THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.147 - ELIZABETH DAY

Episode Date: February 7, 2021

Adam enjoys a rambling conversation with British author and host of the How To Fail podcast, Elizabeth Day.PLEASE NOTE - the second half of the podcast touches on dealing with the death of a child, infertility and miscarriage.Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and to Anneka Myson for additional editing. Podcast artwork by Helen GreenRELATED LINKSFAILOSOPHY - A HANDBOOK FOR WHEN THINGS GO WRONG by ELIZABETH DAY - 2020 (WATERSTONES)ELIZABETH'S WEBSITEGEAR4MUSIC - BEECASTER USB MICROPHONETHE HORNE SECTION PODCASTSONG EXPLODER PODCASTIT'S A PIXIES PODCASTJOHN COOPER CLARKE - I WANNA BE YOURS (AUDIOBOOK) - 2020 (AUDIBLE)SIGN UP FOR THE NEWSLETTER AT THE ADAM BUXTON WEBSITEADAM BUXTON'S RAMBLE BOOK (HARDBACK) - 2020 (WATERSTONES)ADAM BUXTON'S RAMBLE BOOK (AUDIOBOOK) - 2020 (AUDIBLE) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening I took my microphone and found some human folk Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man I want you to enjoy this. That's the plan. Read the standing orders.

Read them and understand them. Just bullying my dog friend Rosie there. She's looking at me with pity. Going, oh yeah, okay, get it out your system. Maybe you're listening a long time in the future, in which case, perhaps you may not remember the Hanforth Parish Council meeting. Who knows what future viral fun

with subsequent controversy and unforeseen consequences you'll be having. Uh-oh. Rosie has spotted a couple of deer. And she was thinking about chasing after them. But she gave up after a little bit. They're too big and fast. Their white tail's bobbing up and down.

Sorry, Rosie. But you have no authority here, Rosie Buxton. None whatsoever. I'm doing it again. Hey, how are you doing, podcats? Didn't say hello, did I? It's bitey out here. We've had a few hours of Beast from the East-style snow flurries.

Not too bad so far but it's quite gray albeit with the sun trying to poke through a bright spot in the grayness quite windy and the windy has got a snow edge to it last beast from the east it was like hoth out here where's hoth said my wife when i said that the other day me and my son exchanged oh dear oh dear you don't know where hoth is looks it's all happening. Anyway, look. Icicles are beginning to form on my unruly eyebrows and the extremities of my face are beginning to lose sensation. So, let me tell you a little bit about podcast number 147, which features a rambly conversation with British author and podcast host Elizabeth Day. A sprinkling of day facts for you.

When she was 12, Elizabeth wrote to the editor of her local newspaper and said, You need a children's columnist, and I'm 12, and I'm your woman. And I'm your woman. So it was that at just 12 years old, Elizabeth got her first journalistic job as a columnist for the Derry Journal in Ireland, where she and her family were living at the time. Elizabeth went on to achieve a double first in history while studying at Cambridge University,

before returning to journalism as an award-winning writer for publications that included The Daily Telegraph, Elle magazine, The Evening Standard and The Observer. Since 2012, she's also written four novels, and last year the second of two non-fiction books was published, related to her highly successful podcast, How to Fail. It's called How to Fail, but it's done very well. That's ironic. Elizabeth began presenting the podcast in 2018 and has spoken to the likes of Phoebe Waller-Bridge,

Gloria Steinem, Malcolm Gladwell, Dame Kelly Holmes, Alan de Botton, Nadia Hussain, Bernadine Evaristo, and even Adam Buxton. How did she get him? About what they have learned from their failures. My conversation with Elizabeth was recorded remotely towards the end of November 2020. remotely, towards the end of November 2020. Around the time Elizabeth was promoting her book Phaeolosophy, a handbook for when things go wrong, which features lessons learned from some of her podcast guests and from experiences in her own life. We exchanged advice on what to say to people when they ask you for advice. And I do a sweary joke in there, which I apologize for, because I don't think there's too much swearing in the rest of the podcast. And I just got in

there very early with an unnecessary F-bomb. Sure, I could have bleeped it, but I haven't. Anyway, we also exchanged interview tips and memories of celebrity encounters that went wrong. And in the second half of the podcast, we spoke about ways of dealing with some of the more painful things experienced by Elizabeth's guests. The death of one of your children, for example, albeit a grown-up child, and by Elizabeth herself, namely her divorce, infertility treatment, and miscarriages. Though we don't get into any detail, and the conversation focuses on how to get beyond misfortunes like that. I wanted to give you a heads up here in the

introduction just in case the mention of those subjects is not what you need right now. But we began by checking recording levels and exchanging podcast microphone bands. And that reminds me, in last week's podcast with Stuart Lee, I forgot to thank the team at Gear 4 Music. That's Gear with a number 4 music. The online music store. They sent out a USB microphone to Stuart with their customary super speed and efficiency.

There is a link in the description of this podcast. If you're also in the market for a mic, you'll be able to find the one that they sent out, the Beecaster. Basically, if it's audio related, check out Gear for Music. That's my taking-the-piss-out-of-plugging-something-while-actually-plugging-it voice. Which I do a little more of in a moment.

