Henry Oliver is the author of the book "Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life" and prolific blogger on literature.
Timestamps
(0:00:00) Intro
(0:00:38) Late Bloomers
(0:07:28) Great Man theory of history
(0:16:14) The Common Reader
(0:20:56) Rear Window
(0:22:58) Literature vs film or music
(0:26:41) Mimesis
(0:30:07) Artistic themes
(0:38:11) Knausgaard, Bolano, Ferrante
(0:39:27) Misreading
(0:42:54) Harold Bloom
(0:45:47) Art and economic growth
(0:47:25) LLMs
(0:50:55) Hayek
(0:52:20) Keats
(0:54:35) Literature vs philosophy
(0:57:25) Morality
(0:59:11) Nepotism
(1:00:00) Shakespeare
(1:06:57) Henry’s output
Links
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Dan: This is a conversation with Henry Oliver. Henry is one of the most prolific writers on the internet and his blog The Common Reader, features some of the best writing on literature that I've come across. He also recently published a book titled Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life, which I highly recommend. In this conversation we talk about the real meaning of his book, the Great Man Theory of history, Shakespeare, and lots, lots more. I hope you enjoy it.
All right. Henry, welcome to the show.
[00:00:36] Henry Oliver: Good to be here. Thank you.
[00:00:39] Dan: I would like your take on a particular reading of your book. I wonder if the book is actually a warning against complacency. What you're really doing is you're predicting that the world in the 21st century, it's going to get much better at spotting outlier talent. If you're not at the top of your game, you're no longer going to be able to rely on say, the career totem pole, or your network, or just being a general high achiever who's really conscientious for you to get ahead.
What you're really saying here is the late bloomers are coming, get it together, or you'll be forgotten. What do you make of this?
[00:01:10] Henry: I wouldn't express it in such strong terms, but yes, that is more or less why I wrote the book. I was frustrated that people were ignoring this group of talent and I was convinced that there's potential being left on the table. Yes, it is a warning against complacency in the sense that you say, but also for the potential late bloomers. People take a lot of optimism from it, but some of the people who've read it carefully have said every page of this book is about people who worked really hard and never gave up. The overall mood of the book is a bit more anti-complacency than maybe some of the direct expressions in it.
Yes, from a talent-spotting point of view, there are a lot of people in that book who got a huge advantage by not accepting what everyone else believed about the talent around.
[00:02:00] Dan: Yes. I think if you look at the marketing for the book or why some people might pick it up if they see it on the shelf is, "Oh, I'm going to become a late bloomer and I'm not really trying anything." Then I read it and I say, "Oh my gosh, wait a second. This is not what I thought of it. It's not a 10-step process. This is hard."
[00:02:18] Henry: In a lot of interviews, people are like, "The book was great, but can you tell me the 10 steps for me to become a late bloomer?" I'm like, "No, that is not how you become Toni Morrison. I'm very sorry that it doesn't just happen." It doesn't. You have to compromise on these things because otherwise, it's not a book. It's just a rant about why stuff is hard. There is a lot of truth to the optimistic view.
I think it's very important that this is why the book does this. It combines the hard work message with the message that like, "Yes, but if you do that, it can happen." The biggest enemy is just not doing it. Like, "Oh, I'm 50, I'm 40, I'm whatever. I'm already doing this." Then you'll just never know. All this stuff we're talking about won't even come into play. You lose everything. You don't try and win. All that kind of thinking.
I think as a society, as a culture, we've become very like, "Oh, the grass says that it's like this." Whereas in the past people would've been like, "I don't know man, God told me to cross an entire continent and make a new town so I'm just going to do it." If we could just meet in the middle with these two approaches, because there's a lot of value in the crazy, guys just do it and we'll get something out of it view.
[00:03:38] Dan: What do you think is actually the greater force? I also read in two forces that it seems like hold late bloomers back. One, there's cultural structures as you talk about. I think one of the biggest observations it's a note to organizations that, "Hey, you should be looking outside of your organization to identify better talent." Then it's also a part individual beliefs. I view these as separate. One is to the cultural institutions, and talent spotters, the other is to the individuals themselves.
What do you think is actually the greater force holding late boomers back today?
[00:04:14] Henry: I think it will vary by the individual a great deal. Some of the people I wrote about in the book at the moment when it was made clear to them that you can try this now. This is your moment. Some of those people, honestly, to me it feels a bit like something in a children's story. The call to adventure came and they said, "All right, let's go." In a way, they thought that it was the surroundings that had held them back. It was, but what they came to realize was that they could just get up and do it.
Whereas other people like Malcolm X, clearly the institutional and societal structures were a huge, huge problem for him. I think there have been a lot of late bloomers in that position and there probably still are. I know that we've paid a lot more attention to diversity and inclusion and we've tried to change some of these structural things, but I think there's a deeper lesson, which is whatever your assumptions are about who is good at this, those assumptions will stop you from seeing the potential in someone who doesn't fit your archetype.
Now, we're much better than we were at trying to not make those assumptions about women or about people of color or whatever. I'm not saying we're great at it, but effort is been made to change that. That doesn't mean we've all become like Merlin and we'll always know when we meet Arthur. That's not how it is. We all work with sets of assumptions, models of the world, frameworks of what good looks like in this job. When someone comes along who isn't an obvious pattern match, I think our ability to assess whether they would be good drops quite significantly.
One example I have of this, anyone who's worked in a corporate environment knows this. If you get hired to do job A and you've done it for 18 months and you express an interest in moving teams to job B, there'll be a program and you can have coffee with the manager. They'll be like, "You are really good. We want to keep you in the business. Let's move you," blah blah blah. If you do job A and you apply somewhere else and you apply to them for job B, they'll be like, "Oh, CV requirement of three years experience, blah," whatever bullet points, whatever.
It's like, "Wait, how stupid is this?" Now, obviously, it's not that stupid because they know that-- If you've worked there, there is institutional knowledge and you can make an assessment and not everyone gets moved over. It does show you if we can find a way of assessing people differently, we might be able to unlock potentially in ways that we currently cannot. I don't see a lot of effort being put into those new forms of assessment.
Maybe AI will change that. Maybe better use of networks will change. Maybe we'll unleash ChatGPT across LinkedIn and it will be like, "Oh, here are loads of weird matches that actually might work out really well that you've never been able to--" You know the way that artificial intelligence told us, actually, you're playing chess wrong. Maybe it'll do something like that. At the moment I just feel like there are these obvious times when someone who's not qualified can have the job, but only if they're already in.
To me that suggests there are people outside your business that you would do well to hire that you can't spot. From that, we should say we're not as good at this as we think.
[00:07:28] Dan: Do you need to believe in the great man theory of history for your book, the message of your book to fully make sense?
