THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.153 - KAZUO ISHIGURO

Episode Date: March 14, 2021

Adam talks with British writer Kazuo Ishiguro (Remains Of the Day, Never Let Me Go, The Buried Giant, Klara and the Sun) about sci-fi, artificial intelligence, the nature of emotions and whether an AI Rosie would be as good as the real thing.Recorded remotely on 7th December, 2020Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and Matt Lamont for conversation editing. Podcast artwork by Helen GreenRELATED LINKSDONATE TO MARIE CURIEKLARA AND THE SUN by KAZUO ISHIGURO - 2021 (WATERSTONES)KAZUO ISHIGURO, NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE - OFFICIAL INTERVIEW (2017, YOUTUBE)KAZUO ISHIGURO ON REMAINS OF THE DAY - 2017 (YOUTUBE)THE REMAINS OF THE DAY - DELETED SCENE (YOUTUBE)THE BURIED GIANT (INTERVIEW AND Q&A) - 2015 (YOUTUBE)THE THREE BODY PROBLEM by LIU CIXIN -2008 (AUDIOBOOK)FRAN LEBOWITZ - PRETEND IT'S A CITY (TRAILER) - 2020 (YOUTUBE)THE TERROR (TRAILER) - 2018 (YOUTUBE) 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. Hey, how you doing, podcats? Adam Buxton here. Reporting to you from a blustery field in South Norfolk, UK.

Not far outside the fair city of Norwich. It's cold. Luckily, I doubled up on fleeces, but I didn't bring gloves. Another reminder that I'm my own worst enemy. Why is it so cold? It's mid-March. I want sunbathing weather now.

Rosie's looking at me. What? What do when's it gonna get warmer i don't care she's an all-weather all-terrain half whip it half poodle cross and she's doing very well the black fox she was poorly last month but now she is back on top form okay look it's too inclement for aimless waffle. So let me tell you a bit about my guest for podcast number 153, the British writer Kazuo Ishiguro. Ishiguro facts. Kazuo, currently aged 66, was born in Nagasaki, Japan, a decade after the atomic bomb was dropped on the city

at the end of the Second World War. His father, an oceanographer, was offered a job in the UK and moved his family over there at the end of the 50s, when Kazuo was five. By the time he'd left Woking County Grammar School in Surrey, Kazuo dreamed of making it as a singer-songwriter inspired by artists like Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. Nevertheless, he studied English and philosophy at Kent University before attending what became known as one of the most prestigious

creative writing courses in the world, down the road from us here at the University of East Anglia. Cazoua's talents were spotted in the early 80s, not by a record company, but by the publishing house Faber and Faber, who encouraged him to begin writing short stories and novels. In 1989, the 34-year-old Cazoua won the Booker Prize for his third novel, Remains of the Day. It was made into a film directed by James Ivory, with producers including Ishmael Merchant and Mike Nichols. I didn't realise Mike Nichols had produced it. Anthony Hopkins plays Stevens, an ageing butler in a stately home

whose unspoken love for housekeeper Miss Kenton, played by Emma Thompson, reveals to him the possibility that he may have spent his life committed to the wrong principles. I watched it the other day with my son, and it still packs a massively hefty punch. It's one of those rare cultural double whammies, the great film adaptation of the great book. Double Whammies, the great film adaptation of the great book. Coswell received his fourth Booker Prize nomination in 2005 for his novel Never Let Me Go, a dystopian science fiction story set in a British boarding school, also made into a film directed by Mark Romanek,

starring Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield, with a screenplay credited to Kazuo Ishiguro and Alex Garland. In 2017, Kazuo was the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. It's the big prize, a year after it was awarded to his musical hero, Bob Dylan. My conversation with Kazuo took place in early December of last year, 2020, with me in my voice booth in Norfolk and Casuaux on the top floor of the South London house where he lives with his wife Lorna. I thought you'd like to know what floor he was on. I'm actually guessing. I don't know if it was the top one. It looked like the top one to me. We talked about the themes of his most recent novel,

Clara and the Sun, which charts the close friendship between an AI or artificial friend called Clara and Josie, a 14-year-old girl dealing with a serious illness. We also talked about sci-fi, the value in forgetting, the specialness of musicians and cloning Rosie. But throughout, we kept returning to a subject Kazuo often deals with one one way or another, in his writing, and that is the subject of emotion. What is emotion?

What does it mean? Should it be switched off? But before all that, I began by thanking Kazuo for his patience in the run-up to our conversation, which, in the current remote link-up landscape often tends to be a time when technical things must be checked. Do you have a good quality USB mic? Now that chatting with the mic in your headphones, that's not good.

Can you make a backup QuickTime recording? back up quick time recording. Are you more comfortable on Zoom or Riverside FM or Note Tracks or Soundtrap or Noisebin or Waffle Maker or Yak Hunter? I made some of those up. Back at the end to say goodbye, but right now with Kazuo Ishiguro. Here we go. Ramble Chat I've signed up for all kinds of strange events in the last few weeks, many of them involving three or four different parties in different parts of the united states coming together to host some sort of event in which i'm supposed to take part and the technology as well as the time difference things have got very very complicated yeah and well i mean i't accuse you, put you in this category, but people have this strange assumption that, you know, I have every kind of weird piece of software already downloaded onto my very, very up-to-date laptop, that I have got a laptop. And they assume that it must be a Mac.

And they just say something like, oh, well, you know, we'll just do it on Platt Garden or something like this. just say something like oh well you know we just do it on plat garden or something like this i mean i just get this the whole time it's kind of a weird assumption and that it's just my inadequacy that i don't have plat garden or flat garden or whatever and i don't know what to do with it and my os might not be able to handle it and yeah i'm still too embarrassed to say but what is plat garden i say yeah yeah fine and then they desperately check out what the hell this is later on now the other thing is i don't know if you've been involved with a project where people start exchanging different formats of files and then people start getting very irritated and saying i couldn't open the thing you sent me or the other way around people just

send you stuff and there's no way that you're going to be able to open it. You're clicking and double clicking and trying to unzip compressed files and things like this. And I find it very easy to take it personally and get really quite irritated. And there was a guy I worked with who was devoted to every new piece of networking and file sharing and creative cooperation software that there is. He loved this thing called Slack, and it's like a little mini website that people involved with the project can all sign on to,

and they can create different areas where they exchange images and ideas and links to other files and things like this. And he would just get very indignant if people failed to use Slack to exchange information. So you could send an email and say, hey, I had an idea. I thought this might be quite good. And rather than responding to the idea, he would just reply, put it on Slack. Can you please put it on Slack?

