Why is a stock price like a piece of art ?

Why is a stock price like a piece of art ? And on balance, why I remain hopeful about the future of art in the face of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), digital forms and AI.

In a fashion, a stock price in a number embodies all of the reputation, social, natural, financial capital, assets, liabilities and cash flows both negative and positive discounted back to this exact moment in time.  All of the human thought as to what is the “value” of a company’s equity embodied in that moment in time. 

It’s a human construct. Like all money related phenomena it’s based in intersubjective myth or intersubjective trust.  It exists because other humans believe it to have value.

The fish do not care. The sky does not care.  The parrots do not care. 

Natural science does not care about the stock price directly (although if a collapse in price forces a person to sell their parrot, or they buy new parrot food with their profits then at the second order the parrots care; and to the seventh order if the stock prices lead to or reflect a world where Miami is underwater and the fish can swim there - to that extent the fish would care).

There is human skill in its art forms. Some art can only be made by people who have honed their skills for 10,000s of hours, and even then these people may only be almost singular. 

I once met a Kyoto artisan who claimed to be one of the the last 5 hand makers of buckets left., link end.* 

Humans on occasion value this type of art very highly. 

(*It turns out, I think he wasn’t quite the very last. And he was certainly poorer than this other artisan who elevated his art of bucket making even higher.  I bought his bucket for about £100+, the artisan/artist bucket is £1,000s+ )

Some art does not require the same physical skill. Take Duchamp’s toilet urinal. 

Marcel Duchamp's toliet (1917), likely value today >$2m. pic.twitter.com/pJzY3b8he4

— Benjamin Yeoh (@benyeohben) May 28, 2022

For those interested in or wanting to converse in this type of language of art and culture, the toilet embodies many different strands of human thought and values embodied in a toilet. (What is art? Can an artist say anything is art? When are found objects art? Who decides what is art? What is the strucutre of belief and value associated with the concept of art?)* See, link to essay end.

‘I was drawing people’s attention to the fact that art is a mirage. A mirage, exactly like an oasis appears in the desert. It is very beautiful until, of course, you are dying of thirst. But you don’t die in the field of art. The mirage is solid.’ (Duchamp)

…Just like a stock price the parrots don’t care except perhaps as a place to perch on or defects on even. 

But the history of art suggests that art works always have a portion of their value in what they represent. The value of Duchamp’s urinal is not in its material cost and skill of labour, no more than the price of most biopharmaceuticals are not in the material manufacture cost of chemical compounds. It’s in the ideas - the intangibles - that such work represents. (And in the case of pharmaceuticals the intangible value of innovation that went into the drug, and intangible value of life extension a drug brings).

The representation maybe be allegorical in the painting, it may be representative of the artist’s life, her skill, what she represents; or the culture of the time, and so on. That is all embedded in the piece of art.  Much like value is somehow embedded in a stock price.

So as art moves digital - and you have a piece like Beeple’s “Everydays - The First 5000 Days”  which sold for $69m in 2021….  The art works means of digital production, the NFT, the work being on the block chain, are only a portion, and perhaps a very small portion of the value of that piece and what it represents. Beeple worked on the piece for 5000 days. 

In this reading, the piece represents the years Beeple spent on his work, the advent of digital art - the culture and presentation of web3.0, and crypto, and all the hopes and dreams of a crypto cyber punk future; expressed in an array of digital pixels.

Until Oct 2020, the most Mike Winkelmann — the digital artist AKA as Beeple — had ever sold a print for was $100.

In Mar 2021 an NFT of his work sold for $69 million. millionhttps://t.co/m4j4SevHgO

— Benjamin Yeoh (@benyeohben) May 28, 2022

Although note as Alex Evans implies this particular selling price might be part of something a little odd and like a scam. That too is the story of art.

source: https://t.co/YhVAprcM3A lets not got back over the yucky scammy world of en eff tees again

— tanh(mmalex) 🇺🇦 (@mmalex) May 28, 2022

The art still means nothing to the parrot. Just like the stock price.

If this reading of art is correct, it partly explains the relevance of cave paintings from thousands of years ago - what they express then, the cultures the art represents and what they express to us now. These bison art are >30,000 years old.

Bison from Cauvet caves, (cc) wiki.

It will also explain the value of art in a digital world. It’s obviously not the pixels we are buying, nor the skill or lack of skill which went into their making; but what they represent to us now and in the future. 

And the parrot still won’t care. 

The Future of Art

The Future of Art… in honour of the effective ideas blog project (which you should check out, link end), I thought I’d spell out an idea for what this might mean for the future, say in 2072. 

My argument is that art will be more accessible to a wider range of peoples because technologies will allow them to express their imagination better without as much physical skill. Physical skill will still be valued as it always has, but physical skill is only a component. (Else we would value the hand made buckets of Kyoto more; and the urinals of Duchamp perhaps less). In many cases, representation, imagination, culture and all those things that matter to humans make up art more. 

I will continue by talking about the now. Computer programmes - AI art makers - have made the creation of complex images possible in seconds.  The image at the top of the blog was generated from a few works “Stock Market as a piece of Art). There is limited physical skill in creating these images. 

But they allow people with little physical skill to express a much wider range of imagination and in that basis create a wider range of art. 

Fast forward to 2072, the technological possibilities will defy our imaginations of today. 

In the same way that most of us in 1972 could not have imagined Beeple’s art, AI art or the regenerative art processes of today. 

Critics might worry about the skill in art. The cave paintings survive. The art of bucket making may be gone by 2072. 

No one is saving the buckets of cedar wood. I am sad we have lost so many of these arts.  So many that there must be thousands if not millions we do not even know of - we almost did not know of the poets of Bengal; we have lost the recipe for Roman cement; the gardens of Babylon are but a dream; no one alive now or in the future will ever see a vision of the pyramids in their orginal white.

And yet, what we gain is more than what we lost and as long as we progress this is ever so. 

The stock price and the stock market is the sum of the hopes and dreams of listed businesses. 

But art is the sum of the hopes and dream of humanity, its culture and its progress. 

And as our life expectancy progresses which is our health; and as our morals and social relationships progress from the end of slavery, to womens votes, to minority and disability rights…

This will be seen in our art. Our arts will reflect our progress.  We will still have the expression of physical skills perhaps not in bucket making, but in something new.

In 2072, we will have technologies that dwarf ones we have now. 

We will be able to voice our thoughts and visual images will be created; animated films will be accessible to many; sculptures that will be the legacy of 3D printing in materials and structures we can not make now.

The sum of art will have grown because the sum of human culture will have grown. 

Some old arts might only evolve. Poetry may have new  forms but will still be poetry. 

Dance might be more accessible as robotic technology enables artists to defy age or physical limitations. 

Performance arts may merge with the digital and find a way to be both live and accessible; and make work that is impossible to perform today. 

Music will still thrive. The future of art will be extraordinary.

There is an unlikely chance we will have the technology to speak in the language of parrots but if we don’t 

the parrots still won’t care. 

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Check out the Effective Ideas blog competition.

Listen to a podcast on intangibles and future innovation with Stian Westlake.

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Death Haiku

There is a tradition with Zen monks and Chinese, Japanese poetry to write a poem when you are dying. In the Japanese tradition, this has ended up being a death haiku – although some have been written in other traditions, like a Chinese poem rather than a haiku. Many of the stories relate to the very final few minutes of life. For instance, 

Goku Kyonen died on Oct. 8, 1272. He was 56. Here is his death poem:

The truth embodied in the Buddhas 

Of the future, present, past;

The teaching we received from 

the Fathers of our faith 

Can be found at the tip of my stick.

And the story:

When Goku felt his death was near, he ordered all his disciples to gather around him. He sat at the pulpit, raised his stick, gave the floor a single tap with it, and said the poem above. When he finished, he raised the stick again, tapped the floor once more, and cried, “See! See!” Then, sitting upright, he died.

Perhaps the story is “fake news” but it does seem to be handed down.

I think I am going to write my own death haiku to put in my next performance of Bigly | Death, if I do it again this year.

Death Haiku, Chogo

People I long for

People I loathe

End of autumn

I like this one as it centres around people. The image zings out to me. The sentiment is one I feel clearly, and so many of my friends and loved ones seem to feel at times.

We really miss and want to be with people.

Yes, sometimes, we really do not want to be with people.

And this can be the most important thing of a moment.

JP will often articulate this to me.

I do not want you with me, Daddy.

Sometimes, I want you.

But now I want to be alone in good fortune.*

JP has this with people. The presence of others is sometimes too much for him to bear.

(*This is a reference to Walt Whitman’s poem ‘Song of the Open Road'“, which JP often quotes phrases from.)

But, other times, company is enjoyed. Like most of us.

My dangerous jeep ride to a lost civilisation

This week I’ve been reflecting on a haiku that I have returned to over and over across the years. 

summer grass

all that remains of

soldiers’ dreams

夏草や　兵どもが　夢の跡

Natsukusa ya | Tsuwamonodomo ga | Yume no ato ~ Basho (c. 1689)

I first came across it at 14 years old as I stumbled across Japanese and Chinese literature. I encountered  old pond / Frog  leap / splash  around the same time. The frog haiku also comes back to me in quiet / surprising moments in nature.

古池や蛙飛こむ水のおと Furuike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto

Fu-ru (old) i-ke (pond) ya, ka-wa-zu (frog) to-bi-ko-mu (jumping into) mi-zu (water) no o-to (sound)

Old pond

Frog leaps

Ker sploosh

But summer grassses haunts me more.

I was reminded of this in a recent exchange with a philosopher. I mentioned I was cycling across London. He recalled a terrifying taxi ride when young. This triggered my memory of my most terrifying vehicle ride.

The scariest vehicle ride I had was in Indonesia. In 1998, I was travelling in Sulawesi. We heard about puzzling megaliths in the Bada Valley. Getting to the valley would involve a jeep ride. This jeep was stacked seemingly with the possessions of 3 families, their chickens and their wares, and us. My travel companion thought we would die as the jeep careened around the crumbling path that clung to the slopes. The burned out car wreckages lining the slopes did not allay our fears. Amongst the fear, I do recall an impression of beauty about the valley.

I remember this trip, not so much for the jeep ride, but because in the Bada Valley we trekked to see these mysterious statues. (also see Moxon, link below). This statue (locally named, Palindo “the entertainer”)

Leaning megalith

all that remains

a civilisation’s entire dreams

Now to be gawped at by tourists.

Nobody really knows how old the Bada megaliths are, or who made them, or even why they're there. They date anywhere between 1,000 and 5,000 years old. The locals don't have a clue – 'They've always been here,' is the most common response if you ask someone where the statues came from. They seem to pre-date the current Bada people. Adding to the mystery, all the objects in the area are made from a type of grey stone of which there are no deposits in the vicinity. cf. Stonehenge or Easter Island, The statues are huge, heavy, and in the middle of nowhere, a long way from any stone which could make them….

…I ponder what this era will leave behind and what will be remembered. Bringing me back to the haiku poet,

Basho…

…Having left Edo in late spring of 1689, Matsuo Basho and Sora travel north, arriving at Hiraizumi on June 29th.  Once the seat of the Northern branch of the Fujiwara family, it was destroyed in 1189. As the poet gazes down at the old battlefield, he hears in his head the words of the ancient Chinese poet Du Fu and explains:

“In the space of a dream, three glorious generations of Fujiwara vanished; two miles in the distance are the remains of the Great Gate. Hidehira’s headquarters have turned into rice paddies and wild fields. Only Kinkeizan, the Golden Fowl Hill, remains as it once was.

First, we climbed Takadachi, Castle-on-the-Heights, from where we could see the Kitakami, a broad river that flows from the south. Nearby, Koromo River rounds Izumi Castle and at a point beneath Castle-on-the-Heights, it drops into Kitakami. The ancient ruins of Yasuhira and others, lying behind Koromo Barrier, appear to close off the southern entrance and guard against the Ainu barbarians.

With his most loyal retainers, Yoshitsune fortified himself in the castle, but his dreams of glory quickly turned to grass.

“The state is destroyed, / rivers and hills remain. / The city walls return to spring, / grasses and trees are green. “

With Du Fu’s lines in my head, I lay down my bamboo hat and let time and tears flow.”

I once adapted a Noh play. It happened to win a prize. Was performed in London (at the Gate theatre) and garnered good reviews.

I’ve loved Scrabble and word play from a young age. Translation and adaption - across a language and culture - is one of those satisfying puzzles.

Let’s look at this poem. First consider for Basho - or any poet in this style - the calligraphy or writing style adds to the impact of the poem. You can compare this, for instance, to the hand written poems of Emily Dickinson.

For the average English poet, the hand writing form or written form in general matters less - another exception would be the typewriter form of ee cummings.

In Emily Dickinson - to my mind her hand written forms are a superior art to the typed page form. The length of her “dash line” varies, and the vigour of its stroke conveys a sense of pause and fluidity that the standardised text does not.

The same for Basho. Even more, Basho’s writing would often be intertwined with ink drawing for an even more complex impact. As the below (the writing itself seems to be falling quietly at the start)

horo horo to / yamabuki chiru ka / taki no oto

quietly quietly / yellow mountain roses fall / sound of rapids

I can not find Basho’s original calligraphy here but we need to possibly imagine the flow of ink.

Take the first line - ignoring the syllable structure at first - the syllable in Japanese being different to english.

夏草や

Natsukusa ya

Natsukusa - those characters conjure a specific image of fields of grass - almost weed like. Most translators say summer grass but it’s not quite as evocative as the original to my mind. That is also to do with the sound and the visuals. 

And then we come to the “ya”  or や

There is nothing close in English which can represent this character. In poetry, it has both a sound use and a slight technical conjoining use -

Going back to the sound - you have 

a - u - u - u - a

Some translators put “Ah” or “O!” to give some sense of this sound and character

Summer grass - Oh -

Ah - Summer grass

Summer grass - sigh -

Or - some other punctuation - perhaps a flourishing Emily Dickson long dash with a curl - would represent this better - or a squiggly ampersand -

Although to do this - you lose the sound pattern…

Look at line 2:

兵どもが

Tsuwamonodomo ga

兵 tsuwamono is an old term for a soldier - suggesting a lowly soldier - a foot soldier - it also has a plural form

This is an image of “ranks of foot soldiers” as opposed to  single well-armoured samurai - (although the Basho diary note does refer to Yoshitsune more precisely (along with his retainers) 

The plural form adds sound 

u - a - o - o - o - o- a

And note already the lack of “e” sound

And we have  “ga”

Again this is a post-preposition word in Japanese that has no good English equivalent - it tends to denote the “subject of the sentence” or to give some word or idea extra emphasis -

This potential puts the soldiers at the heart of the poem considering the poem started with the summer grass

The technical meaning adding an emphatic touch and the “a” sound adding more. There is also - to my mind - a visual break stop with the character - the line break adds a stronger break | caesura - but this character itself also issues a break - we might expect a new idea, linked but separate

And we do, we have:

夢の跡 yume no ato

The mark, trace - vestiges of a dream. Not the middle clear lucid vision you can have. But the decaying echoes of a dream you might have on w

aking, and one that vanishes out of mind, or is going to vanish. 

This is a stronger image than “dream” and doesn’t need the potential clumsy english parts such as “remains of”, “traces of” to give the impression of a fading ideal.

Then we have the meaning behind the poem. The first order meaning seems clear given Basho’s travel entry. 

But now time has passed, and the poem has left its original context, many people today (and in the future) can read this as poem that critiques wars in general. Implying life is lost, dreams are lost, and all that remains of those lost humans are grass and weeds.

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My further travels in Indonesia in the 1990s here when I went to visit the Wana tribe.

I found this account from Moxon, and his one of the funerals of Toreja land similar to my experience and one year earlier then my visit.

Sophie Woolley: deaf culture, hearing culture and her creative journey

What is it like to go deaf and then gain back your hearing? On this episode, I speak to Sophie Woolley.

Sophie is a writer, performer and theatre maker.  We have been friends for a while and I have learned a lot about Deaf culture and from her personal journey and one as a creative.

We have a meandering chat about her creative journey, how felt she had to write about her story of going deaf and then gaining hearing again via a cochlear implant. We recorded the podcast while Sophie is in Taiwan. She chats a little on her experience there and Taiwan’s COVID management. 

This is a long conversation between friends discussing the complexities of Sophie’s experience. I was particularly intrigued by her thinking on what it might mean to be a cyborg and being augmented and being part of both Deaf culture and hearing culture.  I am still thinking about her comment about captioning AI being her friend and how we can often simply criticise AI in a way we would not critique a human. (But also there’s no need to anthropomorphize AI either).

Links: Sophie’s website is here. Disability rights drama, Then Barbara Met Alan.

Image credit: Justin Munitz.

Listen below or wherever you get podcasts.

PODCAST INFO

• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

• Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh

• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

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Sophie Woolley, Transcript (only lightly edited)

Ben Yeoh (01:30): Hey everyone. I'm excited to be talking to Sophie Woolley. Sophie is a brilliant writer, performer and theater maker. Sophie, welcome. 

Sophie Woolley (01:41): Thank you. Thank you, Ben and thanks for calling me brilliant. You're brilliant as well. We've known each other a long while now.

Ben Yeoh (01:50): Quite a long while, and now across geographies, time, countries. One thing I'm really interested in is that you are really knowledgeable about hearing culture and also deaf culture. But to some degree you knew deaf culture first. I was wondering what it was like finding out about aspects of hearing culture or hearing culture sort of rediscovered after being so involved in deaf culture? 

Sophie Woolley (02:23): What was it like rediscovering hearing culture after being immersed in deaf culture? Yeah. I'm going to unpick the question a bit. [ ]

Sophie Woolley (02:54): So yes, just to unpick the question a bit. I grew up hearing. So, I come from a deaf family and our hereditary deafness is such that we got hearing and from adolescents we go deaf and we become profoundly deaf. So, it's quite a bit a strong deafness gene that runs back through the generations and I think most people who are in my family, married hearing people but the deaf genes are winning and so I grew up hearing and my mum was deaf and my youngest sister started going deaf before me. It was always a big mixture, so I was very immersed in human culture and the hospital decided I would not go deaf and my sister was going deaf, they picked it up. But with me, it was a happening bit later. So, I always had him in mind that I was obviously the hearing one.

Sophie Woolley (04:14): Like I said, I did hear people's stuff. I was also aware of deaf culture and the deaf rights movement and the disability rights movement. So, you might've seen that Jack Thorne and Genevieve Bart drama that was on last night on BBC, which I haven't watched it. Well, it’s about the disability rights movement, and that was all going on and my mum was involved in that when I was a kid. And then, I wasn't expecting to go deaf, when people go deaf, all of them, if you know an elderly deaf relative or someone who's starting to go deaf, they will always sort of be the last to admit him. 

Sophie Woolley (05:11): So, I was doing that classic thing, even though I was coming from a deaf family and people were saying, has your hearing got worse, Sophie? I was going, oh no, no. Just saying how it is because the hospital said that I'm not going deaf. So, I went through all the different levels of deafness and so deaf culture is not mono culture, it's this lots of different types of medical deficits, but also with that in that deaf people of different cultures and requirements and access requirements. But what I found helped me because I was always doing well as a writer and performer; what helped me get to the next level professionally was when I kind of made the full adaptation, started using access to work and using sign language interpreters and panel typists. You have a code; you have the stenographers they code in instantaneous verbatim caption. So, I had those in, in meetings and when I was in rehearsals or sometimes in auditions, I had sign language interpreters. 

Sophie Woolley (06:37): So, although we use sign language and speech at home, I wasn't fluent in sign language because I was more immersed in hearing culture, went off in to the world doing that. So, I was more becoming fluent in sign language when I started using sign language interpreters. So, you know like when you learn a language and you can read more than you can speak it or more than you can write it. So, I sometimes feel like that, like I can watch my mates, making their BSL videos on Facebook, chatting about that. Like I call it deaf web. So, when people are just making comments in video in BSL, I can understand what they're saying, but I'm not doing that myself.

Ben Yeoh (07:36): Wow. Really interesting. What do you think people who really only know about hearing culture, perhaps most misunderstand about deaf culture or maybe something you'd like to explain to them? I hadn't fully appreciated for instance, or the many levels of a deaf culture and it varies by geography as well as label and things like that. Nor, I think until I came across it well, I guess quite a few years ago, I really did not appreciate how rich and kind of amazing and poetic it is with this huge, very rich culture, but I'd be interested in your reflections on what I'm hearing culture really misses, I guess a lot of your friends would know, but I guess a lot of people haven't come across a deaf culture very much.

Sophie Woolley (08:39): What does hearing culture not notice about it? 

Ben Yeoh (08:42): Yeah. And what do they miss, or maybe don't appreciate? So, something which you would love hearing culture people to understand about deaf culture or maybe show them if you want to find out more, this is something you'd be really interested or excited to learn.

Sophie Woolley (09:06): Yeah. So, it’s a really good question, sometimes when someone asks me that question, my knee jerk reaction is to go, all right, this is one chance to have a bit of a moan but that's not what you're asking you come by as well. 

Ben Yeoh (09:27): You can moan as well if you like. 

Sophie Woolley (09:30): Yeah. That'd be a very podcasty, good album one. I guess people who get into deaf world would always have a moment, like a light bulb moment when they discover something and it makes them want to get to know more deaf people or learn to sign or something. And there's nothing to beat when you walk into a room and everyone's signing. If you get the chance to walk into a room where everyone's signing and you don't know the language then yeah. So, I guess if you go and see a play that’s in sign language and where the audience is mostly deaf. It's quite something; it's another language that's going on in different countries. And, in Britain, the deaf art scene and the deaf filmmaking scenes, the deaf TVs scenes, and it's really strong. And so, there's lots of opportunities where you could go. I'm trying not to say the words, another world, like it's alien or something, 

Ben Yeoh (11:23): Because it's our world. 

Sophie Woolley (11:35): So, what people often ask me on the main front and the standard things that people will always say to me when they find out I'm deaf and they might be able to talk to me about sign languages. So, it's international, right? So, everyone always says, the language is international and it's not. It's not only English people that say that. So English speaking people think that English is international but there were also people who their first language isn't English, but who also asked me this question, because I've been around the world and, and then they'll go. It’s an international question, but sign language has its people in France speak French and people in Taiwan. I speak Taiwan sign language. So, it's an international question and then the next question that people ask me is not a question, it's a complaint. So, people say that that's so stupid, why isn't it? It should be international; it should be an international language. And there is some more information that you can give to people about all of that, but it's once they've started complaining about how stupid sign languages, because it is not international, I don't feel like telling them.

Sophie Woolley (13:18): Because I'm speaking to you actually from Taiwan. I’m in Taiwan at the moment, I'm not in London where I normally live. So, I thought I want to try and meet some deaf people in Taiwan. And I went to and Googled deaf people in Taiwan, and there's a cafe about half an hour away that’s run by deaf people. So, I went there knowing that if I go in there and start signing, I will be able to have a chat with them a bit easier than people speaking Mandarin or Taiwanese or Hakko. And because I can do some hand shapes and I know some signs from other countries and so I went in to buy a coffee and I said I'm deaf and then I signed, I've got a cochlear implant. And, these positions, they recognized so they came outside because it's COVID restrictions. And at the time I went to visit that café, you have to go into the cafe, order the coffee and wait outside because it's a really small coffee shop. 

Sophie Woolley (14:49): So, they had to come and outside them, the deaf couple or two people and we had a basic chat and we were doing some typing on the phone, on Google translate. And so, we were able to have a chat a bit faster than if we were having two languages, we didn't know. So, there is an international sign language that gets used. Sign language is not international.

Ben Yeoh (15:32): It’s one of those really, really annoying questions. Well, maybe some impressions of Taiwan as you’re there would be really fascinating because I think you mainly grew up in London, like around maybe Halston, Northwest London, actually, not too far from where I am, but I think maybe first born in Glasgow a little bit of time in South Africa and obviously you being around the world, I'd be interested in your impressions on how it's like in Taiwan at the moment. Obviously, we still have the Pandemic happening, but maybe either some of that everyday life or deaf culture, even food, transport, shopping, anything you kind of think, wow, this is really different about Taiwan, or I really like this; this is something we should bring to London or vice versa. I’d be interested in your impression. 