[00:07:33] Henry: The great man theory of history is another one of the so-called Straussian readings of my book. Yes. I drafted some stuff about that and I deleted it because I was like, "Everyone is going to tell me this will never get published." You need to be sympathetic to it. You need to understand that of the three or four different explanations historians offer that is one of them. It has some explanatory power. I don't know if it's 10% or whatever.
We tend to hear from people like, "That's wrong. It's one of these other theories." I'm like, "Clearly many times in the world it is a large part of what happened." I think we're living through that right now. I think we live in the age not of heroes, but of anti-heroes. We don't worship heroes anymore. We hate the other guy's hero. That's a huge part of modern culture. One of the things the book is saying is take that theory more seriously, but in a very indirect way because already people listening to this are like, "Oh my God, he's an idiot."
[00:08:34] Dan: Here's something I think that you do well that I view is really hard and that is assessing the motivations of successful people. To me it seems like people are often, they're not always able to even articulate, or sometimes they just are not totally straightforward about what is motivating them deep down. One example that struck me is, you pulled out the example of Larry Page being motivated by Nikola Tesla's commercial failures. Larry Page then grows up and he's really concerned about, "Okay, I'm not going to fail commercially. I have this great technical background and I'm going to put it to use." How do you figure out what actually is motivating people when you're analyzing their careers?
[00:09:15] Henry: I don't know if I have a good methodological answer for that. I'm really pleased you've noticed that actually because I think that's very important. I think what I do that other people in this space might not do is I pay a lot of attention to the imagination because I'm primarily a literature person. I believe very strongly that the things that you absorb imaginatively as a child have a lifelong effect on your interests and therefore on your motivation.
Whatever it is that entices you, everyone will remember something. A picture of the woods, what's in the woods? Should we go into the woods? Do these woods look scary? What do they look like? Maybe there's an adventure in the woods. There's something, some film, some book. This is what happened with Larry Page, basically. His imagination was gripped by-- There's that biography of Tesla that he read. The famous one with the famous ending, where it's like Tesla was just this anonymous guy on the streets of New York and everyone was bumping into him and they had no idea he was the greatest genius in the world.
What a powerful ending. What a fairytale ending. There's Hans Christian Andersen quality to this, to the darkness of the way that biography ends. It's really well done. This clearly gripped Larry Page in the way that-- I'm always just talking about Merlin and Arthur, but it's got that quality. I think it's notable too that Tesla himself, this is freaky, he memorized the whole of Goethe's Faust and he could just recite long chunks of it whenever he felt like it. As a child, he was a big reader, big interest in poetry.
When he came up with the solution for the induction motor, he was walking in the park reciting Faust. This is the same thing as with Paige. This thing gets into you when you are young and it just shapes your vision of the world. A lot of people who write about talent are much more rational, much more statistically oriented. They're all on that side of things. I'm less good at that, but I enjoy looking at a person and thinking, "What is exciting their imagination?" I think, whether we know it or not, this is very important to us, how we work.
[00:11:29] Dan: What's the right way to think about early success on late bloomers? I was actually really surprised and never thought about it this way, but you classified Taylor Swift as a late bloomer. The idea here is, I don't know if this is tongue in cheek or whatever, but the point you made was basically, if you look at her sales, she was famous for what she does today 10 years ago. Her real, real Beatles level stardom occurred quite later in her career.
Here's my take on it, I'm just curious what your framework is. I feel like it's dangerous to have modest success in the thing that you don't really want to do. That modest success, it'll keep you away from your passion. What is the right way to think about early success? Taylor Swift had it, and then she could still become a late bloomer. How dangerous is early success to someone who wants to one day do something they're really passionate about?
[00:12:20] Henry: You mean you wanted to do something, but you ended up becoming a McKinsey consultant, and because they promoted you, you just stayed?
[00:12:28] Dan: That's what I'm getting at. That's probably the canonical example. You're working at McKinsey, but you want to be a poet.
[00:12:34] Henry: There are poets who've worked in corporate environments. I found Taylor Swift interesting because I think it was The New York Times did a great piece and they graft when she'd had her number ones and stuff. I don't remember all the numbers, she's had like 27. She's had a lot of number ones, and four fifths of them have come in the last few years. In the same period of time that the Beatles were running for, she got three and they got loads.
In the same space of time that the Beatles changed music forever, she got three number ones and she's just sung pop star. She's the country singer, she's done fine. She's doing well. No one's looking at that saying, "Oh, Taylor Swift's going to become the first billionaire musician. She's going to do The Eras Tour, whatever." It takes her, is it 15 years, to go from her starting out to what she is?
[00:13:33] Dan: Probably at least.
[00:13:34] Henry: Right. Maybe a little more. For a pop star, that's quite long. I was saying she's a late bloomer. It is a bit tongue in cheek, but actually, the graph is very striking. It's amazing to me that she's an outlier in that sense. I think Mozart is a late bloomer in a similar sense. I'm not saying the 10,000 hours literally, but if you say, "When did he start his 10,000 hours?" Rather than, "Oh, he was really young and therefore a genius."
You say, "He starts doing his 10,000 hours of composition practice when he is eight or something." He doesn't start composing the music that we still listen to until years and years and years later. It actually takes him a long time to start writing the music that we think of as Mozart. If I played you some of the early Mozart, you'd be like, "This is dull." That's not what they put in the adverts or in the concert halls.
Taylor Swift in a similar way, she's going for so long, and then suddenly, it's like, "Whoa, you just became Taylor Swift." I don't know if early success in the "wrong thing" can get in the way of that at that level. I do think that there's a different one level down maybe, where you can get caught in what's called the competency trip, which is that you spend your 20s learning how to do something and that's just hard and difficult and you have to be embarrassed in public.
You show it to your boss and your boss goes, "What are you? An idiot? I didn't tell you to do it like that." Then by the time you are good, you're like, "I can just turn up, do stuff, not be embarrassed." This is easy. Then if I say to you, but really you want to change your career and you should do that before you get old and lose your teeth. Your whole instinctive reaction is, "I want to go back to being 23 and feeling embarrassed about everything I do. That's the trap.
Now, with Taylor Swift, maybe what you would say is on that model, she made a really big decision not to do country music anymore. She made actually several really big decisions to reinvent herself commercially, artistically, whatever. Not guaranteed to work because audiences want what they want. Also, I don't know, presumably very, very difficult for her. I think those things are the mark of success.
I'm undecided on this question. If you allow yourself to get caught in the competency trap, does that just mean you didn't want it enough? I don't know. Different margins for different people. I think some people get into the competency trap, but they are still daydreaming about the thing they didn't do.
[00:16:06] Dan: I see.
[00:16:06] Henry: Some people aren't, and maybe that's the difference. My message is, if that's you, you should think seriously about how you deal with it.
