharp lower bounds for the volume product of a convex body and its polar, with equality cases. One of the central long-standing problems of convex geometry.

4.5/5

Lean formalisation covers the symmetric and general geometric inequalities and equality cases.

Free group factor isomorphism problem

Claims all interpolated free group factors with parameters greater than 1, including infinity, are isomorphic. A major operator-algebra problem.

4.5/5

Lean formalisation of the main isomorphism statement.

Matrix multiplication exponent <= 9/4

Pushes the asymptotic exponent for complex matrix multiplication to 2.25, a conspicuous improvement in one of algorithms' most famous quantitative races.

4.5/5

Lean formalisation of the 9/4 bound and related rectangular bounds.

Kadison's similarity conjecture

Settles a problem dating to the 1950s about bounded homomorphisms of C*-algebras and similarity to *-homomorphisms.

4.5/5

Lean formalisation of the central theorem and supporting uniform estimates.

Global solutions for 3-D relativistic Vlasov-Maxwell

Claims global existence and uniqueness for the one-species system for broad smooth data, without smallness or symmetry assumptions. A major nonlinear PDE / mathematical-physics result.

4.5/5

Lean formalisation of the global classical solution statement.

Banach's simple Lebesgue-spectrum problem

Constructs a smooth volume-preserving diffeomorphism of the three-torus with simple Lebesgue spectrum on the full mean-zero L2 space.

4/5

Lean formalisation of the central construction statement.

The irrationality exponent of pi is exactly 2

Shows pi cannot be approximated unusually well by rational numbers in the asymptotic sense measured by irrationality exponent. A long-standing Diophantine approximation problem.

4/5

Lean formalisation of the exact exponent-2 statement.

Catalan's constant is irrational

Settles the irrationality of the classical constant G = 1 - 1/9 + 1/25 - ... , a question going back to the nineteenth century.

4/5

Lean formalisation of the headline irrationality theorem.

The Riemann result is a useful case study

The Riemann hypothesis itself remains unsolved. It predicts that every non-trivial zero of the Riemann zeta function lies on the line Re(s) = 1/2. OpenAI's theorem puts a zero-free boundary at 7/8. That is much weaker than 1/2, and it would be silly to say the Riemann hypothesis is now a quarter solved. Mathematics does not work like a progress bar.

The reason mathematicians care is more structural. For more than a century, unconditional zero-free regions could be pushed slightly left of 1, but the safe strip becomes thinner as one moves higher. A fixed line strictly below 1 had remained out of reach. The OpenAI formalisation says 7/8 works uniformly for every Dirichlet L-function, as well as for zeta itself. It also gives a uniform logarithmic exclusion region for Landau-Siegel zeros.

This is one of the strongest parts of the release because the formal theorem matches the interesting headline closely. There is already an independent technical re-run: the zeta proof was compiled through Lean's kernel and then through an independently written Rust kernel called nanoda. Both accepted it. The proof closure runs to almost half a million lines of OpenAI modules.

There is a caveat worth keeping in view. That external check was carried out by Claude Code on one person's machine. It verified the formal artefact; it did not amount to a roomful of analytic number theorists reading the paper, finding the core idea and saying, yes, this changes the field. We have unusually strong evidence that a precise theorem has been formally derived. We are still at the start of understanding what happened mathematically.

Why Lean matters so much here

Maths has an advantage that most intellectual work does not have. A proof can, in principle, be translated into a formal language where every logical step is checked by a small trusted kernel. Lean is one of the leading systems for doing this.

That changes the economics of AI-generated work. A language model can hallucinate. A second language model can fail to notice the hallucination. A Lean kernel has a much narrower job: does this exact formal statement follow from these exact definitions and accepted axioms? If it does, the machine accepts the proof. If it does not, compilation fails.

This gives maths a plausible architecture for abundance: a high-volume generator on one side and a rigorous filter on the other. Terry Tao has used the image of a firehose that needs a filter. Mathematics is unusually well placed to build one.

Still, Lean does not settle everything people care about. It checks the statement you formalised. A famous conjecture can be subtly weakened in translation. Hypotheses can be stronger than advertised. The formal theorem may cover only one part of a natural-language paper. Formal correctness says nothing about novelty, importance, proper attribution, or whether a human can see the idea.

So I would put the verification ladder roughly like this: a natural-language AI manuscript is a candidate result; a matching Lean proof is much stronger; independent reproduction is stronger again; expert mathematical digestion remains another step. The top OpenAI results currently sit at different places on that ladder.

Why many mathematicians are unhappy

The interesting reaction has not been a simple defence of human jobs. A lot of the strongest critics accept that the capability is real. Their question is what happens to mathematics when proofs become much easier to produce than to understand.

1. A verification and attention debt

Seven hundred papers can be generated much faster than seven hundred papers can be responsibly checked. That creates an asymmetry. OpenAI gets the headline; the mathematical community inherits months or years of unpaid validation work.

The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence (AGMAI), an independent group hosted at the Institute for Advanced Study, described the release as an important event and then immediately added that publication was only the beginning. The work still has to be assessed, understood and incorporated into mathematical knowledge. That process cannot be automated away merely by making the PDF public.

There is also a practical curation problem. Which ten of the 372 families deserve a specialist's week? Which are incremental? Which accidentally rediscover something? Which contain a subtle mismatch between the paper and the formal statement? An abundance of candidate knowledge creates a new shortage of expert attention.

2. Tao: generation, verification and digestion

Terry Tao's framework is the most useful one I have found. He separates mathematical progress into generation, verification and digestion. Generation finds a proof. Verification establishes that it is correct. Digestion turns the proof into something the community understands: the key lemma, the reusable technique, the clean example, the connection to another field, eventually the version a graduate student can learn.

Historically these stages moved at roughly human speed. If it took six months to crack a problem, spending another month writing it properly was a manageable extra cost. AI can compress the first stage from months to hours while exposition may still take weeks. The ratio changes dramatically. Tao calls the resulting problem 'proof indigestion'. Each individual researcher can become more productive while the average quality of the total literature deteriorates, because raw output grows faster than careful explanation.

This is a subtle point. A correct theorem is still a correct theorem. Yet mathematics is more than a database of true statements. The proof has value because it gives people new mental equipment. If nobody understands the equipment, some of the value stays locked inside the artefact.

3. Famous problems were landmarks, training grounds and incentives

In September, a declaration initially signed by 25 Fields Medallists — including Tao, Peter Scholze, James Maynard, Martin Hairer, Maryna Viazovska, Manjul Bhargava and Pierre Deligne — argued that famous open problems have functioned as 'landmarks and lighthouses'. They give communities something hard to push against. The failed attempts generate techniques, conjectures, collaborations and trained mathematicians.

A benchmark culture can Goodhart that system. If AI companies optimise directly for the count and prestige of famous problems solved, the old proxy starts to break. A deep theorem used to be reasonably good evidence that deep thinking had happened around it. That relationship may no longer hold in the same way.

Tao pushes the thought further. Good open problems are, in one sense, a scarce educational resource. Once a machine publishes the solution, a young mathematician can still study the problem, but the untouched landscape has changed. Knowing that a long proof exists, and roughly where it goes, affects how you explore. Industrially sweeping through a curated list of open problems may therefore consume something that the field used to use for training and discovery.

4. Failure itself contains information

The Unique Games story makes this concrete. Dor Minzer and his students Yumou Fei and Shuo Wang had spent years on a closely related problem. When rumours spread that OpenAI had solved Unique Games, they rushed a 95-page manuscript online so that their contribution would not be swallowed by the coming announcement.

Minzer's description of their human process is telling. Several approaches failed. Those failures taught them which structures mattered and eventually helped them assemble a proof. His worry is that a system which jumps straight to the successful path removes much of that learning loop. A human who sees only the final route may know where the summit is without learning the mountain.

That does not make the AI proof worse as a proof. It may make the research process less fertile for the humans around it.

5. Credit, priority and provenance become messy

Mathematics has always built aggressively on earlier mathematics. The difference now is speed and opacity. A model has absorbed an enormous literature and can combine ideas across it. It may also finish a research programme that humans have pushed close to completion. Working out where the genuinely new idea enters can be hard even for specialists.

The worry is not merely philosophical. Careers depend on priority. In this release Daniel Litt noticed that one advertised result was a special case of a conjecture of his and followed from stronger work already under way by one of his students. The result can still be useful; it shows why '372 discoveries' is too clean a description.

The earlier Navier-Stokes episode also left some mathematicians angry about how AI labs handled credit and unpublished human work. Whatever one thinks of the disputed details, the episode increased the demand for careful prior-art searches, prompt provenance and slower claims about novelty.

6. Proprietary models create a two-tier science

AGMAI's sharpest recommendation came before this release: frontier labs should stop testing advanced mathematical problems on proprietary internal models that the mathematical community cannot access. Their worry is straightforward. The lab can explore thousands of questions with an instrument more capable than anything available in a university department. The people who formulated the questions then watch the answers arrive from outside their field's normal institutions.

OpenAI says it is working towards a responsible release of the model. That matters. A world where every serious mathematician has access to this kind of collaborator feels very different from a world where a few companies privately harvest the frontier and publish the outputs.

Access is also about compute. Even if the model becomes public, the ability to run thousands of long research attempts may be concentrated in rich institutions. Mathematics has historically been unusually cheap at the point of research: paper, pencil, library, blackboard. AI could make the frontier materially more capital-intensive.

7. Publication norms have not caught up

The ordinary norms of mathematics assume that authors understand their papers, can defend them in seminars, know the nearby literature and take responsibility for errors. An AI lab can now publish a proof that nobody at the lab fully understands in that traditional sense.

AGMAI therefore asked labs to do more than upload files: search for prior art, improve exposition, reveal the model, prompts and compute, document failed attempts, formalise where possible, use independent scholarly repositories, and fund the human work of understanding what has been released. It also asked that mathematical results not be treated primarily as model marketing.

OpenAI has moved part way. It released the papers, revision histories, substantial Lean material, ten reasoning summaries, aggregate compute information and a promise to fund workshops and programmes around understanding the results. The model remains closed, the full attempt history is absent, and GitHub is controlled by OpenAI rather than an independent mathematical repository. The current release feels more transparent than a press release and still some distance from a mature scientific publication system.

8. What happens to the next generation?

This may be the most important long-run concern. A mathematics PhD is simultaneously research and training. You learn judgement by being stuck, trying bad ideas, reading around them, proving small lemmas, explaining your work and discovering that your beautiful shortcut is wrong.

If a model can answer every well-specified technical question faster than the student, the temptation to skip those stages will be enormous. Some of that is healthy cognitive offloading. Nobody wants students to spend a career doing arithmetic that a calculator handles perfectly. The harder question is where the productive struggle ends and deskilling begins.

There is also an incentive problem. Why spend ten years becoming a world expert in a narrow area if a proprietary model may solve the flagship problem next Tuesday? Quanta's account of the Unique Games race captures the psychological effect rather well. Humans sleep, eat, teach and have moods. A trillion-dollar company does not have those constraints.

The positive case is also strong

There is a risk of romanticising scarcity. Maths was slow because it was hard. Some of that slowness was productive; some was simply slowness.

If an open question has resisted us for 80 years and a machine supplies a correct proof tomorrow, humanity knows something tomorrow that it did not know today. Cheap discovery does not make the discovery fake.

Tim Gowers, another Fields Medallist and a member of AGMAI, deliberately did not sign the September declaration. He agrees that mathematics faces a crisis and worries about credit, institutions and training. He is less persuaded that understanding must always be the primary goal with problem-solving as merely a proxy. Mathematics has long had different cultures: theory builders, problem solvers and people somewhere in between.

Gowers also makes a simple quantitative point. Suppose AI produces 1,000 important results and humans only manage to digest 200 of them. If the old world would have produced and digested 100, we are still ahead. There will be more undigested mathematics and more digested mathematics. That could be a pretty good bargain.

There is another upside: machines can search across fields whose literatures have become too large for any human. A result buried in ergodic theory may be exactly the missing tool in number theory. A model with broad recall and endless patience can test combinations no individual would have time to try.

Jeremy Avigad's optimistic version is that humans move up a level. Let the machine fill in more of the technical terrain. We ask harder questions, build better concepts, find simpler proofs, decide what is beautiful and important, and explore spaces that become visible only after today's frontier has moved.

Formalisation could also enable a genuinely new collaborative scale. Large proofs can be split into modules. Contributions can come from humans, AI systems, students and specialists who do not know one another personally, with formal checking supplying a common trust layer. Tao has called this direction 'big mathematics'. It looks less like a solitary genius at a blackboard and more like a large engineering or software project — with mathematicians still setting architecture and meaning.

And there is an appealing possibility that status itself shifts. If raw proof generation becomes cheap, perhaps more credit moves to the person who asks the best question, extracts the reusable idea, connects two fields, writes the explanation everyone remembers, or builds the formal library that lets everybody else work faster. Mathematics could end up valuing taste more explicitly.

What might this mean beyond maths?

This is where I would be careful and also where I think the release matters most.

Mathematics is unusually favourable territory for AI. The literature is formal and cumulative. Many answers are crisp. Most importantly, proof assistants provide a route to mechanical verification. There is no Lean kernel for 'this company has a durable moat', 'this patient will benefit from this treatment', 'this policy will increase social welfare' or 'this play is good'.

So maths probably moves earlier than many other areas. It may also give a cleaner signal of capability because we can separate fluent nonsense from verified output more effectively than elsewhere.

One comforting story about AI has been that routine work will automate while highly creative, abstract work requiring years of specialist training will remain human territory. Research mathematics is a fairly brutal test of that story. These systems are now producing candidate original research across unrelated fields, including work on problems that generations of exceptionally able humans knew about and could not settle.

If even a modest fraction of the strongest results survive, creativity and abstraction no longer look like reliable technological moats around human work.

The more interesting economic point may be that the bottleneck moves. For most of modern research, producing the new result was scarce. Peer review, publication and interpretation were arranged around that scarcity. If candidate discoveries become abundant, other things rise in value: verification, attention, experimental confirmation, explanation, taste, choice of problem, and trust.

That pattern should travel beyond maths even when formal proof does not. Software has tests and formal verification. Chips can be simulated. Chemistry and biology have assays, though often expensive ones. AI research systems will move fastest in fields where proposed answers can be rejected cheaply and reliably.

Fields with weak verification may actually face a nastier version of the problem. A firehose of bad mathematical proofs can eventually meet Lean. A firehose of plausible investment theses, policy arguments or psychological explanations can sound excellent and remain wrong for years.

That makes the maths story both reassuring and unsettling. Reassuring because we can see a route to rigorous checking. Unsettling because the underlying generator appears able to operate at a level of abstraction we were recently inclined to treat as distinctly human.

What happens to mathematicians?

Chess did not end after Deep Blue. People still run despite cars. Photography did not eliminate painting. These analogies are useful and incomplete. Professional chess is different from chess in 1996, and few people are paid to perform arithmetic by hand.

People will continue doing mathematics because understanding something beautiful is enjoyable. I am quite confident about that. The profession of research mathematician is a different question.

Universities and governments fund research partly because researchers produce new knowledge. If frontier models become cheaper and materially better at theorem production, funders will eventually notice. The strongest case for maintaining human mathematics may become less about beating the machines at their own benchmark and more about preserving a population capable of understanding, directing and challenging them.

That requires a pipeline. You cannot preserve expert judgement by keeping a handful of senior people around to read AI output. School pupils, undergraduates, PhDs and postdocs have to practise. They need hard problems and room to fail. We may end up having to protect some forms of inefficient human learning precisely because the efficient machine alternative is so good.

This sounds odd only because we are used to the process of producing mathematics and the process of producing mathematicians being the same activity. AI may separate them.

Where I might land, for now

A day after the release, certainty would be silly. Some manuscripts will probably fail. Some will turn out to be known in stronger form. Some formal statements will prove narrower than casual headlines suggest. Several of the most spectacular claims still lack the kind of verification that would make me comfortable calling them established mathematics.

The reverse error is also possible: concentrating so much on the process controversy that we miss the capability signal. The quasi-Riemann theorem has a matching Lean formalisation and has already survived a second-kernel replay. Unique Games, Mahler, the free-group-factor result, Kadison, Vlasov-Maxwell, matrix multiplication and several other striking claims have formal artefacts tied to their central statements. If even five or ten major results ultimately stand cleanly, this is an extraordinary research output.

And the number I keep returning to is not 722. It is roughly 4,000 questions in; hundreds of significant candidate result families out; average retained-result inference measured in hours. That is a different research production function.

Tao may be right that mathematics needs to defend the slow work of digestion, failure and human formation. Gowers may be right that abundance is still a good bargain and, in any case, hard to stop once these models diffuse. I suspect both views contain part of the answer.

The sensible response is probably to change what we reward. If proofs become abundant, reward understanding. If candidate discoveries become cheap, reward judgement. If machines can search the known landscape faster than us, reward the people who make better maps and ask better questions. Make the labs pay some of the cost of verification and exposition. Give researchers access to the tools.

I would also resist the urge to make this a morality play about humans versus AI. The more interesting question is what human intellectual life looks like when one of its hardest outputs becomes abundant.

Maths lets us see that question early because it has a language for checking the answer.

Worth pondering.

Sources and further reading

Note: this article reflects the public evidence available at the time of writing. The mathematical status of individual claims may change quickly as specialists review, reproduce, correct or reject them. The article was LLM assisted.

Social, Medical and "administrative" models on autism and disability

September 29, 2026 Ben Yeoh

Introduction: I had some musings (with LLMs) on the issues/strengths of medical and social models of disability, in particular autism. And thinking about, my own “model” which I called bureaucratic model, but might be better called administrative… and then synthesising this into interactive models which are discussed briefly… and some links end for further reading.

My question: For understanding autism, what does each model explain well, what does it obscure, and what framework best guides how we treat autistic people and design support?

My answer is that both the medical and social models capture something important, and either becomes misleading when treated as the whole story. And to ignore the administrative state is to ignore a whole other layer in terms of what is happening.

For autism in particular, one could use something close to an interactional model: disability arises from the interaction between a person's underlying characteristics, the demands of their environment and the support available to them.

This is also broadly where the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning has ended up. The WHO explicitly treats disability as arising from interactions between a health condition and personal and environmental factors rather than locating it entirely either within the individual or within society.

I would then add two further perspectives.

Neurodiversity asks a normative question: even where someone is different, should that difference actually be regarded as something that needs correcting?

And what I will call the administrative or bureaucratic model asks a different question again: how does a continuous, complicated set of human needs become legible to a government that has to decide who receives resources?

Together these give a more complete picture of autism than any one model alone.

2. The medical model

In a simple form:

A person has an impairment or disorder that produces limitations. The appropriate response is diagnosis, treatment, rehabilitation, education, care or some other intervention directed substantially at the individual.

Applied to autism, the causal story might look like:

neurodevelopmental differences → difficulties with communication, sensory processing, executive function, adaptive functioning, etc. → disability

Consider an autistic person who cannot reliably communicate pain, experiences severe sensory distress, cannot safely navigate roads alone, has major sleep problems, cannot manage money or food preparation independently, or requires substantial help with everyday living.

Those difficulties cannot plausibly all be explained away as discrimination or poor social design.

The medical model therefore has important strengths. It takes impairment seriously. It allows us to investigate causes and mechanisms. It legitimises treatment of problems that cause suffering. And it recognises the enormous heterogeneity contained within the autism diagnosis.

This is particularly important for autistic people with intellectual disability, epilepsy, severe communication difficulties or very high support needs.

A theory of autism that leaves little conceptual room for intrinsic impairment risks marginalising precisely the people who need the greatest amount of support.

But the medical model can also (and does also) go badly wrong.

It can turn difference into pathology merely because it departs from the statistical norm. It can make normalisation the objective rather than wellbeing. And it can locate every problem inside the autistic person even when the environment is generating much of the difficulty.

A child who cannot tolerate a noisy, chaotic classroom might be described as having poor emotional regulation.

But perhaps the classroom is an extraordinarily hostile sensory environment for that child.

Teaching the child to tolerate it better is one possible intervention. Changing the classroom is another.

And the fact that a behaviour is recognisably autistic does not itself tell us whether changing it would improve the person's life.

I tend to ask the question, can we bring the world closer to the person as an intervention? And also, how much of the challenge is situations in the world / society / environment rather than the person?

The classic social-model distinction is between impairment and disability.

Very roughly:

People have bodily or cognitive differences. Society disables them when environments, institutions and expectations are designed around people without those differences.

The influential British social-model tradition emerged from disability activism in the 1970s, particularly the work of the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation.

Applied to autism:

autistic characteristics + poorly matched social environment → disability

This produces a very different set of questions.

Instead of asking:

“How do we make this autistic child behave more normally?”

you might ask:

“What is it about this school, communication system or expectation that makes functioning unnecessarily difficult?”

That shift is genuinely powerful.

An autistic person may struggle enormously with an unstructured verbal meeting but function exceptionally well when information is written down beforehand.

Someone may be unable to work effectively in an open-plan office but perform extremely well remotely.

Someone who communicates unusually may have considerably more understanding than observers infer from their speech.

The social model consequently highlights reasonable adjustments, accessible environments, alternative communication, predictable routines, sensory accommodations, anti-discrimination and institutional redesign.

It also guards against an important conceptual mistake:

unusual ≠ undesirable ≠ pathological

Some (arguably many? can we argue all? ) autistic characteristics are simply differences.

Intense interests, preference for routine, unusual communication styles or reduced interest in conventional social rituals need not themselves be things that ought to be “fixed”.

4. Where the social model runs into trouble with autism

The criticism:

Some disability is intrinsic to impairment, rather than wholly socially produced.

Imagine the most autism-friendly society realistically possible.

There would still be autistic people who could not independently cross a road safely, communicate urgent medical needs, regulate overwhelming sensory experiences, manage money, prepare food or live without substantial assistance.

Changing society could reduce their disability enormously.

It would not abolish it.

This matters because an excessively strong version of the social model can inadvertently erase people with the greatest support needs.

Tom Shakespeare's influential criticism of the strong social model makes a related point: the sharp conceptual separation between bodily impairment and socially produced disability becomes difficult to maintain once we recognise that impairment itself can restrict people's lives. The social model remains an extremely useful corrective to medicalisation without necessarily being a complete causal account of disability.

Autism also creates a second problem for a purely environmental explanation: people's accommodation needs can conflict.

One autistic person requires silence; another constantly seeks sensory stimulation.

One needs rigid predictability; another finds routines oppressive.

One communicates best through writing; another cannot read.

There therefore isn't necessarily an “autism-friendly environment” analogous to installing a wheelchair ramp.

Autism involves multiple dimensions, and accommodations have to be individualised.

