A conversation with Henry Oliver, author of 'A Second Act', exploring the concept of late bloomers (Henry’s substack here).

Oliver elaborates on societal pressures, hidden talents, and how these impact individual successes at various life stages, advocating for a broader recognition of potential beyond conventional timelines.

The dialogue includes themes such as the significance of networks, the role of luck, and the historical context of late blooming, challenging prevailing notions of talent and achievement.

Following this, the conversation delves into the philosophical contributions of John Stuart Mill, particularly focusing on his expansion of utilitarianism and its inadvertent influence on contemporary moral behaviors like vegetarianism. It contrasts Mill’s stance on liberty and value measurement with other philosophers and highlights the importance of engaging with diverse perspectives for personal growth. The chat connects Mill’s philosophies to present-day issues. 

We end on Henry’s advice: the importance of personalized approaches to absorbing content, seeking expertise, the application of tailored advice over generic guidance; and to ignore those who do not have recent advice experience.

On Hidden Talents and Societal Barriers:

"So in the case of someone just happens to emerge later, and in the case of someone has been held back, I would call that hidden both times. Because very often when you've been held back by your circumstances, people like actually cannot see your talents. And so they are hidden, not in the sense that you've kept them in, or you were scared, or whatever, but in the sense that, you could have put it on your t-shirt and people wouldn't have realized."

On Overcoming Historical Bias and Recognizing Talent:

"And obviously historically, very often that was to do with if you were a woman, if you were a person of color people just aren't going to, people literally aren't going to take that seriously. But that, to me, is interesting, it's an interesting demonstration of the fact that, You can be very confident that you know how to find talent, and that you know who's a good chap and who would be good at this job, and be completely blind to what is right in front of you."

Podcast, transcript and headlines below. Video above.

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• 00:13 Learning from Henry’s mother

• 01:01 Exploring Hidden Talents and Societal Constraints

• 03:34 The Nuances of Midlife Crises and Opportunities for Growth

• 07:45 The Power of Networks and Circumstances in Shaping Late Bloomers

• 10:23 Margaret Thatcher: A Case Study in Late Blooming

• 16:20 Seizing Luck and the Importance of Being Prepared

• 21:32 The Role of Networks in Realizing Potential

• 30:20 Addressing Societal Biases and Embracing Equality of Opportunity

• 34:29 Rethinking Talent: Early Bloomers vs. Late Bloomers

• 42:55 The Fluidity of Intelligence and the Potential for Growth

• 45:29 Exploring Misunderstood Characters in Literature

• 45:56 Audrey Sutherland: The Unrecognized Kayaking Legend

• 47:09 Malcolm X: A Misunderstood Figure in History

• 48:46 The Ones That Didn't Make the Cut: Missed Profiles

• 51:28 The Writing Process: Insights and Personal Habits

• 54:51 The Fascinating World of London's Churches

• 59:36 Underrated and Overrated: A Deep Dive into Mindsets and Philosophies

• 01:18:23 Current Projects and Life Advice

Transcript (in part, AI generated so mistakes are possible)

Ben: Hey everyone, I'm super excited to be speaking to Henry Oliver. Henry has written a book about late bloomers called A Second Act. This is going to be published in May 2024. Henry, welcome. 

Henry: Thank you for having me. 

Ben: You suggested your mother was a late bloomer. What have you learnt from your parents? 

Henry: My mother did not get a degree.

And she spent a significant part of her life in adult education and became a solicitor. I can't remember what age, but I was a teenager when she became a solicitor. So this was it was quite a long process, lots of weekends, with textbooks, lots of fitting it in around work and children and all these sorts of things.

So I didn't realize this at the time because I was a self absorbed teenager, but I was, I had this example of what it takes to be a late bloomer right in front of me. So that was very, when I wrote the book, I was like, Oh. I'm theorizing about my own mother here. 

Ben: And you give examples where there are some like your mother, where you could argue it was somehow circumstance or society where it was trickier.

You had children to look after. Yeah. Perhaps, this opportunity and situation wasn't there. And you come to it later. And then you've got some where it suggests that there might have been some form of Perhaps blossoming of, call it hidden talent or talent where you're not aware or some other shift and you seem to have examples of both.

Would you like to comment on this idea of either hidden talent or where perhaps society or some other environmental or circumstantial constraint has been there in your early life? 

Henry: So I think a hidden talent is a really good phrase and we toyed with that for the title actually. I would say in both cases.

So in the case of someone just happens to emerge later, and in the case of someone has been held back, I would call that hidden both times. Because very often when you've been held back by your circumstances, people like actually cannot see your talents. And so they are hidden, not in the sense that you've kept them in, or you were scared, or whatever, but in the sense that, you could have put it on your t shirt and people wouldn't have realized.

And obviously historically, very often that was to do with if you were a woman, if you were a person of color people just aren't going to, people literally aren't going to take that seriously. But that, to me, is interesting, it's an interesting demonstration of the fact that, You can be very confident that you know how to find talent, and that you know who's a good chap and who would be good at this job, and be completely blind to what is right in front of you.

And how different is that really from not being able to say when someone's 20? That person's going to be great, but they're going to need a lot longer. So just the idea that actually this is less tractable, we should be less certain than we think, I think comes across from both. That's why I see them as being more closely related than Sometimes people say to me, Oh, is that late blooming?

They were just held back. And I'm like, I don't think we know actually if that's very obviously what happened on the surface. To me, it's a deeper, the deeper lesson is people very often can't see the talent in front of them. 

Ben: That's super interesting. Or you have some examples of where you had a talented childhood in some Yeah.

And they switched because actually, perhaps there was the other part was under that definition of hidden. So there's three areas which you categorize, which I'd really like to explore networks, circumstances and midlife crisis. Yeah. And you have a phrase in the book or an argument. Which I think you call a strange argument, which is that more people should have a midlife crisis.

Yes. Why do you think more people should have a midlife crisis? And you're actually a little bit subtle and nuanced about what a midlife crisis might be, or the shape of happiness in a sort of U shaped idea. But, why do you think people should have a midlife crisis? 

Henry: So I don't want, I didn't want to get into it like Particular definition of a midlife crisis, because I think very often those things are quite interior.

And like a lot of great novels, are essentially about the midlife crisis, or any type of crisis, that is happening inside one of the characters, and which is like less accessible to the others. So it's very difficult, I think, to judge. It's very difficult to judge, meet someone and say, oh, they're having a midlife crisis.

And I think partly that's because the sort of accepted wisdom is you should write it out. You, it won't last forever. It's because of one leading theory is it's just biological phase. Apes have midlife crises. Don't worry about it. It's just biology, right? Or it's, or the common sense point of view as well.

At that age, most people have got a stressful job they're having the physical sort of changes of being in the 50s and 60s, you've got teenagers in the house, who wouldn't be upset? Who wouldn't be upset? And the idea that you should ride it out. I don't think that's as commonsensical as it looks, and at other times in your life when you're undergoing these sorts of changes, be they internal or external or whatever, you're encouraged to, to change.

You're encouraged to explore, okay, do new things. If you're a teenager and you're going through all these sort of difficult phases and you don't quite know what's going on, people say great, go and explore. Somehow when you're fifty people say, if you could put a lid on that would be much easier for the rest of us.

But I think a lot of the time, Those are your opportunity moments. I interviewed Robin Hanson, the economist. And he did his PhD late twenties, early thirties, if I remember correctly. And he had two children, I think two under two. Two, two small children, right? And he had a good job, but it wasn't the job he really wanted.

And he said he just reached this point. I think the word he used was desperate, but he just basically He just had to go and do that. He had reached this point where he was, it was driving him mad not to do it. And I think a lot of people have that. And a lot of stories about how people have changed their career, changed their lives, have that element.

And that should be more a part of how we think about a midlife crisis. Very often it's not a phase, it's not just because you've got kids and a job or whatever. It is actually a signal that You are desperate to, to change something and it gets all muddled up with all these other things. So I don't want to give people advice.

You should all quit your job. But I'm curious as to how many people are sitting on something that maybe they could explore a bit more. 

Ben: That's one of the great things I like about your book and your thinking is you just take it in my mind at least one level deeper. It's not a surface Thank you.

