Fuchsia Dunlop: Chinese Cuisine, Culture, History, Philosophy, knife skills, texture and mouthfeel | Podcast

Fuchsia Dunlop is a cook and food writer specialising in Chinese cuisine. She was the first Westerner to train as a chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, and has spent much of the last two decades exploring China and its food.

In her latest book, Invitation to a Banquet, Fuchsia explores the history, philosophy and techniques of China's rich and ancient culinary culture. Each chapter examines a classic dish, from mapo tofu to Dongpo pork, knife-scraped noodles to braised pomelo pith, to reveal a singular aspect of Chinese gastronomy, whether it's the importance of the soybean, the lure of exotic ingredients or the history of Buddhist vegetarian cuisine. Her Instagram is here.


In this podcast episode, Fuchsia joins host Ben to dive deep into the history, culture and techniques behind Chinese cuisine. From the ancient origins of steaming to the finer points of knife skills and texture, Fuchsia provides fascinating insights into what makes Chinese food so unique.  We talk about our origin food dishes:


“there's one dish that is very dear to me that sort of expresses partly why I fell in love with Sichuanese food. And that's fish fragrant aubergine or eggplant. I think when I went to live in Sichuan in 1994, what was so impressive was that the local food was unlike anything I'd had in England. It was all very fresh and healthy and all these seasonal vegetables and amazing flavors. That's the thing about Sichuanese cuisine that it's all about the art of mixing flavors. So this particular dish for me just represents the sort of-- I mean, it's made with pickled red chilies, ginger, garlic, spring onion, and a bit of sweet and sour. Then you have the sumptuous kind of golden butter-ness of the aubergines. So it's a really homely dish with cheap ingredients and it's sensational. Sichuan everyone thinks [numbing and hot], lots of chilli and Sichuan pepper. But actually, it has this kind of melodious heat with a hint of sweetness and it's just conjuring up this complex flavor from a few limited palette of seasonings. I think that's one of the things that I fell in love with Sichuanese food”


Fuchsia debunks common myths and misperceptions about Chinese food in the West, from the idea that it's unhealthy to the notion that exotic ingredients are eaten only out of poverty. She traces how historical circumstances led Chinese cuisine to be seen as cheap and lowbrow in the West compared to French or Japanese food.

Delving into the cultural exchange around food, Fuchsia offers a nuanced take on debates over cultural appropriation and argues that an openness to different cultures can be "life enhancing." She shares colorful anecdotes from her research and travel in China that bring dishes like Pomelo Pith and Shanghainese "Western food" to life.

We chat about:

  • Steaming and its importance as a cooking technique.

  • The importance of bland food, and how my mother needs to eat rice regularly

  • How to understand mouthfeel and the joy of texture in Chinese cuisine

  • Knife skills and the skills of the wok

  • Fuchsia’s writing process 

On mouthfeel and texture:

“if you want to be able to experience it all and to eat on a kind of equal basis of appreciation with Chinese friends, then you really need to open your mind and palate to texture because it's so important. But the interesting thing is-- because I've written about this and talked about it a lot because I find it fascinating. It's also really funny because so many of the words we use in English to describe these textures sound really disgusting.”

Listen in the player above or on your favourite podcast player.

PODCAST INFO

Transcript (only lightly edited)

Ben: Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Fuchsia Dunlop. Fuchsia has a new book out, Invitation to a Banquet. Fuchsia is one of the most extraordinary writers on Chinese cuisine and culture I know. You'll understand more about Chinese culture from her book than I think almost any other book on China. Welcome.


Fuchsia (00:00:18):

Hi. Very good to be here.


Ben (00:00:21):

So what would be your origin food story or recipe, the dish that explains a part of the story of your life? I'll tell you mine first so you can have a little think. So for me, it's probably chicken rice, or it's sometimes called Hainanese chicken rice. The dish was probably adapted from a poached chicken dish in Hainan, a kind of wenchang chicken because in Hainan at the time, they didn't have what we think of as chicken rice. And the immigrant diaspora from a hundred over years ago went to Southeast Asia, Malaysia, Singapore, where my parents come from. My father is from Malaysia, my mom is from Singapore, and they met in London. Now, this is the dish we now cook as chicken rice and it has traveled. We still use poached chicken, although we can do it with steamed chickens as well.


My mother, particularly when we started eating the dish really likes to use a corn-fed chicken, so it's a different kind of chicken adapted to how we are today. It appeals to us because there's kind of no food wasted, you have the nose to tell aspects. You have a wonderful broth as well as the rice and the chicken. We'd eat with growing up probably almost once a week on a kind of Sunday as often a substitute for the traditional Sunday roast. So that was kind of our way of being in London and having a connection to where we're from. So what would your origin food dish be?


Fuchsia (00:01:51):

Well, can it be a Chinese origin dish?



Ben (00:01:53):

Yeah.


Fuchsia (00:01:55):

I've been interested in food since I was born practically and I've been very keen on cooking since I was a child. But there's one dish that is very dear to me that sort of expresses partly why I fell in love with Sichuanese food. And that's fish fragrant aubergine or eggplant. I think when I went to live in Sichuan in 1994, what was so impressive was that the local food was unlike anything I'd had in England. It was all very fresh and healthy and all these seasonal vegetables and amazing flavors. That's the thing about Sichuanese cuisine that it's all about the art of mixing flavors. So this particular dish for me just represents the sort of-- I mean, it's made with pickled red chilies, ginger, garlic, spring onion, and a bit of sweet and sour. Then you have the sumptuous kind of golden butter-ness of the aubergines. So it's a really homely dish with cheap ingredients and it's sensational. Sichuan everyone thinks [numbing and hot], lots of chili and Sichuan pepper. But actually, it has this kind of melodious heat with a hint of sweetness and it's just conjuring up this complex flavor from a few limited palette of seasonings. I think that's one of the things that I fell in love with Sichuanese food


Ben (00:03:19):

That reflects on a couple of things in your book and actually a lot of your work. So one is the kind of vegetable heavy nature of actually a lot of Chinese cuisine because there's a lot of people who think of the banquets and maybe the roast meats which came from Cantonese cooking over here, but actually a lot of it is vegetable heavy. The other thing I guess is that you tend not to eat a single dish in isolation. You'll always have a comparison dish like some sort of rice or noodles or something like that. So when you eat your dish, what would you pair it with? Are you generally vegetable heavy in terms of how you're thinking about food?


Fuchsia (00:04:01):

Well, yes, that dish you would always have with something else and rice. So because it's a vegetable, you'd probably have something with protein in it. So maybe some tofu or some chicken; maybe something like you could have dry fried chicken could be quite nice, a different sort of texture and a different sort of heat, and plain steamed rice. But yeah, that's another thing. There are many slightly weird and crazy western stereotypes about Chinese food. The most baffling of all is this idea that Chinese food is unhealthy. Of course this derived from the fact that for most westerners for a very long time, Chinese food was kind of take away food. It was tremendously popular, but mainly fried, deep fried, stir fried; not very many vegetables or soups.


Actually, as I'm sure you know very well, there is no other culture probably that puts as much emphasis on the link between diet and health; the inseparable link between diet and health as the Chinese. This has been going on for 2000 years and more. So yes, one thing that I'm always terribly keen to emphasize in my writing is that Chinese food is not only delicious, but it's really feel good food. If you know how to cook simple home dishes and how to assemble a menu, it's both satisfying to the senses and really balanced, and that's what it's all about. So yes, like everyone these days, I'm very aware of the terrible environmental disaster that we are facing and the need to eat much less meat and dairy foods and try to put the emphasis on vegetables. I think that Chinese cuisine is just a treasure house of inspirations for anybody who's looking to reduce the amount of meat in their diet. And certainly with me, I can't really live without vegetables. I crave the simple blanched or stir fried leafy greens that are part of almost every Chinese meal. I actually feel quite uncomfortable if a day or two goes by without having lots of vegetables.


Ben (00:06:28):

Well, my mom feels really uncomfortable if she goes a few days without eating rice. And actually, that's quite true of a lot of my family back in Asia. Also the link of health and diet, my mom has slowly persuaded me over the years or over this link. She would always say, "You've got to eat such and such a food. You are too hot, you are too cold." And I'm like, "Having grown in the western side tradition, that's kind of rubbish." And now particularly when I have a cold or something like that, my mom's congee rice porridge, soupy rice type of dishes-- It's like, "Oh, that is exactly what I crave and I feel better." The other element, I guess, when I explain to a lot my friends who grew up here riffing on a couple of your earlier things is, soupy rice is often very bland. It doesn't have to be, you can have toppings. But this blandness as a contrast is really important. So like having rice at the end of the meals as well as your vegetables. That's something they don't quite get.


Then the other thing is often-- I guess the translation is mouthfeel; a kind of texture. So my mom and I like knuckles and bones and we have all of these kind of gloopy bits and often some dishes, the joy isn't in the flavor. It might be kind of very bland to certain palates, but the joy is kind of in the mouthfeel and that combination I still find is something that isn't so well understood. Did it take you a while to appreciate that? I guess a lot of the recipes when you look at them in the original talk about mouthfeel or the kind of mouthfeel that you should be expecting in a recipe.

Fuchsia (00:08:03):

Yeah, it certainly took me a long time because I think like most westerners, I grew up with a relatively limited range of textures in my food. So crisp and soft and crunchy. But not slithery and bouncy and with a high grapple factor, as my father always says; the sort of very intricate parts like chicken's feet and so on. So I was brought up to be very polite and to eat everything that I was given. So when I went to China, I did that. I would eat out with Chinese friends and there would be goose intestines for the hot pot or tripe and so on. For a long time, probably few years, I would eat these things politely but without really any pleasure. And I would just kind of think, "What's the point?"


Then I don't know what happened. I guess it was just through exposure and through eating with lots of enthusiastic Chinese people. But I have come to really appreciate this extra dimension of gastronomy and I love it. I just found that I was ordering slithery things myself and now I think the texture and the-- I mean, I think Chinese palates really appreciate complexity of texture. So things that are very soft, but then a little bit crunchy, or a very soft lion's head meatball with crispy water chestnut in it, or a goose intestine which is so smooth and slippery and then it's a bit resistant to the bite in the end. So I now really enjoy these kind of playful, flirtatious, unexpected contrasting textures. I do think that for foreigners, if you want to really appreciate Chinese food, this incredible cuisine, you don't have to appreciate texture because there are so many other delicious dishes that don't require it.


But if you want to be able to experience it all and to eat on a kind of equal basis of appreciation with Chinese friends, then you really need to open your mind and palate to texture because it's so important. But the interesting thing is-- because I've written about this and talked about it a lot because I find it fascinating. It's also really funny because so many of the words we use in English to describe these textures sound really disgusting. So it's kind of a fun, slightly unexpected, uncomfortable subject. But I found that I've had quite a lot of messages from readers who have said that after reading the chapter in the previous book about Shark's Fin and Sichuan and Pepper, about texture and mouthfeel that something kind of clicked. For the first time, they actually kind of realized that you could eat certain ingredients mainly for the pleasure of texture, like jellyfish. I mean, it has no flavor.


So once you've kind of opened your mind merely to the possibility, then you can start to sort of play with it. I've done some events, I've done some talks where I've taken along a whole load of pig's ear strips or dog's tongues and talked about texture, then got everyone to taste them. It's just a really interesting experience for most westerners because it is just trying to eat these things with a different mindset; to put away all your prejudices and the deeply ingrained idea that there's no point in eating them because there's no meat. And just try to explore the texture in a sensory way, and people find it really fun.


Ben (00:11:49):

Yeah. It struck me there was a couple of things there on reading your previous work and this one, and one was the history of it. So even within British food, I guess it was a nose to tell eating, but you would've eaten these textural foods more often, although more highly flavored. I wonder whether it's something to do with the stories you are told around it; the kind of almost cultural value that you are also eating at it, or like you say, your mind is open to it. I remember reading-- I never tasted it-- but Heston Blumenthal, who's a famous British chef who does kind of some molecular gastro meat type recipes as well. He kind of did a deconstructed fish and chips where he sprayed the smell of salt because there's an adage within British food that it always tastes better at the seaside.


I think a lot of that is to do with the experience and the stories that you had and things that you're growing up. And I wonder with texture whether it's the same. So when you're open to the story and you've heard the really long tradition about why we would be interested in texture and you are attuned to it, it kind of opens up another form of appreciation for it which if you don't have that story or the way that sits in that. One of the great things I found in reading your book is just the long history of so many of the stories about where the techniques come from, where the recipes come from. And some of them are sort of newer stories, they don't always stretch back 2000 years. They might stretch back earlier. I was wondering how conscious you are about when you eat something about its history and its food and how much that is part of the pleasure that people get.


Fuchsia (00:13:29):

I think it is part of the pleasure. Specifically, so many Chinese dishes have little stories about them and legends, about emperors and scholars and servants and how the dish was invented. Some of them are clearly just made up for fun, they're not really historical. But they still are part of the character of a dish. More importantly, yes, I think it is. Like Mrs. Song's fish soup, fish stew-- Song’s [ ] — which is the one of the dishes that I write about in the book. That is a dish that goes back to the 12th or 13th century to the Song Dynasty. There's written mention of it in historic records and it's rather a fantastic feeling that there's this kind of continuity.


But I think more than anything, for me it is just sort of recognizing that this is a very great gastronomic culture in which food has been thought about and written about and considered in all kinds of ways for more than 2000 years. I mean, in early Chinese literature, you get these mouthwatering descriptions of food. This goes on through history and food was something that was worthy of consideration and literature. Also, of course it was the basis of health and ritual. I think once you understand that about China, then it completely blows out of the water this kind of another silly western stereotype that in some ways it's a poverty cuisine. There's this traditional Western assumption that the reason you would eat a dog's tongue is because you are desperately poor.


But things like you dog's feet are banquet delicacies. Yes, poor Chinese peasants would eat things in times of famine and they would eat wild plants, and like all farmers everywhere, they would try and make the most of an animal they killed. But rich and powerful people wanted to eat interesting, exotic, unexpected delicacies for fun. There's this amazing description of a banquet in the 18th century, which I've mentioned several times in Zhangzhou, and one of the dishes served was a bear's paw surrounded by the tongues of crucian carp. This is a really extravagant dish.


Ben (00:16:11):

I think that's one of the things I got through the book. And I wonder whether the mouthfeel texture element as part of that is this thread of I guess, rarity or also the skill of something that you have to cook. So you look at this and go, "Oh, what can we do with this to make it really great to eat, even if it seems like a slightly strange ingredient?" There's one story which was in your book which a friend had recounted to you, which actually I remember because it was a recounted to me when I was a child. So I think it's probably one of those made up stories. But it was the idea of wanting to eat fish cheeks and fish head. So it was presented to me and they were like, "Wow, we are going to give you the best part of the fish and we’ll serve it as you are an honoured guest because you come back to visit us."


They told me the story about how in the olden days-- I don't know when this was-- you'd have highway robbers of some sort. And if they were to kidnap you, they would actually serve you a fish. If you went for the head or the cheek and you disregarded everything else, you were probably a keeper and it was worth ransoming you. If you went for the fins and around that, you might've been more middle class; you might've been worth keeping or not depending on that. If you went just for the body, there's like well, actually you would just return to the street; have a nice fish and that's it. There was something about the rarity of the cheek, but also it had this lovely sort of soft silky texture as well as being somewhat rare.


So there's kind of this intersection about rarity and exotic, which perhaps I think has been taken a little bit too far. But at least within history it seemed to be intertwined with those stories. Then as a five or six year old being told of these stories gives it a sort of glow, and later on when we're out there it's like, "Oh yeah, you want the whole of this prawn head." Give the little body to one of your western friends, they won't appreciate it. My mom has an actual phrase of-- I think it literally translates as, "They do not know how to eat. So you might as well do that.” I wonder how you feel about that intertwine with the exotic or the techniques that you use and where that is today.


Fuchsia (00:18:28):

What do you mean?


Ben (00:18:29):

Well, I guess that it's part of the appreciation of some of these kind of rare things. It's the stories that we've been told and that within perhaps within Western cuisine, we don't have quite the same emphasis on this sort of rarity or the stories about how this food has come about.


Fuchsia (00:18:49):

Yeah. So I would say that China is a culture that expands the possibilities of the pleasure of eating in all directions. So part of that is through using a whole very complex raft of culinary techniques to transform ingredients into many different textures, colors, this sort of thing. It's also in diversity of ingredients. That's one of the things about China; that it has a huge range of terroirs of geography with different produce. So you have this extraordinary biodiversity, an immense choice of ingredients from tropical rainforests in the South, Siberian forests and deserts in the north. There are so many different things you can eat. And coupled with this intellectual appreciation of the thrill of eating and of the element of surprise and of using food to honor people.


So if you are having a special Chinese dinner, you want to have dishes that will make people go, "Wow," which will excite them and thrill them. This might be some very hyper seasonal ingredient. Maybe it's the new bamboo shoots of the season which are just perfect. Maybe it's some kind of fish that is only around for a couple of months a year, but also exotica, unusual things. So that might be, as you just mentioned, like the cheek of a fish. I mentioned in the book this incredible dish made with multitudes of fish cheeks which I was presented with once. To a certain extent, this is present in western gastronomy. So we have rare and precious things like caviar which was always something very expensive and exotic. Smoked salmon used to be until it was cheap sort of farm stuff.


I think particularly in the West, you have that sort of association actually with wines. So like a rare vintage wine has that kind of cachet. But in China, food has that place. And I think also in China, there's a long history going back to the Song Dynasty, at least of dishes that pretend to be something they're not. So there's a famous Sichuanese banquet dish jidouhua, which is chicken tofu. So you get presented at a banquet with what looks like a cheap street snack, like just silk and tofu in the way that it's made in. But actually, it's a laboriously made kind of curd made from pureed chicken's breast, which is a luxurious ingredient in a fine banquet stalk made from chicken and ham. So it's like a sort of edible joke; a witticism. So that's also part of the thrill.