Where the medical model runs into trouble

The corresponding mistake is to treat observed difficulty as though it directly measures intrinsic impairment.

Conceptually:

Observed disability = individual characteristics × environmental demands

rather than simply:

Observed disability = severity of autism

The multiplication sign is metaphorical, but the interaction is the important point.

Suppose an autistic teenager functions badly in school but substantially better at home with one-to-one teaching, written instructions, predictable routines and breaks.

A crude medical interpretation might be:

severe autism causes educational dysfunction

A crude social interpretation might be:

conventional schooling creates the disability

The evidence may support something closer to:

There is a genuine neurodevelopmental difference whose disabling consequences vary dramatically depending upon the environment.

That is a much more useful causal model.

It also explains why the same person can appear profoundly impaired in one setting and strikingly capable in another.

This distinction between underlying capacity and realised performance is explicitly present in the WHO's ICF framework: what someone can do and what they actually do in their current environment are related but distinct outcomes.

6. Neurodiversity adds something different

I would distinguish the social model from neurodiversity, although they overlap.

Neurodiversity introduces an additional normative proposition:

variation in human cognition is not automatically pathology.

That seems broadly right.

But there are stronger and weaker versions.

The weaker claim seems strong to me:

Autistic traits should not be treated as deficits merely because they are atypical.

The stronger claim:

Autism is simply a difference rather than a disability or disorder

is much harder to sustain across the entire autistic population but could have a claim amongst some.

Autism is unusually heterogeneous.

Someone living independently, working successfully and mainly encountering difficulty because social conventions favour neurotypical communication has a very different relationship with autism from someone requiring lifelong continuous assistance.

Trying to force both experiences into either “disease” or “difference” throws information away.

Robert Chapman's work provides one of the more sophisticated philosophical versions of the neurodiversity argument. Rather than simply denying impairment, he argues for an ecological conception of mental functioning in which individual abilities have to be understood partly in relation to the wider social environment in which they operate.

A useful recent overview by Steven Kapp similarly argues that the neurodiversity movement and the medical model need not be simple opposites. In practice, neurodiversity proponents can support individual interventions that improve quality of life while rejecting normalisation as an end in itself.

That strikes me as a much stronger position than either “everything autistic should be treated” or “nothing autistic should be treated”.

7. A better causal model

Perhaps I would suggest an interaction model.

Intrinsic characteristics

Neurodevelopment, cognition, sensory processing, language, executive function, motor abilities, emotional regulation, intellectual ability and co-occurring conditions.

↓

Environment

Noise, complexity, predictability, communication style, social expectations, educational structure, employment practices and physical environment.

↓

Person-environment interaction

The demands placed upon this particular person relative to their capacities.

↓

Assistance and adaptation

Human support, assistive technology, education, treatment, environmental adjustments and social care.

↓

Outcomes

Independence, distress, relationships, learning, employment, safety, wellbeing and flourishing.

This gives us a much better practical question than:

“Is autism a disability or merely a difference?”

Ask instead:

“What is preventing this particular person from flourishing, and which lever is best changed?”

Sometimes the answer is the environment.

Sometimes it is skills or treatment.

Sometimes it is ongoing human support.

Sometimes there is nothing that needs changing at all.

Usually it is some combination.

8. An economic way of seeing the problem

There is also a useful resource-allocation perspective.

Suppose someone has difficulty doing X.

There are broadly three margins of adjustment:

Person → Environment → Assistance

You can invest resources in:

changing the person's capabilities;
changing the environment;
providing another person or technology to bridge the gap.

The best combination depends on the particular difficulty.

If £500 of assistive technology removes a communication barrier, insisting on years of behavioural training could be both expensive and unnecessarily burdensome.

Conversely, if learning a particular skill substantially increases someone's future autonomy and can be learnt without excessive distress, saying “society should simply accommodate this” could deprive them of something valuable.

And sometimes neither adaptation is sufficient.

Society simply needs to provide care.

That last category gets insufficient attention in some versions of the social model.

Dependence on other humans is not necessarily a policy failure. (see my podcast conversation with disability activist David Ruebain on interdependence here)

Some people genuinely need substantial lifelong assistance.

The relevant comparison is not independence versus dependence as moral categories. It is which arrangement produces the best achievable life given the person's characteristics, preferences and resources.

9. The administrative or “bureaucratic” model

There is then another layer, particularly important in welfare states such as the UK.

Disability is not only a biological condition or a person-environment interaction.

It also becomes an administrative status.

Governments have finite budgets for education, social care, disability benefits, healthcare, supported housing and specialist services.

Human need, however, is continuous and multidimensional.

Government decisions often cannot be.

At some point an institution must decide:

eligible / not eligible

benefit / no benefit

additional educational provision / ordinary provision

funding / no funding

So the administrative causal chain looks something like:

underlying characteristics → functional difficulty → evidence and classification → administrative eligibility → resources

This is not primarily a theory of what disability is.

It is a theory of how governments make disability legible enough to allocate resources.

10. Why labels become valuable

A diagnosis therefore acquires an administrative function as well as a clinical one.

Government cannot directly observe someone's sensory overload, executive dysfunction, communication difficulties or need for supervision.

It has a problem of asymmetric information.

The person and family know far more about the difficulties than the state does.

But a state allocating scarce resources cannot simply accept every claim without evidence.

It therefore uses proxies:

diagnoses;
professional assessments;
functional tests;
reports;
administrative descriptors;
eligibility thresholds.

Diagnosis can therefore act partly as a signal.

It provides a shared vocabulary and external validation that the difficulty is persistent and recognisable.

Economically, one way of interpreting this is that diagnosis can reduce the transaction costs of demonstrating need.

That does not mean diagnosis is necessarily a formal prerequisite for support (at least in theory….)

But:

“A recognised diagnosis may make it easier to demonstrate and legitimise need within bureaucratic systems”

And many people report that without a diagnosis it is very hard to get support…

11. Bureaucracy changes behaviour

Once categories determine access to resources, people and institutions inevitably respond to those categories.

This generates several predictable effects.

Threshold effects. Two people with almost identical underlying needs may receive substantially different resources because one falls just above an eligibility boundary and the other just below.

Incentives to seek diagnosis. If a diagnosis helps obtain appropriate educational provision, accommodations or benefits, the private value of obtaining a diagnosis rises. This does not imply the diagnosis is false; it changes the incentive to identify and document an existing condition.

Professional gatekeeping. Clinicians, educational psychologists and other professionals become important partly because their assessments convert private experiences into evidence that institutions recognise.

Strategic presentation. Systems organised around demonstrating impairment naturally encourage applicants to explain what they cannot do rather than what they can.

Socioeconomic inequality. Families with more time, knowledge, money and confidence may be better able to commission assessments, obtain reports, understand bureaucratic language and appeal adverse decisions.

Path dependence. Once support is conditional upon demonstrating continuing impairment, families may reasonably worry that evidence of improvement could threaten the support partly responsible for that improvement.

None of this requires fraud or bad faith.

It follows from institutional incentives. There is a large literature on public choice theory and other literature that accounts for this… (basically: Once rules attach resources to categories, rational actors respond to the rules as well as to the underlying need the rules are trying to measure.) And these impact both the state actors and the non-state actors…

12. The paradox of the deficit narrative

This creates an uncomfortable tension between the social and administrative models.

The social model says:

Do not define disabled people by their deficits. Look at capabilities and change unnecessary environmental barriers.

The bureaucracy often says:

Explain precisely what this person cannot do, demonstrate that it is serious and persistent, and provide evidence. Otherwise we cannot justify allocating resources.

So families can find themselves having to construct what might be called an administrative deficit narrative.

To obtain the resources that allow someone to flourish, you first have to document everything that prevents them from flourishing.

This can feel dehumanising.

But it is important not to caricature the state either.

There is a genuine allocation problem.

Resources are finite. Need is not directly observable. Eligibility creates incentives. Some form of assessment is unavoidable.

The administrative model points to a more general phenomenon.

Human variation is continuous. Bureaucracy needs categories.

Governments cannot allocate £7,842.37 of educational support because someone's underlying level of need happens to sit at exactly 7.84237 on some objective scale.

There is no such perfect scale.

Instead institutions construct categories, measurements and thresholds.

Once those measurements determine resources, the measurements themselves acquire value.

This has something of a Goodhart's-law character.

A diagnosis begins partly as a way of describing or identifying need.

Once diagnosis or documented impairment becomes useful in accessing scarce resources, individuals and institutions have additional incentives to obtain and preserve the category.

It means the observed system is an equilibrium produced jointly by:

human characteristics + social environments + administrative rules + behavioural responses to those rules.

That is a richer explanation than either “the disability is entirely inside the person” or “society creates the disability”.

How to synthesise?

Weight the different models according to the question being asked. So you might get…

Why does this person process the world differently?
Medical and developmental science.

Why are they struggling so much in this particular setting?
Social and interactional models.

Should this unusual behaviour actually be changed?
Neurodiversity, wellbeing and the person's own preferences.

What adjustments should a school or employer make?
Primarily the social model.

Could medication, therapy, education or skills training improve life?
Medical and developmental approaches.

How much ongoing support does this person require?
Functional and interactional assessment.

Why do diagnostic categories sometimes become so important to families?
Administrative incentives and resource allocation.

What should ultimately be optimised?
Flourishing, wellbeing, autonomy, relationships, participation and safety.

So overall synthesis is:

Autism is a real neurodevelopmental difference that can produce intrinsic impairments, but whether and how severely those impairments become disabling depends substantially on the person's environment and available support. Society then overlays an administrative system that determines which of those needs become recognised and resourced.

The normative principle I would put above all of this is:

The objective should not be normality. It should be flourishing.

That resolves quite a lot.

If an autistic person's harmless repetitive behaviour makes other people uncomfortable, there is little reason to train it away merely to make them look normal.

If inability to communicate pain is causing suffering, improving communication is enormously valuable.

If school is producing distress because it demands a particular form of social interaction that isn't necessary for learning, change the school environment.

If learning a skill would genuinely expand someone's future choices, help them acquire it.

If someone cannot safely navigate independently despite every sensible environmental adjustment, recognise the impairment and provide support rather than pretending society alone created the disability.

And if someone requires lifelong human assistance, that does not make their life less valuable or represent a failure of inclusion.

(while easy to say, m and harder to put in practice)

For autism, therefore:

The medical model is descriptively necessary but normatively insufficient.

The social model is morally and institutionally corrective but descriptively incomplete.

Neurodiversity rightly challenges the assumption that difference itself requires correction, but cannot make severe impairment disappear by changing the language used to describe it.

The administrative model explains how genuine needs become categories, entitlements and resources, while also creating its own incentives and distortions.

A defensible position is consequently pluralist:

accept difference, accommodate difference, treat suffering where treatment helps, teach useful capabilities where worthwhile, provide technology or human assistance where it bridges limitations, and provide care where substantial limitations remain.

The relevant outcome….

how good a life they can actually have.

Fuchsia Dunlop: Five Tastes, Chinese Flavour and the Art of Balance

September 4, 2026 Ben Yeoh

Food writer Fuchsia Dunlop returns to the podcast to discuss her new book, Five Tastes: The Magic of Flavour in the Chinese Kitchen, and what Chinese cooking can teach us about flavour, texture, balance and learning to trust our senses.

Fuchsia explains the Chinese idea of wèi (味), taste or flavour, and why the classical five tastes (sweet, sour, salty, bitter and pungent) are better understood as a cultural framework than a literal limit. We explore běnwèi (本味), the essential flavour of an ingredient; xiānwèi (鲜味), the fresh savoury quality we now call umami; and xiāngwèi (香味), fragrance and aroma. We also discuss how Chinese cooks use ginger, spring onion, Shaoxing wine and other seasonings to correct unwanted flavours while allowing good ingredients to speak for themselves.

A central idea is that balance often happens across an entire meal, not within every dish. A fiercely málà (麻辣), numbing-and-hot dish might sit alongside plain rice, vegetables and a light qīngdàn (清淡) broth. These quieter foods are not failed attempts at excitement: their role is to soothe, cleanse the palate and make the meal work as a whole. Fuchsia also explains Sichuanese guàiwèi (怪味), “strange flavour”, where multiple strong seasonings are combined so harmoniously that none dominates.

We move from taste to texture: slippery, crisp, chewy, glutinous and gelatinous pleasures that are often more central to Chinese eating than Western diners realise. Fuchsia recommends wood ear mushrooms as an accessible introduction, and jellyfish for the more adventurous.

The conversation also becomes practical: how to build a Chinese meal from what looks good at the market, why not to overcrowd a wok, the usefulness of cold dishes and flexible sauces, and how Chinese flavours can travel into roast potatoes, roast chicken and even a French-style vinaigrette. Fuchsia talks about fermented tofu, three decades of food research and around 170–180 notebooks of observations, recipes and conversations gathered across China.

We discuss why becoming a better cook means moving beyond timers and measurements towards smell, sight, sound and taste — knowing when garlic has lost its raw edge, or when hot oil is ready because ginger and spring onion immediately hiss.

We finish with overrated or underrated: hot pot, steaming, microwaves, air fryers and tasting menus; and with Fuchsia’s argument that Chinese cooking can be immensely sophisticated without being intimidating.

Key takeaways

Balance belongs to the meal. Strong, spicy dishes make more sense alongside plain rice, vegetables, soups and other quieter foods.
Good cooking starts with the ingredient. Běnwèi is about understanding and respecting its natural flavour, then deciding whether to reveal, correct or transform it.
Chinese flavour goes far beyond “the five tastes”. Umami, fragrance, numbness, texture and compound flavours all form part of a much richer culinary vocabulary.
Texture deserves as much attention as taste. Crisp, slippery, chewy, soft and gelatinous foods create contrast and prevent the palate becoming bored.
Recipes are training wheels for judgement. Smell, listen, look and taste rather than relying only on exact timings.
Chinese cooking can be very simple. A few useful seasonings and techniques open up a large repertoire of fast, healthy everyday food.

Fuchsia Dunlop in her own words

“They’re not meant to be stimulating and exciting. They’re meant to soothe you.”

On the purpose of qīngdàn, light and understated dishes within a balanced Chinese meal.

“Chinese cuisine is hugely complex and sophisticated… but it has… simple dishes that you can knock up in five minutes after work.”

On why people should not be intimidated by cooking Chinese food at home.

Listen: Spotify ~ Apple ~ Listen notes
Watch: YouTube (audio only this one)

00:00 Welcome Fuchsia Dunlop
00:30 Five Tastes explained
03:53 Balance and layered flavour
06:44 Correcting off flavours
08:43 Fragrance and Maillard
11:34 Umami and xiānwèi
15:08 Harmony in sauces
18:05 Seasoning and salt
20:21 Showcase or transform
23:40 Qīngdàn and light broths
30:15 Texture as variety
34:31 Wood ear textures
35:29 Jellyfish crunch
36:29 Menu planning basics
38:33 Cold dishes and sauces
40:10 Roasts with Chinese flavours
41:37 Creating new recipes
43:16 Fermented tofu magic
45:14 Food, culture and field notes
49:55 Cooking by the senses
53:16 Overrated / underrated
59:37 Final advice and future projects

Transcript (AI-assited so mistakes possible)

Ben: Hey, everybody. I'm delighted to welcome Fuchsia Dunlop back to the podcast. Fuchsia is one of the finest food writers working today, and she's one of the most perceptive and engaging writers on Chinese food. Her new book is Five Tastes: The Magic of Flavour in the Chinese Kitchen, and I always come away from her work having learned something new about culture, history, and how to eat and cook better.

Fuchsia, welcome back.

Fuchsia: Thank you, Ben. It's lovely to be back.

Ben: When a Western cook says taste and a Chinese cook says wei, taste, are they actually talking about the same thing? Or within the Chinese idea, are we containing a whole philosophy of relationship, balance, and transformation that perhaps the English misses?

Fuchsia: I suppose it is slightly different because in one sense wei is talking about taste or flavour equivalent to the one that we talk about in English, except that the Chinese have five flavours or five tastes, whereas we have four. Chinese adding xin or la meaning pungent or spicy, to the, the Western sort of accepted four.

And beyond that, wei is a metaphor for all the flavours of the world and for the ple- like, if you say someone chases after the five flavours, the five tastes you mean that they're obsessed with good food. So flavour or taste becomes a metaphor for the pleasures of eating, of gastronomy, and also it ties in with the Chinese concepts of five, tying in across the cosmos.

So you have five directions, adding center to north, south, east, west. You have five colours, five phases or elements. So there's this whole system of fives. So I think there is a sort of metaphorical aspect which is perhaps deeper than it is in the Western four tastes.

Ben: So the five Chinese tastes are sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and pungent.

We can argue about that translation. And your book soon adds umami, numbness, fragrance, lightness, essential flavour, and we can go on. And then in Western cooking, as you hinted, in the sensory sciences we tend to talk about salt, sweet, bitter, sour, and we've added umami and sometimes mention of fat and acid.

And I think you alluded to this. So do you still think five tastes is the first right initial organizing idea because of the metaphorical way of thinking about this, that actually five is still quite a useful concept? Or is that perhaps a little bit misleading because it is a little bit more narrow and doesn't take into account some of the relational aspects of Chinese flavour?

Fuchsia: I don't think it's meant to be taken literally, really. So for example in the Western five tastes, now umami is largely considered to be an additional one because scientists have found that there are sensors in our brains and on our tongues that actually respond to umami in the same way that they respond to sweet and sour.

So it's always going to be a sort of classical, metaphorical, cultural concept of taste. But as you already mentioned there are various other flavour and taste terms in Chinese culinary arts and in Chinese gastronomy which are incredibly useful, both in the appreciation of food and to the home cook.

So I think it's not really a question about whether five tastes are limiting or not. It's an expression of the beauty of the Chinese arts of flavour for me, and that's why I chose it as the title of my book

Ben: Excellent. And if we go one more level deeper then on Chinese flavour, I had the impression from your writing within it that perhaps it's a little bit more relational than sort of English cooking concepts, in sense you have one taste correcting, one taste complementing.

When I read English or Western cookbooks, they tend to be a little bit more ingredient-centered. Do you think this is correct in terms of thinking about relational balance within flavour?

Fuchsia: I think that Chinese cooking is very technical and very thoughtful, and the Chinese have a very serious culinary culture in the way that the French do, with a whole vocabulary to express different processes and different concepts.

And I think that they are more abundant in these culinary concepts than we are perhaps in English because, the English, we borrow most of our culinary terms from French anyway. So in Chinese, yes, I would say that the idea of balance is at the heart of China- not just Chinese food, but also Chinese culture.

Yin and yang, and a good Chinese menu is always balanced, and there's an idea that if you have some dishes which are strongly flavoured, you should have some that are qingdan, which means very light and delicate. And then also as [Lin Yutang], that great interpreter of Chinese culture for the West in the early 20th century said, "Chinese cuisine is all about the art of mixture."

So typically you cut ingredients into small pieces and you combine them. So you don't have a steak. You cut up your piece of meat and you stir-fry it with a vegetable, perhaps with another ingredient. And so I suppose in flavour terms as well it's often about combinations of flavours. And I think particularly in Sichuan because Sichuan is the sort of home of flavour in China, you can argue, because the whole essence of Chinese cuisine is not just hot and spicy like the stereotype.

It's [fu kou wei], layered flavours. [Bai cai bai wei], 100 dishes, 100 different flavours. So in Sichuan, where I originally learned to cook in China you have all these combinations of flavours, not just sweet and sour, which of course is a sort of emblem of Chinese cuisine all over the world, but strange flavour, fish fragrant, all these different combinations which are meant to be balanced to create an exciting taste and, and in contrast and harmony with other dishes.

And as you said earlier, apart from the idea of actual- the flavours that you add to foods with seasonings. So sweet and sour, classic example of that. There are also all kinds of concepts for just the basics of handling ingredients and what ingredients have to offer. So the most fundamental perhaps is ben wei, the root taste or essential taste, and that's the sort of inherent natural taste of an ingredient.

And the job of the cook in Chinese conception is to honor the ben wei, the root taste of an ingredient, and to use the culinary arts to if there's anything slightly unpleasant about it, to correct that, and then to showcase this essential flavour. And so the idea of correcting flavours is a concept that you find not only in Chinese cuisine, but in many cuisines acro- across Asia and even the Arab world, that meaty and fishy ingredients sometimes have a sort of slightly unpleasant edge to their flavours.

And there are all these terms in China like [xing we]i, fishy taste [yi wei], off taste, some ... [shan wei], a muttony taste, which go back more than 2,000 years in the Chinese kitchen. So the first thing you do with your ingredient is you think, "Are there any of these slightly off tastes, and what do I do to subdue them?"

And so this is why when you're cooking meat in Chinese cooking, you often add salt and Shaoxing wine, which is to refine away those unpleasant meaty tastes. Similar with crushed ginger and spring onion or scallion. And then with quite heavy meats like- sheep meat, which has this shan wei, this muttony taste, which is traditionally not prized, for the Chinese.

You often find sort of things like garlic and coriander and spices like star anise and Chinese cardamom, and all these are also about correcting these off tastes. And then the other one, I think you mentioned [xiang wei], fragrance. This is a beautiful Chinese culinary term, and I think the character originated from the character for millet.

But it's also associated with incense, and it's associated with the scent of sacrifices and burning things to create wonderful scents to send up to the spirits. And the Chinese use the word fragrant very widely in cooking, and it's often used to describe what Western cooks might call Maillard reaction.

So when you're toasting and browning things and creating these wonderful smells, Chinese would describe that as xiang wei. And some ingredients are particularly xiang, like duck, roast duck, that wonderful aroma. And also toasty things like scorched spring onion whites, that's very xiang. A lot of these concepts, they're not, they're not the five essential tastes, but they're all about how you use flavour in cooking.

And I think that for a foreigner to understand them, it's a way to up your cooking game, and also more deeply appreciate not only Chinese food, but any kind of food

Ben: Yes, my mom tends to insist on slices of ginger with fish because she'll talk about fishiness in her dialect.

And then perhaps even more extreme, when I've cooked my mom's liver and do it in, say, a little bit more English or Western styles, which tend to be plainer and get to the essence of liver, she essentially complains. She says, "There's this liver pungent, off flavour," and says "Why haven't you done anything with that?"

And she would cook it in a very different way, much more layered and flavoured and say that's how you should cook liver and your offal, and you've got this completely wrong," which I think's really interesting.

Fuchsia: Yeah, 'cause with offal dishes in China, you find more Shaoxing wine and salt, and this idea of really cleaning up and refining the flavours.

So yeah. And I always say to people, if you want to, if you're not Chinese and you haven't come across these concepts and you want to understand what it's about, if you make a pork bone stock or broth, try making it with and without a bit of crushed ginger and spring onion.