There is nuance and there's complications. Your description there actually reminded me of a conversation I heard, it was fireside chat very early on in my life as a teenager with the now writer Matthew Paris. And he'd had a very successful career I think it was civil service and then an MP.

Yeah. And then essentially he said, although I'd been fine with that, neither, none of the careers he'd had up to that point were the one he really wanted to. And then essentially he became a journalist and writer and said that was the thing. And it was very late, I, in, seen very late as a teenage boy, and that was, I think, 40, in his 40s then.

Yes, yeah. But he'd certainly had two things and that would certainly fit the pattern. Perhaps that's a good segue into this idea of circumstance, although I guess there's not necessarily circumstance. So one is the circumstances of how your early life were but some of it is the change in circumstance, which, which would come about.

Yeah. How do you think about circumstance in this idea of late blooming? 

Henry: Matthew Paris is a really good example, and I wish I'd thought of him when I wrote the book. What's interesting about him is that he resigned from Parliament, I don't remember exactly what year it was, I think it was 88, 86. He basically resigned at a point when the Tories were doing incredibly well.

They were on or about to be on their third. Electoral victory, big majorities, Thatcher ascendant. No one knew they were going to win in 92, but from where he was, they looked fairly unassailable. And a lot of politicians will quit when the tide's going out, right? As we've seen with the Tories recently, a lot of Tories are saying I'm not standing at the next, who needs that, right?

So he's really interesting because he left in the middle. And I don't know exactly why, but I think you're right that, what he felt was he had these talents and he hadn't done enough with them in Parliament. He'd been in the Foreign Office, then he's in Parliament, and he's done fine, but he hasn't, he hasn't done enough with them.

And there's a great phrase from Samuel Johnson about the definition of genius being large talents that flow into a particular channel. And the idea is, there is not one place that you can put your talents, and only one. It's the direction of your talents into a particular channel. And he knew.

He's a smart guy, but he obviously worked out somehow, you can redirect that. There are, you don't have to have been a journalist for 20 years, you can go and just do it. 

Ben: It was (I hesitate to use the word enlightening) but it was really impactful. I still remember it now, having heard it when I was 15 and 16.

And it's one of the reasons that I do theatre making and playwriting. I also do investing and doing all of these things. Because I was told early on, it's okay. And he was actually, arguably He said he was a successful sort of constituency MP. He got along very well. I think he very much liked Margaret Thatcher.

He'd had a successful civil service career earlier. By all intents, he'd had two successful careers, but actually he said it wasn't the one. Maybe that's a segue into, you write about Margaret Thatcher, so that's interesting. I wonder whether he was in part slightly inspired by her in the sense that she'd had more than one.

More than one career in her life. How does she fit into your late blooming thinking? 

Henry: Margaret Thatcher was about 50 when she became the leader of the Conservative Party. And that is, I did a sort of rough calculation of 20th century Tory party leaders. She is basically the exact average age.

So some people say she can't be. a late bloomer, because she's, that's, they're all 50, look at them, they're all 50. But the difference between her and some of the others is that, particularly the men and the English men who have led the Tory party were all coming up through the cabinet and they were all tipped, not necessarily to be Prime Minister, but they were tipped for high office.

It was a surprise in the way that Churchill became Prime Minister. But, ultimately, when you look back, Churchill, he's been everything. He's had all these big jobs. When Anthony Eden took over, everyone had been waiting for him to take over for years. And then Macmillan takes over.

Macmillan's been the Chancellor. These people aren't coming out of nowhere. Whereas Margaret Thatcher A few weeks before she won the leadership election was 50 to 1 against at the bookies. And there were people having meetings in flats, little groups of Tory MPs, and they have a list.

Oh no, he's having an affair, no actually his bank account rules him out, and then they say, oh my God, we can't have Margaret. Because she's seen as a real pain in the foot she's trouble, and these people became the ones who ran her campaign, who became loyal to her, who would go around, in, in the later years saying, Come on, Margaret's the one, Margaret's winning for us.

And that, to me, she is like archetypal of the sort of person who no one can see. There were two or three people who actually put their money where their mouth was and said, This woman is startlingly capable and we should introduce her to people, we should fly her to America, right? The rest of them were just saying She's such a colossal irritation, if we give her a job, we'll never get rid of her, and if we don't give her a job, we'll never hear the end of it.

So she's being promoted, she was put in, people say she was a cabinet minister, she was put there because they had to have a woman, and she was the, the one they didn't like, and it was easier to try and keep her under control. She represents this thing where you pick her up and you say now you're Tory leader, you didn't expect it, no one around you expected it.

This ought to go wrong, and people are writing diary entries. She becomes leader in, what, 74, 75. She doesn't win the election until 79. And in those four years, people are writing diary entries saying, Oh my God, gotta get rid of her. This is awful. And people are saying on the back benches they'll never vote for a woman in the North, and this constant culture of We, it's not going to work. It's not going to work. And then she won the election. But then people say, Oh we're down in the polls. These crazy ideas. And then she won another election. And it actually takes a long time before people say, My God, she's unstoppable, and she's going international and then of course, everyone thinks, everyone's prepared to say that she's great.

And she, for me, is a really good example of the way that you can there are two things about her. Over a long period of time, if you put yourself in the right situations and the right circumstances, it just builds up this steady drumbeat of experience. It builds up and it makes you into a different sort of person.

So she's very well regarded for governing on paper. When I interviewed Charles Moore, he said that she had an ability to get into the detail of government, and an interest in the detail, for hours and hours a day, in a way that few prime ministers really have. Now if you look back in her career, this is evident earlier on, in the way that she, when she was science minister, there was a big discussion about should we have more market oriented funding for scientific research or should we leave it as this kind of, here's the money, do what you think is best.

And to begin with, she takes the standard civil servant position, which is we shouldn't have it market oriented, we should leave them to do what they want. And through getting into the details of the paperwork, she changed her mind and said no. It's a, it's one very narrow bit of funding. I can't remember, it's not the whole budget.

It's one, and she changed her mind through discussion and through really getting into the detail. And this pattern comes up again and again. And she does the same thing with her courage. When she's in these jobs, she's Thatcher the milk snatcher, and she's the most, quotes, the most hated woman in Britain.

She she gets attacked by students who don't like her policies. Not attacked, but she's in these, there are crowds of students and they're and she actually learns how to deal with, she's famous for being the Iron Lady and being super resilient and everything. But that does not come naturally to her at all, and she learns how to deal with all of that.

And so just the circumstances. Turn her into, we think of her as Mrs. Thatcher, totally indomitable, totally unable to change her mind, totally, and no, she's not like that at all to begin with. And there's a point where people are saying, change your hair, change your voice, or you're too screechy, or you look too much like you live in a big house in Surrey, you wear too many pearls, and eventually she turns around and she says, I will wear these pearls, my husband gave them to me.

And they all went, oh. Actually, that was quite good. Could you do that again? Could you do that on television? And actually, the conditions that she's in, because she's not one of these men, she's not public school, she's not one of these people who's been leading the party before, she has to find her own way and develop her own leadership style.

And through being in those conditions, She becomes Margaret Thatcher. 

Ben: She's famous for it, is that quote? This lady's not for turning. Which happens. One other element in your chapter on that, which I feel overlaps, is this other idea you have that on occasion some of these late bloomers or indeed anyone in life has to be ready Yeah.

And it, it feels a little bit like that golfer who says, Oh, the more I practice, the luckier I get. There is this element that luck is a huge element and it strays into business. I remember reading about Jeff Bezos, who's thinking he's been extremely lucky, but there's a kind of bias within it is that yes, these people have been really lucky, but when that moment has come.

Yeah. They've been able to seize it. Sometimes it's over a period you could call it luck or skill. She's now leading. The Conservative Party, but like you say, at that point, everyone expects her to fail, and yet she seizes. What she has around and it seems to be it seems to be a theme in late bloomers Although perhaps other characters as well, but in particular within some of the late bloomer characters you have how important is this and how?

Could we perhaps prepare to seize that luck when it might happen in our everyday lives as well? 

Henry: I think preparation is a really important word But it's you're preparing for something that you don't know. You don't know quite what you're preparing for so Margaret Thatcher has this, but so does Samuel Johnson, so do many of the other people in the book.