Then of course, you have the negative aspect which is eating endangered animals. So things like shark's fins and bear's paws, which in the past, fair enough. There weren't that many people who could eat them and they were very rare. But now with this global crisis of biodiversity, we shouldn't go on eating things like this. Some of them are illegal now. There's a Chinese wildlife law which is supposed to ban poaching wild animals, but some of them are perfectly legal like shark’s fins. Unfortunately, China is a real center of wildlife trafficking of rare animal parts for tables and for medicine, for prescriptions.


I'm always very keen to emphasize firstly that this is a very elite minority thing. The vast majority of Chinese people never eat illegal exotica and probably don't eat shark's fin; most of them never in their whole lives. So it's kind of minority thing. Also, I think it's really important to get in proportion. We have many problems with what we eat. Like many European chefs serve eel, which is critically endangered Japanese bluefin tuna. I think that the Chinese have received more opprobrium for eating shark’s fins than these other categories. I think that we should all be facing up to our crimes against the environment. Not to mention actually, the beef industry and its connection with deforestation in the Amazon and terrible pollution and overfishing all over the world. So I think that it's a human problem and not just a Chinese problem. But having said that, I think that this kind of conscious desire to eat rare and illegal things for kicks is the unattractive side of Chinese gastronomy. And I hope that people will-- I've written in the book there are so many other things to eat in China which are exciting, exotic for other reasons. You really don't have to eat these things anymore.



Ben (00:24:06):

Yeah, I agree. I think exotic food is now definitely overrated, and I certainly don't eat anything like shark's fin anymore. But also actually, I don't eat foie gras. Like you say, I try and avoid eel. I'm not sort of dogmatic about it in the sense that if it's served to me already, it's like, "Well, if it's going to go in the bin, then that's even more of a waste.” But certainly, it's a sort of ordering of it. I wanted to pick up on your comment because there's a lot of it in the book on cooking techniques. One of the ones which I'm always astounded that a lot of my western friends have basically never done is steaming. 


This was in university, and I remember passing by with a friend at a market and there was some really beautiful fish. They said, "Oh, I wouldn't know what to do with that." I say, "Oh, that's fine. We'll take it back and we'll steam it. Just couple of chopsticks as a kind of trivet and a plate with some water and we'll be away." They were astounded. It takes about 10 minutes and the whole thing was done, yet most of my friends have essentially never steamed a fish. They might've steamed some vegetables maybe in a microwave, but none of the steaming techniques. I find it's also a very easy technique as well as a quick technique for a lot of foods. I hadn't understood the history of it until reading the book. So I was interested in maybe how you came across steaming and what you think about steaming as a technique today and its history in Chinese cuisine, and what westerners should think about what's the first foods that maybe they should attempt to steam?


Fuchsia (00:25:38):

Yeah. Well, I suppose I find it really fascinating. I remember when I went to the Banpo Museum near Xi'an, which is a Neolithic settlement museum, and this was years ago. I was astounded to find-- among the artifacts in the museum was a pottery steamer from the Neolithic age. So actually, steaming is the most ancient of the really distinctively Chinese cooking methods. Everyone thinks of stir frying in a wok, but that came much later. So the Chinese, like everyone, as soon as they invented pottery, they were boiling, but they were also steaming. No one else was doing this to the extent or at all of the Chinese. One example that someone pointed out to me is Moroccan steam couscous, but that's basically just couscous. In China, you can steam everything.


You can steam a fish, a soup, your staple grains, your noodles. In Shanxi, they steam their oat noodles. You can steam anything really. It's a hugely versatile method. It feels very fresh and healthy. With some things like a fish as you mentioned, a perfect way. You cook it until it's just done and its flesh is still so juicy and kind of lively. You can also steam things for many hours. Like in Sichuan, they have these wonderful dishes where you marinate meat and spices and chili bean paste, and you coat them in crumbs of rice and you steam them, and it has this wonderful sort of comforting texture. I think one thing that's very interesting in China is that nobody really has ovens.


So in China, you went from the very archaic cooking methods with open fires and standing pots in open fires and hanging them over fires to enclosing the fire in a sort of kitchen range with their mouths in the side or the back for putting the fuel in. And then larger openings in the top where you would put your wok and your steamer. There was no oven. I was really surprised when I started researching Chinese food. No one had an oven in their house. Nowadays, western baking is a bit trendy with urbanites and people have some fitted kitchens and stuff. But basically, the oven is not part of a traditional Chinese kitchen. You don't even have an oven in most restaurants. Until recently, you roasted and baked things, you went to specialists. So you might go to a particular bakery or the people making roast ducks and barbecue meat, they would have ovens. If you wanted to eat roasted things, you bought them in from these kind of specialists. 


So I think in many ways, steaming takes the place of the oven in Chinese culture. It's a very economical method. So traditionally, you could do something like you could boil a stew and then steam your grain on the top. So you'd be using only one lot of fuel. It was like a kind of one pot meal, but a two story pot. So I think it's a cooking method that's-- I mean, in the West, when people do steam food, it tends to be as a sort of very consciously, healthy minimalist option. It's not really about gastronomy. But in China, it's also about creating amazing flavors. The interesting thing is also that it's so basic. Of course you can have a nice tower of bamboo steamers, but you don't need a steamer. You can just put a little trivet in your wok and then put a plate on it and put a lid on it, and you have a steamer. Or you can even lay a couple of wooden chopsticks across the base of the wok and balance a plate on that. So you can sort of steam with anything. I suppose back to texture again, that westerners don't terribly like the texture-- Like if you steam a fish, the skin is sort of soft and slippery.


Ben (00:30:03):

Which I love.


Fuchsia (00:30:05):

Yeah, exactly. If you steam a chicken as well, the skin is sort of floppy. Westerners I found don't particularly like this texture at first. People like things to be crisp up. But I can't think of any better way really to cook a fish.

Ben (00:30:22):

And does it have an origin story within Chinese culture as some, "God came down and gave steam in the same way that sort of fire has it." It's a little bit more complicated, is it?


Fuchsia (00:30:33):

I think it was the Yellow Emperor. I did write in the book. I think the Yellow Emperor certainly taught people how to cook cereals and I think he taught them both how to make jook congee and to steam the grains as well. Then there's a very famous poem in the Book of Songs; this really archaic collection of folk songs. I can't remember the name of the pen, but it describes Lord Millet because millet was the original kind of sacred grain before rice. People in the North where Chinese culture sort of coalesced were eating millet. There's this description of how Lord Millet taught people how to grow the grain and to steam it.


Ben (00:31:19):

And actually, mentioning of the soup brings to mind-- So when my father would always go out, when we would eat, he would always order a soup at a Chinese meal. I kind of never really appreciated why. It would just happen and sometimes it was just a very light broth type thing. Even with kind of almost one plate meals, you have something to wash down the meal. But it wasn't really actually until reading your work did I have a full appreciation of that, nor it's history, nor that actually sheer variety-- I mean, I guess you get this with all Chinese cuisines that when you look into it, the sheer variety is kind of mind boggling. But yeah, I'd be interested in how you think about soups today. Are they as important as they've ever been in Chinese cuisine, and what is it maybe that here in the west we haven't appreciated about the soup part of the meal?


Fuchsia (00:32:10):

Yeah. Well, in China, there are two kinds of soup, really; two broad categories; gong and tongue. The gong is like a stew soup. So it's where you have a pot full of liquid and you have lots of food usually cut into slivers floating around in it. This is a very interesting dish because it's really the original Chinese dish to go with your rice, and it was a sacred dish. It was offered in sacrifice to the gods. This gong, this soupy stew was used as a metaphor for the art of government. So ancient writers and philosophers talked about creating harmonious flavors in the gong using seasonings. And what they were really talking about was the art of government and balancing different interests. So this gong soup just has this incredible significance and it goes back to the sort of dawn of Chinese civilization.

Then the tongue is usually a lighter broth in which bits of food float. In these kind of soups, often the actual ingredients are less important than the liquid. I think a particular example is the Cantonese soups. So the Cantonese are brilliant at making these tonic soups with meat or poultry and different herbs and vegetables tailored often to the season. With these soups, you basically just eat the broth. You strain it off and it's all full of the chi, the life force, the nourishment of the ingredients. You might eat the ingredients, but they're quite exhausted, they're not tasty. The point is the liquid. I think that soup is an absolutely integral part of almost every Chinese meal. The equivalent of our English phrase, "Meat and two veg" as a sort of example of what a meal is. In China, [Chinese] which means four dishes and a soup. To a Chinese palate, you need a soup because it refreshes the palate. It's just part of the comfort of the meal.  So a meal without soup is a bit dry, it's a bit incomplete. 


So different parts of China, the soup maybe had first like Cantonese often have it first. In Sichuan, you have it last. Sometimes you can just have it on the side of the meal. But Chinese people really need soup in a way that westerners don't. So it's quite interesting. If you go to a dumpling restaurant in Beijing, so you can have your boiled jiaozi dumplings with your dip of soy sauce, chilies, whatever. But they usually have a big samovar full of meon pong, which is like the noodle cooking water because most people want to have a sort of broth with their meal. This is something that Westerners completely don't get.


I think it's probably because firstly, soups are not essential to a Western meal. The soups that we favor tend to be thicker blended soups, so they're more full-bodied. Many Cantonese restaurants in London-- not so much now-- they used to always have these wonderful wei tang, the soup of the day; these tonic soups I was talking about. Westerners would never order them. They would always order the crab and sweet corn soup. I wonder whether people think westerners think, "They're just not good value. It's just like water, it's just liquid. What's the point? It's somehow not satisfying." But it's a different sort of satisfaction. It's the satisfaction of comfort and of rinsing the palate and so on. And certainly since my own palate became kind of sinusized, I really love soup and I often make soup. If I'm making dandan noodles for example, I often have a bowl full of the noodle broth because the dandan is very spicy and very dry. Then you have this little broth with it and it's just comforting.


Ben (00:36:28):

Yeah, I completely agree. In fact, you had a passage in the book where you make kind of such a soup for your Chinese friends and they really appreciate it. I remember once going through a lot of effort to making a kind of soup like that for some of my western friends, and they really didn't get it. They thought the rest of the meal is-- And actually, I spent more time on the soup and actually probably more money than anything else. I had once I think, an Italian consummate type thing which was the closest that I'd had it where the soup was the star, but it was certainly not the same way. I wonder with that in restaurants here in London, we have a slightly similar issue with vegetables.


So you might have a really beautiful Chinese broccoli, a kailan or a thing. It's almost expensive, or it is as expensive as the meat dish because it's treated, it's cooked as well-- if not better, and it's considered sort of equal importance. Yet I know a lot of my friends are kind of like, "Why is that one so much more expensive? Let's just order another roast meat dish. Why not?" I said, "Well, that's not going to give you what you would just want to eat. Just meat and maybe a bit of your rice." So there's kind of that interesting thing, and I think it's perhaps similar with the soup. You don't feel you get value or maybe your mind is not attuned to the same way of it.


I think about the vegetables as a segue also. I hadn't fully understood until I read your book, some of the, I guess what I'd call the culture wars involved with this. I'm thinking about knife skills and the small slither food that you often get in Chinese cooking. I hadn't appreciated that. I could see how back in the day there was a sort of propaganda about, "You're not getting value for money. You don't understand what you're eating. This is just small food and they're trying to cheat you,” in that kind of propaganda war without realizing, "Well, if you're going to eat with chopsticks, the beauty of knife skills, how they evenly cooked." I remember sort of thinking, "Oh, I'm just going to really speed through. My knife skills are only average." It was like, "Oh, this is really much harder to cook and much less satisfactory. I now know why they all do it within that." So I was just interested in that what you feel about that kind of cultural part of it and the understanding maybe wrapping in the knife skills and that misunderstanding and how much of it, I guess was an almost not quite purposeful cultural war, but some of that. I guess some of that we have a legacy of that today. There's some things we have that are referred to sort of the cheap food where we had with MSG, vegetables and all of that. It seems to be maybe an ongoing kind of cultural exchange type of thing going on.


Fuchsia (00:39:15):

Yeah. Well, I think just to pick up on your point about vegetables. I think if you order vegetables in an English restaurant for example, they're usually these tiny apologetic little dishes on the side. But as you said, like a Chinese dish of vegetables, it's a proper dish. It's quite a lot of it and it's part of the balance of a meal. I think that's one thing I'm always keen to talk about. Again, this thing about Chinese food being about health and balance. That a Chinese meal is not really complete if you only have this sort of sexy, tasty, exciting dishes. You always need the neutral, the pale, the understated to balance them and to make a nice meal and to make you feel good afterwards because that's the point of eating as well as pleasure. It's sad really that people don't appreciate this dimension.


But again, I think it's about information and education because once you understand the purpose of it, then it becomes very important. The thing about food being cut in small pieces. So the Chinese largely have the habit of cutting food into small pieces for about 2000 years since the Han Dynasty. For that reason, all the cutting is in the kitchen. So the kitchen was a place where you had violence and knives and slaughter and chopping. And at table, it was very civilized. You didn't have clashing metal, you had your nice delicate chopsticks, and you would eat food that was already cut for consumption, or it was soft enough to be picked up with chopsticks. The habit of eating food cut into small pieces and the habit of eating with chopsticks have grown up together. Obviously, they're completely connected because you can't really eat a lamb with chopsticks very easily. I mean, it's better to have it cut up in small pieces.


When I was doing research for this book-- So I was reading some of the early accounts by Europeans of their first encounters with Chinese food, and a lot of them would say things like, "All the food was cut into very small pieces and I had no idea what I was eating." And they didn't because you see a sliver of something, "What is it? Is it chicken? Is it pork? What is it?" So it just struck me that, as you say, it kind of fed into all kinds of western suspicions about Chinese food because there was this idea that the Chinese, who as we know are very adventurous eaters and eat lots of exciting ingredients, that they were eating all this terrifying exotica and that if you went for a meal in San Francisco's Chinatown, maybe they would serve you rat or snake and you wouldn't know it because they would chop it up.


So there was this kind of on one hand, a great affection for Chinese food and all these chop suey and those early dishes. But also this kind of suspicion of the Chinese as being very other, very different eating habits. And I think the fact that the food was not recognizable like an English roast chicken played into people’s anxieties about it. Of course, nobody would give you a snake if you were paying for chicken because snake is much more expensive. I think also just in terms of character, that in the West, having great hunks of meat and roast turkeys and all bits of beef is seen as very macho and manly. So it's the bloke cooking on a barbecue or the male head of the household carving up a large chunk of meat at the table.


So by contrast, maybe Chinese food looks a bit kind of effeminate when it's all very delicate and cut up. But from a Chinese point of view, actually, it's rather different because eating great hunks of meat was things that the uncivilized barbarians beyond the Great Wall did. To be Chinese was to eat food that had been transformed by cooking, by knife skills into something that was very civilized and elegant. So the hulk hulking great roast actually seems a bit kind of archaic to Chinese eyes. So it's not that either is right or wrong, but I think it's really interesting to just consider how perceptions are different and how these enabled and encouraged prejudice.


Ben (00:43:49):

You have that phrase in your book [ ]  which I guess roughly translates as simple and monotonous.


Fuchsia (00:43:56):

Oh yeah. So many Chinese people will dismiss the cooking of the entire Western world as [Chinese], very monotonous, very simple. It's like almost a catchphrase. So many Chinese people will just say, "Oh, you just eat hamburgers and sandwiches, don't you?" It's obviously hilarious for me because I know that also lots of westerners think that Chinese people just eat chicken's feet, whatever it is.


Ben (00:44:22):

You talk about the sort of blending of ingredients and all of this. One of the most extraordinary stories you recount-- and I hadn't realized this was a thing-- was around Pomelo Pith. Did you know about this from a while back? How did that story raise, and what's so great about Pomelo pith? You kind of think, "Okay, well that's an ingredient which goes straight in the bin," but actually not.


Fuchsia (00:44:45):

Yeah. So pomelo-- I know lots of British people don't seem to even know what it is, but it's like a huge kind of citrus fruit with a slightly bitter taste. So the Cantonese-- I think only the Cantonese they use the pith, the white cottony pretty tasteless pith of this fruit, which is very thick to make a dish. The first time I had it was with a Cantonese friend of mine, Rose, who I actually wrote a whole chapter about in my previous book. She took me to a restaurant. We had this completely delicious dish and it was these kind of domes of something lovely and soft and mashy and a gorgeous sort of really opulent gravy scattered with shrimp eggs. It was so delicious. It turned out it was pomelo pith. It's a real Cantonese thing. [Chinese], that's Mandarin pronunciation by the way. So what they do is they peel or burn off the thin, shiny outer layer of the fruit. They breed special pomelos which don't have much actual fruit. Then the pith is tasteless, it's a bit bitter. So they soak it for several days, they change the water. It's a long process. Then they cook it in a fabulous broth made with meat and seafood for hours. And eventually, you get this very tasty and satisfying dish.


What is so fascinating for me about this is how the Chinese are so creative with cooking. It's this very analytical approach. I wrote about this in the book that I think that in most cultures, people will ask themselves the question, "Is this edible? Is this food edible? Is this sort of thing edible?" And for the Chinese, I think the question is slightly different. It's like, "How can I make this edible? What is this plant or this animal part? What does it have going for it and what's wrong with it? Can we bring out these qualities and modify or suppress the deficiencies?" This is what they do. 


So you have all these ingredients like pomelo pith, which is so unpromising. Everyone else just puts it in the bin. Yet, with a bit of imagination and technique, you have a fantastic dish. I find this so inspiring and I think everyone should look to the Chinese for creativity partly because it's fun and it's dazzling and it's delicious. But also it's so resourceful, and at a time when we are feeling all these environmental constraints and we have to eat more creatively. Some chefs in the west are trying to think of ways to eat insects and so on. The Chinese are way ahead. There are so many ingredients. But not just that, just this creative approach to making delicious things out of anything.