Sophie Woolley (16:34): Yeah. It's so the first thing you're struck with when you come to Taiwan is the COVID theater, the pandemic theater is different. And when I say theater time, I mean like security theater. But it's not for show. It's proper. In many ways, it's like they're handling the pandemic in the way I wanted it to be handled. But that makes it quite difficult to get into the country. So, when I arrived, I had to do two weeks in quarantine. When you arrive at the airport, there's lots of people in hazmat suits and you have to wait and get COVID test and then go in a special taxi straight to the hotel. And in, in the hotel, the hotel reception staff are wearing their PPE. Oh, I missed a bit before I got in the taxi, the taxi driver, he's wearing PPE as well, sprays the whole of me, disinfects me and spays all of my luggage and the windows are down. So proper. I'm trying to remember if there is anything else that's done proper about coming into the country? There's really this digital system, so I have to register health form and then every day I'm texted by the CECC. So, the Command Center for Epidemic Control, I might have said the acronym words wrong, but they text me a message and I have to reply saying I'm well and the CECC says, thank you, we care about you. So, there's that automatic system and then police officer also calls as well and say eventually you get out of quarantine and there's at the moment is a full mask man mandate say everyone's wearing masks. 

Sophie Woolley (19:18): Sometimes people say, oh, it's lots of restrictions in Taiwan, but really it feels like a layer of kind of distress is removed because you don't have to think about it. Everyone wears a mask and everyone just gets on with it. So, there's no awkwardness either way. So, you wear a mask and you go to a restaurant and take you off. And there's no COVID. I haven't looked at the stats, but people aren't dying and there's no COVID but they have an issue with I think 45% of older people over a certain age haven't been vaccinated. So, their hesitancies with the pensioners. So, the long quarantine periods, I think Taiwan might be looking at Hong Kong where there's also a lot of people who didn't get vaccinated and now Hong Kong has got a very bad pandemic going on. So, it just feels like a kind of pandemic. 

Ben Yeoh (20:48): And has that changed how you viewed the arts and culture or restaurants and food? Or you give me the impression that everyone’s just getting on with it so it's as a normal part of life. But I'd be interested in how different Taiwanese culture or food seems to you to versus your experience in London.

Sophie Woolley (21:15): Yeah, the culture and the food. So, when I first came here last year, I came out of quarantine. And they did have an outbreak, they got the Alpha variant, the British one. And so, all of the arts closed, so I didn't see very much. So haven't seen very much, but I've seen some incredible visual arts and mainly me educating myself about the food. So, I go to the night market and also, I live near the night market. It's open opening the day as well. And that's really, really dazzling in different ways in the day and the night. So, there's the fish stores, the meats stores, then vegetable stores and then stores that are full of the different kinds of tofu, dog food and then stores that I think are full of many types of tripe.

Ben Yeoh (22:36): Wow.

Sophie Woolley (22:37):  I don't want to eat tripe, but I'd like to ask them questions, but I don't want to eat it but sometimes you do order something that you think is just a vegetable soup or have bits of tripod. So, you just sort of order the wrong thing so you did get to experience some tripe accidentally and then there’s these jellies and puddings. Like when I was in quarantine and I ordered some puddings and the consistency of food is very different and the puddings and cakes are not as sugary. So, at first, I was really unused to the food so I thought, well, I don't know if I'm ever going to get to like them food, but now I'm getting to like crave the different foods. And I really liked the red bean paste stuff and the congees and the jelly is made of different plants. 

Sophie Woolley (23:56): So instead of being made of animal the jelly is made of things like the other day I had some made of figs. The jelly is made of rubbing fig seed each together, and it's like jelly, it's cold. 

Ben Yeoh (24:14): It's very, very different textures, the food around Taiwan. It's really, really fascinating. So, I have a question here. I know none of us like to be pigeonholed, particularly in terms of our creative work. But you did a whole show ‘Augmented’ kind of about sort of deafness or finding out about that. I'd be interested in your process for that. And I think you've spoken also about a little bit of the moments when your cochlear implant was first turned on and, and how that all happens. So, I was wondering whether you'd like to comment on that and also your process and thinking behind creating your show ‘Augmented’ and using sort of your own life as kind of source material for theater making. 

Sophie Woolley (25:15): Like you said, the show is based on my past experience. So, I went totally deaf over 20 years and I thought I was going to just be deaf for the rest of my life. So, I knew about cochlear implants and I thought they weren't very good. I just had a lot of prejudices and fears about them. So, the original idea for the doing a show about someone who becomes what I call it, a deaf cyborg came from the moment I realized I was a deaf cyborg and the world had to know.

Sophie Woolley (26:06): And so, the process started in 2013 when I was switched on and in the hospital. But it took me a while because it's autobiographical and to find them the language for telling this story, because the three painful three audiences that I was thinking of when I was trying to write the show. So, there's hearing painful and deaf people who are not implanted and then there was people who are implanted or people that I thought might be like me and my it's life-changing. So, I didn't want to be an improv pusher, but I just saw there's just not anything culture about that's realistic about implants. It's always, oh, as a kind of there's a lot of old-fashioned dramas about it and saying, no it's controversial and showing people being unhappy with their implant. And it was, there was a lot of joy about it. But when I thought about making a show that that showed joy about implants also felt ashamed. I thought this would be quite impressive to a lot of deaf people who can't implant or don't need to implant. And implant. then I realized that that was a confidential conflict of the show. So, it's a show about me, my progress as a writer, by journeys as a writer. I know my journeys of a former employee takes out me to tell this story because I'm pulled in different directions by my duties to the different audiences.

Sophie Woolley (28:35): So, it's like the hearing audience is easy because they understand the standard story, you go deaf, you want to go hearing again. But really, I haven't gone to hearing again because in the story of augmented, I tell the story. I can't tell the story of going hearing until I tell this story of going deaf. And it's a story that show Sophie doesn't really want to tell the story of going deaf because It's a traumatic journey and she wants to present herself as a brighter hero as do I. I don't want to be a pitiable character. I'm proud of my deafness.

Sophie Woolley (29:29): It's very complicated. So, in the play, it's about I work with Sarah Dickinson, a dramaturg and she's brilliant and a brilliant director called Rachel Bagshaw and who implicitly understood whereas coming from, because she also has a quiet disability. And so, she feels free for transformation so they helped me and encouraged me to dig into the complexity of the story rather than make it but someone gets switched on and they cry and then everything's brilliant because I when I’m in a show you see, when I got switched on, my deaf family were there and they were subverting, it was kind of family chaos and my mom's hearing dog was farting and make everyone laugh. And so just to explain to my mum, she was deaf and she has a hearing dog and that's a working dog for deaf people. And so, it wasn't a kind of romantic moving switch on. But it was a really serious moment for me. And so, this faith in that moment, that way to shine that made it cheesy but it wasn’t. 

Ben Yeoh (31:10): I mean, one thing I love about the workers, it's really complex and shows that these things are not like our fairytale myths. They are story about being human, which has all of these complexities about it. One thing we've talked about maybe on the little bit more of the positive, surprising side was when you picked up incidental sound again and I think I had not appreciated as a hearing person, how incidental sound infuses everything. And also in your show, you talk about toileting and how toileting is a visceral thing, but actually sound is very much associated with it. And so that also is something I hadn't appreciated.

Sophie Woolley (32:07): Can I interrupt you? Because this is a deaf I sometimes I have to stop someone if I didn't understand a word or I think I heard a word and I think that can't be right. And did you say toileting? 

Ben Yeoh (32:21): Yes.

Sophie Woolley (32:23): When I'm toileting? 

Ben Yeoh (32:25): Well, the sound of the sound of urination. The sound of urination, which was just an incredible moment just in the show and for me, I hadn't really appreciated what we have as sort of hearing audience. And this was also around an incidental sound and hearing about that. So, I was just interested in, I guess the thing about incidental sound coming back and how that was for you. 

Sophie Woolley (33:06): Yeah. This is why I'm glad you pick out those details because they are details. And that's why it's so important for deaf writers and deafened people and deaf people who have had implants to write these stories, because then you get the specifics and the specifics are just as important as the general drama that people see from afar that you you've got these really moving, funny sound details that really, really give people more empathy than a kind of generalization that someone's got from a consultant and then got hearing writer to write it. 

Sophie Woolley (33:56):  So, the bit about the shock of when I went deaf and still must've still been in denial when I was profoundly to totally deaf and then one day realizing, wow, I can't, I can't hear myself, I can't hear that anymore. So that's gone, so I think things disappear and that’s quite philosophical, isn't it? Not being able to hear what you're doing. So, the detail is really important. 

Ben Yeoh (34:42): And I guess on that philosophical level there, I detect a sort of certain fear amongst many people about this idea of being augmented or cyborg. I guess we've got the idea that we can have artificial limbs, people I think are more peace about that but when it's to do with things like hearing or maybe brain or maybe other sorts of things, and I thought that was one thing really great about your story is that, at the heart of it, I thought, well, we're still really human, we might have other bits. I'm sure sort of when glasses came along, people thought, oh, that's an extra bit that we put on our body. And maybe that's the way that some of the human body is going. It might have bits which are not which are not as biological, but I don't think that really makes us any less human than I thought on that level is something that the story really resonated with me. I felt that was one of the underlying messages. Is that something you think about in, in general with, with where this has got to? 

Sophie Woolley (36:01): Yeah, and also, I think I need to write another show or film about it because I want to dig deeper into the duality of that. So yes, when I got switched on, I realized I hadn't been switched on as a Frankenstein monster. I had a sense of horror. The other people who have that stigma of seeing someone with the thing on the side of their head. I felt that horror in advance and having someone, it's very invasive, like having someone digging into my skull and such and then realizing that it gave me access to parts of myself and my identity that I hadn't been doing for a long time. And people close to me saw transformation in me. I find it difficult to talk about and that's why I had to write about it because I'm trying not to say oppressive things. Yeah, it's really because I am from the deaf community and I self-edit. So that's why I have to write things that are really hard to say.

Sophie Woolley (37:43): And the other thing I want to mention about the duality as well. We're human. Just because I’ve got this freakish thing in me. But also, immediately when I got switched on, I had all of that yeah, oh she's back, the old me. Also, there's a new me, I'm a cyborg.  So, things sounded very strange at first and science fiction and I loved all that and I miss all that liminal period of weird sound. But I also feel very appreciative of AI and machines and the sound of machines. And I'm not a transhumanist, but I wonder if there's kind of side of future humanism, and it's not the dodgy version.

Sophie Woolley (39:07): There's a book that I want to get that I think I can only order by the post that's just being published by a Caviar as it's a computational philosopher. And so, I saw a friend post about it, when people put picture of the book, they like so I looked up that writer and he's talking about other forms of intelligence. So, I looked up an essay done and he was critiquing humanism and saying, why is AI so bad? Why are we so arrogant to just dismiss that? And there is something in that I think, not having read his book yet, but I saw, I didn't explore that so well because what I find happens is people have this knee jerk response to that? It's like it's really an evil force and there are really, really bad things happening in computers and AI because they've been developed by non-diverse teams and things but it’s not what people have been knee jerked about, I'll be on a zoom and I'll say I'm just going to put the automated captions on so that I've got a transcript and people sometimes switch them on and stop criticizing their AI captions. And that's kind of allowed because the AI is not human, that I'm a cyborg and the AI is my friend.

Sophie Woolley (41:11): Like people wouldn't criticize my sign language interpreter. Some of them didn't always behave well with the interpreter, but that's understandable. They emphasize the ethics of that, but yeah, I've got a cup on about 

Ben Yeoh (41:33): Yeah, I think that's fascinating. And I think this gives you such brilliant insights because of these dualities, understanding deaf culture, understanding hearing culture, understanding AI and robotics, so I I'd be really interested in hearing you write more about these topics. I guess, with this duality, what I'm hearing though, is that you still feel part of deaf community and deaf culture as well as part of hearing you haven't lost that in being able to hear or do you feel also a little bit of a sense of loss because when we gain one thing you lose another and you talked about that liminal state where you have a set of sounds,  would you only have in that state and you pass out of it you lose something I'm interested. is that a tension in the duality or do you find you sit in a balance that no, you can accept being part of both cultures, like they're a little bit antagonistic sometimes because they don't understand that other half as well.  

Sophie Woolley (42:51): It's really been a beautiful journey. So, the play focuses on some of the tension. So, you know, my hearing and definitely if their response to me suddenly changing and them having to adapt to the new me. So, there's a sort of sense of loss maybe when I get back that over time. I've learned that it's not a loss, so I'm I have more time. So, I can do more work for them for the deaf group and rather than like be focused so much on myself because I used to have to spend a huge amount of time because I was a freelancer going from one job to the other. Insourcing access workers or being very tired from using access workers or lip reading. So now I have the hearing privileges, is not having that fatigue or having more time and also in real time, being able to have more instant access and hearing privilege in the world, the anger about that doesn't go away. The anger about the injustice against deaf me who didn't have this, doesn't go away.

Sophie Woolley (45:53): I'm not going around feeling angry all the time, but it's in the core. So, I can't walk away in theory. So, I can do thing that me and my sister used to talk about well, hearing people who can sign, they can still just walk away. Like if you're deaf and this is something you can't walk away from being deaf. But like, I sort kind of do that. I could walk away. But I don't think I do; I'm still very much involved in in deaf things as well as hearing things and there are things I do behind the scenes. I really want to spend more time being a cyborg. 

Ben Yeoh (46:03): I see that. I don't know if you see it the same, but that you are a bridge between these cultures and therefore you can advocate more effectively for deaf culture. Until I came close to people who had accessibility needs, and I think I don't even still fully appreciate it because I don't have those needs myself, about how difficult its cyborg. is. And there's a whole different set of these accessibility needs that people who don't have them who are in the majority simply ignore, not necessarily out of bad intent, but just from ignorance. And I think the more we have kind of these bridging things and exploring that, is a positive. 

Ben Yeoh (47:01): What made you think about being a cyborg or would you like to explore more about the AI thinking or the kind of machine thinking? Is it this idea that we could treat AI perhaps a little bit more like we consider humanity or what part of that duality is most interesting to you at the moment? 

Sophie Woolley (39:07): No, I don't know if we have to anthropomorphize the robots, but maybe we can learn from them. But I’m going to do some reading and thinking. I also want to get my external processor upgraded and I’m interested to see what will happen with the sound mapping of that? That's a very technical thing. So, whether my sound map board change, I have more control over it in real time or will the company be controlling the sound world. It's amazing, it makes you appreciate how many parallel universes that are because each time I get a new map, I think this is a great version to hear the world in, you know, you tweet it in the hospital. And then sometimes I come away and I have to go back and go no that's wrong, it's too Bassy. And but then I get this, the version I've got at the moment I'm really happy with.

Sophie Woolley (48:45): There are still things that are difficult to hear. So, there's a lot of technical things that I want to do that's more of a personal thing to work on the hearing. So, there's things that I think I'll never be able to do than I can do. So recently I was listening to some hip hop. So, I, I don't listen to as much music as I want to because I'm a writer. If I listening to music which Bluetooth directs to my brain. I get too distracted, but I thought I'd never be able to understand hip hop lyrics with my implant, but now it's becoming clearer.

Ben Yeoh (49:36): That's amazing how you can change or how the sound world changes with your sound map and you can sort of upgrade it or change it over time. Has the sound of your own voice change that much for you over time and these different processing’s and how do you feel about the sound of your own voice? Do you have a changing relationship with it? I guess there's the useful things, right? Of your voice or how you can voice them in terms of acting and things and changing voice but has it changed over time and you kind of interested in that? 

Sophie Woolley (50:21): Yeah, that's another thing I want to do about the cyborg thing is, I want to do some more acting and I think for that to happen, I am going to be writing my own parts and I don't know if it'll be a cyborg story, but I it might have to be. But my voice has changed in terms of when I was getting deaf, I was doing lots of different voices in plays, different accents and I was working with Jemma Fairly, a brilliant director. And so, I was really into doing that and then I was beginning to be cost is deaf characters on TV and radio. Since I got my implant, I haven't been getting so much of that work. My voice had changed after I got the implants, I didn't work on it but it changed because I was able to monitor my speech. 

Sophie Woolley (51:41): So, I'm learning Mandarin in Taiwan and that just feels incredible to me. While I'm learning, the teacher has got a mask on, so I can't lip read her. So, this isn't the case for all people with implants, but for me I can follow speech without lip reading. And it's not easy learning Mandarin or hearing it when it's muffled, you know, how everyone's deaf in a pandemic because all the speech is muffled by the mask. My voice is different when I'm speaking Mandarin. I wish there was more time to know the languages and I wonder if I can use that in my work. I hope someone is making a film where they need a Londoner who speaks a little bit of Mandarin.

Ben Yeoh (52:54): Yeah, that'd be great. So maybe the last couple of questions is do you have any advice for people, either advice from how you lived your life or perhaps advice for people thinking about having implants or those interested in deaf culture. So yeah, any thoughts or advice that you might have?

Sophie Woolley (53:21): Is there any advice about deafness or getting implants?

 Ben Yeoh (53:25) Yeah, definitely. Or just general life advice. It doesn't have to be something specific, but final thoughts. 

Sophie Woolley (53:32): Yahir really think I'm specific. It's really important with deafness. So, I want you to say more specific things in our chat. One of the things is that all deaf people are different. I grew up in a family where we are deaf and we sign and speak and sign language has been very empowering for us and so I have cochlear implants. One thing that's been happening in the last six months, and I'm not sure why is it, people have in working context, people have been asking me if I want them to book me a sign language interpreter. I haven't used sign language interpreters since 2012. Yeah, that was the last time I used them at work when I was working on a play for the culture, ‘The Olympiad’. And then I got the info and I found out that I just had to use one access last year implant, but what's been happening in the last six months is maybe the people in the pandemic have been like seeing a lot of access on the public zooms and things and so the question has changed. So instead of asking me what access do you prefer people have been asking, do you want me to procure sign language interpreter? Because I come from, signing, speaking background, I can take it. But I just think for there's a lot of deaf people who go deaf later in life and they don't sign and they it's going to be quite difficult for them to be asked that question. So, the question to ask people is do you have any access requirements? Is there anything I can book?  Just something more general in that context, because people have all different specific requirements.

Ben Yeoh (55:57): So that's a good question to know. And overall, I mean, that's probably the kind of way we should be asking sort of everyone, do you have accessibility needs? Can I help you with something rather than sort of pigeonhole people into a particular way?

Sophie Woolley (56:13): Yahtzee was a producer that I worked with who is really good on the access front and I think he has a sign off after his name. Some people have pronouns and things like that. I mean, he has the thing after his name on the emails saying if there's anything access wise, that I can organize, let me know. I can't remember the wording. So that's on the sign off and that's so useful. I think for a lot of people who might be have to pluck up the courage to ask, because it's difficult to know when everything's online, how, how it's going to land sometimes.  So, a lot of them, the labor that people have when they're becoming deaf is the fear of asking for what they need. Fear of looking weak or something. So, the, the advice I'd give to someone who's going deaf or, or just going into them the working, working life is you have to sort of take the bull by the horns and assertive and ask for what you need. But I think get your foot in the door first and then be organized about what you want, because you're going to need X, Y, and Z actually some point. And if you ask for it late, then that's not a collaborative approach to your access. So, you'd sort of be organized it about it. The style I used to do is organize all of my own. I think other people organize it for people now.

Sophie Woolley (58:17):  Access to work is more difficult to get. I don't use it anymore. I understand that it's more difficult to get. So, if people are unemployed, they should be doing some of the work to get access to work for their workers. I feel like I'm straying a bit from my remit which is as a being a writer or an actor. 

Ben Yeoh (58:47): No, I don't think that strays from your remit at all. I think that's really useful actually advice as its pretty practical and any advice or thoughts for creatives, maybe reflecting on your own personal creative and a writer performer journey. 

Sophie Woolley (59:10): Yeah. I make my own shows, applied my own path and I wasn't working for the big companies at first. I was just getting up in pubs and clubs and teach myself. So, if you don't have training, then that's quite a good way to develop your own voice. If I go back and do it again, I would learn some craft and structure a bit earlier on because that's expected and it also speeds up the writing process and

Ben Yeoh (01:00:01): Great. And what future shows or shows where we can see some of your work. Cause I think that the Deaf Faker series is still available on YouTube. Is that right where we can see some of your work? Any particular work you're proud of that, we could look at and future projects that you're interested in working in, which might be coming up?

Sophie Woolley (01:00:25): Yeah, you can. I've been writing between the pandemic, writing for EastEnders and I'm proud of the episode that was last done in October. I think that was the 12th of October or something like that. So, if you go on my website, sopheywolley.com, there's a link to the EastEnders episodes and I also start as a villain in a short film called ‘Veneer’ by Jean Sinclair, who is a brilliant deaf actress and writer. He also worked with me on ‘Augmented’ so that's on BSL zone. You’ll probably get to that from my website as well. And yeah, I've got YouTube channel I did a kind of short experimental film with Dudley Reese and Told by An Idiot in 2021, I think, or 2020. Oh, dear it's sort of blur and that was called ‘Best in Lockdown’ and it was quite strange to make that because I was using my technology and the director was in another room, so we did it all very safely. So, he gave me instructions and questions through a gadget that just beamed sound to my brain. That's called Best in Knockdown. And the other advice away to give, going back to your other question. 

Ben Yeoh (01:02:14): Yeah. Please do.

 Sophie Woolley (01:02:18): Don't be hard on yourself and I have to tell myself. 

Ben Yeoh (01:02:24): Yeah. I guess be kind, don't be too hard. Be kind to yourself. I remember you telling me quite important to try to never get repetitive strain injury. So, these other little practical things that's again, don't be too hard on yourself. 

Sophie Woolley (01:02:47): Yeah. Yeah. When my play ‘Augmented’ when it did nine shows and then the tour had just stopped because it was March, 2020 and I was like oh I couldn't work at the time because we couldn't go out and I did the whole workaholism thing. I know, but I didn't get RSI. So, I've got my desk go set up really well now these days. 

Ben Yeoh (01:03:22): Excellent. So, any other final thoughts you'd like to share? Advice or something I haven't covered that you think actually, I quite like to chat about that. 

Sophie Woolley (01:03:37): Yeah. I think go to you mingles if you can. That if we were still on the advice thing, they’re really good 

Ben Yeoh (01:03:52): Yeah, meeting other people. I feel I've learned so much from your work and just following what you've been doing over time. So, I find it's really fascinating and important. And so, thank you for being brilliant.

Sophie Woolley (01:04:11): Yeah, thank you. It's really good to hear that all the way over in Taiwan. Thank you. I hope I get to see your shows when I when I get back to London soon. Yeah. 

Ben Yeoh (01:04:27): Well, thank you very much Sophie. If you appreciate the show, please like and subscribe as it helps others find the podcast.

Why Wordle works

I succumbed to Wordle. My previous podcast chat with games philosopher C Thi Nguyen has I reckon hit upon the pleasing mechanics of the game in this thread. See our podcast here on games philosophy. This is his thread on thinking about the game:

OK, so I was curious, and I played Wordle. And I have a theory about why it's so successful. The design is ingenious in a very particular way

This is a philosopher of games' theory of Wordle. A thread:

— C Thi Nguyen (@add_hawk) January 12, 2022

I’d like to expand on his point on the social diagram graph.

Once you have played the game a couple of times, and once you have finished a word. You can examine the struggle/journey of everyone else that day. There is only one a day, so you know everyone is playing the same word at the same time. One a day means you will not overcommit/addict like Candy Crush or Farmville might have done for you. (Other viral social games, though those games were tryingt to/were making money).

When you look at someone’s completion graph, you can know fairly accurately where they struggled, how they struggled or not. And either admire in awe at an amazing step change guess, or sympthasise on a tricky journey. 