The idea that, okay, the Tory party suddenly decided they're going to get rid of Ted Heath. Are you going to stand? And, the whole thing that makes the difference between different candidates is, yes, and I'm ready to, and she, because of all these things I've been describing about how she Got toughened up and learn how to make decisions.

She said I was prepared actually to just make a decision and go with it. And a lot of the men around me at that point were dithering. And so they weren't prepared in the sense that they weren't prepared. I'm not prepared to do that. I ooh. But also just in the sense that they hadn't done the legwork in the way that she had.

And that, how often does that opportunity come up? You don't know. And of course they all thought she wouldn't last and, she wouldn't make it. If you didn't stand in the 1974 leadership election, you had to wait until 1990 before the Tory party had another leadership election. That's a whole career.

You, it's gone. So a huge part of what makes a difference is being ready and able when the moment comes to say, okay. Let's just do it. 

And do you think that's a theme amongst other late bloomers that you looked at? Was there another character that you particularly felt like, yes, they were prepared, a piece of luck definitely came, and they seized it?

There are lots  and lots of people like that. If you think about Katherine Graham, who owned the Washington Post this is a, a much more tragic story, because her husband shot himself. But she was able, and at that point she inherited the paper. It was her father's paper, but there was this complicated thing where he'd given a much bigger share of it to her husband than to her.

And she'd been essentially bullied by her husband and was quite in quite a bad psychological condition. And everyone was saying, you should sell it. You can't, you can't do that. And she said, no, I'm not going to let, I'm not going to let this is the family paper, I'm not going to, I'm not going to let it go.

I'm not going to be the one who lets it go. Now that is the one moment when you decide, you can't come back later and say, oh, I wish I'd changed my mind. It happened to Samuel Johnson when they come to him and say, we want you to write a dictionary. And actually, to begin with, he said, I'm not going to write a dictionary.

But, you have to be willing when the time comes. It can work in other ways. If you think about Audrey Sutherland, the kayaker. Maybe my favorite late bloomer. She said to herself, she went kayaking on the British Columbian coast when she was in her 60s and 70s. And she'd never kayaked in Arctic water before.

And she, this is solo exploration. She's having encounters with bears. This is a really big thing that she's doing, and she looked in the mirror and said, If you don't do it now, you will be too old. So she, it wasn't so much that someone had come to her and said, Do you want to stand in the election?

Do you want to write a dictionary? Do you want to run the paper? But more she realised, I have to be the one that says, there is this one window, and if I don't take it, it's gone. Luck, that's what I mean about luck. It's these moments will happen or you can force them to happen but if you don't do it, if you're not prepared in some way to do it, it's over.

Now you'll get lots, the point about luck is you'll get lots of these sorts of moments through your life. Okay, it's not gonna be leadership, it's something else. The more open you are to it, the more you're looking for it, and the more prepared you are, the more of them you will see. And if you don't, you can't take the opportunities you don't.

See, and so something about the mindset, the attitude the persistence of these people is what eventually brings them to the next opportunity. 

Ben: One of the other themes I saw through that is this power of network. Yeah. And it seems to go slightly hand in hand because you could argue whether through happenstance or built something like Catherine had a network as well.

But it also strikes me that some of the characters built their network. Yes. So that when, then they're ready, and then they are prepared, and then depending on what comes up, they can use their network, Yeah. To its fullest. I'm also a reasonable fan of, I guess in social science, they call it the weak social ties theory, but that a lot of the value is not necessarily Strong social ties are important for many things, but weak social ties seem to catalyze a lot of these other innovations around.

Yeah, very much so what is it you think you observed around networks and late bloomers and generally happiness in life? A 

lot of late bloomers get their break through their network. If you think about Maya Angelou she'd been trying to be a writer for years. She'd moved from the west coast to New York.

She'd met with people, I think she'd been in a writing course. And it's not working out and she gets I don't know if she's depressed, but, things not going well. And James Baldwin went over and said, one day, come to this dinner party. And she doesn't want to go, but he says, come on, you've got to get out.

And when she gets there, there are two publishers there, two editors. And she tells them the story of, her life. And they're like That's please sign this publishing contract on my card, now, that's a really good example of how of everything you've just said. But I think what's important there is that James Baldwin is influential with Maya Angelou.

He is the person, he's linked to these other people, and he's linked to her, so he's a weak tie in the appropriate way. And he's bringing her a network, and he's not doing it just because it's a network opportunity, but he is the one who can actually say to her. Come on. You've got to come, you've got to come out and go to this thing and be social.

And that's the crucial thing. So many descriptions of network theory over emphasize the connection, or the number of connections, so the theory of connectors and stuff, and under play the role of influence. And what you need is someone who's a weak tie, preferably on the margin of two networks.

Or able to move between networks in the appropriate way. But with influence. And if you don't have that influence, you're just someone else saying, Oh this pizza restaurant is good, you should go there. While everyone's going whatever. I'm not, I don't want pizza right now. That's what happened with Samuel Johnson, right?

The person who made the dictionary project happen was Richard Dodsley. And he knew, He's a bookseller, so he knew all the other booksellers. A bookseller is a publisher at this time, so these five or six people are putting up all the money. It's one of the biggest publishing investments that's been made at that point, so it's quite serious.

When they do this, Samuel Johnson has never delivered on any of the major projects he has said he's going to deliver on. And you can imagine that to a consortium of publishers putting up really quite a lot of money for these, it's, it's two very big volumes. Dodsley's saying we should use Johnson and they're saying, but he's constantly saying he'll do an edition of this and he'll write a book about that.

He has never, and he's, nearly 40 and he's never done it. But Dodsley had enough influence with them and with Johnson to make both sides of the arrangement see that you're not going to find anyone who's read more widely. Because he, Johnson used to go into Dodsley's shop and he would see him just every book, every subject.

This man is an absolute monster for words. He is constantly turning pages. So Dodsley knows, he says, I know that no one else knows about as many things as Johnson does. And he's also got the influence on Johnson to say, come on. You can do it and you have to deliver something significant.

Otherwise you're going to be lost, you're not going to have anything to your name. So the being on the, being weak, a weak time, being on the margin is key. But if you have influence, I think is the really important point. And you see this a lot, like people online will say, Oh, six degrees of influence, but I never get invited to parties at the White House or whatever.

But that's why, right? Because, your first degree connections, very influential. Second degree, yes, still quite influential, right? By the time you're at the third degree, if you're like, wife's brother's friend has recommended you something, that's just not the same. And you can see, you get to fourth degree and stuff, the influence just, it wears out.

Whereas someone who can be second degree, third degree connection in two networks, that all of a sudden is more significant because you have influence. 

Strikes me that also you need to make sure you're friends with such people. Also listening to that, it strikes me that it's, this is perhaps why I've recently seen or read a lot of.

Works around this idea of working in public or having substantial newsletters or podcasts, even like this, because when you get a introduction or something within the network, and maybe it is weaker, but if you can actually show proof of something, then with that, you've actually got something to show because you've had a body of preparation work, whereas some other aspects are perhaps a little bit more hidden or when you didn't have so much public work.

You can't show people as easily. You have to rely on someone's judgement okay, this person is expert and knows a lot about people who are good at literature, or with, with Johnson, we can trust this person who's seen this do you think that's a factor, or actually at some level, you can just trust the type, taste, or judgement of that person within the network who's well respected?

Henry: I wouldn't want to generalise about working in public or private. I think it's notable that in the examples I just gave those people were working in private. They didn't have anything. That was the point. They didn't have anything they could show publicly. Turn up and tell your story, have your friend explain to people that, you happen to be an absolute book monster.

The same thing happened to Margaret Thatcher. Aerie Neve decided to run her campaign. And people often say that she won because Aerie Neve was a former Spy, and used his sort of nefarious spy tactics in the corridors of Westminster. There's a sort of, there is some truth to that, and he did slightly lie about he would go around and tell people that Ted Heath had got more votes secured than was real because he needed them to realize that if you didn't get rid of Ted Heath now, you really stuck with him.

But actually, Airy Neve had never been in the cabinet, and so he never quite belonged, the, in political parties, there are all these different factions and groups, he wasn't really in. And because he was ex military and he had a, he was very impressive, escaped from a, escaped as a prisoner of war and really a record that in the Tory party at that time made you very highly respected.