This is exactly what I'm talking about. It's weird. It's the kind of software nationalism people become quite hostile to even the failure to acknowledge the ubiquity and dominance of their favorite thing i mean i have a problem with my accountant of all people and they keep sending me things i can't open all the time i'm probably running up a huge debt with hmrc because I can't open these things. And yeah, and they're a company. So the assumption is to do with my inadequacy, but I'm convinced that there's something up with their system. I guess people might assume that you have an affinity for technology, especially now that you have written what is technically a science

fiction book, isn't it? Clara and the Sun? I suppose, yeah. I guess you could call it science fiction. No one goes up in space or anything like that, but you could call it that. But I think these categories have become very blurred these days. Sci-fi has become very mainstream, and there are probably mainstream elements going into sci-fi. I mean, reading Clara and the Sun, it seems like you've made a conscious decision not to get bogged down with the technical aspects of how an artificial life form might function. To what extent is it a mechanized creation? Is it like fake flesh on

there? You don't go into any of that about how these artificial friends work. It's really all about the interior life of that being. Whereas I read a book during the summer called The Three-Body Problem. Have you heard of that by a Chinese writer? The Three-Body Problem. Yeah. I haven't read it. But yes, it's what people call hard sci-fi. Hard sci-fi. It was hard. Because he gets very technical in there. And he goes deep into the science, computer science and theory. And whoa, I struggled. But it was good and absorbing. But you're doing a different thing. I'm not part of the kind of sci-fi community. But I understand that there is a kind of a schism, if not a civil war going on in the sci-fi world between hard

sci-fi and, I suppose, non-hard sci-fi. And there is an argument that says, you know, sci-fi has to actually be very knowledgeable about the actual real genuine science. You can't just make it up. And so something like the three-body problem with epitomize what you call hard sci-fi. It's based on real scientific knowledge. And he is a professional, either a research scientist or an engineer or something. Liu Cixin, I think you pronounce his name. I was hoping you would go first with pronouncing his name. That's been a phenomenon, international phenomenon, that book, which is interesting because it is reputed to be so difficult to understand. But that is one argument that science fiction has to be

proper science. It's not just made up science. And then there's another group of people, another argument that says, no, I mean, science fiction doesn't have to be so scrupulous about the technical aspects of the science. It's about speculation, imagination. I mean, I don't have a choice. I don't have the know-how to do hard sci-fi, but I'm not even sure I would necessarily wish to, because I'm not that kind of writer. I'm always looking for a metaphorical aspect in all of this. And the possibilities that open up once you can have kind of AI characters are very appealing to me, because I'm always looking for people who can express or characters who can express what I consider to be really interesting, fascinating aspects of human nature. And so in the

past, you know, I focused on things like English butlers, or the last time I suppose I was in something like sci-fi I was in something like sci-fi territory was in the book Never Let Me Go, when I looked at a group of young cloned people. But of course, I wasn't really interested in cloning as such. These became very convenient ways in which I could get a slant on what I thought were universal human experiences. And so, but in Never Let Me Go go by creating a world in which young people knew that their destiny was to kind of lose control of their organs by the time they're in the late 20s and die, because the political system had told them that's what's going to happen to

them. It seemed to me a very interesting, albeit kind of exaggerated paradigm of the human condition. It's a concentrated version of what we all face to some extent i mean we're all mortal we have to live with this ticking clock inside us we know that at a certain point yes we are going to get ill probably and we're going to fade out and those are the lucky ones you know if you last you know 70 80 90 years then you're doing very well but we all know that we have to live within that framework and we make our decisions and we decide what's important to do in the meantime you know with that knowledge at the back of our minds so you can call it sci-fi if you like but using devices like clones with a very limited lifespan enables you to kind of get an interesting perspective.

And I suppose Clara and the Sun is another example of that. I'm probably not that fascinated by what it would be like to be an AI robot, but I saw a great opportunity to have a creature that learns super, super fast. And so you go in a very short period of time through almost like toddlerdom, kind of early childhood. Yeah, total infancy. Yeah, through a kind of almost teenage phase, through a kind of parental phase.

Right. And then almost like old age, when you're kind of discarded because you've kind of lived out your uses. And you can do that very rapidly. But if you do it from a point of view of a weird being, I've got this theory, this hope anyway, you take the reader off their guard.

They think they're reading about something strange and weird and hopefully they get fascinated. And it only gradually dawns on them that this is perhaps something actually quite universal and might actually apply to them. I mean, I've always liked that strategy. Yes, that works very well in The Buried Giant as well, which I read recently. And you initially feel that you're in almost fantasy realm like medieval England, but with fantastical creatures, ogres, dragons, pixies.

But with fantastical creatures, ogres, dragons, pixies, there's a kind of Game of Thrones sheen to some elements of the universe. And then fairly quickly you realize that the overwhelming sense is one of disquiet and discomfort and fear because everyone is losing their memory. And that is something that's so outside of the fantasy genre, for example. You don't have whole episodes of Game of Thrones about like, I can't remember that thing because it's too abstract and it's almost too unsettling. It's more complicated and uncomfortable than just watching people having a sword fight. And so in this fantasy world, suddenly you have a real chill. And all my fears about

losing my memory, my mother lost her memory before she died, and it was uncomfortable to watch that happen to her. And it's something that so many of us fear and all that is bound up in that world very cleverly incidentally i really like sword fights by the way so we can come back to that in a minute i'm not anti-sword fight and in fact buried giant has quite a few sword fights it does indeed there's monsters listen if you haven't read buried giant listeners it is a rollicking game of thrones style adventure with crazy creatures with big teeth in dark corridors lots of sword fights a lot of blood a lot of guts a lot of monks with terrible wounds on their faces it's got it all i was a japanese samurai kid you

have to remember right yeah i mean i got photographs of myself aged you know for months old yeah a little baby sitting in front of the family samurai swords and samurai banners and things. So it's in my blood, all this sword fighting. But I don't know about the fantasy genre very much. But I mean, something like Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, they're often about power battles. I think they say something very interesting about power and the relationship of violence to strength and power. In The Buried Giant, that wasn't really my principal interest. My interest was in the way that, as you say, our memories are very fallible. And I was particularly interested in the way that

societies have fallible memories. And you can see this now, I mean, one of the current things that's really come up in recent years, and indeed, it's one of the things that's cut through the whole COVID era, has been this question about how different societies remember their pasts. So America, in the wake of the George Floyd murder, it's really ignited, reignited this question about symbols of the Confederacy, the statues, and whether you take them down and so on. And we've had the same thing here as well. And I think what's happening is that, you know, people are saying, look, as a society, we've just forgotten things. We've just forgotten massive,

massive things. And sometimes maybe that's good that we've forgotten things. Maybe that was the only way we could function for a time. But if you keep things just buried and hidden all the time, bad things are going to remain at the foundation of our society, and that we're going to have to deal with. And I think that's what's happening about things like race in America, to some extent race here. I think that there's a big difference in the British situation. I think most societies have these one or two major buried giants that they've gone and buried. And they hope these giants aren't going to erupt out of the ground and cause mayhem. Do you think that the response in the UK this year, the whole Black Lives Matter movement,

etc. Do you think there's a difference between how we've responded in this country and how people have responded in the US? And do you think one is preferable to the other? I'm not close enough to judge, you know, the quality of the responses, but I think they should be different, because I think there are some fundamental differences in the race issues of the United Kingdom on the one hand and America on the other. And I think one fundamental difference is that the question of race in the UK is overwhelmingly to do with the question of empire, how Britain acquired an empire, held onto that empire, and then let it go in a rather messy way. And so when we talk about race in the United