Ben (00:48:09):

Yeah. One of the principles or ideas I got from reading your book is that you kind of approach all ingredients like that so you can have something which more or less seems perfect; so don't do that much with it to bring out its essence. So you have something like pomelo pith, which you're going to have to do a lot with and with that idea that we're going to get the most of what we have. Actually, all of those sets of techniques come through from something where you likely get the sort of soul or the essence of the food because that's where it is, to something where you have to cook it, source it, technique over and over to really get the most of it. I found that the way you described that and put in your writing was really wonderful.


Then I picked up, which I'd heard earlier as well, the famed Catalan Spanish chef, Ferran Adria, which is probably considered one of the best Western chefs over the last few decades. His comments about how he thought that actually Mao was one of the most influential figures in food history because of how he sent so many chefs or so many people to work in the fields and how that changed Chinese cuisine, at least in the more modern era. So I was kind of interested in how you thought that perhaps Mao was an influence and maybe how Chinese cuisine in the last 50, 10 or 20 years has sort of developed post that era.


Fuchsia (00:49:35):

The thing is that the Chinese were pioneers of so many things that are now extremely interesting or crazies in the West. So things like the obsession with terroir, with the origin of ingredients, with seasons-- 2000 years in China, making imitation meat foods out of plants goes back to the 10th century in China, at least. Your restaurants go back six centuries before Paris. There was a sort of sophisticated restaurant scene in Hangzhou in the Jiangnan region. So China is this absolute treasure house of gastronomical thinking, ideas about health, cooking techniques. It's tragically neglected in the west. This is, I think largely for historical reasons because China was pretty much turning itself upside down. It was closed, so a lot of the 20th century there was this big period when China was turning in on itself and wars and revolutions and invasions and Cultural Revolution, and emerging at the end of it being a sort of quite secluded nation, quite poor, et cetera.


So for that reason, I think it's just people-- as Ferran Adria said so memorably. It's just that the outside world has just not really been aware of what China has to offer. And it's still the case that Chinese-- I mean, I think it's changing, frankly. But it's still the case that Chinese food by and large is immensely popular all over the world, but it's mostly seen as quite cheap and lowbrow and not terribly healthy. I think most people or a lot of people would understand why you would perhaps sometimes spend a lot of money on Japanese food or Spanish food or French food, but they don't really see Chinese cuisine as being a sort of big, hitting serious cuisine, which is completely mad. I think this is just historical reasons. It is actually partly what motivates me to write because considering how interesting the subject is, it's not been very much reflected in western food writing. There are some very good books, but there's not many compared with the scale of the country and the cuisine.


Ben (00:52:14):

Yes. I was reading I think something you'd written earlier about how hard it was to get your first book published because there wasn't that much interest from standard publishers. It's like, "Oh, why would we want a book on that?" Which kind of reflects it. I had a question in from a listener which could have riff on that, which is again, around all of this cultural appreciation, cultural appropriation dialogue which is happening in the media. One of my comments is particularly around food, there has always been this exchange. So the chili pepper started off in the Americas and food has always traveled, is this way of cultural dialogue. It's a little bit why my origin dish is where it is. My mom's dish travels wherever my mom is, so it's always my mom's cooking wherever she is. That's the sort of a unique thing I think around food.


It's also interesting it's kind of reflected a little bit in how laws have been developed in the sense that, rightly or wrongly you can have copyright for stories and films and you have patents for ideas and technology. But recipes have actually always been considered something which is kind of like a public good. We exchange it because it's always changing because as often you can't really say, "Well, where is that whole source thing from where a recipe comes about?" A little bit like chicken rice. It kind of developed across a lot of people at a lot of time because of that. So within that and where some of this dialogue has gone, do you have any thoughts about how we can best understand cultural exchange particularly around food and some of the dialogue around appreciation versus appropriation?


Fuchsia (00:53:58):

Well, the first thing to say is that basically all food is fusion food. Human beings have been exchanging ingredients and techniques and ideas for ages.


Ben (00:54:12):

Thousands of years.


Fuchsia (00:54:12):

In China, the food of North China, so many ingredients. To mention just a couple like sheep meat and wheat and flour milling technology, which is basically the basis of Northern Chinese food, and big garlic all came in along the Silk Road from the western lands in ancient times. In more modern times, the chili-- you can't imagine Sichuanese food without the chili. So it's all fusion. And I think that exchange and adaptation is a kind of human inevitability. But the whole debate about cultural appropriation is very much about-- I think most people don't really think that you shouldn't make a dish from another culture. It's about treating other cultures with respect, and it's about having fair representation in the media, in the restaurant industry.


So this is why it has struck such a raw nerve, this unfairness. Like, "Why do you only have white people writing about everything in the media?" There were all these controversies in New York about-- There was one restaurant that was opened by someone who was not Chinese, doing a Chinese restaurant and saying that it was going to be healthy Chinese food, and implying that ordinary Chinese food was not very healthy. So I mean, that was just offensive to Chinese people, understandably. So I think that the issues raised by the whole furore about cultural appropriation are very legitimate, and I think that societies are going some way to address this. You're definitely seeing greater diversity in the cookbooks published and in the food writing world, for example.


But I think for most people the solution to this is not that you should only stay in your own lane. Of course, it doesn't really make any sense anyway because just for example, with Chinese food, it's like you could say, "Well, you have to be Chinese to write about Chinese food." But then is it okay if you are a Cantonese British writing about Sichuan food? Then how would you write a book about the whole of Chinese food because you can't do it. I think also the whole notion of who owns culture and what is authentic, once you start examining it under a microscope, it's really complicated. So I think it's about honest discussion of fairness and respect really.


Ben (00:56:57):

One of my favorite chapters was actually the one where-- I think we've commented on it. But when I go back to Asia, a lot of Asians are quite dismissive about the whole of western food as it is, vice versa. But the Shanghainese restaurant which does its own versions of things like Russian soup and that I hadn't appreciated that was such a long history of it, which actually makes complete sense when you think about it. Is that a restaurant you go back to much in Shanghai? Would you like to tell a little bit of its story?


Fuchsia (00:57:28):

…It was originally a German restaurant, and da which means big. Big cuisine was the word at the time late 19th, early 20th century for Western food. So it's called the DeDa Western food restaurant. It's in Shanghai and I can't remember exactly when it was founded. But I think it was just before 1900 or something. It was founded by a German at a time when Shanghai was full of foreigners and it was these foreign concessions and so on; very international. The really interesting thing about it is that it kind of survived the Cultural Revolution. And very early on, it was taken over by a Chinese businessman.


If you go there now, of course all the staffs are Chinese and you have Chinese chefs in the kitchen who specialize in Western food. It serves this really interestingly curated Chinese menu of Western food. So the signature dishes are like you mentioned, the louson tongue which sounds like Russian soup. It's the local version of borscht which is made with cabbage and potato and beef and not beetroot, which they don't really have there. Then they also do things like a kind of local version of a schnitzel, but made with pork not veal, and served with la jangyo which means hot soy sauce, but which is a local version of Worcester sauce. Then there's a sort of crab dish which is a crab in a cheesy creamy sauce in the crab shell, but it's made with a freshwater Chinese crab.


Anyway, I went there just out of curiosity and I thought it was going to be serving horrendously bastardized so-called western food. Actually, it was really charming. It was full of Shanghainese families. It's a real institution. It goes back more than a hundred years and it's part of Shanghai needs culture, these old dishes. The whole menu, you'd never find that menu in a real restaurant in the west because this is western food on Chinese terms curated by Chinese people really. But the food is nicely cooked, it's fresh. So I went there expecting just to be curiosity and it was rather charming, so I have been back. It was funny because I've talked to customers there and they see it as part of their heritage.


Ben (01:00:20):

They see it as really authentic?


Fuchsia (01:00:22):

Yes. And it's not the only one. There's another one called the Red House in the former French concession, which does things like french onion soup with a bit of toast with melted cheese on top. Instead of snails in garlic butter, they have local clams in garlic butter, but served in that sort of pan. For me, it's just really interesting as an example of how cultural appropriation works both ways.


Ben (01:00:48):

Great. Well, last few questions. One is, if you were to open a restaurant in London, you had a magic wand, what sort of restaurant it would be? I thought about this and I think if I could magic it, I would do those Buddhist temple restaurants. So I was taken to one or two when I was growing up which do these amazing essentially tofu dishes, but they're all so-called fake meats or whatever. I remember being presented one which was just like, "Well, this is a roast duck." And I thought, "This is just not going to be good, but I'm just going to eat it because I've been taken there." It was amazing. So it’s something which is sort of skilled and quite fun and I think would go down well in the London scene. It’s not understood that this whole fake food thing has been going on for a couple of thousand years in a really high class way, or maybe somehow seasonal British Chinese or that. But what restaurant would you transplant if you could with a magic wand?


Fuchsia (01:01:50):

Well, it would be something along the lines of the Dragon Well Manor in Hangzhou, which I wrote about in the book. But basically I would need a magic wand because what I would need is a sort of Chinese farm in London with a bamboo grove and ponds where I could grow water bamboo and water chestnuts and have fresh water, fish and shrimp and rice fields. I'm getting carried away here. But the point of it would be to do really fine Chinese food made with the best ingredients because this is another of these weird things; that people don't associate Chinese food-- people in the west-- with fine ingredients. It's again, this thing about it being cheap. It's really unusual to find Chinese restaurants serving free range meat or organic vegetables or forage foods or all the things that are quite normal in Western restaurants. It's such a misperception because as we've sort of already touched on this, the Chinese gourmets have been obsessed with the quality of their ingredients forever, really. Good Chinese cooking starts with good ingredients. So my restaurant would be really showcasing this; that Chinese food is the best food made with the best ingredients and not only cooking skills, but it makes you feel wonderful and it's in tune with the seasons and the cosmos and everything like that.


Ben (01:03:15):

Great. So now if your game, we'll do a short section of underrated, overrated, or you can sort of pass and we can neutral. So I'd do like one word or phrase or idea, and you can give a quick comment about whether you think it might be underrated or overrated. So the first one, I guess an easy one is milk.


Fuchsia (01:03:36):

Well, overrated. Personally, I just don't like milk. I absolutely love cheese and butter and everything like that. The reason I'm saying that is because it's not the be all and end all. Of course, you draw your attention to the wonderful world of soy milk and tofu which is a far more sustainable alternative.


Ben (01:03:58):

I should have specified cow's milk over soy milk, but yes. Cake?

Fuchsia (01:04:05):

Kind of hard to answer.


I mean, I don't know how cake really is rated to be honest. I would say that cake is very delightful, but it's not the be all and end all. But I don't know that anyone would say that it was.


Ben (01:04:22):

Well, I guess one comment would be most of Chinese cuisine probably doesn't have a big cake tradition, although my mom would partly disagree because of all of the quays and the things you get in Malaysian, Singaporean food. But obviously in Western cuisine it's very much like. So maybe correctly weighted. How about alcohol? But maybe we could go wine?


Fuchsia (01:04:48):

Wine, well, I would say overrated just because I'm far more interested in food than alcohol. I don't drink. I love the tasting and exploring different wines and whiskeys and things, but I just don't drink very much. So I can quite happily go for a long time without alcohol. Definitely food is more important.


Ben (01:05:05):

Yeah, I've been drinking less and less and I think I really don't like-- you actually talk about it in the food that a lot of Chinese celebrations have all of this huge drinking culture bit of it. Then by about round three, you can't remember any of the food anyway, which seems a real shame with a lot of that. Then sea cucumber overrated, underrated?




Fuchsia (01:05:29):

Well, in the West, underrated. I love it. It's one of these weird exotic texture foods as far as westerners are concerned. It doesn't have any taste, but it has this voluptuous sort of wobbly texture and it's a bit sort of sticky and soft and a bit crisp, and it's quite wonderful.


Ben (01:05:51):

Great. Then last one in the series, durian?


Fuchsia (01:05:56):

In the West, underrated. I just find it completely thrilling. I really adore stinky, smelly cheeses in the state of advanced dishevelment and durian is a bit like that really. It's sort of a smell that really gets onto your skin and is a little bit disturbing and a bit delicious at the same time.


Ben (01:06:16):

Yeah, I love it. I've loved it from early and that's one of the things it's like, "Oh, are you're going to like it? Are you not going to like it?" I even like the smell. I remember I was laughed at because as a child I described it as a perfume, which most people don't think. But there was that just complex aromas which came from it which I really enjoyed. So last couple of questions. This is, I guess most focused on your writing and your research. I was interested to know what your sort of writing process or even writing day is because it's obviously to my mind, deeply researched. Obviously you've had lived experience going to places, talking to chefs, doing the cooking, and being trained. Yet, at least to my mind, your prose is very stylish, it's also very clear. Food writing's quite hard to come across; the sort of joy or deliciousness and texture of all of that. It comes across on the level of the sentence-- your sentences are really super great. So I was kind of interested in how you kind of write. Do you think a lot about structure or form or does it happen? Do you come across sort of you take a lot of notes and it all gels together. Is there anything you'd like to share about your writing process?


Fuchsia (01:07:33):

Well, I think it's a little chaotic to be frank. But the one thing that I really do religiously is I take a lot of notes. All my Chinese friends get used to this eccentricity and find it quite funny. But I write everything down because this is material, and in my books there are often passages, particularly descriptions. So if you write a description of a place when you are in it, like what it smells like, what it sounds like and what it tastes like, then it's going to have an immediacy that is quite hard to recapture. So the more I write down in the field, in the moment, the more I thank myself later. Although obviously it's all very rough cut. But quite a lot of phrases and thoughts and even paragraphs will end up in the finished books from this kind of field work.


And then I suppose that with writing, it's not a terribly conscious thing. But I think I have a real sense of what it sounds like and when it works and when it doesn't work. It's a question of repeating sentences again and again until they sound right. Sometimes it's very easy and it really flows and sometimes it's a nightmare and it's, "I want to give up." Then with the structure as well, I found this a real challenge because having done several cookbooks-- Cookbooks structurally are relatively easy because I think that a fairly conventional structure works well. So you have chapters on different sorts of food and you have head notes. The only long bit of writing is the introduction really. But this kind of book it's like, "It can be anything. So how on earth are you going to structure this huge flood of ideas and thoughts?" It's a bit scary at first because you've agreed to write this book and you don't really know how it's going to work out.


But again, it's just a question of applying yourself and sometimes taking a break and doing something else. I don't understand how it works. It's like an instinct for sort of knowing when something feels right, when it's getting boring, when the argument is incoherent. Then also, I'm lucky to have a good editor. So with this book, the one chapter that I had such a lot to say, which is the one about eating exotica and endangered species. I really wanted to get the tone right which is to kind of be very frank and honest and fair and balanced in the way I wrote it. My editor thought it was a bit chaotic at first. So I went away and had to put a lot more work into redoing it. But I wouldn't say there's some rational elements, but a lot of it is just sort of-- It's like just recognizing when and when the proportion is right


Ben (01:10:34):

Just practice. I'm guessing you write your notes by hand because you probably do some characters as well as English in your notes or you have that turned to like tapping on a phone or an iPad or things?


Fuchsia (01:10:46):

No, very much paper, because as you say, I have to write notes in both English and Chinese. I can't be specific about things unless I write them in Chinese, like the names of ingredients and dishes and people's names and all that sort of stuff. And also sometimes they do drawings and diagrams.

Ben (01:11:05):

And I guess there's a dialect they might have to say, "Well, and these are the characters." And it's like a whole new technique specific to that regional things. So they've got almost their own language around it.


Fuchsia (01:11:14):

Yeah. And also other people write in my books too. So sometimes someone will explain something-- I remember once a man in a tea shop in Chengdu wrote a whole page about different street snacks in Chengdu. Also, the great thing about a notebook is that it has no value. It's like if I had everything on an iPad, it's something someone might nick. But a scruffy notepad covered in oil is not very appealing.


Ben (01:11:41):

Got a huge amount of intangible value. The structure of your book I think really flows as well because you've got the chapters, but you've got the kind of meta-chapters above. But you're saying that actually that structure probably came sort of midway through the process. You didn't think, "Oh, I can do sort of history. We can start with fire and grain and we go and we have a section of techniques, and we end on meta-philosophy of food ideas." It's sort of like, "Oh, we had these essays” and then through that process you can see this would be a pleasing structure for it to work.


Fuchsia (01:12:14):

Yeah. So I did have some conception that the-- I can't remember when, but I think quite early on. Probably when I did the proposal I did have the idea that it was going to be about a dish, and with each dish, a theme. But then I think sometimes some chapters clearly had to be standalone chapters, others sometimes divided off into two chapters or made into one. It sort of evolved as I went along and the final structure just happened at the end really. It was a whole process of rearranging and there were one or two that could have gone in different places, but it just has to have a sort of harmony to it. It just has to fit and not feel labored. It has to just feel inevitable.




Ben (01:13:02):

And is there a kind of missing essay or chapter which you thought, "Oh, this would be quite good, but doesn't quite fit?" Are there lots of things which didn't make the cut for some future work?


Fuchsia (01:13:11):

Actually, I think I got everything I wanted in this one. Of course I'm going to write many more books. But this one ended up feeling just about the right sort of, "I did manage to put in what I wanted to say."


Ben (01:13:30):

Excellent. And when you write, are you a morning person, evening person? Does it matter? Are you short bursts one to three hours, or can you write the whole day? Or is it kind of chaotic in the sense that it kind of just depends?


