EP.263 - ZADIE SMITH

Transcript

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Speaker 3 I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin.

Speaker 3 Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening. I took my microphone and found some human folk.

Speaker 3 Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke.

Speaker 3 My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man.

Speaker 3 I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan.

Speaker 4 Hey, how are you doing podcats? It's Adam Buxton here. I'm on a Norfolk farm track with my best dog friend Rosie

Speaker 4 and we are having a nice afternoon walk.

Speaker 4 The sun is nearly below the horizon, even though it's not yet 4 p.m.

Speaker 4 Yuck, that's because the clocks went back last weekend, of course. Just in case anyone missed that, I'm here to keep you up to speed with all the latest.

Speaker 4 It's nice to get an extra hour in bed, sure, but

Speaker 4 then you've got to deal with the gloom. Anyway, so myself and Rosie are out here grabbing a bit of daylight while we can.

Speaker 4 Oh, stopping for a wee week.

Speaker 4 Rosie, that is, not me. I went before we left.

Speaker 4 How are you doing anyway, podcats? I hope you're well. Hey, thank you very much to those of you who came out to the Royal Festival Hall last weekend for my book chat with Miranda Sawyer.

Speaker 4 That was a fun night. I hope you agree if you were there.
I really enjoyed that evening. Sang a couple of songs as well with Michael Lovett from Metronomy and the Adam Buxton band.

Speaker 4 And if I say so myself, the version of tea towel we did was

Speaker 4 pretty good. And it was nice to meet some of you afterwards signing books.

Speaker 4 Okay, let me tell you a bit about podcast number 263, which features a conversational ramble with the British author and friend of the podcast. This is her third appearance, Zadie Smith.

Speaker 4 Quick reminder of a few Zadie facts for you. Born in 1975 to a Jamaican mother and an English father, Zadie grew up in northwest London.

Speaker 4 Her debut novel, White Teeth, was written while she was still studying English literature at Cambridge University. It was published in 2000.

Speaker 4 The book interweaves the stories of two wartime friends, a Bangladeshi man, Samad Iqbal, and a white Englishman, Archie Jones, and their families in London.

Speaker 4 It's an imaginative tour de force that brings to life a diverse collection of characters with humour and empathy.

Speaker 4 And 25 years after its publication, it's still easy to see see why it became an international sensation and turned its author into a literary star.

Speaker 4 Since then, as well as teaching fiction at Columbia and New York University during the 17 years she spent living in New York City from around the mid-2000s, Zadie has written five more novels, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, Swing Time, and The Fraud, as well as a play, The Wife of Wilsdon, short story collections, children's books written with her writer-poet, husband, Nick Laird, and essays published in four collections so far.

Speaker 4 The most recent of those, Dead and Alive, was published earlier this year, 2025, and contains a fantastic selection of pieces on subjects as varied as the film Tar starring Kate Blanchett, Stormzy performing at Glastonbury, political censorship, the impact of digital media on our perception of time, and narratives concerning the Black Diaspora.

Speaker 4 There's also obituaries and reflections on literary figures including Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Martin Amos and Hilary Mantell.

Speaker 4 And there's personal reflections as well on hidden emotions, Zadie's relationship with her body and growing older in general.

Speaker 4 This conversation with Zadie was recorded in early October this year in her small, cosy, book-strewn writing room in the northwest London home she shares with her husband and their two children.

Speaker 4 And after some fun chat about wordle start words, appropriate fashions for the older man and the sadness of podcasts becoming TV shows, we talked about a couple of the essays in Dead and Alive that made a particularly big impression on me.

Speaker 4 One is titled Fascinated to Presume in Defense of Fiction, which challenges the idea that authors should, quote, write only about people who are fundamentally like them, close quote, asserting instead that fiction requires the challenging and inherently risky imaginative act of finding universal connection through a fascination to presume the existence of shared griefs and consciousness in others.

Speaker 4 The other essay we talked about is called Shibboleth, originally published in the New Yorker in May 2024 during a period of, as the short intro to the essay says, heroic student protests against the war on Gaza.

Speaker 4 In the essay, Zaidi notes that participants in the political conversation around Israel-Palestine use shibboleths, which Zaydi defines in this context as, quote, phrases that can't be said, or conversely, phrases that must be said, end quotes, to show which side you're on.

Speaker 4 In both essays, Zaidi, as far as I can tell, is considering the value of empathy at a time when efforts to empathize, particularly with political adversaries, have become especially divisive, as demonstrated by a piece which I talked to Zaidi about, written by New York Times journalist Ezra Klein, who I've mentioned before appreciatively on this podcast.

Speaker 4 The piece we're talking about was written the day after the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 4 And in the piece, Ezra Klein spoke about the importance of trying to talk across political divides.

Speaker 4 But one of the people who felt the piece effectively laundered anti-democratic and dehumanizing ideas was the American author and journalist Tanahisi Coates, an acquaintance of Ezra Klein's, who appeared on his podcast soon after Kirk's murder to talk through his objections to Ezra Klein's peace.

Speaker 4 Zadie and I also spoke about what her problem is with Generation X. Not the band, but the cohort.
I'm sure she loves Billy Idol. Who doesn't?

Speaker 4 Now trigger warning, as well as the political chat, you've got at one point a short period of slobbering and grunting from Zadie's lovely pug dog, Peggy, who appears and

Speaker 4 it's a bit like having Boggins back. Some of you, Black Squadron members, will recall those days, the divisive Boggins times.

Speaker 4 Not everybody likes having even a very cute dog slobbering and grunting at close quarters, but it doesn't last very long.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 I think it's nice, not to say sexy.

Speaker 4 Back at the end for another dock recommendation, but right now, with Zadie Smith.

Speaker 4 Here we go.

Speaker 4 Ramble chat, let's have a ramble chat. We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that.

Speaker 4 Come on, let's chew the fat and have a ramble chat. Post on your conversation, hope to find your talking hat.

Speaker 3 Well, speaking of Wordle,

Speaker 1 do you have a standard start word?

Speaker 3 It's a big argument in this family because everyone here says always start with slate. And so I get bored, and then one day I didn't start with slate, and you can imagine it was slate.

Speaker 3 So everybody fucking here got it first time apart from me so now I do slates it's good what do you do I don't have a standard one groin yeah that's good and sometimes I just it's what I see at the breakfast table or whatever I just wanna yeah go for it I want a couple of vowels yes uh and then are we recording already we are recording yeah okay sorry this is it this is it and it's quite nice how many will you play on the trot I play three every morning yeah okay but if spelling bee doesn't go well like someti I mean I'm ashamed to say but sometimes that could take up till midday

Speaker 3 before I get any work done. Fuck.
Three is good.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Now,

Speaker 1 just now, I went and used your beautiful lavatory. Yes.
And I changed because I arrived here on my bike. But I was listening to you talking to Bella Freud the other day

Speaker 1 on fashion neurosis.

Speaker 3 That is a kind of interesting story because that was my first realization that podcasts are now TV shows. Oh, God.
So I agreed to do it. And then I got there.
And

Speaker 3 it was like a TV studio.

Speaker 3 And I was really shocked, but it was too late. And then she made me lie on the sofa.
And now for all time, that's on the internet. But now I know, now I know better.
So I get dressed before podcasts.

Speaker 1 Oh, it's terrible. I think it's so awful.
I love the podcast medium.

Speaker 3 I love radio, I love podcasts, and I don't like television. So I don't want to go on television.

Speaker 1 Exactly. And then if it's all about fashion and you don't even know, that's a bit weird.

Speaker 3 And if you're a woman, that means you have to kind of whatever get, you know, because I normally I'm dressed like a delivery driver, kind of like today. And so it was a lot.

Speaker 3 On the Bella Day, I, because it was Bella, I had made some effort, but not, I hadn't realized it was going to be filmed.