As you know the word and the rules (or even if you don’t know the word, but can see the guesses) the design of the word gives you a replay into their game.

In this sense, it’s like watching the replay of a well constructed football goal in slow motion. You can see how the moves where put together and placed to an ending.

The social element recalls a time when people did many cultural activities together (and still do), like watching a new episode of Friends, or in the UK Bake Off and Strictly Dancing; or playing Among Us, Minecraft.* There is a large cultural shared language. Decades ago Brits listened to the wireless together, or Radio 4 was a very commonly shared cultural outlet. 

The partial atomisation of aspects of culture to where you can find your “tribe” means to some extent this sharing is different, maybe diminished. The typical Guardian reader, does not read the Daily Mail (and vice versa).

Strictly, Bake Off; to some extent Squid Game; Harry Potter and the like cross those boundaries.

Wordle achieves this cultural synchronicity as well. The achievement is daily and almost real time and crosses many boundaries.

So, in a rather amazing piece of social game picture design (the design of the final outcome was actually inspired by an early player, I believe), I say hats off to game maker, Mr Wardle.

I note the developer is feeling somewhat stressed about the responsibility of it all, and as of now, only unrelated games with similar names have benefited financially. This is a VC orientated interview and here in the Guardian.

*As an aside, noted Rationalist blogger, Scott Alexander got married recently, and one of his early dates was a building a house together in Minecraft with his now wife. Seems to represent something about the time we are living in.

What school taught me

What did I learn at school. I’ve listed 43 ideas (link here) that I suggest could be taught at school. There’s an underlying sense I was not taught those ideas at school (although maybe most of them are what we learn from family). This week, I pondered what I did learn.

It could seem like luck (but really was my parents’ foresight) brought me to a school that fostered independent thinking and an enormous amount of questioning. There was a willingness to follow your curiosity and passions. This lead me to A-Level Art along with four maths and science subjects. I ended up writing to Edward Albee to gain permission to stage Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf when his London amatuer agents refused. There was to be a major London West End production. This supposedly caused a hold on all productions including my modest school endeavour. I recall my annoyance that his agents failed to see how my production could not possibly interfere with the West End staging. Albee agreed to my request.

Practicing and studying art demonstrated the emptiness of grades. What value in spending 50 to 100 hours looking at your 16 year old self and painting that self. Is that picture, is that contemplation, is that devotion to looking, re-looking and painting…. an A, B, C or D ?

There were learnings over what we might now call deliberate practice. I slowly improved my drawing by drawing every day. There was a realisation of the role of modern art in attempting to capture a truth about an idea or picture rather than a photographic representation. 

Modern art captures an element that is essential and somehow true rather than a representation that has the physics or photographic accuracy. A resonant moment was viewing Diego Velázquez’s painting of Pope Innocent X and Francis Bacon’s version.  Velázquez captures so much in a mostly realistic fashion. Bacon’s does the same with a modernist (de)construction. (See above)

I try and pass this learning on from time to time. The essence of something.

The deeper learning was on the superficial status of exams and grades in this respect. 

Our maths teacher explained to us,

let’s get the exam stuff over early and then we can learn some real maths.

(We did take the exam modules early). There was a sense that although exams were important to tick the boxes, tests were not a true assessment of learning or knowledge. I recall the moment when he explained how there were different set sizes of infinity and you could understand that by analogy of counting off groups of sheep in two pens.

(If you have two pens of sheep and you wish to know if one pen contains more sheep, you can pair the sheep off and if you have left over sheep in one pen, that pen must have contained a larger number. If you think about all the discrete numbers between 1, 2, 3… to infinity as one pen (pen A), and all the continuous numbers between 0 and 1, then you always pair the numbers in Pen A with a number from the second pen (think of one-to-one correspondence), and have numbers left over, so by that thinking it’s a larger set of infinite numbers! You can find using this idea that there are more real numbers than natural numbers. See Gerog Cantor) Ensure class debate on nature of infinity…

Many institutions teach to the exam and strategies to pass them. Exam techniques, reading the question, allocating time, studying likely questions and memorising the syllabus, facts and arguments for those questions. Using spaced repetition or memory palaces to aid memorisation.

This ability to guess the essay question in advance and only prepare for that by rote memory might be called a type of “hack”. A short cut and workaround that obtains the desired result. This hack is teachable but the deeper learning is that hacks are not life learnings. 

Excelling at these hacks can be a disservice if you fail to realise this point.

I observed some of these people who excelled later in life. Good memories, abilities to synthesise and analyse ideas and systems but they were mostly trying to life hack their way through work. To guess the essay question in advance. Excelling at the short cut heuristics that can ace test papers. How can I get this product to sell? Is there no hack for it ? Mostly not. You need to make a product that people want. Wrapping a poor product in gloss will fail.

How do you hack a self-portrait if you wish to capture an essential truth about yourself ? It seems as silly as asking how do you hack friendship ? How do you assess the future worth of a business ? The hack is putting a few numbers into a discounted cash flow but that seldom gives you the real answer.

There are elements of work ethic, what we might call grit and stamina that can help but the idea I managed to learn was the exam was not the answer, was not the knowledge, was not the point. In the way that the map is not the actual territory.  An over reliance on hacks, like an over reliance on a model, may mean you miss the real truth and knowledge.

As an aside, you can see some of that development in many fields. Observe the sustainability and environmental social governance (ESG) area. 

Here,  a company management team can ask, how do we do well on this ESG exam? How do we get an AAA grade ? The way to “hack” this is to obtain a good rating from a rating agency. If you examine the tests rating agencies use, you can find many of them are graded on “having an appropriate policy”. So a company management team can write various policies and put them on the website and they will have “hacked” the rating. They pass the exam, but a policy in itself is not sustainability, it’s often not anything to do with the real world. 

I can observe this effort to hack, on occasion, in people looking for investment in their pitches. They want to “hack” what investors want. Long-term sustainable investors want companies to develop and grow products and services that customers love because these products solve problems or challenges for them. Those problems may be related to health, the environment, food or so on. There’s no short-cut hack for creating long-term sustainable value.

I was fortunate to glean that lesson from school and travelling (which my parents also very much encouraged) and perhaps schools today don’t really teach it either, but I think it is perhaps one of the most valuable life lessons.

Stephen Unwin: theatre over the decades, what disability teaches us | Podcast

Stephen Unwin is a theatre director and writer. Amongst many accomplishments he has been the artistic director of the Rose theatre, founder of ETT, English Touring Theatre. He is also chair of the charity Kids, which provides services to children with disabilities. His Twitter is here. 

We speak about whether we need language to be human and what non-verbal people teach us. 

We chat on how theatre has developed over the decades and Steve’s appreciation of Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble. We touch on Steve’s experience of the Traverse theatre, dealing with the very different stakeholders of the Rose Theatre; and how European theatre, realism and London has influenced theatre over the decades; what’s enjoyable about theatre over film.

Steve discusses how much of liberal progressive thinking may overlook the history and challenges of disability. While contested, we chat about the possible roots of this in the 18th century enlightenment and its influences today. We talk about the importance of self-advocacy but also the challenges of self-advocacy if you are - for instance - non-verbal.

Steve talks about going viral on Twitter around “mock gloom” and disability. He also provocatively suggests five of the greatest artists of the last century.

We comment on:

• Bob Dylan

• The artist Piero della Francesca

• And what he has in his library of thousands of books

And finish with his current projects and life advice Steve has. Transcript and podcast below.

PODCAST INFO

• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

• Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh

• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

Click below or wherever you get podcasts.

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Steve Unwin transcript ((this has not been deeply proofread, so expect typos etc)

Ben Yeoh (00:00): Hello and welcome to Ben Yeoh Chats. If you're curious about the world, this show is for you. Do we need language to be human? On this episode, I speak to Steven Uwin. Steve is a theatre director and writer, as well as a chair of a disability charity. We speak about the challenges of running a theatre, touring, the strengths of realism and human scale theatre and what it's like to go viral on Twitter. If you enjoy the show, please like and subscribe as it helps others find the podcast. Thank you, be well. Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Steve Unwin. Steve is a theatre director and writer, amongst many accomplishments he's been the artistic director of The Rose Theatre. He founded ETT; English Touring Theatre. He's also the chair of the charity kids, which provide services to children with disabilities. Steve, welcome.

Steve Unwin (00:57): Thanks very much. Lovely to be here.

Ben Yeoh (01:00): So Steve, do you think we need language to be human? I asked this cause I guess I've been asked an exam question from science or neuroscience and the typical question goes, does language make us human? Is it the defining characteristic? But if you flip it on its head that kind of suggests that people who don't have language like us are not human like us, which is perhaps a troubling set of circumstances to be in. So do we need language to be human?

Steve Unwin (01:36): That's a big, big, brilliant question. No, of course we don't need language to be human. This goes right back to classical philosophy and the kind of endless question about how we define human beings? What is human and what is non-human? And rational thought and language have been sort of promoted … for thousands of years as somehow the defining factor, but it's really not good enough. It seems to be that a human being is the offspring of two human beings and that's simply the best way of expressing that. I think that human beings are social animals however, and I think there is an interesting thing, which is the range of communication, which is available to human beings is enormous. So I think that by privilege's speech is the only form of communication, we actually miss out on [non-verbal] communication. The really interesting thing is that people progressives will talk about body language one moment and then the next moment they'll say speech is the definition of being human. So you want to say, well, what happened to all that body language that you were caring about? No, it's a big question, but we have to move beyond the definition I'm convinced

Ben Yeoh (03:21): That makes a lot of sense. So we'll come back to perhaps disability and the meaning of humans and things. But I was wondering first on the theatre theme, which I guess is a communication theme. You're a rare breed of theatre maker who continues to have a directing and writing and theatre career over many decades and there's plenty of debate today as to whether British theatre is building back better and whether it's embracing creative opportunities or perhaps stuck in a rut. How do you feel theatre making has developed over the decades and where do you see its strengths and weaknesses now?

Steve Unwin (04:02): Another enormous question. Well, I've been working in theatre predominantly as a director for 40 years and there are a lot of things which have changed over those years. There are some things that stay the same. I think that what I am concerned to see in the theatre, but actually in broader, in culture and indeed in disability politics, which is another thing I care about a lot, is a human being in all his or her or their frailty and complexity and multifacetedness and I suppose in all the theatre that I have enjoyed watching, trying to make, being part of has been about the human being, the human scale, the fragility of human beings, the delicacy, if you like, of human experience. And certainly that's the kind of theatre that I am drawn to as opposed to fantasy and techno and violence, which, I mean, all of those are parts of human experience. I recognize that, but I'm most interested in theatre and this is what I like about the theatre as opposed to film, … but is that there is a human being in …, there's a human being on stage …if you like. So that for me is the spread that runs through all the theatres that I've enjoyed and also not enjoyed. I tend to prefer going to see a new play than an old play, because I like the-- I you like the innocence that you bring when you go to see a new play, because you want to know what happens next, you want to know who these people are, you want to know what this story is, what this family is, what is happening in this world the writer is presenting.

Steve Unwin (06:37): So I sort of prefer that than going to see yet another radical take on established classics. Now, I've done that… work myself over the years and I'm aware of that, but that's certainly my taste when I'm going to a play and I suppose that I think that the development of new writing which catches modern human experience is what I think is the most important thing that can happen. Now, that to me should be about writing, which I feel is engaging in what it is to be human, going back to your other question rather than simply engaging in questions of form. I mean, of course, form, but it seems to me that new content should come first and form should result from content. And I think it's important to recognize the number of experiences, of modern experiences, which the classical writers weren't able to write about. It's not their fault, it's there from the past. And so there's so many different kinds of ways of--different kinds of experiences which are being more and more validated. Like for example, Non verbalism, we are talking about … all sorts of issues amongst culturalism and gender politics and so on which are new kinds of experiences. So I want to see new plays. I do believe in drama. I do believe in plays. I think the playwrights… I mean, of course the death of individual playwrights is inevitable, but I do really believe in somebody sat there writing a play, writing a story with people [… people talking to each other, connecting with each other and through the action of the drama showing some kind of psychological, social, political, cultural change. That interests me still. That interests me much, much more than the new style of directing.

Ben Yeoh (09:24): So content first or content over form and the present, because in a way the present can talk about class, disability, gender things, which in the past were not to the fore. I mean, I find it interesting that-- Actually, we'll come to the fact that disability very poorly if ever represented on the stage, but even notions like class, which particularly in the UK seem very current, seem to have fallen away from the stage a little bit. And I think back when you are thinking about your sort of decades and the way you articulate it, 1950s, 1960s, world court, Berlin, Germany have that-- the theatre which starts there seems to be of this human scale idea that you talk about and the way it's developed, we still have some of that but like you say, perhaps a little bit less so in the last decade or so. Is that your impression and how you see it's developed or do you have a little bit of a different reading?

Steve Unwin (10:29): Well, I certainly come out of the tradition which is.-- You're right, of the old Royal court. When I was in my teens, I was seeing in the Royal court and obviously the impact of the [Berlin] ensemble … and of the political and social readings of Shakespeare and of classics. That's certainly where I come from. Now, of course that must always be challenged because if you look at that, that was … It was all kinds of things, all kinds of charges should be leveled against that and I recognized that and yet at the same time, it was perhaps more socially inclusive than some people remember and I think most importantly there was a realistic attitude to human life, to human beings. Of course I don't mean naturalistic. I mean, realistic. I mean people live in society, that people live next to each other, that people interact with each other, but we are shaped and created by our environment and our class and our gender and our sexuality and our religion and all the rest of it. But that work and I think this is one of the hallmarks of all the great classical writers actually, is that that work sees the human being in the society. It doesn't imagine that human beings are this kind of isolated. I sometimes think that we have a rather romantic notion of characters. There is this kind of I stand independent of my time, which I don't think one can stand independent of one's time or background or class or whatever.

Steve Unwin (12:34): So, it's not that I think, oh God, I want everybody to be doing the Berlin ensemble in 1949. I really don't. I really don't. But I do think that there are lessons to be learnt from that moment and from the Royal court and I suppose from the tradition of realism, social realism, political realism. I think there are still great things to be learned from that and I emphasize that's not to be confused with naturalism, although I think that naturalism has great values and great radical values, which of course is unfashionable now … . It's a phrase that I always get wrong, but I love. So it's something like there is more poetry in the apartment of the [bourgeois]… than in all the faded palaces of history [Zola quote] and I kind of love that, that in everyday life there is poetry and this is in a great position to get back the ., the great painters; but there is poetry and meaning and value in a theme set in the kitchen … Well, there's a reaction against that, which of course I understand. But I came of age in the 1980s. That was my time. I left university in 1982 and what we were all engaged with … all sorts of various companies but I think we were engaged in with a reaction against Royal court naturalists and we said … and I was involved in all of that.

Steve Unwin (14:54): I look back on it and I go, it was… that tension with that, but we were perhaps—.… There is a value in that social realism and I was getting all wrapped up in magic realism and all of that and then of course funding and a different tradition, which is liberating. It's liberating but it's also problematic. I remember reading Measure for Measure, which is one of my very favourite Shakespeare plays and it was all about the …liberation, sexuality and the play was kind of-- the over script was about the overthrow of repression. But when I look at … what I see so much is the problems of commercial theft, which is disease and exploitation and the play seems to be dealing with that rather than this all being jolly good.. . . I think it's just really quite complicated but sexuality is complicated because of course there's love and freedom on the one hand, but there's also this thing called exploitation and violence and disease and all the rest of it. So, I think that Shakespeare brilliantly is being realistic and paradoxical and not saying hurray for unconstrained sexual expression.

Ben Yeoh (17:05): That makes a lot of sense, a lot to unpack there. I'm thinking with this--

Steve Unwin (17:09): Yeah, I suppose that's too dense.

Ben Yeoh (17:12): I'm thinking of this tension between, I guess the realism naturalism school and the say magic, realism, clowning, other traditions, which entered … counter reaction to that and where we are merging today and I was thinking about the history of … theatre making was touring ETT and then theatre building, Rose Theatre and I was intrigued to think, is there anything which you think is really misunderstood about running a theatre building, so being kind of place based and community based and developing a work there. Does that make it easier to be part of a movement or something where you are reacting either for or against something and would it learn something form touring or vice versa? I was just interested. So do you think anything which is really misunderstood about a theatre building? I meet a lot of theatre makers and they kind of think, oh, having a building is the be all and end all. And then some people who come out from buildings like, oh, I can't, can't wait to be rid of that. I want to be touring or making my own work again.

Steve Unwin (18:26): Right. So, it's all interesting Ben. In a moment I want to get back to the 80s cause there's something I wanted to tell you about, but let's look at this first. … says there is a world elsewhere and I think that's a really important point that in Britain, unlike actually in a lot of European countries, everything is so centralized in London. Where I live, where you live, where most people are working in the city to live, not everybody, but lot of people and there is this kind of economy which is kind of feeding on itself and I set up-- Well actually there was this sort of a previous company, which I took over and changed the name and changed everything about it in 1993. It was called Century Theatre and I took it over and called it English Touring Theatre and we relaunched it. But I remember when I was applying for that job, I did a play upstairs at the Royal court. … and I remember sitting there on the first night and looking around, you know, there's 60 people there and I kind of found that I knew nearly all of the audience and there were some theatre critics who I just sort of vaguely knew, but didn't really know. And I said what am I really doing? I'm doing this work for my buddies and for myself. This has no political engagements, if you like. So when I then took over ETT and we were touring, I think I did a production … which went to big theatres all over the country; Blackpool Grand, 800 people watching Midsummer Nights Dream.

Steve Unwin (20:15): And that seems to me is an engagement, a fascinating engagement, a difficult one. It's hard, it's complicated because you've got a difficult building in some ways, you've got an audience which is very, very different in all sorts of ways, all sorts of different expectations about what an evening in the theatre should be and so on. Incredibly difficult to generalize, but I found that that engagement with a very different audience and a very different group, incredibly stimulating. Stimulating and frustrating, challenging, thrilling and headache all at the same time. I stayed with ETT for 15 years. … Probably would say too long, but that's another question and I got absolutely devoted to those theatres that we toured all over the country. There are real, you know, for young directors wanting to do something like that, there are real challenges. It is not easy. At the same time making a career as a freelance director is not easy either. But it was just sort of a learning curve and an opportunity, which I'm so glad I had. Then going to [the Rose Theatre] which I did in-- when did I do that? 2008 was it? We opened it in 2008, Peter [Hall] , he was going to run it and then he couldn't. So I opened it and ran. Enormously challenging, enormously challenging. A beautiful theatre, which is too big, which has some major design problems and yet also brilliant in a suburb of London without any funding, any proper funding.

Steve Unwin (22:33): So, I spent so much energy trying to keep the place open, trying to manage all the different stakeholders who wanted different things, contradictory things. The theatre critics want one thing, the actors want something else, the local authority wants something, the university wants something, the town wants something, the business wants something else. Well, it was fascinating and I'm glad I did it, but Jesus, that was hard. I mean, that was really, really hard. And the honest truth is, I sometimes found that I was-- I mean, I think this was my fault, but I had moments of feeling very depressed, like really depressed that I couldn't-- how do you make this thing work? And so I probably would sometimes feel a bit negative and a bit this is all impossible … I mean, I think it opened and it worked and we built an audience and I'm really proud of the vast amount that happens, but somehow you probably need more magical belief than I had to really pull it off. It wasn't helped by the fact that I live an hour and a half [away]. I live in Northeast London and this is in Southwest London. So it'd be a kind of hour and a half journey first thing in the morning, and then getting home at midnight having watched the show or whatever it was that evening. So it was a very, very-- Yeah, it's hard.

Steve Unwin (24:25): So, I think running things is a really good thing to do for a director, but recognize that it's only, or rather recognize that the creative element, or well you have to redefine what creativity is. I mean, I look back and of course those two jobs allowed me the opportunity to direct a lot of plays and my CV is-- I've directed, I don't know, 80, 90 plays now, something professionally. So I've done a vast amount and that was helped by having my own company but I would reckon that in both jobs, the directing was 10% of my job. If only all one has to do was direct plays, that would be fine. I'd say particularly directing is very, very, very challenging.

Ben Yeoh (25:26): I hadn't understood how multi-stakeholder that was. I guess most buildings are there because some are placed in their community, but often have all of these multi-stakeholder issues. And actually it's the same interestingly with science today. I speak to a lot of people who go into sort of post PhD and they think about becoming a professor and they say, actually, I need to spend 60 or 70% of my time that high seeking funding and pleasing my other stakeholders to be able to do 20 or 30% of the science.

Steve Unwin (26:00): Exactly. Exactly. 

…

Steve Unwin (26:03): Yeah.

Ben Yeoh (26:04): Go on. You wanted to make a comment on the 80s, but yeah, you had something to finish off on buildings, please do.

Steve Unwin (26:09): Well, I mean just the buildings, you've got to imagine the theatre critics go we want something to write about, we need a fashionable star and an event. The local authority says, what are you doing for seven year old, for children? Okay. The university says, where's the program for our students? How are you working with our students? We don't care about famous stars. Some of the philanthropists want you to do a good program for local disabled children or whatever, which is great. Other philanthropists want their brand to be attached to some famous name. So, if you like, corporate sponsors need that and they trust in foundations but another thing again-- So, the stakeholder map is deeply contradictory. What I wanted to tell you about the 80s, there was a particular project, which in some ways is one of the most successful things I did, but in a way marries both the notion of the social and political realism, if you like that we are talking about, but also the new forms and the explosive nature. I suppose, postmodernism, which was happening at the time.

Steve Unwin (27:32): I did a play by a German, playwright [Manfred Karge]. I did two plays by him, in fact, and this was called Man to Man and it was a one woman show, one woman play about an hour and 10 minutes and it was played by my old friend from university [Tilda Swinton]. And we did it at the [Traverse] and then it went to the Royal court. This was, I don't know, in 1986 or 7 [1987] …what he wrote was a play which absolutely had to have its own …  theatrical self-consciousness and provocatory, fragmentary. It was a pop art in some ways, but with its roots in a real serious political analysis. So that, which was a big, big success, is an enormous bit. I think that was in a way, was what it seemed to me was the place where what I inherited met what was arising, if you like, what was just emerging … That for me was a very important moment about being able to be in the 80s while at the same time anxious about the 80s, if you like, which was, if you remember, the high time of … It was a pretty appalling museum culture, reactionary thing going on; bright side revisited.

Ben Yeoh (29:38): And were you in Edinburgh a lot of that time, cause you spent a lot of theatre work around the Traverse, right?

Steve Unwin (29:43): Yeah. I worked in the Traverse Theatre (Scotland. Edinburgh) as I left university in 1982. I spent most of the 80s at Traverse and started to do opera. And then in 1993, I founded ETT. 2008 I went to the Rose. So I was ETT all the time. In  2008 I went to the Rose, and then I left the Rose in 2015 and I'd been freelance. …

Ben Yeoh (30:19): … how did you describe London theatre where we feed on ourselves? Was [IEdinburgh] a little bit less [feeding on itself] so because you have the festival every summer or outside of the festival, I guess there's fewer theatres and it's smaller, but perhaps that means there's less feeding on itself to some extent.

Steve Unwin (30:39): Well, there's a funny thing. The British theatre every five years discovers Europe. There's this incredible thing called European theatre and there's always a new person who's discovered Europe again. What's amazing about when I look back on the early 80s, the festival was extraordinarily European and international. We had… every year in the festival, we had three or four international companies, South Africa, we had a big connection with South Africa. But then you get to Riverside studios in London … So I think at that moment, those early 80s were the most international I've known the British theatre and the influences on the thinking in the British theatre was very, very international. … Now, obviously a different stage in my life. I probably don't go to the theatre as much. I'm doing my thing and probably less aware than I used to be but yeah.

Ben Yeoh (32:04): Why do you think that is? Obviously we've had Brexit hit, but it seems like it's been a longer decline or a sort of up and down decline from that if that's true. Anything in particular you would point to, or is it more sort of like a wave?