Fuchsia (01:13:44):

I just don't know. So in general, I'm on better form in the morning. But I also find it really hard getting down to work. The whole thing about writing, and I think many writers find this, is that it's elusive. It's not something that you completely control. So you can put the time in, but sometimes you will write well and easily and sometimes you can just see what's wrong with the structure of a chapter. Sometimes you can't. You can spend hours just banging your head against a brick wall. I think one just has to accept that it's something a bit mysterious. You have to put the time in. I think with my earlier books-- with almost all of them, I had major crises when I just wanted to give up and I thought, "I can't do this." With my previous, with my memoir, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper, I got so despairing about it that I nearly deleted the whole thing and all the backups and handed back the advance because I thought I couldn't do it. But by now, I know that when I have these moments of despair that somehow you just find a way through the woods and it's just by having it in your mind. Sometimes taking a break, doing something different. In my experience, it's just a work in process. But it is a bit scary because you have this expectation you're going to finish a book and then sometimes you don't know how you're going to do it.




Ben (01:15:15):

Yeah, exactly. Playwrights have a couple of techniques which we talk about which are cousin to those. So one is whenever you've written the first draft or whatever draft, one rule is you just delete the first 10 pages because it takes you a while to get in and just don't worry about it. You can always come back to it, but just don't worry. Just delete them and then get onto your next draft. Some people do throw away whole drafts and then write another draft, but then refer to it. But it's this whole idea that you are going to have a panic, it isn't going to work. But actually it's okay because whatever you do, you started getting things and it will be there and it will be better. That's a kind of other thing.


There's one which went is that there's a sort of adage within some playwrights that it is kind of somewhat painful to write depending on how you write and where you come from. So there is this bit of like actually you do lock yourself away and you get it out and you don't worry too much because you need to get yourself into business where you force yourself to write where it comes out. Not everyone's like that, obviously, within that. But there is that some things because there is this fear and because you get these difficult patches that you have to push through, but it will be okay. That's what we tell ourselves.


Fuchsia (01:16:27):

Yes. I'm much happier when I'm around people and doing things in a team. I don't really like this whole thing about being alone at a desk writing, but then you have to do it. So then when you have a big deadline and you have to just lock yourself away, it's pretty ghastly.


Ben (01:16:47):

Yeah. Well, actually that's why some more latest theater work has been more collaborative partly because writing alone is not for everyone. Great. So final kind of question; two part question. What are your current projects and things that you're working on? I know there's going to be a book tour starting soon. Second half of the year you have your food tours which I think are ongoing. But are there any other projects? Then the sort of segue from that is, do you have any advice for people? I guess this can be broad advice about how to live your life. It could be advice about eating Chinese food or being a writer. So current projects and any life advice or eating advice you'd like to share?



Fuchsia (01:17:30):

Well, current projects. So this book, I'll be doing things around this book for a while. But then I will have to start the next one. I just have several concurrent-- I mean, the next one will be a cookbook. But I tend to have lots of things on the go and they will bear fruit at different times. I'm collecting material for other books that may not come to light of day very quickly.


Ben (01:17:53):

Are you going to tackle all of the great major Chinese cuisines and then as many as the regional ones as you can get through? So there's at least 117 plus books that you could write?


Fuchsia (01:18:04):

Well, this is a lifelong project because it's endlessly interesting and there are all these different angles. And also because I enjoy actually the narrative writing as well. This has reminded me there's so much I'd like to say with that. So I'm definitely not doing some kind of routine box ticking exercise. I want to really have a connection to a place or a subject and feel really involved and make friends there and have a kind of personal involvement before I write a book. I don't want to just rush in and do something token.


Life advice, I would never really think I'm a good person to give life advice. But I suppose the thing that I find so rewarding is just when you open yourself up to another culture and you really step outside your own point of view, it's tremendously illuminating and life enhancing because of course, I have not only been learning about Chinese food and culture all these years. I have also been learning that there are other ways of looking at my own culture. There's not just one way of looking at the world. There's not one point of view that's valid. I think this is incredibly important to sort of see that many things are relative-- not everything. So I think that, that is a very interesting consequence of-- So I would encourage people to be open to new experiences and to rethinking their own assumptions about everything too.


Ben (01:20:00):

Okay. Well, with that, thank you very much. The book, Invitation to a Banquet should be out in the UK at the very end of August, and then in the US, a few weeks later.



Fuchsia (01:20:12):

In November, actually.


Ben (01:20:12):

Okay, a little while later. You can catch Fuchsia maybe on some book tour in the second of the year, into next year. So look out for that. I highly recommend the book.


Fuchsia (01:20:25):

Thank you. Lovely talking to you.


Ben (01:20:27):

Thank you very much.


Sustainability Podcast: Arts Council, Mya-Rose Craig, Ellie Harrison and Benjamin Yeoh

Artists, Activists on Climate and enviroment. In this episode, join Mya-Rose Craig, Ellie Harrison and Benjamin Yeoh as they explore what is the connection between art and climate change and how can the storytelling skills of individual artists drive structural change at a corporate level.

Featuring:
• Mya-Rose Craig - ornithologist, environmentalist, diversity activist as well as an author, speaker and broadcaster
• Ellie Harrison - artist, activist & author
• Benjamin Yeoh – playwright, investor and podcast host

Summary (via AI):

Here is a summary of the key points from the conversation:

- This is a podcast discussing environmental responsibility in the arts and culture sector. The three guests are Mya-Rose, Ben, and Ellie.

- They discuss what environmental responsibility means to them personally. Mya-Rose talks about campaigning and raising awareness, as well as encouraging local environmental action like rewilding. Ben discusses leading by example but also influencing systems change. Ellie tries to live modestly and thinks about the impact of her actions.

- When asked how they embed environmental ideas in their work, Mya-Rose talks about engaging youth from underrepresented backgrounds with nature. Ben discusses incorporating climate themes in his theatre work and engaging with companies on sustainability in his investment work. Ellie campaigns on public transport issues and divestment.

- They discuss different forms of environmental action from large protests to local community projects. Mya-Rose advocates bigger changes like ethical banking as well as local rewilding. Ben focuses on influencing senior leaders.

- On why the cultural sector should take action, they agree it should lead by example and reflect these issues since they affect everyone's lives.

- They debate how to best communicate to affect change. Mya-Rose discusses effective social media activism. Ben focuses on influencing leaders. Ellie uses humor and music in her art and activism.

- For actions people can take today, they suggest political engagement, ethical purchasing/investment, storytelling, and getting involved locally.

- When asked what support would help cultural organizations, they suggest identifying environmental impacts, getting guidance to address them, and funding for climate-related art projects.

- For art that affected change, they cite nature documentaries, conceptual art exposing pollution/hypocrisy, and films spotlighting funding by polluting industries.

Transcript

Presenter: Hello and welcome to the IP Pod from the Arts Council which set out to unpack and illustrate the fundamental ideas that underpin the four investment principles. Today we’re looking at the subject of environmental responsibility. What is the connection between art and climate change and how can the storytelling skills of individual artists drive structural change at a corporate level. Before we get into it more deeply with our specialist panel we’ve asked a couple of people from the arts world to weigh in on what environmental responsibility means for them.


On a base level as a human being I guess it means carrying out our lives causing as little negative impact as possible - at minimum, even better actively trying to leave the world better than we found it both in our personal and work lives. I guess from an arts perspective we should realise the power the arts and culture has to influence and inspire behaviour change in large amounts of people and so we’ve got a responsibly to use that as a force for good and positive action but we’ve also got a responsibility to work with other industries to make sure what we’re doing is authentic and grounded in science.


Aileen Ging: The one thing artists should be in terms of thinking about or doing with sustainability is promoting the idea collective action for systematic change. For too long we’ve put emphasis on individuals actions around reusing, recycling, remaking and of course there’s a place for that but actually the change really is to send the message that we can only do so much. This is not about individual action, this is about collective action, facing up to corporations, to governments, holding them accountable to the extractive practices that don’t respect that the earth has limitations and moving away from the growth mindset. We don’t have to get bigger and bigger and this is really important actually for funders such as the Arts Council England is to send this message as well themselves. In the end it’s all intertwined, whether we’re talking about social and climate justice, the root causes are the same. It’s a mentality that thinks you can do more for less and that is extractive and that’s the bottom line.


Presenter:  That was Aileen Ging, sustainable operations lead for the Wild Rumpus Arts Organisation and Alia Alzougbi, cultural strategist, storyteller and facilitator. Now, to explore the subject further we’ve gathered together three people with unique perspectives but a shared understanding of the issue at hand. We’ve given them a pile of envelopes containing prompts and questions and the result is a conversation that is both urgent and ultimately empowering. The first of our guests is Mya-Rose Craig, sometimes known as Bird Girl who at 21 represents a new generation of artist activists all deeply invested in the future of the natural world. Mya-Rose has already turned her childhood passion for ornithology into an inspirational career and she recently published her memoir, also titled Bird Girl. Next up you’ll hear from Glasgow based Ellie Harrison who’s playful and politically engaged work takes many forms from installations to events and music. Within the diversity of her practice, Ellie has also discovered the value of hyper focus on local issues, namely public transport, via her British Rail campaign. Finally we have invaluable input from British Chinese playwright and theatre world renaissance man Benjamin Yeoh. As well as writing and directing his own plays, Benjamin sits on the board of theatre companies and develops sustainable development strategies for major international organisations in the arts and elsewhere. It’s Benjamin’s voice that you’ll hear first.


Benjamin: Great so let’s see what question number one holds for us. We have what does being responsible for our environment mean to you?


Mya-Rose: Everyone’s looking at me! I don’t know I feel like I interpret it differently because I do a lot of environmental campaigning and I feel like part of for me being responsible for nature and the environment is sort of campaigning and going out and raising awareness and telling people that there are problems and issues! But I think I also increasingly have also engaged with things on a much smaller more local level so like my charity that I run is a very grassroots project so we’re literally working with kids from the local area. I’m talking a lot to them about how they can do re-wilding in their garden or their local park and I think working to create a population who are engaged with nature and who care about nature and environmental issues is such an important first step. I don’t know, what about you guys?


Ellie: For me it means trying to tread as lightly as I can on the world, to live as modestly as I can, to produce the smallest amount of carbon that I can like just thinking about the consequences of my actions I suppose and that is difficult to do that on a daily basis. But I think that’s where I start from and trying to remain mindful of that through everything I do.


Benjamin: I have two hats or two ways of looking at that. I suppose on is my theatre making hat and another is my investment hat which have both got slightly different theories of change. So one is that personal leadership, try and know your own footprint a little bit, talk about local things, talk about what people can really do and when you think about theatre making and think about how you’re going to produce this show, are there sensible things you can do which probably 10 or 20 years you probably wouldn’t do, like why are you making your props new when you could do something which is maybe more circular? Then there is the systems impact which has been increasingly part of my work, whether in investment or in theatre making and I think in theatre making it’s often both of you who are really involved in this and it’s the stories that we tell ourselves and what are artists uniquely able to do? Well they can live their life in a sustainable fashion but they can tell the stories which change us and I guess when I was younger I was maybe a little bit more like oh you know what do movements do? What do protest movements do and things and actually as I’ve got older you can think back to suffragettes or anti slavery movements and things and you get to modern days and actually those movements have been very catalytical and those are the stories we tell ourselves. And actually it’s the same in the investment world about nudging the system or nudging the companies and so for me there’s an individual threat which is important and it’s important to live your life how you want and to show others but then actually you may not be able to do that where you are but you could still be nudging across the stories and the systems and so when it comes to making or producing it but it also might be the stories you choose to tell and things like that. So now when people ask me I think well those two bits and depending on where you are and how you’re thinking about it it might nudge to one or the other.


Ellie: Different levels of engagement from the personal to I guess more systemic change.


Benjamin: Exactly. And I think it’s partly as I’ve got a bit older as well I’ve met more young people who have got this climate anxiety and they feel like am I doing enough or I’m not doing enough or there’s nothing I can do and I feel like this for a lot of problems and challenges that humans have, the individual can only do so much right? It’s the systems and things but you can do something towards it, you don’t have to feel helpless and you can see that through an individual lens and that’s fine and that’s also fine as well because you might just be selling stories or performing or inspiring in some other way. They’re both valid mechanisms and we probably need more of both of them and you can’t do 100% of either all the time and you don’t need to get too down about it. 


Mya-Rose: I do think there’s such a split, I do see there’s two groups of people that I know and one side is the people who do very deeply feel all the environmental issues going on and are very anxious and I know lots of people who would feel incredibly guilty if they drive a car one day instead of cycling and stuff like that, down to the minutiae of their day to day activity and then on the other side of things of people who literally do not think about their environmental footprint, aren’t doing all the little things we think we need to do and I think both - obviously to different extents but both of those things are very unhelpful and I know people who do not care and I think actually creating a handful of very decisive very helpful things is much better than making people feel incredibly guilty about the nuances of their lifestyle and so for me I advocate a lot the bigger things so like switching bank or looking into where your money’s being invested and stuff like that or sort of looking into where your pension fund is being invested because so many of those are involved in fossil fuels and things where it is individual action and individual change but it’s also tackling what is a genuine systemic issue as well. 


Ellie: I think it’s fine to feel that anxiety but to use it as a force for good, to challenge it into those wider systemic campaigns. I think that’s what I do and I think you have to - for me definitely it feels important to try to live my values to a certain extent because otherwise the other activity that I’m doing I don’t feel I can do that with any integrity if I’m not trying to keep my own house in order as well but I definitely agree the two channels are important and interact and that they drive each other forward.


Benjamin: And they definitely amplify. The way you live your life makes your message stronger, I do think that. That’s one of the things that is so impressive about Greta and a lot of activists like you guys really, the way you live your life and talk about it I think amplifies the message that you have. If you’re able to do that and that’s part of it I think that’s really great. Who’s got number two? 


Ellie: Okay. We’re onto question number two. Let’s see what we’ve got. How do you embed ideas of responsibility within your practice/work?


Benjamin: So I’ll take the two hats briefly on theatre making and then on investment work and I’ve sat on the non-exec level for a variety of theatre companies, currently Improbable, previously Coney and Talawa and over that time environmental issues have grown and part of that is stories in the work that you want to make so that’s tilted and actually it’s tilted also to thinking about young people and other aspects, you can call it diversity and things like that, a lot of that is intersectionality within this, you can’t tackle one or the other so that’s shaped the kind of work we make but also at the board level when you’re thinking about strategy and these things, other thoughts have come in. So net zero commitments and what does it mean to be net zero and that’s how you’re making your work, should we make it this way, should we be travelling so much, are there other ways of making our work which is more circular or things like that and I think both of those elements over the years has come out and then in my personal practice I do a series of what we call now performance lectures and that’s definitely been really low-fi in terms of the materials and resources that I use and one of the reasons for that has been thinking of this and one of the topics I talk about has been around climate and another is about death and health and some of that intersectionality. In investment world that’s actually got quite complicated as well but a lot of that is to do with are company’s thinking about net zero, are they prepared and planned and then a lot of my world is around companies who may be in open good faith, so you might not be talking about the most difficult actors, let’s put that to one side for a moment, and engaging with them because a lot of the real world change happens from convincing management or teams or companies who often have a lot of other stakeholders or employees or their customers wanting them to do that as well and engaging for them to go on a more sustainable path and that is also intersectional with how they might be treating their employees, how they might be thinking about diversity and inclusion, what countries they’re working on. So a lot of this is under the rubric of environmental social governance or sustainability and it’s quite complicated but one of the primary drivers there we are using is engagement because actually at the end of the day a lot of the person in the street, the lady in the pub owns an investment through their pension or through the government or through something and ultimately people are the owners of companies or businesses or they are the owners of investments and even if it’s via your work place like Arts Council, you might have a pension through that and actually through that you have that thing. So ultimately companies are beholden to those owners who are us and so nudging them down that pathway is quite an important part of what it means as well as perhaps the innovation front so trying to create the tools and things that we don’t have yet already.


Mya-Rose: I think it’s in the sphere of environmental campaigning, responsibility is quite a weird thing because I spend a lot of time in youth climate change circles and it’s essentially a big group of people trying to solve an issue who had very little to do with creating it and yet there is this big sense of responsibility in terms of if not us then who? I have people asking me a lot what gives you hope? Are you optimistic, are you pessimistic? And I feel like for me it’s not really about that, it is this sense of we must try and do what we can to try and make things better and I think especially there’s been such an increase in conversations around intersectionality in terms of environmentalism and so I think increasingly you’re seeing people from the west and from countries like the UK sort of feeling that essentially the west is very responsible for climate change and yet it’s countries in the global south like Bangladesh where my family’s from that are currently experiencing the brunt of current environmental collapse and so it’s almost taking responsibility for our colonial legacy and trying to do what we can to help those people and help those countries. But I guess on a much smaller level in terms of my charity work we’re working with a lot of kids from black and Asian backgrounds, we’re working with a lot of kids from communities who are struggling quite a lot and like one of the reasons I set up the charity in the first place was partially because as someone who is not white and spent a lot of time growing up in the countryside I want to share that with kids, I wanted them to be able to enjoy the outdoors but I was also deeply aware of just how important it is to spend time in nature and the environment. I’d see first hand the importance of mental health and wellbeing in particular and it was during this period that I set it up that the NHS started doing green prescribing and things like that. So it was also this feeling of helping kids to get outside from the communities who statistically are disproportionately struggling with mental illness the most and yeah I think that side of things isn’t discussed as much but for me on a personal level I feel like that’s incredibly important.