And the one with the ginger and spring onion, the flavour is just brighter and cleaner and more beautiful. And also, if you blanch the bones first, which is the other thing that the Chinese cook would do to refine away these meaty tastes. It really is l- night and day.

Ben: My mom can always tell if I have or haven't used ginger in those types of broths.

It's ki- it's really, it's amazing 'cause one of my sons doesn't actually quite like ginger, so sometimes I do or don't. And my mom can always tell. She says "Oh, you've forgotten the ginger." So it's for those sorts of palates really obvious. I was wondering then, out of these Chinese flavour concepts, there's a couple of ideas I have.

What do you think is one of the hardest to translate into English or into the kind of Western style without losing something? And would you wanna highlight, perhaps the clusters of flavour concepts that someone is, coming into this should perhaps first understand? So we have the one with the pork broth, which I think's a really great idea.

But yeah, maybe the one which is hardest to translate and what are the ones we should think about first in terms of getting into this?

Fuchsia: Funnily enough, I think the hardest to translate is [xian wei], which is the Chinese for umami. And obviously now umami is becoming familiar, but we use the Japanese word because we don't have an equivalent.

And so I think that in the past, before umami gained currency as a word for these lovely savory tastes of nature, people just used savory, which was very inadequate because it's a beautiful, almost poetic term. In Chinese, the term xian wei originally meant fresh and then came to mean umami, but it still has a connotation of freshness and the beauty of natural ingredients.

And the Chinese character is made up of the sign for fish and the sign for sheep. Originally it was just three fish. But so it's full of cultural meaning. And I think, umami is now completely embedded in the language of people who care about food in the West, but it's a bit of a shame that we don't recognize that the Chinese also have their own term, which is [xian wei].

So I think to grasp this as a concept is very useful. So again, your second question, because Chinese cooks talk all the timit for some time, possibly adding a bit of ginger, spring onion.

You might add a bit of cured ham, Jinhua ham, which the function is to magnify the [ ], the umami flavours. You might add that it's very useful when you have pale-tasting ingredients like some kind...

…pak choi, Chinese cabbage, winter melon. Trying to think of Western equivalents. But just very lightly flavoured ingredients. If you cook them with something umami, you make them very delicious. So Chinese cooks will often cook vegetables in lard traditionally, particularly in the countryside, or use a little bit of stock to give them umami tastes.

And the same function is performed by little bits of cured pork, which is something that you also find in Italian pasta dishes and Spanish dishes, the use of a little bit of cured pork for umami flavours. Dried shrimps, dried seafood. And if you're vegetarian, you can bring out umami flavours with things like soy sauce, some kind of preserved and pickled vegetables.

Soybeans, if you sprout them and boil them, you get lovely umami tastes. So I think that this, this sort of [ ], umami, is both the most difficult to translate and also one of the most useful in practical terms.

Ben: And what then distinguishes, do you think, a harmonious combination of flavours in a sauce or a dish, rather than a dish or a sauce which just has lots of ingredients thrown together and it somehow doesn't balance?

Is there a kind of concept or way of thinking about that?

Fuchsia: It's difficult to be very precise about it because it's about instinct and the taste of the cook really. But the best example is the delicious Sichuanese guaiwei sauce, strange flavour sauce, which I've included in the book as a sauce for all kinds of things.

Green beans is the main recipe, but also roasted vegetables, cold meats, all kinds of things. And the guaiwei sauce, the whole, the reason it has the name strange flavour is because it uses most of the key seasonings in the Sichuanese pantry all together. But they're meant to be blended so harmoniously, so nothing stands out individually and it doesn't jar.

So you've got the nuttiness of sesame paste, the fragrance of sesame oil, sugar sweetness, vinegar sourness and soy sauce for umami, but the whole point is that it's balanced.

But the other thing is that the concept of harmony also can be present across the whole menu. So if you have something that's very fiercely spicy, like a dish that's [mala] , numbing and hot with chili and Sichuan pepper, that on its own, I don't think you'd really describe that as harmonious.

But if that's one dish in the menu and you also have some, something that's a bit sweet and sour maybe, or a fish fragrant dish with a little bit of spiciness and a very gentle soup, then across the meal you can have a kind of harmony. And it's back to the idea that Chinese food is all about balance, and good Chinese food should not only be really delicious, but it should make you feel very [shifu], very comfortable and well.

Ben: We might come back to this idea that the individual dish might not need to be so balanced, but actually across the meal or across the whole setting that we could have a, a balance wi- within that. But I was quite intrigued as to your makeup of some of these sauces. So we could do it through a dish with a fragrant or strange flavour or maybe even in making a kind of English meat gravy.

But when something tastes wrong or tastes off, and maybe we'll also come to this, this is the experience of the cook when it comes through. Do you think the answer is usually to add another seasoning or to take something away or to start again? Or how should the home cook start thinking about, "Oh, this doesn't taste quite right," how are we balancing it within what we're cooking?

Fuchsia: It depends what it is. I think the key thing is salt. And that's the most important seasoning in a way, and almost every savory dish has salt in it, apart from some very, very gentle soups which might not be salted. And salting is tricky in the sense that it's partly a matter of personal taste and what you're used to.

But it's very much just about the judgment of the cook, and there's no rule on that. But of course it's better to go, you can always add salt later, but you can't really take it away. So if you oversalt a dish, then you have to either add more ingredients to dilute it, it becomes very complicated.

So the thing is to always add ingredients very gingerly. With something like a strange flavour sauce, it's a bit different because you could just, if you made that too salty, you could just dilute it with more sesame paste and a little water. So that's not a problem. And I actually find it really fun making a strange flavour sauce because it's like playing an or- directing an orchestra, conducting an orchestra, and then you just say "shall I bring up a little of this and a little of that?"

And it's just, it can be quite fun and different every time. I think I always en- encourage people to use their palates and use their tongues and use their noses and just judge what tastes good. And I should say that, as a recipe writer, I test the recipes very rigorously.

If I give you a sauce, I will have measured every teaspoon of soy sauce and vinegar, and I hope that means that you'll come up with something that is balanced and tasty. But my hope, at home when I'm cooking, I don't, for most of them, I don't use measurements. And anyway, it's quite fun if you're a home cook to make it, once you've got a grasp of the principles, to make it a little different every time.

Yeah.

Ben: Yeah, for sure. My mom never uses measurements like that, and so she always said, she has a phrase for it "Sometimes you just have to fing-fing, fang-fang," is what she literally tells me. I said, "That's actually not that helpful at this stage in the dish." But that's what we have to do. What I thought of one of the most important judgments in the book, or one of the ideas which comes through, is when to reveal an ingredient's essential flavour, and we've talked about this, I think, the Ben way, or when you transform it through a blended flavour.

And how do you think you might decide which approach to take? 'Cause you can showcase the natural ingredients, you can remove or rebalance these unnatural notes. And I think we mentioned, we can even create new composed flavourings through seasonings and different blendings. And I was interested in your ideas as to when you nudge one to the other, and they come out very clearly in the recipes which one is that.

But I'd be interested in your thoughts on those different ways of judging how to do flavour.

Fuchsia: The traditional Chinese view would be that if you have a perfect ingredient that is just lovely, and in season, and very fresh, that you don't want to mess about with it too much, and the job of the cook is just to show it off.

So that is why Cantonese seafood dishes, for example, are often very understated. So you might have a beautiful fresh fish, and you just steam it with a bit of ginger and maybe spring onion to harmonize the flavour, and finish it with a sizzle of hot oil, little bit of soy sauce. But you really don't need a heavy flavour.

And so I think the snobbish Chinese view is that people who add lots of flavours are very lowbrow. And so Sichuanese cooking has traditionally since it's been spicy, known as a spicy cuisine has been seen as popular but not posh and elevated. So the hearty, spicy cuisines, the traditional Chinese view is that those are the cuisines of people who didn't have very fine ingredients, and they would be eating- wanting something tasty to go with their staple food, maybe rice in the south.

And so they would add all these chilies and spicy seasonings to xiafan to make the rice go down. Whereas rich people and privileged people would have very fine ingredients, and they wouldn't need all these seasonings. And it's quite interesting that not only does that concept carry across cuisines, like the most prestigious cuisines are Cantonese and the cuisine of the Jiangnan region around Shanghai, which are very understated.

But even within regions, so in Sichuan, the working class, docker's food of Chongqing is crazy hot and spicy, and the more elegant food of the old Mandarin officials, for example, understated. So you have things like ji douhua, chicken tofu, which is chicken breast that's whi- pulverized to a sort of puree and then made into set like a kind

So it resembles tofu in a clear broth. That's a classic Sichuan dish, and there's no chili at all. So I would s- I'm not ... I think that good and elegant Sichuanese cooking can combine good ingredients and spicy seasonings as well. But in general the finer the ingredient, the less you want to do with it.

Ben: And in the book, or in your writings in general, you defend this quiet food, this kind of Qingdan food that is clear, gentle, and understated. And do you think in the very best meals then you need dishes or it's great to have dishes which might seem unexciting if eaten on their own? And it's interesting that within English or European traditions you have less of that.

Although, I do remember going to an Italian restaurant and at the end being served a very plain, but really to my mind, delicious consomme, which is the closest I had to the kind of Chinese tradition of that. So what do you think about this sort of gentle and understated food and where is that placed within a meal or within cooking traditions?

Fuchsia: Yeah. I think it's not just, I think you mentioned just then, very elevated meals. But it's not, even just everyday meals in China will normally include say in Sichuan, you might have spicy dishes. Almost always you have a very plain, under-seasoned light broth to cleanse the palate and to balance the spicy dishes.

You almost always have plain white rice, not even salted. So I think that this is, it's a bit of a it's a way in which Westerners often misunderstand Chinese food that a typical bunch of Westerners go to a Chinese restaurant and they just order the exciting dishes, and they order egg fried rice or fried noodles to go with the food, and they order they are much less likely to order, a very plain stir-fried vegetable or a light broth.

And this is a sort of misunderstanding of the whole purpose and the whole principle of Chinese cooking, which again, is balance and health and making you feel good. And so in a good Chinese menu, you always have understated dishes. And yeah, you can say they're boring, but that's the whole point.

They're not meant to be stimulating and exciting. They're meant to soothe you. They're meant to calm you. They're meant to balance the other dishes. And that's one of the lessons that I think it took me quite, quite a long time to learn with Chinese food, 'cause in the beginning, I always gravitated to the more exciting dishes on their own.

But now I just love the way a well-balanced Chinese menu makes you feel. And part of that is soup. I found a much greater appreciation and appetite for soup, and I love soup, and I want to have soup all the time. And that's something which is, you don't really find you don't really find in Western cooking, but almost every Chinese meal has a soup.

Even if you go to a street stall and get a plate of fried noodles for your lunch, there'll probably be a bowl of broth to cleanse the palate. If you have some noodles in northern China, you may be offered some mientang, noodle water. The broth from cooking the noodles to smooth the throat and cleanse the palate, and that's taken unseasoned.

Yeah, so I do. I think the way we translate qingdan into English is usually bland or insipid, which are pejorative words in English. They just sound uninteresting. But actually qingdan is a beautiful term. It's lovely. It just makes me feel calm thinking about it.

Ben: Yeah, we should rethink that, and that's to our earlier point that you're, we can balance something across the whole meal and the whole menu, and if you have a whole meal or just dishes which are just explosive, then you've lost the balance.

You've lost some of the interesting things and the tension. And I was reading this anecdote you had within the book or your writing around the, I think maybe it's the only place that I know, but in China, even in something which is a fast food place like a KFC, you might go in there for your greasy, "Oh my God, this is the only thing I can have at 2:00 AM fried chicken."

But they might also offer you some basic broth, maybe made from a stock cube or something, but something to balance that even within something like a KFC meal. So do you have that across many fast food places in China, and is essentially that part of this concept within balance within that?

Fuchsia: Yeah. Yeah, so there's actually, in my book, there's a, a, a sort of a homemade version of this rather lovely vegetable soup they have in KFC, and its freeze-dried vegetables in a light broth with wisps of egg.

And it is very lovely, and it makes a KFC meal in China much more healthy and balanced than it is in the West. But I think in, in, in many fast food restaurants you have the option of getting a set menu. And fast food, by fast food I don't just mean American fast food, food options in airports and stations and things and school dinners, and you often get a tray with a few different dishes, but almost always part of that will be a light soup. And I think this is an aspect of Chinese cuisine which is not reflected in Chinese restaurants in the West, because the sort of old-school British and American Chinese food, all the soups were what the Chinese would call a geng, like a thick stew soup.

So things like sweet corn and chicken, sweet corn and crabs, sour and hot soup, which are much more substantial and much more like dishes than a light broth. And those beautiful light broths, every Cantonese meal practically has a light broth, but they very rarely feature on Cantonese restaurant menus in the West, I think because your average Westerner probably thinks it's a bit boring and a bit watery.

Why should I spend money on a clear liquid, instead of some exciting fried chicken?

Ben: Yes, we don't quite get it, and it's the same for those vegetable dishes. There's fewer. In fact, in some of the Cantonese restaurants I go to, you often have to ask what's fresh vegetable and things?"

It's not necessarily put on the menu high up, because it's perhaps a little bit expensive for the Western view of, "Oh, these just should be a side dish on the thing," without understanding actually it's a really important part of the menu or the balanced dish, and I would put soups in that category as well I was thinking also the book concentrates a lot on flavour, but it does mention something that we spoke about last time as well, which is the importance of flavour and texture.

So I was interested in that. Are there any particular flavours that you think also naturally belong and pair with texture? And o- obviously, in the West, we are, I would say, a little bit behind in thinking about texture compared to the mouth feel that we think about in Asia. So how should we think about composing flavour and texture and, maybe some of the recipes or things that we could try out in the book as a kind of easy way into texture or texture and flavour?

Fuchsia: Yeah. I think so. In Chinese terms, a good meal is all about variety. So you typically have several separate dishes at a Chinese meal, and the whole point is that they're varied. So if you have one dish where you have, say, meat that's stewed in dark soy sauce, a red braised dish, then you might have something else that's bright green or pale in color.

So colors, flavours you want to have bold flavours and light flavours. You also want to have food that looks visually varied. So if you have one ingredient that's cut into chunks, maybe another will be cut into slivers or shreds. So there are all these different dimensions of variety, and the more variety in your menu, the lovelier the meal, and your palate doesn't get bored as you roam from dish to dish, and you try this, a bit of that, and a b- bit of this.

And texture is another dimension of that. It's partly related to how things are cut. So the feeling of a strandy, shredded ingredient in your mouth is different from biting into a cube of meat, for example. But also, there are h- there's a whole world of textures. And texture is an essential part of the appreciation of food for most Chinese people.

And the range of textures people enjoy is much wider than it is for most Westerners. So there are all these sorts of glutinous, sticky, huggy textures, very much enjoyed. Slithery, crisp, slimy, gristly. So here we're going into words which don't sound very nice in English, but denote textures that Chinese people love eating.

But all these add to the variety. So if you have a meal, for example, in which everything is soft and mushy in texture, that's not as exciting as if you have something that's soft and mushy, something that's succulent and a bit juicy, and something that's crisp, and something that's slithery.

Wet and dry, different mouth feels. Yes, and I ... I always encourage people who would like to appreciate Chinese food more to just play with texture. Just try putting things in your mouth and just considering them. Put aside all your prejudices. Put a bit, start chewing a chicken's foot and using your teeth and tongue to take away the little bits of skin and cartilage, and crunch the cartilage, and just try not to make any judgment.

Just experience it in a sensory way, and I think that's the way in to realizing that texture's this whole other dimension to be explored. So yes, in terms of flavour and texture, I think slippery, crisp things like jellyfish, wood ear mushrooms, particularly lovely with sour tastes. There's a sort of briskness, refreshing briskness to them.

And then deep-fried things, particularly nice with sort of spicy tastes, numbing and hot, mala. Very good combination. And yeah, so I've given some suggestions for where texture and flavour might relate together. But I think if you want to have a go at experiencing the kind of textures that are very essential to Chinese cooking, but less for Westerners, then one ingredient I would really encourage people to try is the dried wood ear mushrooms. You can buy them in any Chinese supermarket.

You just soak them in water for a while, and then rinse and blanch them, and then you can put them into salads and stir-fries. And it's an ingredient that has virtually no flavour. It's all about the texture. But it has that quality that Chinese people love, which is that it's smooth and slippery, but a bit crisp at the same time.

I c- I think of these as edible oxymorons, contradictory textures. But it's just a mushroom. It's not some bit of offal. So I don't think most people have a problem with that. So that's a really good ingredient to try. And in the book I have a dish which I've called Italian wood ear mushroom salad because I made a version...

So n- the, there's also a version which is the typical Chinese one where you use rice vinegar, and garlic, and sesame oil, and chili. But I've done one with olive oil, and wine vinegar, and parsley which I made up for fun one day, and it was really delicious. So I put that in the book. But there again, you have the slippery texture, and the briskness of vinegar, and the sharpness of garlic, and it's quite an invigorating dish.

The other ingredient that's really fun to play around with is jellyfish. 'Cause if you haven't had jellyfish before, it sounds a bit scary and extreme. But actually jellyfish is just, it's just pure texture. It's the kind of jellyfish that you can buy in packets ready to eat in most Chinese supermarkets, it's just sheets of transparent slipperiness with a little crispness.

And there's one, one of my favorite recipes in the book is a white radish daikon salad. So delicious, so Chinese. But I often add some shredded jellyfish to that, and that just adds another lovely dimension of texture that goes very nicely with the crispness of the radish

Ben: That sounds all lovely.

So the dried mushrooms, jellyfish if you want to try textures, and pairing them with all of these flavours where something, the variety, is giving us the loveliness as well as the flavours. So putting this all together, perhaps inspired by your book or other recipe ideas that you have, say I am returning from an English farmer's market or a supermarket, say, we can decide what it is, but perhaps I have a fish or some chicken or whatever's on best special offer, and I have some classic things, tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, aubergines, mushrooms, eggs, and the like, and I have the basic Chinese store cupboard, rice, tofu or however and perhaps we're gonna cook this tonight or on the weekend.

How would you think about maybe turning some of that into a dinner for four or six people? How should we go about deciding, and then what are the kinda couple of recipes or whatever that you might suggest for me?

Fuchsia: So the first thing is that traditionally with a Chinese menu, you'll have about the same number of dishes as people.

So if you're cooking for four or six people, four or six dishes. But if that's too much, I don't think you have to be conventional about it. You could just make four dishes for six people, but scale up quantities. The important thing to remember is that don't try and scale up quantities for stir-fry dishes, 'cause the whole point is you have a sort of limited amount of ingredients that you chase around a hot wok and they get hot very fast.

And particularly with a domestic cooker, if you double up or triple up, it's not going to work. It's going to lose that heat and speed that's essential to a stir-fry. So if you want to scale up dishes, then make stews or cold dishes, which you can make as much as you like. The other thing is that with Chinese ideas, you can often make several differences.

So whereas a Western cook might put everything together in a stew and then have a salad on the side, in China you're more likely to separate ingredients and group them and then have several different dishes. But I, this is what I do every weekend. I go to the farmer's market and come back with things and think what to do with them.

So I would say I always recommend including some cold dishes because they can be sensationally different, d- sensationally delicious, and you can make them in advance, so they really lessen the load of cooking for a bunch of people. And some of them are very nice for a day or two in the fridge as well.

So we've already mentioned the strange flavour sauce, and that's one of my standbys, 'cause it's so delicious. And so the main recipe is those sorts of fresh green beans which are, when they're in season, just top and tail them, boil them, refresh them in cold water, and then when you're ready, cover them in fish fragrant sauce and some toasted sesame seeds.

Delicious. You can use the same sauce with roasted cauliflower, really nice with cold chicken, with cold noodles, all kinds of things. There's another sauce that I invented in this book which is so delicious. So it's basically a French vinaigrette, but I added some Chinese fermented tofu, which gives it this wonderful creaminess and umami depth. The main recipe in the book is a version of the French leek vinaigrette, you know, leeks.

But I also serve it just as a salad dressing with lettuce. Crazy delicious. And it's also really nice just over sliced tomatoes, in half an avocado, on practically anything. So that's another sauce, and I would just see what vegetables I've got- come back with. And then you can also do Western cooking with Chinese flavours.

So for example one of the recipes in the book is for chicken joints, which are marinated in Sichuanese chili bean paste and other spicy seasonings, and then simply roasted in an oven, which is not really a Chinese home cooking method, but very delicious, very easy to make. M- marinated in advance and roasted it.

And also, as an English person, of course, I was brought up on potatoes, and I love potatoes, and roast potatoes especially. But I've got a really delicious recipe for roast potatoes tossed with all kinds of exciting spices, a bit mala, a bit of cumin, and herbs. It was really delicious. Yeah, but I think the main thing is just decide how many dishes you want to make realistically.

Minimize stir-frying if you're cooking for a group at home. And then just, yeah, think of different sauces and what they might go with. I've put... With all the recipes, some of them, there is a main recipe, but I've put suggestions for other ingredients, and the whole purpose with this book really was to encourage people to think in terms of flavours and then to be very playful and flexible about actually how to apply them.

Ben: Yeah, you have some really wonderful ideas in that. If, and if I recall correctly, there was a, a, a potato rice type of dish that I wanted to try out, or there was one where you're mixing two starches, which I hadn't come across. And I was thinking in terms of, I, I guess this is under personal creativity, but when you think about creating a new recipe or some new ideas, how does that come about?

There's gonna be a bit of everything, but is it, an ingredient, a remembered dish, this flavour template that we have, technique, a, a curiosity, and how does it come about? And maybe you could highlight a dish or two in the book through that. I s- I seem to recall this potato rice dish, but I mean that.

Now and how do we think about starting when you're creating new recipes?

Fuchsia: Oh. I'm just someone who thinks about food all the time. So sometimes I would literally, while writing this book, I would just wake up in the morning and think, "Let's try this. Wouldn't that be great?" Sometimes it's provoked by ingredients, so going to the market and thinking, "What can I do with kohlrabi, which would be really nice?"

And there's a recipe in the book where I've done a kohlrabi salad with spring onion oil, which is a Shanghainese thing that they normally or more commonly do with a daikon white radish, but I've done it with kohlrabi. So sometimes it was just seeing what's available. And also there's a carrot salad- And carrot is used in Chinese cooking, but usually as a supplementary ingredient for its nice color.

It's rarely the main ingredient. But I've got a carrot salad there which has a spicy Szechuanese sauce, and that was actually an idea that my sister-in-law gave me because I'd made a lovely... What did I make? I made one salad, maybe with the daikon radish, for a family party, and she said, "Wouldn't this be nice with carrots?"