Speaker 1 Okay, I'm sure you looked great. I'll check it out later.
I only listened to the audio version. And you were talking at one point,

Speaker 1 both of you, about men's fashion. Yes.
At one point, you referred to the sadness of middle-aged men still dressing as they did when they were in their 20s. Right.

Speaker 1 In the 90s specifically, cargo shorts, Adidas tops. And I was thinking, oh, that's me.

Speaker 3 I mean, it's a lot, it's fair. And I was wearing boot-cut jeans for a really, really long time until I

Speaker 3 went out into the streets and thought, stop this now.

Speaker 1 What's wrong with boot-cut jeans?

Speaker 3 It's just... They're coming back actually, but it's just, it's not, it's not a thing that I want to be wearing anymore.
I wore them a lot. And we're done.
We're done there. Okay.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But that's a fashion perennial. That's a great look.

Speaker 3 I think gene shapes change and it's kind of important to recognise that.

Speaker 1 All right. Well, I've made an effort to dress like a sort of grown-up.

Speaker 3 You look like you deal in Japanese vinyl. It looks good.

Speaker 1 This is, yeah, I've got Japanese jeans on.

Speaker 3 Oh, there you go. See?

Speaker 1 Because I heard you talking about those. I was like, well, they are good.
I'm going to get some Japanese jeans. They're very austere.
Like, it's so thick, the denim.

Speaker 3 They're very severe, yeah, but they look good.

Speaker 1 Okay, good. And then I've got a blue top that my wife bought me for my birthday from Toast.
Yes. Short-sleeved linen

Speaker 1 shirt. I've been wearing the living heck out of it.

Speaker 3 Little hipster hat.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I've got the Docker cap, Stetson. White hat.
I've been wearing it non-stop this year. I think it works.
Some people don't like it. Some people have said, oh, why are you wearing that?

Speaker 3 That is a problem in Britain. If you try and make any variation on a uniform, someone will comment.
At least it's not an orange hipster hat, which is the one I really dislike. The orange beanie.

Speaker 1 Is there a problem with orange in general?

Speaker 3 I think few people can wear it. I definitely am not.
I think if you're very, like my mother in orange and yellow, if you're dark-skinned, it looks fantastic.

Speaker 3 On the rest of us, I think it looks a little...

Speaker 3 It makes you look sallow. It's not good.

Speaker 1 I was worried that maybe it had a political connotation for people. I don't know what that would be other than the orange order.

Speaker 3 I think it's a Taylor Swift colour. Didn't she just like Napoleon take orange as hers? Oh yeah, okay.
Yeah yeah so that's hers now.

Speaker 1 Because I did go to a wedding the other day and you were supposed to dress quote over the top. So I wore orange shorts and a orange short sleeve top.
It was very orange.

Speaker 1 And there was a guy in the street when I was walking to the tube who said, keep wearing orange, bro.

Speaker 3 That's what I mean. They're past remarkable.
These British people. I'm amazed you're still going to weddings.
I don't think I've been to a wedding since 1996.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was pretty good. Everyone said the same thing.
It was someone getting married. They'd been divorced, one of them, and now they were getting married late in life.

Speaker 1 The other person had never been married. Oh, that was nice.
Yeah, it was nice, actually.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 although they had, it was a lovely wedding. If anyone is listening from that wedding, we all had a great time, didn't we? It was a beautiful occasion.

Speaker 1 But they had a brass band in the corner of this quite small space where we gathered afterwards. And I just couldn't hear.

Speaker 3 What were they playing?

Speaker 1 They were playing pop tunes.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a strong choice.

Speaker 1 Well, it was a really good band, and anywhere else, you would have been going, this is the best band. Right.
But in that space with quite a lot of older people.

Speaker 3 People in their 50s who are having hearing issues from earlier clubbing.

Speaker 1 I could literally hear like every third, fourth word, maybe.

Speaker 3 I've got very good at just the nodding and smiling in between not really. comprehending what people are saying.

Speaker 1 In those moments, are you thinking, what am I going to say when they stop talking?

Speaker 3 Yeah, you need neutral phrases. Sometimes you get caught out.
Sometimes it's good to just say, you know, I'm old.

Speaker 3 Try that again louder. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay, I've got notes here.

Speaker 3 Yes, go on.

Speaker 1 How do you feel about someone that has notes? I mean, especially the older I get, the more I feel like I just need notes.

Speaker 3 No, no, that's fine.

Speaker 1 And I have to be kind of transparent about it. But the notes I've made are a little weird.
They're in a weird order.

Speaker 3 I heard you on another podcast, Holding Up the Ladder.

Speaker 1 Enjoyed it very much.

Speaker 1 Hosted by someone I didn't know,

Speaker 1 Machidiso.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, Matsy. She's a really old friend of mine.

Speaker 1 Matsidiso.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 She is a great girl. Went out with my brother, maybe briefly.
And long-term of this neighborhood, and she's fantastic.

Speaker 1 She's an artist, musician. Yep.
It was you and Devontae Hines.

Speaker 3 Yes, Mr. Blood Orange.
Right.

Speaker 1 Who I also... I was sort of familiar with Test Icicles.

Speaker 3 Great band name one of the best band names of all time though you can't say it in front of him But really he does not enjoy that.

Speaker 1 Oh, it's so good I remember like emailing a load of people at the time going there's a band called test icicles It's amazing

Speaker 1 yeah, things are great and I liked him and it was a good chat actually. I really recommend it.

Speaker 1 I'll put a link in the description But you talked there about the fact and maybe you've talked elsewhere about it too that part of your training as a writer if we could call it that yes was literally transcribing other people's writing yeah i i thought it was unusual but then once i did an event with michael shabon years ago and he did exactly the same thing but with science fiction and fantasy stories so how old were you when you were doing that then like 9 10 11 12.

Speaker 3 i got a typewriter when i was 12 it was given to me by my mum and i typed out stories on that a lot of roal doll

Speaker 3 Agatha Christie.

Speaker 1 Because it was fun to be learning to type and also just to sort of feel the words of these stories.

Speaker 3 You can kind of pretend they're yours. You know, it's a kind of confidence thing.
You would write it out and think, oh, well, I could have written that. I didn't, but I could have.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I used to have the same approach to exams. Like, in college, I would think, or even at GCSE, no one knows yet that I

Speaker 3 haven't failed. I don't know how to put that.

Speaker 3 As if

Speaker 3 I could do well. They don't know.
So maybe I'll just do well. It's like a mind trick.

Speaker 1 The feeling at the beginning of an exam. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Anything could happen. You don't know.
I'm not necessarily going to get what my teachers strongly felt I was going to get. Anything could happen here.
So it's that kind of confidence bump.

Speaker 1 That's great, man. I literally have not thought about that feeling since back then.
But you're right. That is how, that's certainly how I felt.
Like, this might go well.

Speaker 3 This might go well.

Speaker 3 Didn't always go well. As my kids really enjoy reminding me of my GCC results, which were mixed.
They were mixed. Yeah.

Speaker 3 But some of it went well just exactly because of that feeling, like, well, who knows?

Speaker 1 Sure, confidence, that's half the battle. Yeah.
But I remember that I, my own version of doing that kind of thing, was writing down the lyrics to songs I liked. Oh, look at that.
And I found them all.

Speaker 1 These are the original bits of paper.

Speaker 3 Songs that we copying.

Speaker 1 So it's mainly Madness's greatest hits.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 But this is the lyrics for The Message by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.

Speaker 3 Classic.

Speaker 1 It's like a jungle sometimes. Makes me wonder how I keep from going under.

Speaker 3 What tune?

Speaker 1 It really is good, and the lyrics are great. Although I didn't quite understand

Speaker 1 all of them,

Speaker 1 turn around, broke my sacrophiliac.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Midrain, migraine, cancered membrane. Sometimes I think I'm going insane.
I swear I might hijack a plane.