Ellie: It is difficult to answer without talking about some of the activities that I’m involved in because I think as an artist I definitely went on a journey where when I started to realise about 15 years ago the extent of the climate crisis that I didn’t necessarily want to be investing all of my time in art anymore and I wanted to be channelling that energy into getting involved in campaigning so I specifically started campaigning for better public transport because I saw that as a big barrier for enabling people to make more sustainable travel choices when our public transport system is so expensive and dysfunctional. So I started to invest a lot of time in that and I think in terms of taking responsibility that was central to that really, it was identifying the problem but then taking steps to actually try and address that problem and solve the problem and the problem hasn’t been solved yet! But I’m continuing and the campaigning is expanding and it’s not just about public transport as well, you’re talking about pensions funds because I have a pension through the university where I work which is USS it’s the biggest in terms of its value so I’ve been involved in the divestment campaign for that as well and I think it’s that thing again of asking the questions, realising where the problems are and then taking responsibility by actually trying to get involved in trying to address them and that hasn’t been solved yet either but I’m continuing with the campaign and I think that I used to see the campaigning and my art practice as quite separate but I’m trying to find ways to kind of synthesise those two elements a bit more so you can use more creative tactics in campaigning, let the two disciplines learn from each other as well.


Mya-Rose: Question three: what does taking environmental action look like? Who want to go first?


Ellie: I think it’s actually really interesting Mya-Rose Rose to hear more about your work because it’s completely driven from the same place but we’re tackling completely different issues, both equally important in a way and I think it’s probably something in our personalities that have taken us to these different places and I think that yeah there’s definitely something in my personality that’s taken me down this passion for public transport and the characters I’ve met along the way and I think acquiring knowledge as I’ve been going has been an important part of that as well but I think that can be a problem in a way as well because I’ve become almost a bit too specialised in this area whereas before I think I had a much broader perspective around what needed to be done but it’s got more specialised the longer I’ve been doing it I think.


Mya-Rose: I think that makes sense though. You need people to be doing individual issues because if you have hundreds of people just going we want change and not saying what that change looks like that’s obviously not super helpful. I definitely think for me my idea of what activism is and what activism looks like has definitely shifted over the years. I think when I was younger I really liked all the big protests - which I still do attend - but sort of people going out and going out into the streets and telling our leaders that things need to change now and going to Downing Street and all of that kind of stuff, that felt like that was what was true activism to me versus I think actually I think as I get older I think that still has an incredibly important role but I actually think more community based action is incredibly important. Sometimes more important in terms of actually form the ground up building things that are better and that can literally be as simple as in my rural community the public transport system changing so people can actually not use their cars in the countryside, just things like that that make a difference and so I think maybe because I spend a lot of time working with young people as well who aren’t old enough to vote and get involved in local politics and that kinds of stuff, it’s thinking of ways that people can take action because I think doing stuff, especially physically doing stuff is so important in terms of fighting the disenfranchisement and eco-anxiety and all that kinds of stuff and so I’m literally very young kids I’m telling them to go out litter picking in the local community or my charity we do lots of tree planting events and things like that and for very young kids doing something with their hands genuinely helps so much in terms of the stress they feel at the state of the world and re-wilding or guerrilla gardening or all that kind of stuff. Thinking on a more local level is increasingly something attractive to me. Obviously now the big national campaigns continue in the background but I think we need both.


Benjamin: I agree. I think for me personally I’m really fortunate to meet quite a lot of influential people within their fields and for them it’s essentially influencing them. Perhaps if I think about theatre work, investment stakeholders and the board, non-exec type of stuff - at least in theatre work for me it’s a little bit about having those stories I referred to earlier. There’s a kind of term for it, a narrative plenitude and it’s also diverse voices and elements like that and it’s really apparent that given the scale of the challenge why are there so few climate stories, very broadly defined, and then when you think about climate stories of the global south and stories from these marginalised voices and part of the problem is when you’re not hearing that then that doesn’t weigh in. So a lot of my work around that is by trying to think about raising those stories up either through my own individual work or through the work I’m trying to support with others to do. Some of that is about then taking it to groups who might not otherwise hear it. So it was designed, I’ve done it in a couple little theatres but I took it to Aeon which is one of the biggest investment consultant insurers around, I took it to PWC, I’ve taken it to community churches, so to reach other groups, marginalised groups maybe but also other groups who might want to hear it to do that type of influence. And then in the investment world one of the other things is when you’re meeting with senior leaders who might be open but haven’t perhaps paid as much attention to this as you might have thought is making the argument to them. So part of that is just a good faith argument about why you should consider this and then one of the other steps that we do is link it to their actual stakeholders. So for instance in companies as I was saying they ultimately serve customers, employees and shareholders but actually shareholders are all of us sitting in this room, they are the people in the streets and so you have an onus to do somewhat what they are directing you to do and so this is where a lot of that comes through and closing that loop and influencing that at that level is quite important in terms of what action means for me. In a lot of organisations like this you have got this board at the top whether it’s in the charity space or in company space and they’re often three to twelve or three to fifteen people setting the strategic direction for the whole of that organisation. Say if there’s 12 if you can convince 8 of them this is a direction to go in so say they have no net zero commitment and you get them to say okay we should have a net zero commitment from the words it then starts, then the management team has got to think about what that means, set a strategy and do it. So part of my time is spent with people who sit on boards or when I meet boards or things like that saying you haven’t got a net zero, why is that? Is it something your stakeholders would want? Often the answer is yes and then maybe you should set that in place. So influencing a relatively small amount of people can actually often get quite a lot of change within that within the context because everything else around it is also pushing in that direction. In some of the podcasts I do I mix a lot of sustainability thinking with other arts thinking or maybe economic thinking. So for instance I had Chris Stark who is the chief executive of the UK Climate Change Committee talking about what UK climate policy needs to do and things like that to try and get this broad reach of actually there are things we know and there are things we know we can do and there is a gap from that and part of that gap is that if more people know them and influence those around them who might be more senior or not then that influence spreads like I guess my analogy’s always that stone in a pond and the ripple and some of that is just the conversations and stories that I have and increasingly over the later years more of those stories are broadly defined are amongst that. In some ways it’s also stories you don’t necessarily need to be… The cutting edge is a climate story, it’s actually just currently all stories are somehow climate related in many ways right, and is bringing some of those elements out in the same way that now in theatre it’s really common to have mobile phones on a stage or referenced because everyone has one right? It’s a part of things. 20 years ago it would have been really weird and now it’s not. I find it’s really weird how so many normal stories don’t have a thread of climate in it given that the thread of climate is in all these conversations. So if you just nudge those stories to reflect our own lived experience a little bit more you suddenly see that reflected in what we see and across all of those things. Alright question four, let’s see what we’ve got. We have: Why is it important for the cultural sector to take environmental action?


Ellie: Just to answer quickly I think it comes down to leading by example. I think we’ve got no choice but to take action because we do have a high profile in terms of influencing culture across society and if we’re not leading by example and again trying to get our own house in order then how can we expect anybody else to so I think it’s vital.


Mya-Rose: I also think it touched like what you were just saying about environmental issues being a thread that’s running through everyone’s lives now, I think one of the roles of the cultural sector is to reflect people’s lives and the things that are going on in the world and I suppose be a representation of that and a cultural influence in terms of that and so I think if anything it feels incredibly bizarre. It feels often like environmental issues are being dodged around or avoided and things like that maybe because it feels like it’s a bit of a downer maybe but the sector has such an important unique role in terms of communication in the way it reaches out to people and we can talk about the politics of it or the economics of it but at the end of the day the social cultural influence is probably the most important one in terms of the general public. 


Benjamin: Yeah I agree. I think if you look back in history and you look at these really big moments when humans have decided to do something, we decide laws. Laws are kind of meaningless to other creatures except that we impact them. Those laws and stories are things that humans tell each other and we believe them to be true because we’ve collectively made that belief. 200, 300 years ago we kind of collectively believed that slavery was okay but we changed the narrative of that because we came to realise that it was not and then you have women’s rights, you have disability rights, you have all of these things which really only came about through the power of culture. Now there are a lot of other elements needed to that but without that cultural change you are not going to get any of those so I think it’s uniquely the stories that we tell ourselves. As you’ve been saying what we reflect to one another - when we tell ourselves powerful new stories… We could even call them myths in the sense that humans have made these up, they’re not necessarily like physical laws of gravity that humans do to one another and when we believe these new stories which are better stories for us and for the world then change comes about and we get positive change and throughout history there are always segments which for lots of complicated reasons you never get 100% agreement between humans on anything but once you get a kind of change it flips over and now no one thinks slavery is a good thing, the vast majority are into women’s rights, disability rights, minority rights and things like that and that simply wasn’t true, even up to 100 years ago. Even 50 years ago where some of that… That’s not to deemphasise the huge battles and challenges still ahead in a lot of these things, still women’s rights and disability rights and all of those but it’s also that we’ve come some way and I would argue we’ve only come as far as we have because of the power of the cultural sector and the stories we tell ourselves, the art that we make, the activism we do, the lives that we lead in all of those aspects and if the cultural sector does not step up and play its part then I would contend that we won’t solve this challenge. I also think it’s potentially doable but isn’t doable without new stories, better stories, stories which reflect us. 


Ellie: Question five, let’s see what’s in the envelope. How do you/we best communicate to affect change? 


Benjamin: Oh… Well if I think of the individual way that I’m doing it part of it is actually with podcasts and story telling and weaving those stories which reflect us. I think that’s quite important and then actually I think it is those on the more individual basis, the things I’ve been alluding to. So when you meet more senior people in positions of influence and you make it real for them you can actually influence and affect that change and often it does come from a personal interaction. It’s someone who’s had a conversation or someone who’s listened to a podcast, someone who’s seen a piece of art, who’s gone on a protest, who’s been to an event, so it’s sometimes through that individual moment that you spark a lot of this systems change.


Mya-Rose: I feel like being an activist and a campaigner, so much of the job is communicating and I’ve heard someone refer to it as being a form of storytelling before which I absolutely agree with because you’re basically at all times figuring out the best way to package an issue to make people understand and to make people care. I spend a lot of time in the realm of social media and stuff like that which has its pros and cons but I think in some ways one of the things I find incredibly difficult is taking very complicated nuanced issues and packaging it down into like an instagram post or a blog post or a series of tweets, stuff like that. But, although I don’t think it’s the best way to be teaching people about these issues, I also think the power of social media is so unrivalled. I think the state of environmentalism and climate change campaigning today is absolutely due to social media and the influence of young people in particular and so I sort of carry on doing that sort of stuff. I think it basically boils down to everything I’m doing all the time. I always try and weave in stuff about all the things we have going on in the world in terms of the environment whether that’s climate change or biodiversity loss or species going extinct and things like that and that could be anything from radio or TV stuff to even like my book that came out last year Bird Girl like it’s not about climate change but the thread of climate change is running through it because it is something that is present in my life, especially as someone who loves nature. My way of communicating is slowly trying to drill into people’s heads that the stuff is all going on.


Benjamin: Maybe there’s no best way but Ellie?


Ellie: I think as I was saying earlier I’ve tried different tactics whether I’m working as an artist or an activist. I think with my art work humour has always been an important element of it that I’ve wanted my art work to be accessible  on lots of different levels and to contain quite important political messages but there’s something to hook your audience in before they get hit with that. So I talked a bit about trying to synthesise my art and activism together a bit more over the last few years and I’ve specifically done that by creating a musical about bus regulation - Bus Regulation The Musical - which is touring three different cities, Glasgow Manchester and Liverpool in collaboration with local public transport campaigns and that’s been a really good success because it’s been really appealing to lots of different age groups. Behind the music and the rollerskating there is an important history about how our public transport policy has changed over the last 60 years and how that’s left us with a really fragmented and expensive system as a lack of regulation over the bus network and giving solutions so the final  act is kind of looking into the future and projecting a vision of the future where public transport works seamlessly and the buses are all perfectly coordinated. It’s very upbeat and I think that’s really important as well because people can leave feeling inspired that change is possible and being connected to a local campaign where they can channel that.


Benjamin: Sounds like roller-skates are the key!


Ellie: Yeah the rollerskating is fun!


Mya-Rose: Yeah, I do think we need more stuff like that though because obviously I’m more in sort of the traditional campaigning sphere and it is all very traditional still. So much of the communication is literally almost the Attenborough style of voice to camera like we need you now to sign this petition to do that and do that and I feel like people are bombarded with things that are going on all the time and sort of going like this desperate plea and I think actually we do need more hope and we do need more optimism and I do think there has been a shift away from this already but sort of the trend of just constantly telling people we’re all doomed and it’s all terrible, turns out it doesn’t work very well and it just makes people feel miserable rather than ready to create change.


Ellie: I’m an optimistic person, I think that motivates me and I think just reflecting about what you were saying about the young people that you work with and the litter picking and stuff and how that can be really good for wellbeing and creating a sense that you can actually see change unfolding in front of your very eyes because you’re picking up the litter and you’re recycling it or disposing of it and then it’s no longer there so I think just being able to see that tangible change can also create hope and drive people forward to think that change is possible.


Benjamin: Let’s see what’s in six.


Mya-Rose: Number six, yeah. What’s an action that we can all take today?


Benjamin: So I’m probably going to quote Chris Stark on this. He would essentially say one of the things you need to do is use your vote or use what you’re thinking about politics. He even went as far as to say I’m not telling you how to use it but if this is important to you then that is one of the levers that we use as a system - as we’ve reflected today when I talked to some of my peers I tend to say where are you spending a lot of money? One or two of the items you’re spending a lot of money on, you should think about whether that’s sustainable because very broadly the more money you’re spending on something probably the larger impact it has. So that’s things like are you on a green tariff because that’s probably thousands of pounds in terms of your energy bill or a few hundred or if you’re buying something like a washing machine which is going to be a big cost, you don’t have to do it across every item but where you’re spending something big you should think about it and actually as both of you alluded to that’s where you often come to investments because you might not think about it but that’s probably one of your largest if not the largest pocket of money you’re directing so there’s that. So one would be use your vote or think about how you’re doing that politically both local or big and then there’s thinking about spending your money and then the last one at least on the cultural one would be just the stories that you tell, so that’s what comes to mind.


Ellie: And do we mean we as in us three or our listeners? 


Benjamin: You could do either! I hedged my bets!


Ellie: Well I think we should stay in touch! I’m all about that about like keeping communities going and building on connections with people that you meet. What can we all do today? Just get involved in a local campaign, channel your anger, channel your anxiety into a positive direction. I’ve found it really inspiring over the last few years while I’ve been working more locally in Glasgow just getting to meet people through activism and building a sense of community and that’s vital for actually being successful. Get stuck in if you have the time. What about you?


Mya-Rose: I would really really agree about getting involved in community projects and things like that. There’s probably something that is a bit of a pet peeve of any listener that actually there’s probably a campaign, go and get involved whether that’s public transport or stuff to do with your kids or stuff to do with housing locally, people will be talking about it so go and find those people and I really want to reiterate that where we put our money is so so important. I do rail against the idea of these issues being very individualistic or that any one person can either save or destroy the planet, all of the above, but I do think lifestyle choices are the only ones that I’ll mention is meat which I won’t go on about too much but it is really really really bad for the environment and I’m not advocating for everyone to become vegan or whatever but just reducing consumption of things that are bad for the planet is really helpful. I think people think you have to be the perfect environmentalist and go from 100 to 0 and actually going from 100 to 50 or 40 or 30 also really helps. I know I also said it but I also really advocate for people going out and just doing something with their hands. If you have a garden plant up some native species or put out a bird feeder or it’s going to be getting warm so put out some water. I have a friend who’s very into hedgehogs so maybe cut a hedgehog hole in your fence so they can roam around or do guerrilla gardening in your local park. I’m just such a big believer that doing something physically with your hands is so important in terms of feeling hopeful for the future. 


Benjamin: So we have on this question what support would best help artists and cultural organisations meet their environmental responsibilities? That’s quite a tough one. What support would best help artists and cultural organisations meet their environmental responsibilities? Well I can go first having looked at this both as an artist and sitting on a board. Broadly speaking of how I’ve explained it is that you can make a statement like a net zero commitment and that’s kind of your easier first step but then you need a support to make it into action and so I think some of the things you can do is there are resources for smaller organisations to essentially do a kind of carbon footprint so they can see where they are having the most impact so they can look at maybe not doing all of it as Mya-Rose Rose was saying you don't have to go from 100 to 0 but let's see these are the two or three things and you might end up, it’s often in your building or heating or your transport or something like that and then when you have identified that then help for that element. So if it is transport well, can we do something that is going to help them take transport, help them rent a bicycle or shift our location or work so that you’re not having to use a car or you can use public transport and actually there is a couple of organisations which will help you do this, like Julie’s Bicycle and the like but then you will need a little bit of support to put policy in place, particularly if you’ve never thought about how are we going to do our transport, then something like heating where you’re not in control of the building which doesn’t have a heat pump or whatever and there a little bit of help would be like well can we organise something to convince the landlord to do this. Or maybe food waste or whatever it is is in your impact in that and you can just deal with the three and the top of your list. But identifying where you’ve got a gap and then some help to sort of say well how do we lower that gap? But then I do think there is a whole other element where there could be if you’re very interested in this some sort of funding nudge on if we want to have these stories that we want to tell maybe that’s a competition or prize because I think a lot of these are already out there, maybe they’re not getting to people that you want or the stories which are not heard but if you want to do that some overall nudge of that. You’ve got some big innovation, you’ve got earth shock prizes and climate prizes and things like that, I haven’t really heard of that many prizes for climate inspired art or performance art or a campaign or a campaign of art or theatre piece or dance or wherever it is. But essentially some sort of prize or something like that where you know you can go for something would also be an idea I would have.


Mya-Rose: That was so thorough! No I agree with everything you just said so strongly. I think also maybe a shift in how we tell environmental stories as well but maybe it’s more about distribution maybe I’m just not seeing the more interesting pieces of art and culture which are being created. I don’t know, but everything you just said I’m like yes!