He could go to all these different factions and get a hearing. And so people are saying either, Who the hell is Margaret Thatcher? Or, Oh my God, I'm not voting for her. And, but then Airey Neve would come in, And it's okay, we will listen to Airey Neve, Because, my God, this man escaped from being a prisoner of war and has, won medals of bravery.

Of course, now Airey's telling us that she's good. Okay. Yes, we will reconsider, with really a limited record of what she's actually achieved as a cabinet minister. Not that limited, but, so I think working in private very often is quite good. And if you need more time, if you need to, if you need the freedom of not being in public to experiment or to develop in some way, that's where the network of influence is very useful.

On the other hand, if your grandma Moses The American primitivist painter her paintings got discovered in a, what the Americans call a drug store by a man who happened to be not in the middle of the art world, but a well known enough collector that he had the influence to get her into an exhibition.

So I wouldn't generalize about public private, I think. And I think actually very often talent always develops itself in private. It's just that a lot of people come, they go public at a relatively young age. But that's not true of everyone. And I wouldn't want to give the advice of yes, go public and have a, it will vary so much depending on the individual.

But yes, being online is great, right? Of course. 

Ben: Yeah, you can't take a principle between public and private. Okay that's interesting. And then another theme which we've touched on is, so many of the examples you give have, and I guess this is because of history, this. Cultural or other society bias as to why they were a late bloomer or some of those.

Difficulties and circumstance and there's a kind of, now a consensus in society that we definitely want equality of opportunity. There's a lot of arguments, between left and right as to how to do that. Do you think that those society biases are as prevalent now? And how does that intersect with thinking around late bloomers today?

Or where were that? Because I know a lot of people still feel, oh. I'm not getting the opportunity or however, but there does seem to be more opportunity than ever before if there's a way of unlocking it. Do you think that's got better over time or how should we think about it? 

Henry: I think you have to say it's got better over time, right?

Like, how can it not have done? And that to me is, I think, quite obvious. But at the same time, I think it's very difficult to know what biases you are currently operating under at that level, right? And I don't think in the past it was always obvious to people that there was any sort of limitation on what was going on.

I don't know, these are obviously not of the same order that sexism and racism have been in the past, but I think there's a lot of looksism, right? And I think that can, that, there's also a lot of like it's interesting that in VC and in Silicon Valley and in places like that, People will talk about, you'll often see quotes from investors saying that founders are very intense, that they're much more, they can be a bit off putting to people who aren't interested in investing in them because they're intense about their project.

Maybe they're weird in some way, which is, used to be a derogatory word, but now actually has got many connotations that actually, I don't think, I think that word is changing the sort of mood around it is changing quite a lot. And it's interesting that this huge area of the economy has opened up for people of, who are skilled in that way.

Where they don't go into corporate life. They go and get funding and they do their own thing. And people speculate about neurodivergence and all this stuff, but just in some way, those people are, they're not the median person. And it may not always be, I think, that they're like An outlier on IQ points, or whatever.

Very often they're also like, the kid who took everything apart and put it back together again. Or, whatever the, right? They're the intense kids, the collectors the whatever. I'm not so sure that we've conquered the human inability to treat people in a meritocratic way. I don't know.

Ben: Yeah, lots of different biases. I think, yeah, the Those biases are still about. I do agree, though, that 

Henry: we're better at channeling capital towards people who might not otherwise if all those guys in Silicon Valley, all those founders, if they all went to work for major corporations, I don't think they'd all get promoted to become very senior people.

I think some of them would just, it would just be awful. I agree that there's a lot more opportunity. The idea that we're somehow, as a society, past all that, and we can now just, we can really see through to what, who the talent is and everything. No, the knowledge problem is real, asymmetric information is real, psychology is, a huge barrier to some of those things.

Ben: It seems to me that things have got better, but they're still far from Perfect, as you argue, because if you take the idea that talent is maybe roughly distributed semi randomly, at least, then you see, if you just look at it on the data, it's this does seem to be huge areas of pockets where we're still underweight, we're probably still underweighted in terms of weirdness and things like that as well, even though it has got it's got better from where from where I see it.

Henry: But I, I don't want to ever emphasize I do think it's got a lot better. And the bigger the market, the more people will find their niche, right? Presumably that's why it's got better, and that's why it will keep getting better. I don't want to sound like I'm down on it

Ben:  And then does that mean, with the idea of late bloomers, have we overrated? early talent or youth? Or is this more of an acceptance of the fact that if it's maybe just more equally distributed or we had a lot of issues with hidden talent, this is just something which is at the margin been really interesting and hasn't been departed as much.

I guess when you think about particularly certain domains, such as Maths and maybe music, the rule of thumb has had to be, Oh, if you don't do something amazing by 21 or at least 30, you might as well give up. And actually you've got some interesting counter examples with that. Yeah. On the other hand, I can definitely see that if you think about.

Under 18 talent again globally that does also not seem to be equally representative, but it seems to me that there's probably an argument that just generally hidden talent is still fairly well hidden. But I'm interested, what do you think between old talent, young talent and around that and have we overweighted early talent or how does it fit with late bloomers?

Henry:

No, these are really good questions. I would make some very simple observations. The bigger the market, the more people can find their niche. So as we keep growing and diversifying the global economy, you will just constantly be looking for more talent and constantly finding more talent. At all ages and of all types.

The second one is, it's not zero sum. We don't have to pick between the 30 under 30 list and the 50 over 50 list. We should just have both. I think there's been a huge Flourishing of young talent in what, the last 20 years and right now there seems to be a great flourishing of, great, why not I, I'm not, why would you be opposed to that, I think that's, I, and also it's just obviously true, these people are obviously brilliant but I don't think that precludes the idea that there is talent to be discovered at other stages, and I think the idea of human potential can be creatively fitted to many different tasks, many different, this idea of powers of the mind running into different channels, and as the market gets bigger, you'll get more ways of doing it, right? There are some really interesting people on Substack and Podcasts and YouTube, and they're from all different stages of life.

And this new technology or new opportunity arrives and they can go and do something else, which simply wasn't there. Like the internet created a lot of late bloomers, right? One of the most popular YouTubers in the very early days, I've forgotten his name, but he was a retired widower. And this was back, when you could, there were time limits on how long a YouTube video could be.

So if you watch his old videos, he's constantly getting to the end saying, Oh, I'm sorry. I've got to go. I'm running out of time. But he was really big on YouTube to begin with. So let's have all of it. We can have all of it. And that's the beauty of growth, right? Let's have more. 

Ben: it seems to me that you argue in the book that pretty much every domain that you look at can have late bloomers and early talent and.

In the sense that to my earlier point, there was some arguments that maths has to be early or at least early for the median. I remember reading a profile of a mathematician. I forget his name, but he did his mathematics in South Korea. And essentially not until his thirties, did he even get his.

PhD or things and came to mass extremely late. I think he came to mass essentially at university, which is crazy. Yeah. Second or third, very crazy 

Henry: June Huh?

Ben: (Yes. June Huh.) Yeah. Like crazily late. Also I liked the story because he really only works really hard on his math for perhaps one or two hours a day.

And then that, but there's lots of other things to his story, but I was really taken by it that people think he's a real. outlier, but actually you look at it and there's quite a lot. And I think this is actually maybe also sometimes the danger of averages. Yes. Yeah. When you look at X group, when you're looking at a hundred million versus 90 million, you can see these little differences in averages, but it really tells you very little about actual human individuals and where you might be.

And sure, on average, we might look at fewer. female mathematicians or seemingly fewer female composers. But does that mean any one individual of that? And maybe there's all of the circumstances because you could see so many who are obviously brilliant, late and young. So I was interested in, do you do you feel that strongly this across all the domains and all of that?

And what about the other arguments that for instance, in certain domains, music and math, I think comes to mind, maybe even philosophy, although I think there's enough. counter examples in philosophy that feels quite weak.

Henry:  Socrates was a late bloomer. Yeah. 

Ben: Yes. And I think you get quite a few philosophers who are arguably late bloomers.