[00:16:15] Dan: The common reader, let's say, your personal definition of it, are they a dying breed? Are we at risk of losing the common reader altogether? Or do you think we'll see an increase in literary interest in say the next 20, 30 years?
[00:16:28] Henry: Oh, I think we could easily see an interest increase, yes. I think one of the things AI will never be able to do for you is read a great book. We're going to move into this fantastic world where it can deal with all the dross in your inbox and auto reply to the family WhatsApp group and whatever. Make lower life of work easier and do your coding. It will never be able to read Anacreon on your behalf.
There's no summary. There's just nothing it can do. Either you've read it and allowed it to just completely demolish you, or you haven't read it and everything I'm saying you're like, "What is he talking about? That sounds weird. I don't know what that is. There's no middle-- AI-- You could be like, "I just read this page and I don’t know what it means. AI is great at that, but AI will never take over that function for you. I think it will rise in value, being one of the things left that's really, really worth doing on your own.
I'm seeing more people say that offline is the new online. There's a great post on Catherine D's blog about that today. I don't know if that is going to mean reading more books as opposed to going to more hangouts or whatever, but I'm optimistic that there's going to be a comeback. I also think the narrative is very much focused on fewer people are reading English literature at Harvard. If you take a bigger view, lots and lots of people on Substack, on Interintellect on the Catherine project, they're reading the great works. The humanities are okay online.
There was that great news story about a book club somewhere in America, in the United States. I think that's right. They'd spent 20 years reading Finnegans Wake, and really going through every word and saying, "What does this mean?" Oh my God. They enjoyed it so much. They said the next book for the book club is Finnegans Wake again. Which to me sounds, I have so much respect for that crazy level of devotion. I couldn't do that.
You see these things coming out, and I speak to people and they want to read. I'm optimistic, but I do think that right now, everyone's very down on the whole and we need to have more people saying, "Read a book, you'll feel better."
[00:18:39] Dan: To your point about college students, let's say, maybe are not as interested in majoring in English literature, but the common person or the common reader we believe is alive and well. How do you think the internet has impacted the demographics of these people? What are they doing for day jobs?
[00:18:54] Henry: The people who I interact with on my Substack come from a very wide range of, as far as I can tell, that they do skew slightly-- I don't know that I've got as many 20-year-olds as people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, but I don't get to see everyone. I don't always know who I'm online. The people, as far as I can tell, they have a very wide range of jobs and backgrounds. They're geographically diverse. I don't think there is a demographic. I think a lot of people are just interested in reading.
That's why I'm most optimistic, because I don't see it as being-- You hear a lot of this stuff like, "Oh, the only people who read fiction are women between the ages of 25 and 42 or something." I'm like, "I'm sure that they are the biggest group of people who purchase novels," but it's a stupid thing to say. That's not the data I would choose to rely on when I was saying, who are the readers? We're never going to know who's picking up a book at home, who's going to the library. We don't know.
I think it's very diverse and I'm quite hopeful about that. I think Substack is really, really good for this.
[00:20:04] Dan: I strongly agree. I don't think my interest in literature or any of the arts would be 50% of what it is without the internet. Between blogs and good reads Twitter, I just don't even know how I'd be discovering this stuff, or knowing that there's other people that are interested in it.
[00:20:18] Henry: The search costs have gone way down. AI is good at giving you reading lists as well actually. It got really good.
[00:20:24] Dan: It's really, really good. It's very good. If you say, hey, I'm interested in a specific book, and you say what you like about it, it'll give you 10 more. It is shockingly good.
[00:20:36] Henry: That's what I mean. AI can be a really good reading companion, help you with all that stuff, so it's making it easier to find out what to read, but it will never do the reading. Put those two things together, I think compared to some more technical stuff where AI might just take over a lot of what you do, it's more of a compliment here, not a substitute.
[00:20:57] Dan: What did you see in Rear Window that gave you an appreciation for film?
[00:21:00] Henry: I can't believe you found that out. When I was young, I did not enjoy film so much. We went to the movies and I just thought movies were bad. This was the '90s, so a lot of movies were quite bad. I saw The Matrix and I thought that was exciting, but I thought Jurassic Park was what the movies was, which is great. It was great. It's a fun film, but it's not art.
Then I was sitting in-- This is a terrible story. I was at work and we had the TV on because it was Westminster, you always have to either have the live stream of Parliament or the news on in the background. I was moving between the two channels and I saw a shot from Rear Window, which I obviously couldn't just be like, "Oh, we'll just leave this film on this list."
There was something about the composition of the shot that-- partly I love Technicolor, but there was something about the composition of the shot that it had that thing I said about the woods, like, wait, what is that? There's something in there, there's a mystery here. It could have been a framed picture. This was the moment when I was like, "Oh yes, there are movies that are aesthetically beautiful." I was just really, really compelled to find out what that picture was that I had seen and to open up the world behind it.
I did, and I was very lucky because that of course happens to be one of the all time great movies. Just truly, what a remarkable film. That just sent me off. That just sent me off. I think that's really important, finding art stuff artistically, where you just look at it and you say, "What is going on in there?" Which is so strong in children, and we let it lapse I think. It sounds immature for me to say it, it doesn't sound intellectual, but I think this is how art begins. This is how the appreciation of art begins.
Frankly, the great movie directors spend a lot of time perfecting those shots so that it will have that instinctive reaction in you.
[00:22:58] Dan: What advantages do you think literature has over film or even music or the visual arts?
[00:23:04] Henry: There is a quality of prose that cannot be intermediated, which is why when you watch an adaptation of a Jane Austen novel, you lose almost everything about the story because it just becomes a plot. Now she's good at dialogue, so you get some good dialogue, although a lot of adaptations don't follow it. There is something about the ability of prose to give you access not to the outer world of the story, but to the inner world of the story that can almost, I think, never be replicated in other ways. That's not true of all literature, that's not all that literature can do, but that's the first thing.
The second thing is that literature relies on you to do a lot of the work. When you start reading about a night riding through a forest, or a young woman sitting in a window feeling trapped, you have to put it all together in your mind. Whereas in the film or whatever, it just gives it to you. I think that's why television, frankly, is often just so boring. Even the so-called Golden Age of Television.
I think a lot of music can have the same quality, but it's a much more difficult language to work in for a lot of people. It takes a long time to get used to it. The joy of prose or poetry is that you speak that all the time. Your parents told you stories and it was the same thing. The book is just an extension of that, whereas music is a whole different realm of understanding. I think that's the main advantage.
There's something mystical about language. Oh, I sound very vague and waffly, but there's something about the sound of it. I read The Hobbit out loud to my children recently, and it-
[00:24:56] Dan: Oh fun.