Speaker 3 You know, one of the things about hip-hop is that the rhyme is quite important. You're often going for the rhyme and not entirely for literal sense.
Yeah. Yeah.
Fair enough. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But no, that was very, it was

Speaker 1 fun to hear you talking about that. Oh, okay.
Here's an actual interview question.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 1 Seeing as, are you doing a fair number of interviews around the publication of the SP?

Speaker 3 I'm doing, because I always, the choice is put in front of me. Do you want to sit down for profiles with newspapers and/or go on television or podcasts? And so I always go for the podcast.

Speaker 3 And so I'm doing a lot of podcasts. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 when you are doing them, how pleasurable or not is the experience? How often do you come out

Speaker 1 with feelings of pain?

Speaker 3 My thing is, this is a medium where whatever you do exists forever. And I find that concept really, really hard to deal with.

Speaker 3 Even in the old days, I guess if you're on television, you were on television, then it went, right? There was no... The BBC probably had an archive, but you didn't get to see it.

Speaker 3 No one, it just happened. So I do find that pretty tough, but

Speaker 3 I don't know. I'm getting used to it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, that's everything that happens.

Speaker 3 It's everything, everything lasts forever, and that is modern life.

Speaker 1 And at least there are still podcasts that aren't filmed.

Speaker 3 Yes, there are a few, but they're getting, you know, this is a rare species, what you have here. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 So, if I'm not filmed, I'm on the radio or on a podcast, I feel like I can have a human conversation, which is nice.

Speaker 1 And do you, my specific question was: to what degree do you feel like the person you want to be when you come out of these things? Like, often I... Like this year I've been doing a lot of press.

Speaker 1 I did a book and I did an album and so many times I come out and I'm like, oh God, that is not who I want to be.

Speaker 3 No, that's it. And it feels like a kind of mask that's eaten your face and you wake up at 3am thinking, did I say that?

Speaker 3 Particularly with the book of essays because point of an essay is that you formally consider something and write it the way you want to write it.

Speaker 3 And then talking about it is like saying the same thing, but so much worse

Speaker 3 in a disorganized and crappy way.

Speaker 1 So it's a little painful, but I would say it unusually, it sounds like you're unguarded, whether that's true or not.

Speaker 3 People always say, that's the thing which scares me about podcasts. People always say that, and I'm like, what does that mean? What are other people doing on podcasts?

Speaker 3 If I listen to them on podcasts, I would know. You would know that is the key.

Speaker 1 I think that they're either keeping things so light, they're either choosing podcasts where they know that there won't be anything

Speaker 1 scary brought up. Right.

Speaker 1 Or they are just minding their P's and Q's, or you get a list of stipulations from the PR beforehand saying, you can't talk about this, you can't talk about that.

Speaker 1 And that's not the case with someone like you.

Speaker 3 No. I'm kind of worried that in 25 years of publishing, I don't think any

Speaker 3 PR has ever given me any... Why don't maybe they should?

Speaker 1 You could ask for it.

Speaker 3 Maybe they should.

Speaker 3 No one ever seems to. They just set me off.

Speaker 3 Well, I guess it would be

Speaker 1 weird for someone like you at this point.

Speaker 1 It's a bit late.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So you don't presumably

Speaker 1 read back reviews, for example?

Speaker 3 No, no, I do. Every time a book is published, I have this thing in my mind.
I'm not going to Google myself. I'm not going to look at any reviews.
I'm going to, and then I don't.

Speaker 3 And then at some point, eventually, you read every review. It might take two years, but in the end.

Speaker 1 Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. So you do just suddenly splurge.

Speaker 3 It's just self-harm. It's a terrible.

Speaker 3 It's also not...

Speaker 3 Like with my sensible hat on, I know that despite the explosion of this technology around 2008,

Speaker 3 for hundreds of years, what a writer knew about what they've written were the responses of readers, which come to you in a control... You know, at a reading, someone writes you a letter.

Speaker 3 That's a normal amount of response. And actually...

Speaker 3 If you could stop there, brilliant advice for young writers, well, they wouldn't be able to do it.

Speaker 3 You'd get the gamut. So in the first few weeks of a book coming out, I maybe get nine emails.
In those nine emails, I get it. Some people liked it, some people hated it.

Speaker 3 That's all you need.

Speaker 1 And are those from acquaintances?

Speaker 3 Sometimes, sometimes strangers, people guess your email address or whatever, but you get the idea.

Speaker 1 People get to you.

Speaker 3 How that needs to be amplified by them reading 50,000 versions of the same thing is no human brain is ready for that.

Speaker 1 So, you don't go below the line on pieces that have been published online?

Speaker 3 Not anymore, maybe when I was younger but I you know for my own mental health my anxiety I need to um do a little bit kind of minimum of self-protection and there are whole bits of it like I don't I haven't seen goodreads in 10 years I don't Amazon is a stranger to me like I don't I'm not crazy

Speaker 1 And then if you write a piece that you think might be controversial in one way or another, what's your policy there? Do you then withdraw more purposefully? Or are you just the same as ever?

Speaker 3 And stuff gets it? I always know. Like, people talk talk to me, tell me whatever, but I need to kind of be able to do what I do.

Speaker 3 So, I'm absolutely, you know, thumbs up to everybody having their opinion. But I think it's acceptable for a human being not to take on two million opinions.
Yeah. 20 to 30 is good.

Speaker 1 I mentioned Ezra Klein before. I've kind of gone down a rabbit hole with him this year.
I like where he's coming from and I like listening to his podcast and I like the way he conducts conversations.

Speaker 1 But especially in the last few weeks after Charlie Kirk's murder, he wrote a piece called Charlie Kirk Was Killed Practicing Politics the Right Way or something like that.

Speaker 1 And that was in the, I mean, that was literally in the hours after he was killed.

Speaker 3 I didn't read the piece. I just saw Tana Heasy or listened to Tanya Heasy talking to him.
And

Speaker 3 I mean, no offense to Ezra.

Speaker 3 He does a very good job at what he does.

Speaker 1 Is he someone you know?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I did his podcast. Oh, yeah.
And of course in New York, he's ubiquitous. But

Speaker 3 Tana Heasy makes a very good point that people have different jobs and Tanaheese's job is different from Ezra's and my job is different from Ezra's and different from Tanah's. I think sometimes Ezra

Speaker 3 I don't know how to put it like he does he's very technocratic. He doesn't know what he doesn't know and what Tanehese was trying to say to him is here are people with this particular trauma.

Speaker 3 It's not Ezra doesn't need to know that he doesn't know it kind of to the bone, but this trauma exists and these people will respond in this way to this event. That seems to me like an important

Speaker 3 kind of political and philosophical lesson for anyone, right? There is no perfect objectivity in this world.

Speaker 3 And I thought that conversation between them was really beautiful because there was no anger, like they're old friends, they know each other, they have, in some ways, opposite political positions at times, but they were able to discuss it in a way.

Speaker 3 And Tanahizi stood his ground and I think was right too. And I, and I, that was a, you know, a hopeful moment on the internet.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I i mean when i i listened to the piece i didn't read it with my eyes

Speaker 1 and so i could hear the emotion in ezra klein's voice recording a few hours after kirk was murdered and you know i could hear how worried he was and you know the feelings that a lot of people had just about like the moment political sociological moment whatever

Speaker 1 and um I listened thinking, okay, he's talking, he's trying to be as fair as he possibly can to this person who he fundamentally disagreed with.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I don't suppose there was all that much at all that he would have approved of as far as Charlie Cook and his views were concerned.

Speaker 1 But he was trying to be sort of as fair-minded as he could and say, well, one thing you could say for him was that he was at least going through the motions of trying to meet people and debate with people.

Speaker 1 And that's sort of what... democracy should look like.
That's what I took from that piece. But then afterwards, I heard so many, obviously there was a quite a big backlash against it.