Henry: Yeah. No, definitely. I don't like, I don't like to put these kinds of definitions on it. So some people want to know what's the age when you become a late bloomer? Can you be a late bloomer in physics? I think the answer to everything is maybe. So it used to be the case that, people more or less believed you had to be very young to do great maths and great physics.

Now we see the average age of career defining work, Nobel Prize winning work, that sort of thing, is getting older in all of the sciences. And there is debate about, is it because ideas are harder to find? Is it because you need to spend more time learning everything before you can work at the frontier?

All these debates. But the fact is that the average age has gone up by quite a lot. The idea that you have to be a young mathematician, I am not a mathematician, and I'm sure that people who are will read that chapter and tell me I'm wrong in a hundred ways, but what I see is that it used to be a consensus that great mathematics was done by young people, and as well as June Huh, we've had Zitan Wang, who made great progress when he was like 60, and I also, I note in the book there are studies showing that actually, The averages of mathematical accomplishment are a bit higher than we think.

But also the Fields Medal is given to someone age 40 and under. And that decision was made in a very arbitrary way because of politics on the early committees and who wanted to give the prize to like, their prodigy, not his prodigy can't get it, so I'm gonna make the cutoff age at this. Imagine if we just took the age off.

I don't know what that would do, I don't know if it would do anything, but just, it seems very arbitrary. And June Huh is a great example because he came to it late. Like early twenties, right? And before that, he was trying to be a poet. Yes. Now this is not just Oh, you have to come to it early.

No, you don't. Oh, coming from poetry. This seems crazy.

Ben: I believe his poems are quite good as well. 

Henry: Presumably they are, right? Because if you're good at one thing, you tend to be good at another. But I think for me, there are just too many things like that suggest that what we're very certain of now Actually, that's already quite different from what we used to be very certain of.

And, again, I just see this great potential for people to change. I have a quote from John Stuart Mill in the book. He says something like, just look at human history. Just look at the sheer variety of what people have been like, in different times, places, cultures, whatever. It's amazing how malleable people can be.

And maybe we've measured. the average age of mathematical accomplishment, and we've got the number we've got. But we have no idea that actually it could change quite significantly. 

Ben: And I also think, even when you have so arguably one of the greatest living mathematicians I believe it's Terry Tao, who was extremely good at maths from a very young age, but continues to be very good at maths.

What's that? And I think most people, maybe it will fall off, but it's still at the very top. Of of their game, and, I think Very top, 

Henry: right? Yeah. The idea to me that he oh, he's not gonna have any, do any great work at this point. What are you, crazy? Yeah. 

Ben: Please. Yeah, and would you not bet against him, particularly, even be the greatest work in ten years time, you would not bet against that.

Henry: Of course not. No. And that's exactly my point, right? It just, the more, it, the more we carry on in this new culture where we don't quite believe that anymore, the more obvious it is that Yeah, actually, we do believe in the potential of older mathematicians, and why shouldn't we? 

Ben: And I guess we've even in the field of intelligence studies I've looked at they've now tried to go, Oh, we've got fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence.

But it seems to me just backwards looking way of the fact that you can now observe in the world, so many of these counter examples that actually there's that, and I think that's the case with a lot of social science, that it might work for a period of time. Yeah. So do those principles and rules.

In fact, arguably you see this the most in, in, in economics is that we have got a lot of good economic theories and models, but they only seem to work for certain periods of time. And we can't tell when that period of time changes on us. And then somehow it's all changed and what worked before, which seemed to work quite well for that period now doesn't seem to work because everything around it has changed somehow.

Yeah. And I think. 

Henry: Just the fact that the Flynn effect is true is a really good example of this, right? That people a hundred or longer ago would not have been able to imagine that the average IQ could have done that. Yeah. How do we know that we've maxed that out? Do we even know why that happened?

Like, where is the certainty coming from on any, and, of course, the fluid crystallized intelligence results are very robust. It's a major find. I'm, I treat them very seriously in the book. I had quite a lot of correspondence with one researcher in particular. But what I take from that, and I was careful to get his, to make sure I wasn't saying something that I'd misunderstood.

What I take from those graphs is there is a decline. It does, it does do what we all think it does, and it comes in at particular ages and stuff. But there is huge variation around the average. And just telling people, as is often happens in, there was a particular article in the Atlantic, and it was followed up with a book that, I take great objection to this.

Where the premise is your fluid intelligence will drop off, so when you're in your fifties, if you're in some senior position, your executive decision making is, you're on the, you're on the clock, and you don't know when it's going to go, and you should restructure your life, and all this kind of thing.

You don't know that. The variation is actually quite high around those averages, and If you look at the Moray House test data, where intelligence researchers were able to give the same intelligence test to the same people, I think 60 or 70 years apart, many of them were more intelligent at 70 than they had been as a school child.

I think it would be crazy for someone to make major life decisions based on these averages without being told that actually there are really good odds it doesn't apply to you. Yeah 

Ben: really good odds. Okay, thinking back to the book and some of the characters, who do you think was The most misunderstood of the people that you looked at for the book.

In their own time. In their own time. Or maybe even misunderstood now. You have a view where you look at it and you go, People think it's X, but really really this is what's going on here. 

Henry: I would hope that for all of the six major profiles, there is an element of that. I think Audrey Sutherland maybe counts here just because no one Yeah, she's not well known enough even though she's super cool and she should clearly be incredibly famous.

Ben: what would you describe, what's not understood about her story? 

Henry: Audrey Sutherland solo kayaked the coast of Alaska and British Columbia throughout her 60s and 70s and into her 80s. I am not capable of group kayaking anything, and she encounters bears and she's, and she has to repair the huts as she goes, and she's away for weeks at a time, and she has to take her own supplies, and she uses a small inflatable canoe because this is lightweight and easy for her to maneuver and everything, and when other when well known kayakers encounter her, they make fun of her, very often, actually, they make fun of her in print And they say this crazy old woman with her orange inflatable kayak, what is she doing?

Actually, she was probably the most impressive kayak of her generation. And something like that is more now the consensus view. And this to me is the sort of story that people ought to love, in, in modern culture, but which hasn't had enough of a hearing. At all. The person in the book who was most directly misunderstood in their own time, is Malcolm X.

I wish I'd written a lot more about him, but there are, there's a very recent biography which is really excellent. And but he does have a section at the end and he was told. As a school child he said he was going to be a lawyer and the teacher said, Don't be crazy, you're black, you can't be a lawyer.

And this just sent him on a completely unhelpful trajectory, as you can imagine it would. And he ended up in jail by his account, semi literate, but he seems to have been quite a good school pupil. I'm, I'm prepared to believe him, but It's difficult to know exactly where he stood.

But he then dedicated himself to hard study. He's a genuine autodidact. Several of the people in the book are autodidacts. And of course he remains somewhat misunderstood in the early part days when he comes out of prison. And he's the sort of person that just invents himself in public. And to me, he's one of the least predictable people in this book.

And some people have said he can't possibly be a late bloomer because he was dead before he was 40. But to go into prison, age sort of 1920 as a young black man in 1950s, 1960s America with limited education and to come out as Malcolm X, Is a really great transformation and I think we should all be astonished at what he did on his own in a prison library.

A remarkable turnaround. 

Ben: Definitely underrated. And who would you, who didn't manage to make the book or maybe had only one or two lines where if you could have double the size of the book you would have liked  to have added?

Henry: I would have written more about Malcolm X. I cut out a lot of material about Eisenhower.

Because I felt that he I wasn't covering enough new ground for the book and I didn't necessarily need to tell the whole story of Eisenhower, but he's a very interesting one. David Ogilvie, the advertising executive, I think I cut him out entirely he, he's a very interesting late bloomer 

Ben: Why did he not make the cut in the end?

I guess biography must have been written about him.

Henry: There is a  biography, and it is by Kenneth Roman. It's pretty good. Kenneth Roman was a long standing colleague of David Ogilvie. I have a chapter where I apply the theory of late blooming, the economic theory of late blooming, the one that Malcolm Gladwell wrote about years ago in the New Yorker.

It's a theory about how artists are late bloomers and I apply it to business people to show that the same thing is True of business people. And that's what I was doing with David Ogilvie. But I, in the end I wrote that chapter about Ray Kroc. So those are some of the people that didn't make it.