But first, it's jingle time! Ramble Chat, that's our Ramble Chat. We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that. Come on, let's chew the fat and have a Ramble Chat. Put on your conversation coat and find your talking hat. Is that better, better? That's perfect. Now you're just showing off. Now I can just do a series of voiceovers for you.

I can do an advert for my microphone, the Shure MV7, which allows you to connect via XLR or USB simultaneously with a variety of easy-to-use controls. Is that the one you sent to Louis Theroux that you later called crappy? No, I sent him the Yeti Blue, which is also good. Yes, that's a classic. That's a podcasting classic. It's really a great mic.

Very easy to use. Wonderful results. What kind of mic are you using? I mean, I'm not using that mic. I'm using a Rode USB mic, which comes with its own pop shield and is very reasonably priced. Yeah, no, it's a very good

one highly recommended anyway so i thought we could just chat about mics and pop shields for quite a long time how do you feel about that i mean it's all most people seem to message me on instagram about so i'm completely fine with it oh yeah okay have you ever just replied to one of those queries by saying google it that's what i did i had to google it not yet not i know me too i it is bizarre isn't it the way people ask you for knowledge that is readily available yeah at the click of their own button i just ignore most of them you should just reply fuck you what i'll reply now is adam buxton told me to say fuck you yeah that's what i'm going to start replying when people ask me for advice what do you say when people do ask you for advice because that happens every now and again and it seems crazy to me like

you're a bit different because i perceive you as being more together and and you talk about these things a little bit more and you think about them more. But me, when people ask me for advice, I'm like, who do you think I am? I'm not qualified. What do you say to people? It's an interesting one because my route to being asked advice has been different from that of a celebrity so a comedian or an actor who becomes famous for doing comedy or acting and is then asked for their opinion on a whole range of things from brexit to who should be the next james bond my my route seems slightly different

in that because i set myself up to talk about failure, I sort of understand why people then ask me about it. Because I have spent a lot of time over the last two and a half years asking incredibly nosy questions of people about failure and resilience and how to overcome it. But I do feel like a bit of an imposter because I never set myself up as an expert. It was purely a route to having a series of quite nosy chats. I always marvel at people who reply to that question in a very confident way. Yeah, here's what you do. And I'm talking about people literally just asking, have you got any advice in a very general way, as if to say, I think what's implied is you know you've done well for yourself you've got a nice life any advice I always say just keep on doing it I feel like keep on trucking keep on you don't

just say google it you fuckwits no I don't say that I mean google it would be a good bit of advice because you I don't know if you've ever been on the internet but there's a lot of stuff on there and you can find out pretty much anything you want to know. I mean, that's genuinely how I started a podcast. Yeah. I Googled, how do you start a podcast? Like what, what listenership should I put in a pitch document? How can I hire a sound engineer who'll make me sound like I know what I'm doing? I'm interested to know what the, what kind of answers you got. How'd you find a sound engineer? Super easy. So one of my things was that I knew because I was a complete unknown quantity as a podcaster and because I wanted people to talk about failure

which is quite an intimate subject I knew that I wanted to make it as easy for the person as possible so I wanted to have a mobile sound engineer who could make it sound studio quality but who could come to wherever the person in question needed to be. I basically Googled mobile sound engineer podcasts, and Chris Sharp came up, and he was my sound engineer from the very beginning and still is now, and he's absolutely brilliant. Also, you have someone to blame if it all screws up.

Exactly. He's basically my professional scapegoat. Has he ever massively screwed up? Or maybe it wasn't him that screwed up, but something just went wrong and you've lost the files and it just hasn't recorded. He has never screwed up. And I'm now reaching to touch some wood, just in case that was tempting fate. I have screwed up as a journalist where my dictaphone has failed to work. And that's's the worst and now if I'm doing a journalistic print interview I will always record but I always take uh shorthand notes as well which is quite disarming for the person being interviewed because I do this kind of automatic writing thing where I'm constantly writing but also looking at them so so I imagine

it looks like I'm being possessed by a spirit. I was going to ask you actually, what your biggest disasters as a journalist have been? And were there any encounters that just left you feeling absolutely shredded? Because you used to do celebrity interviews, right? With some quite big celebrities. I did. Yeah. So for eight years, I was a star feature writer for The Observer. I did, yeah. So for eight years, I was a star feature writer for The Observer. And a lot of that involved going to press junkets for actors who wanted to promote certain films. And one of the worst experiences I ever had was when I was sent to interview Rob Lowe for a film that he did, which starred and was written, and I think directed by Ricky Gervais, called The Invention of Lying.

Oh, yeah. Yes. I flew to Toronto to do this interview, and I was excited because, you know, I liked Rob Lowe on The West Wing, and I felt like I'd, like, grown up with him as part of the rat pack. And I turned up at the allotted hotel, and there was no one there.