[00:24:57] Henry: -so much fun. I will never forget this. I was reading it for myself and my daughter said, "What is that?" I said, "Oh, it's this really good book. I'll read you the first page." As soon as I said, "In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit," she's like, "A what? What?" Now that's a simple sentence. Why would it be so enticing? Part of it is the meter of the sentence, "In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit." This is a kind of fairytale cadence. It's almost like hymn meter. It's got a lull to it, which it's a much more subtle version of, once upon a time in a far away land.
Literature can combine those sounds and rhythms with the meaning of the words in a way that no other art form quite can. It's actually quite remarkable how that one sentence, presumably it's conjured up something in your imagination. Very basic words, but it starts to happen. Then you own that, and that's yours to be in. You can always just think to yourself about that hole and that Hobbit, and at the highest level of appreciation, you can then write your own book that's been influenced by that.
Presumably the visual arts do do this in a similar way, but because again, it's not how you speak to people when you buy your food or go to work, it doesn't have the same day-to-day directness. I think literature is precious to us from when we are young in a different way. Lots of films are precious to us, but it's in a slightly different way. We have to give words to things before we can properly know what they are.
[00:26:41] Dan: You have a piece called Nurture Your Imagination to Cultivate Anti-mimesis. In this, you describe art as a tool to become anti-mimetic or basically not do what everyone else is doing and break out of the mold. I think it's applied to just general career advice, but I'm curious, just more broadly, what do you view as the purpose of art? I get the sense that you believe there's something beyond career advice or building a startup that's useful about it.
[00:27:08] Henry: I think that our lives are a quest for meaning, and that to be an individual is to constantly be on the search to make your life meaningful. That art is the nearest thing to life. Art gives you the raw material for going on that quest, for seeing different things in the world. I believe that imagination breaks the path that reason follows. That it's not that you have to see it to believe it, you have to believe it to see it. This is what art does.
We forget. When we grow up, we forget how much of what we want and know about the world comes from our imaginations, and we neglect them as we get older. Some people do. It's a really important part of being who you are. There's a wonderful-- Do you know the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?
[00:28:00] Dan: I doubt. No.
[00:28:01] Henry: It's great. It's an Arthurian story. It's very good. There are lots of modern translations, so you don't have to slog your way through middle English. It's a really good story. Arthurian Knight goes on a quest, fights a guy, come, standard thing. There's a great commentary on that by John Burrow, and he says, "Ultimately the quest is all about constantly going out and rediscovering yourself and rediscovering the world."
Now we are all doing that all the time. We do not shut up about, I'm on a journey with this. My career journey, my spiritual journey, my personal growth journey. I'm traveling to find myself. We are questing. I feel like some people believe they're questing every day on the commute on the way to work. It's so fundamental to the way we talk about ourselves. The 20th century, was built on the idea of the quest. Mass migrations, space travel, the invention of the airplane, the invention of the automobile. It goes on and on and on.
We are still living in that world. It is fundamental to the idea of modernity. It is the great inheritance of romanticism and freudianism. We are constantly looking to expand ourselves, to get out of our comfort zones, to be our best self. It just goes on and on and on. Literature is the best way you have of imaginatively expanding yourself. It's not practical or immediate. There's no 10-step plan. It's not self-helpy and so it suffers, I think, in contrast to some of the easy promises that are made in modern culture.
It is over the long term, the most rewarding and the most effective way of living with your mind in a way that is not boring. You are stuck with your mind for your whole life, why wouldn't you furnish it? Wallace Steven said, "We say that God and the imagination are one. How high that highest candle lights the dark?" Is most of what people are reading to help themselves get through their lives, lighting the dark. I don't think so. George Eliot and Shakespeare and Jane Austen will light the dark for you.
[00:30:08] Dan: Do you think that artistic themes wear out? Dostoevsky writing on existentialism, Kafka and absurdism, is there's still room to explore those older ideas? Could there be a modern writer who comes in and says like, "I'm just going to be the next Dostoevsky? Or are those things pretty much worn out?
[00:30:24] Henry: Well, Kafka was the next Dostoevsky, and then Borges was the next Kafka. Then as far as I can tell, Borges has influenced almost everyone who's written a book since including fantasy writers like Susanna Clarke. I don't know that the themes wear out, but the treatment of the theme does for sure. This interacts with the idea of influence. There's a wonderful book called The Burden of the Past on the English Poet by Walter Jackson Bate.
His theory is that with romanticism comes the importance or the predominance of individual creativity. It's no longer good enough to write a great poem in the style of the Latin obes or whatever. You have to be your own guy. This is obviously a simplification of the thesis, but that's the general switch that we get with romanticism. When Wordsworth comes along, he says, "Oh, I can't be the new Milton. That's not good enough."
He's forced into becoming this inventive thing of being Wordsworth and writing about death. Then Keats comes along and the next generation and says, "Oh my God, I can't be Milton and I can't be Wordsworth. What am I supposed to do now?" He creates the second wave of romanticism. Then Tennyson comes along and says, "You have got to be kidding me." He creates a kind of post-romantic victorianism. This is what happens.
I think that is probably a bigger part of why these things change, which is the Kafka looked at Dostoevsky and basically thought, "Well, I'm too late. He's done it." That then becomes, you go through the valley of the shadow of, I'm never going to be a great artist, it's already been done. You come up on the mountain of Whoopi, "I've discovered a way to spiritually destroy my influence and reinvent myself." Shakespeare did that. He did it with Marlowe, Philip Sidney and Ben Johnson. Dante did it with Virgil. It goes on and on.
I think that's probably more like it. Then what that gets coupled with is the bigger culture. There's a lot of angst in the Dostoevsky, Kafka period, because the world is in an anxious place. Modernism can be born out of the ruins of the First World War because everyone is just psychologically distraught at that point. Whereas someone who starts writing in the 20s, and so like a younger generation, they might have more of a fresh young things view of the world. That's like Evelyn Waugh.
Then the novels, he starts writing after the Second World War equally become a bit darker. I think it's a combination of each generation of artists comes along and has to differentiate themselves and they find themselves in a culture that's significantly different to what came before, which is why technological and social disruption is so coupled with the emergence of the greatest art in my view.
[00:33:22] Dan: I have a question for you, and this is, you can psychoanalyze me, maybe this is a me problem. For some reason, to me, when I see books or television or movies that try to write about social media or the internet, I always get this feeling of tackiness. I think movies seem to do this, worst of all, I don't know what it-- Just the way they portray text messaging and social media. It either immediately feels outdated a year later, or it doesn't feel quite right.
When I think about it, this doesn't actually make sense because at any point in history, it would be weird to watch a television show that didn't reference that television or the radio existed. They're just part of normal life. When we watch old movies that portray television, we just think, "Oh yes, that's what they were doing at that time." It feels weird to see the use of cell phones in the internet in just modern movies. I'm not sure why that is. You had this take that you've called for anyways, someone to write a great novel about the internet. What's going on with my intuition? Why does this feel tacky and why does this feel hard?