But I tried to mention most of the late bloomers that I was really excited about. 

Ben: I would have liked more on Penelope Fitzgerald. Poor Penelope. 

Henry: I had a whole chapter dedicated to her. And I decided that the book was long enough and I could save, I think I had another three or four thousand words about her.

So that's, yeah, personally I love her and I love her work. And I was very sad to cut that chapter. But if I've left you, wanting to go and find out more about her, in a way that's probably a better result than if you think, great, I've read that and I'm, 

Ben: what few words would you say about her?

Henry: She started writing fiction at the age of 60, and she became one of the most significant novelists of her generation. And there are very few And she, she gives off a real old lady vibe. And that's just not really true. 

Ben: Arguably one of the greatest living British playwrights is Carol Churchill. And she was I would probably put her in late bloomer due to circumstance.

And then, she's gone on. Being relatively late at least every five to ten years has written. Right still going significant Dramatic works, so I always think that's really interesting Okay, turning a little bit personal for a couple of pieces. Okay is do you have your own? writing And also you've examined in biographies a lot.

Do you like to write in spurts? Are you morning or evening? Do you have a writing desk? Do you write by hand? How would you describe your writing process?

Henry:Yes, I have   read a lot of biography. It might be my favourite genre. In writer's biographies, I think the only consistent rule is you just sit down and write.

Okay, and people will spend, I've read all the, what's the best routine, what's the best way to, I've read all these things. I really do think that it, actually that was a waste of time, the advice is sit down and write. Personally, I do have a desk, but it I'm not a tidy person, so it's not always available to me.

It's more of a book storage, place. I like to write whenever I have an idea. If I'm on the bus, if I'm on the train. If I'm in the library, if I'm at home, it doesn't matter to me very much. 

Ben: And do you then focus in a particular burst? And do you have a little notebook which you carry on the bus and you have the idea and then you expand it when you're at home and you have some time?

Henry: I like to write  longhand so that whenever you type up, it's already a second draft. I don't always do that, but I did that for a very significant chunk of the book. And I think that's really useful. draft is actually, has already been through quite a lot of editing. 

Ben: Yeah I have the same impression.

I think there's even a book of writer's routines sort of things, and the book shows that some writers 12, 1, 2, 3, 4, and you can go through every 24 zone hour of the day  

Henry: the commonality is that someone's awake and writing. 

Ben: Yeah, but the commonality is that they all write. Some are mainly writing, some have another job in writing, but the fact is that they all write.

Henry: That's Mason  Currey.

Ben: Yes, exactly. That's a great  book. Yeah. I think he's done a couple, although Yes, he has. I think he argues that a lot of them have certain quirks in their routine, but there's nothing there's no pattern to the quirks except that you can you can often identify some quirk and by quirk it's just some aspect which just seems unique to their routine, which you wouldn't have necessarily said, but it's so variable.

That, and then some that don't have it that you could just say that there was that, but I thought that was interesting.

Henry: My day job, which I still freelance at. Is to do with the branding and communications that organizations use around hiring people and around their company culture.

So I have done a lot of focus groups in every industry you can think of. And I think those quirks are much less to do with writers than they are to do with just the way people work. Yeah, okay. So I've been into like loads of different offices. Everyone has a question. All over the country. I've been to different countries.

I've been into, car mechanics, whatever, science labs, whatever. People have their funny little ways of working. So I love that book, but yeah, like you, I took from it. They just, they're asocial. If they need to be. I think that's a big thing. And they just sit down and write.

And the quirks probably come out wherever you are. But if you're in an office you have to regulate your quirks in different ways than if you write in a tower somewhere. That's probably, I think it can be a distraction. 

Ben: Yeah. Okay. That's fair. That sounds like there's a, there's another book in there on, on quirks or company culture coming through.

What did you learn about when you were a tour guide or also the way I like to ask this often, what's not well understood or misunderstood or the secret of being a good tour guide? 

Henry: I don't know if I am a good tour guide. I don't think I can answer that. The essence of it to me is that the city of London the small area in the east that is the old city, has got something historically fascinating on every street.

Very often dozens of things. And most people don't know. And they walk past it. And you, the average person who is interested in History, buildings knowing the history of the city they're in, whatever. You could walk them round all day and keep them interested in the City of London.

Ben: Oh, yeah, I completely agree. I think not only all day, I think almost all day, every day of your life. I've lived and worked around the city for some time now. And I have a mini, very slow project. I have not yet been able to visit every single church in the City of London. I think I've done Almost 50 or something like that.

What's your favourite? I like I the one or two which are no longer churches. I forget their names. The one in Dunstan, which is in the east. I like that. I quite like those who have been converted or Converted as in they've taken on this new lease of life. St. Ethelburgers, which is one of the ones which have got medieval roots. Yeah. There's now a lot on truth and reconciliation. There's one on Bow Lane which the name might come back to me. Which was, is more recent life is now a very thriving cafe. During its, oh yeah. Yeah, during its day.

And I quite like those, this kind of. Re, rejuvenation aspect, but I guess I all of them and also not quite knowing what to expect when you're just Oh let's just check this one out. Cause even all of the, even all of the smallest and ones which are still around, or even those which aren't even really churches, whatever, have something to them because they've just been around for so long or have some history.

Henry: What so one thing is the best cafes in the city are in churches. And this is underappreciated. If you want tea, cake, breakfast, maybe lunch, you should go to a church cafe. They're much, much better than all the other places, but I think a lot of people don't because it's in the church, whatever.

But I agree. And a lot of the churches are interesting because when Wren rebuilt them after the fire, he couldn't change the layout. And so what you get is the application of one creative mind in the physical restraints of what is now about 25 churches of different shapes. And so he's constantly having to rethink, this is a completely irregular, I think all but one of them is completely irregular.

How am I going to make it work? And so part of the beauty of it is that you've very rare to get one genius applying themselves at the same time to all these different shapes and sizes. And we've got some leftover material, we're going to have to incorporate that. We don't want you to use your weird new classical ideas.

So you get to see him. Solving problems in every church. He never gets the ability to say. Oh just do another one like st. Stephen. That was good So I think that's part of it. 

Ben: There is something really great when Artists are somehow slightly constrained I guess you see this all the time in poetry and they will choose a form particularly to do this But it's that and actually with the built environment.

I think it's even more important to have these adapted or resilient buildings, but our best ones have this, that they have never ever been just one thing and are still not. They're almost, I guess architects would say they're almost living in that sense. Yeah. And you have to repair, renew them and adapt them and make them for and make them for today.

Henry: St. James's on Piccadilly is Wren's only freestanding church where he got complete control of the shape of it and the site. And this is the sort of thing that. most people don't agree with, but I think that's his most boring church. It's wonderful it's a great church.

But it's really striking that it's actually his least interesting building. 

Ben: Yeah, I think that's definitely something to that. My Most interesting little tidbit on London city bit is I think it's just on the outskirts of the city Boundaries just off the strand, but there still is a gas lamp, which is powered by natural gas Underneath it.

So if you walk down the strand think it's Yeah, I can't quite remember the street that's on, you might, better. And it's still going today. And I pass it every now and again and go, aha, natural gas powered. And people go, why is that not an electric lamp? And if I ever pass, it's you would have to know.

Henry:I love stuff like that. And as I say, there's something almost on every street, and people are going past it. 

Ben: Great. So now we have a short section of underrated, overrated. Great. Underrated, overrated things, and then we'll finish off with some current projects and maybe some life advice.

There's a lot of mindsets, so I thought we'd have a look at three of them, which have got this title, and we'll see. So underrated, overrated growth mindset.

Henry: I think the idea is wrong, and for a long time it was overrated. I don't know if it still is by the average person, but I think it is still taken seriously in in some areas of education and sometimes you will at least see it in corporate settings. And I think maybe it's just become a phrase people use rather than that they actually take the idea seriously.

But for those reasons, still overrated. 

Ben: Yeah. There's a little bit around this, I think it comes through in your book that. If you try and do any of this stuff, to use corporate speak by tick box, it really doesn't work because it's to do with all of these internal processes, which are murky and have a lot to them.

Henry: What you're looking for  is motivation. And that's not quite what growth mindset is. 