Ellie: I think having got funding from Arts Council England last year and been through that process, I actually think that we’re kind of going in the right direction in terms of changing value systems in the arts so it’s less about international Biennale’s travelling around the world and how we measure success in an artist’s career or this person’s shown in this far flung place and that far flung place and all the rest of it so they must be very successful and I felt there is a real focus on thinking globally and acting locally. Funding more community projects, funding very inclusive projects of different age groups and backgrounds can get involved in and I think that is all really important because that is going to have a knock on impact on the environment as well. 


Mya-Rose: Final question: Can you think of a piece of art or culture that successfully created a shift in public perception? First one that comes to mind immediately for me is I guess the obvious one that is all the Attenborough stuff that he’s been doing the last few years which obviously that’s very very mainstream media but Blue Planet was a very big moment for the environmentalists because suddenly everyone was talking about plastic pollution and saving our oceans. I think the Wild Isles programme that’s coming out at the moment is going to have a big shift in terms of the conversation around biodiversity loss in the UK. I think in terms of engaging the everyday person in the street with these big issues going on in the world is so important that we do have these really big beautiful programmes talking about the struggling side of things as well.


Benjamin: Yeah I think having gone on about how there needs to be more climate stories they have started to appear in more recent years across all of our forms and I think that is - I know there’s a lot of individuals who have been affected by that and we must be aggregating to a wider audience. I have a slightly different story which rings in my head which just goes back a generation for again it’s a more intersectional fight but I think about this because when you think about oh does it need to be an event which changes everyone’s minds and sometimes you’re just changing one person’s mind. So there was a white Texan lawyer, many decades ago, who saw a gig that Louis Armstrong was playing and he heard that gig and he said I’ve seen genius in a black man and I think the most important thing now is to fight for the rights of black people and he became a key part - in fact the most important legal part of Martin Luther King Jr’s legal team which actually then gave rights to that and so in a way that whole system change happened - and obviously there was a lot of other bits to it - but it actually sparked from a piece of individual change in this one lawyer. So yes sometimes it’s a big thing which affects everything and sometimes it’s that one snowflake or avalanche. And you can’t really tell where it’s going to be. Maybe you stopped at the bus stop and you had that one conversation and it was that person or maybe you’re a school kid and you sit outside your parliament and you start a movement. So sometimes these small things lead to big things as well as all of that and I think that humanity is too complex and random and beautiful and stupid to exactly know. So actually you can get some of these sparks of change from all of it but it tends to have started from something that a human has done - either for good or for ill within that. That’s the story I think about from a moment of artistic genius to a whole minority rights movement.


Ellie: Brilliant. Can I give my example? I think as an old school conceptual artist I don’t know if you guys known Hans Hack, German artist? I’m very inspired by him. One piece in particular from the 70s is called Rhine Water Purification Plant which was based on his experience of looking at the Rhine river and how much pollution was in there and the affect that was having on the fish and lots of fish were being killed and so he brought some of the water into a gallery space with the fish in it. The fish died in the water but because that was visible, taken out of the context where it was happening on a massive scale and put under a spotlight of course people thought what he was doing was really unethical but he was just throwing a spotlight on what was happening on a massive scale in the world. I think that that was a really powerful piece of work that affected change but some of the other stuff he did after that around looking at funding of the arts in America and particularly about how the tobacco industry was funding lots of art galleries and he did a lot of work to expose the hypocrisy in that and affected change. It was quickly seen as quite taboo to accept funding from tobacco companies in the arts and that struggle goes on and I think all the campaigns around fossil fuel funding in the arts have been really inspiring and really successful - particularly the Liberate Tate campaign. And most recently I’d say the most inspiring thing I’ve seen is the film about Nan Goldin All the Beauty and the Bloodshed which is about her campaign against the Sacklers and all the funding that they have put into the arts over the last 30 years or so to legitimise the pharmaceutical companies and she was amazingly successful. I think that’s a lesson to anyone who’s got a high profile is use it for good. 


Benjamin: Cool. That’s really good to chat with you all.


Mya-Rose: A nice conversation.


Benjamin: Nice to chat.

Nadia Asparouhova: future of philanthropy, science funding, creator economy, family stories | Podcast

Nadia Asparouhova (previously writing under Nadia Eghbal) is an independent researcher with widely read essays on a range of topics most recently philanthropic funding including effective altruism and ideas machines, and recent ideas in funding science.  She’s written books about the open source community. She has worked in start ups and venture. She set up and ran Helium grants, a microgrant programme. She is an Emergent Ventures fellow. 

How are crypto billionaires most likely to change charitable giving Effective Altruism (EA) aside?

“Broadly my worldview or thesis around how we think about philanthropy is that it moves in these sorts of wealth generations. And so, right now we're kind of seeing the dawn of the people who made a lot of money in the 2010s with startups. It's the “ trad tech” or startup kind of cohort. Before then you had people who made a lot of money in investment banking and finance and the early tech pioneers, they all formed their own cohort. And then you might say crypto is the next generation after that, which will eventually break down into smaller sub components for sure but we don't really know what those things are yet, I think, because crypto is still so early and they've sort of made money in their own way. 

And so, I think when we talk about how will, let's say, crypto billionaires change the world? The way I often see it discussed in public or in the media is we really hone in on individuals and their individual perspectives on the world. So we'll say, oh, Elon is doing this thing with his money or Jeff Bezos is doing that thing with his money. But I think what gets undervalued or discounted is that all these people are sort of products of their peers and their cohorts and their own generations.

When you have a group of people that have made money in a certain way that is almost by definition it's because it's a new wealth boom. They made their money in a way that's distinctly different from previous generations. And so, that becomes sort of like a defining theory of change or worldview. All the work that they are doing in this sort of philanthropic sense is finding a way to impose that worldview. …what will crypto's contribution to that be? I think it's going to be really different from the startup kind of cohort… for example, I think the trad tech cohort is much more interested in finding and uncovering top talent and in the meritocracy worldview where you have these young unproven founders that went on to start companies that rivaled or took down these huge legacy institutions and that really shapes the view of that sort of startup, a generation, where they saw over and over again that you can see someone who may not have a ton of experience in a topic, but it just has the right combination of ambition or grit, or seeing the world a certain way and they can take down these big legacy institutions. That's really what defines that cohort.

Whereas I think in the crypto kind of generation you might see instead of thinking about the power of top talent, I think they're more about giving people tools to kind of build their own worlds. So it's a lot more diffuse. I don't think it's really about going toe to toe against legacy institutions in the way that trad tech is kind of more obsessed with. It's much more about programmatically ensuring that people have access to tools to build their own worlds or build their own lives for themselves. And so again, you can kind of think about how is that going to play into their public legacy or what they do in the world and I just think it's way too early to really know what crypto's public legacy is going to look like. 

I think we are really only in the very beginning stages. It's maybe similar to in the early 2010s where you saw some people who had made money from startups that were doing experiments in philanthropy, but it was so early that comparing that to now is just completely different. And so, yeah, I think we just don't really know yet, but think the answer to that question would just be think about what does crypto actually value that is distinct from what previous generations have valued and then try to extend that into thinking about how might that play into social public values.”

We speak about what she learned from microgranting and reviewing thousands of applications.

We discuss what she thinks about EA influenced philanthropy, and why she is personally pro-pluralism.

Nadia talks about why doesn’t consider herself a creator and the downsides and upsides on he creator economy as currently formed. We discuss parallels with the open source community.

We chat about Nadia’s work as an independent researcher versus her work at start-ups and how they are fulfilling in different ways. 

Nadia examines what faith means to her now. We chat on the importance of intuition and the messiness of creative science and learning. We talk about science funding and how we might be the cusp of something new. Nadia expresses optimism about the future as we discuss possible progress stagnation.

On a more personal note, we chat about how Nadia was a vegetarian and how and why she changed her mind. But also that she could not be a complete only  carnivore  either. We discuss the importance of family stories that shape us and the role the stories of her grandmother played in her life.

We play over-rated under-rated:

  • Effective Altruism

  • Miami

  • Crowdfunding

  • Toulouse

  • Newsletters

  • Katy Perry

Nadia talks briefly about a seed of an idea around anti-memetics. Nadia ends with her advice to others. Follow your curiosities.

Nadia’s website is here. You can follow her on Twitter @nayafia and newsletter. There is a video, if captions are easier for you to follow (pictures only of me). Available where you get your podcasts or below (or aobve in the embedded player).

PODCAST INFO

Transcript (only lightly edited)

Ben Yeoh (00:35): Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking with Nadia Asparouhova. Nadia is a brilliant independent researcher. She's written books about the open source community. She's worked in startups. Her essays are widely read. She's given away money with microgranting and is an emergent ventures fellow. Nadia, welcome.

Nadia (00:55): Thanks for having me.

Ben Yeoh (00:56): I read that you hate repeating yourself, so I hope I don't have to make you do too much of that given all the excellent essays you've written on your blog, but starting with the microgranting, I am interested in your view on what you have learned now from your experience with the program, maybe what projects or people did you find the most impactful to fund? And I think you ended up thinking independent research or independent research was a good area to fund, then you ended up being an EV fellow yourself. So I'd be interested to know how your thinking has evolved on microgranting.

Nadia (01:28): Yeah, it's a great question. I think I ended up gravitating towards independent research just because it was an area that I was interested in. So, the impetus for the helium grants was basically just saying why aren't more people just giving away small amounts of money from their own personal income and seeing what happens in the world because maybe a small amount of money-- So, the original grants were $5,000 and then a thousand dollars. Maybe that small amount of money can get someone to do something they otherwise wouldn't have done before and that came from my own experience from my first year out of college where I got a grant from a foundation to do my own research and that set me down this whole different career path, I think, than if I had just gotten a normal job out of college because it made me realize it was possible for me to pursue my own curiosities and design my own projects and then just sort of find ways to fund them and that is basically how I've structured the rest of my career.

Nadia (02:28): So, I wanted to, I guess, impart that worldview onto other people through the grants. And yeah, I think it was a really helpful experience to see that actually affect some of the people that I gave grants away to, and some of whom I still keep in touch with. There's definitely a lot of noise that you get as well and I think maybe one of the things I learned when I first started, I just kind of said, these grants are no strings attached. Turns out if you're just trying to give money away on the internet, no strings attached, a lot of people will flock in with a lot of ideas on how you should give your money away and so I think maybe starting from that sort of idealistic position of I just want to fund your great ideas to having to narrow it down a little bit more, just to sort of manage the inflow of applications that I was getting and just help set the right tone because in the end I realized that even though I wanted to be as wide reaching as possible, I am only human, I'm the person processing the applications and there are things that prefer to look for or not look for. And so, I don't want to waste other people's time either. So I think it was helpful to kind of see the idealism meet pragmatic reality in some ways, if only for my own sort of sanity managing applications.

Ben Yeoh (03:58): Sure. How many did you get in, I don't know, a six month period when it was all flying?

Nadia (04:03): Oh gosh.

Ben Yeoh (04:03): Or even a year? Like a couple of hundred types of things.

Nadia (04:07): I'd have to go back and look at the numbers. It was definitely in the thousands.

Ben Yeoh (04:10): In the thousands. Wow. That's the price of being a bit too famous.

Nadia (04:15): Yeah, and I didn't really expect it. I think the first time I posted it, there weren't really that many other microgrant programs like that at the time, I think. And so, I got a lot of inbound and then I just set up a mailing list and then would sort of pay people. I ran it quarterly, I think, and had a rolling application and yeah, it just got to be a lot to manage. And then I would also, you know, I only had so many grants to give away, so I think it's good on the other end to sort of help set expectations and just kind of manage who's coming in.

Ben Yeoh (04:50): Sure. I don't think Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures get thousands or at least it didn't in maybe its early days, it probably does now. I'm interested, how did you find the experience being, I guess on the other side, applying for, I guess it's a little bit bigger than a microgrant and maybe my second part to the question is obviously Tyler with Daniel Gross has written this book on interviewing and talent and questions, but what question would you ask Tyler if it was the other way around and he was applying for the EV grant

Nadia (05:21): Oh, I have to think about that one. I don't know. I mean, I think the thing that I'd be looking for in anyone applying for a grant is it should be something that is tickling your curiosity so much that you just-- I guess, another way of saying this is, there are a lot of things you can do with your career that pay a lot more money than getting [grants]. I feel like grants are there to sort of fill a little bit of a gap where you can't really-- there's no other sort of path for you to figure out how to scratch this itch or go down this little rabbit hole that has just been sort of bugging you for a while. Whether it's a side project or whether it's a full-time thing. I think seeing evidence of that in someone who's applying for a grant, regardless of what the grant is, is what kind of tips me over the line of, oh, this is something you've been thinking about for a really long time, and this grant is going to help get you over the line. One of the things that was surprising to me about helium grants, at least, was it's often not even about the money itself. I've heard some people say that about emergent ventures as well who've received grants and that's probably true for myself as well, where sometimes it's just about getting external validation or giving you excuse to think about something that on your own, it kind of gets relegated to the bottom of your to-do list or something like that. And so, yeah, it's often strangely not even really about the amount of money that's being given.

Ben Yeoh (07:01): Yeah. Someone's telling you your idea is valuable, you are not crazy, we back you, you should go for it. I think there is a lot of truth to that. I think I would maybe ask him one of his own questions about what his most irrational thought that he might believe to be true is, but it is quite interesting on that. Your recent essay ideas machine looks at effective altruism EA and philanthropic giving. I have a question from Tyler on this a little bit before we get into the EA and his question is how are crypto billionaires most likely to change charitable giving EA aside? So I kind of think this is interesting on the whole machine idea, but maybe there is this new class of different crypto billionaires. Obviously we have the future fund, which is more EA aligned, but they might well think about giving differently. Do you have any intuitive sense about what might happen there?

Nadia (08:02): Yeah, definitely. Although I think I could probably talk about this quite at length.

Ben Yeoh (08:07): Go for it.

Nadia (08:08): Broadly my worldview or thesis around how we think about philanthropy is that it moves in these sorts of wealth generations. And so, right now we're kind of seeing the dawn of the people who made a lot of money in the 2010s with startups. It's the “ trad tech” or startup kind of cohort. Before then you had people who made a lot of money in investment banking and finance and the early tech pioneers, they all formed their own cohort. And then you might say crypto is the next generation after that, which will eventually break down into smaller sub components for sure but we don't really know what those things are yet, I think, because crypto is still so early and they've sort of made money in their own way. 

And so, I think when we talk about how will, let's say, crypto billionaires change the world? The way I often see it discussed in public or in the media is we really hone in on individuals and their individual perspectives on the world. So we'll say, oh, Elon is doing this thing with his money or Jeff Bezos is doing that thing with his money. But I think what gets undervalued or discounted is that all these people are sort of products of their peers and their cohorts and their own generations.

.

Nadia (09:31): And so, when you have a group of people that have made money in a certain way that is almost by definition it's because it's a new wealth boom they made their money in a way that's distinctly different from previous generations. And so, that becomes sort of like a defining theory of change or worldview. All the work that they are doing in this sort of philanthropic sense is finding a way to impose that worldview. And so, what will crypto's contribution to that be? I think it's going to be really different from the startup kind of cohort and I've written about [that]. I can go into it as well if you'd like, but for example, like I think trad tech cohort is much more interested in finding and uncovering top talent and in the sort of like meritocracy worldview where you have these young unproven founders that went on to start companies that rivaled or took down these huge legacy institutions and that really shapes the view of that sort of startup, [this] kind of generation, where they saw over and over again that you can see someone who may not have a ton of experience in a topic, but it just has the right combination of ambition or grit, or seeing the world a certain way and they can take down these big legacy institutions. That's really what defines that cohort.

Nadia (11:01): Whereas I think in the crypto kind of generation you might see instead of thinking about sort of like, yeah, the power of top talent, I think they're more about giving people tools to kind of build their own worlds. So it's a lot more diffuse. I don't think it's really about going toe to toe against legacy institutions in the way that trad tech is kind of more obsessed with. It's much more about sort of like programmatically ensuring that people have access to tools to build their own worlds or build their own lives for themselves. And so again, you can kind of think about how is that going to play into their public legacy or what they do in the world and I just think it's way too early to really know what crypto's public legacy is going to look like. I think we are really only in the very beginning stages. It's maybe similar to in the early 2010s where you saw some people who had made money from startups that were doing experiments in philanthropy, but it was so early that comparing that to now is just completely different. And so, yeah, I think we just don't really know yet, but I think we would expect-- I think the answer to that question would just be think about what does crypto actually value that is distinct from what previous generations have valued and then try to extend that into thinking about how might that play into sort of social public values.

Ben Yeoh (12:39): That's really interesting. So it's this idea that perhaps the world building element, which seems to come with crypto perhaps might enter the thinking, whereas your point was with the kind of tech startup Silicon valley basis, they were searching for talent and that type of thing which has kind of influenced their thinking. I hadn't thought of it like that. That's quite interesting. You asked the question also within your essay about why there are not more ideas machines, but I was unclear if you actually answered that question to your satisfaction. You came up with quite a lot of other ideas machines, which have kind of started going. Do you have a clearer view now maybe with some feedback on why there are not more and where that would be going?

Nadia (13:27): I mean, I guess, and part of the impetus for that essay is that I think to some extent effective altruism has had a little bit of a monopoly on idea machines in that, yeah, if you are someone who has an interesting idea that doesn't quite fit into the typical sort of startup machine, if we can call it that the only place for you to go is [EA] and try to convince them that your cause is interesting. I think the answer might just be as simple as there's a lot more capital slashing around now than there was before. And so, in the past we were sort of, and I kind of touched on that in the essay of, yeah, there's just so much more capital available and so many different people now that are controlling that capital that you don't kind of have to be forced into the same machine to get your ideas heard. So I actually do feel optimistic that this is going to be very different. It is already now different and is only going to be more different in the next few years, but I think we are starting to see more and more idea machines crop up. But yeah, I think the answer might just be simple, but there's just way more money now than there was 10 years ago.