And it turned out that the PR had given me the wrong hotel. And so I turned up slightly late and slightly flustered, which wasn't great in the first place. And so I turned up slightly late and slightly flustered, which wasn't great in the first place. And then we sat down to do the interview. And within 14 minutes, one four, I asked him a question about whether he found it difficult to trust people. And the reason I had asked him that is because he was the subject of a number of lawsuits launched by former employees, including nannies. And he had brought up the trust issue. And I thought it was a sort of friendly way of getting into that territory. And he just kind of

glazed over and the publicist came in and shut down the interview and said, Mr. Lowe has to go now. And I didn't know what had happened or what had gone down or if I'd done anything wrong. And I was so sort of taken aback by it. And he did, he walked out and I had to fly back to London with 14 minutes of interview on tape. And it turned out later that the publicist had intended to send me a list of banned topics on which were his various lawsuits. I have my issues with that as well, because I sort of feel that a grown up should be able to say, do you know what, I can't answer that. And that would be fine. I would move on. So that was like one of the biggest nightmares I've had. Oh, I've been in similar sorts of situations where maybe the stakes were a little lower,

but you just come out of it feeling utterly humiliated. And also, I don't know about you, but just enraged because I've got quite a big ego on me. And also I'm thin skinned. So the combination is sometimes deadly when you encounter higher status people than yourself. You know what I mean? You had your Rob Lowe one. Mine was with Michael Shannon. Do you know that actor? Yes.

He's very tall, isn't he? He's very tall. How would you characterise 90% of the parts he plays? Outsider weirdos. Yeah. With a sinister intent. There you go. And also about to explode with rage. Yeah. He's in Boardwalk Empire.

walk empire he plays the agent in there who's who's kind of very tightly wound and and flagellates himself in private for kicks and stuff like that anyway a lot of the parts he plays are like that i interviewed him at the apple store because he was in a film he's promoting a film called the ice man about about some serial killer or something that he was playing. You know, another guy who's tightly wound and then explodes into rage and violence. And so at a certain point, I asked him a question and said, you know, to what extent are these roles informed by your own propensity to keep things a little bit tightly wrapped? And, you know, maybe a little bit of an obvious question, but I was interested to know. I mean, he didn't start shouting or anything,

but he was absolutely fed up with the question. Clearly, he gets asked it a lot because he's always playing those parts. So he just thought, another idiot asking me that stupid question, just thought, ugh, another idiot asking me that stupid question. And he just couldn't conceal his contempt. And it was so weird and annoying. I just thought, come on, mate. If you don't like the question, then explain why you don't like the question. Don't just treat me like a complete prick, even if I might be.

Was this for the podcast? No, this was pre-podcast days while me and Joe were on BBC Six Music, those kinds of times. And I was excited to meet him. I just, I thought he's a brilliant actor, still do, you know. Maybe he was just having an off day. I don't know. Are you one of those people who, in an interview, if someone loses it and there is an appalling shift and drop in atmosphere, can you sit with the discomfort or do you need to fill the silence? No, I can't sit with the discomfort. And yes, I do need to step in and do something about it.

I just flounder. That's why it was so humiliating at the Apple store, because there is somewhere a video of that encounter. And I have never had the guts to actually seek it out and look at it maybe if I looked at it it wouldn't be that bad but it was awful what about you I also need to fill the silence and I know that that's that sort of goes against the cardinal rule of interviewing which is that you should be comfortable enough to leave space for people to express themselves um and often say things that they don't really want to say um i'm essentially looking at

the markings on your beard you have the most phenomenally artistic beard the market i've just never it's like marble it's like veins of marble it's very beautiful thing thanks so much i was described as a badger pattern by hadley freeman when she interviewed me it's a sort of inverse badger pattern though because there's more i was about to say there's more white than black but then i felt that might be no i mean anyway at some point it will be all white it's a shame because it means that there's not too much definition and actually the shape of my face is now defined by the dark areas. Like Boy George when he has all that dark makeup on his neck. That's what you're going for.

What did you used to think when he used to do that? I always thought it was funny. Do you think he was deliberately being funny? Listeners, we're talking about when Boy George, in phases of his life when he was heavy around the face he would kind of create a jawline by literally just painting the underside of his jaw black so he would sort of paint away his double chin as it were my main thing was that must take a lot of time and it also must kind of leak off onto any clothing that you're wearing right so i

had a kind of very pragmatic response to it yeah yeah i i mean i think george is used to a kind of high maintenance fashion regimen though isn't he so now here's a question i've written some questions for you elizabeth but obviously we you know i didn't even really say hello to you in a normal way at the top there. And I apologize. No, are we recording? I had no idea. We steamed in. Let me just take my foot off the chat accelerator right now and say, hey, how are you doing?

Nice to see you. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you so much for having me. Not at all. And how are you? Are you happy at the moment? Are you you're in promotional mode and you're talking about your book, Philosophy? And how's everything else? of a really seismic year and within that year I have enormous gratitude for the fact that I've been able to make a living and have a roof over my head and my loved ones are healthy and

it's also been a very odd time to be promoting as you say the latest book because given that I write and talk about failure it stands to reason that people want to ask me about my own and I'm completely fine and and honored to be able to talk about them but I've realized that I've done so many of those kind of conversations that I feel like I have a sort of emotional hangover now I just want to hibernate and get into a bath and sleep without being woken by my cat every couple of hours thinking that I'm prey to be hunted. So that's how I'm honestly feeling, as well as it being really lovely to chat to you. I'm quite tired and I've given you quite a downbeat answer. So I'm sorry about that. I promise I'll be more fun in a minute.