And so I tried it with carrot, and it was great. So yes, and sometimes it's just one ingredient that I think is incredibly underappreciated in the West is fermented tofu, right? So this is tofu that has been allowed to grow a coat of mold, and then tossed with salt and alcohol and sometimes spices, and then cured.

And it's a bit like a blue cheese. It's rather like Roquefort in its salty intensity. But it has this amazing salty, rich umami flavour and a creamy texture. And at a time when people are wanting to make more plant-based foods that satisfy the sensory requirements of people who normally eat meat, dairy fermented tofu is just this magic ingredient.

It just adds a richness, a creaminess to vegetable dishes, stir-fries and, as I mentioned, vinaigrette dressing, which is a non-conventional application. So with that, I think I was thinking a lot about the fermented tofu and what can I do with it, and I started adding it to other dishes and ingredients that I had never seen in China, but I just thought, "Let's try it and see if it works."

And it's quite fun. So this book, because some of my books have been, like I did, a Szechuanese cookbook, and that was all about really trying to faithfully reflect the way people cook in Szechuan. And I wanted to take myself out of the equation and just report on food from Sichuan. This book is more personal.

This is just having fun and experimenting.

Ben: That really comes across. And now I've remembered it. It's smothered rice with pork and potatoes, so it's not quite rice potatoes. And I think you also mentioned within it, you could, you do it, you could try pancetta as some of that lard we mentioned, and you can add fried porcini, in mushroom season, which would not be a classical Chinese ingredient, obviously an Italian ingredient.

So that really comes through. And I think another thing I really love about your writing is that your recipes and food all tend to always recall, one of your travels or a particular person and a place, but then it travels with you and to us through that into some expression of whatever you're thinking.

And I'm interested in how much of a recipe is intertwined with particular people and places and how that travels. And maybe over the years of Chinese food or thinking about food, what has perhaps changed for you, maybe not maybe the most, but changed over that time in terms of what you pay attention to or your palate or some of the influences of people in place and how much does that influence when you're thinking about recipes or the recipes that you bring to people?

Fuchsia: The whole purpose of all my work is to try to encourage readers to appreciate not only the food, but the culture, and the place, and the people who make it. And I've been lucky to have met... I've had many adventures and met many fantastic people in China, some of them very good friends, some of them just chance acquaintances who've shared a recipe with me.

And so it's very much part of my research, and it's very much part of, yeah of the recipes. When I'm in China, I just meet people all the time. I talk to them about food. I write down everything, not just recipes, but also observations, what things that people tell me. Sometimes recipes, oral recipes, explained by a taxi driver during a short journey, and sometimes I've been in the kitchen with someone, watching them cook.

But all that is part of trying to, yeah, in- introduce people to the culture as I've met it as well. And yeah, and for me, there are some recipes when I make them. I think of particular people and places, and that's part of the pleasure of cooking. And so again, in this book, it's a sort of funny mixture because some of the recipes are, directly my attempts to recreate someone, something someone showed me or fed me in China and that, you'll hear about the place or the person.

And others, I just made up i- in London. So it's a mixture. But yeah, I think in terms of my method, for many years I've been writing everything down, and I think that I learnt quite early on that the more I recorded in the field, the more I would appreciate it later. So I write everything down, and when I'm writing an article or writing a book, I have 170 or 80 notebooks full of my notes and things from 30 years of work.

And so this is all very useful. And I suppose what's changed is just that now I'm a much more experienced cook. Sometimes I taste something delicious and I don't really need someone to explain the whole method. I just need to ask one or two key questions, and then I'll be able to have a go at recreating it myself.

So yeah, and sometimes I'll just grasp what the recipe is about w- without ev- just from eating something. So I think that the process of recreating recipes... 'Cause 'cause I don't really use written recipes for my books. It's not like someone in China gives me a piece of paper with a recipe.

As you mentioned with your own mother, so many people cook intuitively, and they don't measure things. So what I do is I taste something and write down my observations about the dish, or I watch someone in their kitchen and I write down my own approximations of how much of something. And then, the process of researching the book and writing the recipes is actually trying to re-engineer the recipe in my own kitchen.

But I... it's got easier with experience.

Ben: That really comes through in your writing as well, when you've observed people in their own kitchen. 'Cause there is this, Chinese cooks talk about this art of fire and timing, and my mom always goes on and on about how you hear or how you smell or how you see something.

And I'm often, "I have to come and watch you because I can't, I'm not quite even enough experienced to do that." And I know you've been around and looked at particular techniques, and in fact, there's Chinese characters, I'm sure, which are specific to these kinds of techniques or regions which don't necessarily even translate onto that.

So I was intrigued, what should a cook, maybe starting out, or even one fully formed in the home, be thinking about how to incorporate smelling, hearing, and seeing and all of that into your practice as to that's the kind of art? And I often liken this to a carpenter.

So you can- see a carpenter's spreadsheet, and maybe you can even watch them on YouTube. But there's nothing like being with a carpenter or trying to actually make something yourself. There's this whole other gap of knowledge which just seemed to be a kind of learnt or lived experience, and I was wondering about your thoughts on the importance of that.

Fuchsia: Yeah, very important, and I always do incorporate it in my recipes. So I don't believe that it's helpful to say heat some oil, add the garlic, and cook it for 20 seconds, and then add this. Because 20 seconds, what does that mean? It depends on how thick the wok is, how hot the flame is, how much garlic you...

There are all these different variables and if you just do it for exactly 20 seconds in different conditions, you'll get a different result. It's much better to, to tell people, cook it until you can smell the garlic losing its raw edge of flavour and becoming very mellow and aromatic but not changing color.

So if you give readers s- sort of observations about what they should be looking out for and smelling, and in some cases hearing then I think that's much more useful for actually learning to judge. And of course, you get better at it with experience. But that's part of the fun and the satisfaction of cooking.

With the ear thing, I would say a classic method is when you steam a fish. A very beautiful Cantonese technique is then you steam your fish and then you strew over some very finely shredded ginger and spring onions. And then you heat some oil, and you pour it over. And what you want to do is have the oil so hot that as soon as you put a drop on the ginger and spring onions, they s- they hiss and sizzle, and a jet of steam comes up, and a lovely smell.

And if you don't heat the oil hot enough, then it just ends up feeling greasy, and the ginger and spring onions will be raw. You won't have woken up to their flavours. And so you do need to get the oil hot enough, and the only way to know that it's hot enough is to get that sizzle. And so you can either have an old scrap of spring onion and just dip it in the oil, and w- as soon as it enters, if it goes shh, then you know the oil's hot enough, you pour it over your fish.

Or you can, use a ladle to drop a few drops onto your fish, and you want that immediate violent hiss. Yeah it is part of the fun of cooking, and I do try to guide people to how they should be observing what's going on in the pot.

Ben: That reminds me of hearing someone who does a lot of deep-frying and how they can tell by the sound of the batter and how low the batter drops u- up and down what the temperature and how they do, and then which ingredient they should do for which thing because different ingredients have different things with...

And that's all done by sight, sound, and however.

Great. I thought I'd do a little section of overrated, underrated, or correctly rated, and then we'll finish up with a couple of final questions. So I was wondering, overrated, underrated, or correctly rated nowadays hot pots

Fuchsia: Overrated.

I'm not a big fan of hot pot. Hot pot is a really fun way to eat, but I just, I just think that there's a tendency to have what I call the hot pot-ification of Chinese communities abroad, because hot pot is a much easier business to do than a restaurant with wok cooking, because you just need a master broth, and you need some workers to slice up ingredients.

You don't really need cooks. While I think hot pot is great fun once in a while, I think if all Chinese restaurants turn into hot pot restaurants, that would be a terrible tragedy.

Ben: Yes. I see another hot pot restaurant in London, I'm always a little bit sad. It's like, "Oh, it could have been something else, not that, that."

Great. Steaming as a technique. Overrated, underrated?

Fuchsia: Underrated in the West. In China, it's correctly rated, 'cause everyone- Yeah ... steams everything all the time. But I think that in the West, you may think of steaming dumplings or, at best, a fish. But you can steam all kinds of things, and you can even...

I don't have a microwave, so when I want to reheat leftovers, I put them in little dishes on a sort of metal grill in my wok and steam them with a lid. Yeah. Chinese microwave. Yeah.

Ben: Yes. So w- when I was at university, which is really my age, like a long time ago, over two decades my peers just thought I was crazy to steam a fish.

But I said "I steam a fish in this throwaway wok. You can, you only need a ring." We only had two electric rings, and it cooks so quickly that it's faster than all of these other dishes that you're trying to do. By the time you've cooked your pasta and even done your sauce, I'm equal, and that.

So steaming, definitely underrated. And you take away- And also- Go on ...

Fuchsia: One other thing about steaming is that it's very clean. If you're cooking with oil, there's a certain amount of mess. Steaming is just beautifully clean. You don't make any mess at all, and it's a really lovely way of cooking fresh ingredients.

Ben: Yes, and that's another thing, 'cause you didn't set off the possible alarm if you were doing- ... that. So it was- Yes ... they would say "This is crazy." I was like, "No, this is actually really simple," dorm cooking. So it did win me a lot of friends, but initially, they thought it was very crazy to steam, steam fish.

And in those days, fish was also quite cheap. So this is over two decades ago, at least where we got it from our own farmers market. In any case you stole my next underrated, overrated but I'll still ask it anyway, which was microwaves, underrated or overrated?

Fuchsia: I haven't much experience of them, so I'm not really sure.

But I would say my limited knowledge of them, a bit overrated as a cooking item. Okay for- Yeah ... heating things up, but I really like using traditional methods for flavour.

Ben: Sure. Air fryers, overrated, underrated? Do you have an air fryer? I guess you don't have a microwave, so you probably don't have an air fryer as microwaves.

Fuchsia: No, I'm the wrong person to ask because I'm not a gadget person.

Ben: Yeah. I simply

Fuchsia: like my Chinese knife, chopping board. That's it.

Ben: Yeah. And when, I, this got, I got this from your last book, but when in domestic Chinese households, when did ovens actually start appearing? Because if you go back in history, this, steaming because if you wanted roast meats, you'd probably go around to the roast meat place rather than do it in your own home.

So I don't know whether the air fryer is just one of our sort of expressions with that. But yeah, ro- roasting in ovens was actually relatively new in domestic Chinese households.

Fuchsia: Yeah, when I was a student in China in the '90s, nobody had ovens at home. They just weren't part of the thing. You just cooked, over, over gas really.

And yeah, so I think now that baking has become a sort of lifestyle hobby thing. Yeah. And so you do have fitted kitchens now, and you have ovens, and you have people baking for fun baking Western cakes and things. Yeah. Yeah, very recent to be part of domestic cooking.

Ben: Great. And then the last one on this tasting menu, overrated or underrated?

Fuchsia: I don't think they're either overrated or underrated. I think they're food as a form of art and performance and experience, which is absolutely fantastic once in a while with an accomplished chef showing you what they can do. But it's also a sort of intensive and quite exhausting way of eating.

So it's just not normal... it would certainly be overrated for an everyday way of eating. Yeah. But for a special treat, I think tasting menus can be fabulous.

Ben: Sure. Overrated every day, underrated if you've never never been to one and you're into food.

Fuchsia: Yeah. W- when I was younger, I remember when I was privileged to have my first experience of tasting menus with great chefs, it was an absolutely glorious experience, like going to some great opera.

And I think that I have had enough now that I wouldn't, I don't have a great compulsion to taste tasting menus, but for an experience they can be incredible

Ben: Yes, I think I was the same. Particularly I hadn't realized all of these extra pieces that you get with something like that, which is even the shape of your dish or how they've decided to present it and the order and all of these other things, which essentially is a, it's a cultural expression like you have in art or in theater and the like.

Which you, again, probably wouldn't do every day. But as this form of cultural expression in any food culture, actually, I think it's really fascinating to see, particularly with someone who has an expressional way that they're doing it in terms of their art.

Fuchsia: Yeah. And I think people sometimes, they're very, there's a tendency to pass judgment on things as if it's either/or, and it's not. The best thing to do is to eat more simply for most of your life and occasionally have a tasting menu. Yeah. And that's very, it's very simple to have both, really.

Ben: Yeah. And it goes both ways in terms of you shouldn't ignore street food either.

You probably shouldn't eat street food every day either. But to ignore snacking or snacks or street food again, I think would be y- yeah would make, lessen your food and life experience, for sure. Great. So the final last couple of questions would be any particular current projects or curiosities that you're working on?

Obviously, there'll be a lot of work around the launch of your new book, but anything else that you're working on that you'd like to share?

Fuchsia: Oh Chinese food has become a lifelong project, and so I've got various things that I'm working on at the moment, different regions, trying to deepen my knowledge and thinking about the next book.

Ben: Yeah. Great. And perhaps we can end on any open thoughts you have or advice, perhaps advice for an ordinary home cook. I say ordinary, but just someone cooking at home. Or perhaps you have some thoughts about what it is to be a food writer today. But any final thoughts that you'd like to share on your food writing?

Fuchsia: I think one thing is that people sometimes find Chinese cooking intimidating, and they think you need a lot of special equipment and special ingredients, and you really don't. Chinese cuisine is hugely complex and sophisticated, but it has everything from very complex and labor-intensive banquet cooking to simple dishes that you can knock up in five minutes after work.

And Chinese food, also contrary to the traditional Western stereotype, can be fantastically healthy and life-enhancing. So I think I would just encourage people to just give it a go. Buy a couple of seasonings, have a go and you'll find it I can almost guarantee life-enhancing and delicious and fun.

Ben: Excellent. So with that, I'll remind listeners that her new book is Five Tastes: The Magic of flavour in the Chinese Kitchen. And with that, Fuchsia, thank you very much.

Fuchsia: Thank you.

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

May 28, 2026 Ben Yeoh

Matt Lodder on Tattoos as Art History

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key takeaways

Tattoo history is a way of reading wider human history, because tattoos sit at the intersection of image, body, identity, fashion, technology and social judgement.
Many tattoo myths persist because archives preserve the bodies of people who were surveilled, while more private or ordinary tattooing often left fewer records.
Matt pushes against the narrow question of whether tattoos are “art”, arguing that art history is more useful when it asks about style, authorship, taste and reception.
Tattooing was not simply “discovered” by Europeans through Captain Cook. That story reflects later colonial myth-making more than historical reality.
Instagram has not changed the basic fact that people copy visual culture, but it has radically accelerated the life cycle of tattoo trends.
AI tattoo imagery is technically influential, but Matt is sceptical of its aesthetics and ethics, especially when it shortcuts artistic authorship.
Matt’s practical advice: ask tattooed people who did the work, look at healed portfolios, choose artists by style, and do not treat people’s bodies as public property.

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

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

Transcript (lightly edited with AI so mistakes are possible)

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

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

Matt: Hi, thanks for having me.

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

Matt: That's a good question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben: And they're still cool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben: That's amazing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We humans seem to be very good at forgetting stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben: Oh, crazy.

Matt: This is systematic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben: Really?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So- Yeah. ... you do them.

Matt: Great.

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

Matt: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben: Wrong question.

Matt: Yeah.

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

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

Matt: overrated. ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben: Wow. ...

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

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

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

Matt: Oh, yeah.

Ben: overrated, underrated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matt: Does it hurt?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Matt: Just, that's just blanket advice.

Oh, yeah. Throw it here first, people.

Ben: Don't grope anyone.

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

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

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

Ben: Yeah. Great.

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

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

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

Ben: Great. That's amazing.

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

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

Ben: No, I don't.

Matt: A Blank.

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

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

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

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

Ben: Thank you.

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

April 21, 2026 Ben Yeoh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

00:21 Why Tech Lacks Humor
02:09 Silicon Valley Arts Funding
05:28 London Versus California
08:31 China Culture Censorship
12:56 Food Culture US China
18:58 AI Utopia Versus Doom
23:04 UK Building Energy Bottlenecks
30:58 Fixing UK Planning Housing
34:28 Neurodiversity In Silicon Valley
37:04 Cadets Discipline Rule Breaking
39:15 Modern Opera: Mozart. Verdi Debate
42:04 American Shakespeare Picks
45:31 Book Tour Reflections
48:09 Retyping Great Writers
52:56 Reading Plays Together
58:29 Playwrights And Prose
01:01:38 Overrated Underrated Round
01:10:21 Advice For Your Twenties

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

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

Dan, welcome.

Dan: Great to be here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's a pretty thin list of names.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dan: more optimistic or less optimistic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But do you have an underrated American food?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dan: looking at?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there are possibilities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So that's the optimistic case.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dan: shape

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben: Yes. I haven't done it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dan: people total.

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

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

Dan: the appeal of Arcadia?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dan:What about Leopoldstadt ?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dan: It's worth reading.

It's an aspirational document.

Ben: Board games underrated or overrated. Yeah.

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

Ben: do.

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

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

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

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

Underrated, overrated,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dan: Really?

Ben: And you compare that to something like

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

February 24, 2026 Ben Yeoh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

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

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

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

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

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

Ben: Says something about our age.

You are also gonna shrink more than me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's like standard.

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

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

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

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

We've got 30, 31 years of it.

Salima: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, for my own take.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben: They're pretending

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

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

Ben: Yes.

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

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

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

Salima: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Salima: right exactly.

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

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

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

Salima: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben: mothers do it to us, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look after my mother.

Ben: Yeah.

Salima: She's alive.

Ben: She's gonna read it. Probably.

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

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

So that wasn't easy, but

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben: Yeah.

Salima: In childhood. As I like glamor.

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

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

Ben: Yeah. Still filling your teenage hole.

Salima: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Salima: oh, I see.

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

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

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

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

Salima: I've just noticed something down.

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

Ben: Yes. [Kintsugi]... Something

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

Ben: One day….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben: Then it feels like work.

Salima: I had to kid myself.

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

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

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

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

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

Salima: Exactly as you found out.

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

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

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

Salima: Overrated. There's no need.

Ben: Yeah. What is With all these tall people

Salima: There's no need.

Ben: Your head on the doors

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

Ben: Hustling, hustle, culture.

Salima: Underrated, underrated.

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

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

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

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

Salima: Yeah.

Ben: Social media

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

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

Salima: yeah,

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

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

Salima: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben: Yeah.

Salima: So often it's just curated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Salima: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben: Yeah. You either laugh or you crack.

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

Ben: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben: Yeah.

These are my, like lifetime goals.

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

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

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

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

Ben: small and plod.

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

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

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

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

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

Find a mentor.

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

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

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

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

Salima: Come on.

Ben: Yeah.

We'll be approaching 80 then…

Salima: I'm just living to a hundred remember

Ben: Yeah. Okay.

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

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

Salima: Thank you so much.

Simon Kane: Performing Shakespeare on YouTube, Immersive Theatre, and Why Fun Matters

February 14, 2026 Ben Yeoh

Is walking around a fake bathroom really “immersive” theatre, or is a theme park actually more honest art?

“If you’re making a space from scratch, why make a space that already exists? One of the reasons I love Disneyland is: Walt Disney made a thing that doesn’t exist.”

In this episode, Ben sits down with Simon Kane, a writer and performer whose work spans the devised theatre world of Shunt, BBC radio comedy on John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme, and a lockdown Shakespeare experiment where he began reading and performing the plays chronologically. Simon takes us inside the mechanics of performance, questioning what “immersive” should actually mean, and arguing for “fun” as a rigorous artistic metric.

“An idea of what theatre should be is not theatre. You can do anything. That’s the point.”

We also dive into why Richard II can be read as a story about a fallen celebrity, the difference between stage acting and voice work, and the challenge of maintaining creative intentionality in an age of streaming algorithms.

We cover

Story first: why Simon shifted his Richard II from “Sigma male” energy to “washed-up star” to make the play land.
The immersive fallacy: why “walking around a set” is not enough, and why theme parks might be the clearest form of intentional spatial design.
Devised vs scripted: how Shunt built worlds without starting from a text, and how that contrasts with the discipline of audio comedy and drama.
Yes, and no: the improv rule that a clown “must always say yes”, and how refusal can be a creative act.
Escaping the algorithm: practical ways to consume culture on purpose rather than letting autoplay dictate your taste.

“Do stuff on purpose. That’s harder and harder these days because it is so easy to just click the next thing on my algorithm. It’s different to go, no… what do you actually want to do?”

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

Contents

00:00 Meet Simon Kane: writer, performer, and lockdown creator
00:24 Lockdown Shakespeare marathon: the idea
01:44 Why YouTube? From Defoe’s Plague Year to tackling Shakespeare chronologically
05:02 Making Shakespeare accessible
06:36 Story-first acting: motivation, ‘pretending,’ and finding the way in
11:10 Cracking Richard II: reinventing the character to unlock the play
15:28 Julius Caesar choices: Cassius, Antony, and playing the populist
16:28 From Shakespeare to Shunt: ensemble theatre and a different kind of acting
22:07 How Shunt builds shows: space as text, rewrites, and devising under pressure
25:19 Audience, space, and ‘immersive’: Jonah, walks, Punchdrunk, and Disneyland
34:25 Clowning 101: Saying “Yes,” Saying “No,” and the Absurdist Engine
35:59 Writer-First vs Ensemble Theatre
37:04 When Critics Don’t Get the New Thing
39:32 Devising, Short Runs, and the Joy of Doing It Night After Night
40:20 Voice & Audio Work: Fast Choices, Characters, and “Reacting”
43:11 Post-Pandemic Theatre + Digital Futures
47:29 What Sticks: Influences from Theatre, TV Comedy, and Low-Fi Ambition
50:53 Overrated/Underrated: Criticism, Arts Council Funding, and Netflix’s Impact
57:52 What’s Next: The Book, Edinburgh Decisions, and the Cost of the Fringe
01:00:55 Advice for Creatives: Do It on Purpose, Make the New Thing, Have Fun

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

Ben: Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Simon Kane. Simon is a brilliant writer and performer whose work ranges from devised and ensemble theater to new writing, solo shows, audio work, and from comedy to Shakespeare. Simon, welcome.

Simon: Hello. I've never actually written any Shakespeare.

Ben: But performed in?

Simon: Yeah. I've just been re-edit, trying to re-edit on this phone, the stuff I did in lockdown projects where I was reading the whole thing. But the phone doesn't have quite enough memory. I want to make sure I, in case YouTube ever suddenly falls to pieces, that I have everything I put on there in other versions.

And I also thought I'd just to explain: during lockdown, I did an actor weekday. That's a bad way to explain it, isn't it, Ben? I read an act, a play, a day for a week, intending to do the complete work of Shakespeare a week at a time. And I got four plays in and then I came back for another play and didn't like it.