Ben Yeoh (15:05): Sure. That makes sense. A lot of it is driven by the cash available. You talk about, or you seem to argue for a pluralistic view of the world that there are many types of giving or philanthropy that we might be interested in and I was interested what areas of giving or impact do you really rate, which don't really fall under an EA framework that you'd be interested that people should think about giving to, or spending their time on?

Nadia (15:36): I'm not sure that-- I get asked that sometimes, but I guess, I'm not sure that my opinion really matters that much to be honest because I am sort of pro pluralism. I think I'm oddly sort of agnostic on what people actually do with their money and I've never really resonated with this concept of doing good. I don't even know what good means. I think it means something different to everyone. So, what I mostly care about is that more people are experimenting and doing things right and that was again, sort of what was driving-- Writing that essay about idea machines was just like-- effective altruism is great, I personally don't resonate with its ethos, but like why aren't there more people trying experiments like that? That is the concerning question to me. So yeah, I think it's more about just wanting more people to be experimenting with more things.

Ben Yeoh (16:37): Sure. I think for me it's part of the kind of impact on systems and particularly the power of art, which I guess because some of it's got utilitarian roots, they somewhat dismiss. Although I think you noted this, for instance, the future fund has got a little bit of thinking about, well, what the power of media and arts and books and that type of thing can do for that type of movement. So maybe it will evolve again. And it seems to me you write, you blog, you do research that in a way you are part of the so-called creator economy, even if it's not readily understood by everyone by that term, but your work is kind of more open ended and less transactional than say social media creators who are trying to have to earn a living just via their channel or something. And you've also touched on your work about the importance of rituals and things like that. So I'd be interested in your evolving thoughts on what it means to be a creator today and how you think of yourself and whether you, do you think of yourself as part of that creative community and what that means?

Nadia (17:42): I guess by the book, I probably fit into the category of creators. I don't think I think of myself in that bucket and I'm not exactly sure why. I think I may have touched on this a little bit in this essay about sort of creator economy and my qualms with the concept of creators at least the way that they kind of look today. So, people will call me a writer for example and I don't really identify with that term either, because I think it feels like this terminal state of I exist to write versus I just think of myself as someone who's just driven by curiosity and I want to explore things, but for me, the writing and the research is all about trying to understand a question that has been bugging me for a really long time. And then once I've figured out I want to go do something about it, or I want to figure out how to translate that into action. I think getting to hung up on a sort of creator as terminal state can make people lazy or at least that's my fear of it is that you just sort of end up-- Like when you know that you're being rewarded just for thinking out loud or for your ideas or for whatever, you're kind of just like-- it's very low cost to you to kind of just like spit ideas out and I think a lot of creators or writers have had this strange of experience of realizing that it's almost a little bit easy to sort of game the system if you really wanted to.

Nadia (19:47): You start to notice the things that you can say online that will get you the clout and the attention if you really wanted it. You start to see the same sort of pattern of like yeah, just sort of attention that you can get and it can sort of soil the experience a little bit, I think, or at least that's my experience of it because it's like, well, I could just say, you know, I could just keep spitting out these things kind of mindlessly and people will pay attention to it, but that's not actually rewarding. And so, I think that's maybe what I want to fight against is feeling-- I always want to feel like the work I'm doing is rooted in action and not just sort of creating for the sake of people to consume content and maybe that's just a cope. I'm not really sure, but that's sort of how I think about it.

Ben Yeoh (20:43): Yeah. I think you did touch on that and that's the kind of transactional nature, you can kind of game the algorithm, or I guess you even see, like, I think one of the most successful YouTubers ever is Mr. Beast and he spent a lot of time figuring out what makes a great video on YouTube and obviously he's very successful and things like that, but there is an element which feels a little bit transactional, whereas your work is quite a much more open ended than that. But I do think that if you kind of consider well writing or being, say an essayist you do write essays and they are wonderful and thought provoking and all of that. So, I think that in some ways that is what it means to be a writer, even if you haven't got the transactional part of it and maybe, like you say, you've kind of gone down a, not quite patronage, but like a grant fellow type route in order to keep that thing alive rather than to having go a more transactional. And I think that's interesting because it seems to me that it's almost a thread that you can pull out from maybe some of your thinking around open source communities and being around that for so long.

Ben Yeoh (21:56): So, I'm kind of interested in that since your book, many of your insights still seem to be true, that for instance a small number of dedicated people maintain much of the open source code and what it is to be that community within that. But do you see any resonance there between your work and open source and how you're working kind of in public today? And is there anything maybe different around how you think about those types of communities since your book was published?

Nadia (22:23): Yeah. I definitely see that they're parallels between how open source works and how creator economy more generally works, which was part of the impetus for writing the book. And yeah, I think I've just sort of continued to see that play out like a huge thread that had not quite fully hit its stride at the time hat working in public was published was just sort of the explosion of web three and dows and like all these sort of new experiments in organizing creativity, I guess. So, I think if I were to write the book again today, I would absolutely include a lot more of that. There just weren't as many examples to draw from. I don't think web three even was a term people were using by the time that that book was published. So it's been cool to see it play out in all these different ways that I had not even fully covered in that book, but I still think like open source as a north star for me of like something that has been around for a while and that we have had the chance to see play out for, let's say, 20 plus years is a really just like yeah, helpful example to make sense of everything that's happening right now and all these different new incentive models and ways of people getting paid and doing things.

Nadia (23:53): In terms of its relevance to my own life or my own work, I mean, I think even probably one of the strange sort of paradoxes about open source developers is a lot of them have full-time jobs as software developers, not doing open source. They're just sort of working a typical software engineer kind of job, and then they do their open source on the side. But the thing that they're best known for is their open source work, which is on the side and I kind of feel that way about my own sort of writing and research as well, cause I mean, in the times when I'm more in full time writing research mode, as you've said, I'll do grants or contracts or whatever to sort of fund that lifestyle or just do it out of my own savings. But then I do go and work at startups as well. But I don't feel like I'm known for the work that I do at startups. To me, that's sort of the translating it to action component of research where I've already spent some time trying to deeply understand a topic and then I'm going to go work somewhere to put those ideas into practice.

Nadia (25:05): But I would hear from open source developers, some version of this, you know, it's really strange that the thing that I'm actually getting paid to do full time is not the thing that I'm actually known for. Why am I not getting paid for the thing that I'm actually known for? And I think I feel that way a little bit too around, yeah, I don't think people associate me with being a product manager at a startup, for example, they associate me with the work I've done that I don't necessarily get paid for that is like writing on the side or the periods in which I'm doing research.

Ben Yeoh (25:37): Sure. How did that contrast with having a more regular-- cause you did work for a startup, well, I guess two startups for a time? I guess you found that fulfilling but in a different way, but actually independent research is kind of where it went for you.

Nadia (25:52): Yeah. It is definitely very fulfilling in a different way. I mean I can only be in my head for so long. It's very different to get to work with a team and in every case where I've gone to work at a company it's also this really wonderful-- You can kind of sit in a corner and say, I think the world should work like this, but then when you're actually trying to make the world work like that you'll hit harsh realities of why things don't work the way that you expected and I think it's really good. And I've noticed this pattern in other independent researchers that I know, I think a lot of the reason why people who become independent researchers, like the reason why they don't go into academia is because academia is much more sort of sequestered away from practice. You really are spending time in the system of ideas and you don't get the chance to really translate your ideas into practice. You're just fully in academic mode. Whereas with independent research, you actually have the opportunity to sort build your life the way that you want and I've noticed that other independent researchers who are also very interested in this idea of both research, married with practice and that definitely is something that I care a lot about too.

Nadia (27:11): And so, yeah, I think being able to work at a company and sort of see your ideas play out and realize why certain things don't work the way that you expect or, oh yeah, that definitely works the way that I expect or whatever it is. I think that can be very rewarding and then, yeah, again, just sort of on the personal level, just being able to work with people and collaborate with people in that way is yeah, just being part of a team shipping things can be really satisfying. All of that is very fulfilling in a different way.

Ben Yeoh (27:44): Cool. Yeah, that's kind of really interesting seeing that balance, all those differences. And I guess it's part of like the pluralistic view of life that you can get different things from different areas all at the same time. Great. You created a personal reflection on faith with Henry Drew on a podcast where I think you concluded that maybe you had a little bit more faith or call it spirituality than perhaps you thought you had. Have your feelings around faith changed since then and what does faith mean? Or perhaps in a pluralistic view, some of the stuff that you might not think rationally in the mathematical world now mean to you?

Nadia (28:29): So yeah, I was just talking about this with my husband this weekend. I mean, some aspect of that has not changed in the sense of yeah, I think I'm very driven by and interested in the things that are sort of ineffable in the world. I always think about my friend Michael Nielsen, who I think this used to be his Twitter bio. I don't really know why I associate this phrase with him, but maybe it's still his Twitter bio, 'searching for the numinous' and he's, I think similarly, just sort of looking for that thing that creates that feeling of maybe being touched by God or having just like a strong feeling that you don't necessarily know how to explain. Let's put it that way. And I think that drives a lot of people who are interested in science and technology as well. I think there's this false divide that is placed between, let's say, science and art or science and religion. But a lot of scientists that I know are deeply moved by something spiritual or this sort of wonder about the universe. I don't think that's universally true, but think it's more true than it may often seem. And I feel like that drives so much of my work when people sort of ask, why do you choose the topics that you're interested in? Or how do you know what you want to pursue in research?

Nadia (29:58): I never have a great answer to that. To me, it's just sort of like, I have such a strong feeling or this thing has sort of gripped me or taken a hold of me and I have to just follow it to the end. I don't even have a choice in the matter. And to me that is sort of like spiritually motivated or moving. So yeah, I think that has been very consistent in me throughout my entire life but there's multiple roles that I think religion or faith or spirituality can play in someone's life and something that is definitely newer for me since exploring that that podcast series with Henry is, I think I've become more interested in ritual and tradition. Especially as we're talking about having kids now and thinking about what are the traditions that you want to pass down to your kids? And I think religion can provide a lot of continuity in that and it doesn't have to only drive from religion. There are obviously many different ways that you can find rituals in your life but I think that's one place that it can come from and that's something that I'm starting to explore and understand and appreciate more now than I did before.

Ben Yeoh (31:16): I think it's really good intuition to follow that first impulse that you have, which is why I'm putting you kind of in this bucket of creativity, because I think that's an impulse that a lot of creatives have. And for instance, I think accountants are sometimes quite creative, not in the bad sense, but they're having to follow some sort of intuition. And I think there is some research in the early science or science of progress. I can't remember the exact researcher, but he called two types of science progress, I think S1 and S2 where S2 was the formal scientific discoveries that you have, which you put in equation, which are declamatory statements that you can argue about and go into the cannon. But before you get into S2, you actually arrive in a state of science or creativity, which he called S1 and in that is much more messy, intuitive. You have a lot of individual stories or anecdotes, like how Einstein thought of relativity and all of this before, where it's really messy and unformed by its nature. You haven't got a declaratory piece of algebra that you can debate yet and actually a lot of the stuff in S1 is very interesting and less well discovered. And I think what you described there about following an intuition or a curiosity, or however it might be, is where a lot of progress happens in that S1 space.

Nadia (32:44): Yeah, definitely--

Ben Yeoh (32:44): So riffing on that-- go on.

Nadia (32:46): That definitely resonates.

Ben Yeoh (32:47): So riffing on that, I mean, there has been much talk about this science of science or progress, and you've written about science funding and tech over the last decade. But I'm quite interested to know where do you think it will go in the next decade? And maybe if there was anything special about what's happened in the last decade? I guess, you noted a lot of things which happened just in the last one or two or three years, arc Institute, different ways of science funding. But I was wondering, what you saw over the last 10, what does it mean for the next 10 and was there anything special that we've just gone through?

Nadia (33:25): Yeah, it's hard. I feel like I'll have a much stronger intuition on this in maybe two years because I really do feel like we are just on the cusp of something that has immediately turned. And so, it's so hard to know how it's going to play out. But I think one thing I feel like right now, the conversation in science funding is more about, there's a bunch of new tech wealth that has come in that's more from what I call like the trad tech or startup kind of cohort and it's now budding up against sort of the legacy ways of funding science, even within science philanthropy, but then also just sort of broadly science institutions. And so, the tension that I think people are sort of noticing or seeing is with this new tech wealth coming up against sort of like the old way of doing things. Whereas I think in the next decade, that's probably going to shift one more notch downstream where I think the tension we will be seeing is between sort of trad tech ways of thinking about funding and the sort of crypto influenced ways of thinking about funding.

Nadia (34:44): I feel like we are seeing that tension build and build now between the startup cohort and the crypto cohort in many different ways and I think it's hard to know really like what direction that's going to go in, but I think the question might become less about do I get government funding for my project versus take this sort of funny money from a bunch of weird startup people. It might be even more extreme than where it's like, do I go work at an Institute at all or do I do one of these crazy science dell things or something like that? And again, I think it's probably important to zoom out of all that and say all these experiments are really at the fringe. There is a whole world of science that fundamentally doesn't even care about any of the stuff that is happening. These are all very small drops in the bucket of more broadly how science is done but I think if I were taking a snapshot of it right now, I think people are vaguely aware there are these [Inaudible:00:35:49] initiatives that are happening and that people are experimenting, but it seems like really fringe and just sort of like who knows what's going to happen there, whereas maybe a decade from now we'll look and say, huh, like some of those experiments are actually starting to play out and people will be taking it a little bit more seriously.

Ben Yeoh (36:06): Sure. Do you have an intuition about what one or two of those might work out? Because I guess in some ways, this is the really interesting part because we haven't had the decade, so we don't know which of those, whether it's a dell thing or something else, or are you so uncertain that you wouldn't want to make a little forecast?

Nadia (36:26): Yeah. I still feel really uncertain. I think crypto land has proven itself to be so unpredictable in so many ways and it moves and changes so fast that it's hard to know, but I think that just broadly that the things that seem a little bit radical right now might, at least some of those might work out and start to seem like viable ways of funding your research or organizing your research or disseminating it.

Ben Yeoh (36:52): Sure. That seems fair enough. So, there's a lot of debate or I guess evidence that science or productivity or science may have slowed down in the last decade or two and now just recently there's been some sort of counter arguments that maybe there's some areas which have stopped slowing down perhaps in biotech and some other areas or maybe even increased again. And I think it's kind of interesting that if we are saying that there's an old blob of how science was funded and that was ticking along, and we're still getting some discoveries, but maybe at higher cost or lower rate, but you've now got this kind of tail end of more radical, or they seem radical because they're new that actually that might spark a little bit more innovation or different innovation, cause it's going to come from something that we haven't done. And maybe my kind of intuition is that's perhaps a glimmering of where we're seeing that actually this productivity is at least flat lining or maybe going to increase in a couple of areas, say AI and say biotech. Do you think there might be any truth to that kind of idea? Or do you think this is just such a small amount and it's so uncertain who knows what it does and do you sense that we have had this same slowdown in productivity or progress or science that people are kind of envisaging on the macro level from your experience in startup world and speaking to open source communities and the like?

Nadia (38:23): I don't know that I buy that progress has been slowing down or stagnating in any shape or form. I think I'd probably just say I'm fundamentally somewhat unopinionated on it because I just prefer to look forward rather than backwards. But in as much as any opinion I might have about it, I feel like, I don't know, it just doesn't-- I think I'm just fundamentally very optimistic about human civilization and I really, I don't know. I believe that we're capable of so many great things and I've just never really had this sort of like what I feel is a bit of a pessimistic view of us not doing as much as we could be. So yeah, I think my interest in a lot of these topics comes less from a place where science is slowing down or we need to sort of improve progress because it's stagnating somehow. I'm sort of unconcerned with it and I'm more about-- I just want to make sure that all the barriers are removed and we are moving as fast as possible to the future. But yeah, and maybe that's just a matter of aesthetics of what is the fundamental driving reason to get to the same outcome or the same area of interest but yeah, I don't know. I'm very, very optimistic that people are doing great things and I don't know, I have a very rosy view of the world in that sense.

Ben Yeoh (39:56): Well, someone told me there's a quote that, something like a pessimist never builds anything. Something like that. So maybe it's one of those things that even if it is true, we should fool ourselves into thinking something else because we build a better world that way.

Nadia (40:13): Yeah, totally.

Ben Yeoh (40:13): Even if it's not quite true. I was intrigued by something you wrote about how you were vegetarian and then not and I guess this is personal for me because I worry a little bit having met some [EAs], a lot of them are very into animal welfare and I had wondered whether not being a little bit more veggie was a kind of deep, moral failing of my own, or maybe not deep moral failing, but some sort of moral failing and every year I kind of eat a little bit less. Although, it's kind of strange, cause it's not really animals., I don't really eat octopus anymore because I've seen all of this research about how kind of clever and curious and alien they are, but it doesn't feel consistent cause I still eat pork and things like that. But I was kind of interested that you sort of went the other way and I'm meeting a few people who go the other way and said actually, you know what, it isn't too big a deal. Not having over thought that, has it been a big thought that you've had, or it was just kind of like, oh, well, it's time being vege is not a big issue.

Nadia (41:17): Yeah. I don't think I've ever been asked this before in an interview, so yeah, I'll think about it now. Yeah, I guess for context I became a vegetarian when I was, I think, 11 or 12 and then I remained a vegetarian for about 10 years and then I started eating meat again and now I eat a lot of meat. I even tried being a carnivore for about six months, but it was really hard to just eat steak all the time. And so yeah, I mean reasons why-- Originally, I became a vegetarian out of concern for animal welfare. I think I literally saw a pita something on the internet when I was 12 and I was like, oh my God, I can't do this. I mean, there were just so many-- it's funny cause it's really hard to know where to draw the line and I think being a vegetarian for a decade kind of gave me an appreciation for how there just really is no perfect black and white. I remember, cause I would be on all these vegetarian forums and stuff and there are some people that are really extreme. There are people that also troll vegetarians. All the fun of the internet, culture, early internet culture but I remember seeing things like, you know, there are field mice that are being killed in the fields when you're growing your plants or something. It's like, well, what are you going to do about those mice that are dying? It's impossible to get to a point. And then of course drawing a line between like vegan and vegetarian and then even within vegans, it's like, do you eat honey or not? Or do I wear leather products or not? If I'm a vegetarian, should I not be wearing leather?