Kingdom, I think it revolves around the question of immigration, how a host nation assimilates waves of people from other countries. And typically it was from the old colonies before and the Commonwealth. And then it's a different situation in America, I think. Fundamentally in America, you're not talking about the attitude of a host nation to immigrants. I mean, that's there too, about people from Mexico and elsewhere. But the problem in America

is that you're talking about two groups of people that were there from the beginning, the African-Americans, and in many cases, the white Americans who came in later waves of immigration. And so we're not talking about a situation about how nice should we be to immigrants. I mean, that's not the question there. It's closer to the situation about Jews in Europe,

an abusive relationship towards a group of people that have always lived in your society. And because the Native Americans were more or less annihilated at the beginning. So you have this situation between, in America, the fundamental racial schism seems to be between the African-American community and the others. And so it's about two communities and how they can actually live together and how the injustice that's been perpetrated on one by the other can be addressed. And as you say, part of moving on in these situations, and even on a personal level, because talking about The Buried Giant, that book is also about a couple on a journey, and it's about their marriage,

and it's about the way that you manage a relationship, a long-term relationship, and part of that management requires some forgiving and forgetting and the same could be said of larger political situations and also on a cultural level you know one of the things that's been interesting this year is how people have been trying to figure out what to do about all these symbols from a shameful past. Do you just tear down statues and get rid of them for good? Do you put them in a museum where people can see them

and be reminded of that past in a kind of managed environment, a safe, as it were, environment? What do you do with films made in a time when, you know, social attitudes were out of sync with the attitudes we have now or that we aspire to now? Do you put warnings up in front of them? What's the best thing to do? And a lot of it just seems very ad hoc and unsatisfactory. It is very difficult. I think it's really, really difficult. When is it better to forget? When is it better to remember? There's no easy answer to that, whether you're talking about that at the individual level or at the societal level. And it's quite interesting to make that comparison

between an individual person who might be told by their therapist or their best friend, just forget about all that and move on. And they say, but I can't because it's going to come back and get me, you know. And I think that a very parallel situation exists with societies. I think there are times when you do have to just forget it and move on. I think it's very interesting what happened in South Africa after apartheid, when very consciously there was an attempt to balance those two things so that you didn't descend into mayhem and civil war. It's one of the great things that Mandela was able to do was institute a truth and reconciliation process that was very formal in an attempt to balance the need of a lot of angry people to address all the injustices that had occurred on a massive scale, and the need to just carry on as a community

so that people could actually cohere and continue. You could say the same thing about France after the Second World War, when so many people collaborated with the Nazis. Every village, somebody had betrayed somebody else, you know, and betrayed the resistance movement and collaborated or, you know, sent local Jews to Auschwitz and so on. So, you know, France made a decision at the end of the war, let's just forget it. Let's pretend we're all resistance heroes for the time being until we've got a more stable society. And then, you know, there'll be time later on to look at that, you know. And I don't think there's an easy answer to it. And that applies to, you know, marriage as well or a family.

Or just amongst friends. There are things that you have to leave behind. But sometimes you have to address them. Otherwise, they're going to fester and it's not going to be addressed. Yes. It's an ongoing process of negotiation, isn't it? But the thing that I've found now, once or twice so i'm uh 51 and i have had a couple of experiences recently when people that i was friendly with much more i still consider them my friends now but i was much

more friendly with them at another point in my life and i was spending much more time with them maybe an intense period of time when we were always together And then we moved out of each other's orbits and went on different paths. And then they've got back in touch with me with some complaints from the olden days and said like, when you did that thing, that was just so you know, I hated that. And it was really upsetting. And on the one hand, my response is always like,

I'm very sorry. And I didn't realize. And I hope you can forgive me. But another part of me sort of thinks that was a long time ago. That was 20 years. I didn't murder anyone. And it's a fairly obscure point. And I could easily come back with a load of things that kind of pissed me off about you. But what is the point? 20 years have gone by. We're both fine. Let's move on. You know what I mean? Why are they doing it? Is it because they think you've become famous and successful? No. That's nothing to do with it. I don't think so. No, no, no. I think it is, maybe an unkind interpretation would be that they enjoy the drama of it. But is there some kind of trigger in the present?

Are they saying, I've just got divorced from my wife, and I realise it was all because of this thing that you did 20 years ago? Is there some obvious reason why it has to be now that they're bringing this up? Because we had more contact. We had an opportunity to see each other again. And then afterwards, after a very, very nice reunion, comes the hand grenade. Well, reunions are notorious for things like that. I mean, people, there's some kind of festering thing.

And sometimes that can be as much to do with what a particular person thinks about their past, just as much as it could be to do with you personally, I think. They're not happy with the way they were at a particular era in their lives. Who is, though? Does anyone look back at their 20s and go, yep, I nailed that? Well, no, most of us are terribly embarrassed, I suppose. But maybe sometimes there's a temptation to scapegoat some figure from the past. In this case, you. Yeah.

You've exorcised something from your past because you say, oh, it was all because of that Buxton character. And if it wasn't for him, I wouldn't have been such an embarrassing person. I don't know. I mean, I'm just fascinated that this should have happened to you. I have to say, I haven't really had this. Do you know what? that this should have happened to you. I have to say, I haven't really had this. Do you know what?

I'm not that surprised because I think that you have conducted your life in a way that seems from the outside to be a little more thoughtful and restrained in that way. I mean, you started your career thinking that you were going to be full-time in music, right? I've heard you say even that you wanted to be a rock star. Well, I was never a rock and roller. No, you were a folky guy. Yeah, I was more kind of folky, but I wouldn't have been a finger in the ear kind of

folky folky. I mean, rock star is a better summary of the kind of status I would have been after. I didn't want to eke out a living singing in the back rooms of pubs or something. I wanted to be a big star. Who were you imagining then when you had fantasies about being successful? When I was about 15, 16, my heroes were the great singer-songwriters. I'm 15 years older than you, so I'm not sure how in tune you'd be when I was 15, around the time you were being born. But I mean, it'll be people like Bob Dylan,

who remains a godlike figure to me, Leonard Cohen. And then there were very interesting, very talented singer-songwriters of that era who are still around, people like James Taylor, Jackson Brown, people like that. But as I got a little bit older, I really loved other kinds of music as well. I liked songs, basically,

songs that came from any tradition indeed you know Irish Scottish traditional folk songs songs from the great American songbook and Broadway songs and so all these things I really liked but one of the things that slightly annoyed me was that I was in England and all the songs I loved seemed to be American and the lyrics always evoked kind of American landscapes and they had American slang and they were sung with an American accent and I found this very awkward and so there was a point when I was trying to kind of very consciously do a kind of English version so I remember that became a kind of a challenge so that you don't go down the highway.

You go up the motorway. And you're walking down the pavement, not the sidewalk. Yes. Yeah. At first glance, it doesn't evoke the same kind of landscapes. But I thought, actually, there is something quite evocative about standing next to some drizzly roundabout outside of Carlisle, trying to hitch a lift on a grey day, you know, while Morris miners struggle past you, rather than, you know, being on Highway 61 or something in the sunshine, with trucks zooming by. So I tried to embrace

some kind of Englishness, although I was very aware that I was in an American genre. And I think that that's always been an interesting struggle for a lot of British, not just singer-songwriters, but British rock musicians in general. They've embraced basically an American genre. Yeah. Well, Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys springs to mind as a more recent exponent of very British style of songwriting and delivery.