Speaker 1 And Tanahisi Coates wrote a piece explaining why he was so offended by it and detailing all the appalling things that Charlie Kirk had said.

Speaker 3 Genuinely appalling, yeah.

Speaker 1 And the way that he conducted himself day to day as well, which was in no way,

Speaker 1 you know, practicing anything the right way. It was sort of...

Speaker 3 And I would actually even take the

Speaker 3 particular heat of his views out of it and say,

Speaker 3 if you're claiming that that is

Speaker 3 successful debate, it's not even undergraduate 101 debate. Like, coincidence is not causation.

Speaker 3 It's not, his way of arguing has not got anything to do with actual debate. Like, philosophically, the structure of his arguments, it was kind of like child's play

Speaker 3 and often attractive to children. But I think adults who understand what a discussion actually looks like could not think of that as serious debate.
No.

Speaker 3 So, I mean, I didn't read

Speaker 3 the original Ezra piece, but I thought Tanahiti made an absolutely solid and impassioned defense of his position.

Speaker 1 Definitely.

Speaker 1 Then I sort of went down a bit of a rabbit hole with the whole thing and started reading responses to it and then responses to his conversation with Tana Heasy Coates.

Speaker 3 This doesn't seem like a good use of time.

Speaker 1 The way that you do. I know, but it...
It feels like it is because it feels like, look at me, I'm engaged with what's happening.

Speaker 3 Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 3 But that is the trick of capitalist internet monopolies is that they make you feel that you are not a political or engaged person unless you are engaging with the machine 24-7.

Speaker 3 But that isn't actual political engagement. That's just spending time on their platforms.
So I think trying to separate those two things is quite significant.

Speaker 3 And there is also, again, like a gap between the unbelievable seriousness of murdering a man, which is of enormous ethical and political import, and the actual content of his discussions, which to me were almost comically childish.

Speaker 3 So it's hard to contain those two things in the same place. But because something incredibly serious has happened, doesn't mean that this person has to be taken seriously as a thinker or debater.

Speaker 3 Those are two completely separate things in my mind.

Speaker 1 The reason I brought it up, though, was because,

Speaker 1 you know, to me, Ezra Klein seems like a fair-minded person who acts in good faith and thinks hard about what he's saying. And that's not to say that he gets it right right all the time.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 the wave of comments and people just sort of going, oh, well, this guy, he's part of the problem. He's the reason we're in this mess in the first place.

Speaker 3 But what is that old thing of don't go to the hardware store if you're looking for milk? Like you're looking in the wrong place for what you need.

Speaker 3 I mean, I think Tanahi's point about Ezra is that when you assume that your base idea of rationality and fairness is everyone's, you're making an error because people have, again, their individual traumas, their individual histories, and what might seem obvious and rational and fair to you might not seem so to them because they're dealing with a completely different set of American facts.

Speaker 3 And I think that was the point of that conversation, which was key: is that the America that Ezra is thinking of is not the same America that Tanahizi has experienced and lived through.

Speaker 3 They're talking about two different places. And I felt like the conversation, as it moved on, Ezra could recognize that this is not the same America.

Speaker 3 We can have the conversation, but we have to realize that our particular experiences of them are radically different.

Speaker 1 These guys commenting onto the thing, though. People don't express themselves in the way that you

Speaker 1 just did. You know, rather than saying any of that, it's just like Ezra Klein, he's just a plant, he's just a shill for the neoliberal system.

Speaker 3 But Adam don't take the bait. I know, it's just there are other things to think about and engage with.

Speaker 3 I know, I could be spending time. And again, Coates is a a great example of someone who doesn't take the bait.
He thinks instead.

Speaker 3 He thinks things through in depth and is able to articulate himself properly. Thank goodness.

Speaker 1 Another fun conversation in the world has been in the last couple of years. Well, we're talking on the 7th of October,

Speaker 1 two years after the attack on southern Israel by Hamas. You write in the book, there's a piece called Shibboleth.

Speaker 1 And that was written in May 2024. Yes.

Speaker 1 And that was reading from my notes here examining the I have read it obviously but it examined the ethical and rhetorical dimensions of the pro-Palestinian campus protests over the war in Gaza

Speaker 1 and a lot of that piece was about the kind of weaponization of language and and about the well what is a shibboleth?

Speaker 3 Well, look, it's happening right now when you talk about the weaponization of language. Netanyahu says anyone who doesn't leave this strip now is a terrorist.

Speaker 3 That is an example of language as magical thinking. You don't suddenly make someone a terrorist because you say that they are.

Speaker 3 The mothers who can't move, the children who can't move, the people who refuse to move are not immediately terrorists because your language decides that they are.

Speaker 3 And that's what I mean about the weaponization of language. It's a kind of magical thinking where you twist reality into what you wish it to be by speaking it so.
And that is not the case.

Speaker 3 So when I was writing that piece, I was interested in the history of that kind of language in that region, language which hopes that just by naming something, it will come to pass.

Speaker 3 I don't think that's how reality works.

Speaker 3 And even more directly, my question was, you know,

Speaker 3 at that moment, there had been these enormous protests against Netanyahu in Israel. So there is an opening, a possibility.
of solidarity.

Speaker 3 And the question is, what kind of language

Speaker 3 might model that? Hope of solidarity. It doesn't mean that that solidarity will be accepted or taken, but to me,

Speaker 3 to be asked to

Speaker 3 ignore or minimise

Speaker 3 murder or rape, it's not something that I can do.

Speaker 3 It's not something I can do, and I don't think it's necessary in the fight for justice. That was my point.
I don't think it's necessary.

Speaker 3 I think if you want a one-state solution, which I personally do, though, what I want in my chair in Wilson Green is not really relevant.

Speaker 3 But if that's your dream, the question is what kind of political modelling and language will allow for it? You have to.

Speaker 3 I wanted, in my piece, to say, in the context of a student at that point, had just been brought up before a board in Colombia and asked about his idea of killing Zionists, that's what he'd said.

Speaker 3 And he was asked, do you think there's anything wrong with that sentence? And he said, no.

Speaker 3 And I wanted to try and write a piece which suggested that our fights for justice don't have to include the dehumanization of our adversaries I don't think they do I think in fact I think our claims for justice are much stronger when our adversaries are seen as human and in this situation right now where any attempts of solidarity has been closed down then you move on to the next battle But in the first instance, I knew, I knew there was a movement within Israel against this government.

Speaker 3 I knew there was a movement that might be spoken to. To shut down all possibility of that in the first minute is not the job of a writer like me.

Speaker 1 And when you write a piece like that, one thing that Ezra Klein gets accused of is

Speaker 1 not centrism exactly, but kind of both sides-ism. Anyway, this idea of both sides-ism, and also centrism as a dirty word, is something that I have noticed.

Speaker 3 But I don't feel like I'm doing the business of the left.

Speaker 3 Right, okay.

Speaker 3 If a reader cannot tell the difference between the numbers 1,700 and the numbers of whatever they were, 42,000 at that point, that is the job of a reader of an ethical intelligence to know the difference between 1,700 bodies and 40,000 bodies.

Speaker 3 There is an obvious ethical, philosophical, moral, practical difference between those two amounts.

Speaker 3 There is no... only a machine makes

Speaker 3 thinking like a machine creates those two things as unresolvable binaries, this or that.

Speaker 3 There is a war crime, and then a greater war crime that becomes a genocide.

Speaker 3 If you can't understand that as a reader, I don't know what kind of reader you are.

Speaker 3 So, to me, I wanted to write about that moment and about something which felt to me like a human tragedy.

Speaker 3 In that moment, what that essay calls for is a ceasefire, the end of arms sales to Israel, and the end of police entering universities to oppress students who are protesting, which is their right to protest.

Speaker 3 That was not the question. The question is: how do we do this?