Steve Unwin (32:22): I don't want to be critical particularly. I sometimes observe a kind of production happening to give a kind of … experience of something that happened 15, 20, 30, 60 years ago. So if somebody did something remarkable, we now do a kind of … event which has kind of got a nostalgia built into it. I mean, what I like, I want to go and see somebody do something new. I want to see a new experience. I don't want to see a version of something that I saw when I was a kid. So I think there's a disconnect, a slightly lack of self-confidence about the stories we want to tell and that's because I think that people have got so caught in how you do it that-- I had an experience the other night, I finally finally finally watched Parasite, that brilliant South Korean film and what I had with it, I thought it was completely marvelous until the last 35 minutes when it just descends into [a stylised horror] 

…Whereas what was happening before was absolutely brilliant analysis of an appalling stratified class system with some people living in abject poverty and some people living in huge luxury and that was the brilliant thing to be seen and then I just want to go, why do you want to end it in Gothic horror?

Ben Yeoh (34:35): And this is a content over form?

Steve Unwin (34:38): Kind of [it’s a shame the creators thought] In order to make it exciting, we have to have people being stabbed …

Ben Yeoh (35:18): In some ways trying too hard to please, or to be visceral and therefore lose the heart of it. That kind of brings me onto my impression on how representative theatre is, and we've reflected earlier a little bit about class, gender, all of these other things, which have waxed and waned a little bit but one of those which is close to both of us is around, I guess, disability as widely thought about and my impression is that theatre doesn't seem to reflect those stories at all in its making or in its audiences or when it does, the work can be very flawed, sort of even more flawed than the typical cause obviously we need to experiment and make mistakes. But I'm thinking of puppet gate, I'm thinking of other stories here and maybe this is the way that the story seep in, you start with things which seem very narrow and trite and it broadens as people understand the richness of their experience, but it does seem to have got very stark or never really moved forward, both in the reflection of the stories at stages or its audiences, or I know you've also written about and looked about in the wider lens of disability in history. I'd be interested in how you see disability reflected in theatre or not.

Steve Unwin (36:49): Well, what I think is that if you just take a historical perspective for a bit. If you go back to the eugenics moment and I think the eugenics, not moment century, if you like, I've been doing a lot of research on that, which I can explain in a minute, what you see is a very peculiar, double standard, which is a large number of progressive artists. The kind of people we would regard as kind of, we have on our bookshelves Virginia Wolf, DH Lawrence … HG Wells and so on and so on and so on. …there are lot of those people who fought for the great progressive causes, whether it's women's rights, whether it's sexual liberation, whether it's gay rights gay rights slightly less but the others and a more equal society. This group regarded people, particularly with intellectual disabilities but even with physical disabilities, with utter content and supported the eugenics movement, which thought that there were ways of stopping these people from reproducing, which was sterilization and segregation and that somehow that disability and neuro disability with a person on the planet, which needed to be got rid of. Some of them even suggested murder and of course murder happened under the Nazis and sterilization happened on a massive industrial scale in America.

Steve Unwin (38:46): So then what I'm trying to say is that I think that disability and particularly neuro disability, intellectual disability is… is a blind spot with liberals; which I am a liberal … And I think it goes back to your opening question about how do we define a human being as a human being. What I'm saying is that if you think that the most important thing in the world is to be intelligent, to be clever, to talk at least, to read lots of books, you really can't cope with somebody who isn't and somebody who doesn't talk, or doesn't read lots of books, and you find that somehow appalling sort of visceral appalling. And that double standard is still evident and I can give you a real example of this and I'm going to come to the theatre in a second. I'll give you a real example. You remember the Euro football match, which was the final… you remember the lad who missed the penalties at the end. They all happen to be three black lads… and there was a lot of racist abuse of them. What was interesting looking at Twitter was how many people attacking the racist said, oh, you're a racist “moron”, or you're a racist “idiot”, or you're a racist “cretin”.

Steve Unwin (40:27): So in other words, these liberal progressives … [those who] champion the cause of multiculturalism and diversity, [who think] racism is bad. Racism is bad. So the terms of contempt [idiot, moron] that were used to abuse and segregate and sterilize and attack and even murder people like frankly, our kids. Those words are still fair game. That kind of abuse is still fair game. And that, I think just shows the most vivid way, the way that progress, the way that this subject, this experience, not so much physical disability, but intellectual disability is still a great problem for progress and progress is of course, you know, work in the theatre. There are people who are changing that, there are people who are fighting that. I'm not a lone voice at all. There are lots of people doing good stuff, but I think there's quite a long journey to go. [Unwin makes the point that liberals/progressives are unaware of the origins of such term like “idiot” which stems from abuse of disabled people]

Ben Yeoh (41:38): Has it always been this way? Actually, I probably have found through your work, Tom Shakespeare's and some others (see Dan Goodley)  more relatively recently sort of the history of disability or disability studies. If you look back in history, has it always been like this or was specifically that intellectual movement around that eugenics time kind of catalyzed this movement against, and that stuck with us for all of these complex reasons that you said and haven't dissipated to the same degree?

Steve Unwin (42:13): Well, I think in a way the critical moments of this are much contested, but I think the critical moment is the enlightenment of the 18th century. Now the enlightenment, hurray, bring on the enlightenment. We all love the enlightenment, but of course, what that started to do was categorize human beings. And so there are some people like this, other people like that. This kind of categorization taxonomy said that there was this group and this group needed to be put into silence, needed to be other, needed to be treated in all sorts of ways. When that then hits the late 19th century with the crisis in overcrowded cities, hygiene, all sorts of anxieties about the mob and the mass and the great unwashed and all those terrible phrases, the group who had been regarded previously as a fairly small group of what was called the feeble minded, then expanded exponentially to include anybody who people didn't like. So, alcoholics, schizophrenic women who got pregnant outside of marriage, et cetera, et cetera, were all bundled into this group called the people minded and terms like moron and idiots and so on were invented to categorize this group. And that hit it in the most dreadful moment, of course, under the Nazis, but actually even in the 50s and 60s and even right through 70s and 80s, there was still this notion of this group, this other group who are not like the rest of us as if it was an absolute and if it was a binary choice between intelligent or not intelligent.

Steve Unwin (44:14): So I think the thing about intellectual disability is that it's an idea as much as a reality and the more that it is kind of labeled than others, the more it becomes problematic for people. So there is a brilliant new book for those they call idiots, which shows that George and London were rather relatively good at accepting and including people with different sorts of brains. So, of course George and London is pre-enlightenment. Moving on into culture, the great movement in intellectual disability is self-advocacy which is and still endured as a very, very important argument that people with intellectual and other disabilities should speak for themselves. They can speak for themselves and we must listen to their voices and that highlighted a very important phrase, … “"Nothing About Us Without Us!" No policy about a group without including them or without them being (consulted) by that group, by people from that group and that is hugely important. I think there's a nuance, however, which needs to be understood particularly when it comes to intellectual disability. My son, Joey, who's 25 has no speech. He's not autistic. He has no speech, but he's never developed speech. He has very severe intellectual disabilities. He can't write a play. He really can't write a play. He has no words. He can sort of say “cup of tea”, and he said no other words. He weirdly sometimes says cup of tea, which is a very odd thing.

Steve Unwin (46:37): So, it's not good enough just to say self-advocacy, nothing about us,  without us. If one is trying to engage with some of the most severe disabilities, it is absolutely right with moderate disabilities. Of course it is. I suspect that the answer is to see self-advocacy as a continuum rather than an absolute. Let me explain what I mean. So I don't have intellectual disabilities and I can advocate for myself in most situations, except I need a doctor when I'm ill. I need my accountant to sort out my miserable, small amounts of tax every year. When my car doesn't work, I need somebody to fix it cause I don't know how to open a bonnet. So I need people to do things for me. I cannot internally self-advocate. I am not an entirely independent person and no doubt as I get older, I will need-- When I was a baby, I did and when I get older, I will need care and support as I become disabled through old age, this is what happens. So, in the same way that I am not an entirely autonomous human being somebody with disability, with evident disability can't be an entirely autonomous human being. And then right to Joey, who does advocate for himself, but in a very, very particular way and actually frankly, a small way, but his very presence is an act of self-advocacy. So it needs to be regarded as a continuum and not binary and I think that that's a kind of nuance that the politics and the cultural politics needs to embrace. I think there's some people who would disagree with me and would tell me off for saying that, but I think that's where I've got to…

Ben Yeoh (48:52): A continuum structure articulated that way. It seems to me one definite way that you can make it work and like you say, self-advocacy can only go so far in all circumstances, particularly if you have a pluralist view of the world.

Steve Unwin (49:12): I think that's right. I think that's right. I…I wrote my 10 points about what I want to see in representations of learning disabled people. I don't know if I can remember them all, but they're all about not seeing learning disabilities as a metaphor, start seeing it as a reality. Don't see it as a tragedy, but also don't see it as, you know-- I had this funny debate with somebody the other day who said, yeah, but learning disabled people are really clever and [but I would argue but not all] … I think what I want, and I've just been reading Tom Shakespeare. I think it says the same, but in a much more sophisticated way is I want kind of realism about all these issues.

Ben Yeoh (50:13): The messiness of humans.

Steve Unwin (0:15): Yeah. It seems to me it's highly possible to say that something like my Joey has infinite value while at the same time saying he has very high needs. We've got to be able to do both. The danger with some of the disability arguments at the moment is that they actually-- By emphasize high achievement all the time, they're actually replicating the structures for the rest of the world, which say high achieving people are better than low achieving people. That's their problem.

Ben Yeoh (50:55): I see that and I hadn't heard your articulation before with the clarity about how, where we get to say, for instance, in theatre or art today being so influenced by the enlightenment and a set of intellectuals is still weighing down this area of humanness because of the disdain that they held a lot of these disabilities. And in some ways the metaphor is no reason why you can't walk and chew gum at the same time. There are a lot of these things where you can show that you can be very loved and have high challenges, be very human, but still have a lot of needs. And that maybe brings me onto the fact that you are one of the only people I know personally who has gone viral on Twitter … What was that like? And I guess you probably wouldn't suggest it to anyone else being viral for a few hours or a moment in the sun, but it was due to the fact that we can celebrate a certain aspect of being human and that's okay. Would you like to describe being viral on Twitter?

Steve Unwin (52:12): I forgot. I think I've been viral on Twitter, I think three times, or is it two? I can't remember; all about Joey. There was one, which was Joey's 25th birthday and I put a lovely photograph of him on his 25th birthday and I said, he's 25, he's never spoken a word and he's taught me more than I've ever taught him. And it went-- I can't remember how many things it did, it went absolutely mad and that was a bit weird, the phone just kind of nonstop, but anyway, for a few hours. And then I think we were trending from it. But I think what was interesting about that is that I was sort of presenting people and this is what I try to do, I think is presenting people with what seems like a contradiction, which is somebody who has not spoken, might teach and it's true. He has taught me, he's taught me more than-- I mean, I've got three kids. My other kids have taught me a few bits and pieces, but I've probably taught them more than they've taught me. Well, certainly my 13 year old daughter, but Joey, I've tried to teach him a few things, I have not really succeeded, but he's taught me a lot. He's turned my life upside down, you know, my whole world is different. That was interesting and then the other one which was right at the beginning of-- I think it was new year's day of 21, I put up a picture of Joey and me on our sofa and I said how terrible it is to be the dad of a learning disabled kid and Joey and I were laughing. We're obviously smiling and laughing and tickling each other and what was interesting about that is I got hundreds of responses of-- Did you do it, Ben? Did you reply to me? I can't remember.

Ben Yeoh (54:07): I [don’t think so] I don't tweet so much on that and I hadn't been using Twitter so much there, but it was the mock gloom, I think was the phrase at the time.

Steve Unwin (54:17): So what was interesting about this is that hundreds of people sent photographs of them and their learning disabled child or brother or sister or whatever, you know, climbing a mountain, going to the pub, having a laugh, doing lovely things and I then would reply to every one of them and say, oh God, how awful, I'm so sorry, thoughts and prayers. I just did a whole risk on this. Every single one of them I replied to and what I think was interesting is that what they were saying I sensed is it's not the person that's the problem, it's the bigger problem, which is if we face problems with our learning disabled kids or whatever, it's the way that society engage or fail to engage, or allows, you know-- You can have a wonderful, wonderful time with somebody who's got profound learning disabilities. You can have a huge laugh. It can be brilliant. You can feel real joy and love of course. But once you step out and try and get a service, try and get an education, try and get housing, try and get financial support, trying to get all those other things that these people need, that's where the problem lies. The problem is not in the person. It's the social model of disability, if you like. The problem is a broader one. And I think that's what that tweet-- the reacts that tweet brought out which was lovely. There was another one that went viral, but I can't remember which one it was. Anyway-- 

[…]

Ben Yeoh (56:04): …The way you express that as a moment, which essentially encapsulates that social model or disability, or this idea that if society's rules changed, then naturally everyone would be better off. No one would be the worst off and that's the core of the problem. Not the relationship.

Steve Unwin (56:29): I think it also defies the tragedy model in that kind of ironic way, because these pictures would be, you know-- So I'm saying, oh God, it's absolute hell and there would be some lad tossing his chocolate cake and having a laugh. You know what I mean?

Ben Yeoh (56:48): I had a similar moment with Sally Phillips who's been on the podcast as well, who has a disabled son saying we've got very high challenges, but actually huge moments of joy as well and we need to be able to celebrate that as well.

Steve Unwin (57:04): Sally is [great] but you've also had Dan [Goodley] on the podcast, haven't you?

Ben Yeoh (57:06): Yeah, Dan Goodley, talking very specifically on disability studies. I don't know him well. I should send a message to Tom Shakespeare cause I think his work is very interesting here as well. This maybe brings me to a short section on underrated or overrated or commentary. So I'll fire out four or five little kind of words or ideas and you can say whether something is overrated, underrated, or you can pass, or you can just say some comments about it and then we'll wind up. So overrated or underrated, Bob Dylan.

Steve Unwin (57:51): Well, I love Bob Dylan. Absolutely love Bob Dylan. Actually I think there are parts of Bob Dylan which are overrated and there are other parts of Bob Dylan, which I think are underrated. So I think both but I think I have a theory. I have a theory of five great artists of the 20th century; … but five great, great artists and this is pure, pure provocation, but anyway Picasso, Joyce, Brecht, Bob Dylan. They're all [modern]. Those are my five names. What they are is they're 20th century artists who could only be in the 20th century. They produce 20th century art, but there they are. Disagree… I've said it before, but I get shot down but anyway.

Ben Yeoh (58:49): Two and a half of them are playwright. That's interesting as well. So overrated, underrated Piero Della Francesca.

Steve Unwin (59:04): Oh, sublime genius. My favorite painter probably. Probably underrated, although I don't know what critical opinion of him is at the moment, but there's something about Piero. Well, in fact, I was on a podcast called my favorite work of art and I did the baptism of Christ. Piero is that phenomenal, cool, objective. Everything is counterpoint. The resurrection … is the risen Christ coming out of the tomb, staring straight at us and below the tomb of the four soldiers are all asleep and that for me is like it's Shakespearian in its counterpointing. That is, if you like, the essence of the embodiment of the realistic condition that I've been talking about is yes, there's a spiritual element. … it's also completely materialistic because the soldiers are all characterized and individualized or asleep. No, I love Piero. I love Piero….

Ben Yeoh (01:00:26): Excellent. Underrated, overrated, having your own library. I think again, you are one of the few people I know who've gone viral on Twitter and I haven't. You're probably one of the few people who I think have more books than me. I think I have maybe 1 to 2000, so in the low thousands, but my impression is you have several thousand, so you are a tiny order of magnitude above me. Is this overrated, underrated? How much do you love your library?

Steve Unwin (01:00:57): These are very good questions. I wrote a thing on my blog about my library and I absolutely love my books. It's an illness. So I finished a book last night and I said to Jenny, oh God, what am I going to read next? I haven't got enough books. I need some more books. And he said, yes, go and buy another one. I don't know. My books are like my past. They're like my life, they're kind companions through my life … There's a really broad range of stuff. There are a little tiny bit of them behind me here. I can't read on-- I find it [hard to] read on a Kindle. I don't like it. I like the book. I read in the bath, but I can't hardback in the bath. No, I sometimes think there are three-- My brain at any point has got three compartments. My family, my friends and people I love is in one compartment. There's my work, whatever I'm working on is another compartment. And then what I'm reading and sort of what music I'm listening to, but above all what I'm reading is the third compartment. I had this wonderful birthday present now three years running. I hope I'll get it again is there's a brilliant [gift]… you just get a new book every month and it's just a brilliant way of opening the brain, opening the brain, opening the brain. I'm a great believer in opening the brain, discovering stuff that you didn't know. I mean, I'm a complicated mix cause I do that and yet at same time, I get very fixed on-- I've got to read all of somebody who I've discovered and I'm quite systematic…

Ben Yeoh (01:03:09): Excellent. So that's definitely underrated having your own library, which is what I would suggest, and I've ended up-- I do read some on Kindle but I've ended up often buying the Kindle and the book. I just doubled down. It's like, well, I might as well get it. I might need to carry it around with me or like a heavy hardback. I quite like it, but I'm not going to carry it around. So I read a little bit more on the Kindle and then just end up having the book and I'm in a stage in life where I don't mind giving authors double or triple on their books.

Steve Unwin (01:03:43): You're a good man.

Ben Yeoh (01:03:45): So that's what I've ended up doing, having even more but I just got double copies now.

Steve Unwin (01:03:50): Yeah. Maybe when the study thing is over, I can come and visit your library. I love other people's libraries; absolutely fascinate me. So I'm in my dining room. So that's a lot of European classics So Dickens and things … Over there, that's all Shakespeare, that wall there. That's Medieval And Now Is This Okay to walk you through? ( Visuals available on YouTube) 

Ben Yeoh (01:04:24): Yeah.

Steve Unwin (01:04:25): Since you asked about the library you might be interested and then here's my front room and this is all 20th century, all 20th century, 20th century, 20th century. …That’s all history in there and they're all piling up here. That's all sort of music and literary criticism and then we go into my study and this is all bunkers anyway, and those are all plays. That's all plays and drama and that is-- Well, this is all learning disabilities and the rest of it is just piles of crap.

Ben Yeoh (01:05:15): So, I think you are the only person's library I've seen who has more plays and more books on disability than me. So that is a great thing and I noticed also and I think you've written about this in your blog, your history books had a very special looking bookcase as well.

Steve Unwin (01:05:33): My history books had a special looking bookcase, yes. Well, that bookcase, my mom left Hamburg. My mom is still alive, left Hamburg as a child. She was born Monica Cohen in Hamburg in 1933, which is a bad idea and some of the furniture came, you know, they were a middle class family in Hamburg. Some of the furniture came with them, including that bookcase with the glass front which was, as I say, was in…Hamburg once upon a time and now here it is back…

Ben Yeoh (01:06:19): Great. Okay. So coming to our last couple of questions, maybe one would like to tell us anything about some of the current projects you're working on. I think you might have written a new play which you are looking to work on and have some ideas, and maybe you can interweave this with what a productive day might look like for you, but you can tell us maybe something about your projects and how that works into your day.

Steve Unwin (01:06:46): Well, at the moment I'm writing-- I mean, there is a theatre project that I'm meant to be directing next year, but in the spring, but God knows I won't go into that detail, but I've got three writing projects on the go. I've written a play about the wild boy of Aveyron,  who was a lad who was discovered in the woods of Southeast France in 1800 and he had been completely uncivilized. He was 12 or something, and he had no engagement with human company at all. He was a wild boy and he was taken to Paris and he was taken under the watch of this guy [Inaudible:01:07:27] who wanted to teach him and he was interested. He thought it was interesting in what makes a human, going back to your opening question, what makes a human, how do you socialize? How do you learn human skills? But ultimately […] failed to teach him very much. And it's probably what's still not known to this day is whether the lad had learning disabilities, profound learning disabilities and had been abandoned in the woods because of his learning disabilities or whether because he'd been abandoned in the woods he never developed speech and the rest of it…. I'm very interested in the housekeeper, who actually ended up looking after the boy and that's the principle of love and care as opposed to science and knowledge. 

Steve Unwin (01:08:23): So there's that. I'm just finishing writing a history of learning disabilities in culture and society going right back which is some of the stuff we've been talking about. There is a book, which I'm not going to tell you what it's about, which is coming out in the spring of next year, which is my surprise and is something I've been working on for 40 years and it's finally been published by a very classy publisher, but I'm not going to tell you cause I want it to have massive surprise and impact when it happen.

Ben Yeoh (01:09:00): So anyone listening, do watch out for that in the spring.

Steve Unwin (01:09:02): I'll put it up on Twitter the moment I'm allowed to, but that's what I'm working on and that's what my, oh, and then as you said, I'm the chair of this charity for kids. I stand down in the summer and most days there's a call about that, something that I have to respond to and I go for a walk after lunch-- I mean, the theatre has, which is okay, has slightly turned its back on me. I mean I still do some plays. I think my commitment to what I call realism, I think isn't very fashionable at the moment and that's life, but I'd love to direct some more. There are some plays that I really want to do…

Ben Yeoh (01:10:05): Great. So maybe that brings me to the final question is do you have advice for anyone listening, maybe reflecting on a conversation would be maybe what you have for thoughts, for people who are liberal. What should liberals be thinking or doing, or maybe you have some advice or thoughts for people who want to start off in the theatre because it seems a particularly difficult time for theatre at the moment. So I don't know, any reflections on anything you like to share?

Steve Unwin (01:10:37): Well, okay. So there's a phrase which keeps coming back in my head at the moment, which is there is more in heaven [There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy….] and that's I think one of the things that Joey has taught me. I didn't know anything about this stuff and then Joey turns up and it's like, oh my God, there's all of that and in a funny kind of way, I think that that's the same for people like me …when we start thinking about Brexit, we start thinking about all of these kinds of cultural questions. I mean, I've had a bit of a learning curve recently about France, which is something I didn't know and I hadn't really thought deeply enough and that's been a bit of a learning curve and I'm glad about that. But I think that people need to-- there's a little bit of digging ourselves into our own position. I just think we need to keep kind of opening up and finding connections rather than isolate ourself. So they're being more in heaven and earth and I feel that's my advice, but you know, my advice, if you listen to me, but for people wanting to work in the theatre listen, it's a big world out there and read everything, see everything, do everything, know everything and then you can get a sense of what you might do could be new and about now if you know an awful lot about what's happened already, what else is out? So yeah, you have to be passionate and committed to what you're doing while at the same time continually being open to contradiction. I think that sounds very wise and I don't know if I live it but I wish I did live it. Do you know what I mean?

Ben Yeoh (01:12:43): Yes. So open to connections, not simply closed in your own box and to be in the now particularly for theatre, it helps knowing where you've come from and what's exciting around in order to create work of the moment.

Steve Unwin (01:13:01): I think that's right and stuff, which is about now and stuff that can only be about now rather than about then and of course there are some human things which endure, but you can't, you know--

Ben Yeoh (01:13:23): Like those creators on your list. It can only be creators of the now, of this century or last century.

Steve Unwin (01:13:31): Yeah. It's interesting in the learning disabilities culture bit. It's my view that Shakespeare did not write about learning disability. There is character there with learning disabilities and in a way you kind of-- it wasn't really a concept. It wasn't really an idea. I mean the word idiot in those days, by the way meant somebody without social standard, it didn't mean learning disability. So a tale told by an idiot is a tale told by a peasant and that's interesting, but you don't say therefore Shakespeare should never be done or is evil, but you do say, well, this is interesting in order to-- let's write a play which just engages with as a learning disabled character or whatever because even the great Shakespeare did it. So maybe it's time that it happened. See what I mean?

Ben Yeoh (01:14:26): Yeah. Great. Well with that, I think that's an excellent thing to end on. So Steve, thank you very much for the conversation.

Steve Unwin (01:14:36): Oh bet. It was a great delight. Lovely. Hope it makes sense.

Ben Yeoh (01:14:39): Yeah. Thank you. If you appreciate the show, please like and subscribe as it helps others find the podcast.