But someone who does it so well and it doesn't seem forced and there's a real evocative poetry, especially to some of those early songs. Did you ever like the Arctic Monkeys stuff? I mean, my daughter liked the Arctic Monkeys a lot when she was living at home and she played them a lot. And I enjoyed what I heard, let's say. I mean, this is outside of my comfort zone. I'm not really familiar with a lot of, well, even the rock bands of my youth. I never really followed them. I was super interested in music, but I had quite a narrow field of people that i listened to and a lot of the huge bands that were around at the time i didn't pay much attention to you know i now realize that some of the greatest music was made by these people you know pink floyd and

people like that but yeah i wasn't listening to them at the time i didn't even buy the beatles or the stones you know i mean um I was interested in the blues-based people to some extent, because the blues was something I was quite interested in. And so people like Cream and Eric Clapton's band, you know, and his later bands, I found interesting. And it's fascinating to me that if you look at the history of the blues,

it goes, you know, Mississippi Delta, Chicago, and then Surrey. Yeah. But I mean, it's not a joke. The Surrey bit is absolutely crucial. And B.B. King himself has acknowledged that if it wasn't for those people like Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, and all those people who came out of that era. And then, of course, the Stones and John Mayer and all those people. Blues would have died in the 60s. He says it's the white boys from Britain that brought it back.

And suddenly B.B. King had huge queues for his concerts, with white kids coming to hear him as well as black kids. He said he was amazed. And that's one of the wonderful things about music and art in general, how it crosses boundaries like that. But who would think of a trajectory like that? Yes, well, I suppose one possibly tediously obvious thing to say might be that nowadays you couldn't do that

because you'd get accused of cultural appropriation by the PC gone mad brigade, wouldn't you? But within that glib point and voice is a more serious one, which is that I suppose people might be nervous to do something like that now, because for a bunch of white boys from Surrey to form a band trying to do authentic sounding hip hop, not that it's a bit different because hip hop is not a genre that's dying out in the way that maybe the blues might have been. But you'd be in trouble, I think, wouldn't you? You would be accused of being inauthentic at least and at worst insensitive

culturally. But you do have very successful British hip hop artists, don't you? I mean, they address British things, I guess, but the form has been taken from America. But yeah, I think we still have that. But that's a very good question that you raise, I guess, but the form has been taken from America. But yeah, I think we still have that. But that's a very good question that you raise. I mean, would the Rolling Stones version of Little Red Rooster from 1960, whenever that is, I mean, apart from people accusing it of being inauthentic, would it be actually accused of being something wrong? And would it be condemned?

That's a very good question. I mean, there are people who would accuse the Stones of that anyway, I don't know. But let's not go down that road too far. I'm interested to know what you sounded like when you were sat there strumming away writing songs, over 100 songs or something you wrote in your early 20s. Were you singing? Unfortunately, yes. If I'd been a little bit older, I think there would have been this idea of you could be a songwriter. But I was coming of age during this era of the singer-songwriter. So everybody had to sing their own songs. Somebody like Carole King is a very interesting example, because she had a whole career as a kind of Tim Pan Alley songwriter,

providing hit after hit for other people. And then she found herself in the singer-songwriter era. She started to release her own versions of her songs. And then, of course, because she was a wonderful singer, I mean, she became a singer-songwriter. But I felt, yes, I have to be a singer. And I had been a choir boy. Wow.

So I have this kind of very strange singing career that until the age of 11, I was a wonderful singer. But I was a wonderful kind of choral singer, you know, sweet-voiced, high treble. And I sang all the solos at our church and at school until my voice broke. And then I had this terrible voice, absolutely terrible voice.

And it wasn't helped by the fact that my models were people like Dylan. So I was singing in this kind of strange way. And so that became a kind of a major hindrance to my songwriting career in that my songs were always represented by my own singing. My guitar playing has always been good, actually. I still play the guitar. Yeah, you do still. Yeah, I'm more like a jazz guitarist these days. But there's nothing wrong with my guitar playing, but voice isn't very good.

And I used to get really, really nervous if I stood in front of an audience with a guitar. It's one of the very few times I get nervous. I can talk in front of large crowds. I don't feel any nerves at all. But if I'm holding a guitar and I have to sing in front of an audience, I would become absolutely petrified. So this was another problem for me.

What's going on there then? Just being anxious about being judged unworthy by your peers? Maybe that was underneath it all. But you see, I was so convinced that my songs were good. Looking back to myself, aged 19, 20 19 20 21 i don't think that could have been it yeah i really admire musicians particularly when i see them performing live because i think it's such a high wire act you know what we're doing now i mean we could just go completely off the rails now yeah and i assume i hope you can just edit it out or sure so there's a real sense of safety net when you're playing music like that, just one little, you hit the wrong string on the guitar or the wrong key on the keyboard, it's absolutely

blindingly obvious. Everything just comes to a crashing halt. Or as happened to me a couple of times, you blank out on the lyrics. There's so many ways in which you can just fall off that rope. And everything I have done since then, in public or you know talking on live radio sometimes in quite tense situations you know like I've had to deliver the Nobel lecture and things like this nothing has been as nerve-wracking for me as when I had to play music in front of people I mean all musicians anyway but when I see what they do over and over again sometimes night after night I just think they're amazing just a kind of human yeah endurance and courage level and we started talking about

this phase of your life because I was imagining you in your 20s as being altogether more thoughtful and restrained I think were the words I used. Then someone like me, was that the case? Or did you have some wild years where you were experimenting with being all over the place? Well, I don't know quite how bad you were. I wasn't that bad. I mean, I wasn't going crazy. And I, I certainly wasn't setting out to hurt anybody's feelings. But evidently, I did along the way. And I think it's partly because I just, I wasn't careful enough a lot of the time. What about you? I'm sure I've hurt many people's feelings. Looking back to when I'm much younger, in my 20s,

what really strikes me is how inconsiderate I was. You know, I was so preoccupied, I suppose, about myself. This is long before social media, but I think that the sense of building a profile of yourself, some sort of performance version of yourself, it becomes so preoccupying when you're that age. You feel you're building yourself as a kind of a moral being and an agent in the world in some kind of way. And so this becomes so preoccupying.

And even if that includes being a nice, decent person, even if that's an important thing you're trying to build into your profile, you're taking your eye off the ball as far as other people are concerned. And I think that's very easy to do when you're that age. You're so focused on yourself. And ironically, you might be so focused

on being a decent person. How do I make myself a very decent person? So when I look back, lots of things come back to me. It's almost the converse of that experience you were relating earlier when someone phones you up from the past and says, I mean, I think of things and I think, well, I really could have done that a hell of a lot better. And in those moments when you have those recollections, have you ever followed the impulse to maybe make contact and make some kind of reparation? Possibly not, actually. I can't really bring it down to like big, they're often not like big, big events, you know, a single incident. Yeah. And I guess the problem is that sometimes even if you do have that impulse,

And I guess the problem is that sometimes, even if you do have that impulse, you feel so bad about the way you treated someone, that if you reach back into their lives now, 20, 30, 40 years later, and say, look, I've always felt bad about the way I treated you. And the idea that what they really need is this formal statement of reparation from you. It's just kind of a bit narcissistic, don't you think? There is a selfish aspect to apology, I think. And it can just be another latter-day repeat of what had been happening before. But having said that, I think, yeah, that's not to say that there aren't times when you should. I'm not quite sure what you're alluding to

when you keep alluding to these things from your past. I mean, it might be a different kind of thing altogether. But I don't have, perhaps fortunately, or perhaps once again, I'm just blanking things out. I don't really have moments I feel I have to actually go back to somebody about specific moments to say, look, that was a terrible actual thing I did to you. look, that was a terrible actual thing I did to you. Yeah, no, mine are just, they're more general, like I should have taken you more seriously or I thought I was doing some funny banter and probably it was kind of hurtful.