Ben: An intrinsic motivation. You can't hack it. Exactly. And I think that's actually one of the, we haven't touched on this yet. That's one of the problems with. Generally education today. Paul Graham's got a really good essay on this as well.

But what at the margin exams have taught us is because exams are hackable, right? In the sense that, yeah. Oh, we're going to have these could be the three most likely questions. If I memorize the 3, 000 best words about this question, I'm going to do well. And you somehow then think that's life.

But actually, life is not hackable in that way whatsoever. In fact, if you think it is, that you do A, B, C, D, E, and that will be it. It will really steer you wrongly. I'm And that seems to be at the edge, because there's been no other way, and because of how it's worked. And there's too many of our really bright young things, or bright things in general, who've been tilted to this idea that they can hack life, and not to this other stuff.

Henry: No, no one's going to grade you when you grow up. Yeah. Yeah. There's a great paper about patronage in the British Navy. And how there was a lot of patronage going on. And that ought to lead to worse results, because you're like, giving your idiot nephew a job or whatever. But it didn't. It actually led to better results.

And the people who had patronage outperformed the people who didn't. And they weren't given better ships or anything like that. And it seems to be that patronage, when coupled with meritocracy, actually works quite well at helping you fill information gaps. Who is really motivated? Who's got the fighting spirit?

I know that guy and I can tell you he really does. And because it's coupled with meritocracy, it works really well. But it wasn't, the meritocracy wasn't a written exam, it was an oral exam. After your six years as a midshipman, you had to go to the admiralty and be quizzed on whether you knew all, all the stuff you needed to know to be an officer.

And that, to me, is a very unhackable exam. Like you're going to go into the Admiralty, which is like a big, scary building, and you're going to meet these, these old admirals who aren't going to take any nonsense. And they're going to just throw questions at you. And if you don't get it right, that, and that to me is like a very unhackable system.

I would, I find that paper fascinating.

Ben: It strikes me reading about that or listening to it just now that it's a little bit like how VC works today. Yeah. So VC likes to think that. There's no nepotism in it, but as an outside observer, there's a huge amount of what I would call nepotism. I would call it patronage, but yes.

Oh, they wouldn't might be calling it network, but it's obviously that. But, at the end of the day, if no one wants your product, or also there's these other kind of tests within VC, it fails.

Henry: So it's it's a really interesting  system the VC, they still use the oral exam. 

Ben: Yeah, essentially.

They have to, because no, they, you've got no other proof. It's much harder to hack it. Although I guess they got a little bit of proof, particularly in the US, where they like seeing you, or they don't mind at all seeing you having failed. Inverted commas failed, because for them it's not a failure. 1, even times.

Henry:But if you just want to know I've got 10 people, I need to find out who of them is legit, who really knows their stuff, who's really got the energy, test them all orally. That's much harder to fake than Go away, write something, produce something, and send it back to me.

Ben: If you  ask good questions.

Henry: Oh no, of course no, you have to be the Admiralty. 

Ben: You have to know your stuff. Yeah, of course. Okay, another mindset the Scout mindset. Overrated or underrated?

Henry:  This is Julia Galef.

Ben: Yes, I guess she she's written a whole book about it, but there is this idea, I guess it's a little bit rationalist, but this idea of, yeah, of scout mindset, scouting ahead and being, I guess being prepared, so that's a kind of interesting thing which overlaps.

Henry: Yeah, no, definitely underrated. Partly because the idea is great and I don't think it, People don't talk about scout mindset the way they talk about growth mindset. That would be great if we could swap those, right? But also just, that type of rationalism is probably underrated today because of some of the other things that have happened in and around that community.

Have led people to think that it's fundamentally limited in some way. Okay, that seems fair enough. I don't want to say the good rationalism.  To some  extent that side of it doesn't get as much attention, because there's no gossip or interesting story for the papers, so underrated.

Ben: The stoic mindset. 

Henry: Oh, overrated. Overrated, overrated. 

Ben: But you do say, I think somewhere in the book, I was going to say that. Perhaps I think I'm going to quote, or some words, this might be a summary, that sometimes a change of attitude, as in finding the usefulness in the work you already do, is somewhat underrated, maybe for many people, which to me is a slight change in mindset.

I'm not sure that's necessarily stoic, but, and it refers to that. I'm going to call it that midlife crisis, although to your earlier points that's not necessarily the things that somehow you might not actually just be appreciating what you've been doing. Maybe because you've been doing it so long that you've forgotten it or this idea that you don't want to necessarily leap to something else.

You might want to scale up or find the value in what you do. 

Henry: I think maybe  like reading Seneca is underrated but absorbing stoic content. It's overrated. Can we put it like that? 

Ben: Okay. That seems fair. Next one then on the opposite side Epicureans or an Epicurean mindset, overrated or underrated?

Henry: Does anyone know what it means anymore? Does anyone read Epicure? Just on that basis alone, massively underrated. 

Ben: Fair enough. Were they the two oppositional schools at the time, Stoicism and Versus? Or they ran in parallel? 

Henry: I don't know if they're oppositional, because they're both diff, they're different interpretations of Socrates, and Seneca frequently quotes the Epicureans and says, I know, they don't believe what we believe, but they made a good point.

Yeah. And I'm not sure, That's what I mean about Stoicism, right? If you've read Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and you've read Epicurus and everything, there's a lot to, there's a lot of interest and there's a lot of value in that. And they're books that are worth rereading, but just doing that seems to be underrated relative to reading secondary materials about Stoicism.

Some of which are very good, like I don't want to knock those people, right? And I'm sure that they have brought far more people to the reading of the original books. Yes. Great. I'm not Gateway drug. Yeah, and I'm not against it at all and I think it's great, but my suspicion is that, 

Ben: Yeah, that's fair enough.

So a quick hit thought actually that brings one to mind then, which we haven't talked about, but we could do a quick overrated, underrated Arete, or Arete. 

Henry: Greek concept.

I think the notion of excellence is probably underrated relative to how it used to be thought of in society. But there are many areas today where that is not the case. Yeah, okay. 

Ben: So maybe overall neutral, but in some places underrated. It's difficult 

Henry: to say. I think, I read a good blog post recently where someone I wish I could remember his name because I strongly recommend this blog post.

But the point was that people, not exactly toothless illiterates, but anyone of any educational level would go and hear a sermon and read the Bible and sit around and talk about it. And this entailed exposure to big and difficult ideas and to a fundamentally important and challenging text.

And that is, that kind of thing is slightly lost from ordinary culture today. Now I think the argument's overstated because there's great complexity in the modern world, and I think maybe it's difficult to see that we've replaced it with something equally cognitively challenging. But I do think there's a kind of There's a kind of truth to the idea that like, Greece and Rome used to be our models, and we used to think that society should achieve excellence.

And we used to genuinely even if you didn't believe it, it was accepted that philistinism should be resisted and that we should try and experience the best things. And I think that's no longer true. I don't want to go back to that. I want an eclectic, catholic taste. But I think there's a kind of, maybe because people were, made to sit too many exams and they feel bored by it, I don't know, but there's a kind of sense of, Oh, that sounds a bit like hard work.

Whereas actually it's not.

Ben: Yeah, I think there's obviously problems with old school elitism, so there is something like that. And I think even new school elitism, for instance, generally isn't as open minded as, for instance, TikTok dances. I'm very intrigued, but you can see at the height of TikTok dances or whatever they are, they're incredibly successful people with bazillions following and some, there's a lot of complexity, which I feel I don't understand, but that's what I mean, that eclecticness  of and the culture we've replaced it with is not just lowbrow, dumbed down.

Henry: There's a huge amount going on. I just wonder. I don't know. I can't answer. 

Ben: I don't know. Fair enough. Actually that's a good segue into the other underrated, overrated, which is Tristam Shandy. 

Henry: I guess underrated in the sense that it's not that red anymore. Personally, I've never finished it. I don't know what that says about me.

But Yeah, probably underrated. 

Ben: And the whole, arguably, lineage of books which would come from it, which don't fit into, I guess, so I know more about dramatic writing, but like the three act play, Tristam Shandy takes you off to something which isn't the well constructed novel. 

Henry: Indeed. Yeah. But books, like classic books are underrated.