How To Ask Good Questions

On podcasting. In order to have an in-depth conversation with a virtual stranger but a public writer, I decided I’d have to read/listen to their works. This caused me to examine their writings more deeply with a view to asking what I then could not understand further or what I thought was particularly insightful. I ended up learning about a wider range of experiences and ideas than was usual and in more depth. Three practical skills emerge:

• Concise follow up emails

• Active listening 

• Asking good questions

Concise emails: At least 3 guests responded to follow-ups once the initial email had faded. The hit rate on well-worded concise (cold) emails is higher than you might think.

Active Listening: To hold good conversations, you need to truly listen to what the person is saying, process that with knowledge you have or you’ve heard earlier and formulate the next point. I think “active listening” covers this point, but it’s about absorbing what the person is saying or trying to say, combining it with other information and formulating something new from this.

Good questions: This leads into being able to ask good questions. For many, the more specific or detailed you can go then the better. I often end up succinctly summarising an idea I think my partner has and then asking them to develop it further and add anything I have left out or misunderstood. This show them how far your understanding has reached and gives them a little time to process what the answer should be. It also gives a general listener a brief baseline for the conversation.

The higher the level of prefaced information, the better the answer as they will not need to go over basics you’ve already expressed.

Avoid bland unanswerable or rote questions.  

Dinner parties or conversation with strangers in real life are somewhat different to podcasts. But another principle I like is to try and get your partner to be the best version of themselves and their argument. Rather than flat out deny or challenge, you want to tease out to the fullest what your partner is expressing even if - and perhaps even more so - if you think you disagree.

(For dinner parties, I like to try and find out the things or areas my partner knows that I know nothing about. Even better if it’s a secret. And if you are up to it, diving into a deeper topic, not simply a shallow one. You can pick upon the internet these type of questions (or books eg Gregory Stock questions, Amazon link ):  Would you rather lose a hand or all access to telecommunication devices? Rather live in the greatest city in the world, or a remote beautiful town? Whose reputation would you destroy? ….)

If a guest, if you can find out about a hobby/cultural interest and ask you often find a revealing answer.

With a stranger on a podcast, try and make your introduction sincere and ask a challenging/insightful question first. Typically, I find after 10 or so minutes, the guest will know by then if you’ve done your research and if you are genuinely interested in what you they have to say. This then makes it fun for everyone.

More in the newsletters sign up or check out below:

Aella: escort work, home school, rationalism, circling, working in a factory, losing faith, polls and endless questions | Podcast

Aella is perhaps most famous on twitter for shining a light on the life and economics of Camgirls and escorts; and asking challenging questions. But her independent research is larger than that and has encompassed reporting on LSD and psychedelics use, circling, the nature of faith, and enlightenment. She grew up homeschooled in a fundamental Christian household before leaving home at 17.

The transcript and conversation includes adult themes and mild profanity from Aella and is recommended 18+.

We discuss what is most misunderstood about escort work and the additional needs of men such as emotional intimacy. How Aella thinks of her own compartmentalisation.

What you should say about male anatomy size. How insecurity can go both ways on male thinking on size.

What Aella thinks about Twitter and making questions and polls.

What it was like to have ideas you took for granted completely turned on their head. For instance, what she was taught to think of gays.

We chatted about her interest in psychedelics, speaking to people who think they are enlightened and spirituality. And what that intersection with rationality is for her. 

 She discusses several viewpoints of the Rationalist community and her views on Effective Altruism. Her thoughts on archaeology and  thinking about moral arguments in their place in time.

Why she feels to strongly about home school. 

Her thoughts on losing faith.

What it was like working in a factory, and what the point of secret messages she scratched at her work were. 

How she has struggled with cultural norms.

How she answers some of her own questions:

You're in a room with 10,000 people. You get to ask three binary questions. Yes or no.  For each question, the people who answer the question according to the way you want, they stay and the people who don't leave the room.  What do you ask? 

We play underrated / overrated on these topics:

• Accordion

• Ballroom Dancing

• Pronouns

• Abalone

• Sweating on command

She talks about emotional pain and tells me what the practice of circling is all about. 

We end on what her research interests are and what her life advice is.

Her family friendly twitter is here. Her website including her research, analytical research on escorting, essays on faith, circling and more - find here.

PODCAST INFO

• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

• Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh

• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

Click below or wherever you get podcasts.

---

Aella transcript (this has not been deeply proofread, so expect typos etc)

Ben Yeoh (00:00): Hello, and welcome to Ben Yeoh Chats. If you're curious about the world, this show is for you. What is most misunderstood about escort work, on this episode I speak to Aella there's occasional profanity in this podcast and adult themes, which makes this conversation unsuitable for children. We have a fascinating chat on the challenging questions Aella asks, her strict Christian upbringing and why she is so passionate about homeschooling, her thinking about rationality and enlightenment, and why she is a camgirl. If you enjoy this show, please like and subscribe as it helps others find the podcast. Thank you, be well.

Ben Yeoh (00:44): Hey, everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Aella; Aella is perhaps most famous on Twitter for shining a light on the life and economics of cam-girl and escorts and asking challenging questions, but her independent researcher is larger than that has encompassed reporting on LST and psychedelic circling the nature of faith and enlightenment, and she discusses many viewpoints of the rationalist community and I find her work fascinating, welcome.

Aella (01:14): That was a lovely intro, thank you.

Ben Yeoh (01:16): You're welcome. First question, what do you think is most misunderstood about sex work?

Aella (01:24): Most misunderstood, it depends on the population you ask, but probably a very common one is that there's no emotional component or that the guys just want to get off and then they hire a girl and then there's no additional importance beyond just the physical expression.

Ben Yeoh (01:42): So it's not just the transactional thing, there's more to it.

Aella (01:47): Well, it depends on how you define it, but it is very transactional, the thing that's being transacted is more than just sex. There's a lot of additional needs that men tend to have that are very common to get fulfilled with sex workers specifically because the men that don't have those needs go and watch porn. Because with porn, you don't need this live interaction to the same degree and so the men who tend to seek out live sex workers tend to also have additional desires that they won't fulfill emotional intimacy.

Ben Yeoh (02:19): Sure, that makes a lot of sense to me but that's also partly because I've read your guide, which you've written recently to escorting which covers pricing, marketing, safety analytics, all great practical advice. But it's also part essay I found and you had a section on what I think you called the heart or the heart of escorting and I'm intrigued about this heart because it's not quite what I might have expected and critics might suggest perhaps there's a bit of romanticization in it. But I think your reflection seems true to me that there is more meaning in sex work, there's the emotional part and there's the other part of all of that and I was just wondering how true it is from your experience and what you've seen in the wider community and maybe you'd want to reflect on that heart of escorting work.

Aella (03:07): I think it depends per person again; most of my answers are going to be hedged like that. But I think for me, I have the ability to have love in this way because I'm so compartmentalized about escorting like when I escort versus not escort. It's almost like there's two separate ME's that do it; there's the escort me and then the not escort me and there's a mode that switches and that feels very protective, like when I'm in that mode, I don't have to worry about feelings or what this means or if I'm making a good decision about sex work, it's a job. I become job mode and then when I'm in that job mode, I feel sufficiently insulated from myself that I feel it gives me the freedom to be able to bond with these men in some ways, like a part of me is I feel safe enough to be vulnerable in some way with them.

Aella (04:00): And so, for me, I enjoy that. I enjoy looking for the ability to be vulnerable with men, some of them don't feel they give me very much of an opening, it seems they want me to be something, but I like looking for it and taking it where I can find it and some people are good at doing that. That's me specific, a lot of escorts don't feel the same way, other escorts have different ways they approach compartmentalization, some don't compartmentalize, some find a lot of effusive like bonding vulnerability without having to do the compartmentalization thing, so it's different for everybody.

Ben Yeoh (04:43): Sure, but for you there's, I guess, a persona as well in this compartmentalization or is it just another version of the you that you think is you.

Aella (04:43): I'm not sure what the difference is, I feel we are sort of our environment in some way. If you put me by my parents, I've become an unrecognizable person and if you put me in front of a crowd, I change and it's not like I'm going to become like a crowd Aella or like parents Aella, it's a reaction to the incentives in the environment. And so, it's a natural response to optimizing for the situation you're in, so the Aella that escorts are very different and I wouldn't say it's a conscious persona in some way, it's just an organic persona, it's just what happens when I'm in that situation and it is very different from this Aella, I have a body language changes and my tone of voice changes, I seem a little bit less nerdy and a little bit more feminine but I don't consider any less real in some way. I am self-protective in some way but I wouldn't consider it not genuine or something, I am dishonest sometimes when escorting like, if somebody asks me what they think of their penis, I sometimes am very dishonest about it but in general, yes.

Ben Yeoh (05:51): And that's presumably because you're always flattering.

Aella (05:55): Yes, or sometimes even the opposite way. Sometimes guys who have big dicks are very insecure and I realize if I try to tell them that their dick is big, they're not going to believe me, so I have to act chill about it; it's pretty good so it's in both directions.

Ben Yeoh (06:10): That's quite subtle, that completely makes sense to me because I always say it on Christmas dinners or festive seasons this is where often you're trying to be two people at once. Like if you're trying to be a girlfriend and a boyfriend and a good son or daughter and that's it because you aim to play the daughter and you aim to play the girlfriend and often that's conflicting personas slightly. And so that's why I think you get so many arguments and those sorts of things because people end up trying to play two or three things at once and at a point in time you sometimes can't be those two things, so something slightly cracks and you get all of these arguments.

Aella (06:48): And that's a fascinating theory.

Ben Yeoh (06:51): And you can see it and you often the outsider will see it with close family like if you're invited to a family gathering or whatever, and then you can see it because you can see them, their boyfriend/girlfriend there but now they've been dragged away. And now they're having to try and be the son and they've got different pressures, but you can almost see the tension in what I say because I would normally say this in front of my parents, but I would normally say this in front of my partner and it all splinters.

Aella (07:18): I haven't paid close attention to that, I'm about to go to a large extended family gathering so I will use your theory.

Ben Yeoh (07:25): Particularly with those who you know you've just been this other person and now you can't evolve both of those personas at once and that leads me on to you seem utterly brilliant at asking questions and your questions are awkward, challenging, silly, funny, deep, and kind and they range from your surveys and polls to your dating form. And I was just wondering, how do you think of your questions and you seem to have so many, probably not in danger of running out but do they just occur to you, or is this how your mind works in the curiosity of what makes people, people?

Aella (08:00): I guess that's the way my mind works at this point; it's just such a habit now. I feel like the question is why is everybody else not doing Twitter polls, to me it feels like coming up with questions all the time. To me, it feels like the obvious thing that everybody should be doing, and then sometimes people ask me why do you do questions? Why is that the question?

Be Yeoh (08:23): Why aren't people doing more questions, everyone else is weird, I'm the normal one here.

Aella (08:28): I know I'm the normal one. A lot of my tripping or something a lot of the themes around this were finding the right question. It wasn't so much about finding the right answer to your questions but rather figuring out how to look in the right direction. Because a lot of our questions are hedged in by what the invisible norms that we have in the society around us that we can't even see and so to me new curiosity feels like it's an indication of poking at the invisible walls. And it's almost not the point what the answer is, the point is the poking and so I get a lot of thrill out of that and I don't know how to answer for why I seem to do this more than other people.

Aella (09:10): Part of it is Twitter. The fact that I do have a very fast response thing, like if I'm having a conversation with somebody and you're like, man, I wonder if people who are more agreeable tend to be firstborns more; we can just check that fast, um, through Twitter. And so, I think having that fast feedback thing helps increase the amount that I think about Twitter questions and my Twitter questions, I mean, my proxy questions in general so, that was all also very useful.

Ben Yeoh (09:36): And did you have that as a teenager as well or did that develop as you came onto Twitter as well?

Aella (09:42): I think it developed on Twitter; I do think that I was into questions when I was a teenager but not in the same manifestation. Right now, the manifestation is social questions like what generates interesting social confusion or social conflict whereas as a teenager, it was more figuring out philosophical questions that I didn't register as being socially controversial.

Ben Yeoh (10:05): Sure, I see and if anyone listening is interested in questions, you can go to askcole.io, I think. And there's a bunch of questions there and you can buy the questions or I think you can...

Aella (10:16): We're out of stock, but we do have it downloadable for free.

Ben Yeoh (10:20): There you go, find out more or I think there's at least over a hundred; I have skimmed them more than we might ask a couple of them later. So that also leads me to think because you are known as well for a lot of your rationalist thinking and being a part of some rationalist communities. There is also a lot of curiosity. How did you fall into rationalist thinking?

Aella (10:43): A long time ago I dated a guy who kept sending me LessWrong articles [a rationalist website forum] and I was like whatever, I'll read it later and then I started reading it and then they have interlinked and I started following the interlinks and then it was no going back from there. I suspect it falls close to the questioning thing because there's an orientation that not just a lot of people have which is decoupling your moral response from questioning a thing. A lot of people in the rationalist community used to be religious, I used to be very religious and I had this wake-up shock, I'm not sure if you've ever had a very radical mental change.

Aella (11:23): But realizing that a lot of things that you took for granted that were tied into your moral sensibilities were wrong, like I used to be disgusted by gay people but I'm embarrassed to say that about me in the past but I genuinely felt I'm horrified by the fact that people like two men could kiss each other; this is a moral.  So that turned out to be wrong, I no longer have that moral discussed response, but now whenever I do have a moral discussed response, I'm like, well, I can't trust that like once one was proven to be incorrect. And so, I think, this is driven by the questioning, this curiosity, like curiousness about your discussed response where is that coming from?

Aella (12:02): Does that hold up if I change the circumstances in various ways? So asking a lot of hypothetical questions about how your moral intuition handles this alternative role or this alternative role, it tests to see if this is just something people told you to feel and now, you're feeling, and it feels like your own because so much of what we feel, feels like our own. But anyway, this is something that the questions do very well, but also rationalists are very interested in doing; very interested in sousing out exactly why we think about the world and what is justified.

Ben Yeoh (12:31): I hadn't appreciated that, in some ways, it is a counterforce to being like you say, a lot of rationalists used to be very religious, already had a set of values tied into them, and that there's been a complete change. And therefore, you can question everything because something that you took as a hundred percent truth, when you learn that you don't think is a hundred percent truth more within, you can then question everything which was a hundred percent truth and I didn't appreciate that about.

Aella (12:58): I suspect it's similar to psychedelics too; psychedelics do the same thing where they knock out things that you thought were true a little bit, they shake the foundations of your belief, which generates a lot more questions than questions about who you are, it’s a very similar principle, I think.

Ben Yeoh (13:11): So, that's another strong, long strand in your writing investigates spirituality and enlightenment, you've got these set of enlightenment interviews and research that you're continuing to do and although I can see it now, it almost seems to me that's potentially a conflict with a rationalist point of view looking at that, but I can see while if you take the rational point of view that it's questioning then maybe not. But I was interested in why there is such a deep fascination there and what have you learned or are you learning from interviewing so many self-feed enlightened people or people who feel they've reached a certain level of spirituality or thinking there?

Aella (13:54): The interest in spirituality came well, I had some strong spiritual experiences and pretty isolated from the spiritual memeplex, there's a map that people have made about what spiritual experiences mean, what and where they land and what comes before and after and I had gone through my thing independent of this. So it looked a little bit weird and also, I had no idea what was going on with me in regards to the way that other people understood it so I started talking to some prominent mediators about this to get insight and then eventually I heard, I just talked about other things and then I started hearing them disagree with each other. I talked to one monk who told me that another, a very famous meditator, was full of bullshit and thought that they knew what the progression of meditation was, but had no idea.

Aella (14:46): And then that made me fascinated. I was like, there's something going on in the spiritual realm or whatever, but everybody seems to have very strong opinions about it and in different directions, so that made me want to figure out what people meant by the word enlightenment. I use that word as a hook but I explore a lot of things close to it, like awakening or stream-entry and so are people like, what is your experience with this and people have done this before but I wanted to come at it outside of the spiritual memeplex because I'm mostly untainted. And I try to protect myself from exposure to that, just to see if the patterns that I organically observe happen to align with what already exists or just to put my spin on it, I don't know, to see if I can detect my own patterns. So, I talked to a bunch of people who claim to be enlightened to have to try to figure out if there was anything, how they disagreed with each other mainly.

Ben Yeoh (15:39): So that's almost like a rationalist framework approach to it or does it not square with your rationalist thinking as well or it's a completely other thing for you?

Aella (15:47): Well, it depends what you mean by rationalist; rationality is the practice of attempting to minimize bias and make predictions and the enlightenment thing is pretty hard because it's outside of the realm of predictions. Enlightened people don't make predictions better than other people, so it's outside the scope of rationality to some degree and a lot of rationalists consider this to be an irrational thing like coming out of a lot of biases. So there's some disagreement there inside of the rational community, for example, one concept of rationalities that the map is not the territory, the word is not the concept. We're using these references to this landscape of concepts.

Aella (16:34): And a lot of people get attached to the concepts and the words. When I first got into rationality, I was pretty tribalistic and I was anti-feminist and I once asked somebody are you a feminist, wanting to know am I going to be an ally or not? And the person responded, this was a rationalist being like, I don't know what you mean by that word, what concepts and this is rerouting from the per-formative layer into what are we talking about? They name the concrete thing and I'll tell you if I support it or not and so there's something that was a rational skill that I took to the enlightenment thing, I'm not looking to find out is it or isn't its enlightenment? This is just a word that people are using to refer to a landscape of concepts and my interest is the concepts, not the word like I give a fuck about the word, so that would be an example of the way that rationality related to that inquiry.

Ben Yeoh (17:26): That's interesting because I viewed that sometimes rationalists seem to me that I'm not super close to the communities. There's not as large a community here in London, in the UK but potentially a little bit narrow in where they look because of that and therefore not as rich as those who look beyond that. But like you say, some of it is beyond the bounds and I hadn't quite appreciated your point about the map and the territory of that, well you got to try name and articulate the thing and then know about, are we talking about the same thing or not; not just the word on it. And is that then intersectional about what psychedelics and other things have taught you because you've taken quite a lot of psychedelics and for quite a period and that again seemed to be quite an eye-opening or pivotal point in your life and thinking, and is that a third pillar or does that interweave with how you're thinking about rationalism frameworks and how you're thinking about your life?

Aella (18:28): I'm not sure about the third pillar, like psychedelic rationality, and what was the third?

Ben Yeoh (18:35): Well, I guess was this enlightenment/interest in that otherness or faith spirituality part; however, you want to name it? I was just thinking that psychedelic initially, at least in my thinking was perhaps again, something slightly apart from rationality, quite hard to explain, you got very personal and different experiences, the framework for talking about it is quite tricky, doesn't seem to fall into a rationality framework that easily, or I'm mistaken and that you were going to explain to me how it might fit in quite neatly. I was just intrigued because you've written quite well about it in terms of your essays and are quite open but articulate it quite well, so I was just fascinated by your experience.

Aella (19:22): I would say the psychedelic for me is quite tied into the interest in spirituality; my spiritual experience is I think a direct result of my heavy psychedelic. A lot of rationalists are; I just had a moment of delight, I don't think I've ever been on a podcast where people ask me about the intersection of rationality and psychedelics, this is so cool; sorry, that aside.

Ben Yeoh (19:45): I'll try and make it in your top three podcasts ever then.

Aella (19:51): Serious points for the novelty here. The novel is just what do girls do to get more money, [on] only fans. So a psychedelic, let's see, there's a lot of distress about psychedelics in the rationality community, but I think that this comes from a chronic misstep of failing to see that you doing the thinking is part of the thinking. There's this separation of I'm going to figure out the truth, me and the truth are separate, and I'm going to discover it or something and then there's some subtle mental move that people do, where they don't consider the sensation of having a concept to be part of that concept, almost a creation of that concept and so that's where some of the schism comes in with rationality and psychedelics and spirituality. But for me, I got into psychedelics before rationality which was a good idea. I'm not sure but it worked out well for me.

Ben Yeoh (20:56): Well, both aspects seem to sit well in you and you talk about compartmentalisation, but they do seem to coexist quite nicely or at least in your essays and things; think about that and on the rationality part. So a lot of rationality community people to me seem to be quite into EA effective altruism type ideas as well. And that expands often, a lot of them seem to me to be not only giving away their money say but also into vegan and vegetarianism, is that something which has interested you in that part or are you that's an expected value thing on moral decisions and doesn't compute as well with you?

Aella (21:39): When I was taking psychedelics, I became a vegetarian for two years because I felt empathy for animals and all that and then stopped being a vegetarian when I decided that I was okay with killing but that's a more difficult thing to explain. I support EA, in general, it seems they're doing a good thing for the world and mostly having fun doing it.

Ben Yeoh (22:09): But do you consider yourself an EA yourself?

Aella (22:12): No, I don't, maybe it's just uncharitable, but I view them as a little too uptight for me. I like a little bit of a wild and controversial, like taking my clothes off and they're the kind that wear suits and try to look nice.

Ben Yeoh (22:32): And are the many rationalists then like, there's a wild subpopulation of rationalists as well as the nerdy VA types.

Aella (22:40): There's the post rationalist which is a little bit of tongue and cheek firm for rationalists who like rationality, but is also being embodied and doing weird things with their brains.

Ben Yeoh (22:52): Well, this is a good point to ask all questions which is; which of your habit's conflicts with your values and I've been thinking more than the fact that for me eating meat is probably one of my moral failings thinking that I probably should, or I believe that we should treat animals better, yet I could probably not eat them and I do, although I'd be completely fine. I have killed to eat and that thing, I'd be okay as a hunter-gather. [] I don't know what it might be for you. Are any of your habits you think in conflict with your values?

Aella (23:32): Probably the same, maybe the meat-eating thing, but part of the thing is I have quite a bit of self-compassion, so I don't feel like that much in the conflict that often, occasionally I do, but with the eating thing, I've come to terms with it. It's also an indication of compassion for other people who do horrible things, so much throughout history. People are like, man, it would be moral or you could imagine them saying it would be moral, not to have slaves but it's just so inconvenient and so if we can do this on a very small scale and it feels good and normal, it shows how the other people have committed atrocities in the past were also very human and doing very reasonable things.

Ben Yeoh (24:13): That's very true, I think this is one of the things about the time we are living in or considering or the time slavery's quite a good example. If you go back 300 years or so a fair amount of time or even only 150 so years, and you said you were anti-slavery, you would've been the weirdo, you are in the minority and you would've defined it; tough going. So I think today, I am still quite sympathetic for these minority and weirdo views because I'm not certain exactly, which are the ones that are going to turn out to be the ones we view as very moral, today you are anti-slavery, that's a thing but 200 years ago, I'm not sure everyone would've necessarily come to that position.

Aella (24:59): There's a thing where I feel I wish we had more of a focus on argument archeology, where we focus on the arguments for horrific things at the time, like things that were widely accepted and what the discourse was like. People were talking about this and making arguments for the horrific thing and so there are arguments against women's rights and pro-slavery that are quote-unquote like, well seeming to be clear for those listening. I do not endorse slavery, I do not find the arguments to be valid, but if you were at that time, you weren't educated in morals whatever, if you didn't think hard about it, they seemed convincing. And I wish that people were aware that people didn't commit atrocities just randomly, because they were bad, but that they were held up by these arguments that seemed good. And it just seems so important for our understanding of current moral issues. Right now, we're probably going through several atrocities that we're not aware of that are propped up by arguments that we consider to be good.

Ben Yeoh (26:00): And that's exactly my point, going on the slavery one if you go back to something where we feel distant to so 2000 years, so no one can blame for that. I remember reading about it. I think it was the Babylonian king and we have the code or the codex of Hammurabi  and he specifically gave a price for slaves, I think it was 10 or 20 [silver shekels]  and female slaves were worth less than male slaves. Then you went up to the equivalent of the middle class and gave specific values and it was codified in law, so you would've been breaking the law had you thought differently on that. Have you given even male and female slaves equality, you would've been not only extremely weird, but you would've been breaking the law and the thinking of that.