There you go. You're in people-pleasing mode again, Elizabeth. It's fine. This is a safe space for you. All right? No judgment. Thank you. You don't have to apologize for any aspect of you,

your philosophy, your success, anything at all. You can tell me to get fucked at any point. If I say something that you think is offensive or just thick you can tell me and i won't get upset either i'll just say hey let's talk about it and we'll just be two grown-ups talking about it how about that that is just the loveliest most generous thing you could possibly say to me thank you now here's a great great question for you elizabeth which i bet you haven't been asked it's sort of more of a statement than a question but Thank you. get that one um I get it quite a bit but it's a valid question and I always relish the chance to answer it obviously I am aware of the irony that a podcast about failure has become one of the most

successful things I've ever done but it's important to say a few things one is is that I never set myself up as an expert on failure it's purely that I wanted to do a podcast that I found interesting, that led us into conversations with people that we hadn't necessarily heard before. And for me, that started with things going wrong, rather than the constant cycle, which as a journalist I was so familiar with, of promoting something and talking about how fantastic it is and how wonderful it was to work with so-and-so and this particular director I wanted to do something slightly different that would be revealing interesting for other people to listen to but

also I hoped optimistic for other people to listen to too and reassuring because we live in a society where we constantly feel under pressure to post the most perfect filtered images of ourselves online and to claim that everything's going according to plan and that's why it started and so I started having these conversations and they were really interesting and now the podcast has been going for two and a half years and I realized that therefore I have done a lot of research on failure. I have spent a lot of time asking people who are far wiser than I am

about how it feels and how they responded to it. And because of my own natural curiosity, I've read about it and learnt more about it. And therefore I sort of see my role now as being a conduit for those experiences. And if I can make them digestible and accessible and readable and they can also help other people then that for me is great and I enjoy doing it and the other thing that I wanted to say on the flip side of that is that I'm aware that I am nauseatingly privileged I'm white I'm middle class i make a living in front of my laptop i know

and i know that i've had professional success as well but no one can ever know the full truth of someone else's life yeah and at the same time as i was having a degree of professional success when I was a journalist and I wrote novels I was also having personally a very challenging time that I didn't speak openly about so during my 30s I got married to the wrong person and then divorced I tried and failed to have children I had various fertility treatments I had the first of three miscarriages at three months I got into a new relationship that ended out of the blue. It felt like my life was absolutely derailing in a personal sense. And that's where my sense of failure came from. And I know that that's not

the biggest failure in the world. I know that it's far more easily assimilated than other failures, but I wasn't claiming that it was. In fact, I was claiming that it's something more easily assimilated than other failures, but I wasn't claiming that it was. In fact, I was claiming that it's something that a lot of people would have experienced. And a lot of people might have felt as low as I did. And therefore I wanted to do something that created a route out of that. And that's how How to Fail started. An incredibly long answer to your question. No, that was a good answer. Sometimes what gets lost is the fact that, you know, there are things that there are sort of relative experiences which are true and universal for everybody. And some things just feel painful, regardless of who you are and what privileges you have.

Well, your former guest, Zadie Smith, speaks and writes so eloquently about this in her recent essay collection about the hierarchy of suffering and how suffering is its own bubble. When you're in it, you're experiencing it as your own universe. I find it slightly distasteful

that we are constantly asked particularly as women I don't know if it's the same for men but to show our wounds to sort of have a kind of competitive suffering arms race and to say no my voice is worthwhile because I've been through this and that and this and I've had this terrible thing happen to me and I've survived and I and I sort of rail against that because whilst I will absolutely talk about difficult things that have happened to me if I feel it's helpful for others, there are certain things that I won't ever talk about that go very deep for me that potentially involve other people. And I don't feel I should have to keep doing it in order to earn my space because I have a vast array

of fantastic podcast guests who can speak to experiences that I can't possibly hope to understand who can speak to what it's like to be a black person a marginalized person someone who is homeless someone who lives with a disability or a chronic illness these are experiences that I can give a platform to and can learn from I mean that surely the the thing is to be thoughtful as much as possible and to not judge people and to consider another person's point of view to try and cultivate empathy people are attracted to the self-help genre. Do you see yourself as being part of that genre? I don't really see myself like that, but that's not to say that I dismiss it. I'm perfectly happy to be seen like that. But I suppose it goes back to what we were saying that I've never seen myself

as an expert. So I'm not someone who's like, this is how I think you should live your life. I'm much more comfortable saying, these are the things that I think I've learned, and they might be helpful to you. And one of the things that I talk about in philosophy is the disservice that I think has been done to us by the positivity movement, of which Donald Trump is a massive fan. But yes, essentially that thing that if you just think positively enough, you can manifest anything that you desire. Now, that's not to say that there's nothing useful in that, because I do believe that you can train your brain to be happier and you can flex those mental muscles so that your resilience can become

greater. It's just that I think it marginalises feeling sad. and we're all going to feel sad at various points in our life and I think that we should be encouraged to learn to expect that as part of life's rich texture you can't fully appreciate the opposite without having also felt sad I mean you can't exist in a constant state of unadulterated bliss because that's just unrealistic, as nice as it would be. So it's more about managing expectation that simply by thinking positively does not mean that everything's going to be great all of the time. And one of my least favourite sayings is good vibes only, which you often see sort of in trendy neon and kind of yoga studios. And I sort of feel, what does that mean? If I'm not feeling a beacon of good vibes,