So I did that again. And basically, yeah, I didn't achieve playing every character in Shakespeare, but I'm very proud of some of the work they did. I really love the Titus, I really love the Julius Caesar, and I'm thinking of coming back to it as well. I stopped 'cause things were opening up and because I was doing the histories, and Rich II goes into Henry the Fourth, which goes into Henry the V.

And I didn't really feel like doing Henry the V at the time. And also I realized recently, another reason I did it was I didn't know how to do Falstaff, and I've worked out, 'cause I have to choose lots of different voices and it did just have to be big voice choices. 'Cause I'm, and I realized I'll do what I did for Petco, make him Australian.

Ben: What made you choose that as a lockdown project?

Simon: So I'd started the project was I've always been interested in YouTubing and then in lockdown, a lot of my friends were suddenly making stuff like John Finnemore was doing stuff as Arthur from Cabin Pressure and Carrie Quinlan was doing stuff with Andy Stanton.

And that was one aspect of the decision. Another was, as lockdown started, I thought, oh, I'd really wanna read Daniel Defoe's Journal the Plague Year. And then I realized I had that in the flat and I started reading it and it was really interesting. And I thought, oh, I can do read that on YouTube. I'll read 10 pages a day and I'll, and that'll be me reaching out to people on YouTube and by the, and I really enjoyed that.

I really liked that. Discipline's too strong a word. Structure. And already I have a blog and for some reason at the end of the year, previous year, I decided this time I'm really gonna post a thing a day, which would never be the discipline before. And then we went into lockdown. It's, oh, great.

And so that was also provided a thi, the blog was a place where I could then post an episode and a little explanatory thing. And then I got to the end of Journal of the Plague Year and thought, I'm really enjoying this. I want to rea, I'll do another book. And it had to be out of copyright, didn't have to be out of copyright, but I thought—

Ben: Preferable.

Simon: Yeah. And then I suddenly thought, oh, there's no theaters. I haven't done Shakespeare in a while. I'll do the complete works of Shakespeare. And I have, which I won for a competition. I can't remember exactly what it's called. It's the Oxford University Press, I think, which has made some controversial decisions such as Falstaff's not actually called Falstaff.

They call him John Oldcastle. So I quite look forward to being the first actor to play John Oldcastle in a while. They've got a giant magic cat in Macbeth and it's got two king Ls. And I just, anyway, I just, I've got this book. I'll perform the complete works with Shakespeare chronologically as he wrote them.

And I realized I'd get to The Tempest if I'd done that by Christmas and I started reading Two Gentlemen of Verona and really enjoyed it.

Ben: You think you are going to get to the end one day?

Simon: I don't see why not. What was great because it was locked down, there were no theaters, so it would've been a project that would seem, I don't, I actually, I'm not sure I believe in stupid hubris anymore, but it would, this actor's gonna do the complete works of Shakespeare, but if there's no theater going on, it made more sense.

But I'm so pleased with the stuff I did, and I, and it's so, for some people, for some of the people who saw it, and that's very few people, it was their first introduction to this play. And I think they're good introductions. I thought I try to make sense of it and that's, it is good for me as well to have come up with a version of a play that to me makes sense.

Where I know why everyone's doing what they're doing and they're fun and that you approach and it doesn't seem frightening. Like people know I've prepared this in the morning. I've shot it, I've edited. One of the reasons I stopped doing it again was it was just taking up every waking hour.

So by the time I got to Tamer the Shrew already, if I was actually gonna do it chronologically, I would've gone onto the histories. So I thought, save the histories and do those separately. Okay. So then I got to Titus Andronicus. And by the end of that, I was so tired. I thought, I need, I can't continue this.

I'll do, I'll just head onto Julius Caesar, which was a play I was interested in. And then stop. And that's a season, that's four Shakespeares, that's a season. And then come back to it later. So yeah, and then when I tried to do the, I don't, yeah, I tried to look at the Henry of the Sixes, part one, two, and three, which are plays I love, but there are a lot of characters in there who—

Ben: [that's tricky].

Simon: A lot of 'em talk quite similarly and especially the first one is, I think, a big spectacle. So without all the battle scenes and explosions, it's a little hollow. Yeah. It's a much harder, it's a much harder thing to do if you don't, like 12th Night, the characters are really well defined and you can have fun playing all of them.

But also history, people keep changing their names 'cause they win and lose titles. So Richard II is quite handleable because there's three or four characters in it. And also every time I do a new act, I say the story so far. And also usefully offer some content warnings and explanations.

Explanations of the stuff. And also, yeah, all the melanin hatred you keep coming across. You just go, this is gonna turn up and yeah, don't make an excuse for it, but it's good to warn people of it. 'Cause you don't want people to go, oh, watch Shakespeare, suddenly feel like they've been mugged.

Ben: It's good to make it accessible.

And I think there was a tradition even at the time of essentially throwing around your troupe of players. They had a day to rehearse and then they just put it on that evening. Oh yeah. Yeah. So there's a, there was a lot of that. I'm interested in your overall process, but maybe through the lens of this project about what's your starting unit or starting point.

Do you tend to like character or an image as a starting point?

Simon: For what?

Ben: For getting into putting on the piece or performing somewhere. Is it through image or line and speech? Is it through character? Or there's a lot of talk about directors nowadays from the US school about everything has gotta be action and want and things like that.

So I'm interested in how you mix together all of those things.

Simon: I do different things, so I don't, it's not all the same process. I've never really directed anything.

Ben: But you're directing yourself in this piece in a way.

Simon: Yeah, but I don't, I'd happily go, yeah, I'm directing, but that's not directing.

Yeah. If you're not, if you're not taking it to someone else that's not directing. It's, but it's, it is like, all writing is improvisation as well. At some point you're improvising it and then you're recording it. And that's how I worked in devised theatre often we'd be improvising stuff and then, and I'd be the one to go and write up my memory of it, then bring that in and everyone else could go, no, there's this.

And at least there, there was a text there to turn, to use, however everyone wanted to use it. But I guess I still don't, I make things in different ways, so I dunno what you're asking me about.

Ben: Yeah. Okay. I guess for this project, [. Because we'll come onto the Shunt work.]

I'm interested, perhaps when you are getting into Shakespeare, you're gonna perform Shakespeare or a play. A play where you have a written text and there's characters, so we are defining it down.

Simon: Yeah.

Ben: Do you, and maybe obviously you'll listen to the director and things, but before the director or the work you are doing alongside the director, do you approach that from a very character driven, let's get inside the head of a practice or?

Simon: I approach it from a, I approach it from a, I think, a story.

Ben: Story?

Simon: Right. So, I think the two main focuses for me, not as a manifesting, but just the thing I do, is the story and, but, and the, all the normal story things of that. What's your motivation?

Ben: So it is a motivation. Yeah.

Simon: Another way to put it is what are you pretending?

Ben: Yes. That's slightly different though, but, yeah.

Because a motivation could be just your simple want, but if you are pretending that's a kind of projection of what you or whatever you want to pretend, but it might not be the same as your want.

Simon: But how is it different, give me an example?

Ben: You could come across, I guess, as pretending to be beautiful or pretending to be ugly.

So that's the thing.

Simon: Oh, I see.

Ben: [But you are but you are wanting to do… cross talk]

Simon: I don't think in those terms at all. How do you pretend to be? Some people do are completely in, that doesn't make sense. Sorry, I'm talking over you.

But you can, yes. You yourself projection is a thing. But you're so, yeah. You're doing it in character, I think, oh, actually. Yeah. I guess a lot of the work I have hasn't really relied on me finding a character because it is so much about my interaction with the audience or my, or my interaction with the story.

And it's just, and I think actually now you bring it up, one of the wonderful things about doing full Shakespeare is I could really do characters and immediately play people who weren't me. Yeah, no you are right. You're right to make that distinction.

Ben: Yeah, I guess this is because I probably want to go and start with the Shunt work and then come forward at this time, and I, this is obviously taints everything in a really simplified bucket, but you could say that some people would approach something purely from get inside the head of the character and from the character.

Play, pretend, or however the extreme, which you may not think works or not, is I'm not gonna think about the character, all I will just dress up like this character, everything on the outside, clown nurse or something. And from that external point of view, everything might flow. And then you have potentially a third blob of work, which is where you don't have a text or anything to working from and you're working with a bunch of other people.

And from that, and then I'm interested, what might be the thing from flows from that. And it's interesting when you're working with a text from Shakespeare, you think I can get inside and think about a character and do that. And so that's why I was interested about coming to that and how that might contrast for when you are devising work or doing ensemble work when you might not have a script or you're trying to do the script or you're making the script and how that all works.

Simon: Yeah. So I've put, I've got a few things to put a pin into for the Shakespeare, I think. The, it's the absolute best illustration of that for me is the fact that I played Rich of the, I did two Richard IIs. So when I came back to it, I thought, I'll start with the histories. And by the time I got to like the fifth act, I was like, I still don't get this play.

Ben: Yeah.

Simon: I still don't. I've made, I've make, I'm making and putting some something out, which is a story that I don't understand what the story is. And I thought, and I think round about Act four when I was recording, I thought what's one of the things we know about Richard? We know that Elizabeth the First saw Richard the Second and thought that's me.

And I thought I'm definitely not playing that. I am giving a very naturalistic, slightly odd book as every, I, I lean into the oddball nature of myself when I do Shakespeare. I've a lot of experience of, of doing Shakespeare when I was young, and it was really nice to be playing that kind of, I might be using this phrase wrong, sigma male, but like the Jaques and the Lucio and then Hamlet, like the, the underminers, the outsider intellectuals.

I, I really, and who don't fit in but have their own authority. And that's how I've been playing Rich II and that's how I often see Rich II played. And I thought, but that doesn't make sense. That's not who e, if you look at Elizabeth the First, did I say first or second? Elizabeth the First, there's a very clear on that. And I was thinking, I'd seen photos of Ian Richardson.

I thought what if I play Richard II as Ian Richardson, complete full old school, absolutely delivering every line like you love the poetry, like it's a proper performance. And I thought I'll, I'm gonna redo Rich II, but with a completely different characterization of Rich II. And that changed the whole thing and it made sense to me.

By Act four of this second one, I realized I've been playing, I'm Thatcher, this is, I'm playing amongst other things, and I'm also Norma Desmond, because we don't really have a concept of majesty, but we know what a fallen star is.

And Richard II was as, as a story about a fallen star, about a story about someone who absolutely was the thing they projected themself at, and then loses that because it's built on nothing and then has nothing to replace it with.

That changed the play and also changed how every other character behaved. And that, and it suddenly became a story. I understood what I was telling, and that was specifically because I changed the characterization, Richard the Second, and similarly when I came to and I'm—

Ben: Just gonna pick on that.

Simon: Yeah.

Ben: And that makes sense to me now that you say it's story first, because from understanding the story—

Simon: Yeah.

Ben: The character changed. And from the character, everything else changed to make sense of the story. Yeah.

Simon: Yeah.

Ben: Whereas you could have gone, someone could have gone the other way, I'm just gonna make sense of the character.

Yeah. And then whatever story comes out of that, comes outta that. But you weren't satisfied. 'Cause the first time around you, you had a character. Yeah. But it's like, when I play this character the story doesn't seem to make sense to me anymore. So I think that's a really interesting way of approaching it.

Simon: Yeah. I, and you know that, that's why talking about character and motivation and story are interlinked. But often, especially with a well-worn text, especially with part of the canon, I'll see productions where it doesn't make sense. I don't understand what the story is 'cause the characterization doesn't.

And, but with the great classics, you can change what a character is and still tell a different story. Yeah. And I think Hamlet's the, the best and worst example of this. I've seen so many Hamlets way that work so well, yeah.

Ben: Great character.

Simon: For the first, for the first act, and then come the second act it is, but why isn't he killing Claudius?

Ben: Yeah.

Simon: What, there is this huge gap in Hamlet where you… I think you have to know what's, you have to tell the story of why Hamlet then doesn't kill Claudius.

Ben: Yeah.

Simon: And it's not, well because he is pretending to be mad.

What is he, why is he pretending to be mad? Yeah. And I think yeah, it's what's the, so great to be told a story and it becomes, there, there could still be lots of great stuff, but I'd also like, Polonius, what's going on with Polonius. That's a great thing. One of the great things about Shakespeare is just, there are stories there if you wanna—

Ben: Yeah.

Simon: And what's the story—

Ben: We're telling.

Simon: And oh yeah. I, and one of the reasons I'm so proud of my Julius Caesar is I'd always sensed this version of Cassius and Mark Antony. I loved the character of Cassius. I loved how right he was about everything and how he kept deferring to Brutus because he also knew that he was a hothead.

He also knew that he was not a born leader and that dooms them. And I'd always wanted to play that. And then when it came to Mark Antony, I just, I dunno why, is bloviating the right word, sort of Boris Johnson, him, I don't dunno. It was just, he had a very few lines in the first act, but they were so obsequious, Dees, I thought, just go B.

And then by the time you get to his oration, to the Romans, I love doing that so much, even though it's such a sort of classic scene. It was just playing a total populist as a total populist. Without any. Without any, yeah. Without any, yeah. And anyone you play is charming. I could, this is really what you would talk about, but yeah.

It was, it just felt so good to be getting it.

Ben: And let's contrast that then. Do a little potted history. There was a collective called Shunt, which I think was one of the most influential theatre collectives, call it almost a movement, particularly within the London theatre scene.

And so arguably global. And you did a lot of work with Shunt and a lot of their work comes from an ensemble basis. Yeah. Although it often does use a director, but doesn't have to, and we can talk about how ensemble works differently, but often when you start, there isn't a written text. There might be one by the end.

So that's quite different from doing Shakespeare and you might not even start with some characters. But you might do, and I was looking at some clips 'cause I still remember, I don't actually remember the details very well, but I definitely remember the feeling of Dance Bear Dance.

Simon: Yeah.

Ben: [Cross talk: All the way back then. So I'd be interested in, did you—]

Simon: [See the one with me in—]

Ben: Yes. I think I saw it twice. I saw it in the arches. And your one with—

Simon: [Yeah.]

Ben: Yeah, because it was so extraordinary for the time. So I'm gonna let you talk a little bit maybe about your experience of that and then relate it back to making work.

So we just talked about Shakespeare and going through story and then into character and then performing. And then you've got this whole other way of working. And so with contrast, and obviously it's performing, but you start ensemble, you might not even start with much more than an idea or a character, and then you produce this other kind of work.

So why don't you talk about that?

Simon: That's the other thing I want to put the pin in. 'Cause for me there's, the really interesting journey for me was even before I was working with Shunt I knew Shunt through Gemma Brockis, who I knew at Cambridge. And towards our last years at Cambridge, we started working with a guy called Jeremy Hardingham.

So the journey for me is like at the end of my first year at Cambridge, I played Hamlet and I, and it was an amazing company. And then I watched and there it was an amazing company.

I thought I've played Hamlet. I'm gonna… unless there's touring or unless… a friend wants me in something… I don't really wanna act anymore. And Jeremy asked me to be in King Lear, and I said, I don't wanna do King Lear. And I saw his King Lear. And it wasn't like how I imagined, how I had imagined putting on Shakespeare before…

This was not about casting actors who have a really interesting take on the character and bringing them all together and telling the story. This was a completely different kind of piece of theatre, but it was complete, absolutely King Lear. And there were brilliant actors in it. But there were also performances that on their own might be seen as quite wooden, but weren't about people pretending to be that character.

And it was, excuse me, it was just a phenomenal room to be in. For three hours where this thing was happening. And then I started working with Jeremy. We did a thing, we did a version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which I loved being in, and, but this type of theatre. And then I stayed, I've been making work with Gemma ever since, but this kind of theatre made me usefully self-conscious about just playing a character and what else an actor does in a company on stage.

And when I watched Shunt’s first show… watched Shunt’s second show, actually, The Ballad of Bobby Francois, which was quite a silent piece, quite a clown show. All the performances were great, but they were not really playing characters. And similarly, a lot of this devised stuff, immersive installation.

It wasn't about seeing someone play another character. It was just about someone interact with an audience. And I, and so I became… really, I saw that the thing I wanted to learn to do was absolutely just deal as myself in character with an audience, with a situation, but not present a character that was an interpretation of someone from a story.

And that's what went into when I did my, it's still my head, my solo sequel to the Shunt work, Jonah Non Grata. It wasn't about, I'm presenting my characterization of Jonah, it's about what is this person doing on stage? What are they trying to be? How are they interacting with an audience? It wasn't about me putting on a voice or doing stuff like that.

And in terms of the ensemble I made a piece with Gemma where I played two very different characters and that was an adaptation of, or inspired by, the book Invitation to a Beheading. And a lot of Shunt’s works are inspired by books. There's always some kind of text, but then you improvise scenes within the situations in those texts.

And I think normally when you're improvising it's normal anyway to improvise without actually coming up with a character. You're, it's about the situation and the back and the forth. And so I play two very different characters. I was a nervous lawyer and then a sort of weird surrealist alpha male executioner, but I used my own voice for that.

It was just, the situation was different. And the look was very different. If you put on a costume to be a person, you still need a mirror, otherwise you dunno what you're wearing. It might help you stand or move differently. But I, yeah, I have, I think I have at least those two strings to my bow, if that's the metaphor.

Like I can, like being present with other actors and with an audience in a space and interact with that. And also going away and finding a character and going, doing the whole Antony Sher thing, which I loved growing up. Seeing him draw the characters he was going to be and then transform into that.

I think the visual aspect is really important. And that, and also fun.

Ben: And how did you make decisions within the ensemble? So you're improvising, you're going back and forth, people are playing, however they're playing, all the scenes develop. How does a group of people then decide this is the most interesting way forward?

This is the best way forward. There is no way forward. Let's argue about this for a while. How do decisions within a rehearsal room start to form? Can you articulate that?

Simon: Yeah. Although I'm an associate artist, I would never be involved at the very beginning of a process. The time I would come on board, there would always be a set. The set is the text. What Lizzie designs. And the basic idea, which can change, that the collective has of the audience's journey through that space, or just within that space, is already in place and the text is already in place.

The one slight exception to this was Tropicana, where I came in mid-run. And so there was already a show there, but when I came in as the lift operator, I was allowed to rewrite my stuff. And that rewriting inspired other people like Hannah to rewrite their bits and yeah, I could work on everything I did and it was really useful to have a show in place and for me to be allowed to come in and go, oh, I think this might work, and do this.

And so there's always some kind of thing already there when I come into a Shunt show, and it really varies. It's always down to the wire, at least down to the wire.

And I think when I was first brought into Dance Bear Dance, it was as someone who, working with Gemma on Invitation to a Beheading, it was someone who had experience of coming up with text for a devised show.

Bobby Francois, there wasn't really much text, but because this was gonna be a council meeting, that this was gonna be a much more text-heavy show than they'd done before, which at least I think is one of the reasons I've been invited to come in as early as I did on it.

And I think one, definitely something I literally brought to the table in Shunt was an idea of how to create text that worked within an immersive environment that wasn't just like delivering a lecture, say. Like how you present information to an audience and give them the information to present audience back as well.

And you play games and one of the best bits about the devising process was just, oh, every hour go away, come up with something to present. And the presentations are so important. And when they were doing the cabaret, that was also people would present a thing, a scene.

Ben: Just make the work and see—

Simon: See where it goes.

Yes, it was very much that, yeah. That improv thing of just do it and then see.

Ben: I'm gonna try and pick up on quite a few things and we see where we go here. So I think it's really interesting. I guess it's always been within performance, but there's emphasis, first of all, on audience or audience experience.

And second of all, where the audience and the performer is within the space. And this idea that, and actually it's influenced my more recent work around the show starts immediately. Or in fact my last show, it even starts when you're not in the space, within the bar. Yeah. I'm speaking to people.

You're inviting them in, you are already telling them about what it is, and then you're invited and go through the space. And I've been very much more interested in how much the audience has agency within a space as opposed to in a very traditional, or some traditional, where the audience just sits and watches something and, or you go further back and they're always rowdy.

And I'm interested in how your line of work here thinks about having an audience pay attention, how you think about audience within space, and maybe you can do this with reference to your latest work or even some of the Shunt work, with how that works in terms of thinking about the audience where they're not simply a passive piece of the performance, but a more active piece.

Simon: Yeah. It's obviously about that, but I guess why I become, why I get antsy is I don't wanna start, as I hear often, suggesting that a passive audience is unengaged.

Ben: To do with attention.

Simon: [Not even that attention. Yeah.] No, I thought you said tension.

Ben: [No.]

Simon: All engagement, all art is about holding someone's attention and I think so much of it for me, in terms of doing immersive work, is you're doing this every night. For me, it's really about making the experience I'm going through night after night a proper experience, and that means different from the one before.

And so I was thinking about this on the way here, 'cause I'm thinking about making another, a second solo show finally after Jonah, and what I'd forgotten, one of the things I loved writing about it and when I took it to Edinburgh last year and all the things I was refining about it, but one thing I hadn't really, at least I don't remember acknowledging, is how it's so much a show about a performer in a space.

It's what I'm doing in a space. It's about a person in a space with an audience. And that, which sounds redundant, but I was really thinking about what to do next. I realized, oh, my problem is, I dunno the way in because sort of everything I wanted to play with about the idea of what it is to be, to go into a room and then have someone talk at you, was there in Jonah.

And so I'd be thinking about, oh, maybe the character of this new piece, we sit at a table, it'll be a date. And I'm like, but that's, so you're losing something. It's about the less I have to pretend, the better. Unless there're bits where I suddenly really do have to pretend. And that's a great bit.

So when, although the audience may never be conscious of this, when I'm in the whale and there's just a blue spotlight, there's loads of theatre happening in front of you. And I am covered in stuff, and I am playing a person in the belly of a whale. And that's, and I love it.

And that's something mystical going on, but I always thought a theatre's like a church and a church is set up a bit like an airplane and just all these spaces where an audience come in and that's the contract, and they understand the contract, and you can play with the contract, but that's also something I don't have to pretend.

Ben: Yeah.

Simon: That allows me to come in and be as alive as possible in front of them in this show. In the same way that with Shunt where we had these incredible play spaces designed by Lizzie, you could just come in and play that game in that space. What do you want to do in that space with those people? It was a huge inspiration.

And so I was, yeah. I think this was inspired by a bit of a documentary about Punchdrunk last night on Sky. And I've never seen a Punchdrunk show, but someone was saying about, oh, the audience coming in and they're in a space. But also that space has been designed, like yeah, that's just pretending.

I was like, I don't want to detract from their incredible work 'cause I've never seen it, but I was just like, just a set. You're just walking around a set. What's interesting about being either in a, sharing a space with someone and realizing that, oh, maybe if I do go to Edinburgh with a show, it should be in Edinburgh, it should be a promenade thing.