Ben Yeoh (26:49): And so, 2000 years seems almost incredibly long in some respects or not, but that is how far we've evolved, at least in our social and moral thinking but we don't have very much evidence at that time, but we have it in the Kodak. That thing would mean a lot of arguments for that time. I see that's quite a good segue into thinking about school and I was wondering what you thought about home school or unschooled or generally educational institutions because your experience was quite different but grown-up has a Christian homeschooler, but I guess in a slightly more fundamentalist type of experience and way. But I think a lot of your essays have also been quite critical about the institutional thinking you get in, say a more mainstream type of schooling on that. So I was thinking, what do you think about the advantage of an unschooled/home school type of thing and how it viewed you and does some of this more, I guess, it's critical thinking about the way we are, the way we have been spring from having a fewer rules-based approach to learning that you might get in a more mainstream institution.

Aella (28:03): Yes, you are right, I was home school to my entire childhood, very isolated from the outside world, I only ever interacted with other homeschoolers, I didn't watch media with the public school in it very often, so I didn't know anything about schoolwork. I remember when I was 14, maybe you mentioned this, I went to school for three months when my parents tried me going to public school and there were some shocking things like that, I didn't expect; one is the wasted time would probably be the top one, is that I was shocked by how much time it took to learn almost no information; at home I would've learned all of my entire school day in an hour and a half. And, I was just shocked we just spent a lot of time waiting, walking around, hanging out, the teacher would get ready to talk and the teacher would go very slowly through things and I'd be holy shit, I'm not learning anything. In hindsight, I feel the problem here is that it took away my free time, as a kid I would do my homeschooling, schedule in a couple hours, four to five days a week and then I'd have the rest of the day, a hundred percent free to do what I wanted and what I wanted to do was awesome shit, I learned to juggle, I wrote a million words of fantasy fiction, I read nonstop, I learned how to sew, I was constantly creating because I had all of this spare time. 

Aella (29:38): And as an adult, when I look back on what was valuable about my childhood, I think about the shit I taught myself because that's the stuff I was passionate about and that's the stuff that carried over to my adulthood. I think very little about the stuff that I learned that I was required to learn that I didn't want to and so, I'm horrified at public school because they take that away from kids, it's not just that they're bad at teaching them is that they take away the ability for kids to teach themselves; it's so upsetting to me. So I was home school the whole time, I ended up getting out and then shortly after I entered the normal adult world, I lived in a house, a bunch of other people who had gone to public school, which was by the way pretty culturally isolating because they all had this or understood history, vocabulary, culture, awareness but that's a different point. But hearing them talk about their school experience made me increasingly grateful for mine, also the school social experience, it's abnormal to have a bunch of kids stratified by age group and have almost no adults there or older/younger kids present. With my upbringing I always hang out with families, I was constantly exposed to other people's parents, we had homeschooler times around Mondays, all of the families would get together and educate each other as families and so there was no opportunity for weird social hierarchies to evolve, in your tiny age range. 

Aella (31:05): In my opinion, it was much healthier and so these people would talk about getting bullied in school with emotional stuff, how people are trying to become the queen bee or having people insult you or invite you to a party and laugh at you. Like all of these are traumatizing emotional experiences I had never once been bullied by a fellow child at any point, I had never once had another kid be mean to me in my entire childhood. When I was three and somebody stepped on my sandcastle, and I saw these emotional traumas that my friends were carrying, way more insecure in some ways than I was, which is saying something because as I was a pretty insecure person, and way more oriented around their appearance, I have a good relationship to my appearance, but they got bullied for it and picked on. It was important for them and I went through my childhood because nobody cared about appearance, so I don't have any of that fucking bullshit traumas that everybody else seems to have. And I think it comes straight from public school, I am ranting a little bit because I feel very passionately about this. Public school seems like one of the worst things to happen to humanity, it just takes the joy and the independence and the confidence and the love of learning out of children very systematically and my childhood wasn't even good, I had abusive parents; my dad worked from home and we were homeschooled, so I was stuck in a house with a monster my entire childhood. And I still think that was a better outcome than the sh*t that I see my friends go through in public school. There I'm done with my rant. Thank you.

Ben Yeoh (32:34): I hope that was cathartic for you as well, but that's a very good advert for homeschool, and you picked up on the last point which was, I wasn't sure about having such a fundamental Christian, which you now probably disagree with that part of the upbringing, but you said you probably would take that trade off again, almost you saying between a public school and I guess not that upbringing or the freedom that an unschooled/ home school environment gave you. I think that's fascinating. So I don't know about that-- you think that's a separate strand, you home school regardless of whether you're brought up in a fundamental way or not, it's just a better way of thinking and I guess the fundamentals of public school or how we come about them, I guess was a Anglo Saxon invention to get industrialized people, factory workers to read and write and have this working class, middle class bit of when the schooling went, because the elite from a hundred years ago or so still used family learning.

Ben Yeoh (33:38): Essentially, they had a governor/governess, although you did also start to send children away to boarding school, somewhat on that, so yes, I think that's quite interesting. And your upbringing was very strictly religious and you write about studying logical Christianity but you lost your faith and that was also quite painful. I was interested in whether your reflection of that has changed over the time as you've become more distant to it and whether the home school/unschooled thinking that freedom that you got to potentially think for yourself helped unwind some of that. I know you get told one way, like gays are evil or whatever, so that doesn't compute but that's a little bit of freedom of thought that home school gives you, also opens the door to that way of thinking. So I don't know whether you'd reflect on losing your faith or how that came about and how that was for you.

Aella (34:38): My upbringing was pretty anomalous even among other Christian homeschoolers because my dad was a professional evangelical Christian, so we were a little bit more focused around the intellectual defense of the Christian faith than other people. I do think that part of me losing faith was genetics, I think that I just got born with a weird brain that is more disagreeable and more open than most other people which is more likely to change your mind, I guess. And a lot of the people, the friends who I was brought up with, the majority of them are still very Christian and still in that life. So for me, I think I was abnormal, I think that my dad specifically tried very hard to instill good thinking in us. As far as he could, he was quite smart and taught us logic stuff. Some of my earliest memories are him playing logic games with us as kids; he'd be like, does a monkey have, or does a cat have two legs? And I'd be like, no, he has four and my dad would be like, yes, the cat has two legs and four, just stuff like that to make sure that our thinking was crisp and precise, so like four years old, I was child and so I think that did help to some degree. There's some question everything, I remember having that from a very young age being taken by the concept that there were other Muslim kids because the Muslims were the worst for us.

Aella (36:08): There are other Muslim kids being raised, very similar to the way I was and they were devoted Muslims. And I feel exactly the same way that they do, so how do I know that my faith is true and theirs isn't? I have to cling to something beyond my sensation about this, like my conviction because I think that was helpful. Part of the weird brain thing is being very interested in the way things feel for other people and checking to see if that is the way that I also feel and that was also vital in losing my faith because somewhere in my brain, I had this constant awareness that this might be wrong and I think that's something that a lot of Christians don't have and I was very lucky to end up with that.

Ben Yeoh (36:52): That's fascinating; you were given the seeds through all of that questioning to unpick your faith. Well, what would you say to others who might be on the verge of losing their faith?

Aella (37:09): I felt a wave of compassion and sadness for that. Losing your faith is so hard and I respect it because you're losing a lot. It's losing your comfort and your sense of direction and morality in society and it means so much. I think it's better on the other side of it, but if I had to say I'm sorry that you have to go through that, would be my feeling,

Ben Yeoh (37:43): But at least for you, it's better on the other side, even though it could be painful going through it.

Aella (37:49): It's terrifying, it's scary, but it's great. I swear, at least for me, it's great; some people have more trouble than I did, some people have less but it can be great,

Ben Yeoh (37:59): But I guess there's light at the end of the tunnel, not to use the heavenly metaphor for it. And then you left home, you're in these new gigs and stuff and I think you went to work and I read an essay, I think, which only briefly talked about waking up even something like 4:00 AM or very early to go to work in a factory in quite a miserable type of job. And I'm not quite sure how long you did that for, but it seems like a significant amount of time or felt significant there. And I was just wondering, because that's an insight into what a lot of Americans or a lot of people do in the world and I think there's a lot of people who are born richer or listen to podcasts and stuff who don't ever get that sense of what it was like to be, I guess what we think; working class, you're working at a minimum wage, hard living job. So I don't know whether you wanted to reflect on that experience and how that then shaped you into where you are now or what it's like or what people might not understand about what it's like to wake up at 4:00 AM and go to work in a factory.

Aella (39:12): I had very little standards for my life at that point; I was expected to become a housewife. The cultural idea of what I would do with my life was not very grand, I was supposed to have children and so when I didn't go to college, or I did very briefly and I didn't have a hope of becoming a higher-class person. So for me getting a job, it was slightly above minimum wage, believe it or not and that was very exciting for me and at that point I was going hungry because I didn't have enough money and I was applying to every job; I was applying for jobs like working in the sewers to scoop poop. So when I got a factory job, I was thankful because it was a step up from what I was prepared to do in order to live.

Aella (40:03): So I got the factory job and I made the best of it. I tried hard to like it, I was like, I'm going to make my life good, I'm going to enjoy it. We worked at a factory and we had got these trays with the units on it that we would assemble then pass the tray and the tray had a little pad on it. And so, when I had a couple seconds of downtime, I would scratch little messages because these pads got circulated throughout the factory and were seen by the other factory workers. But you had to angle it just right, at a certain light to be visible, so it was like a little bit of a hidden message, so I would do this, I would scratch these messages to other factory workers. It was like that sort of thing. I tried to make the best of it but it was hard working weekends and waking up that early and working for 10 sometimes 12 hours a day, it sucked, man. It's stretched even my ridiculous optimism, but some people there at factory seemed to like it somehow or they just were good at emotionally handling it, I'm not sure. But during that time the spare moments I had, I was doing photography on the side and I got briefly employed by a photography job, which allowed me to quit my factory job and then the photography job fired me because I was 19 and not good. And then after that I was like, I can't go back to the factory job, I just can't make myself go back because when I left on my last day, all my coworkers were like, good job for you, go get them, go out into the world, you got out. And I just go ahead and bear the thought of being like I failed, so I did not do that and then that's when I ended up doing sex work after that.

Ben Yeoh (41:46): That almost feels slightly Hollywood film script, but on the factory work thing it's interesting because you do get some people and I'm not sure if this is true but people are doing this low paid work. So the classic story is I think a janitor or the janitor in the white house goes, I'm not just cleaning the corridors. I'm helping put a man on the moon or the cleaner cleaning toilets in a hospital says, you know what, I'm not just cleaning poop, I'm saving people's lives because you bring this purpose to your job. But it seems to me pretty rare and I almost wonder whether it's a romanticization from other people who are not doing this thinking, this is what people can make or do of it. And it's just either physically tiring or mind numbing or both and you have to do these. I'm interested that you have a little piece of creativity, a little piece of something other, which makes it human, which I hadn't quite fully appreciated in it. But it was so the economy was so poor, even though it was slightly above the minimum wage, which you thought on the one hand was great, but it was too so destroying to go back to, or do you think had you not had that little step up, did something better like a photography job that maybe you would've, but it was that you feel you couldn't fall further back down the ladder?

Aella (43:10): Well, I didn't know how to get out, I didn't know how to do anything, I had zero community, no network, I was completely unknown. I had no conception of steps I could take to make my life better. I just knew that I should pursue, I should just try. I think I was also very high risk. I was willing to take a lot of high risks which helped, I'm not sure if that answers your question though?

Ben Yeoh (43:40): Well, I guess it does and I guess your next step is into escort and sex work. The economics of it are so much better, but comes with all of risk and everything. And I guess without it, you wouldn't be where you are today with it, but it does seem it's such a large jump with that. Did you feel there was nothing else around that or was it just a more expected value like, this might be quite risky but there are high rewards, I could do this, why not?

Aella (44:12): I didn't even think that far. It was mostly after I quit the thing that I moved back down to Boise, which is five hours away from the city that I was working at the factory. And I wanted to figure out how to do my own thing, so I tried doing photography, I tried doing product photography, but again, fucking 19, I was homeschooled, no idea how the world works, no friends or at least very new friends, not a good community. So all of my attempts were shit and so I was living on a friend's couch, living off savings, trying desperately to make my way, trying pretty poorly because I had vowed never to have a boss again, the factory was so terrible. I was like, I want to make my own business somehow, I don't know how I just can't do that and then so I would try a couple of things and then a friend suggested camming and then I, I caned my first night, made $60, which is fucking loads of money for me at the time and I was like, this is something I could pour my effort into and get something out of it, and so I didn't have long-term concepts at all. All I knew is that for the first time I was able to make money doing something that I was directing, so I just threw myself at its full heart and soul.

Ben Yeoh (45:29): So entrepreneurial spirit in charge of your life and destiny, with all of that, I think it interesting that you came out to be smart with lots of critical thinking, homeschool skills, but then none of the other because I guess what public schools would give you or say, west coast or east coast CIHI public schools give you that social capital and network that allows you to use all of these other things, but that without it it's difficult to use whatever smarts you might have. You've referred to community loads of times and it is interesting and then you've got communities now, but coming out at 17, 18, 19, 20, that lack of community means you didn't have that social capital to rely on.

Aella (46:15): I should probably be a little bit more precise or something there. I was able to make friends but there was a very strong cultural divide at that point. I had grown up completely with a separate set of media, and a separate set of social norms and so it was very much coming from a different cult country. And I remember many times hanging out around normal people and feeling I was an alien and there was no way I could explain it to them because to them, I looked the same, I talked the same, I had grown up in the town over. But there were just tiny little things about the way they interacted and the words they used that I did not understand. I was like, there's some other thing going there. And I must have been very strange to them too, there was a lot of things that I did that were like, what the fuck, she's weird. She's not hanging like normal people behave and to be clear, I grew up with homeschoolers and all homeschoolers behaved like that. So I was pretty socially good with homeschoolers, but it was this transition to this new thing that made it hard for me to develop friends that were good. And I think that's one of the reasons I was unable to keep my job as a photographer because my cultural norms are too different. I'd been raised to be extraordinarily submissive and they needed somebody who was able to say no to people and able to be confident and engage with people who might have different wants and I was unable to do that. I had that beaten out of me, so it's just stuff like that. So, when I say community, I don't mean that I was unable to go to meet-ups and make friends, it was just that it was a constant handicap.

Ben Yeoh (47:54): Well, I guess there are two things there because on the one hand it's speaking a different cultural language but on the other hand, it's also that your character was shaped in a way that it wasn't able to fit into this new culture so easily and I guess both points were difficult for you. But you learned this new language and it sounded like it took you quite long to fit into the non-fundamental Christian world but that came through. So your character changed and your understanding of this new world changed, was that a year's long process or did you have two or three aha type moments? I guess this comes on to creation and invention. Is it small incremental innovation or do you have moments where it all crystallizes together, which loops into a little bit like enlightenment or where steel things, is it constant, almost meditation? Do you get there through prayer or do you have this aha moment where you think, this is another force beyond which speaks to me.

Aella (48:59): I like the analogy, for me it was incremental, I think it took about seven years until I no longer had that feeling of being a stranger. Now I still get it; I get little flashes every now and then but it's very pretty rare, but I think it was around 25 because I left home when I was 17 and it was when I was 25 years old, I noticed I don't feel I'm an outsider anymore. So about that long and it was very slow.

Ben Yeoh (49:27): Alright, you still spent more years feeling as an outsider than as an insider then really?

Aella (49:35): I guess so.

Ben Yeoh (49:36): I was just thinking about life's journey. Well, here's one of your questions, which I thought was interesting because I didn't know how to answer it quite and so I'm still thinking about it. So this is the one when you go, you're in a room with say 10,000 people, maybe a thousand people and you get to ask three binary questions, so yes, no and so for each question, the people who answer the question, according to the way you want, they stay and the people who don't leave the room. So I don't know if you've ever asked yourself this question, but what are the three questions that you ask people?

Aella (50:15): I had a good set of answers to these that I forgot, but I'll try and generate some, but they're not going to be as good. I think probably one is freewill was one of my favorite questions, do you believe that we have freewill or not? And my preferred answer is no, so I would take those people, maybe something about sense of self, where's your sense of self located? That's not a yes/ no question, I'd have to think more specifically.

Ben Yeoh (50:48): And what's the correct answer: sense of self, in you or outside of you? Is that the idea?

Aella (50:55): Because that's the thing I feel something in that direction of a sense of self, maybe like the location isn't quite right, but there's some malleable sense of self or the sense of being a character on a stage and play a little bit.

Ben Yeoh (51:12): Acting out, that’s one of your questions.

Aella (51:15): I like that a lot and I find that I bond well with people there. And then have you ever changed your mind on something drastic, like huge, like fundamental to who you are,

Ben Yeoh (51:29): I guess the answer you're going to want to hear is yes.

Aella (51:32): What are your answers for that question?

Ben Yeoh (51:37): I don't know, I keep on thinking about it and now I'm riffing on your freewill one but I guess that's just so if there isn't one, that's like a destiny, but it feels almost the same as your second question because that is, I think, how do you class it again, I think I've taken this from a survey where you say life is a story, a game and we have don characters to play it; billionaires play the game of money, religious fanatics play the game of heaven and hell, people who watch the children die, play the game of grief and that we are all playing parts. But if that's true, that's almost true that you don't think there's freewill if we're all playing these character games and parts in it. So I think that's a double question: you're going to not lose that many people. I guess, minus to do with mindsets to be with things like curiosity or curiosity and open-mindedness would be one and then if I'm going to hang out with these people, it depends on how you're using this, there'll be something to do with liking food or conversational culture. Could we have a good party together, that type of thing but I'm not sure exactly what it would be because I don't think I necessarily party well with everyone and then I don't know what my last one would be, I'd have to still think about it. It might be something to do with love of travel, which is a lot of this or you have an opportunity, but this idea of wanting to visit places or go places.

Ben Yeoh (53:02): Because particularly when I was younger, I traveled a lot and I think it's been influential and I think people still now don't travel enough or they make pronouncements about things, which they don't have any idea of because they either have no lived experience or they haven't gone there, which is like a point you made way back about, rooting where we were in history and what the pros and cons of an idea debated on that time. And so that was one, I was fascinated about your working in a factory, so I've never worked in something like that, but I did stay on an open cast gold mine in Borno, in east Malaysia when I was about 17 and that was quite eye opening. I wouldn't say, I don't know whether it was completely dramatic, I held something close to me and then it changed. But I think I had that slightly, what I would call a paternalistic view that I know better than these poor people who live in villages with no running water. And this must be the way you should think and to do better. And then when I went to stay with these people, it was like, you know what, you are completely rational, this is exactly what you would do. If you have no running water, you'd find a job, you are pulling in a hole, you are digging that week it changes your mind. You have no credit card or family to get you out of that and this is your whole life ahead of you and many of you are very likely to die young, so why would you bother with a pension if you thought there was a higher than 50% chance you're going to die before you're 60. You just wouldn't.

Ben Yeoh (54:45): And so that did change my staying on this gold mine and speaking to people and traveling around there and I was traveling by myself. It's like, okay my world view was wrong because I made these assumptions, I think you could have gotten there if you thought very hard about what it was to live there. But I would say maybe all of us, that's such a leap of imagination, if it's very far apart from the world that you've lived in, that you can't do it. It's very hard to imagine living for two weeks without running water, unless you've actually ever lived without running water and had to dig your own toilet. It's just such a different way of being, and it's a little bit like you were saying, going back 150 years ago, they had no running water and all of that, the time of it was very different. Anyway, that ties in with what you were saying. So perhaps now a little section on underrated, overrated, or you could just do a little commentary about what you might think about this item coming up, if you are happy to play this game, So underrated, overrated, or you can pass, or you could just make, a commentary on it. So underrated, overrated, the accordion?

Aella (56:00): Underrated; it's underrated.

Ben Yeoh (56:03): And why is it underrated? What don't we understand about accordion or accordion playing?

Aella (56:12): I think people like its accordion tend to play a type of music, which is very goofier oriented or French, you know something like that but I...

Ben Yeoh (56:23): Folk music, I guess.

Aella (56:25): Excuse me.

Ben Yeoh (56:25): Folk music.

Aella (56:28): But it feels like a great thing to play for a lot of different types of music, I find it to be also like a cable of great sadness, which I enjoy and also it feels like it vibrates your body when you play it. And in a way that piano doesn't, for example, or a flute, so it's like you're closer, almost like you're breathing with your instrument, which I find to be wonderful.

Ben Yeoh (56:52): Cool that makes a lot of sense, ballroom dancing or other social dancing like this.

Aella (56:59): Underrated.

Ben Yeoh (57:01): I know the underrated one. They're not going to be all underrated, well, we'll see.

Aella (57:06): Ben, it is underrated because it takes a lot of effort to learn, but man, it's so worth it. I think that the people don't understand how fucking fantastic it can feel to be good at it.

Ben Yeoh (57:17): Well, here in the UK, we are very obsessed by this program called Strictly dancing. I don't know if you've got a US equivalent, but the country's been mad about it for years, so there's quite a big ballroom dancing culture and even some quite because you don't associate it with young people. But there's quite a lot of young people who will do that or at least learn a little bit partly because of strictly and strictly it's been quite groundbreaking recently because they've introduced age or thoughts of ageism and then also gender and identity, should you have same sex or not in your dancing and things? So it's been weirdly progressive in what's considered not necessarily progressive art form, but anyway, the UK's a bit obsessed by it.

Aella (58:07): Well, it's interesting social dancing in general is weirdly progressive. So in the US, we have a lot of social dancing but it tends to be blues and fusion, not a lot of young people doing the ballroom specifically. So I might have to check out in the UK, but the scene is very progressive compared to others and I suspect it's because you end up being physically in close contact with strangers, which tends to select for more of the poly or sexually fluid crowd who are less uncomfortable switching, physical contact is my guess, my theory.

Ben Yeoh (58:35): And I guess the culturally or whatever, a lot of gay people have also been into this side of dancing and particularly in the UK forums been identified with that and performance and things. Okay, underrated, overrated or commentary; pronouns.

Aella (58:55): Are pronouns underrated; pronouns in general or are you referring to they, them pronouns?

Ben Yeoh (59:01): Well, you can choose.

Aella (59:03): I can choose, in generally I feel pronouns are exactly as rated as they should be

Ben Yeoh (59:08): Alright and they/them, him/her are identity pronouns?

Aella (59:15): It depends on your culture, if you're in a conservative culture, I think they're underrated and if you're in a liberal culture, I feel they're overrated.

Ben Yeoh (59:21): Overused in some not appreciated in another; that is fair. Abalone, overrated, or underrated.

Aella (59:31): You pronounced it right, It's a great game. I assume people don't know it's an abstract strategy board game with marbles, it's very fast and easy to learn and it's awesome, it's one of my favorite games.

Ben Yeoh (59:46): Very good, so this is a weird one which I picked up on your site, which is then, sweating or sweating on command, what's that about?

Aella (59:55): That one is definitely overrated. I have a hyperhidrosis condition where my hands and feet sweat excessively. I'm sick of it, I would like it to stop but I can do it on command, unfortunately.

Ben Yeoh (1:00:10): Can you? So you know that's cured by Botox.

Aella (1:00:16): So I tried that, I went to get Botox injections and my palm turns out, shoving a needle into all the parts of your palm and fingers.

Ben Yeoh (1:00:25): Quite painful.

Aella (1:00:26): Like 30 times it is excruciating, I do not recommend it.

Ben Yeoh (1:00:29): And I might pick up a little bit of needle phobia or no, not really.

Aella (1:00:33): Very needle phobic.

Ben Yeoh (1:00:34): 30 it's not going to do it for you then?

Aella (1:00:37): I lit up a lot of anti-anxiety meds for that which helped a lot, but still the pain was horrific.

Ben Yeoh (1:00:44): So I happen to know a [dermatologist] as a friend and so we were talking, she gets quite a lot of patients for sweating because also in the armpit, because you can't stop sweating there, but she said moderate, mild to moderate pain. I will go back to her and say, no, I spoke to someone who...