does that mean I'm not allowed to sort of enter this space? Because I don't always feel like I'm just purely atomized with good vibes. I feel a myriad number of different things. And we should be allowed to do that. And we should be taught how to deal with bad vibes so so basically i'm just saying a mixture of vibes all the time should be should be the alternative neon sign yeah that's basically what you keep coming back to really at the end of the day if you're looking for the meaning of life it's pretty unsatisfactory because it's like yeah a little bit of that and some of that and don't get too hung up on that

and then try that for a little bit you know what i mean yeah but i think the meaning of life is in the living of it so in the same way that when you write a book you need to believe in what you're writing you need to believe in the craft of it and take satisfaction from that and then you publish it and you need to try as much as possible to disconnect yourself from any opinion that is attached to it from the outside world because that will destroy you so so it's that thing of taking joy in the doing of it and for me the meaning of life is very much connection and forging connection with other people. And that for me comes through admitting to vulnerability and imperfection. Yeah, exactly. I agree. Okay, thanks. Bye. Bye. So did the meaning of life tick. Hey, everybody in the modern time.

They got to get themselves a podcast. I will do yours and you'll do mine. We're sorting out the problems of the world so fast. Now, in the book, at the point where you're at with the podcast and the work you've done so far, you've arrived at seven principles of philosophy. You admit in the book that that number may well change over the years, but at the moment it stands at failure just is. You are not your worst thoughts. Almost everyone feels like they failed at their 20s breakups are not a tragedy failure is data

acquisition there's no such thing as a future you being open about your vulnerabilities is the ultimate act of strength now that last one speaks for itself they all speak for themselves in various ways but i think that last one we're definitely on the same page. You are not your worst thoughts. Now, that ties in with a recurring theme on the podcast, which is the CBT approach to therapy, wouldn't you say? Again, I've never done CBT, but probably. Have you done CBT? No, I haven't but i've got lots of friends who do it and it seems

like a very practical approach to realigning your thinking and and helping yourself be happy in that way is that the sort of thing you're talking about when you say you are not your worst thoughts definitely so it's a strategy this was something that was really brought home to me by mo gowdat who is one of my most popular podcast guests of all time who is an incredible man who developed an algorithm for happiness he basically said that happiness is about managing your expectation of life he goes into it in far greater detail and far more eloquent way than I'm about to do but one aspect of this is realizing that sometimes your brain gets caught on an anxious narrative loop it will always be focusing on the things that you've done wrong or

could go wrong and the key to a degree of enlightenment is to realize that your brain is producing those thoughts as organic matter in the same way that your heart pumps blood around your body as organic matter. You would not think you were defined by your blood unless you were like Princess Margaret. Generally, you wouldn't think you were defined by your blood. And you shouldn't make the same mistake of thinking that you are defined by your thoughts. And Mo takes this to this logical extreme and he actually names his brain Becky. Becky is the most annoying girl at his school who is always pointing out the things that will go wrong and it means that he can have a conversation with his brain when it's in that anxious narrative spiral and he gave this example of having had an argument with his daughter afterwards he was walking down the street and his Becky brain was

saying you're a failure as a parent. She doesn't love you anymore. There's no coming back from this. And he stopped himself in the street and he said, Becky, I would like you to present me with objective evidence for that assertion. Because if you don't have evidence for that assertion, I would like it if you could take that negative thought and replace it with a constructive more positive one because generally speaking unless we're unfortunate enough to suffer from a neurological condition your brain will end up doing what you tell it to so if you tell your brain to raise your right arm generally it will and in this way you can train your brain to be more content and And it's not easy, but I definitely have done it in my own life. And

it really, really works. It's such a sort of simple way of doing it. And it's been incredibly helpful to me personally. Yeah. No, he's a fascinating character, Mo Gowdat, chief business officer at Google X, an author of Solve for Happy. And the sad aspect of his life is that, well, he struggled with depression for a while. And then his son, who was 21, I think at the time, died. He was in hospital in Dubai. Routine procedure that went wrong. I mean, that's everybody's worst nightmare,

to lose anyone you love that way. But to lose one of your children. I've often wondered how I would carry on. And how does he talk about it? He talks about it in a couple of ways. One is related to what we were just saying. In the immediate aftermath of Ali's death, in the months afterwards, Mo would wake up and every single morning, his first thought would be Ali died and he would just be in floods of tears.

And after a few more months of this, he just realised that he, Mo, could not carry on living with that amount of grief sitting so heavy on his chest. his chest and so he made the active decision that when he woke up in the morning he would still think Ali died but he would add and he also lived and it was the same thought but differently expressed and within that expression he was able to focus on the joy of having had Ali's love and companionship for those 21 years and it enabled him to carry on living and the other thing that he said to me is that Ali was a huge fan of computer games and he and Ali used to play computer games all the time and Mo would always be playing the computer game to get to the next level to win and to finish first and after a while Ali was like why are you playing like that because you're not experiencing the full joy of the game, which is that you get to explore every single level and find out all the kind of quirks of this particular thing that you have to do. And in doing that, you're learning so much more and you're enjoying so much more of your experience.