I do a lot of Jack the Ripper walks. And my friend Ben Whitehead, who came up with them, also came up with ghost bus tours. And I've worked at Phantom Peak and so much of my, so many of my day jobs are within a space. I relate to a very specific space. So Jonah was really good because it was people coming to listen to a man in a box.

Ben: And that's why the label immersive is slightly mislabeled in that sense.

Simon: It's why I think you can call it an immersive work even though it's an audience watching a person on stage. That's why I think it is an immersive piece, yes.

Ben: Oh, so I guess I was saying that for instance, the Jack the Ripper walk is immersive in a way that people might not think it's immersive.

Simon: Yeah. Yeah. But although, everyone knows you're walking around the streets.

I think if you say you don't use it as immersive theatre 'cause you haven't created the space, I think normally immersive suggests to me a creation of a space. And it's some form of installation.

Ben: And which isn't just a set.

Simon: No, it can't help but be a set.

But I think, I guess like I was watching the footage of Punchdrunk and they go, oh, you've walked into a fake bathroom. And it's that, how, it's this dreadful, 'cause I haven't seen the show, but it's like, how interesting is it ultimately to walk into a fake bathroom? And yet, and this is the thing I had to deal with.

I love theme parks. I love theme parks. Okay. And that's just walking around a very created environment.

Ben: Yeah. But they're very honest. It's if you are not pretending to be a bathroom, you're not, theme parks aren't pretending to be something other. So where if you get a very detailed piece of set, which is trying to be naturalistic, but somehow misses a thing, it then feels, oh, it's because you're not the very best fake person.

Simon: That's not the problem for me. Okay. 'Cause everyone makes mistakes. It's not about, it's about the intention.

Ben: I see. Okay.

Simon: I think if you're making a space from scratch, why make a space that already exists? Why? One of the reasons I love Disneyland. Does it exist? Walt Disney made a thing that doesn't exist.

Ben: Only exists. Yeah. Imagination on some points.

Simon: It's such a realization of his very specific idea of what is good, which you don't have to agree with at all, but it's absolutely… he lived there as it was being made.

Ben: Yeah. It's a real—

Simon: I get that. Here's Main Street, USA and here's, there's a steamboat and there's a mountain, and there's the world, and there's all of Africa in a boat. Although that came later, I think.

Ben: Yeah. And even more amazing. Maybe he's the only one who could make it.

Simon: Yeah, absolutely. Singularly, yeah. That's why David Hockney said he is the most important artist of the 20th century.

But it's a very singular vision of a space. And I also love walking around fake environments.

Ben: Yeah.

Simon: So I dunno what it was about that bit of the documentary. It's not just artifice, it's something else. I'm sure I'd find it huge fun to see one of their shows.

Ben: If it's not too controversial. I'm interested that you haven't been to a Punchdrunk.

Simon: They used to be too expensive.

Ben: Okay.

Simon: When I was watching the bit of the documentary going, why am I seeing the Punchdrunk show? And I think I would be too scared of not enjoying it.

Ben: And in some ways I think, maybe it's not quite fair to say, but I would say Punchdrunk… there's an argument saying some of Punchdrunk couldn't have existed without some of the stuff that Shunt and Shunt-adjacent work had done earlier.

Simon: So I have not seen it. I wouldn't say that. Because I think there's a huge creative crossover.

[Cross talk]

Simon: BAC was an incredible building and they were using it. And I think that's huge fun. And I think similarly when Shunt moved into underneath London Bridge, it's what do we do with this? And I think the approaches to space are very different. And the approaches, hard to put a show in a space.

Shunt made a clown installation. There's something very absurdist about it. And one of the great things about absurdism is it can be done quite cheaply because there's a slight post-apocalyptic sense of the comedy of scarcity.

Ben: On clowning. I had a very short clown question, which is, should a clown always say yes?

Simon: Oh yeah, that's a very interesting question, but it's not interesting because I feel I have to answer it. It's one of the things that put me off when I was in twenties, I was doing clown school.

I'm rediscovering Dylan Moran. I'm just rewatching Black Books. Dylan is a hugely negative figure. But also there's a real innocence to him when he falls in love.

Even if you're saying no, you're saying yes to no. Instantly you're developing it. But just to be given that lesson, because the very first time I heard that was a weekend workshop, that's such, it's such an important question, which is why it's an interesting one.

Yeah, because also like Jonah is like Hamlet was my investigation of refusing the call to adventure.

Ben: Yes.

Simon: And I did my English dissertation on the early work of Woody Allen, who again is like three films in a row about political assassination with a clown who doesn't want to go on with it.

Absolutely. Obviously a clown can refuse.

Ben: This other absurdist things… I was interested in your audio work, which I'm gonna come to as well as a kind of almost separate strand in how it feeds in. But before that, I was just gonna pick up on the BAC, the space, Shunt…

Because at the same time as that was happening and I'd been theatre blogging a little bit around there as well, there was an ongoing argument from a more traditional writing school which would put the writer first. So you have a writer first, a well-made script.

You get a director and actors and you put things on, versus an ensemble school, of which we touched on various ways that you could do that. I guess I was a theatre maker, but I wasn't doing it full time. I had a whole other job and still was making some bits of theatre.

I found that was a really exciting argument, which was played out in performances. It was played out over blogs. And I guess still to some degree plays out now. David Eldridge, who was from very much the writer school has got some great stuff on at the moment, but I'd be interested if you had any reflections on, did you feel that was an ongoing debate then, and how that fits into the liveliness of theatre now?

Simon: I think the only stakes of that debate really were that theatre critics were suddenly being sent to things that they had no experience of. I'm a theatre critic and though I'm watching this I don't know how to process the thing I'm watching because it's not, not the job I signed up for.

Ben: Interesting.

Simon: I'd already gone through that one. My experience of watching Jeremy's King Lear was like that. One of the things was also really great about that was because he was a student. He was a student who was not trying to be a journeyman director.

He was using the resources that we had to try something new and it killed and it completely transformed or broadened my idea of what doing a show could be. And it wasn't just an idea, it was the brilliance of the execution. It was that Jeremy was so good at that. And I think that's a hugely important part.

It wouldn't have happened if he wasn't so good at that.

Ben: Yeah.

Simon: Sometimes as we were talking about, you make the thing that doesn't exist. Often the best artists are artists who are good at something that doesn't exist. Some who are brilliant at something that doesn't exist.

And so they make the thing and then it exists.

Ben: And the critics didn't understand it at the time.

Simon: Yeah. Do you know Nicholas Craig, the Nigel Planer character?

Ben: A tiny bit.

Simon: There's the only credits to, is The Naked Actor show is such a perfect sort of snapshot of black box, him in different costumes doing things and some science fiction and some, but the point I'm getting at is someone brilliant will come along and do something completely new and people go, oh, there's this.

And then a whole bunch of people who don't really get it at all will come along and go, oh, now we're doing this. You go if you don't do it, if you don't get it. And that sort of theatre of the seventies and eighties, which has huge talents doing incredible stuff, but also the sense that quite a few directors were coming along.

In their twenties and going, oh, this is what theatre looks like now. An idea of what theatre should be is not theatre.

Ben: Yeah.

Simon: You can do whatever you like. That's the point. What is it you want to do? That to me is what theatre is.

I think what annoyed me and some of us in, was the idea that we were doing this because we couldn't do text.

Ben: Yes.

Simon: It was, no, we've done text. Yeah. We fucking kicked Shakespeare's ass and now we want to see what else we can do.

Ben: Yeah.

Simon: And it's not necessarily a transferable skill. We're coming back to that idea. The main attraction is that you're doing it night after night, so you're doing something slightly different.

Ben: Yeah.

Simon: And so I don't have that much experience of a long run of a play.

Ben: Yeah.

Simon: I really don't. And that's not 'cause I don't want to. And I don't want to get back to that but yeah, in the first half of my adulthood, it's been mainly devised work.

All very short runs, different things.

Ben: And maybe now be interesting to touch on your audio work. Do you think audio work is essentially your form of theatre as well? You don't necessarily have a set or a space, although you can definitely engage or have an audience pay attention. You don't necessarily get the feedback.

From that. Do you see it as a separate strand?

Simon: There's lots of stuff I'm not good at with voice work, but what I'm good at, I'm good at sight reading, and I'm good at making quick decisions that aren't dumb.

And I also really enjoy working with other people. So most of my voice work that people will know is in a sketch show, where you get to do a lot of voices and use characters very quickly. And it gets me, it allows me to mimic some old school kind of acting because a lot of John's sketches deal in old school genres.

But John's a brilliant performer, a brilliant writer, and everyone in the company's a brilliant performer, brilliant writer. So I'm very happy just sitting and listening. But that kind of work. And then the work I've been doing with Audible and with Big Finish, it's making quick decisions and letting them play out.

The thing that always, and also when I was doing John's show, that's the first sketch work I did. So I wasn't a sketch comedian and a bit like talking about devising, I didn't have a default persona that I could just bring to a sketch and that I didn't have a default voice, but both John and I had been writing for David Mitchell, Robert Webb, and David has a very clear default voice where you could just play it.

I didn't have that. And I certainly hear that in the first two series going I dunno what I am if I'm not playing a specific character. Oh I'm a little awkward about that. I can't remember what's going on and it's all quick decisions.

Ben: Is it just more natural?

Simon: It's just, that's natural. I'm very happy at pretending. I like that game. I like, it's the story, it's the storytelling thing. And I don't always make the right decisions.

There are jokes I don't get. Acting is reacting. You can't react in voice work.

Ben: Yeah.

Simon: I did occasionally. I went, oh, oh. But listening to people, the thing I enjoy a lot about acting you just don't do on the radio, but then you're reading a script, so you're not even looking at the other performer.

Your eyes are basically always on the words. But it's a really nice thing to come in and have recorded. But…It's at the far end of the pretending to be other people spectrum.

Ben: Yep. That's fair. And what do you find exciting or the other side challenging about performance today?

Maybe we could say London theatre performance, but you might have views globally or just about performing arts or culture in general?

Simon: You mean as an audience?

Ben: Either.

Simon: In terms of me watching stuff or?

Ben: Either watching or even doing, maybe in terms of doing actually, and I could frame it as a couple of thoughts I had is I had thought that maybe the pandemic might change things more than they have.

We've got back to a state where I don't think it's maybe changed that much. The little bits around, but that's interesting. I still think there's a big question mark on how we approach digital work. Although I think we're getting more, becoming more interesting still, I feel.

Simon: What do you mean by digital work?

Ben: So digital work is essentially, I'm thinking about digital work as digitizing live work or putting the digital—

Simon: Oh, I see.

Ben: Like video archiving or partly archiving or a little bit. So your YouTube or performing Shakespeare is a kind of form of digital work, right?

Simon: Yeah. .

Ben: Rather than just video cameraing,... So that's one element. Or you go the other way where I think Katie Mitchell's done more of this work, or there's been others around it, where you have much more digital within your live performance.

So using video and things, that's maybe one end of the spectrum of where digital could land. We'll see what these LLMs, AIs bring or not to the process. So I'm interested in what you find exciting, either from a performance view or indeed it could be on the other side in terms of watching, and also what you feel is challenging or boring or is we should really just do less of that and do more of something else.

Simon: I don't necessarily find anything as a performer exciting, otherwise I'd go and do it. Again, I was thinking on the walk here how much easier it was making a show like Jonah when I had so many friends and contemporaries who were also making works in small rooms and presenting me with options to copy or being inspired by.

And now I am, I'm seeking it. I'm still seeking out not beginning artists, but artists working in that space. And I'm really excited by their work. I've met a few people who are doing, yeah, just brilliant stuff in a way that brilliant stuff has always been brilliant.

But less that I can take away and go, oh, I wanna do that.

Ben: Yeah.

Simon: Which is one of the reasons I made Jonah was I wanted people to watch it and go, oh, I could do something like that. Yeah. That's another thing I like about the affordability of a piece of theatre.

And as an audience, like the last three big shows I've seen, two at the Globe and then one at the National, I've all really loved. I saw Pinocchio, I saw a fantastic Troilus and Cressida, which is not something I thought I would see. And then I sat at the front row for The Bacchae, which I think is the place to see it.

I know people have sat further back, had a very different experience of it, but everything that went into it seemed so engaged in what they were making and the idea that it should be fun, but that fun's not an embarrassing— that's made by people who get fun, made by people who seem to genuinely be able to have fun.

Ben: Fun, yes.

Simon: And communicate that, but that not be done incredibly intelligently and argumentatively as well. Yeah. Presenting an argument and that's a run of three of those is not something I'm used to.

Ben: Pretty good.

Simon: I really came away from Pinocchio thinking, yeah, everything's fine. People get it. Don't overthink it, but do think it, and have fun. And be fun and don't, yeah.

Fun's not a genre. Yeah. A lot of things are feelings that you genuinely want to inspire in people, and they're not, and then they're a genre. You can't fake it. It's working out what in the medium you have to fake and what in the medium you shouldn't fake. And I think I've never really had that much respect for criticism.

'Cause I always think it lets people get away with absolute murder.

Ben: We'll come to that when we do a little bit of overrated, underrated. But maybe the last one on this. Is those are recent pieces, which are all done well.

I was wondering if there are any particular pieces either that you've seen or maybe that you've been in, which have stayed with you in the sense that you come back to it from time to time. So actually Dance Bear Dance is one of those. I'm not saying I think about it every month, but I'd probably say once a year something comes along and reminds me of either the feeling of the piece or what it's, ah, this is something there.

There's a few other pieces for me and it might not even be theatre. It might not even be performance. It could be, I sometimes have it on visual work or words or things.

But I'd be interested if there is a piece of performance, either as an audience or as a performer, where maybe once a year or something it refloats back in your mind and go, oh yeah, this has influenced how I think about the world or art.

Simon: There are lots and I, but I can't, immediate, nothing immediately comes to mind.

But when I was, I had a brilliant PR for Jonah Non Grata, which is a 20-year-old show that I did at Edinburgh last year, and I had to write a lot of pieces about it. And so it was interesting to me at least going, what did inspire it? Where did that idea come from?

And so some of it was books by Alasdair Gray and Stan, and all the idea of Stanley Spencer and the idea of the importance of religious art, even as an atheist, just how handy that is dealing with old stories.

But if I think of when I was in Edinburgh I started watching a lot of rewatching, a lot of National Theatre of Brent, and I'll happily put forward that— do you know the National Theatre of Brent? Brent, Desmond Dingle, and then Jim Broadbent and up into Raymond Box.

And I was rewatching them going, oh no, this is really influential. Not even in a, it's a, they're a comedy, but also the lo-fi-ness. But the fact that within this joke, the human scale they gave to history, which is often missing from how history is talked about, was so genuinely pertinent and moving.

And I loved the cleanness of that idea and I loved just the clown-ness of it. And I loved, we are going to stage the biggest thing imaginable, but we don't have the resources. So it's not something I've seen live. But I watched a lot of television, Black Books.

Watching Black Books just 'cause I thought it was about time and every, everything Dylan Moran does, I don't, again, this isn't necessarily really, we talk about, I just go, oh yeah, that informed me so much.

Ben: I haven't re-watched it recently, but there's probably been a series that I've watched—

Simon: Even before Black Books, when he was doing, How Do You Want Me? Just his performance. This is, yeah, I think I saw it in Edinburgh. Yeah.

But that doesn't really… just when I'm, a lot of my writing for comedy, writing for Mitchell & Webb was inspired by the way Dylan Moran wrote. So there's one sketch about Queen Victoria that, where this is sort of David Mitchell rant, and I thought I wasn't intentionally writing a David Mitchell rant, but it was a Dylan Moran rant that David Mitchell then said, and that it sounded like a David Mitchell rant.

But again, so yeah, television is a huge influence and that's I guess why when I'm doing theatre I want, it's based on stuff that isn't screenable.

Ben: Yeah. Okay.

Simon: It's based on being with the audience.

Ben: Great. Let's do a little bit of overrated, underrated, and then into last couple of questions on current projects or any advice.

So I'm gonna say a short thing or word, and you can say whether you think it's an underrated thing or an overrated. I guess things can be correctly rated as well, whether we want more of or less of. So I'll start with one, which we touched on.

Simon: At what point in this should I say I'm absolutely against ratings?

Ben: At the—

Simon: Beginning.

Ben: We could say—

Simon: Because everyone likes different things. This would be underrated, I think, rating. I think I'm really, I don't think, I think in print, I think criticism has stakes with the employee. Yes. And so I don't necessarily trust that people who say they like stuff in print necessarily like stuff.

But I think outside the media, outside journalism, just outside, like in personal interactions, if someone likes something, they like it.

Ben: Yeah. Oh, I don't mean in terms of that sort of rating. So I'll see. So like whether we want something more of or less. So I would say reviews and criticism.

Simon: Right.

Ben: And you are saying we should probably have less of it.

Simon: No but we've now it's, but it's a zero. It's not a zero. I'm game, is it? No it's, no, I've, dear God, I got some amazing writeups from Jonah and genuinely amazing. Not, oh, I've won this prize, but oh, you got it.

Oh, and you taught me something about my show. So if you try, I, I don't just try to see the good in stuff in a kind of self-policing way. I try and see the good in stuff because why wouldn't you find good stuff? Like no, the only benefits your life to find the good in it. But I'll try to not, not answer the question.

Ben: Yeah. Yeah. And what about the Arts Council? Do you think we should have more of it or less of it?

Simon: I don't, I've never had interactions with the Arts Council. So neutral. Not even neutral. I don't understand. Maybe more. I'm very, I'm very, okay.

I've never, one of the reasons I've never applied to council funding—

Ben: Is a good thing.

Simon: State funding for lottery funding less. I think that's why I've never applied. I've always been [uneasy with] poor people gambling and funding me. And also I'm a very privileged person. I went to Cambridge. … I should be able to find a way to make a thing.

I get it. That, yeah, exactly…. I've don't think I've been around long enough to deserve a bit of that pot now. But I think like with the blog and the lack of a financial incentive makes it much easier for me to do what I want.

Ben: …I've done the same, done a podcast, never gonna be commercial. My blog, actually, it is on Substack, but only because they email it out. Never gonna be commercial. My very early work, I did get some Arts Council money, but then I didn't have any money then.

Now I do have money. I wouldn't ever, I would never say never. But I don't foresee a path where I would take Arts Council money. And there's just an interesting, legitimate question about what level you do arts funding, particularly in this country where you wanna fund the NHS, you wanna fund education and things like that.

Simon: Yeah, there's so much money in this country. We do give money to take whatever money …that's my feeling about it's not what it was 25 years ago.

Ben: That's fair enough.

Simon: So have you seen what they're giving money to? If they wanna give something to you, take it.

Ben: Yeah. Okay. And the last one on this, influence of Netflix, do you think it's more influence, less influence? Do you think it's been a good thing, bad thing, or just a thing —

Simon: On what?

Ben: On writing and performance, culture stories, maybe broadly. So I guess there's one argument that it has brought more stories and more funding and maybe more global stories and more funding.

And then there is also a critical argument saying it has maybe narrowed us. It's also taken away attention from other forms. Arguably social media and things are the worst, but there is that sort of argument as well. And then there's in the middle.

Simon: I dunno. I need some actual stats. This is just vibes on what, yeah. Because like sometimes something can get an audience that's not taking away someone else's audience. It's not zero sum. It's like building an audience.

This is a non-answer, but one of the things that intrigues me is how just before the Me Too movement started, like two of my favourite shows on Netflix were Jessica Jones and Kimmy Schmidt, and there were all these massive narratives being made about a woman living in a nightmare world completely controlled by an evil man.

Oh, okay. Yeah. That and yeah, when I, that time, so that would've been 2016, I think, 2015, it was brilliant to see such huge narratives that then played out. And it is extraordinary that Netflix has no money. It just keeps spending more and more money, billions, companies…. I don't understand how that works.

… I still watch. I do stream more than I watch television, but I watch a lot of YouTube. I watch a lot of YouTube channels. Yeah.

Ben: You have a favourite?

Simon: Yeah, I have a few favourites. A few of my favourites don't exist anymore. They've gone on to, is it, and there's a real gender divide by who's stayed on YouTube and who's been driven off.

Theme parks. I love all theme park YouTube. Defunctland doesn't do much now but was an incredible channel. Jenny Nicholson was incredible.

Ben: Do you have a favourite theme park…?

Simon: Hm…

Ben: Every theme park is a great theme park.

Simon: Yeah. Not every, but I do just love theme parks, but Disney, Disneyland is absolutely my favourite. I went as a kid. I went at exactly the right time, right? It was a, for those who dunno, it was a futurist series of rides in the eighties where futurism was still really exciting.

There'd be underwater schools and you can go on, I think you can go on YouTube and see a version of this ride Horizons, which was as responsible as anything for me thinking about the future up until I realized what the future would actually be like and that you can't see underwater 'cause light doesn't travel, which is a huge disappointment.

And I don't, yeah. And so I follow, I really enjoy Red Letter Media. Again, it's really interesting to see people who have started off just putting stuff on YouTube and then have thrived very much within their own scale.

So these now middle-aged friends in, is it Milwaukee, getting together and watching terrible films and getting drunk and talking about them. That is, that, is that now a business model? Matt? Men? I love, I love.

And you couldn't have done that without all of that. Putting that on BBC One, there's no way. And Vlogbrothers, both John and Hank Green, I think, although, and it's a great— Hank videos are now more than five minutes long and I don't follow them so much, but the people who use— I was really interested where suddenly anyone could be a presenter, what they chose to preserve.

Ben: And it gives you a real slice of humanity. Even human flourishing I think is a form of human flourishing. Okay. Last couple of questions 'cause we're running up in time. So one is current projects. Any current projects that you are working on, current or future projects that you'd like to?

Simon: Yeah I'm going back to, I'm writing, am I? Yeah, no, this, I'm writing a book… First I took to Edinburgh was the first three chapter adaptation of the first three chapters of a book, which at the time was the whole story. It was never meant to be the story. And then someone said, oh, that's the story. I went, oh yeah, it was, 'cause it's a sort of a hero's journey.

But now I realized, no, I wanted it to be a bigger, a proper, children's short novel. And so I'm now thinking about that and it involves thoughts about theatre and stories and lies and fantasy and, but it's also just, yeah, really fun to think about and occasionally write.

I won't make the self-appointed deadline for getting a draft done by the end of this month. But that's an unpaid project, but that's what I'm writing on.

And we're towards the end of January now, thinking about whether or not to go to Edinburgh with another show. I've got two in mind as starting points.

But now I'm thinking about venue and how important that is. That sort of completely, and it all starts with as you said, at what point does the audience start feeling like they're in the show?