Speaker 3 How do we move forward? What kind of language do we use? Who are we while we do this? And everybody will have their different answer to that. I'm not judging anyone, that's not my business.

Speaker 3 But for me,

Speaker 3 I don't believe that the fight for justice involves involves the dehumanisation of your adversary. I don't believe that, personally.
I never will.

Speaker 1 And did you have conversations after you'd published that piece that made you think differently? Or did you remain completely happy with what you've written? And

Speaker 3 I felt the pain,

Speaker 3 but...

Speaker 1 By the way, I'm not suggesting that you ought to be.

Speaker 3 No, no. What interests me is that I don't think

Speaker 3 it's so because I'm not online in the way that these people are online, right? That everybody's online.

Speaker 3 So I know that the simple reference to the pain of your adversary prior to like

Speaker 3 2008 and the invention of these iPhones would not have seemed

Speaker 3 in any way strange to anyone on the left. That would have been a part of...
our acknowledgement of a struggle. So

Speaker 3 it's not me who's changed. Everyone has changed around me.
I don't see those things.

Speaker 3 A one-state solution has been part of my imagination since I knew about this situation for many people on the left. But it does not include the idea that a war crime is unmentionable.

Speaker 3 That's not something that I can conceive of. A war crime is a war crime.
A genocide is a genocide. It is not a zero-sum game.
in terms of mentioning these things.

Speaker 3 And to me, it's almost an aid to justice because when you say to someone I understand your pain now try and imagine that pain on this scale you aid justice you don't stop it that's a novelist insight I absolutely understand no activist no politician has to care anything about that but psychologically I think I know that to be true and if you do the opposite if you say your pain is insignificant or I don't recognize it or I even don't believe in it

Speaker 3 you bring these people no further towards justice and so you know, I'm not a nihilist.

Speaker 3 And I was thinking particularly of a friend in Israel, the writer Ekger Kerr, who wrote recently about, you know, standing in the street every weekend with pictures of dead Palestinian children and being attacked by his fellow Israelis.

Speaker 3 What are you doing here? Why are you doing it? What are you speaking of? You trade to you. And that's guts.
Writing an essay in your chair in Wilson Green doesn't really involve much bravery.

Speaker 3 What he's doing is brave. What to me people like standing together are doing are brave.
Palestinians and Israelis on the scene trying to find some way to work together.

Speaker 3 These things are difficult to do. But I also do think bravery is, you know, structural.

Speaker 3 Nothing could have been easier for me to write just what everybody around me was writing with the same fury and with the same zero-sum knowledge and with the absolute insistence that this other trauma is insignificant.

Speaker 3 That would have been, I would have got all my plaudits. And so the question is, why did I do it? Because I genuinely, if I call myself someone who is concerned with human flourishing, it has to be

Speaker 3 everywhere and at all times. And I think if you,

Speaker 3 am I talking too much? No.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's, it's, I feel like I've sort of sprung it on you, and it's such a loaded topic.

Speaker 3 No, it's okay. And I.

Speaker 3 I think one of the things about ethical thinking, aside from political thinking, is that it has to be flexible.

Speaker 3 And if it isn't flexible, for instance when you turn to Sudan if you have these rigid categories of who is the hero who is the enemy and eternally then Sudan is is nothing to you right you can't even see it because it's it's a situation that doesn't fall into these these categories that you've already established in your own mind but that too is a genocide happening right now what's happening in Israel to me is a genocide The question is, can you create a language in which people are able to join you in the struggle against these kinds of war crimes that are happening in many places?

Speaker 3 That is the kind of language I wanted to model, but you know, at the moment it's a hiding to nothing if people don't want to do it.

Speaker 3 And I understand at the point where people absolutely refuse solidarity, what can you do? You can only turn from them.

Speaker 3 If they're unwilling to see what is in front of their eyes, then you are within your rights to turn. And with every ethical emergency, the main thing is the ethical emergency in front of you.

Speaker 3 And at the moment, that is the

Speaker 3 dissolution of a land and the murders of thousands.

Speaker 1 You write about some of the same things in a different context in another essay in the book, Fascinated to Presume, in defense of fiction.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so superficially, that's kind of dealing with cultural appropriation. That's something I've always been fascinated by in various contexts because it so often seems like a dead end.

Speaker 1 You write about all those things in that essay.

Speaker 1 And again, you're talking about

Speaker 1 compassion and empathy. And well, you make a distinction between efforts to presume what someone else's life might be like that are compassionate and those that are containing.

Speaker 1 What do you mean by that?

Speaker 3 I would think, first of all, the one thing I do think about that essay is that, you know, I've lived through a period of everybody defending very fiercely their identity groups.

Speaker 3 And I thought, I actually belong to an identity group called novelists. And I quite like to, if not defend them, explain them.
And I think the essay is open.

Speaker 3 Like, if you reject the category of fiction, again, okay, I wasn't trying to make some kind of bombastic defense of it really, but only to say this is what it has been.

Speaker 3 And maybe we don't need it anymore. And I think that is absolutely possible.

Speaker 3 Like I really don't deny that possibility that the category of fiction is just not interesting to people anymore or not useful.

Speaker 3 But I tried to speak about it not as a writer, because I find it quite hard to defend writing as a writer, but as a reader, I have found it incredibly nutritious and enlarging to my experience on this earth.

Speaker 3 And that's what I wanted to defend far more than writing or my writing in particular, the experience of reading. And it's not physics, right? So, oh, that's a pug.
Sorry, one minute.

Speaker 1 Who's this? Peggy. Peggy.
Hello, Peggy.

Speaker 3 I don't have to sniff too much.

Speaker 3 Empathy is often overstated, particularly by writers. And it is obviously the case, as I always find myself saying, that the Nazis loved Bach and read Anna Karenna.
So this is clearly not

Speaker 3 a one-shot solution to all your ethical problems. Nobody's claiming that.
But I am aware as a reader of being in some way broadened by what I have read. No guarantee, right?

Speaker 3 Like I find myself, you know, I was talking about this book I read recently about Haiti. It's a novel called Sisi by a woman called Emméline Propheté.

Speaker 3 And that takes you into the kind of street supporter prince, the gangs, the drama, the violence, from this very kind of intimate, this is a pug snorting, sorry, novelistic

Speaker 3 perspective and when i finish that novel

Speaker 3 when i enter into the world haiti is in some sense opened up to me in a new way what i do with that knowledge is another question you might do literally nothing with it you might just sit around thinking oh haiti but for me without that i have the news i have reports but that kind of uh

Speaker 3 human connection with other minds other worlds is important to me and I have a feeling it's important to a lot of people I know they find it hard to defend or to find a language for defending it, and I'm not, you know, I don't have any of that kind of Lionel Shriver desire to scream you down about the great, you know, benefits of fiction because I don't really feel that.

Speaker 3 I just know that intimacy and privacy between a reader and a writer is really significant to me.

Speaker 3 The way that it's not mediated by money or commerce, of course, you buy a book, but after that, you're kind of on your own. No one's nudging you, no one's controlling you.

Speaker 3 That relationship is really important to me, and

Speaker 3 I wrote it for readers who have that feeling. And I always say, if you're a reader who finds fiction repulsive or ethically dubious or whatever it is, cool, like don't read it.
I get it.

Speaker 3 Just read thought pieces. They're definitely more factual.

Speaker 3 And they come from the first person you know who wrote them. There's no ambiguity, and you don't have to feel worried or ambivalent, or that's all fine.

Speaker 3 But for those of us who love fiction, I tried to write about,

Speaker 3 oh my god, Peggy, sorry this is a pug making a lot of noise. I tried to write about what's valuable in it to me.

Speaker 3 But it is also, of course, the case that fiction, like every other cultural medium, has often been used to contain people, to write stereotypes, to write ridiculous versions of people.