and that is how Mo now tries to think of life he was like you know Ali was only here for 21 years but he really did understand about making the most of his experience and actually life is not a race to the end quite the opposite life is something that is constantly teaching us and we should take time to explore it so all of those things but I wonder how you found Adam, losing both of your parents, how you have been able to live with that grief? Well, I rationalize it because it doesn't feel like a huge injustice because they were quite old. They'd lived full lives, you know. So that aspect of it is not there. I think that must be a really difficult thing to grapple with if someone dies when they're a lot younger. You know, a friend of mine, her dad died and he was only 60. And that's a weird one as well, because you're just not

expecting it at that age. And you're still in your prime in a lot of ways. You're doing everything that you love to do. You just assume that someone's going to have a bit longer than that. And suddenly if they're gone, it's like, oh man, I didn't even get halfway prepared for that. I think that must be really, really tricky. So I didn't have that with my folks, but I don't know. I mean, it sort of rumbles on the process. And I'm in the phase now where I'm really quite confused about what is and what isn't an aspect of grief. You know what I mean? Yeah.

So as I speak to you now, we're in November. My mum died six months ago, which isn't very long, really, in the scheme of things. I mean, it feels like I'm certainly more together than I was then. But then I have bad days and I feel very overwhelmed. And I mean, it feels like I'm certainly more together than I was then. But then I have bad days and I feel very overwhelmed. And I think, well, is this part of the grief? But yeah, losing someone the way that Mo Gowdat lost his son and people who lose children in infancy. And I just think that's very, very hard. And I admire people who carry on having experienced that. But you talk about the fact that you have applied some of your principles of philosophy to your own life, having experienced some things that nobody wants to go through, the first of which being divorce. which being divorce and i think divorce is so common i think 50 of people that get married get divorced it's kind of a fact of life for a lot of people for you know half the population no my maths is off but um for a lot of people that's it i couldn't work that out

no buckles half the population are not married it's a subset okay um but just seeing friends go through it and the main thing that I feel as if I would feel was just a crushing sense of failure oh totally yeah I mean my divorce is as everyone's divorce is very specific and I didn't have children with my ex which I think makes an enormous difference um I really salute people who get divorced and continue to have functional relationships with their ex for the sake of the children I think that's a really an unbelievably adult thing to be able to do so I should say that and I should also say I can't really go into the details of the relationship not that you're asking me to because I'm so aware that that's someone else's story too but it wasn't a great relationship and it took me a while

to understand that because I had become so lost in the marriage it was only when I was trying and failing to have children and I do use that personal pronoun for a reason because it did feel incredibly lonely and I realized that our priorities were different and that it was never going to be as important to him as it was to me partly because he already had children. And I suppose then that gave me the courage to feel like I need to do something about this. Because as you say, I felt such failure, but also such shame. I felt such incredible shame. It's one of the scariest things I've ever done. And walking out was incredibly difficult. And yes, I felt such shame. Did you ever think to yourself like,

well, maybe there's something wrong with me. So I've just got to try harder and I'm just going to stick with this. Definitely. Yes. I mean, for years, we were together all seven years. So absolutely. I went into therapy during that relationship. And I remember my therapist saying, you know, it can't,

you can't make this work on your own. And that was a really big wake up call for me that I needed to be clear that I had tried my utmost, that I had communicated how I was thinking and feeling. And given all of that, if it still wasn't working, I needed to accept my part to play in it and that it was also my fault, but also try and extricate myself from that for both of our sakes. The amazing realization that I had in the aftermath of that was that the people who I had been most worried about who I felt most ashamed about letting down my parents my best friend were the ones who instantly were without question I'm getting emotional but without question totally there for me and completely got it. And it was just a real

gift and relief because they sort of knew me better than I knew myself at that stage. So they were really able to provide some very necessary emotional scaffolding. That's great. Because I think I remember having that thought, like, if everything went wrong with my marriage, then what would that be like? And one of the things I thought was like, oh, it would be so disappointing for my family. And it would be so like my brother and sister would just go, oh, God, maybe we're all like that. Maybe this whole family's just no good. You know what I mean? I had that thought. Yes, yes. And they were like,

they would feel the failure themselves, is what I'm saying. It's irrational. I'm not suggesting that that's the truth at all, but it's that kind of irrational thought and worry that you have. Totally. And I was like, oh gosh, how embarrassing. How embarrassing it would be for them.

Had to have come to my wedding and all this i just felt so you wasted our time and what have you done with those gifts we had to eat that cake give me back all of those silver frames and that crystal decanter and yeah and then um decanter and yeah and then um segwaying to a sadder thing really in a lot of ways is is the process of ivf and miscarriages that you've had um that's a harder thing to be philosophical about i would imagine and and um obviously that's something that i will not experience, but I can't imagine what that's like. And how were you able to apply the principles of philosophy to your life after your most recent miscarriage? When you, I mean, you've been through IVF and everything. I don't know the exact chronology of your experiences, but.