Nadia (42:55): There's just so many things and I think at some point I think it just made me realize there is no perfect answer. One of the things that I felt I would run into a lot as a vegetarian was sometimes it's hard, you go to a restaurant and there's-- I've been places where there's literally nothing on the menu that doesn't have meat in it. And so, you end up being like, well, I need to eat something. So you order something and then you take the meat off and it's like, well, but now I've paid for a meal that I did order the meat, I just didn't put it in my body. But didn't I basically just still buy into the system and which isn't it almost worse that I'm now throwing away the meat and it's been completely unused instead of just eating it myself. So I just felt like there were just so many nuances and I think my interest in starting to eat it again, I was just kind of like, well, maybe I can-- So, I started eating meat again when I was whatever, maybe 10 years later, but then it was a very, very slow reintroduction of meat. For most of that time I think it was like, I have a meat of the month where I eat meat once a month and have it just kind of be a special kind of treat or I will eat it in this situation where I know that the animal was treated really well, very high bar for the meat I'm going to eat. And then I was like, only eating seafood and it was just sort of like slowly, slowly, slowly.

Nadia (44:26): I still don't really eat pork very much and also I didn't grow up eating very much meat, I guess. So, I still am a little bit, you know, I don't eat tons of certain kinds of meat and things like that but yeah, I don't even really know where I'm going with this, but now I'm just kind of going down memory lane on vegetarianism. But, I just think that maybe the TLDR is it's pretty gray and pretty difficult I think to have a perfect answer, to live this perfectly moral animal cruelty free life. Everything is tied to everything and everyone needs to figure out where to draw that line for themselves. And for me, my personal health improved drastically when I started eating meat again and so I felt like that was the best choice for me.

Ben Yeoh (45:19): Sure. That makes a lot of sense. Even going to being a complete carnival, which is maybe too much and actually completely fits into your pluralistic kind of worldview, which seems to be shaping and I'm also super glad from my point of view that I managed to ask you a unique question.

Nadia (45:38): First time thinking about that.

Ben Yeoh (45:39): Yeah. Somewhat and it is really complicated. So, from an EA point of view, you can actually argue for instance that beef, that cattle, if they're well treated and they only have one bad day has a lot less what they would call suffering risk or suffering with it. On the other hand, environmentalists will say, well, we have a lot of beef consumption, again depending on how you do it, that's very bad for methane and stuff like that. So, it's a tricky individual trade off like you say. Maybe sticking slightly with the personal as well on this one I picked up that it seemed to be that your grandmother was quite important in your life or at least seemed to have been an influence about where sort of she came from and what she was doing. I was wondering whether you had a reflection on what she might have taught you or that feeling of what you learned from knowing about your grandma's life.

Nadia (46:42): So my grandmother actually died before I was born. So, I did not meet her at all but the stories I know of are through my father, her son. I guess, I hadn't really thought about it, but there's the stories that get passed down throughout a family, of course, and I think something that I've really taken from both my dad and from the stories about his mother is just this sense of adventure and embracing uncertainty. I really get that from both my parents since they both came to the US, immigrated from other places and I think in both cases, I just really admire how-- My mom came to the US when she was, I think 29 and just basically upended and I can't imagine as a 29 year old sort of just upending her entire life and just moving to a different country and being like cause I just want something different is I think pretty cool and my grandmother similarly, my dad's mom. So my dad's side is Persian. So my grandmother's Persian and they left Iran when my dad was five or something and moved to Germany and nobody spoke German. My mom or my grandmother spoke a lot of different languages, but when she came to Germany, she didn't know anything. She was this older woman with two small kids and didn't speak the language, just had to figure everything out.

Nadia (48:18): This was also kind of post-world war II. Germany was not exactly a place that people are dying to move to and she just sort of, at least the way that my dad has sort of told stories about her and my relatives, she kind of just embraced it and was like, yeah, I don't know, I'm going to watch a lot of German TV, I'm going to try to make German friends and just figure out how to speak this language and at that point she must have been in her late forties, I want to say mid to late forties. And so again, just sort of imagining-- I think this theme has actually persisted throughout a lot of my parents and my extended family, just cause immigrant life, people's lives get upended by revolutions and things you don't really expect but I think, yeah, this sort of theme that has captivated me about a lot of my extended family has just been one day your life completely changes as you know it and I think we associate that level of sort of high intensity change with your teenage years or your early twenties or a time when you're kind of finding yourself. But other cases it's like, yeah, you're in your forties, you're in your fifties and suddenly everything you know is completely wiped away and you just kind of show up and have to start over and just embracing that uncertainty with this cheerfulness and saying I'm just going to figure it out. That's the way it is.

Nadia (49:44): I think that's the perspective that I really cherish and want to embrace in my own life. Anytime my life has seemed hard or there's something very, yeah, there's just been a lot of change happening in my life, I just kind of think about some of my other relatives where I'm like they have been through way worse and they got through it and it was fine. So I'll be fine too.

Ben Yeoh (50:07): Yeah. I think that family folk law, the stories we tell ourselves are really important in shaping how we are and I did wonder about that because of coming through that. So, is there a Zoroastrian influence running through your family as well then?

Nadia (50:21): There is not.

Ben Yeoh (50:22): Do you want to play a short overrated underrated then, maybe perhaps in honor of Tyler of a few things for that and then we'll just have a couple of questions.

Nadia (50:34): Sure. Sounds good.

Ben Yeoh (50:35): Sure. So you can pass, overrated, underrated, or you can just make some sort of comment. A couple of those we've already touched on. We'll start on the big one, I guess, effective altruism: overrated or underrated?

Nadia (50:48): Ooh, that's a tough one. I think it's both underrated and overrated. So it's just kind of a cop out but if I really had to pick I'd actually probably say underrated.

Ben Yeoh (50:58): Yeah. I think you could get there. It's probably underrated by those who don't know anything about it and maybe a touch overrated if you are very deeply in it or something like that. How about Miami, overrated or underrated?

Nadia (51:16): Ooh, wow. I guess I'm not very good at this game cause I'm going to just probably say both underrated and overrated for everything. Yeah, I think it's underrated as a real city. I think people associate it as a party city and I do not have that relationship with Miami at all and I love it here. Yeah, I'll just keep it underrated.

Ben Yeoh (51:34): Yeah, maybe underrated, right.

Nadia (51:35): Yeah, maybe just underrated.

Ben Yeoh (51:37): It is, I guess, underrated maybe compared to San Francisco or are you putting them in an equal bucket?

Nadia (51:43): That's where I feel like they're just kind of different. I don't think I have the same sort of density of like, I mean, nothing will-- Now I'm going to sound like an old person, but I'm just like nothing will ever really compare to 2010s San Francisco. That was just such a special time. I don't know that Miami is quite there yet but I do think it's a really wonderful place to live and it has a reputation for being a party capital, which I, again, just completely don't relate to at all. I love Miami because it's filled with sunshine and it feels very restorative and peaceful to be here.

Ben Yeoh (52:16): Yeah. And that's the thing about cities and places. It's also time and place and then actually it's probably time and place and people. In fact, I think you've mentioned something and I think it's really true now that we probably are somehow underinvested in being close to our close friends. I think of this now, I'm in my forties and I kind of feel like I would really love to be in walking distance of a handful of my close friends and we are not because of the way life has come about, but it seems to me that that's often the case and that might be perhaps a moderate mistake that we somehow all make.

Nadia (52:53): Yes, definitely share that.

Ben Yeoh (52:55): So underrated, overrated crowdfunding?

Nadia (53:00): Crowdfunding. Ooh. I do think crowdfunding is overrated. Yeah, I don't know. Again, pluralism, so maybe that's a cop out, but I've seen it work for friends really, really, really well. And so, I think it is absolutely an option that should exist and has transformed many people's lives. I just don't think it's the one panacea that is going to solve everyone's problems in large part because it depends on being able to market yourself really well and having a certain kind of audience and not every type of creativity or creative work is going to fit into that I personally have-- I don't think I've ever used crowdfunding to fund my work. And so yeah, I think it's overrated in the sense that there are other ways to do it.

Ben Yeoh (53:49): Yeah. And do you differ between project crowdfunding or kind of patronage Patrion type crowdfunding?

Nadia (53:57): Sorry, what was the first option?

Ben Yeoh (53:59): First one is where you just get a kind of project done, like a kind of Kickstarter Indiegogo. So you're just funding that as a sort of one time, I guess, versus this kind of patronage system, which I guess is the modern day incarnation of maybe old patronage. I'm not quite sure because you've got these fellowship grant things. I don't know if there is a difference.

Nadia (54:19): I don't distinguish between the two for the purposes of this particular conversation, because I think in both cases you're having to appeal to a wide set of people and get sort of small amounts of money. I mean patrons still exist. Patrion also exists, but it's also possible to just find a single source of funding.

Ben Yeoh (54:42): Sure. Toulouse?

Nadia (54:45): Toulouse. Oh no, my mother-in-law's going to be listening to this.

Ben Yeoh (54:52): Well then it has to be underrated then.

Nadia (54:54): Yeah. I just came back there, I was there for a week visiting my in-laws. The duck is definitely underrated. I did not know that Toulouse is basically the duck capital of France maybe. I don't know. There's a lot of duck in Toulouse and apologies to my former vegetarian self, but I absolutely love duck. So I was eating duck in every shape and form. Highly recommend going to Toulouse if you like duck.

Ben Yeoh (55:23): Great. Well, and would you family aside, would you like to go back?

Nadia (55:28): I don't know that I had enough of a sense of-- we were kind of doing a lot of family things, so I don't know that I had enough of a sense to have a strong opinion on it.

Ben Yeoh (55:35): Sure. We can go neutral. Newsletters?

Nadia (55:40): Newsletters. Oh boy. Maybe similarly at this point, I think they're just rated.

Ben Yeoh (55:51): Right. Neutral. Fair enough.

Nadia (55:53): Yeah. I would've said they were underrated maybe two years ago, three years ago and now I think they're appropriately rated.

Ben Yeoh (56:03): That feels fair. I still think they're underrated by the median person, but then I'm quite--

Nadia (56:08): Yes, actually.

Ben Yeoh (56:09): I started blogging in the first golden age of blogging and I still kind of really miss that and newsletters are sort of a rift slightly on that. Those are days of being a blogger and things like that. Okay. Maybe the last one, the last fun one, Katy Perry?

Nadia (56:28): Katy Perry. Oh boy. I don't know if I've thought about Katy Perry in quite some time.

Ben Yeoh (56:33): Well, yeah, you compared her to Mark Rothko. That's where this comes from.

Nadia (56:40): I'm vaguely remembering. The downside of putting a lot of your life in public is then you say things and you're like, oh geez, did I say that? I did say that.

Ben Yeoh (56:48): You could move on from it.

Nadia (56:49): Yeah, I remember saying this now, saying that people will look at Mark Rothko and kind of be like, I don't understand this guy's work, it's just a canvas that is entirely black or something, where is the art in that? And yeah, similarly with Katy Perry, although now probably updating those cultural references to someone more recent, but people look at, let's just say, any sort of pop star and kind of be like where is the art in that? But I think making it like-- simplicity often sort of hides a lot of the complexity and a lot of the work that had to go into making something look that simple. I think there's a lot of hidden art behind it. So yeah, I'll go with the underrated.

Ben Yeoh (57:32): Yeah. I think that's really interesting and that's why I kind of don't worry about the future of art in a kind of digital world, because art there's a big bunch of our, I don't know quite how much the percentage is, but it's representative. Like you have Duchamp's toilet, right? It's raising all sorts of other things behind the actual surface object and I don't know Katy Perry work that well, but I could see similar that there's a whole creative production, what it means, what it means in the world and that which is beyond just the kind of surface things and songs and things like that.

Nadia (58:07): Mm-Hmm.

Ben Yeoh (58:08): Great. Okay. So just final two or three questions. What do you think is something that you might understand or you think about the world that perhaps others do not?

Nadia (58:22): Ooh. I'm all sort of terrible at these something questions because I feel like my brain all wants to go into a lot of different directions. I don't know that I have any sort of unique insights on the world.

Ben Yeoh (58:38): Really. Fair enough.

Nadia (58:40): But I'll say something that defines how I think. I think I just tend to live a lot in the nuance of things and tend to resist oversimplification of the way the world can be and I think a lot of new ideas and a lot of creative work lives at the intersection of, and this is not a unusual statement but you can see over and over again. A lot of creative work comes from sort of mixing domains or having inspiration from these unlikely places and you kind of combine it with a different idea and you're just mixing and remixing ideas. And so, I think it's just very, very important to remain in that sort of nuanced open-minded kind of place because that's where all the unexpected ideas are going to kind of come from.

Ben Yeoh (59:36): Sure. I think that's maybe not absolutely unique, but not sure everyone thinks like that and I mean, you have an already, I think quite a significant interesting body of work where you have made some of these provocations and you go into things some in depth and now doing independent research. I think that's a particular form of brilliance. So last two questions. Are there any future projects or future thinking you'd like to share?

Nadia (01:00:07): Ooh. I don't know if there's anything I'm ready to share yet. In addition to sort of the interest and looking at kind of these new generations of wealth that we've talked about. I've had a couple little side projects on the brain. I have this piece I've been meaning to write about antiemetics. I don't know if that's a topic you've come across but--

Ben Yeoh (01:00:33): Referencing Girard?

Nadia (01:00:35): A lot of it has been driven by this I guess we call them sci-fi author quantum who wrote this book about anti-memetics and that was at least my first exposure to it. The medics being ideas that spread virally and antiemetic idea is something that is very compelling, but resists being shared. So taboo, for example, would be an example of something antiemetic. I just feel like there's room to explore those ideas on this spectrum of whether they're not just memetic or not. If we say something is not memetic, we think, oh, it's just not compelling. But the ideas that are very compelling, but don't get shared mimetically and so like, why is that and what does that kind of spectrum look like? So I have a lot of messy working notes on it, but I haven't actually taken the time to put together an essay about it, but I'm working on it.

Ben Yeoh (01:01:35): Yeah. Okay. That's really fascinating. I hadn't really come across that concept articulated like that, but that kind of makes some sense, like taboos. Even, I guess, some sorts of, I guess, conspiracy theories or not even right conspiracy theories, secrets, I guess. Some sort of secrets. I guess some sort of process and knowhow is sometimes like that as well.

Nadia (01:01:57): Yes. A lot of different categories to put ground on.

Ben Yeoh (01:02:01): Great. Okay. And then just ending this excellent conversation. Do you have any advice or thoughts for others? This could be life advice or thought advice or maybe advice for those who are thinking of following an independent researcher career path?

Nadia (01:02:18): Yeah. I mean, it sounds maybe simple or obvious, but I just would really encourage people to follow their own curiosities. I think a lot of people have really great ideas, but we often kind of dismiss it as oh, but I'm not really ever going to go down that rabbit hole or that's not realistic thing for me to pursue, but I think one of the most rewarding things about independent research is you get to make your own world exactly as you want it to look and if you take those sort of nagging curiosities or those intuitions, if you actually just take them seriously, instead of dismissing the little voices in your head and you just go all in on them, life kind of just reorganizes around you to make those things possible. At least that has been my experience. So yeah, I would encourage everyone to sort of listen to those little voices in their head and follow their own curiosities.

Ben Yeoh (01:03:17): That's a great note to end on, follow your curiosity. Nadia, thank you very much.

Nadia (01:03:23): Thank you for having me. This is great.

Ben Yeoh (01:03:26): If you appreciate the show, please like and subscribe as it helps others find the podcast.

Stephan Guyenet on diet, obesity models, and obesity drugs

Stephan Guyenet completed a PhD in neuroscience, then went on to study the neuroscience of obesity and eating behavior as a postdoc. He’s also been involved with Givewell and Open philanthropy projects. And in 2017, he wrote the book the Hungry Brain.

We discuss the two competing obesity models: One based around  a model of energy balance with the brain as one of the main central controllers, (EBM, Energy Balance Model).

And one model which has evolved but is based more around an insulin - carbohydrate pathway. The carbohydrate - insulin model emphasizes the role of insulin from glycemic load inputs.

While not necessarily mutually exclusive, Stephan explains how the brain centric energy balance model can explain some data, in his view, that the carb-insulin model does not. Stephan notes much individual variability and how the naming “energy-balance” is perhaps not the best type of name for the model.

We discuss the challenge of processed foods, which tend to be easy to eat and tasty to us. Stephan notes that the combination of fat + carb (eg in chocolate!) is very appetising. We chat about the role of genetics, and satiety.

We talk about two classes of  obesity drugs, one rimonabant (using cannabinoid receptor pathways)  which has been withdrawn; and the other being GLP-1s. We talk about the possible role of inflammation and some intriguing data on Alzheimer’s. I ask about his view on intermittent fasting, also on the microbiome.

I talk about my challenges with exercise and we discuss how some people probably are not wired to enjoy intensity training whereas some others are.

We talk about effective altruism and what he has learnt from his work at Givewell.

We play over-rated | under rated on: 

  • Climate Change

  • Nuclear War

  • Rogue AI risk

  • Giving away more wealth

  • Animal welfare

We chat about making cider, growing your own food and cycling in Seattle.

Stephan ends with his general diet advice.

Listen below or wherever you listen to podcasts. Video above, on Youtube.