[00:34:25] Henry: No, I think you are right. I think the problem in TV and movies is that when you send someone a text message, it is very alive in your imagination what that message means. A bit like telegraphs, we can send each other one little picture, a string of letters and it means a lot, it means a lot more than is just literally what's being said. Depending on who you are texting, it has a kind of resonance between you.
Maybe it's a shared joke, maybe it's just something you say, but when you just put that in a text message on a movie, it is just like some letters and a smiley face. We're not in on the deep resonance that it has. That I think is the problem I referred to earlier of the movies can't use prose to get inside someone's head. There are novels I think that have done this very well. I think Sally Rooney is excellent at this. I think that's one of the reasons why she's so popular.
I haven't read lots of modern fiction, but I haven't read anyone else who's had characters use MSN messenger and it really, really, really be effective. Or I think is it in Beautiful World? She depicts a character sitting on the bus, looking at the map on the phone, watching the dot of the bus move along the map. These are very, very good observations about what it is like to live with the internet. That's I think as close as we've come. No, I agree with you. It's a huge challenge.
The one other reason might be that we just take it too literally. The best story about radios is, I think it's called The Very Enormous Radio, or The Enormous Radio by John Cheever, which was written in the '30s maybe and it's really bizarre. Cheever he often verges on the phantasmagorical, just verges on it. I don't know if you know the story, but I won't spoil it, but what happens could not literally happen, but it's a very, very good story about radios and our responses to technology.
I think part of the problem might be that we take social media very seriously and very literally, and therefore we're not writing about the way it lives inside our minds, the way it lives inside our imaginations. We're just writing sentences that say, "She picked up her phone and tapped out a message." When you're like, "Oh God," that's just boring. Who cares? Did she then rummage in her handbag?" You can string this stuff together for hours. It doesn't matter whether it's social media or not, it's just boring.
There's something about Sally Rooney has done it, but in general, we have not yet captured the magic of what it feels like to send a text message.
[00:37:17] Dan: Yes, that's a really good observation. Do you think there's a region or country right now that is producing the best literature it's ever produced?
[00:37:25] Henry: I'm not enough of an expert to say that, but there's a general feeling that Latin American novels right now are really good. I read a couple of them, I read a couple of the ones that were on the International Book of Shortlist this year, and I could see why people were saying that. I felt like the translations were not giving me everything about the book, but I did at least feel like I'm missing something really good. I could feel that.
There's a whole generation of Irish writers that seem to be very strong. I don't know if we can say they're the best, but it's pretty good, it's going really well. Again, I'm not super well read in Japanese fiction, but I've read a few modern Japanese novels and they've been great.
[00:38:12] Dan: Okay. Another personal question. Probably one of my favorite parts of your blog is there's just so many new authors on it that I don't see-- I see a lot of books come across my Twitter feed, my RSS feed, but I still discover more on your blog than all the other sources combined. Luckily the subset search function works pretty good, so you can just check and see who you've written about. I noticed there's a couple of my favorite authors that you don't talk about much at all.
I just want to get your take on what you think of them or why you haven't written on them. Knausgaard, Houellebecq, Ferrante and Bolaño. They have similar themes, but I'm not sure that there's some thread that ties them all together perfectly. Just curious, do you have any thoughts on those authors or why you haven't written about them much?
[00:38:54] Henry: Very embarrassing. In general, the answer is I haven't read 'em. I spend a significant amount of my time not reading modern literary fiction. It's a slow crawl for me to get there. I have tried now Knausgaard and Ferrante and I did not enjoy them. I think I have copies of both of them here and I intend to go back. Same for-- [00:39:19] In fact, no, that's true of all of them. I have copies here and I intend to go back. Other than Submission, I haven't had a great immersive reading experience with any of those writers.
[00:39:28] Dan: Great. Very self-indulgent question.
[00:39:29] Henry: No, that's good. More questions like that. That's great.
[00:39:32] Dan: How should we think about someone-- I'm thinking about when you are analyzing a piece of literature, you have this really good piece that talks about, it warns against what you call a weak misreading. The idea here is you're injecting your preconceived ideas onto the work of art, and you're not really thinking about, how did this piece of art become what it is, is I think, the phrasing that you use.
How should we think about someone like, say, René Girard, who that's pretty much all he does? Is he takes this one grand theory, and then he goes and he applies it to Shakespeare and Proust and other works of literature, and then he says, "See, I am analyzing the human condition with mimesis." It seems like that's as much of a weak misreading by your definition as you could possibly get. What's the right way to understand what he's doing there? Is he weak misreading or is he doing something else?
[00:40:20] Henry: Let me unpack a couple of things. The piece you talk about is very much not aimed at critics like Girard. It's aimed at ordinary readers to say to them, "Look, whether you know it or not, we all have preconceived ideas about things." I run Zoom calls with people, book club Zoom calls. What I see again and again is people saying, "Oh, this bit of the book is about X, Y, Z," and X, Y, Z is just their preconceived notion of the world. I'm like, "Look at all these examples on the page. The book is screaming at you that it's the opposite of what you think, but you are pattern matching to what you already know." It can be hard work to actually let the book teach you what it's trying to say.
This is why everyone thinks that Robert Frost's poem The Road Not Taken is saying, "You should take the road less traveled, and then you'll be great," whereas it's in fact saying the opposite because we're all constantly waiting to hear that the happy message. That's the warning, the weak misreading phrase I stole from Harold Bloom. I agree. I think it's a good phrase. Girard I think is not guilty of this because he derived his theory from literature. When you read his literary criticism, it's quite compelling. The one that really has stayed with me is his reading of Midsummer Night's Dream. When I read that, I found it impossible not to believe to some extent certainly that is a play about the mimesis for sure. He was close reading the details of the language and it was very persuasive.
He first derived the theory out of-- I can't remember all the novels, but Underground Man by Dostoyevsky, Proust, Stendhal, people like this. Again, it's I think quite a persuasive reading of many 19th century novels. It's certainly a very persuasive reading that this is what some of those authors are up to. This is one of the driving ideas in their book. I do agree with you that there comes a point when this is your grand unifying theory of life, the universe and everything. Therefore it can be a bit like-- I don't think everything is always about this, but in general I think he sort of stands slightly outside the point I was making because he's derived so much of it through these careful readings. It's a horseshoe, I guess. You come to it with no knowledge and you just see yourself in it. By the time you've got so far around that you've created your grand theory, it is a bit Freudian. It's like everything is wish fulfillment, everything is-- Just hang around in the middle.
[00:42:55] Dan: What do you think Harold Bloom's worst take is?