Yeah. Fair enough. And that, if you're going to start reading classic books. Which, please do, they're great, let's plug classic books. But people are more likely to go to Dickens, Brontes, and again, like Fantastic. But it takes something else to go and try Tristam Shandy, right? Just underrated in general.

Ben: And then GPT books? 

Henry: Obviously currently underrated. I suspect soon to be overrated. I don't know how quickly that will happen. 

Ben: Fair enough. And then the last one on this utilitarianism, but I'm going to specify, because you've done a sort of blog on it, is a John Stuart Mill's version of utilitarianism.

I guess it's his whole book. But do you think underrated, overrated? John Stuart Mill is 

Henry: grossly underrated. He I don't even think of him as a utilitarian. When you hear utilitarian, you're liable to think of Peter Singer. Who's like a great philosopher and very, important thinker. But Mill is much broader than that.

And has a much bigger view of life. And manages to synthesize The insights of utilitarianism and romanticism, and to bring a whole picture of how you can live as an individual. Whereas what utilitarianism has been, mostly been really successful at, is how you can change your moral behavior along particular dimensions.

So I think a lot of people are, I don't know, I don't think that's a bad thing, but there's lots more vegetarianism and veganism today than there was even when I was a child, right? And I would talk to people in the office and they would say I'm on my, I'm two weeks on, two weeks off vegan.

And they said there's all sorts of behavior to trying to be more vegan, trying to be more vegetarian. That's basically, no one knows that they're being a utilitarian, but that's basically a huge win for modern utilitarianism. And the fact that people don't even know that's where it comes from it only enhances the success, right?

But Mill is much broader than that, and he, to me, we've got everything we're going to get out of the Stoics, short of reading them yourself, right? It's time to go to some other philosophers who have a bigger vision of life. would be the starting point for me. Because we live in these these very polarized times I don't agree that everyone's in an echo bubble and everyone gets radicalized online and all this kind of rubbish.

But it is just naturally difficult, psychologically, to learn from people you disagree with. And it's naturally difficult to get over your impulses for and against stuff. And Mill is the best philosopher on those issues, the best modern philosopher on those issues. And it's not just, don't read Utilitarianism, right?

Read the autobiography, read the subjection of women, come to Utilitarianism later on.

Ben: Yeah, and probably, what's it, On Liberty?

Henry: On Liberty, yeah. If anyone's read Mill, probably they've already read that, but I would go to the others.

Ben: Fair enough. 

Yeah, it's interesting on the veganism, because you can approach it in another way, because there's some whole cultures, like the Jains.

or maybe not full on vegetarians and like Buddhists who've come in from one, but certainly within Western traditions. Yeah, I think you probably have Peter Singer's done a good job there. He's very much disliked in the disability community though, so it's not a clear win for him at all.

Henry: That's what I mean about, the success of utilitarianism has been in these very narrow dimensions. It doesn't mean that people are signing up to be that sort of utilitarian. But it's very interesting that, As you say, those other spiritual traditions, those arguments have been known for a long time and have not converted very many people.

It was actual utilitarian reasoning that converted people. Yes. And that's a very interesting sometimes we're all very utilitarian and sometimes we're not. And Mill is the best philosopher for that kind of thing. 

Ben: Yeah, and where you should do it are the domains. Because I do think probably at the margin we should probably think about those things.

More than we do. But he's also very careful compared to say more naive utilitarians about the value of beauty and art and all of these things, which are in modern utilitarian methods, which are just all generally cost benefit and things that they put numbers on. Not all, but at the margin, you can see people going that way.

And because they can't put a number on art and culture and things, it tends to have dropped out at their first assumption, even if they always started the first, it's Oh, obviously this is really important. And then let's just completely ignore it. Whereas Mill never ignores it from even around the offsets as well, the difficulty being that if you have that yes.

Henry: Exactly. And what people object to in the Peter Singer sort of utilitarianism is that it's, it has no sense of nobleness. It has no sense of the qualitative side of life, and it wants to put a number on everything. And Mill's, everything Mill writes is to say, you must have. You must cultivate nobleness.

You must appreciate the qualitative side of life. Of course you can't put a number on everything. That's ridiculous. No, you mustn't live like that. You'll go crazy. That's a terrible So actually, Mill's much more aligned to what most people are really like. But he wants you to be a bit more utilitarian, in, in ways that we find very acceptable.

We should be feminists, right? We should be kind to animals. I think he's the utilitarian that everyone's waiting for. But which, no. He never wrote one book. There's no oh, read Seneca's Letters, that's Soicism. There's no book quite like that for Mill. But the Autobiography and Subjection of Women, yeah.

And everyone, like I've been promoting Mill on my blog, people write to me, and they say, I tried it, and oh my god. Fantastic. You get this a lot. It's, 

Ben: It's easier to read than, say Kant. Kant's in Impossible. No, that's insane. No, don't. No, that's what I'm saying. So that's why people are sometimes put off.

It's oh, he's a philosopher. He's just going to be so hard to read. Let's not even try it. The autobiography 

Henry: is very short Mill's life was super weird, okay? So it's full of gossipy stuff. It's very interesting. His father experimented on him. He had depression. He had mental health problems.

He had an incredibly strange romantic life. It's, he is a fascinating person. He's Victorian, so it's written in that way. But as I say, it's short and he's You know he's got everything that Hollywood's looking for. 

Ben: that's been your other project. Waiting in the wings of the Hollywood script on on, on Mel.

And just on the last one on the veganism thing, I do think, although it did start earlier, really helped also by the sustainability movement. Yeah. So it's interesting when you can attack something from two sides, just oh, at the margins oh, and this is other that you'd sometimes get.

Henry: A very utilitarian movement.

We only get one planet, right?

Ben: Cost benefit. It is, although I do think it's complicated by notions of future persons.

Henry: If you really want to get into it. Indeed, but that also is a very utilitarian, heavy way of thinking. Yeah, 

Ben: Perhaps. It's certainly, I don't know, because some of it's mouthless.

Anyway, that's gonna, that's gonna get us really off track on that. And so on the GPT books, I was just gonna say on that you've done your own GPT kind of version. Will you be releasing that more widely, and how is your pros and cons? 

Henry: Anyone who has a GPT subscription can already go and talk to it about my book.

It's there, it's available, there's no way of making it available for free because of the way OpenAI, right? You have to be a paid subscriber to use the specific GPTs, but it's there and you can go and question it.

Ben: Last couple of questions. One is any current projects that you're working on that you'd like to share?

Obviously you're going to be doing a little bit of publicity and blogging around the book. 

Henry: Yes. I write three days a week on my sub stack. I write about history, literature, biography, talent, all the sorts of things we've been talking about, right? John Stuart Mill I'm currently very interested, there are a couple of other things in talent I want to write about and one of them is patronage.

So I'm currently researching that, but I don't know what I'll do with it, or a lot of the stuff I research I just end up keeping in piles of notes, so let's see. 

Ben: Great. And then last question is, do you have any life advice? This could be advice for anyone listening or maybe people who are thinking about, maybe they're in a midlife crisis, which seems to be able to start anywhere between say 12 and 80.

A life crisis or anything about perhaps they might think they have a hidden talent or maybe don't any thoughts for them? 

Henry: I once wrote a blog post saying you shouldn't take advice from anyone unless they happen to be in the specific situation that you're in or they have been very closely in time.

So that essentially you should take advice from people who are experts. So if you have a baby, take advice from people with babies a little bit older than yours, right? If you come to me, my kids are six and eight. I've forgotten. So anything I say is just, I'll be very confident, so you should do it like this.

I don't know. And that's quite, if you look at the the research on advice, that's quite a generalizable finding. So my advice is whatever it is in the book that works for you, you have to work that out for yourself. I can't give general advice, and I wouldn't want to.

Ben: That seems like really good advice to me, is the meta advice of only seeking advice where it seems to be really relevant and ideally from someone who's got actual expertise which is up to date.

Henry: Yeah. Expertise, fresh experience. That is where the good advice is. General advice and life advice is either useless or harmful, I think. The question to ask yourself is, how would this person know? 

How would they know?

Ben: I think that's a very good way of ending. Henry, thank you very much. Thank you for having me. 

Henry: This was great.