Just vague feelings like that. Also, a lot of stuff informed by my relationship with my dad, who was a very, talking about remains of the day, Mr. Stevens style character. And only after he died did I find out that actually his background, his family, because he never really spoke about where he came from and what his family were like. Anyway, I found out that his dad was a butler in a, I don't know if it was a stately home, but it was a wealthy family down in Sussex.

And that was his background, his life of service. His mother was also a maid. So it was very odd to find that out after having been a fan of Remains of the Day and especially Anthony Hopkins' performance in that film version, which always really impressed me and upset me, though, because I could see so much of my dad in it. And he had that same devotion to principles and stoicism and tradition and routine and things like that. And he always struggled to instill those values in his children.

And he didn't really succeed. And in fact, I went so far the other way in my 20s. Again, not in a horrible, out of control, destructive way, I hope. But you know, the things that I was interested in were the opposite, really. And so that was always a point of tension. But yeah, remains of the day, holy shit, that whole sense of that terrifying possibility that you might reach the end of your life and look back and just think, oh, I just spent all my time devoted to the wrong things and the wrong people. And that I always found quite worrisome. Sorry, this is a long ramble. No, no, I'm completely fascinated. i'm completely riveted but carry on and then i saw recently these deleted scenes from the film that i don't think i'd ever seen before and one of them was this scene on a pier and it's the end of the story and he said and i think it's the same in the

book isn't it he said goodbye to mrs kenton in the film played by emma thompson and then anthony hopkins as mr ste, walks on his own. It's nighttime on the pier. The lights are twinkling, and he takes a bench, sits there, and he's just careworn. He just looks so sad. And then there's an old guy sat on the bench next door, played by Brian Pringle,

who used to pop up in lots of things in the 80s. Great character actor. And he starts chatting to Hopkins' character and saying, Oh, lovely evening. Nice to take the sea air every now and again. And I'm a butler. Spent most of my life in service. And then Hopkins says, Well, I am too, actually. I'm in charge of a staff at a stately home. And they get talking, and Anthony Hopkins just suddenly takes this opportunity to be honest with this guy and be emotional.

And as soon as he says the thing that he's never wanted to say, which is maybe I made a mistake, maybe I dedicated too much of my life to serving my master at the house. And maybe I didn't think enough about myself and the people i should have been with as soon as he says it he starts to cry and hopkins is amazing i've heard him talking before about he always downplays the extent to which he is inhabiting these roles and he always says oh it's just a technique. It's a craft, you know, I'm not those people. And it's like, yeah, okay. But he's tapping into something incredibly deep. And as soon as I was watching this scene, and as soon as he starts to cry with face crumples, I just started crying as if it was just a switch. My mind wasn't engaged in that way at all. It wasn't like a buildup of emotion, but I suppose I saw my dad and seeing Hopkins cry like

that was like, whoa, I'm off. And I saw you talking about Remains of the Day and about the film adaptation. The reason that the scene, that particular scene was removed was because James Ivory felt that it was too much. It was too on the nose nose and after a whole two hours of studying the condition of keeping your emotions under wraps and the damage that can do it seemed to cheapen that to have that scene of such an intense and painful catharsis in a way at the end there what did you think did you have much to do with the way that that film came together? I wasn't consulted about that particular decision, although I heard a hell of a lot about it since. Our daughter was very young at the time. She'd just been born during that shoot. And so I

wasn't paying as much attention. I got to know Jim Ivory. I mean, I stood in touch with him. I see him whenever he comes to Britain, and I see him when I go to New York. And Ismail Merchant, who was the producer, who passed away in 2004, I got to know them much better after the film was made. I mean, that's how I got to know them. So I heard a lot about it afterwards and there were many arguments about that last scene,

whether it should be dropped or not. It was in the script. It's a crucial scene in the novel. And it seemed in some ways ironic that a film, a movie or a story that seemed to be actually critical of the fear of emotions should actually drop a scene like that because of the fear that the film would get too emotional or that it was showing its emotions too readily. And other people have said it had been filmed wonderfully. The lighting was hopper-esque. I don't know. But I mean, I absolutely respect Jim's decision to remove that scene. But some people have complained that, you know, perhaps the film doesn't quite end. One critic said it

kind of evaporates rather than ends. But I don't know. I mean, I have this kind of dilemma all the time when I'm writing my fiction, because I do tend to write on that border between holding back emotion and letting it get very emotional. That's what I do all the time. And I find it really difficult to judge. When does something become just sentimental? You know, when are you actually just wallowing in unearned emotion just for the sake of unearned emotion? It's actually, it's very easy to make people cry in a way. It's not necessarily a proof that you've done something authentic. You've got to make people cry for the right reasons.

To make people cry for the wrong reasons, I think you're contributing to something not very helpful. And in the new book, Clara and the Sun, you're dealing to some degree with what emotions are in themselves. And I'm interested to know what kind of conclusions you came to. Because there's a point early on in the book, where you describe Clara as worrying about something, I became worried her adults would get out before she said anything more. And it's immediately jarring. You're only 10 pages in or something. And you're thinking like, how does a robot worry? First of all, is the term robot okay? Do you think AIs will find it offensive in the future? Yeah, they probably will. Yeah.

So I'll stick with artificial friend. I think technically she is a robot though so i was thinking like what does it mean for an artificial friend to be worried and presumably you thought about that and presumably you thought like what is the difference and is there really a difference between the little logical calculations that inform a human being's sense of worry or maybe any other emotion? And is there that much difference between those calculations? Because what you're doing, if you're worried about something, you're thinking about possible outcomes from a set of circumstances that you're in. And that's presumably what an AI would be doing as well. So what sort of thinking did you do about that? And how did you, what decisions did you make

about what this interior life of the artificial friend would be like? That's a lot of questions. Yeah, but they're very, very good questions. Yeah. What I needed Clara to be was not just someone who observed as an outsider human behaviour and then started to kind of learn about it. I needed her to be someone who very rapidly started to actually adopt the behaviour that she saw, just as a young child would. And this seemed to me consistent with what I understood about machine learning and how it works. These breakthrough pieces of AI that we've heard about, what happens is that they're set a task and they just go about solving it in their own way because they're powerful enough to do this. And what's interesting about this is that human beings often don't know how

they're achieving what they're achieving. And so you had this interesting case a few years ago when the AI AlphaGo defeated Lisa Dole, the world Go champion. Go being a much more complicated kind of chess, you know, it's a much more complicated game than chess. People didn't think it was possible for a program to defeat a human being because it wasn't like chess. It wasn't limited to a set number of moves. It required much more intuition. But what was interesting about AlphaGo comprehensively defeating the Go champion wasn't just the fact that the AI won, but the manner in which it won was baffling. Although Go is a game with huge history, and in the Far East, people analyse it minutely, the machine was making moves that nobody could understand.