Speaker 3 And in particular, if you were a black child of my age in the 80s, 70s, 80s, 90s, all you were coming across were these containing images that had nothing to do with you, that did not express who you were, and which felt like an affront.

Speaker 3 But then I was even more grateful for those times when I read a novel,

Speaker 3 Peggy,

Speaker 3 in which

Speaker 3 people like me were given our full humanity and capacity for human action. I'm going to have to take this dog out of here because I cannot concentrate with this punch doing her full punch.

Speaker 3 Sorry, Peggy. I'm going to lock you in the living room, honey.

Speaker 3 One minute.

Speaker 3 I do think one of the things we have to be careful about now with our attacks on quote-unquote empathy from the left is that whereas before maybe five or six years ago it felt like an edgy fun game, one of the first things I ever heard Charlie Charlie Kirk say which was after he died on the World Service was I don't believe in this thing called empathy I think it's a liberal conspiracy and I thought oh you too

Speaker 3 so

Speaker 3 to me

Speaker 3 it's not that I consider empathy the cure to all our ills and it's certainly a mostly ineffective political force but I do think that the people who are

Speaker 3 open and made by books and who have allowed books in and have allowed stories in, have some chance of entering into the world with a slightly expanded curiosity. And that can't be a terrible thing.

Speaker 3 I'd rather those people,

Speaker 3 you know, had some influence in the world than people who have decided that the area of other people's consciousness and the area of other people's lives is of no interest to them.

Speaker 1 Do you think differently, though, about writing characters that have different identities from your own compared to the person that wrote White Teeth?

Speaker 3 No, and also I think that argument is kind of, I don't think anybody's really even making it anymore.

Speaker 3 Like one of the funny things about that essay being this book is that some of the early readers were like, oh, that's such a parse argument.

Speaker 3 And of course that's a classic game where you make an argument really fiercely and then when someone, when you find it counted, you're like, oh, well, I never. Who even believed that?

Speaker 3 That was just some nonsense. So I'm like, well, it was pretty fiercely argued, as I remember.

Speaker 3 But no, it was always based for me on a philosophical idea of identity, which was really, really flat, you know, which was the idea that you know someone and you know who they are simply by looking at them.

Speaker 3 And I really don't feel that. I feel that there are mysteries within people which are

Speaker 3 hard to bring to the light. But I also obviously believe that people are objects of contingency.

Speaker 3 They are influenced by everything that happened to them and that includes their history, that includes their trauma and that includes the way they have been treated by other people.

Speaker 3 When I'm writing characters, I'm trying to always keep those contingencies in mind. There There are obviously contingencies which are out of my purview.

Speaker 3 I don't know everything, I don't know everyone, but in my life, and I think in a lot of people's lives, there are a lot of different types of people.

Speaker 3 There are a lot of different types of people in my family, even in my immediate family.

Speaker 3 So I don't think fiction has to come from that place of personal experience, but I certainly have all my life been exposed to a variety of people and been curious about them. And even if it is

Speaker 3 an immoral or vampiric way of being,

Speaker 3 that's what a novelist is.

Speaker 1 Well, you make the point, I think, that most people don't even know themselves.

Speaker 3 I mean, that becomes really, really clear. It's very hard to know when you're in your 20s.
I get it, because I absolutely thought I knew what was going on, I think, then.

Speaker 3 But the older you get, the absolute childish terror. grows.
Like, I have no idea what's going on 90% of the time, both in the world and and in myself.

Speaker 3 And the areas of non-knowledge just get wider and wider and wider. And that's why it's actually really weird for me to always be on these podcasts because I feel like I have to.

Speaker 3 What am I meant to be doing? Like, convey, what do I know? What do I know about Israel-Palestine? What do I know about Charlie Clark? All I'm doing is talking

Speaker 3 from my very small bag of knowledge and my

Speaker 3 principles. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but you

Speaker 1 someone like me responds to what they perceive as a kind of sympathetic, foundational ethics, and you're able to express them better than most people. And, you know,

Speaker 1 it's good to hear someone like you talking. You know, it makes you feel better about the world.
It makes you feel connected to.

Speaker 3 God, I don't feel better, but

Speaker 3 I'm glad if someone else feels better. I don't know.
I feel a lot of despair right now.

Speaker 3 it's I think I thought that the the fever

Speaker 3 of

Speaker 3 of online life would was gonna break sooner or break more radically I really had a lot of faith in in young people that they would have enough but I don't know if it's got there yet and also when things are addictive and though it is of course cringe to talk about it as an addiction i i don't think there's really any other word at this point and

Speaker 3 people don't just say ah I had enough heroin. Yeah, yeah.
That just doesn't really happen. So it's not that surprising, but I thought there would be more disgust.

Speaker 3 I thought that children growing up with parents who have spent so much time with their heads down on a screen, even at the most vital points.

Speaker 3 I thought those children would revolt. I thought they'd be more like, fuck this.
Fuck you and fuck this.

Speaker 1 Well, there's always the illusion, though, that you are connected, that you're not actually isolated. It's like me and my Ezra Klein rabbit hole.

Speaker 1 I feel like I'm making an honest attempt to connect with other points of view.

Speaker 3 I think there are loads of places online where people

Speaker 3 genuinely connect, but they tend to be kind of like modeled on the old chat rooms. Reddit isn't a bad one.

Speaker 3 Like there are little corners where people are actually talking, but the structural design of the algorithms that most people are spending most of their time on are not for that purpose.

Speaker 3 They're for continued engagement. That's different from connection.

Speaker 1 I heard you on

Speaker 1 the wild card podcast, another one.

Speaker 3 That is another one. Straight off a plane, told to go on a podcast.
I'm literally

Speaker 3 so tired.

Speaker 3 My hair might have even been in a hairnet. And I got there and they were like, yeah, this is TV.
And I was like, oh, God.

Speaker 1 Oh, that was TV as well, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, that was TV as well. So

Speaker 3 then that happened. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And the conceit for that podcast is each question, you just select it from three cards.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 1 And so it's exciting to hear you. It is exciting to hear you go to the game.

Speaker 3 Or

Speaker 1 one.

Speaker 3 Oh, it was fun. Sometimes three.
It was a new one to me. I'd never heard of it.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's good. I'm not trashing the podcast.
They were good questions on the cards. Rachel Martin was the host.

Speaker 1 Anyway, you were saying to her that one of the things you said was that you wish you were less selfish. And I've heard you say things like that before.

Speaker 1 And it's one of the things I respond to about you is that I have a lot of those thoughts. I think you and I share a lot of anxiety over time.

Speaker 1 A lot of anxiety, yeah, and a certain amount of guilt over various things

Speaker 1 and regret. And I think maybe you said,

Speaker 1 well, did you always feel the same way about regret? I remember as a young person thinking, I'm never going to regret anything. What's the point? It's a waste of time.
I'm basically a decent person.

Speaker 1 And so I'm just going to go through with an open mind and a curious spirit. And occasionally I'll get things wrong.
But what's the point of regretting it?

Speaker 3 I think maybe that attitude is only possible without children.

Speaker 3 Like when the ethical area is just you and what you're going to have for lunch today.

Speaker 3 Like I imagine, I don't know because I have them now, but I can tell you once you have them, by 9.15, you've already committed so many ethical failures.

Speaker 3 both to your children and yourself and you've told a child to fuck off terrible things have happened people have screwed it's impossible to keep the ethical area clear, and mistake just piles on mistake.

Speaker 3 And I always think it's funny, I haven't actually done this, but somewhere in the middle of parenting, you have this urge to go into your kids' room and go, How's it been so far?

Speaker 3 Like, has this been a good childhood? I mean, relatively speaking, are we good? That is a terrible thing to do, and you should never do it. But the instinct is quite strong.

Speaker 3 Like, please tell me this has gone okay. And the answer is, no, it hasn't.
It never does go okay. There's no such thing as a perfectly happy childhood.
But it's it's hard.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I've always felt a lot of regret and

Speaker 3 a lot of uncertainty. And so it takes a lot to write things because you...