Aella (1:01:13): in every part of the finger, the sections of your finger, so like three in each finger, one in the base, one in the middle, one on the tip of every finger it's not mild to moderate pain, she's crazy.

Ben Yeoh (1:01:20): Well, I guess she's talking about her own book here. Well, that's mostly what I had on underrated and overrated, so we just had a couple more of your own questions here. So one was, I guess I'll paraphrase this, what do you make of emotional pain? And are there things that you would do where it was a lot of emotional pain but you would go through them again?

Aella (1:01:46): Well, I generally like emotional pain and sometimes seek it out intentionally. I suspect a lot of people do this to some degree that when you watch tragic movies and then you cry, that's a very intentional seeking out of emotional pain but there's some acceptance of it that I value and I suspect a lot of other people would like it too, if they could get it.

Ben Yeoh (1:02:28): And I guess they're seeking out emotional things, so I was interested in your essay on circling, which to be honest, I'd never come across and I don't think I would probably try myself. I'm not sure what I would get out of it, but it seems like you did and there are different forms of circling, which I hadn't appreciated either, but you seem to get quite a lot out of it. Some of that to me seems part of its mindfulness, but part of it is seeking an emotional or emotionality and a connection. What is circling for you? Is that right or I read that wrong and why do you like it?

Aella (1:02:45):  I think it stays out of curiosity, circling is an incredible novel, it's one of the highest density, novel experiences that I regularly get stuff out of. I'm regularly surprised by the things that people say and react and do in a way that I'm not surprised in normal conversations like this podcast thing is wonderful and I've been mildly surprised a few times by some of the things you say, but it's not like I'm losing my mind. So even in great conversations, there's this norm about how many novel things is said, but with circling, it's almost everything said of like what and then it triggers a lot of reactions in me, and the practice is to pay very close attention to what is triggered inside of you. So a lot of it is like somebody says something and I have a big reaction inside me and I'm curious about that and I get to look at it, so it's been just the highest information, for me.

Ben Yeoh (1:03:42): That's interesting and so it's very self-awareness on that. Well, next time I'm going to come up with even weirder questions, but I guess this is also people listening in that is slightly too weird and a couple of the other ones then would be, who do you hate most?

Aella (1:04:01): My dad probably, I don't hate him very much anymore because I've mostly gotten over it, so I wouldn't describe it as hating him, but if I had to say the most then maybe.

Ben Yeoh (1:04:13): And are you afraid of death? Why or why not?

Aella (1:04:18): Sometimes, if you put me near a cliff, I'm extremely afraid of death. If you drive me fast in a car. I am extremely afraid that there's some other way, which I'm ready though.

Ben Yeoh (1:04:30): Well, that might be; that's interesting because they feel dangerous things that you might not be scared of death, but of the actual activity. Although you say you like some quite other high-risk activities, I'm developing a show about death, partly because I don't think we think about it enough. So I'm interested in that enlightened bit and stuff, but it seems strange that we at least today, like versus a 100, a 150 years ago, death was present. The pandemic now more of us know people who have died but a hundred years ago you would've, by the time you were 20, 30, 40 seen loads of people die, would've been a normal part of your life, which particularly in richer countries, it isn't. So I think that's one of the reasons that we have become more afraid of death, in general. Anyway, the last couple of questions for you is, what are your favorite questions? Do you have questions that you like asking or questions at the moment that are playing on your mind?

Aella (1:05:31): One of my favorites is, what is your most controversial opinion, according to the people in this room or your peer group or whatever depending on the context I'm asking. But that's one of my favorites because it requires the person to one, make a guess about, well, the people around them are like and which is often wrong. You'd be surprised at how bad people are predicting, what people will find controversial and two, it requires them to set themselves apart from the other people there, which is people pick different methods of doing it and they're all fascinating. That's one of my favorites, I think.

Ben Yeoh (1:06:07): That's interesting, so you've got to, because you've got to know the room or your people and I guess if they're your friends, couldn't be surprising that you might not know your friends as well as you think you do.

Aella (1:06:20): And it's also asking you to take a bold social stand, it’s asking you to figure out what the thing most of the people in the room will think you're wrong about, so it is an emotionally charged thing to do as well.

Ben Yeoh (1:06:34): And what research worker are you doing at the moment? So you've got the enlightenment essays still going, there seems to be something that's still interesting in synesthesia kinesthesia. You're doing a lot of research, I guess, still collecting data on questions and escorts and that type of thing. What are you most interested in your projects at the moment?

Aella (1:06:58): Kinks is another big subject that I'm preparing to do, maybe a set of essays or surveys on sexual fetish issues. I've already done a couple on them, but I want to go deeper and more precisely. What causes them? That’s a big one: are people abused in childhood? Does that make kinks happen? Is it random and unpredictable? What about birth order? Just a bunch of stuff like that.

Ben Yeoh (1:07:15): I had to pause for a second there, because I thought you said pinks with a P not kinks for the chaos. What are pinks, I haven't heard of this one that was normal; cool. And then I guess with your life now, you've talked about going back a little bit into sex work and there seemed to be a period when you were suggesting, it's a real shame that my questions, or other things that I could do are just not as economically satisfying either. Do you feel that's a tension of where you would be, you'd prefer to be running a VC firm or entrepreneurial thing or the way you compartmentalize your life, are you relatively happy about how things are working out?

Aella (1:08:12): I'm relatively happy; I'm not fully happy, I'm extremely fortunate and grateful for the opportunities that I have, I also would love to just get paid to do research; that's my dream. I just want to not think about the sex work thing, it's fine, I don't get a thrill out of taking the 5,000 photo of my breasts, it's just boring. I want to solve problems, I want to solve problems and figure out knowledge that we haven't figured out before; that's my real passion, I'm hoping to take steps in that direction. I'm working on finding a research Institute for sex stuff specifically and I'm hoping to get funding which might happen, we'll see.

Ben Yeoh (1:08:52): Anyone interested in grant funding or anything for that, do you get in touch? So, this is interesting. Maybe you'll get someone from the crypto world or crypto bro who's interested in different things and I haven't seen it open up funding ideas. [ ] there’s a little bit of funding, little cover, interesting streams there but I don't think with funding things are radically different. And again, if you go back a 100, 150 years ago, there were many different ideas about how we should fund things or get things going and now we've got a bit of universities funding and then you've got the Silicon Valley thing but for stuff, which is interesting, but maybe not that commercial and not coming out of the university, it still strikes me as harder to fund than it should be. Anyway, I hope that catches someone to give you lots of funding for that and then the last question would be, do you have any advice for people in general? So the life advice that you've thought either, I guess people who might want to make a career in this kind of thing or you're thinking. Yes, advice that you'd have for people in how they might think about living their lives.

Aella (1:10:13): That's such a large question; that's huge. I should see if this would be a good ask all question because it's just so big, like if I had to, it would be to focus on asking the right question, probably if your life isn't going the way you want, then you probably haven't asked the right question yet, something in that direction.

Ben Yeoh (1:10:35): That's very on brand, asking the right question is your one big thing; that makes sense. Mine's often about curiosity on open mindedness and that's the same, that's the similar thing that asking the right question. I wonder whether you also need the counterpoint is you need to ask the right question, but you also need to be sensitive to listening because if you're not listening to the conversation and answers that you're having and which is part of your circling thing, that you might have asked the right question, but you didn't hear the answers that you wanted to hear or the answers already available to you and so you missed it.

Aella (1:11:13): Would it be something like performative asking, if you ask, but you're not interested in the answer or something like that.

Ben Yeoh (1:11:21): exactly, it’s that, or particularly in British/English speak, we've got a lot of things where we don't mean what we say. So the classic one is if a British/English person says with all due respect and then says something with all due respect is completely the opposite. They only say that when they think you are stupid, so we say with all due respect, if you hear that from a British/English person is no, they think we're completely stupid and we've got loads of these terms, this talking about the cultural difference. Americans often find it quite difficult, so they come in and they went like with all due respect; they must have respected my opinion and this example is no. We only say that if you are, this is like the rock bottom. And this is the step below. I probably would be better if we were swearing at you. This is the lowest of the low with all due respect. It just means...

Aella (1:12:09): I did not know that.

Ben Yeoh (1:12:10): You're such a total idiot that I'm not even saying anything. That's how we use it and another is the way we say, quite good or not bad. So when we say quite well, we don't mean that it was moderately good to even quite good, we normally mean that it was pretty bad. And when we say not bad, we normally mean quite good; pretty good. So it's confusing for Americans to come particularly in office environments with British workers, they'll go that was quite good. No, that was not good at all.

Aella (1:12:43): I had no idea.

Ben Yeoh (1:12:45): Where we say on the off hand, they're like not bad. That means keep going. That was good and you should try that. So there is this cracking the cultural code and that was why I thought that was very true. What you're saying is coming out whatever culture you are, and then implanted as someone who's been through public schools and all of these small, subtle things in word, how you might use your cutlery, what you even think of fast food and all of that, all of it is alien. And so, you're speaking the same words, but you're speaking a different cultural language and it's very obvious to those who are not in that cultural language that they didn't understand that with the classic one, like with the all do you respect, which is not with respect all. Great, so is there anything else? What is the question that I should have asked you?

Aella (1:13:45): I think you hit the fantastic ones, I'm not sure I could do better than you've already done.

Ben Yeoh (1:13:43): Well, that is a very good place to end with. So, thank you very much for speaking with me.

Aella (1:13:49): Thank you so much this is lovely, I appreciate your time.

Ben Yeoh (1:13:55): If you appreciate the show, please like, and subscribe as it helps others find the podcast.

Dan Goodley: disability, social models, technology, interdependence, on being human | Podcast

Dan Goodley is a professor of disability studies and education at the School of Education, University of Sheffield. Dan co-directs iHuman, which sits at the intersections of Critical Disability Studies and Science and Technology Studies. iHuman is addressing  some significant questions of contemporary society including: what does it mean to be human?

We chat about who and how do we decide who gets to be human? I pose what thinking about the rights (or lack of) that Britney Spears has is relevant to disability rights thinking.

Dan wide ranging thoughts on what disability and other intersectional studies have suggested to him. These include:

Thinking about “ability” and what the social model of disability suggests. What a critique of idealising able bodies and able minds might mean.

What medicalisation means and how it is different to medicine.

How humans are interdependent and what that suggests about our relationships.

How technology is impacting Dis/abled humanness.

What being a Nottingham Forest Football fan has taught Dan.

And Dan’s life advice: Move from the object to embrace the subject.

Dan has written the thought provoking book: Disability and Other Human Questions.  You can buy his book here. Check out the podcast below or read the transcript.

PODCAST INFO

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• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

Or wherever you get podcasts.

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Dan Goodley What disability teaches us about being human, interdependence, medicalisation 
(unedited transcript, expect typos etc.)

Ben Yeoh (00:00): Hello, and welcome to Ben Yeoh chats. If you're curious about the world, this show is for you. What does disability teach us about being human? On this episode, I speak to Dan Goodley. Dan is professor of disability studies, and we chat about how disability provokes deep questions about humanity, such as who is allowed to be human and how interdependent are humans. If you enjoy the show, please like and subscribe as it helps others find the podcast. Thank you, be well. Hey everybody, I'm excited to speak to Dan Goodley. Dan is a professor of disability studies and education, and he has written the thought provoking book, Disability and Other Human Questions. Dan, welcome.

Dan Goodley (00:50): Hi Ben. Thank you very much.

Ben Yeoh (00:52): So first question, who and how do we decide who gets to be human? I asked this as this comes up in your book and I don't think I had fully appreciated how certain majorities or say elites do decide on who gets status as human rights or human dignity. And to take a little bit of an adjacent area I was following this year a lot of the news on Britney Spears in the US and I was astonished by how many of her rights had been taken away from her. And then I was reflecting on what is true for Britney has to be, and even is much more true for many people with disability and actually other groups of people as well. And that kind of felt really shocking to me and then I was reading your book and I thought, wow, there is a really big question about who gets to decide who is human or not. From your thinking and what you said in your book, what do you think of this question?

Dan Goodley (02:01): Well, firstly, thank you, bringing together a consideration of human disability and also Britney Spears. I applaud you for the question. I mean, yeah, I think the question of who decides to be human or if you like is allowed to be human is an old question asked by many humans over the years and I suppose one of the ways I would want to answer that question would be through the ideas generated by disabled people and by the ideas generated by disabled people's organizations. So anything I say today is said through and aware of the contributions of disabled people and their writing in the world. And I suppose if we think of the case of Britney, one of the key elements that her fans and Britney activists have pushed has been the question of capability and autonomy that's been taken away from her in relation to her own life. And so there's been some real, really interesting documentaries and obviously discussions through social media. I think that's positioned around or centered around the question of whether or not Britney Spears is being allowed to live the life that she herself wants to live.

Dan Goodley (03:38): And I think that's a question associated with human ability and it seems to me from listening and reading to the ideas coming from disabled people is that this idea of ability is something that we feel we kind of know, we all kind of hold around these assumptions in relation to ability, but it's actually quite a tricky concept. And it's interesting how some people are assumed to be able whilst others are not. And of course disability is the opposite of ability in terms of the way it's constructed and for many disabled people, their rights are taken away from them and based upon the notion that they are not capable, that they don't have the abilities, the competences to live their life. And it seems to me therefore that through disability whilst we need to sit with that very phenomenon, we need to spend a little bit more time, perhaps a lot of time asking questions of ourselves about the assumptions that we hold in relation to this  [ ]  One Way We Could Start To Critique What it means to be human or who is allowed to be human is by sitting with the concept of ability and subjecting that to some deep critique.

Ben Yeoh (05:03): That's super interesting and I'm sure we'll get on to kind of thinking about this social model of other models of the world. I guess I'm sometimes a little bit worried about labels and how we kind of use and misused words and in fact, interestingly recently I was called ableist by somebody and actually in this particular situation, I thought it was sort of very ironic because I'm sure being misused because this person was simply being abusive and I called them out on it. However, I am certain that there are many times that I am being what I think people would call ableist in this sense of centering the world around able people, how else we might think about it? So I was just thinking about what it means to be a productive person or how the world is designed, how useful do you think is this idea of ableism or centering under that, and should this be the kind of model that we should be pushing back against, or at least scrutinizing in order to assess more deeply what it is to be human and who we should allow to do. I sometimes get a bit worried about words and labels, but they can be helpful in many instances.

Ben Yeoh (06:28): In fact, recently I was called an ableist and I thought at that particular instance was ironic as I was pretty sure it was being misused, this person was simply being abusive and I called them out on it. However, I'm sure a lot of the times I am being what I think some would consider ableist as in that I center my world view around this idea about what a typical productive person might be, the world being designed for that typical person and I just wonder how useful is this idea as a concept that maybe we can criticize and push back against is. And then I think towards well, actually the last few decades, I was  going to say this year, but particularly we're hearing these instances of horrific institutionalized abuses and it seems to me that some of these abuses are rooted in some of this notion or rather had the institutions or the people in the culture had centered their thinking from a different spot than you could see that maybe we wouldn't have appear to have those type of abuses. Obviously they are very complicated and it's not necessarily  going to save them, but I just kind of think that actually that thinking of the world is maybe much more useful than some critics give it credit for. I was wondering what you might have thought about that.

Dan Goodley (07:59): Well, I think ableism and disablism are often used interchangeably and I think for example, in the states when people talk about people being ableist, I personally think they're talking about them being disablist. So I suppose for me, the way to think about this is that we now enjoy four decades of scholarship, writing research driven by disabled people and their allies and in the UK, for example there's been a lot of focus and continues to be a lot of focus on disablism and disablism is the institutional exclusion of people with impairments. And of course that remains an absolutely crucial part, not only of research, but obviously of activism, of the arts, of kind of pinpointing those moments of exclusion and challenging them and that's absolutely essential. Over the last decade or so, there's also been a move within activists and academic and artist circles focusing on something called ableism and I'm thinking of the work of people like Gregor Wolbring who's a disabled writer in Canada. And what Wolbring does is to say, yeah, disablism is absolutely significant and we need to contest it and we need to understand it but one of the things that kind of goes on in our everyday lives is that we don't subject to the same kind of critical scrutiny as something called ableism.

Dan Goodley (09:30): Ableism is the idealization of able bodied and able minds. Something I suppose we know when people talk about the able bodied and how the able bodied occupy a kind of position which is often kind of high in the hierarchy than disabled people. What they're doing really is they're talking about ableism and it's intriguing to me because I think that we don't actually question and similar to the idea of ability we don't actually question or even kind of subject to kind of some real critical thought the way in which ableism underpins everything. So not only are, you know, the classic case within disability studies is the inaccessible building that the wheelchair user cannot enter. And there's an example of disablism, but underpinning that is what we might call an ableist architecture, physically as an architecture, but also an architecture in terms of kind of a mindset or an intellectual or a philosophical view and it's quite worrying even that even some of the more transformative or radical thinkers that we might think of often themselves also do not subject their own kind of ideas to this kind of interrogation where they actually might be ableist.

Dan Goodley (10:52): I mean, I'm filling out a research application at the moment. The first question on the research application is research vision and implicit within that is vision. So this very ocular centric and I'm just thinking if I was a blind scholar or a blind researcher filling that out, is there a moment there, already the language being used, which is kind of excluding me. And so I think to disablist and ableist, we need to unpack these two things. They complement one another, but for me, they're also very different conversations that we need to have. So I'd be interested in someone saying to you you're being ableist, perhaps, maybe they're saying you're being disablist, I don't know. We need to be clearer in the kind of language that we use, because these are complementary practices, but they are very different practices.

Ben Yeoh (11:45): So, I agree. In this instance, I think they were hiding behind-- they were being disingenuous, but actually had they wanted to be more specific, I think, thinking about disablism rather than enablism, but I thought it was ironic because it made me think that actually-- cause I thought back to that incident and said, no, but I actually thought back even just to my week and I was thinking, well, actually you probably would've been right had you just picked out some day to day or some of my normal thinking, but actually in this instance you were wrong. So that was one of the triggers for it and I guess this kind of leads into one of the themes of your book on the role of technology as well, because in some ways that is also bringing this other dimension, as in what happens if we are somehow technology enabled or even technology disenabled like somehow [Inaudible:00:12:43], some people would argue that social media is disabling us in certain ways, or at least is an extension of us not, you know, which could have be for good or for ill right? So that was the idea there, but obviously you can have it in physical mechanical limbs. We're seeing it in terms of interpreting brain waves for people who are pre-verbal or non-verbal, or have an issue with verbalizing, can now verbalize somewhere. And I was wondering, is this influencing your thinking and actually is this maybe one way of people to unpack it of saying, well, if technology is doing this and is making us think about these ideas in a different way, maybe we should just be thinking about them in a different way, regardless of where their technology is, which is, I thought one of an interesting reflections I had on reading your chapter on technology.

Dan Goodley (13:40): Well, I'll be honest I have a, like most people, a kind of [love/hate] relationship with technology. It's a love and hate thing. I mean, it's a Freudian kind of classic case study here of something [] also something that I push against and I think what's interesting about the way in which culturally we think of technology and disability, I think there are a couple of kind of common ways or common stories that are told. I think one of them is that technology permits disabled people, people with fiscal impairments, for example, an opportunity to become as functioning as nondisabled people in the world. And I think that's a story that we need to kind of challenge and to be maybe cynical about sometimes, because I think that leads to a second kind of area for me, which is around-- and it's a question really, is how do those engaged in technology understand disability? And I think what happens is that if we hold an idea of disability as something that has to be cured or rehabilitated through technology, which let's be honest, this is a kind of common trope that we have within our society. Then there's some real problems going on there about the ways in which disability is understood and I think like most areas of life and technology is just one of them, disability rarely gets offered up as an opportunity to think more broadly about how we understand the human condition and it frustrates me often that disability is often excluded when people are exploring what it means to be human.

Dan Goodley (15:34): It's almost like the last chance saloon, disability might eventually get thrown in there. And just as there's been some really important and crucial work, for example, around race or around sexuality or around gender, which is all work that we need to kind of come behind, I want to ask why is disability always left out or seems to me anyway, often left out of those conversations. So we go back to the point of technology. How often do we ask or consider the fact that many disabled people are digitally excluded for a variety of reasons. We know this because many disabled people live in poverty [ ] the. technological offer, what is the offer for? Is the offer still associated yet again with the notion of a rehabilitative offer of technology? Because if that's all that technology's being offered the grounds on which technology is being offered, then you can see straight away that there are some pretty dangerous and dodgy ideas associated with disability that are just kind of being implicitly brought into the practice.

Ben Yeoh (16:42): Yeah, I agree. It's interesting talking to a lot of my friends and allies when I mentioned that, oh, the statistics, at least in the UK are, you're talking about at least one in five somewhere on a disability spectrum or some sort potentially higher. And certainly in the world, you're talking, at least a billion people again, probably higher. So when you're thinking about all of these allied groups it tends to be one of the largest and yet is probably like you say, not so involved in the conversation. And then the conversation is led by not necessarily-- obviously the whole range of advocates that you could have, which I find is quite telling as well. And I do think thinking about your comment of technology, and then also we had it in design, I've been thinking a lot about, and I guess it's been around a while, but this sort of social model idea of disability, where if you just sent it around, I guess this is just ideas of inclusiveness across everything that you'd like to be inclusive.

Ben Yeoh (17:50): You get a world where essentially everyone, or at least a vast, vast majority lives peaceably and well which just seems extraordinary. And I was actually talking to a philosopher the other day, Jonathan Wolf, who was mentioning how that it impacted his philosophy. And we've had people like Tom Shakespeare talk about this as well and he was saying he was a little bit doubtful about utopias generally, but at least taking this model just a little bit further along from where it is today, you kind of see that actually you have enormous net benefit to so many kinds of peoples that it's almost extraordinary that we haven't explored it more. I was thinking, what do you think about where we are with the kind of social models of this idea and how it might impact our world and what we could be doing about it?

Dan Goodley (18:47): Well, I mean, I'm very happy with the idea of utopias. I think it's probably better to get out bed in the morning with a utopian view of the day than a dystopian one and personally, the social model disability for me was a radicalizing experience because at that time as a psychology undergraduate being subjected to some very pathological views of not just disabled people, but of human beings more broadly, the social model came along and it did something very affirmative because what it did is it said you cannot understand the human condition of which disability is part outside of the social world. And any sociologists listening would think, well, that's pretty obvious, isn't it? I mean, we are what we are because of the social world. Something curious happens with disability when it enters the world people tend to understand straight away the word disability in terms of either some kind of individual tragedy, deficit or flaw, one kind of something wrong with a human being. And as soon as you start doing that, you then draw upon ideas that are set up to understand that kind of deficient individual outside of society. Some of those ideas come from psychology, for example.

Dan Goodley (20:19): And so the social model remains for me one of the most important interventions in the field of disability, but also has many connection of course with other transformative ways of thinking, whether it be associated with black lives matter or whether it be associated with current trans politics, which is essentially asking us to pause and to act upon the fact that certain human bodies and minds are not given the same value as other human bodies and minds. So the social model is if you like a kind of an entry point into a whole host, a smorgasbord of different kinds of theoretical and political ideas. There's been a lot of energy spent over the last 20 years critiquing the social model, looking at the social models flaws saying, well, have we gone too far? Have we flipped over? It's a little bit like the labor party. And it seems to me that the social model, particularly in these post COVID times, has never been more relevant than today. So the social model for me remains like I say, this kind of entry point and with any entry point, you can go through a variety of different roads and routes. And it seems to me that these opportunities are not only for understanding and pushing the social character disability, but also seeing how the social character disability connects with other aspects of the human condition, each of which of course are also deeply social.