Yes. So when I was married married I had two rounds of IVF unsuccessfully in 2014 and at the end of that year I got pregnant naturally and I had a miscarriage at three months that all happened during the course of one year then my marriage broke down and I had a period of time being single got into a new relationship with someone who wasn't ready to take that next step froze my my eggs or did like everything. I basically ticked every single fertility procedure box. Then happily, a couple of years later, I met someone who is wonderful and we're now engaged. And I had put the idea of sort of biological conception on the back burner because I thought it was hard for me that had been my previous

experience and last November a couple of weeks after my 41st birthday I found out I was pregnant completely out of the blue I had a miscarriage at seven weeks and that's the one that I write about in philosophy since then I've had another miscarriage, this one during lockdown. And that was the worst of all three experiences, partly because it was in lockdown. So thank you, Adam. That's very kind. It was very isolating because it was in lockdown and it was what's described as a medically managed miscarriage, which means you have to take pills and then there's just this unbelievable, to take pills and then there's just this unbelievable brutal pain that you go through and how I used the failure principles was absolutely almost as a challenge to myself to show that they worked because I didn't want to put something out there that I didn't believe in

really the one that I kept coming back to was that you're not your worst thought so at that point you know I go to some dark places and I sort of think I sort of turn against my own body and think it's something wrong with me and I was able to slightly distance myself from feeling that and I was able to see it as a consequence of the sadness that I was feeling. It was almost like the discomfort of the grief. And it's very difficult to grieve a miscarriage because the birth hasn't happened. So you're grieving something you never had. And you're grieving the idea of something that you so desperately wanted. And it's sometimes very uncomfortable to sit with that and you feel a bit like a fraud or at least I did and and so it was very helpful for me to realize that that was

actually just my brain's way of dealing with something that was very difficult so I found that very helpful I also one of the failure principles as you mentioned is that failure is data acquisition yeah what is that what it means in brief is that every single thing that goes wrong will give you some useful data right and sometimes that will help you to get it right the next time now with miscarriages it's a slightly different thing but but every single time i've been through a miscarriage what I've realized is that I'm really strong that I can actually survive it that is a very emboldening thing to realize that I actually I'm resilient enough I'm equipped enough to do this I kind of know what it feels like I feel as if this might be a something that people say which is not a good thing to say I don't know tell me if it is but you know lots of people don't have children and live perfectly happy lives and it's not the be

all and end all of existence and as I say like tell me if that's a sort of insensitive knee-jerk like almost cheer up thing to say no it's not at all and i have absolutely thought of that and mapped that out and tried to be okay with it i've tried so hard to be okay with it the problem is twofold for me one is is that i feel i inhabit a world where i'm surrounded by other people's children which makes it for me peculiarly painful so I'm constantly reminded of what I don't have and of course one can't have everything and you know I absolutely have thought of what it would be like and I could live with it I absolutely could because I'm lucky enough that writing is a kind of vocational love of mine and when I'm writing I never feel alone so I'm

very lucky that I have that it's just that it brings me to my second point which is there is a window where a woman can biologically conceive and I know that I'm at the kind of tail end of that window if I can mix my metaphors therefore it it makes it more acute the idea that I need to try right now right here because I don't want to regret not having tried in this vanishing space of time that I have which is a very cruel trick played on women it really is very sort of it's a very stressful and emotional thing to live with. But I think I always remember reading an interview with Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote Eat, Pray, Love. And she said she remembers reaching 45

and waking up one day thinking, OK, that choice has been removed from me. And it was kind of a sense of relief because she no longer had to think, well, what if, and shouldn't I be doing this? And, and she woke up just feeling like, okay, well that's done and that's not going to happen. And so what kind of a meaningful life can I live? So I think it's just because I'm in that specific time zone that it feels a pressing thing to try and also I don't know I mean maybe you can enlighten me but so many people talk all the time about how being a parent is the

greatest gift ever and you never know a love like it and and part of me is just greedy and I want a bit of it I was like I want to experience this like magical thing which i know is very hard at the same time but it's the kind of thing that you can't possibly explain to someone who doesn't experience it well feel free to tell me that's bullshit i mean i think it is partly bullshit you know this is me speaking from a position of incredible privilege with three healthy happy hope children and i am very grateful for that and And I love them so much. But, you know, once you're tethered to them in that way, there's a lot of downsides. And it is frequently a colossal pain in the rectum. And also, I think I've said before that the reward to sacrifice

ratio often seems absolutely way off. You're holding out for small moments when everyone's okay and everyone's happy and you feel like everything's cool but then you know a day later you're plunged back into there's something wrong with one of them one of them's depressed one of them is screwing up one of them's any number of things that can go wrong and do go wrong. And it's just a very different existence. We live in a society that just fetishizes parenting. Yeah. To such an extent. And at the moment, I'm at a stage in my life where I feel I get a lot of the downsides of being around children with none of the upsides of being their parent.

So I get to be around them a lot. And, you know, I'm surrounded by great children, but I also don't get to raise those children the way that I would like. And it's just my control freakery. Yeah, that's not how you do it. I would like, and it's just my control freakery. Yeah, that's not how you do it. Yeah, but I don't have that relationship. And I suppose I'm sad about that, that I don't have the reciprocal nature of love

that I would hope being a parent would give me. I don't know. It's one of those interesting questions, isn't it? I don't know why I want to be a mother, but I do. And so for the next couple of years, need to lean into that i think yeah even though i'm really nervous about what lies ahead you know it's a difficult path maybe you want to be a mother for the same reasons that people like you and i care about connecting we want that connection that dream of there being no barrier between your thoughts and someone else's thoughts. You don't have to hide who you are from them and they will love you whatever you are.