Speaker 3 I don't write things with this feeling like, oh, I'm right. And I must tell you how right I am.
It's more like...

Speaker 3 I feel this thing strongly. I'm often aware, oh, other people don't seem to be feeling this.
So maybe it's a shameful thing to feel.

Speaker 3 And I guess I definitely felt that with Shibboleth. Like, I knew that I was not meant to think at all about that day.

Speaker 3 I was only meant to think about this other thing, but I couldn't help but think about both things.

Speaker 3 Not because I thought they were equal, not because I thought they were of equal weight, but just because I'm a human being and I don't know how you avoid doing that.

Speaker 3 So it's quite often like that when I'm writing. I think, oh,

Speaker 3 nobody else seems to be saying this.

Speaker 3 Are you sure?

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 I don't know.

Speaker 3 Some part of me feels like it's my job to at least think out loud and give it a go. But there's a lot of anxiety all the time.

Speaker 1 That's what makes it good, though, I think, is that you're doing that work.

Speaker 1 And those are really relatable worries that you have that... you don't hear very well expressed by mostly anyone.

Speaker 3 I just, I don't want to betray myself. I know when I was a teenager, like you, I just thought I'm going to live this absolute pure and brilliant life.
I'm never going to compromise.

Speaker 3 And in the end, you compromise in so many ways. But I think at least when I'm writing, don't do it there.
Otherwise, what the fuck is the point? Like, what have you done if you're doing it there?

Speaker 3 So that place has to remain, you know, as honest as I can make it. Everything else in life is, you know, tricky, full of regret, absolutely.

Speaker 3 And one of the biggest regrets, of course, is spending so much time on this goddamn writing when there's a lot of other things, you know, to do in life. Yeah, but you're good at it, though.

Speaker 1 And people doing things well are in short supply, I think. And it's like.
Oh, I don't know about that.

Speaker 3 Music's very good.

Speaker 1 Oh, sure. I'm not saying there's none of that.

Speaker 3 There's good stuff going on.

Speaker 1 I'm just saying it's valuable when you find them, is a better way of saying it. Maybe they're not in short supply.
Sure, there's lots of people doing things well, but that's good.

Speaker 1 And I'm glad that they're doing that. And I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't be doing anything else at all.
And I get,

Speaker 1 I relate strongly to the feeling of like oh god why why have I spent a whole day singing a song about why

Speaker 1 spoons or whatever

Speaker 3 and how is that helping yeah that's that's the main feeling and but I the weird thing is what as an as a

Speaker 3 I don't want to say consumer it's a gross word but as someone who experiences art of other people I don't have any doubts I never have any doubts.

Speaker 3 If I'm listening to Chappell Rowan, or more specifically watching him perform, I absolutely think that is an unbelievably necessary thing for her to do right now in the world. No notes, like, at all.

Speaker 3 I'm like, please do that. No matter how many wars go on, thank God that you're doing that.
So I don't have doubts about other artists.

Speaker 3 It's just when you're doing it yourself, it's hard to justify or imagine why you would continue. And also, because I did this recently, this is new.
So normally I don't have any books.

Speaker 1 Zadie is pointing to a stack of her own books.

Speaker 3 My own books. There's one of each book.
And normally I never want to look at them. I send them to my mum's house, so I hide them in the book.

Speaker 1 Are they in chronological order?

Speaker 3 They are. So this is my attempt to be like,

Speaker 3 okay, get a grip.

Speaker 1 You wrote some books. You've done some things.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but I also do feel.

Speaker 3 That is a lot of books. It's a lot of books.
And there comes a time in a writer's life where it's just time to stop writing. And I hope,

Speaker 3 you know, it comes and that I know it when it comes.

Speaker 1 What's going to happen then?

Speaker 1 Just. Start rapping.

Speaker 3 I'm just gonna I don't know I'm just gonna chill. I'd love to travel like I've not really

Speaker 3 I've done a lot of you know book travel which is go and sit in a hotel in Berlin for two nights but I've never done these amazing adventures that you hear people doing you know just traveling.

Speaker 3 It'd be so exciting to see more of the world and you know I've been a very parochial writer. I've been stuck in my corner either London or New York.

Speaker 3 Those are both very parochial places, you know, in the end. And I'd quite like to see

Speaker 3 other things. Like, for me, going to West Africa, particularly, that was my only big adventure.

Speaker 1 Where did you go?

Speaker 3 I went to the Gambia, Ghana, but it was like genuinely mind-blowing.

Speaker 3 I was like one of those boring year-off people we used to meet at college, who were like, I've been to India, and you're like, oh, shut the fuck up.

Speaker 3 I was like that. I couldn't get over it.
It appeared in swing time. It affected my thinking.
It had a whole kind of consequence, the way I thought about myself, black people, the diaspora.

Speaker 3 It so useful and so beautiful. And I think young me thought that all life could be got out of books and walking up and down Kilburn High Road.
And it's not true. It helps to travel.

Speaker 3 You learn new things.

Speaker 1 You often refer to the generations.

Speaker 1 Gen X, the Millennials, the baby boomers.

Speaker 1 It's a facet of your preoccupation with time, I suppose.

Speaker 3 I just think, and I've talked about it a bit elsewhere, but it makes me

Speaker 3 it's funny to me

Speaker 3 kind of generational discourse because it's so insane. Like, what is the point, if you happen to be young, of railing against the old when tomorrow you will be old?

Speaker 3 It doesn't, it doesn't make any sense. Like, I get

Speaker 3 that kind of

Speaker 3 racial animus or gender animus because outside of unique circumstances, you're not going to become this other. But in this case, it's like guaranteed.

Speaker 3 If you're lucky, you're going to be this person who you've thrown total contempt on. That's not going to work.

Speaker 3 But also, more seriously, I do think when I think about us when we were young and listening to what were then boomers, my memory, you can correct me if it's wrong, is that we,

Speaker 3 when they talked about their things,

Speaker 3 their woodstock and their Beatles and their blah blah you kind of rolled your eyes, you thought they were a bit pathetic quite often, but there was this kind of there wasn't the animus and I was thinking why and it's because

Speaker 3 though they were ridiculous in a million ways, they were handing on to us

Speaker 3 a decent job market, houses we might possibly be able to afford. So there was no, it's completely economic.

Speaker 3 Like when there's an economic situation in which people feel that there's a space for them, then they can just roll their eyes when their mum is talking about that time she met Jimi Hendrix.

Speaker 3 I'm just like, fine, you do that. And even secretly,

Speaker 3 I think, even though we threw some contempt, we secretly quite admired them, right? Like, but didn't tell them.

Speaker 3 So we'd listen to their music, don't tell them, or imitate their music, Oasis, or whatever it was. But oh, blur, we, it was respectful because it wasn't a zero-sum game.
Now it is a zero-sum game.

Speaker 3 And plus, the planet. So, you can't expect any nice word from someone younger than you.
They're completely within their rights. Look what we did.
Or what we failed to not do, if you see what I mean.

Speaker 1 Yes. Well, yeah, we met last year at a party.
Yes. And, yeah, you mentioned that you've got some Gen X guilt.
You basically lumped it all on Gen X and said,

Speaker 1 what a total shitbag generation that

Speaker 3 I said ineffectual like incredible for

Speaker 3 art right best movies best music I was watching a YouTube compilation of Peep Show extracts as philosophers it's absolutely brilliant look it up online the whole gamut from Plato to Nietzsche to Wittgenstein you can find a clip of peep show which perfectly articulates the entire philosophy of everybody it's a brilliant I don't know who did it but well done you

Speaker 3 so great cultural products. But actually, I was thinking about it this morning.
I mean, I don't want to name in shame, but a great section of our cohort went into the city.

Speaker 3 And we all know how that ended.