Ben Yeoh (22:12): Yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me and I reflect this also touches on your technology point that we are, well, I'll give you a couple of examples. In Iceland today, I was speaking to this with Sally Phillips there are few to actually no people with down syndrome being born now because of the way that they do their testing and I was speaking to some people who are very deeply involved within deaf culture and because of medical therapies for hearing, there's a big debate as to the impact on what's a really rich and beautiful culture in itself as well. And I think stronger thinking about the social model, imperfect as it might be itself, as all models of the world are not the world, right? But as an entry point could be really helpful for thinking about that. But I was wondering, did you have any reflections on this, on how actually marginalized communities are becoming potentially more marginalized communities and a social model is perhaps a way back in?

Dan Goodley (23:29): Yeah, I suppose the first thing I'd say is that the way in which the social model language or the social model discourse has kind of entered the popular discourse is inevitably at least to some simplifications. And so there's a very simple distinction made between the medical and the social models of disability. What happens without that kind of very simple distinction is that those people associated with the medical model often feel very hard done to they often feel that they're being victimized. Now for me, I think what the social model does is because it's social by nature, it views all practices as also having this kind of social, cultural, economic, political aspects to them. So when you talk about those examples of testing for down syndrome or medical interventions around in relation to deaf people or the deaf community. I'm now starting to think about different words and different ways of understanding that perhaps are not as simple, but might actually be a bit more useful in understanding what's going on there. And I think what you're describing there is medicalization and medicalization is very different to medicine.

Dan Goodley (25:06): You and I are not  going to you know, we get a headache, we're probably  going to think and at some point embrace some of the ideas that come through medicine. We'll take a tablet for headache, but when we enter something called medicalization, this is where it's become a totalization in discourse. And I think that we are to draw upon some kind of ideas from disability studies, but also from science and technology studies. We are living in a particular period of time which is framed by medicalization. That is where the human condition is increasingly being understood through the discourses that we might call broadly medical and anything that's medicalized means that we end up simplifying and going down a particular route and also throw in a couple of other ones, which I think are kind of bedfellows, if you like. Psychologization, this is where any understanding around the human condition, whether it be emotion or whether it be the way we think, cognition, that there's some powerful ideas out there that come from psychology and fellow disciplines that end up endangering the way in which we understand ourselves.

Dan Goodley (26:33): So it's impossible to think outside of this kind of very powerful discourse of psychologization. I'll throw in a third, which is psychiatrization, which is very difficult to say, but again, you see, these processes are drawn upon very powerful ideas through which people now tend to understand themselves. And of course, if you think about the current debates around the mental health crisis within young people, for example, one of the things we need to consider is the extent to which mental life, or whatever we want to call it, is increasingly understood through very, very powerful processes of psychologization and psychiatrization to the extent to which it seems for all of us actually, almost impossible to talk of our emotional lives without drawing upon some preexisting, very powerful ideas from medicalization psychologization. So this is what the social model is doing, again, it's an entry point into thinking critically about the very words and the very ideas that we use to understand our everyday lives, living with a human condition.

Ben Yeoh (27:53): That's super interesting. I thought about medicalization, but I hadn't thought about it and the way you articulate it, I do think, yes, you could think of those examples that I gave and described as a sort of medicalization thing happening and if the social model gives you that, that's very interesting. And I do that because actually I'm thinking a lot about death at the moment as well as an idea and I think that is something which is obviously as well being very medicalized. And it's interesting, this idea, and also science is a process mostly and so scientific ideas around the brain or psychology or psychiatry are models and processes. And for instance, if you talk about psychiatrization, most of those drugs, which work on the brain we don't really understand how they work very well, if at all for a bunch of them. So, it's quite interesting. So you've got this kind of empirical sort of medicalization of a thing but yeah, there are social ways about thinking about those ideas as well, and maybe they do go hand in hand and intertwined and it would be more useful to try and think of them sort of together, not necessarily oppositional, but certainly not one without the other, which is your point about thinking about rooting yourself in the fact that the human world is nothing without the social world.

Ben Yeoh (29:31): That also brings me onto another thought, which is through your book on interdependence and some of that. We talked about it a little bit on potential interdependence on technology and these other ideas and I was thinking-- I was discussing the other day with someone actually it was with this philosopher on the philosophy of music therapy or music performance and I was noting that I found this was an incredible thing in philosophy because someone is enabling somebody else to produce music. And the end musicality only exists in the relationship with all of that and it doesn't exist without what we would call this interdependence, but to me, it was kind of beyond an interdependence because the relationship, the connections were the thing, the actual end piece of music, beautiful as it is, does, does not exist without all of those connections. And then reflecting on your book, I was thinking that actually that extends to I mean, potentially all of human life, right, but with all of this, this fact that we are nothing that's probably too extreme, but we are not the same without our connections and interdependence and understanding us without that seems to me a misreading of the human condition, which again, I hadn't really thought about that through say an ability disability lens or this performances lens. But I was thinking about extending that and I thought, wow, this is kind of a really-- potentially you could apply as quite a deep insight and therefore critical to maybe some other ways of thinking or opens up some things. Have your thinking of about-- maybe you could describe how you thought about interdependence in your chapter and maybe how you are using it in your current research and thinking now.

Dan Goodley (31:31): Yeah, I mean, interdependence is a big idea that's come not only through disability research, but very much through feminist research through critical race ideas around community. So it's a concept that's been utilized. And of course you could argue that at the heart of many political or cultural groupings is what we're talking about here is a kind of notion of community. I think interdependency takes on a particular significance in relation to disability. Firstly, I think disability is the kind of quintessential interdependence category because we think historically disabled people's relationships with PAs, with the various technologies over the years display already what we might call a distributed self. This idea that we are what we are through our connections with other people and with other things and it frustrates me when I hear conversations about interdependence and disability is not the first to be mentioned because it seems to me that disability, like I say, is like a quintessential position. I think we also need to recognize that we live in times whereby interdependency is often relegated and we this goes back to the discussion we were having earlier about the dominance of ableism and the ways in which ideas of ableism rely upon processes like psychologization and medicalization.

Dan Goodley (33:19): What they're all doing is essentially saying individuals, when they work well, function or are competent or autonomous have value in the world and when they don't then they fail. Whereas interdependence, what that's doing is, is kind of turning that on its head and saying, no, we are what we are through our distributions, our connection…. quite clearly that music is a collective process there. To what extent do we value and celebrate our distributed selves? And let's be frank here, we go from one context to another throughout our life course where it's all about individual achievement. We think about schools and how schools are set up in particular ways to must I fill kid's heads with ideas that will permit them to pass their exams. It's all about individual achievement there. We look at kind of what our workplace is. I'm thinking about my own, which is university workplaces, which are all about individual achievements, about being agile, responsive. We hear this language all the time in these turbulent times and what's worrying it seems to me is that we still live in a very, very individualistic culture.

Dan Goodley (35:10): So for me, the idea of interdependency is an antidote to that and to push it even further, if you really want to understand what interdependence is about, well, go to disability because disabled people's communities and disability theory that's been generated over many years now is always kind of alerting us to the fact that when the human condition is word world, it's doing so embedded within a community embedded within a variety of kind of crucial interrelationships. Let us not forget here that disabled people themselves are always embedded in those communities and quite frankly, some of these communities would not exist without disabled people. I was once at a seminar where someone asked the question, how much are autistic people costing the economy? Well, in other ways, thinking about that would be, well, how much money are autistic people generating for the economy through the industries that exist, through therapy, through psychology, through all these specialisms. Again, there's this idea I think that's based upon the notion that disability is somehow kind of sucking resources out of society when actually disabled people's place within it and we think more broadly about our place within our communities is more kind of relational. So I think, yeah, interdependence is a potentially affirmative understanding of essentially our very relational nature as human beings.

Ben Yeoh (37:11): That's super interesting. I hadn't appreciated until I heard your articulation about how you can really see disability as your go to root idea for thinking about in interdependence and like you say, this is partly because there's so many other things going on that oftentimes that maybe most of the time disability is not the first idea or ideas around that which come through. And now that you've put it like that, it obviously should be the first way of thinking about this because it's where it is and it's rooted. So I find that really usefully--

Dan Goodley (37:55): I mean--

Ben Yeoh (37:56): -- challenging.

Dan Goodley (37:56): Sorry, is it okay to come on--

Ben Yeoh (37:57): Yeah.

Dan Goodley (37:57): -- Come on that point. I mean, yeah, I suppose I would just kind of maybe disqualify what I've just said in some ways around disability. I mean, there's a frustration for me that disability is often not considered and I suppose if somebody works in the area of disability studies and disability research, I'd want obviously disability to be a kind of a conversation starter. But I think also, we have to be careful here that we don't replicate some of the kind of divisions that have happened in the past. So I wouldn't want to argue that disability appears without recognizing that we are all very intersectional and there'll be moments within particular spaces where class and race and sexuality, gender, they might actually be the, if you like, the starting conversations here. So I just want to be careful that I wasn't just pushing through this kind of idea that disability is the grand master narrative that everybody should be thinking …more that we need to think about how disability intersects with other kinds of identities as well.

Ben Yeoh (39:15): Yeah, no, well heard and there's a tendency sometimes by, how do I put it, to say majority groups to kind of divide and rule as they have done for the centuries, which obviously we would not want but I do think the point is well made in terms of the challenge that you've given to me that I didn't again, like there are these other and it's very intersectoral like you say disabled people are often poor and things like this. But particularly thinking about independence and relationships of that type of thought, I hadn't fully seen it through that disability lens, which I think would be useful on that. And also because so many things in our world do rely on that relationship across creative arts or even business and the things. So I'm kind of just thinking out loud on that.

Ben Yeoh (40:15): That maybe leads me to one, somewhat intersectional idea also in your book about desire. I was listening to Amia Srinivasan, who's a philosopher now at Oxford, probably most famous for her feminist philosophy, although she writes really beautifully about animals as well. But she's written a book which has a lot about desire and there was one thing I was picking up in both of your works, which is this idea about how much desire-- Well, I guess there's this interdependence part, but to what extent is learned and to what extent culture shapes that. And I was kind of surprised to see a chapter about desire in your book, which probably was a challenge to myself in its own way. Maybe you want to reflect about what you were thinking or saying about raising that question in your book about other human questions.

Dan Goodley (41:22): Yeah, well, it comes from a number of different spaces. I mean, one of them is associated with what we might call Crip theory, which is an idea generated from the disability studies community which deposits this idea that disability is something to be desired. And that is a really interesting idea on many levels. I mean, what it does, some people find that really challenging, because of course we're brought up to understand disabilities as being the very last thing that people would desire. But what Crip theory does is it suggests that disability is part of the human condition, is something that could be desired for what it can give and what it gives in the world. And I really love the idea of this kind of idea of disability being very productive in the world. This idea of desires being productive also links into a kind of philosopher that I really like and who talks about one of the real hang-ups that human beings have is that they're just caught up in this never ending cycle of desire, which is predicated upon designing the things that we feel we lack and we try and, you know, you get that theme. I kind of just speak personally, but it's like in those moments upon online shopping, where there's a real feeling of, you know, the desiring that very object that I'm buying. As soon as it's bought, I'm probably as miserable as I was before and this idea of desire as lack, this model of desire is a dominant model within our societies and we spend our lives …  as just replicating over and over again, this notion of them getting hold of the thing, the object, that we feel we lack.

Dan Goodley (43:38): So going back to the Crip theory model, what that's trying to say is, well, how might we remodel or reshape it, an understanding of desire? And one of those kind of remodeling might be to think about how we desire connections with others that in that desire, this kind of more productive model desire, we are driven not by filling this kind of empty hole, if you like, within us, but we are driven by the connection with one another to be yours, like desiring machines coming together, coupled together to create something more beautiful in the world. And so it seems to me that what disability research and disability theory is doing is not only is it challenging some of these old ideas of ableism and disablism, not only is it challenging the kind of dominance of medical models, it's also turning up in the world and offering us new ways about how we might feel about ourselves and others and I really love that, and that kind of taps into my more utopian moments in the morning when I'm trying to be more productive with myself and with the way that I see the world.

Dan Goodley (44:55): And indeed, I think you can see that there's truly beautiful moments of connection are precisely the kind of things that we not only should desire more, but actually often do desire more. It is only through connection with others that we start to realize different aspects or different, if you like, potentialities … causing the human condition. That said, I will be totally and brutally honest, I spend my life living off in that model of desire as lack and it's something I'm trying to work through accepting that it'll always be with me at the same time as trying to kind of develop new ways of desiring in the world for connection. And that again is where I think that disability ideas and the disability community have so much to offer.

Ben Yeoh (45:51): That's fascinating. Maybe that touches on then a couple of personal things and I guess it glances on the desire connection things. I was  going to ask you about Nottingham forest and what being a lifelong Nottingham forest fan has potentially taught you or you reflect on and now you talk about desire. So there's two things which come up there. One is obviously actually the interesting connections that I think football, particularly in this country can give people and community and those things. But then there is this flip side of obviously desire and want, which I see across all football fans, I'm kind of more moderate maybe because my dad was such a big football fan and a lot of my friends. But it seemed like an interesting segue on that is, are there any reflections on being a lifelong football fan there?

Dan Goodley (46:52): I mean, you could have used the term obviously long suffering, which would probably be better. I mean, I think being Nottingham forest fan captures perfectly the split subjectivity that I occupy, which is on one side deeply ableist, wanting success, achievement, glory and the reality, the other side, which is none of those things, but actually quite honestly the things when I think of this football club, it's all about community, it's all about admiration of my dad, it's about my identity, it's about a sense of belonging, even though I don't live there. And I think football is one example of the different kinds of communities that we all occupy whereby we find our moments of interconnection interdependence and quite frankly, new models of desire because if you're looking to feeling of failure, don't go to Nottingham for your football, frankly. I think that my relationship with a football team, they just capture that split personality that we all have. But I think it's more about actually these kind of different models of desire that kind of drives us and there's nothing quite like for me parking a car, walking with my dad [Inaudible:00:48:23], well, doing it for a long time now. And just that feeling of being around other clearly diluted people and that sense of togetherness and I think we all individually find it in different spaces. Don't we? Like [Inaudible:00:48:40] festival would be another one for me, a moment of real human connection.

Ben Yeoh (48:45): And it is that idea of connections that we desire which I think is one of the touch upon themes in this conversation. Perhaps two or three more questions to sort of finish off. One may be riffing on the sort of personal side. I think you say right near the start of the book that we often come to disability through a personal story of some sort and for me, it is through my son who I still believe has taught me more about what it is to be human and the human condition than I'd learnt in my previous decades and still does as he leads me into places in the world I definitely would had not have gone through myself. And you give a story, I think about your grandfather with some of that. So I'd be interested in your reflections on that if you'd like to share.

Dan Goodley (49:52): Yeah. I mean, I really loved your phrase there, leading you into places that you are not perhaps prepared for…I think that's a really lovely wording actually and it reminds me-- I've been very influenced by the work of people like Rod Macaco and Tanya [ ], who are disabled researchers, disabled writers who embrace their kind of philosophical viewpoint is kind of phenomenology or interpretivism and where they say, take your stories seriously to understand how you are being perhaps led into the world, or at least being in the world. And in writing the book, first, I wanted to write a book that was not aimed at academics. Secondly, my mother read every chapter of the book, which was really kind of her. My mom's not an academic, but she's a ferocious reader and I wanted her to check the readability of the book and I think hopefully she did a good job on that. I can't thank her enough for that. And in writing the book and kind of thinking about the ideas and the advice really, people like Rod Macaco, was to take our stories seriously. And my own really, disability was very much part of my growing up. My grandfather had had a stroke at a particular age and his voice was changing such that no one really could understand him apart from myself and my uncle who lived with him and I think, cause I was young when it happened, it was kind of quote unquote normal to me.

Dan Goodley (51:35): So I'd have this kind of pretty deep relationship with him cause I could understand what he was saying, but of course, as soon as he left the space of the house he was subjected to various kind of responses disabling responses to go back to what we were talking about earlier.  I always remember I tended to be in kind of shops or outside fish and chip shops. Maybe that says a lot about what I did with my grandparents and just having that feeling of kind of, you know, like anyone does at an early age, just of anger and a visceral response to other people's response to members of your family who behave in ways that are just part of the makeup of your family. And so it came from that and I think alongside those family stories is the other area which really peaked my interest around disability, was doing a psychology degree and I was lucky enough to do a psychology qualification where I was taught by lots of radical psychologists Marxist, psychologist feminist, who really pushed me to think about what psychology did in the world, but alongside them, I was taught by a lot of what I would call mainstream psychologists who really presented disabilities, some really, really dangerous ways, really negative pathological ways.

Dan Goodley (53:05): And in fact, ways that were very similar to some other kind of moments of interaction in my family, in shops and it's kind of trying to work out what was going on here and I think those personal stories and that experience of being trained if you like in a particular discipline led me fortunately to the social model of disability where disabled people themselves were organizing their knowledge, which is counter to that really kind of negative and often violent response actually to disability and I might understand that as ableism or as disablism. But I think what is interesting about it is that most people will have had some personal experience of disability, whether disabled people themselves, or whether within their families and like any kind of experience of discrimination, which is what I used to experience with my grandparents, sometimes you have to-- it takes you a while to kind of find the language to understand that and luckily, fortunately now there is this, if you like this throwing into the mainstream of these alternative ideas of disability produced by disabled people themselves that do two things. One, they subject with these kind of medicalizing and individualizing stories to critique, but then at the same time they offer up alternatives and I'm sure you've had this feeling with your own son. Not only do you need the critical take on it, but you do need the alternatives cause quite honestly if you just sit with the reality of discrimination, it can be overwhelming.

Dan Goodley (55:06): Fortunately, disability activists themselves have created knowledge, which are not just utopian, nothing wrong with that, but they're actually practical, an alternative way of understanding the world. And so, being led into places that you perhaps not had in mind initially let's just hope one of those places that we're led into it is a way of understanding disability and the human condition in more productive, interdependent, more affirmative ways.

Ben Yeoh (55:39): Yeah, I think so and you raised that point at the end about these alternatives and I think thankfully there are some, like you say, often produced by disability people or other thinkers. Very tangentially, I see this a little bit with climate activists or activists-- Well, there are some climate people who are despondent about the alternatives and therefore are not as energized as they could be. Whereas the ones I meet who are pushing on alternatives, and I think there are a variety that you could choose are energized to change the world or be that part of the world. So, this is one of the things that I try and talk about is that there are these alternatives and a variety of alternatives, but all of this intersectional stuff that we've talked about, and sometimes you are led there, sometimes you might have to go and try and find it, but you can and that will make, I suggest one be more fulfilled or at least feel that you can do something. And I think that's very interesting thinking about your own work, cause I picked up that you, how would I put it, co-produced research often with disability thinkers as well. So maybe as my second last question, I'd say then maybe tell me about your current research, what you are interested in and maybe some of the process that you are doing with sort of co-producing research and how that works.

Dan Goodley (57:24): Yeah. I think that co-production has become a really popular term across policy, across research, across various stages. I mean, hopefully our understanding of this and hopefully our practice is about starting with an assumption and the assumption is that disabled people are not passive objects of inquiry. It sounds again, when you say it you think, well, yeah and what's the obvious statement …  this morning, but you know, let's be frank, there are industries of research, there are disciplines across universities whereby disability is ubiquitous, but it's ubiquitous as a kind of passive object of inquiry. Co-Production, hopefully works from the position that disability is the driving subject of inquiry and that disabled people can occupy positions of being theorists, theoretical provocateurs, methodologists, researchers, analysts, co-writers, co-authors. So this is about it's been an argument from social model writers for many years, is what used to be called emancipatory disability research, is that research should be driven by disabled people in collaboration with researchers to identify matters in their lives are important, and to come up with particular changes that improve their lives. So, what I think is interesting again is  how often disability is not mentioned, how there's a whole history of disability researchers that are ignored that have been arguing for this kind of more emancipatory model for many, many years.

Dan Goodley (59:29): So, co-production knowledge is, again, sort of picking up on some of the things, again, we've been talking about today which is around interdependence, working together and hopefully challenging some of the hierarchies that exist between the so-called researcher or the researcher and the researched. And so we've finished a project with Lydiard and Catherine [ ] and Sally Whitney and other researchers who've explored together particular researching ideas whereby we try to create opportunities for working together, writing together and to be fair to research funders and to university settings co-production is becoming a lot more kind of promoted and definitely kind of more desired as in a model of research. One thing that we do need to take seriously, however, is that within the university settings, disabled researchers are conspicuous by their absence disabled researchers are not coming through university contests. When we work alongside non university researchers or disabled people's organizations, we must ensure that they are probably funded, not just remunerated funded and I would suggest it's kind of a bit of a current [theme] is the idea of experts by experience, which is a term used a lot at the moment.

Dan Goodley (01:01:08): Let's be very careful of that term, cause it seems to me the term experts by experience is being used by researchers and practitioners and policy makers to essentially bring in some people to offer their stories and their opinions and not to be properly recognized, nor properly paid for that kind of work. So hopefully we start a debate there around co-production challenging some of the kind of distinctions between the researcher and the researched, the academy and those outside of the academy and ensuring that we are working with interdependent models, collaboration that's not just value people for their expertise, but also ensure that they are funded properly.

Ben Yeoh (01:01:56): Okay. That makes a lot of sense. I'm very far away from academic circles. I'd never heard of this idea of experts by experience, but the way you describe it I worry a little bit if that's an excuse to get some people in and not pay them, but that I referenced right at the beginning of the conversation about always being slightly worried by words or jargon because it's used as a cover of like, oh, that would be useful, but let's not--

Dan Goodley (01:02:24): I think it is. I agree. I think it is. I think it's being used in many cases as a box ticket exercise and what really is offencing about the idea of the expert by experience is it ignores the fact that there are many disabled researchers out there that might are not working in universities, but for example, self-advocacy groups or parent organizations who know their stuff, who are carrying out research, have done research for many years and they're not experts by experience, they are researchers.

Ben Yeoh (01:03:06): Yeah. So this is this notion of, what would I call it, independent research. I mean, they're just researchers, they're just not within an academic institution. So we help run a group called transport sparks for autistic young people who are interested in transport and actually that group as a community group has actually a lot of quote unquote research to offer but we wouldn't view it as research, right? It's the way that we interact with world and also interact with institutions and organizations and this other systemic framework, which I think is really really interesting and how for instance museum spaces have only, I think relatively recently tried to really grapple with this and actually still do it fairly poorly, even though they're trying to reach out to some of these groups, which I think is really interesting and that is some of this I idea of who's got the power of research, ableism, disablism and these things. But some of it seems to me that actually people are just not listening carefully enough or they could just listen a bit more carefully and they probably would then hear some of these things, which people are saying for a while.

Ben Yeoh (01:04:25): So last question then would be do you have any advice really or advice for people? I guess this could come in two or three flavors. One would maybe be life advice or advice if you are interested in doing kind of research or things. But another thing might be just simply advice or thoughts if you wanted to explore this area or any reflections that you might have for instance, this might be advice or thoughts you've had from having followed your football team for so long that's probably taught you quite a few things as well, which you might want to share. So yeah, any final thoughts on advice for life or advice for people.

Dan Goodley (01:05:10): Oh dear. I'm not sure you want to take any advice from a Nottingham forest fan. I suppose it's a very simple point, but it's something that I think often gets ignored is when you are interested in a phenomenon in life but that phenomenon in life has historically been understood as a passive objective study, then we need to really question and challenge that. And it seems to me that if one thinks across a variety of transformative or political context, they've come about, they've been transformed when the objects have become the subjects, have been driving the kind of inquiry, driving the kind of questions and conversations that would be had. So for me, in terms of the place of disability, the starting point always has to be disabled people themselves and to recognize that doesn't matter what the industry of psychology, for example, might have to say about disability, there's a huge body of literature written by disabled people and their allies that has as much or more to say about the phenomenon than those so-called expert disciplines. So, yeah, move from the object and embrace the subject would be my advice.

Ben Yeoh (01:06:50): Move from the object to embrace the subject. That's a great final phrase to leave with us. So Dan Goodley thank you very much. Your book, Disability and Other Human Questions is available, please do go and read it. Thank you very much.

Dan Goodley (01:07:08): Thanks, Ben. Thank you very much.