Ben: Yeah.

Simon: And you, that, and I do, I want an audience to be excited and I want to maintain that feeling of excitement.

Ben: And you think that's 'cause it's something particular about an Edinburgh audience, or why wouldn't you do it in a London venue somewhere?

Simon: Because Edinburgh has, oh, just, oh, guess this. Oh. That's really, that's a really good question, 'cause that's how we're taught to think.

Fair. But also because you can win prizes, Edinburgh. Yeah. If you wanna go, oh, actually I'm a theatre maker. Yeah. I've got a class, that's where you, that's the deadline you set yourself. That's the best place to show new work.

Even though I've long weighed it in my mind and gone, I live in London. I don't need Edinburgh. But yeah it's different. Which just, it's just, you have to think now, am I gonna do Edinburgh? Yeah. I haven't done a big advert that can definitely pay for it, so probably not. And I'm just moving to a new flat. Financially it does take a bite.

Unless I do free fringe and I do something and that's another thing to think about. Who am I going up there with?

Ben: Just to say most people may not realize that the vast majority of Edinburgh shows don't make any, in fact lose money. Not only do they not make money, they will lose money from— Oh, do they?

Simon: Yeah. If you dunno that. Yes. Yeah.

Ben: Tens of thousands.

Simon: That sort of magnitude. Yeah. Yeah. I, yeah I lost 10,000 and that goes in your rent while you're up there because there's a lot of rent. And it goes on a producer if you have a producer and it goes on a PR if you have a PR, which is a good idea.

And what else? What else other things?

Ben: It depends on how many people you've gotta pay for actors and set and things.

Simon: If it's not just you. You have to pay for technicians, certainly.

Ben: Okay. That sounds a great range of current projects. And then obviously audio work and other things running by.

Simon: That keeps coming up.

Ben: Do you have any advice for maybe wannabe creatives or you could have life advice in general? I guess you've had a portfolio career of different parts of creativity across everything. Have you reached a stage where you would offer any thoughts to others—

Simon: Get out, see work you like, meet the people who make work that you like. Do stuff on purpose. That's harder and harder these days 'cause it is so easy.

Ben: Purpose is an intentional thing you're doing?

Simon: Yes. It's so easy. Because I have a lot of time off and I might just click the next thing on my algorithm and it's different to go, no, intentional, what do you actually want to do?

Watch something on purpose, not because you are in a position where you're watching things and you want to go, I could watch this next. But that's maybe something more for my generation. Maybe people deal with stuff easier.

My other advice is you can do anything. There are a lot of dialogues about, or conversations about what is it you can do.

See what you can do. And that I've been very lucky to be surrounded by creatives who really do stuff that I never saw exist before. But even before that, I knew that was a common factor in a lot of stuff I loved was that it was stuff that was being done for the first time.

So I shouldn't imitate it. I would see who's doing stuff I've never seen before. I really like that. That seemed like an obvious idea once I'd seen it and work out what's going on there. … And have fun.

Ben: Yeah. That sounds amazing. Have fun, do things with purpose, make things which haven't existed before. Great set of advice. With that, Simon, thank you very much.

Simon: Thank you, Ben.

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

January 2, 2026 Ben Yeoh

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

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

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

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

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

We cover:

The Calculus of Altruism: How philanthropists use "revealed preference" to value a year of life.
The Pain Paradox: Why standard health models struggle to account for chronic pain and suffering.
AI for Good: Why the risks of "AI washing" in nonprofits are real, but the potential for capacity building is massive.
Systemic Bottlenecks: Why fixing boring government procurement processes might be more impactful than flashy new policies.
Life Advice: Why you should probably ignore the advice that resonates with you most.

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

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

Contents

00:00 Introduction
01:17 Valuing Life and Health
05:46 Challenges in Measuring Pain and Health Outcomes
13:32 Creative Process and Research Methodology
18:38 Journey and Early Experiences
22:23 Debate on International Aid and USAID
29:20 Impact of AI in Global Health and Development
36:25 Overrated or Underrated
44:59 Exciting Projects and AI for Good
46:14 Balancing Cause Areas and Funding Decisions
58:31 Advice for Aspiring Philanthropists and Innovators

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So the value of a statistical life, quote unquote, that is used for example, in the United States when deciding on, health insurance or, healthcare issues is different from the one that you might use in a different country. But that in turn is a pretty different question from the one that we are answering, which is how to allocate our finite resources across interventions that mostly target health and ones that mostly target income.

So we, when we calculate, the value of a particular grant. We have a metric we call Open Philanthropy dollars or coefficient giving dollars now. And that is used to equalize health and income gains. so that allows us to basically compare across health and income increases to figure out how much you should value one versus the other. Though of course the metric of coefficient giving dollars isn't necessarily comparable outside of the institution. It's, not like a, objective dollar metric, if that makes sense.

Ben: Sure, yeah. You can't compare it to what the US government is saying about anything to do with dollars. But even within that, do you think your order of magnitude is about right when you're using this a hundred thousand and, spreading it, they say, that's within plus or minus 20%, That's the sense I have.

Or do you think there's a risk that you are completely wrong on that? And maybe we can think about that because you had a really, interesting essay on thinking about pain and I think pain's a really interesting thing to think about because on the one hand you could think for minor pits of pain we use say aspirins and things and they're really cheap and we don't seem to value it very much.

And another aspect actually, if you ask doctors and you think, oh, this person's in pain, we've got cheap medications, or they're out, it often doesn't. Get into their calculus that much because we think, pain or maybe acute pain is this is not life-threatening at the moment. You'll get round it.

On the other hand, if you speak to some people, it could be, really valuable to try and avoid or chronic pain is, different and it comes in enough and it's also more nebulous because there's some part of it which is psychologically based, some part which is maybe biologically based and they interact.

So I was interested in, whether you've got your reflections on how you've been thinking about pain and, whether this is the type of metric which could be used at all with this, or whether we should really be thinking about something else.

Deena: Yeah, absolutely. It's, a really good question because I think pain is an area where DALYs get a lot harder.

In large part because it is quite possible, if not likely, that a DALY is not a DALY in all circumstances. You might care significantly more about alleviating a marginal quote unquote DALY's worth of pain. The more acute pain that you are in. For example, and there was one study, that I referenced in Japan that implied that this might be the case.

That the more serious the injury or illness, proposed to individuals, the more that they were willing to pay to avert the same amount of additional pain. And so we don't necessarily think of pain or negative health outcomes as linear. but we might have all sorts of different curves for how much we value amounts of health at different points in our life and at different, levels of discomfort.

so I think this is, an area where yeah, certainly the model and here is six we are using might be a little bit blunt. With that said, it is, like you said, it's such a hard question to answer because a lot of people might have quite divergent beliefs and feelings about what that, what the shape of the curve is for them individually and It would be quite prohibitively hard, I think, to apply that sort of differentiated DLI metric, especially depending on the disease. And looking at how it affects different people in to different orders of magnitude and so on.

Ben: So does that mean we just have to be really cautious with these type of models and thinking when we come across something like pain or is it a kind of this is the best we have, so even if we're a little bit unsure, it's gonna give us some sort of answer?

Deena: Yeah, I definitely think it's, a good reason to be cautious and a good reason why. The quantitative answer is not necessarily the be all, end all, it's a good heuristic. It's a good guide to break down a problem. But for example, with with chronic pain or with, areas where the DALY figure that is given appears to be a little bit questionable or potentially a little bit too high or low one thing we often do is compare it to the DALY burden we've used for other diseases and just think conceptually about whether this is reasonable.

So for example, we might say, the DALY burden associated with cluster headaches is x. Now let's compare it to the DALY burden that we've used previously for o other quite, painful diseases, for example, is it significantly higher or lower? and this can help us triangulate a little bit, what are we really saying when we're using this multiplier for this disease?

Ben: Sure. And when you were looking into pain and, doing your research on that, was there anything which surprised you around that? Or do you think is actually, this is really misunderstood, we should really clarify this more.

Deena: I was very surprised by the degree to which we don't really fully understand pain.

We think of pain as a direct response to the magnitude of an injury we receive. you stub your toe, you feel some amount of corresponding pain, but that's not necessarily always the case. The amount of pain we feel can be very disproportionate, either higher or lower to the actual damage that our body has felt.

And so it is like a much more complicated and psychosocial, fa thing and phenomenon that we experience as well, which I think I underrated to some degree. And for example, also our understanding of like chronic pain and how chronic pain comes about, is quite limited. Our understanding of, phantom limb pain and why it only impacts some people and not others is, similarly a bits body.

So I think I, I underestimated the degree to which there are a lot of open questions around the biological components of pain and how pain literally works.

Ben: Yeah. Particularly in chronic pain. I think the scientists call it heterogeneous. We really don't know some of the causal aspects. So you might present with these same type of symptoms, but the underlying can be completely different.

And we might not even have that big of a clue. And it's interesting maybe making a segue into something where we might think we have clearer numbers around, maybe thinking about the UK or any system which has got a constrained budget. How would you deal with funding for extra money, for instance, for a diabetic versus perhaps a preterm baby or maybe say a rare genetic disease at birth or something like that.

So the overall disability life years, the dalis come out at maybe 20, 30,000 pounds, maybe a little bit more in dollars for the diabetic. So you go, oh that's really good in terms of, life, but the preterm baby is coming into hundreds of thousands of dollars. Same with genetics.

So we could be talking half a million up, up to a million, million or more. And that under kind of pure thinking, just cost benefit or say this. First or the utilitarian kind of goes, it's the diabetic all the time. But then when you ask people, and here in the UK we try and ask people, although we argue about whether this is it, people end up saying no, we think the baby should be worth a chance.

Or, particularly with the genetic and then there's arguments around that. How do you think we should think about that? And do you actually fall on one side of the fence around, how we should make that decision?

Deena: Yeah, it's a really, it's a really hard question and an important one. I definitely won't presume to be able to give a particular answer or say, necessarily what the government should do in a circumstance like this.

It's an impossible one. But I will say that, the, allocation methods that I'm talking about are. Something that's like quite useful for us in our context as a philanthropic funder who are, have a particular pool of money. We are allocating it across cause areas we are explicitly going into it being cause agnostic and impact maximizing.

So we know that is our approach and aim going in. Whereas a government is in a very different position to an individual donor or a philanthropic funder. And they ultimately are tied to a social contract with their citizen. They're democratically elected, they're intended to serve the voice of their people.

And to a large degree, I think the sort of bare utilitarian calculus needs to also incorporate what people believe, how they feel what their opinions and perspectives are on how funding should be allocated and what the priorities of the government should be.

Ben: Excellent.

Perhaps you could talk about your creative process or your research process. Say you're picking up a new topic like AI in health or you're doing some of this research within pain. How do you go about thinking about that? And also you've had a journalist background, so you've been interested in stories and the narrative around that.

So I'd be interested if you've got any particular creative process or anything you'd like to share around that.

Deena: Yeah, absolutely. I picked up freelance journalism, in large part as a forcing mechanism. I thought it would be a really interesting way to. Create a structure for myself to get myself to explore the questions that came up day to day that seemed confusing or potentially interesting to me.

so it, I think has been quite good in that it has given me another lens such that when I read something that is, seems a little bit contradictory or seems a little bit unexplained or intention with something else that I know I have a mechanism by which I can say, okay, I, actually wanna get to the bottom of this.

and I'll go and interview several people and I'll, if it starts to look like an actual story, put together a pitch to an editor who will then, be able to act as like a little bit of a scaffold for me as I go off and explore the question and distill what I what I believe in writing.

And that has been quite helpful in large part because I, have this strong belief that, writing is thinking and, in order to. Be able to understand something very clearly. You just have to be able to write about it very clearly in a way that someone else will understand. and that process I think has allowed me to dive, shallowly into a lot of different areas that I find somewhat interesting.

And, so I'm, really glad that I've that I've been doing that over the past couple of years. I think it's been a really enriching process for me, in thinking about the world. Yeah, I've, oftentimes the topics that I'm looking at intersect somewhat with the topics that, I'm thinking about in a professional setting.

but it's a quite different lens on them than doing, research or making grants. And so I think it's quite complimentary in my experience.

Ben: And do you like making notes as you go? Do you read and write? Do you write two three hour chunks in the morning? Are you an evening person? There seems to be 1,001 ways of doing it, but I'm interested in your actual process.

Do you write by hand or you, straight on computer, or is it just all completely random?

Deena: I tend to type and I usually do all of my interviews first and get a good picture of what I think the story is in my head, and then tend to write the draft all at once. I usually like to leave it for about 24 hours and then come back to it fresh and do the editing then, because I often think that you're a bit too close to it when you've just written it for the first time.

So yeah, that tends to be my process and I like to reserve Saturday, Sunday mornings to, write for a few hours each week, which I think has been helpful for, forcing some cadence and consistency. But certainly everyone has their own sort of writing habits and patterns that I think they're so personalized and individual that, I'm not sure anyone's, writing habits would work necessarily perfectly for anyone else.

Ben: I think there's been a book looking at this. And if you look at people who, are thought to be really great, you can find, they work at every single different hour of the day with every single different habits. Although there's maybe at the meta level some quirky things about them, which seem to have a, pattern, although the actual individual quirk is hard to know.

Do you ever listen to music or things or is it like music or, no. And is there anything about your process you think is perhaps a little bit quirky? Like you don't write with a pet crocodile beside you or anything, or? Really, a lot of people seem to be, at least in humanities creators, a lot of them seem to be high on drugs or alcohol or whatever when they write.

But I'm assuming you are not, but, yeah. Anything quirky or do you think you're just normal?

Deena: Unfortunately, nothing's so out there. I, I can't listen to music with lyrics while I write. otherwise I think the words will distract me quite a bit. But, I do often put on white noise particularly like the sound of rain, I think is helpful for, just being a little bit more focused and concentrated.

No, I can't think of anything particularly weird. I'm a bit, I'm a bit more of a night owl than most people. And so I think often my in spite of plans usually to finish something early in the morning, usually my, most productive writing comes quite late at night. so that maybe is, is slightly quirky though.

I think that's a bit common with writers.

Ben: I think not having lyrics is maybe somewhat common, but actually wanting brain music or white noise is perhaps a little bit more uncommon. So that's that's an interesting note. Maybe that's a good segue into your journey as to where, how you've got here.

Because if I read it correctly, you were a teenage medical inventor of some sort, or at least a kind of social entrepreneur back where you grew up and then you did a little bit of a consultancy gig and then have come into that. I dunno, what did you learn growing up being kind of social entrepreneur like, and, any thoughts of that in terms of how you went from there to here?

Deena: Yeah, I grew up, so I was born in the us and I grew up between upstate New York and Cairo. I spent my summers in Cairo. So usually about three months of each year, I would be there. And I grew up with, yeah, a family of much older siblings who I think, really shaped a lot of how I think about things.

And, I think just being constantly exposed to, adult conversations and like around the dinner table. I think to some degree, shaped my upbringing a little bit. I did work with my sister on a solar energy social enterprise in, in Egypt that distributed solar water panels that, heated water for households and also for organizations, around the country.

So I think that was a particularly valuable experience. given the fact that, like you mentioned, I worked at McKinsey as a consultant and now at Coefficient giving as a grant maker, getting some exposure to implementation and to operations was incredibly valuable because I think it gave me a taste of how.

Unintuitive difficult. It is, in many ways actually getting something done on the ground is quite hard and quite hard in ways that are almost impossible to predict at the outset. so in each particular circumstance, something will come up, but you don't know what it is until it happens.

And, yeah, often things take a lot longer than you project they will at the beginning. And I, so I think, that, that's been a really important perspective for me to have as I've, consulted people from mile High and also given grants to operators to be able to understand a little bit, of what they're going through.

Ben: I guess that will tilt you into thinking about impact if you've done social entrepreneur things as a teenager. Is there anything you've changed your mind about then over the years in thinking about it? you hint at one in the sense of actually implementing things always seems harder than the paper because unexpected things always come up, but, any grand ideas where you think, I used to think this, but now I think.

Really it's that.

Deena: Yeah, it's a great question. I think that is certainly one of them that you mentioned, that, operations is much harder than it looks. and that strategy often, di dilutes the nuances of the details of actually getting something done. I think in consulting, for example, I went in half wondering whether this this common refrain that consultants are just risk management, might be true.

it seemed shocking just because of the sums that, fortune 500 organizations pay for consultants. But I actually think I, I came out of it more positive about the value of consulting, if that makes sense. I think one thing that surprised me is how. Integrated, a lot of our consulting teams were with the organizations where we worked and how almost over time essential we became.

And I think that the scope and scale of that across, industries, across organizations, big and small, across sectors, I think was quite surprising to me. So I guess I came out a little bit less cynical about consulting than I went in, which I I think might be the reverse of what, what happens to a lot of other people.

Ben: it's good because you actually did go into consulting. 'cause otherwise some people would've said, don't do consulting at all. Go straight to making actual impacts. So I'm glad you got something out of it at the high level, I'm interested in a couple of systems piece. So there's been a lot of debate on, for instance, US Aid or even just international aid in general.

And on the one hand you could say we lose usaid. There's definitely some projects which had high value impact. Those are not happening and there's that is negative versus having it right in that world. That counterfactuals definitely negative. I guess some people would though say that there are some projects which maybe not higher return, and we really wanna build on local infrastructure and local projects for people, because there's a whole set of examples when, foreigners go in, try and give money, with good aims and have essentially messed it up.

It's gone to the wrong people. They haven't understood these things, the unexpected has happened. And so that money has not only been wasted, has been wasted, but has been actively poor. And there's examples like that. I don't think there's a consensus answer with within that aggregation. But I'd be interesting from in your reflection this mean that actually it's more important the work that you guys do in terms of philanthropy, because there's a little bit less international aid philanthropy from the government level, or is just this whole idea of aid has perhaps been a little bit more down rated, so it's making your life harder.

I'd be just interested in any reflections on whether USAID was any good pros and cons and how it's affected your work.

Deena: It's a very timely question. I think there is a very reasonable argument that usaid would have benefited from reform. there, there is a group of people that is or a sort of line of thinking that is, the bureaucratic nature of foreign aid in the US and in other large countries has overwhelmed, the institution and it needed a significant overhaul.

I think I sympathize with some aspects of that argument, and I think it is re reasonable to say that, even a pretty heavy handed, overhaul of USAID could have been good. There is a version of that could have been, very net positive. I think a version that, some have talked about since of, like massive slashes to foreign aid, that are indiscriminate or, just go across the board pretty heavy handedly are.

certainly not the version of, the overhaul that I think, would have been most effective. And I think that is something to note, which is like, there is a, there is a, good and a less good version of reforming usaid, if that makes sense. And I think in a, just the magnitude of funding that comes through foreign aid, in global health and development is staggering.

And losing a large proportion of that really would, significantly alter the field. regardless of the sort of spread of projects. And maybe you can say that the range of cost effectiveness that, happens within institutions, it is just so much funding that it, inevitably leaves a massive gap and a massive hole.

I do think that makes our work as philanthropic funders, more important and more sorely needed. And often opens up, more opportunities for us to do cost effective work. Though it is also of course much more difficult when a lot of USAID programs were supporting foundational infrastructure that then enabled us to build, for example, on top of them.

when that infrastructure goes, in some cases there isn't an actor who is well positioned to fill the gap.

Ben: So net, net, although reform of usaid, a reasonable person could have argued for that. What we have now in practice is probably net negative because of the absolute levels of, funding cuts and this issue of some infrastructure with no credible stakeholder or actor being able to do that.

So those, not only those first order projects have gone, but a whole infrastructure layer has been, withdrawn, made, life difficult. Was that a fair summary of thinking around that?

Deena: I think that sounds right. yeah, there is a version of USAID reform that, that could have been certainly net positive, but I think, a combination of magnitude of the cuts and the way in which the cuts were decided, if that makes sense.

In terms of how to prioritize projects and how many people opined on that and how long that process took, I think, resulted in, in less than optimal implementation. And therefore, I definitely do think it was net negative.

Ben: Another systems piece. Perhaps this is wider in, in thinking around cost benefit type of analysis or at least simple utilitarian thought.

I still think with suffering in the ecosystem around some of the effects that F-D-F-X-F-D-X and SBF had on thinking about that partly because of funding and partly because they were so explicitly we now think naively utilitarian around their thinking. Do you think there's still an echo of that and do you think I, mean I guess this is on some of this, but I think it's wider philanthropy in general.

And we are probably a little bit younger and a little bit more apart from it maybe. Has it made your thinking around that systems piece change or been influenced at any way?

Deena: it's a good question. much of the fallout of that happened before I joined coefficient giving, and I was very much looking at it from the outside in.

I think coming into my role, I am less of a sort of hard line utilitarian than maybe some say SBF or pure rationalist or pure effective altruist. And so I think I was already coming from, a little bit of an outside in view, and a bit of a sort of more, more sort of mixed perspective, if that makes sense.

I definitely do see it as having shaken up a lot of the effective altruist or rationalist community and a lot of the thinking around it, I think, a lot of people reflect it after that. Which I think is quite healthy sometimes. For sure.

Ben: Yeah, I'm definitely an outsider looking in.

I think one of the things I reflected on was, what would they call it? Normy stuff. So I now really understand why you just have a regular independent board if you can do it well, because this is the things which gives you distance over some of the things. And when I see things which don't have that, which I mean there's no guarantee, right?

A lot of those things go wrong. But I now understand why those boring, normal measures are put in and maybe there's too much bureaucracy with some of those. But you can see now the counter examples where they failed because you just went on high trust with a couple of individuals with no oversight accountability.

So it was a, win for normal boring covenants. which is which is weird, which is an interesting meta layer. Meta layer thing. Maybe thinking about a meta layer thing. You've done some work on technology and particularly ai, which within say health or climate or a lot of global development is potentially an enabling layer.

Yes, AI in itself might settle certain projects, but maybe it's more importantly is going to enable a lot of other things. So I'm interested in what you think is actually happening within ai. I think global development and health, you wrote a really interesting essay on sort of radiologists, how it hasn't, for instance, there are still a lot of radiologists.

In fact, we don't have enough radiologists, even though. AI is doing that very well, and that's in a narrow thing, but it looks like it could be supporting quite a lot of a infrastructure layer and then into global development in general. has this altered your kind of thinking, and does this mean we should be in investing more in a metal layer, or at least in transforming that metal layer into something practical?

Or is it really the kind of, yes, this is a new technology, but our old models and our old ways of thinking? Just incorporate that and that will just be the same, but with different measurements. I don't know Your thoughts on ai.

Deena: Yeah, it's a big question right now. maybe I'll start with some things that worry me and then some things that I'm excited about in the area.