It was using a style and a way of thinking that hadn't been seen before. And I think this is what's very interesting about AI. So I think it's very possible that Clara would be worried, or that she'll be happy, or she'll be upset, because she has a goal that's been set for her. And if she thinks something is going to endanger that goal or is going to impede that goal, then that will worry her. And she'll be hopeful about things that she thinks will further that goal. I mean, of course, she's using the English language

in a way that approximates what she feels. So she's just using the language. She uses terms like worry, rather than something that's more precise. That's why the idea of AI became interesting to me, because in this case, we're talking about someone who sets a goal and works towards that goal. And the other thing that fascinated me about the possibility of having an AI as the main character is that she learns very unevenly. You know, so she's a bit like an adolescent or something. Because she's phenomenally adept at learning some

kinds of things, she becomes very expert very, very quickly, just from observing out of a window or something what's going on in the street. But she would have enormous gaps in her knowledge, and she'll make bizarre assumptions that even a nine-year-old wouldn't make. So this uneven grasp of the world is such a weird patchwork of utter expertise and proficiency in some areas and real naivety in others I thought was quite fascinating. And so for me she's not just somebody who observes human beings almost like an alien. She starts to actually embody a lot of the things, the lessons that she picks up. And some of those lessons are strange and they're wonky. So for me, she is very interesting because she's like a strange mirror

to human beings. A mirror that's kind of bent and distorted. But she is reflecting not just individual human beings and their emotions, but the society that she sees outside. And she increasingly becomes what she sees. And part of that is the fact that she's exposed to prejudice. And she's exposed to assumptions from some human beings that she doesn't deserve the kind of consideration that would be extended to another human being because she's artificial so you're suddenly exposed to this idea of like well what are those prejudices from the human beings based on if they had to define what the difference is between them the way they see the world and they experience the world and cl, what would they say? And I suppose some people would say a soul.

Is that the defining thing? When people talk about religion, a lot of the time it comes down to the idea of a soul. And then you get some very literal-minded scientists saying, well, no, that doesn't make sense because we've looked for the soul and we can't find it. It's not there. We've looked with very powerful microscopes and there's no soul. So that means you don't have a soul. So stop thinking about that. But really, if you think about it, the people that are hanging on to the idea of a soul are doing so because on paper, there's not that much difference really,

other than some organic bits and pieces. the way that an AI would process the world and the decisions it would make are not that different from the way a human would. This gets to the heart of what my novel is attempting to be about. I mean, I don't want to give away too many spoilers, but this question that you raise, I'm glad you brought up the word soul rather than me,

but I think it's a very convenient concept, whether we're using it religiously or otherwise. If there's somebody I love, I want to believe that there is some basis for that love. And I think the reason why it's very important, that concept, that belief that there is a unique soul inside this body of the person that I love, I think why we cling onto that with some energy is because it doesn't make sense to say that you love that person if you don't think there is something unique about that person. But the very foundation of the way we lead our lives in terms of our affections, our love, our hatreds, how each of us have a hierarchy of people who are important to us and dear to us and people who we resent. I mean,

that is to some extent based on the idea that each person is actually individual in some way. We're not just responding to their exterior carcass. And so I think that whatever we feel in a religious sense or metaphysical sense, I think it's very important to us, that idea of the unique ghost in the machine. Take that away, then a lot of things stop making sense. Why do we bother to have families? If a member of my family isn't functioning very well, why not just discard them and get somebody else? I mean, it would start to break down. And not only would it start to break down, it doesn't seem to us to be true. Our experience as human beings is that other individual human beings matter deeply.

And some version of life that doesn't include that idea seems inadequate in a very fundamental way. And yet, the trouble is, I think, the way we're moving in science and technology, there are some ideas that seem to threaten our sense that there is a unique soul inside individuals by virtue of which I love that individual or I don't like that individual very much. And so when we're getting to the point where some companies have built up such sophisticated data banks on people that they can predict in advance what you're going to order tomorrow, you're going to be able to more or less predict what that person is going to feel and do. The assumption here being that if you've got enough data, if the data is granular enough,

and once we move into an era where we're behaving more and more online, where we go about in cars that are autonomous and actually track all our decisions. You have CCTV type surveillance everywhere. The data would become so sophisticated that you'll be able to actually excavate the person's personality. Yes, it's a little bit like the show Devs. I don't know if you watched that Alex Garland's show. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. That sort of deterministic, predictable universe. I thought that was a terrific TV series. He's concerned about, yes, if the data is good enough, then you can predict everything minutely into the future.

And what does that do to us? In Clara and the Sun, I'm probably more concerned about that question about, does it make sense to love somebody? If you start to intellectually entertain the idea that you can reproduce them exactly if you've got the right algorithm somewhere else like in the old days you know that transition from say cassette tapes to cd was very interesting for me as a music fan because i mean i always wanted the proper cassette or the proper vinyl if a new joni mitchell album came out i wanted the new

Joni Mitchell album. I did not want a copy of it. And so I found it quite difficult to handle this idea. I'm just wondering, are we going to get to a stage where we feel that about human beings? If you can actually, I hesitate to use the word reduce, but if you can actually map out a human being's soul, their individuality, through algorithms, to the point where you can more or less say, you know, how they'll feel and how they'll behave, what decisions they'll make, does that mean then that it's like a digital copy of a digital item? It's going to be the same. And it's just pure sentimentalityality or some kind of superstitious instinct in us left over from a more ignorant time that makes us say oh no i want to keep susan i want the original susan yeah because i love susan they'll say no no there's other things exactly the same as susan yeah

susan point two yeah great and enhanced and less prone to leaving the dishwasher door open. So what are you complaining about? Yeah. Or maybe Susan one is ill. Yeah. There's so many reasons why you would do that. But yes, I think it's innate in most humans, although maybe this will change. Maybe we'll evolve into a race that doesn't have these hang ups. But at the moment, most people would want to hang on to Susan 0.1 for the same reason that if you have a pet you loved, I think most people would at least feel a bit queasy about the idea of cloning that pet, which some people do. I mean, with a pet, you can perhaps make more of a case that they are just a collection of automated responses

designed to make it look as if they love you because they just need you to carry on feeding them and providing shelter for them. But I wouldn't clone my dog Rosie because it would just seem weird. I would instinctively feel that that wasn't Rosie. It was something else. Maybe the thing that defines human emotion and the thing that an AI would not be able to do by definition is the irrationality and the capacity for error and self-deception that is such a core part of being a human being for all sorts of reasons. You know, the big one being death and how we manage that knowledge. I suppose things could become so sophisticated with AI that they could program in some kind of versions of an error algorithm and an irrationality algorithm that would be a super sophisticated irrationality generator. You'd have to talk to someone who really understands AI, but just from my relatively ignorant knowledge of the field,

I would say you wouldn't have to be super sophisticated. I mean, if you're just trying to copy somebody, I don't think it particularly makes much difference whether the AI is actually algorithmically mimicking rational thought or irrational thought. It just has to mimic those impulses. If I had to create some creature that behaved like you, I don't think it's any more difficult for that creature to assimilate your less rational things than it would be to copy your rational things. That's the judgment that we make, that something feels irrational. And incidentally, I think about Rosie, your dog Rosie, I think cloning is slightly beside the point.