[00:42:59] Henry: I haven't read the book, the one about The Book of J, but that is commonly cited as the point when he completely lost it. I theorized that bits of the Bible were written by a woman of the court of Solomon and all this sort of thing. In a funny way, I think that The Western Canon was slightly misguided. I used to be like super Bloomian, and I do still think there is too much critical theory and too much made that literature has to be put to some sociopolitical use. Overall, I think the idea of extending to The Canon and adding to it has been positive. Personally, I've read lots of authors that I hadn't previously read and thought, "This was really great. This was great literature. I'm so glad I read this."
I can't see why anyone would have a problem with adding to The Canon. On the narrow question of some of those arguments he made, he was probably right. Polemicizing it and so forth made him this wonderful figure in the culture wars, but probably tipped him over the edge in terms of the long-term usefulness of what should The Canon actually be. I think that was his aim though. I think he saw himself doing that, but maybe in a funny way, his best take was also his worst take, right?
[00:44:15] Dan: Yes.
[00:44:16] Henry: The other irony of Bloom, of course, is that he was great on television. Spent his whole life saying, "Stop watching TV, get off the internet. It's going to destroy your brain." You're like, "Harold, you're a TV star. This is your whole life."
[00:44:30] Dan: Here's a quote from you that I'd like to get an understanding of what you meant by it. Your piece, how to have good taste. This is one of my favorites, by the way. You write that, "I disagree that capitalism and the internet make it harder to have good taste." Why is that?
[00:44:43] Henry: Because it lowers search costs, because it broadens the range of what you can discover, because it makes it easier to get access to the most well-informed critical opinions, because conversations like this are possible. It just enables you to take things seriously for much lower costs than was the case. You're much less limited by the zone in which you happen to begin. I think that's the number one factor. It's so much easier now to be like, "What are the 100 greatest movies of all time, and can I just watch them cheaply, please?" So much easier.
Now, I agree that it probably also makes it easier to have bad taste, but I think some people conflate their dislike of "late-stage capitalism" and the stultifying effects of social media with this issue. It's like I don't think it's an inevitable thing. I think it's just splitting people out in different ways.
[00:45:48] Dan: In your view, you've reviewed Tyler Cowen's Stubborn Attachments, which is why I thought you might have a point of view on this, but do you think there's any direct causal correlation between economic progress in the arts? In other words, if GDP explodes, would you expect the output of good art to predictably go up or down, or is GDP itself and economic progress totally unrelated?
[00:46:16] Henry: I do think that the arts flourish when there's a good market. That is partly because it gives them the technology to do different things. It gives them the money for the artist to spend their time producing the art. It also in general gives them a better audience. One of the biggest challenges for interesting new art is to get anyone to care about it. The basic answer is yes. I do think that's true. Let's take the example of Shakespeare. Shakespeare emerges at a time when you first get indoor theaters. There's a lead over production from the grammar schools, and Elizabethan England is getting rich and has a general sense of itself as like, "We're going to go out into the world and do great things."
That's why we got Shakespeare. If you take one of those planks away, it becomes much harder to sustain his output, much harder. Also, just in general, wouldn't any economist predict that if GDP doubled, the output of good things would double or more than double?
[00:47:19] Dan: That's the theory.
[00:47:21] Henry: I don't see any reason to disagree with the economist just because I happen to enjoy reading poetry.
[00:47:26] Dan: You've commented just over a year ago on how useful ChatGPT was in writing your book and a post that just outlines all the different ways that you use it in your research. Over the last year or so though, since you've written that, have you become more or less bullish on the usefulness of LLMs per your specific daily workflow?
[00:47:42] Henry: For my workflow, less optimistic, and I'm thinking of writing about that.
[00:47:46] Dan: Interesting.
[00:47:48] Henry: I agree with the people who say the ChatGPT got lazy. There was a period when I found this quite irritating, and now I'm just resigned to it. I think perplexity is really good if you want to do searches. I think it's probably better than Google. I think as we were saying, I read Ulysses earlier this year, and I was putting chunks of it into ChatGPT saying, "I think it means this. Does it mean this? What about that word?" It was pretty good at that. It does reading list, but in general, the new one, 4-0 or whatever they call it, I think has improved some of that. I love the new Claude.
I've also come to feel that actually, as I said, because it can't replace the reading for me, it's administrative assistant, and for what I do, there's less margin than there is for some other people. I was very struck recently. I did an experiment where I just dropped two lines of poetry into it and I gave it two lines of Shakespeare, and it made up its own two lines in return. They weren't great, but they were fine. I thought, "Oh, this is cool." Then everything else I gave it, it just gave me the next stanza of the actual poem. Word perfect. I was like, "I'm really going to test this." I got a random stanza from Book IV of The Faerie Queen, which is hundreds of pages deep in a poem that no one ever reads.
I put that in, and it got the next stanza perfect. I was like, "If that's too much on the never make a mistake, never hallucinate side, I can just Google that. Why do I need the LLM to do?" Now, I get that it's going to become a new operating system, and it's like the film Her, and that's really what's exciting. I don't have that new operating system. When Sydney love bombed that journalist, I was like, "This thing is great. This is going to be so cool." Now, it's like, "I already know the next stanza. I thought you were going to spin me a new yarn." If you say write a poem, obviously, it's just [unintelligible 00:49:52]. I do feel like it's become so sensible, slightly lost its uses. I'm still long-term bullish.
[00:50:02] Dan: You did a late bloomer GPT for your book. When you publish your next book, will you do one of those again? What has the reception to that been like?
[00:50:09] Henry: Not huge. I think the length of the book precludes it from being super useful but yes, I would do it for all sorts of things. I've made GPTs for bits of my blog and stuff. I just think it's here, we have to use it. Yes, I would always do that. As I said, I think they're iterating it right now in a way that's-- I don't want the sensible, never-make-a-mistake people to win. I want it to have a crazy setting. If it's just being really good at doing my accounts, that's obviously amazing. For what you and I are talking about, it should be able to come up with a really weird question. I bet it could if they let it, but I think they've been scared into putting it on tighter rails.
[00:50:55] Dan: You have this list you wrote of seven books that you considered foundational when you were very young. I found the list great and interesting. I'm curious, you listed Hayek's The Use of Knowledge in Society alongside Tolstoy, and Dickens, and Keats. What's Hayek doing on that list? How has he influenced--
[00:51:11] Henry: I wrote the list straight off the top of my head out of nowhere. It's not a great list. Nonetheless, I stand by the Hayek pick for sure. I love that essay. When I was 21, I finished my English literature degree and I was like, "I know nothing about the world. I need to read some real stuff," because that's just been wall-to-wall poetry, and that's been great, but I need to get into some history, some economics, some philosophy. I need to really do this. I was reading John Stuart Mill, Isaiah Berlin doing online economics courses. When I read Hayek, I was like, "Oh my god. Yes, this explains it in--" what is it, 12 pages or ridiculously concise essay.