So a few concerns I have upfront. One is this idea of using benchmarks to determine how much AI can do in the field or in practical terms. for example, looking at AI performance on a benchmark, or a test related to a particular job. And then to say this means that AI can replace.

87% of people who do this job, oftentimes the map is not the territory with benchmarks. And so there's quite a big difference between the questions on a benchmark and the true process of actually doing a job or doing a role. And usually it is quite hard to come to a like detailed and nuanced understanding of what it really means to do a job and how people spend their time in that role and what are the long tail outcomes that are, come up very infrequently, but are actually quite important to get right.

So I think that is one worry I have with ai. another, I have with AI in development in particular is incentivized AI washing. people are very excited about. Potentially implementing AI in a lot of new contexts and settings, which I think is, great. And I'll, also get to that in a moment.

But I worry about setting upfront too much this idea of we would really like to fund AI related projects. So we really like to invest in AI related projects. And then encouraging, nonprofits, organizations that are doing great work by default to feel pressured to incorporate AI where it doesn't necessarily make sense or it isn't necessarily adding much impact so that they can then say, yes, we are AI enabled, we, qualify for this particular program or this particular incubator.

I think there is always a danger with technology of, implicitly shoehorning it into processes where it is not quite the right fit, because it is the next really exciting thing. and I think, in part, in particular, we wanna be careful as funders in terms of how we are shaping the field in that way, and whether we are driving incentives in a negative direction in that sense.

But with all that said, I think this is quite, AI and development is quite nascent, and this is a really exciting moment for it. and I am quite excited by the potential for AI to increase capacity and throughput at, almost every level of development. I think often, human capital is a constraint for a lot of different fields from everything from, do you have enough doctors to do you have enough people to run the government properly?

And if AI can act as a multiplier on people's time, for example. Increasing diagnostic throughput for every doctor by making them a few seconds faster with each patient. Then I think it could have, significant positive effects in low and middle income countries in particular where, that is really the key blocker.

You mentioned, a piece I wrote about radiology, that was really focused on high income country settings, where the question was will ai, replace radiologists and therefore make, radiology interpretation much cheaper and much faster? But in a lot of, low resource settings, the question is not whether AI will replace the radiologist, but whether you can access a radiologist at all and whether AI might act as a sort of better than the default standard of care option for you.

So I do think the questions are quite different in low and middle income countries, and I'm very excited about, the potential for AI to increase capacity in lower resource settings.

Ben: So that sounds like we should move quite fast and hope not to break anything as opposed to moving very fast and breaking lots of things.

Deena: that's a very good question. I think I mean I think that there is also obviously a reason for caution in particular because there, there is a sort of paradigm in which if you believe that AI as a technology will get significantly better in the next, let's say one to three years, implementing a, very imperfect solution Now could, this is an example, but could, lead to mistakes that therefore eliminate trust in AI that will then be very hard to win back. Even if in say, three years the models that you're working with are significantly more accurate or significantly better in a healthcare setting, for example.

So I think that is like one consideration, which is that, when you're introducing a new technology, you are setting the terms of people's impression of that technology. and in a lot of cases right now, AI is people's, most people's interaction with AI in some countries is simply as a tool that spams use to send them a lot of, scam text messages on WhatsApp and scam phone calls.

And I think it is important to consider like the. The relationship that you're creating between the technology and the people and to a, I think to some extent the more that you force technology in where people do not organically see a need for it, the more you can sort of risk creating this negative impression and those impressions can be sticky long after the technology itself has changed significantly.

so I think that's, maybe one reason for caution, particularly right now.

Ben: Sure. I hadn't thought about that. It's very hard to recover from a bad first date is what you're saying.

Deena: Exactly, yes.

Ben: And I guess we also potentially move through some one-way doors, as in you do X and it's quite hard to row back from X, but maybe there might be some two-way doors.

I find it's really interesting that the technologists have a. There are different clusters of them, obviously, but they have a different view, from what a lot of the economists and sociologists think around this. And it's really interesting that they're so far apart. But yeah, when you don't have that consensus, it is a little bit tricky.

Maybe we should do a little short round on overrated and underrated. So I'm gonna give you like a little topic. you can pass or you can say neutral but you can say, yeah, I think this ideal concept is underrated or overrated, or we should have more of it, or less of it or something like that.

Yeah. Are you good?

Deena: Yeah. Happy to do it.

Ben: Yeah, let's do it. Okay. so the comedy one, malaria nets underrated or overrated.

Deena: I would say in general, underrated, still, underrated

Ben: even though we've been going on about them for so long.

Deena: I think so. I think we are in a bit of a bubble in that, within the world that I'm in and that to some extent that you are in as well.

people take for granted this idea of malaria nets are the canonical, reliable, cost-effective intervention. But I think one that's not necessarily really like common knowledge beyond this sort of corner of the world. And two, there is still quite a lot of need for it. Like it is still, an intervention that can absorb more funding.

And I think, until we reach equilibrium with that, I guess by nature or almost mechanically, I would say underrated. Yeah.

Ben: So hundreds of millions of dollars of capital could still flow to mal nets and we're nowhere near, reaching that. Okay. Interesting. Good. Climate net zero. Underrated overrated.

Deena: It's a good question because this is such a polarized one. you have almost, I guess in the US at least about half the country feels extremely negative about this and about half the country feels very positively about this. And I don't know, I would almost say as it nets out neutral yeah, I think when I think about each half, I would say, has been overrated maybe in the past 10 years, but in the last, like year or two, I think that has, like the pendulum has swung and it's pretty sharply corrected.

So maybe I'll say neutral on this one. Okay.

Ben: What, so your, observation is that the US or the world is neutral in it, but are you yourself now neutral or, actually you were saying that maybe the pendulum has swung. Too far. although the world is maybe balanced that actually because of where the pendulum sung, it's a little bit underrated.

Deena: I think. I think, where the pendulum has swung recently, maybe, makes it underrated, if that makes sense.

Ben: Yeah. It's, definitely a tricky one. I would probably say it's overrated for environmentalist and it's underrated for the average person in America, but, yeah, that's, the difficult one.

Universal basic income. Overrated. Underrated.

Deena: Wow. Such a good question. I would say almost. Not discussed, if that makes sense. Really, it's gone. I thought this was

Ben: the Californian solution to everything. I've obviously been misled.

Deena: I think it disappeared. it had, it's had its moment in, the, presidential campaign a few cycles back.

But I, my understanding is recently, like UBI as a policy proposal has fell out of the popular zeitgeist. I suspect as we think more about AI, labor market disruptions solutions like UBI will have their day in the light again. and I'm quite interested to see how different the reaction is this time around.

So I guess I would say, yeah, perhaps for our current like labor market structure and where we are literally today, slightly overrated, but for potential AI labor market disruptions in the future, potentially a little bit underrated in that yeah, there's not, there's, there aren't a lot of, concrete policy proposals around that yet.

and I'm, I think I'm excited to see more thinking around it.

Ben: That's very, well hedged on that one. It's interesting to see that it's actually completely di disappeared from the debate from what you said, or in which case, that would make me think it's a little bit underrated, even if it might have been overrated before.

I was reading that in Ireland, they're gonna do a small version of this, aimed at artists. So if you can get on this list, there's a few thousand artists which will have a small artist, UBI. And to your point about job disruption, maybe this is the offset about, okay. Put all of your work illegally into l and s because it's out on the internet, but maybe we'll give you a UBI instead.

Okay. Long-termism or thinking maybe about the very, very far future, is this overrated or underrated?

Deena: I think in non rationalists and effective ultra spaces, as in for the average person? I think somewhat underrated. I think it's just very instinctively much more salient to think about things that are impacting us today.

Even if, when you truly consider it and when you think about, future generations of, the people you know and your family, you would care significantly more than you do today. I think the average person likely might care significantly more than they do today. if like properly framed about longer term impacts, if that makes sense.

Ben: Yes. But the rationalists themselves maybe think about it a little bit too much.

Deena: Yeah, I think, it's a a concentrated dose of something that is, not popularly considered in, in most of the rest of the world.

Ben: Sure. I think they might just go too far. They just, maybe if you get us to think about 100 to 200 years or 500 years, that's something useful.

Once you go out to say a million, all of the math seems to get really screwed because when we're very, not very good with large numbers anyway. Definitely. But very good. Yeah. Okay. Overrated, underrated direct giving. So this is direct giving of cash transfers.

Deena: Oh, good question. I, guess I would have to say similar to my mechanical answer on bed nets underrated.

Yeah. Build demand in general use. Exactly. still lots of demand and, and not enough supply. So I'll say underrated.

Ben: Great. Okay. AI existential risks. So a GI risk. Do you think this is overrated or underrated?

Deena: it's really interesting, like some of the other questions, it depends radically on who you talk to.

I think, if you spend a few weeks in the bay, it will feel like there's almost nothing else happening in the world. Whereas, if you spend a few weeks. Many other places in the country it's a non-issue or not barely something that's even regularly discussed. So I guess I would say, I wish it were more evenly rated.

If that makes sense.

Ben: Sure, that makes sense. Okay. And Cairo, do you think that's an underrated or overrated place?

Deena: I would say underrated. I think yeah, often, people don't don't manage to get out there themselves, but I think it's, a city with so much rich, with rich history and on top of that it is a city that is just incredibly alive.

It reminds me a lot in some ways of New York and I'm biased because I've spent, quite a bit of time in both cities, but it is one of the few cities that I think compares in terms of sheer, like volume of people and energy and, like the idea of the city that never sleeps and the 24 hour city.

Ben: Yeah, very intense. I was there once for a little while to go to a friend's wedding, and it did ha it did actually have that New York vibe of everything happening all at once everywhere. yes. and last one on this philanthropy in general, do you think it's overrated or underrated?

Deena: Yeah, I, again, am biased, but I will have to say underrated.

You go, you're gonna have to say

Ben: that otherwise you're in the wrong career.

Deena: Yeah, absolutely. but I truly believe it. when you think about the volume of charitable giving each year compared to, for example, like pledges that have been taken or the amount of money people, intend to give, I think it is quite low.

And yeah, I think it's underrated and I think I am excited over time to see more. Very high salience and very visible and easy, ways of giving charitably for people who, maybe are stopped by a form of decision paralysis or uncertainty. but who would like to give, which, I suspect is, is, quite a few people.

Ben: I'd accept that effective philanthropy is definitely underrated, but I still think it's a potentially a bit more of an open question than I was hoping for about overall giving, which seems to have, a little bit more of a, more patchy history. Although I guess that's why places like co giving and open philanthropy come about.

And so any current projects that you're working on that you're particularly excited by, or things that you have granted to or looked at and when these are really great projects and have now come by because you are, because you've been working on them.

Deena: it's a good question. one thing I really love about my job is over the past year I've been able to look at such a wide variety of cause areas.

I think I started the year thinking about antimicrobial resistance and, I'm, ending the year thinking about AI for good and I've hit, many, cause areas in the middle. I think I'm, I am quite excited about the potential for AI, for Good. In particular, I think it's a very nascent field and one where it's possible that a lot of the problems that implementers have are shared even across verticals.

whether you're doing AI for health or. AI for agriculture or weather forecasting? I think there are maybe some common needs and challenges. And I'm excited about, continuing to learn a little bit more about the field and thinking about ways in which we might be able to support that, though, that's quite uncertain right now, so I don't, wanna make any particular promises around.

we, don't have an existing program in the area yet.

Ben: Sure. And so how do you balance out between looking at something like, antibiotics, a MR and. Climate and AI or systems, pieces and things. And you said that the own internal sort of metric is this a hundred thousand in coefficient dollars, which you, seem to be able to, go to, and I guess you're looking for 10 x, five x, a hundred x, that type of, that type of return.

And I guess that's it. You just have to, whatever area you are doing somehow bring it back to these are the inputs and the costs and get to those sort of figures or how do you think about weighing it up and at the strategic level, I guess you've gone development health, ai, also existential risk and some other elements where you're talking about maybe not, some other people aren't looking at it so much and have ideas about tractability or other, but I'm interested in how your own thinking is shaped about what should we work on and then when we work on it, how are we really thinking about whether this is a good idea to fund.

Deena: Yeah, it's a great question. in large part because by nature our time is limited, which means that we can't investigate every cause area. And so making prioritization decisions based on relatively little information upfront, is quite difficult, but a necessary part of the process. I think we often try to split the process of investigating an area into, parts that will allow us to pivot quickly and frequently.

So we might start, for example, with a two day investigation into an area that focuses on one particular crux that could basically suggest that we shouldn't look into it at all. So for example, if there's an area where. It seems really important and really neglected, but we're quite worried that there are basically no solutions and therefore it is totally in intractable, in which case we shouldn't do a full investigation.

we might just spend two days specifically looking at tractability and solutions. so I think that helps quite a bit. And then in terms of prioritizing cause areas, for funding, we do rely quite a bit on this framework of disability adjusted life years and percent increase in income as the sort of north star metrics or heuristics.

and we try to consider three factors, importance neglected is and tractability. So importance represents the overall magnitude of the problem and how many people it impacts. so this can often be dollies in terms of, health issues, for example. but might, go by other metrics depending on the area.

neglected is a measure of how many other funders are working on it and how many dollars are chasing the problem with some sort of adjustment for, what in particular they're working on. And tractability usually focuses on a few specific things that we could hypothetically fund if we were to enter the area.

So we'll try to do direct models of the impact per dollar spent on a few hypothetical grants that we might make in the area to understand whether they might be comparable to the rest of our portfolio. so that is, often how we try to make comparable judgments across very different cause areas, though, of course that is very tricky and there's a lot of, uncertainty there.

Ben: That's a really detailed level of analysis. Do you think it's worth, if you are an organization or even a startup thinking of applying to funders or even thinking of submitting to you guys that they already start to think a little bit in these terms? Or is it just more useful for you to do the analysis on what they would give you and not necessarily say that they've already started to try and translate it into a market size or impact size or a probability of success?

Is it actually helpful if they've already tilted it into your language and thinking, or is it. Better for them to just do their purpose and their things and you do the analysis on top.

Deena: Yeah, certainly the vast majority of grantees we work with, will not have used exactly our model or not be thinking about things in exactly the same way we are.

So I think that's something that we understand. And so therefore, it's quite important for, us to be able to convert even very different materials into something that makes sense within our framework. I think it is often useful, when, organizations have thought about things in, somewhat similar ways though, if that makes sense.

When they've thought about, this is a really big problem. here, we know the shape of the field and what other funders are doing. we know why we think what we're doing is particularly, effective at solving this problem relative to other potential solutions.

things like that doesn't necessarily have to be. very, quantitative terms or in exactly our language. But I think the general mode of thinking of, here's why we think what we're doing is quite effective is, often helpful for us to know.

Ben: Great. And couple of final questions leading into the end.

If you are the Ben benign dictator of the United States or the world, you can think about this globally or the us. what one thing, or I guess if you've got loads of ideas, you could do two or three things, would you implement in the world today?

Deena: Very hard question. As in, any sort of like law or regulation.

Yeah. You're

Ben: the ruler of the world, so I guess it'd be a law regulation more than more than anything else. But yeah, you can make this law and let's assume people are gonna even follow it or policy. or maybe you could, go the other way, right? You could take away a policy which you think is so bad that actually the, most net benefit we'll get is if this thing disappeared rather than this thing came in.

Deena: Yeah. Is it, too niche and boring to say I would fix government procurement processes in the US and in other sort of high income countries?

Ben: No, but I guess the, challenge then is, so you think government procurement A is not a, is first of all probably a pretty bad, but b would probably have an impact which is much larger than the average person might think.

Deena: let me caveat that with saying I've certainly not done a cost effectiveness analysis and I've, definitely not even it was just a thing that immediately jumped to mind. I'm certain there are many other much more cost effective things you could do if you were a dictator of the world.

So this is like quite a small petty thing to be considering. But yeah, in large part, I think our ability to,

Ben: I mean in some ways the US government did have this in mind ish. When they came up with Dodge, they thought, there's something going on here. I know that was only a part of it, so not completely crazy.

Deena: I think it's, certainly at the core of a lot of our ability to get things done. And, maybe this is also maybe again, I'm, biased here 'cause it's something that I personally experienced. For example, when you take public transit and you think about that the magnitude of the budget of the MTA and yet how expensive it is to do any particular project or process to improve the subway system.

and I think this goes not only for transit, but for things like construction, for for almost anything that the government, procures or does or has an RFP for. I think it's a wide ranging problem that impacts a lot of different sort of verticals that we experience day to day, if that makes sense.

Ben: yeah. So when you talk about procurement, it's not just buying supplies it's the building side of things as well.

Deena: Yeah, exactly. So any sort of like contractor agreements or RFPs.

Ben: Yeah, I guess that doesn't have a single bullet to it in a way that say if you propose a global carbon tax might or something.

So if you had 10 minutes with the president and they were gonna do the thing, you would implement that, this is the thing you would say, you'd go fix your procurement, fix your building.

Deena: Yeah. I, don't know. I think it's in part a sort of a funny answer. and in part something that I think is like quite important.

I don't know how much that I would stand by, if I spent 10 minutes thinking about it, which I certainly hope that I would, if I, were, to be dictator for. For a day. I'm not sure that's what I would come out with, but I, do think I do stand by that. It's quite an important problem.

Ben: Yeah, no, I think that, I'm surprised you didn't go for health though, but you won't. Procurement maybe maybe health is even too complicated. Not as tractable 'cause it's too many bits to it. Okay. I'm gonna ask the question in another way, but bring it rather than at the policy government dictator level.

If I give you a billion dollars, which actually might sound like a lot, but actually we know is not a huge amount in the context of the world. And I say, you have to spend this, by the end of the call you have to decide how are we going to do this billion, what would you what would you allocate it towards?

You've got a billion and you can do anything with it. But it disappears unless we use it. So we can't like invest it and save it and do something even better in 10 years time. But what would we do now?

Deena: Yeah, it's a good question. It's a hard one in large part one because often the answer might be divided into many little grants, but of course if one person is trying to think about how they would spend the funding, then you really just have to pick a few organizations or just a handful of, places to direct the funding. and then the second problem comes in of you get pretty, potentially pretty strong diminishing returns as you give the extra marginal dollar to the same organization, if that makes sense.

so the first, a hundred million, they might spend extremely cost effectively, but the further you go, the further down of the list of projects they have goes and, the more you start hitting constraints, sometimes thinking about like these very scalable opportunities I think there are certainly some organizations that that could take a large chunk of that billion and use it well.

again, bias, but organization, give, I think, would definitely be on the list. give directly thinking about, Gavi, for example. that could use a huge amount of funding. yeah, thinking about like organizations that are, Able to take a quite a large budget and have limiting diminished return as they move down the next dollar.

so I think ideally I'd split it up to at least five or 10 organizations, but I think something like that.

Ben: Sure. The effective giving organizations like your own and, but then if you had a pet project, so you're not allowed to give it to an organization. And maybe this would be a smaller amount of money and maybe this isn't first order the most effective thing.

What sort of project or areas would you fund about? I think about this a little bit because one of the criticisms around some of this line of thinking is it never really works on the systems level. Although we've slightly negated that with AI and policy and, the things that they're like and sometimes I talk about, or I think about where we've had great social progress, like over hundreds of years progress, Slavery, women's rights, disability rights have come from this systems level change. And this is my art or your storytelling hat on. Because if you don't have a storytelling narrative for some of this, then you don't have that enabling layer at all to get change. But then, maybe that isn't that effective and we have to do it in a different way.

But I'd be interested in your thoughts of that. And did you have any other smaller pet project that you would want to fund?

Deena: Yeah, it's a, good question. I think abstracting away from. My day-to-day role here a little bit. I think one area that we've looked at this year that I think has seemed quite timely and important is health system strengthening.

And in particular helping, low and middle income country governments allocate their health budgets and their budgets more generally as effectively as possible. I think this is particularly important now given, the perspective aid cuts and potential reductions in budgets for a lot of these countries.

And so it feels quite salient. But I do think there is a lot, of potential benefit in allocating those budgets a bit more cost effectively. And also in terms of, helping with budget execution, for example, ensuring that the budget can be spent, and can, and the money can get out the door each year which is almost an interesting and opposite challenge.

Ben: Excellent. Okay, last question. Would you like to give, any advice to people, listening? So this could be life advice or people thinking about how to give money or perhaps thinking about going into a career, either in terms of innovation research or grant making research, or your thoughts on where you've got to today.

life advice from Deena.

Deena: Another tough question, I don't know that I could presume to give personal advice. I guess I will say one meta observation that has been interesting and helpful for me is that often some subset of people listening to a piece of general advice, should take that piece of advice and sub subset actually need to take the exact opposite.

Okay. and often it's reverse correlated with who is hearing it. usually the listeners of a particular, or the readers of a particular outlet are quite similar to. The person giving the advice. And so they have like similar inclinations. And so they're exactly the group of people that should be doing the opposite.

They're already leading too far in that direction. So maybe my, meta piece of advice is try, to collect advice from pretty disparate sources and from people that you maybe don't necessarily normally interact with and from different bubbles of the world. I think, it's very easy to end up in like a sort of, relatively small intellectual circle that thinks relatively similar in relatively similar ways.

But, I think one benefit I found of living in New York is that I am constantly exposed in a way that I might not have been in SF or DC to people who are in completely different industries who, have never, heard about a lot of the things that, that I spend my days thinking about, but vice versa have a lot of pretty interesting and pretty different robustly different experiences.

Ben: Excellent. So that sounds like if you are looking for the advice you want, you should actually ignore it and go the other way.

Deena: Yeah, in some cases I think that's right.

Ben: advice is overrated. Great. on that note, Deena, thank you very much.

Deena: Thanks so much, Ben. It was a lot of fun.

Key takeaways

Further reading

CONTENTS, TRANSCRIPT AND PODCAST LINKS BELOW

Contents

Transcript

First: what actually happened?

The findings that look most important

The Riemann result is a useful case study

Why Lean matters so much here

Why many mathematicians are unhappy

The positive case is also strong

What might this mean beyond maths?

What happens to mathematicians?

Where I might land, for now

2. The medical model

4. Where the social model runs into trouble with autism

Where the medical model runs into trouble

6. Neurodiversity adds something different

7. A better causal model

Intrinsic characteristics

Environment

Person-environment interaction

Assistance and adaptation

Outcomes

8. An economic way of seeing the problem

9. The administrative or “bureaucratic” model

10. Why labels become valuable

11. Bureaucracy changes behaviour

12. The paradox of the deficit narrative

How to synthesise?

Further reading

Key takeaways

Fuchsia Dunlop in her own words

Contents

Matt Lodder on Tattoos as Art History

Key takeaways

Contents

We cover