You know, we're not really talking about cloning here. If Rosie was cloned, I would argue that you're correct to think that the cloned Rosie isn't Rosie. Because, I mean, cloning is a different kind of technique altogether. And although the new Rosie would have the physical characteristics of your original Rosie, because the new Rosie has been created out of taking a piece of Rosie's cell and growing a new Rosie. I mean, the new Rosie might be completely different in terms of a soul or personality. It's a kind of a physical relationship, if you like. Whereas what we're talking about here, we're talking about the era of big data, where every day, including what we're doing now, because we're using various platforms,

our data is being recorded and assimilated somewhere. And we're talking about very powerful computers and equipment crunching this data that is being gathered every day from people in increasingly more complex transactions right and we're asking ourselves can it actually map out you know what it means to be you or me not just recreate something physically resembling us out of ourselves or something as cloning would do actually, the very things that determine how we decide things, how we feel things. And at the moment, we're still at the point where certain companies just want to predict our consumer behaviour. But I think actually, the reality of

it is that people have gone way, way beyond that. And in some countries, of course, they're trying to monitor people's political ideas. Controversially in China, people are alleging that this is what's happening. And this is a way of socially controlling society. But long before we actually get to the point where we're able to do this, if we actually start to believe that it is even achievable to actually excavate and map out somebody's personality, somebody's soul to that extent, I think it might do something fundamental to the way we regard individual people in our lives.

As we've said, it stops quite making sense. It might feel quite irrational to say that you love your wife or your daughter or your son. Are you just saying that's a sentimental kind of belief and that you would equally love anything else that could algorithmically reproduce the decision making and emotion choosing mechanisms inside your wife or daughter or son? Is that going to be good enough? So I think for your thought experiment about Rosie, your dog, you shouldn't think about a cloned Rosie. rosie your dog yeah you shouldn't think about a cloned rosie i think you should think about someone who says look we've been monitoring rosie you know minutely for the last three years and we know exactly how she behaves in every kind of situation we can predict which room she's gonna shit in next yeah exactly and here it is on this file yeah yeah and when the sad day comes when

rosie has to pass away yeah we'll just shove this into the next dog. And you've got your Rosie again. I don't know. I think I'd go for it. That's probably a more challenging idea. Because this dog will do everything that Rosie did. Will think like Rosie, shit like Rosie. And I could challenge you by saying, look, you're just being irrational and sentimental. You can't extend your love to this new Rosie.

Do you lie awake at night thinking about this stuff? Do you feel sanguine about it all? Or are you kind of depressed about it? No, I don't. I'm excited about the many of the things happening in science and technology. I think we're having incredible breakthroughs in science at the moment. And not just on the AI front, but also in terms of genetic editing and so on. I think there are tremendous potentials here, but also great dangers. I think we, all of

us, we can't just leave it to the scientists to have academic conferences about where funding should go, where research should go, what kind of oversight should exist. I think this is going to so affect all of us that we have to all be talking about this. And we have to all come up to speed about it. No, I don't lie there, you know, worried about this. But I guess because of the generation that I am, I worry about the assumptions that I had through most of my life, about living in a nice, liberal democracy with kind of freedoms and so on. I mean, fundamental to that idea, I think, is the idea that individuals matter very much and society has to serve the individual, not the other way around. And I think I've grown up in an era where that idea became stronger and stronger

in the era after the Second World War, where people just saw all the horrors of dictatorships and Nazism and Stalinism and so on, where human beings were sacrificed en masse to some idea. And I've grown up in an era where there seemed to have been steady progress in human rights, and people have pushed back against racism, and we've had gay rights, we've had feminism. It seemed like, for a long time as I was going well into middle age, it seemed like all these things were getting better and we were getting more sophisticated.

And now here I am in my mid-60s, I don't feel so sure. Everything looks very fragile. And one of the reasons things look fragile to me is because we do stand on the brink of a world that's going to have to live with, well not have to live, but will live with huge new powers that come from science and technology that didn't exist before. And this is going to change things. It's going to change the way we relate to each other, the way we organise our societies. And I feel nervous on behalf of the individual, that idea

that the individual, you and me, just the guy or the woman just sitting outside a cafe there, is very important. That's the basic unit of importance when we come to make decisions. Yeah. So that worries me more than that. We're going to create sort of superior robots that are going to rampage across New York City or something.

That kind of thing doesn't particularly get to me susan 0.5 with her laser eyesight are you on social media no i'm not no i haven't seen that many selfies from you with your nobel prize and your favorite joni mitchell album having a salad but do you ever look at social media well if you if you don't do it, it's much harder to look at it. Yeah. So I see the occasional tweet that somebody points out to me. I probably read about social media much more than I participate in it. I have a time problem as it is. And I have an energy problem as it is. I spent hours every day writing emails and sorting things out, you know, admin things in my life. I can't imagine

how I'd do anything if I was also in social media. I mean, I think it's probably a very important aspect of many people's lives. And it's fascinating for me to watch as a non-participant, you know, the different debates that go on about its dangers and so on. Are you a big social media person? No, not at all. I've kind of withdrawn almost completely from it. The thing I was going to say, though, was that it feels as if the first stage of a fundamental change in the way human beings relate to each other has been taking place in the last 10 years as social media has really taken hold. Hence the number of think pieces that people like to write about it, etc.

But it is fascinating. And maybe one of the defining characteristics of that new interplay is like conversations seem to be led by emotion, coming back to the idea of emotion, far more than they ever used to be. So for my dad's generation, Mr. Stevens' generation, it was all about, well, look, it's going to be counterproductive to just give free reign to all these emotions. They're dangerous things. They need to be carefully managed. Why don't we just stick to a set of protocols and routines in order to manage these things and keep them under control and preferably keep them down so we don't have to deal with the more complicated ones but now the tone of interaction on social media whether it comes to conversations about trivial things or very important things politics etc is very emotional

and it's almost as if you are less of a person if you don't express your opinion in the most emotional terms possible. And sometimes that's when I hear my dad's voice in my head. That's when I get all Mr. Stevensy. And I think, I don't know about that. I think that's dangerous. There is a big generational thing here, as you point out. I mean, in an era when there were wars that actually really threatened not just wars in faraway places where your boys got sent out, but when you're talking about wars that are more or less existential for your way of life and your country and your society, as your father would have experienced. I'm not quite sure if he would have been alive during the Second

World War. Yes, he was in the Second World War, second world war yeah yes yes but anyone brought up in that kind of atmosphere in the first half of the 20th century in many parts of the world it was a military code it was a practical code right i mean you cannot do anything if people are emoting all over the place because you know the overwhelming emotions you want to express will be those of fear we're doomed and you know let's just give up and let's all eat each other, you know. And so I think there was an understanding that that's not helpful. And if you get an impulse to come out with these things, you don't say these things, you know. And so it became admirable for people who kind of drive through a bombing raid to take an important message and say,

yes, it got slightly hairy. Never mind. Here it is. That was seen to be admirable. And that became part of how we were supposed to behave. And I think that was true in Japanese society as well as in British society. And I guess in the workplace, the way the workplace was geared up in the 20th century, it did not help if people emoted all over the place at the office or in the factory. They had to be machine-like or very disciplined. So if capitalism wanted the workforce to function well, and indeed if communism wanted the workforce to function very well, once again, you wanted to discourage people emoting everywhere and expressing their emotions.