I think he's right. I think the information problem is real and I've seen it every day in my life. That unlocked way of thinking about things that I could start making sense of what economics is really about. I think it holds true as a model of a liberal international world.
[00:52:19] Dan: I have on my personal site just a list of a couple of ideas that I considered foundational to myself, and that essay is on there. I'm a big fan as well. Let's talk about poetry for a second because you also note that at one point in time, that entire list would've just been poetry. What's the mindset you've had or the phase of life that you've been in where you're all in on poetry versus prose? What makes you prefer one or the other?
[00:52:42] Henry: I don't know. I'm tempted to think that when you're 17, of course, it's poetry because the whole world is so intense. Everything is so intense. Now that I'm 37, obviously not everything will be poetry. I don't really know the answer. Hopefully, the real answer is I'm high in openness, and I want to keep exploring. If you read Ivanhoe by Walter Scott, this can really light up the imagination much in the way that Keats once did. I wonder if it's just a function of aging. Darwin was obsessed with poetry when he was young, and he said by the time he was middle-aged, he couldn't face it anymore.
[00:53:20] Dan: What does the poetry of Keats mean to you?
[00:53:23] Henry: I love Keats. I memorized whole poems by him when I was a teenager. Keats was romanticism as far as I was concerned. I later had a Wordsworth phase, but at that point, that's what I lived for. The density of his language is extraordinary. What he means to me now is to think back to when I was 17. I still read him, I still get a lot out of him, but that was what it was. I read the sonnets now more than the odes.
[00:53:50] Dan: Back to your question on you think that people who read about the purpose of art, it's not as interesting to you. What about philosophy? Do you have a favorite philosopher?
[00:53:59] Henry: It is interesting to me. I love philosophy, and it is interesting. I shouldn't say this. I don't think there's very much good aesthetic philosophy. My favorite philosopher, I have to say John Stuart Mill based on my recent output. Like everyone else, Plato was what shocked me into realizing there was that way of thinking about the world. I still don't think you can properly think about art and the nature of art in society without thinking about Plato. Maybe I would be forced to say it's Plato, even though the person I want to read is John Stuart Mill.
[00:54:36] Dan: At the margin, what does the world need more of today? Great literature, great philosophers. In thet 21st century if you could pick, would you rather we produce one or two just canonical all-time great philosophers or one or two, just all-time great novelist?
[00:54:52] Henry: That's a great question. I'm going to say novelist or poet or whatever. We need an imaginative mind, I think. It's the embodiment of ideas in art that matters most. I think we're suffering from so many theories, so many facts, so many philosophies, so many explanations, and no one has yet managed to embed all of that into a story about society and say, "This is what all of that means, people moving around and living their life and doing their jobs." Sally Rooney has tried to do that, but she's a Marxist and a determinist.
While it resonates with a lot of people, I'm not sure she's yet got to the George Elliot level of writing a Middlemarch, but I think that's what we're lacking. I think aren't we all exhausted with huge books that explain everything?
[00:55:38] Dan: Maybe those are not great philosophers and the purpose is a book that explains everything. That's actually good.
[00:55:44] Henry: Yes. I feel like we've had a good run at that, and would it not have come up by now? Who was the last great philosopher?
[00:55:51] Dan: Gosh, depends on who you ask, right?
[00:55:53] Henry: You see what I mean?
[00:55:54] Dan: Yes, maybe Parfit.
[00:55:56] Henry: Parfit, yes. That would be my answer. Where is the great novel of Parfit's ideas?
[00:56:02] Dan: Probably be boring.
[00:56:04] Henry: If you said though, "This is George Elliot. She's translated a long work of German theology about the fact that Christ wasn't divine, but that His ideas can still thrive in a humanistic culture, and she's going to write really long novels about that." You'd be like, "Get out," which sounds dreadful. As it turns out, Middlemarch is the best novel ever written, and everyone always says that when they read it.
[00:56:31] Dan: That's fair enough.
[00:56:31] Henry: I think we need a George Elliot more than we need anything else. I think there are lots of ideas out there. I also think this works the other way. I think the rationalists, the effective altruists, the utilitarians, libertarians, all of them. I'm sympathetic to all these people. Where is the art in this movement? Where is their ability to actually tell me what it will be like for society to live in this way? I feel like LessWrong has worn itself out because it has tried everything other than art. That's what I think we need. I also note that I'm going to talk about that movie, Her, again.
That's had a huge impact on the way people think about AI. I suspect it's had more of an impact than anything else for good and for bad. I think people are going to keep going to discover that film. I want more of that.
[00:57:25] Dan: Do you think we should care about the morality of the person behind great art, or should we just care about the art itself?
[00:57:31] Henry: I think you can care about it without letting it affect your view of the art. I think that's quite important. I don't agree with the people who say just divorce the two and don't worry about the biography because there's a great [unintelligible 00:57:45] Paul quote, where he's like, "Artists are really major significant people in our culture, and a good biography of their life might have more to tell us about the society we're living in than the art itself," which is quite a strong opinion, but I think it's worth giving a lot of consideration to. I think some of the great biographies of the past have been like that and have had very big influences on their cultures.
The revelations of the truth about the artist has been very socially important. I don't think what we should do is let that spill over into saying, "Oh, Philip Larkin was racist and now I hate his poetry and it makes me feel sick when I read it." I think that's just a huge intellectual mistake because you quickly then start reading books written by nice people. That's just not what we're here for. I want both, but I want them to be kept reasonably separate. Obviously, there should be some crossover and some cross-readings. Imagine saying the life of Beethoven is irrelevant for us to understand. That's insane. That's just clearly insane. That's obviously wrong.
[00:58:46] Dan: It's the most interesting part potentially about it.
[00:58:50] Henry: It's so important that we understand these things, but we shouldn't let ourselves get carried away. Also, because the bigger point there is if we then allow our appreciation of art to become partisan like everything else, and one of the benefits of art is that it can just steer clear of all that nonsense where it's so over-invested in politics these days.
[00:59:10] Dan: Do you think nepotism is bad?
[00:59:12] Henry: I think it can be, but we don't appreciate the extent to which it can be very, very useful, and it's in a very Hayekian way, a source of discovering knowledge that we cannot otherwise discover. I have a piece in the pipes about this, so I don't want to say, I don't want to give the whole thing away. Basically, if you want to assess whether someone is good for a particular job, there are personal qualities that simply cannot be measured and tabulated and compared, and you get the best information through something that looks a bit like nepotism.
That's why if you look around, everyone's always trying to find a mentor, a patron, someone who can do them a favor, someone who can give them a leg up. The secret is to do it in a way that's fair and based on promoting the right people, not to do it in a sort of White guy promoting White guy's way. We have to be careful about when nepotism is good and when it isn't.
[01:00:07] Dan: You of course rate Shakespeare very highly, but I'm wondering, do you think that Harold Bloom overrated him?