Speaker 3 So that is definitely part of our generational.

Speaker 1 We told our kids that we loved them, though.

Speaker 3 We did do that. We did do that.
We've tried our best.

Speaker 1 That means something, doesn't it? I mean, sometimes I worry that actually

Speaker 1 just because that's one skill I have, I kind of let myself off the hook for all the other things.

Speaker 3 It's better than nothing, but definitely going into

Speaker 3 the world economy and treating it like a casino and destroying the future of millions is not the best thing we ever did.

Speaker 3 But I do feel when

Speaker 3 those people, I saw those people going to the city and we were all 20,

Speaker 3 I thought they were assholes then. And as bad as those guys were, the tech bros make them look like Mary had a little lamb.
So

Speaker 3 I think this generation will have something to say to their kids in 25 years about why they celebrated, idolized, thought Polar Necks were cool, and basically went all in with a group of Palo Alto sociopaths.

Speaker 1 Because you could store your entire music collection.

Speaker 3 I don't think that's a good enough reason. I think these kids will have questions.

Speaker 1 One device.

Speaker 3 No, I don't think they're going to take that as an answer. We'll see.

Speaker 1 Did you go and see Oasis when they reformed?

Speaker 3 I feel like all I'm doing on this podcast is digging my own grave. I don't, um,

Speaker 3 I do not partake of Oasis as a thing.

Speaker 1 Come on, the first time that you were on the podcast, we waxed lyrical a little supersonic about the dock, Oasis.

Speaker 3 Yes, because I was on a plane, I'd had some white wine, and I got incredibly sentimental about the 90s, but that does not include...

Speaker 3 I do not, they're not my

Speaker 3 no.

Speaker 3 I think that Liam has a fantastic voice and, you know, it's just not, it's not my vibe. I went to see Usher.
That was my 90s nostalgia thing, or Buster at Glesson Briès.

Speaker 3 You know, it's just Oasis is not for me. I would have loved to have seen Blur, but I did not get it together to get a ticket.

Speaker 1 Yeah, have you never seen Blur?

Speaker 3 Never, such a shame. Oh, really?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, they'll do it again, come on.

Speaker 3 Will they? I don't know.

Speaker 1 They're very good.

Speaker 3 Life, they're brilliant.

Speaker 1 I think Oasis are good life as well.

Speaker 3 I hear it. Everybody, I'm people go and don't look back in anger.

Speaker 1 That's, I mean, that's normal.

Speaker 3 To me, the lyrics are like

Speaker 3 Beatles' windings. I just can't inside the eye of your mind.

Speaker 3 I can't. I'm sorry.
I'm sorry. God bless them both.

Speaker 1 And well, the other day,

Speaker 1 I was in Oxford Street. I think I'd done a gig or something.
It was late. And I was cycling back.
It was a warm night. And there was all those tuk-tuks.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 And they blast out music. And people, I just don't, that doesn't seem fun to me.
Let's go and get deafened in a tuk-tuk.

Speaker 3 With the flashing lights, yeah, with the flashing lights.

Speaker 1 Anyway, they were playing Oasis. I think it was Wonder War.

Speaker 1 And it was amazing to be in the wake of this tuk-tuk going down Oxford Street. And you could see the effect it was having on.

Speaker 3 People singing. People singing.
It was beautiful.

Speaker 1 It really was like every kind of person from every, like tourists and different races and ages.

Speaker 3 No, it's amazing. I do love a mass event.
Like, I know if I was actually, someone dragged me to the concert, I would be overwhelmed. Like, I

Speaker 3 don't know, I don't know how to admit this in public, but I at Glastonbury, I found myself in front of ColdPlay, and then for the next two weeks, I was going around explaining to people how

Speaker 3 great they are live. That happened to me.

Speaker 1 Well, that happened to me and I wasn't even there. I watched it on TV and I was just like, holy shit, I get it now.
They're amazing.

Speaker 3 I'm incredibly susceptible to group events. If there's 100,000 people, I'm in my happy place.
I love to be in a massive crowd. I love to go to carnival.

Speaker 3 When it's on the edge of chaos, that's my favorite. So I'm willing to believe if I was at an Oris concert, I would squeeze out a tear.
You never know. Yeah, man.

Speaker 1 Slip inside.

Speaker 3 Stop it. I'm gone with those lyrics.

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Speaker 4 Hey, welcome back, Podcats. That was Zadie Smith, of course, talking to me there.
I'm very grateful indeed to her for making the time, for letting me visit her with her teetering piles of books.

Speaker 4 It was really good to talk to her. I loved her essay collection, Dead and Alive.

Speaker 4 Really recommend it.

Speaker 4 Such a variety of pieces in there in the description of today's podcast you'll find links to some of those things we were talking about including a couple of podcasts fashion neurosis with bella freud

Speaker 4 and that episode of holding up the ladder with Zadie and Devontae Hines really enjoyed that There's a link to Ezra Klein's piece about Charlie Kirk and Tanahisi Coates' response in Vanity Fair and then Ezra Klein and Tanahisi Coates talking through their disagreements

Speaker 4 on Ezra's podcast. Careful you don't disappear down that rabbit hole too deeply.

Speaker 4 Who would do that?

Speaker 4 There's also a link to that compilation of moments from Peep Show that demonstrate the world views of various philosophers.

Speaker 4 And there is a link to the trailer for a documentary that some of you might enjoy, which I alluded to in the last episode with John Fox,

Speaker 4 when I was saying that this doc changed my mind about the American comedian, Andy Kaufman. It's called Thank You Very Much, directed by Alex Braverman, came out in 2023.

Speaker 4 Andy Kaufman, of course, American comedian, well, he called himself a song and dance man, but he was, I guess, more of a performance artist perhaps, prankster, someone who blurred the lines between

Speaker 4 fact and fiction in order to delight slash confuse his audiences. He became a huge star in America after landing a role in the sitcom Taxi in 1978,

Speaker 4 where he played Latka who talked like that and one of his catchphrases was thank you very much, thank you very much, he would say but he died of cancer when he was really quite young and he was the subject of the film man on the moon

Speaker 4 starring jim carey

Speaker 4 and then

Speaker 4 there was the documentary about jim carey making man on the moon directed by chris smith which i actually talked to chris smith about maybe is that i think that is a bonus episode of this podcast which you can find if you go onto my website adam-boxton.co.uk, link in the description.

Speaker 4 And there are a few bonus episodes of this podcast.

Speaker 4 And one of them is with Chris Smith, the director of Jim and Andy, The Great Beyond, which was about Jim Carey's efforts to portray Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon and how he stayed in character throughout the production and ended up driving people nuts in the same sort of way that Andy Kaufman would do for comic effect and in the name of art or whatever you want to call it.

Speaker 4 Anyway, this documentary, thank you very much,

Speaker 4 is a really nicely put together

Speaker 4 portrait of Andy Kaufman with a lot of really good archive

Speaker 4 and a lot of his stuff makes a bit more sense

Speaker 4 having seen this documentary. Not so much the wrestling women part, that remains a mystery still.
I don't know what that was all about really

Speaker 4 anyway

Speaker 4 thank you very much okay i think that's it from me for this week thank you very much to zadie smith once again thanks to seamus murphy mitchell for his invaluable production support

Speaker 4 Thank you to Helen Green. She does the artwork.
Thank you, Helen. Thanks to everyone at ACAST who works so hard liaising with my sponsors.
But my biggest thanks are reserved for you.

Speaker 4 Thank you so much for coming back, listening right to the end. I appreciate it.

Speaker 4 And if you would like a hug on this cold November evening,

Speaker 4 then just stay right where you are and I will creepily approach you.

Speaker 4 How's it going? Good to see you.

Speaker 4 Oh, it's cold.

Speaker 4 Till next time, we share the same sonic space. Please go carefully.
And for what it's worth, I love you.