That was not relevant. They had to be regimented and disciplined. And so those were the overwhelming values but it seems like we live in a different age when different forces have been set loose and actually for the most powerful wealthiest companies corporations in the world today the reverse is true from what we've just said. The more people emote, the better, because their business model is not about selling us a nice piece of kit or a car or something, and we give them hard earned wages in return for that. What they want is to be able to get as rich a set of data from us as possible. And so everything is geared up so that you're inaudible

unless you are very emotional. And unfortunately, I think you're more audible if you're negatively emotional than if you're just being positively emotional. Angry or, in Trump's case, to take one example, sort of vindictive. In that way, do you mean? Well, I think anger attracts more clicks. In order to make this kind of capitalism work, you've got to attract loads and loads of people to behave and interact on your platform. That's how it works. And it works much better if you're getting people to be emotionally involved. And it tends to be the case that people get involved much more if they're provoked to feel angry or outraged.

I mean, you know, I talk about my emotions a lot and I like doing it and it's fun. So I'm not sort of saying that I'm opposed in principle, but I do. Yeah, I have that schism and I have my dad's voice in my head all the time sort of saying a bit more restraint wouldn't go amiss. Yes. Bit more restraint. Wouldn't go amiss. Yes. 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 pics and I don't want to stop. And I'd like to access your members area and spend in your shop. These are the kinds of comments people will say about your website if you build it with Squarespace. Just visit squarespace.com slash Buxton for a free trial.

And when you're ready to launch, because you will want to launch, use the offer code Buxton to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So put the smile of success on your face with Squarespace! Yes. Continue. hey welcome back podcats that was casuo ishiguro talking to me there that was certainly one of the highlights of last year for me i'm very grateful to him and to Josh Smith for all his help arranging the interview. Much appreciated. There's a few links in the description of the podcast

related to some of the things we spoke about, linked to the new book, Clara and the Sun, which I really recommend. He's such a technically excellent writer, as well as being someone who really knows how to tell a story engagingly while dealing with all these big themes some of which we spoke about there there's also a link to those remains of the day deleted scenes Anthony Hopkins crying on the pier watch Watch out! Hope I didn't go too hard on the dead dad chat in this episode.

Probably I did. Well, anyway, tread carefully if you're in that boat watching that deleted scene. Link to the audiobook of The Three-Body Problem, which I really did enjoy. But having said that, I haven't actually... It's a trilogy. I haven't actually got round to checking out the other two parts of the trilogy. So how much did I really enjoy it?

I don't know. I mean, that actually makes me think that I should go back and continue. It's just that I'm up for something a little lighter to sustain me through the cold times. Speaking of which, in case you haven't seen it, I really recommend on Netflix, Pretend It's a series of seven half-hour programmes, conversations between Martin Scorsese, who presents the series, and the American writer and humorist, Fran Leibowitz. listening to Fran Leibowitz, who's very funny, acerbic, New Yorker, now I think age 70. And if you've never read her stuff before, she's, I suppose, a kind of proto-David Sedaris, is how I would describe her. A very particular kind of dry American wit. A lot of amusing complaining about other people and certain aspects of the modern world,

but all offset by a great deal of self-awareness and self-deprecating humour. And it cuts between conversations she has sat at a table with Scorsese and members of the film crew in a kind of swanky private members club somewhere in Manhattan. And then there's a few clips of her doing live shows where she's being interviewed by people like Alec Baldwin and Spike Lee at one point. There's a few clips from a live conversation she did with the late writer Toni Morrison, who was a great friend of hers. And to illustrate various topics that she talks about, they're vaguely themed by subject each episode. There's lots of great bits of archive that Scorsese has dug up. Oh, I loved it. Felt sad when it finished, but now I'm in the nice position of being able to go back and explore her stuff more because I didn't really know anything about Fran Lebowitz before watching this series, Pretend It's a City. One of the fun things about it is just watching and listening to Martin Scorsese dying

with laughter at almost everything she says. He can't believe how funny she is and he's kind of rocking back and forth and slapping his thigh and his face is crinkling up with delight at all of Fran Liebowitz's utterances. And it's very infectious. I recommend it. It's been a nice antidote to the terror which I blazed through with my wife and my eldest son a couple of weeks back. If you haven't seen the Terror, it's based on a naval expedition to the Arctic

in the mid-19th century. I forget the names of the people involved, but one of the boats was called the Terror, and they disappeared. No one ever figured out what happened to them. They were up looking for the Northwest Passage to propagate trading routes for the Empire, and something bad happened to them. And this series speculates as to what that might have been in a kind of mad, slightly fantastical way.

And it's good. Great acting, great cast, including Jared Harris. I just get the feeling whenever Jared Harris turns up these days that people are going to start dying in really unpleasant ways. people are going to start dying in really unpleasant ways. And so it is with the terror. And coming from the Arctic wastes, it was very nice to climb into a lovely, warm Netflix bath with Martin Scorsese and Fran Lebowitz. It's a nice image. Thanks, Buckles, you're welcome.

Rosie! Let's head home oh yes, just before I say my thank yous I put a link to the Marie Curie Cancer Charity in the description of the podcast and once again I would encourage you if you are able to

to donate to them to support the work they do, they rely are able to, to donate to them to support the work they do. They rely so heavily on donations to support people who are affected one way or another by cancer. And if you're able to donate, that would be very much appreciated. Thank you very much to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his production support on this episode. Thanks to Matt Lamont, Primary Conversation Editor. Thank you so much for all your hard work, Matt. Thanks to Helen Green for her podcast artwork.

Helen is in the process of designing the cover for the paperback edition of my book, Ramble Book, which will be out in a few months. She's done a really nice design. I'm excited. I want to get it made into posters, which perhaps I would sell at some of my live shows this year. Who knows? Oh, speaking of selling things, wow, this is a long outro now. long outro now in a few weeks in mid-april i am planning to do an online auction or rather the auction will be on ebay i guess my ebay i'm trying to figure out all the technicals i've never done anything like this before but basically i want to auction off a load of my memorabilia accumulated over the years. Stuff from Adam and Joe show days and hot fuzz bits and pieces and Radiohead and things like that.

My plan is to auction it off and donate the proceeds to Medecins Sans Frontières, another excellent organisation who provide medical assistance for people in regions of the world affected by wars and disasters. But my idea was that I would do an online show on Zoom or whatever in which I would talk about some of the items up for auction and tell stories about them,

show a few clips, that kind of thing. Anyway, I'll let you know more obviously nearer the time. But why am I mentioning it now? Oh, I know, because I might start doing some prep for it in the next week or two, getting it all together and trying to sort out the logistical aspects of it,

which might mean that the next podcast episode is delayed a little bit, won't appear next weekend. Maybe it will. Who knows? I'm just giving myself that option in case nothing appears next weekend and you're thinking, what's wrong with buckles? that'll be why okay I hope very much that you're doing alright out there

wherever you are I gift you a sonic hug and I ask you to bear in mind that whether it can be reproduced by an algorithm or not, I love you. Bye! Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Please like and subscribe. Give me a big smile and a thumbs up. Nice like a pat with me thumbs up. Give me a big smile and a thumbs up.

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