[01:00:13] Henry: No.
[01:00:14] Dan: You agree with Harold Bloom? Do you think he underrated him? Would you go even further?
[01:00:17] Henry: I don't know if you could go further because didn't he used to say that thing about there is only one God, and his name is William Shakespeare or something.
[01:00:24] Dan: The title of the book is he invented the human.
[01:00:27] Henry: There's a misunderstanding about that book because what he's doing there is playing off of a very well-known Samuel Johnson saying, which is that the essence of poetry is invention. Now, Johnson did not mean invention into the way we think of invention, partly because he was a classicist, and he believed in the mimetic theory of art, and he didn't want super, super original people. He wanted people who could show us very familiar things about the world in an unfamiliar way. When Johnson says invention, it is a twin with the word discovery, and discovery is one of the definitions that Johnson puts in the dictionary.
What he means is that Shakespeare is the first person who properly discovers the real depths of human subjectivity in art. Now, you still might disagree with that, but it becomes a much more sensible position when you see it that way, right?
[01:01:20] Dan: Yes.
[01:01:21] Henry: He was just using this 18th-century word without properly explaining himself, I think. I think it's quite a good book actually, the Shakespeare book. Some people think it's crazy. I think there are two things. He's constantly pointing to this thing about discovering subjectivity, and as John Stuart Mill said, the way that we overhear the artist, we don't hear the artist, we overhear them. Shakespeare says the characters in Shakespeare overhear themselves. That's really interesting. If you take a selection of the players and read them chronologically, you do see that right at the end of Richard III, Richard does a soliloquy and he overhears himself and he starts saying, "Oh my God. Oh." He starts interacting with himself.
By the time of Hamlet, this is the dominant mode. This is definitely something that Shakespeare "discovers, invents," and it becomes totally normal for us to think about ourselves in that way and to think about art in that way. I think that's valuable. The other thing is he'll just explain the play to you and then quote a whole page worth of stuff. I think he sensibly understood that very often he should just give space to Shakespeare so that you would come away from that book having read quite a lot of Shakespeare and understood it better than if you'd just read it on your own. I think it's great, actually. I think it's a really good book. The people who dislike it, they have very valid reasons. If you've just take it on the terms I'm saying, you can get a lot out of it.
[01:02:46] Dan: You've commented on how Shakespeare's often performed poorly. If you were in charge of directing a play, what would be your top things where you're like, "We have to get this right"?
[01:02:54] Henry: I was an amateur director, so I have a lot of vanity about my ideas of how I would direct place. There's some advice from Noël Coward, which he meant as a joke, but not really, which is speak clearly and don't bump into anyone. I think that actually is the starting point. I think so much is put upon Shakespeare that if you can actually just work out what do these lines mean and speak them clearly, you are a long way towards doing a really good production. What I see too much of is very impassioned acting. When I go to the theater now, I feel like there's no sense of dramatic tension building up and falling down and building up again.
There's just lots of, "Everything is super intense all the time, and we're all running around the stage and yelling and going, 'Oh my--.'" I'm like, "Guys, no one's going to die for two hours. We need to build up. [chuckles] The apocalypse is not here already." I think that's the biggest thing, an appreciation also that we hear Shakespeare as much as we're watching. People always say he was written to be performed, but he knew that people made anthologies. He knew that people pirated his work in poetry collections, and he purposefully wrote lots of stuff that would be put into those anthologies. He was written to be read as well. We should give the audience the benefit of knowing that they will just listen.
[01:04:14] Dan: You had to turn off the comments on your post that argued Shakespeare actually wrote Shakespeare, and it was quite controversial. Why is this so controversial? I don't know, reading your posts, seemingly pretty clear-cut argument, but it seems to get a lot of people really heated. Why do you think people care?
[01:04:30] Henry: I don't know if I want to say what I really think, because it might be rude. I honestly think that there are some people who believe in a conspiracy theory. I am not trying to be rude when I say that because they think that there is a conspiracy to conceal the truth. They have said that, and they say things like, "Oh, there's no actual record of Shakespeare going to the grammar school, and we've never found any of the books he owned." Then they'll say, "Why didn't anyone ever tell me that when I was in academia? Why didn't anyone ever--" They're actually promoting the idea that there is a conspiracy.
Now, I personally have known people who believed conspiracy theories, and it's not a serious way to discuss something like Shakespeare and everything that I have ever read from a non-Stratfordian has been written in that way. "Did you know that Mark Twain believed this?" That kind of thing. I'm like, "Everyone knows that this isn't a serious way of making arguments." They send me emails saying, "You're ignoring the facts, and you're an asshole." I'm like, "If you emailed me any facts, that would be cool, but that's not what this is." One of them sent me an email saying that, "You've said you've got all this proof. It isn't proof. You've got no idea what you're talking about."
I was like, "Tell me. Just tell me what your argument is." They were like, "I read the sonnets backwards focusing on particular details." You're telling me I'm missing three archival records, and you're saying the whole thing is bogus. This backwards reading of the sonnets, on the other hand, that's proof. That's why it gets heated, and I turn the comments off because people on both sides were starting to be a bit rude. I was like, "This isn't going anywhere," and I don't want any more emails from these people.
I made it very clear if someone wrote a piece on Substack that laid out the case really well, I would link to it or cross-post it on my blog. I will still do that, but I haven't been sent anything that doesn't open with, "Did you know that three justices of the Supreme Court believe in this bit?" "Great. So what? [chuckles] They believe lots of things that make other people really angry." You know what I mean? Are you telling me you believe everything that Justice Scalia believed? No, that's not how we make decisions. I think that's why it makes people cross.
[01:06:58] Dan: Tyler Cowen gave Noah Smith the Writing Every Day award for 2023, but I view you, honestly, is comparably prolific, and here's why. Your output is super consistent, and it's quite deep. You're right on all these different topics where the topic is a book, so it takes a long time for you to actually read up on that knowledge. Noah also has the benefit of being able to write about current events, whereas you're not typically doing that, so you can't just skim the news. The question just is how do you stay so prolific? I know I've asked you this previously, and you said you don't feel prolific, but I think it is. Doing research for this, there's a lot of material to go through. How do you do it?
[01:07:35] Henry: I don't know. Now that I don't have a job, I can obviously be more prolific. I'm quite boring in that this is my whole life. I don't if the word is obsessive, but I'm very, very focused on the things that I do. I'm told that when I was a child, I would just endlessly rewatch the same movie, or I would just endlessly sit there and read, and I still have that. I think that is a form of narrowness. I do less, I have less range of life than some other people in a way that comes with the advantage that it's not very difficult for me to write 2,000, 3,000 or 4,000 words a day. Also, whenever I get an idea, I just write it down, take paper with you everywhere.
Henry Oliver