One of my greatest fears, which I've been working on, is fear of unremitting, alienating loneliness. That idea that at the end of my life, there'll just be no one. There'll be no one. Everyone would have pre-deceased me. I would have lost various friends along the way for reasons that I don't understand. And I find that terrifying.

I'm sure loads of people find that terrifying. But it's partly why for years and years, I've just tried to accumulate just a lot of friends. And I do have amazing, wonderful friends. But when a friendship ends or when a relationship ends for me, it is completely soul destroying because I feel it is taking me to the brink of that abyss. If I couldn't maintain this relationship or this friendship by being the best version of myself I possibly could basically just projecting the most perfect version of myself that I could if I couldn't even maintain it then what hope is there for the real

me that's one of my biggest fears but that's why this is going to sound super trivial this link but that's why I love podcasting because I do believe that in my podcast and in this conversation with you Adam I am not pretending like this is who I am and to have finally found the professional thing that enables me to be who I am at this stage in life is is like a huge gift me. So I have hope. I have hope. Elizabeth, you know, I wish you all the best. And I'm so sorry you've had to deal with all that. And I hope it goes well. Thank you. Could I have one of your kids?

Definitely. Great. Thanks. Wait, this is an advert for Squarespace. Every time I visit your website, I see success. Yes, success. The way that you look at the world makes the world want to say yes. It looks very professional i love browsing your videos and

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Continue. Hey, welcome back, podcats. Rosie. Oh, man. It's cold, isn't it? Oh, I love you. Come on, let's head back. Ah, the fingerless gloves. My fingerless gloves are not enough to deal with

freezing rain my fingerless gloves are not enough to prevent my finger pain why didn't i pick up my normal ones oh yes i remember why my fingerless gloves are good for operating technology. What? Okay. Thanks very much indeed to Elizabeth Day. Very nice to talk to her. Oh, it's gone maximum beast from the east out here now. Snowy rain. Hope you're keeping well out there as far as possible, keeping warm.

I was on Jo Wiley's Radio 2 show earlier this week, and she was talking to me about Simon Pegg's 50th birthday party that I was at with Jo almost exactly a year ago, in fact, before COVID times kicked in properly. And Joe Wiley was DJing at that party, playing lots of very good music. Scroobius Pip was playing a lot of good music there too, in fact.

And I spoke to him this week. I did his podcast, Distraction Pieces. Not sure when that's coming out but uh Joe Wiley was saying that she'd been listening to the Christmas podcast I did with Joe when we were talking about being there and meeting Tom Cruise of course and what a strange experience that had been and I forgot that we had mentioned, me and Joe, in our conversation that there was a random guy running

around, actually there were a few random people running around accosting some of the celebrities but there was one guy in particular that I mentioned who pinned Tom Cruise down for quite a while and chatted away to him. Anyway, Jo Wiley reckons that that was her son.

Good effort. That guy's a go-getter. Oh, I'm walking into... I'm walking into the wind right now this stretch of track why do I come out I always feel as if I have to come out and do these intros and outros outside

because I've established the format now so I've got to stick to it. I can't just sit in my room and do the intro and outro. But this is ridiculous. I can hardly feel my face. I can't really open my eyes. Because the windy snow rain is so sharp and painful. I have to just turn away from it a little bit.

Rosie seems fine with it. She's lower to the ground. Anyway, look, I was just saying that I recommended a handful of podcasts to Joe Wiley and I thought I would share them with you. But it's too freezing for me to go on at any length about them.

I'll put links in the description of the podcast. They're music podcasts. So I said I really love the Horn Section podcast which I've mentioned before. Alex Horn. You know Alex Horn from Taskmaster. Playing music based games and comedy songs with his brilliant band, The Horn Section,

and guests really recommend it. Hello, Technobird. I recommended Song Exploder, which I'm sure some of you are familiar with already. Really good kind of deconstruction of a single track from a wide variety of music artists. I really recommend MGMT, talk about how to pretend. Bjork talks about Stone Milker. There's one from Spoon, really good one from john hopkins i mentioned it before and the one that i haven't mentioned before i think is a pixies podcast i think it's called very well put together 12 part serieshour episodes, nice length, about the making of their last album in 2018. It's great. I mean, obviously, it helps if you're a Pixies fan, I suppose, but it's a very good,

well-constructed account of a band's creative process in the studio. Nearly finished that one, but luckily, I've also got John Cooper Clarke's good long memoir on the go, I Want to Be Yours, it's called. As you would expect from the king of the punk poets, the guy turns a good phrase. I recommend it. Okay, look, this is getting ludicrous. Thanks very much indeed to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his invaluable production support on this episode thank you so much to Annika Meissen for conversation editing the artwork for this podcast is by Helen Green thank you to the hard-working team at ACAST for their continued support.

Ah! Ho-ho-ho-ho! Magovty, magovty, soon I'll have a magovty. Thank you, most of all, to you, podcats. Wishing you all the best out there. Back next week with another rambly conversation. Till then, quick windy hug. Come on. Ooh. back next week with another rambly conversation till then quick windy hug

come on very firm up there have you been working out take care I love you bye Bye. Thank you.