Books That Changed My Life: E.A. Hanks & Cloud Atlas By David Mitchell

Lets welcome E.A. hanks to the show. And she's here today to talk about a book that changed her life. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

One day my dad came to pick us up from school because it was his weekend, and the teachers looked at him and said, colin and Elizabeth haven't been here for weeks. They were fighting because my mom thought my dad had sent the CIA to.

Kill her at five years old. Do you remember that tension.

Books.

They've saved us from the dark, set our souls on fire, and whispered truths we couldn't ignore. I'm Chris Collins, and this is books that changed my life.

All of the coping mechanisms that I had built that allowed me to survive how I grew up eventually started working against me.

Good question. How did Cloud Atlas change your life?

Oh, my goodness. Hello. You're my favorite person to appear out of nowhere.

So this is a gin martini with a twist.

This is a Nolitz gin martini with a twist because it's the only gin I partake of.

Choose.

Thank you for having me.

It's nice, right?

Yeah. How would you. How would you rate our execution on it?

10 out of 10.

Oh, she'll be excited, thrilled.

But, you know, that's a straight glass of booze and I've had, like, two protein bars, so we'll, we'll take our time.

Let's welcome E.A. hanks to the show. She's written for Vanity Fair, Huffington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, and more. Her debut book, the 10, is out right now, and she's here today to talk about a book that changed her life, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. She also hates spiders and she likes firm handshakes. So the moment of truth.

Yes.

How is my handshake so firm?

Delightfully sturdy, warm, accepting, slightly intimidating, but ultimately also 10 out of 10.

How could I make it less intimidating?

Be shorter and have less of a beard?

I'll work on that. I will. I will work on that. That's funny. How many books do you read, like a month?

Oof.

Or does it come and go?

Yeah. To peek behind the curtain for viewers, when you're a guest on the show, you got to fill out a lovely form that says what kind of drink you might like to enjoy. And there was a question that was like, how many books do you read a year? And my response was kind of rooted in the fact that as a writer, I think my real job is actually reading. Very early on, I was in high school, I was blessed to have a teacher who took my ambition seriously and said, if you really want to be A writer, you have to write all the time and you have to read more than you write. So you need to be reading constantly, and you need to read with a pencil in your hand just in case. And so that's really the muscle that I've grown. Reading is not just part of what I do. It's part of who I am. It's how I understand myself. It's how I understand the world around me is through reading. I'm also lucky that I'm a very fast reader, which I think if I was very slow, all of that would be much more of a burden to me. And part of also why I read is because I stink at math. So you're asking me to quantify. Here's what I will tell you. That roughly, I read a fiction book and a nonfiction book a week. So sometimes it's more than that, sometimes it's less than that. So I can tell you about two books a week.

And what is your process? Like, are you reading in a chair, in bed, everywhere?

How do you do? This is my favorite question I've been asked.

So in the morning I read while I caffeinate and I read fiction. And that's because that's my most open kind of accepted state. I'm soft in the morning. My critical thinking skills aren't quite awake yet. And I want to sort of fill my tank, as it were, for the.

Art making with creativity and abstraction.

Yeah, creativity and abstraction. And also, like, give up the reins. Like, let someone else be in charge for a little bit. It doesn't have to be in a genre in which I'm writing. It doesn't have to be like, if I like. Right now I'm working on children's novels, but I'm not reading a children's novel right now for fiction, I'm reading adult fiction, fiction for adults. And then I do the bulk of my work. So I'm at the desk creatively on a good day from around 9 till 2, thereabouts. And after that I usually will take a bath to kind of wash off the juju. And I read nonfiction in the bathroom for a really long time. And that's kind of how I wash off the days.

Like, will you cycle the water? Because if you're there a while, it gets cold.

Yes, yes.

How hot? Do you. Do you like it or do you like the change?

I like the. That's how I tell it's time for me to get out. Maybe I'll refresh the heat once. If I reheat the bath twice, I know, bubbles really enjoy every time.

Salt?

No. Unless I'm genuinely sore from working out or something like usually at night if we're not watching Drive to Survive or my newest obsession, Chinese soap operas, which are, I really can't recommend enough, then maybe I'll pick up the New Yorker or something like that. My job is to fill my brain with as much quality, you know.

Stuff as possible.

That's a great insight for writers and artists to understand that you're actively working on feeding the muscle in a couple different ways. One with the, with the abstraction and then the other with more reality based substance. Yeah, you know, I think a lot of people kind of get lost in that, that they don't understand that it's. You're practicing what you're going to do.

In a sense, a lot of my process is informed by the fact that I was unable to write for about 12 or 13 years. I had a significant creative block. I sold three as three novel series in my early 20s. At the time I worked at the Huffington Post and I was basically on a four hour news cycle. I was 20 something years old. I had the beginnings of a stomach ulcer. It was just physically and intellectually brutalizing experience to be be churning out copy at that level. And I had no process for creative work whatsoever. And suddenly I get given everything I've ever wanted. You know, I've known I would be a writer since I was 8 years old. And here it is, I've been given this opportunity and I choke so hard. And so fundamentally it completely, it broke my personality down to crumbs in the way that it completely altered my sense of self. I had no idea who I was if I wasn't writing. And I thought, well, I'm a huge failure because I've set up my whole life to do this and now I can't do it. And I have no other marketable skills and there's no such thing as a 30 year old with promise. So I'm done, I'm benched. I didn't even get to play in the game. I'm like one of those guys who is gonna storm the beach on D day and he doesn't even make it off the U boat. Literally dead on. ARR. And a huge part of how I built myself back up to being able to finish something, let alone publish something was the artist's way was my introduction into self help. And a big part of the artist's way sort of artistic recovery is morning pages, which is a practice where you free write three handwritten pages every morning, and something called an artist's date, which is that you take yourself to take in someone else's work at least once a week. Whether that's you go to a gallery or you go to a movie, or you buy stickers and decoupage an old picture frame. You do something creative, but it has to be on the regular and it has to be solitary. The idea that taking in other people's work does not corrode your talent, it buoys it, it inspires you, it gives you the fuel to do your job. And the biggest takeaway I had was the only way out of this is to read more, read things that I don't think I'm going to like, and to write bad. Write bad for as long as it takes to build the muscle. Again, the biggest thing I can say to anyone who's trying to write and can't, or who's trying to get out of a rut is you have to inspire yourself. It's integral. I don't know what your artistic process is. I don't know if you, you know, if you regularly go to see other people's work. I think the most dangerous thing that a young artist can tell themselves is that art is a solitary practice. You can't make it on your own, you can't be inspired by yourself and you can't physically achieve art.

Of any sort. I don't think on your own. And even if you're the community that you find with other art makers is just by reading other people that counts.

What do you think about the part of it that's like the spiritual part where, like Paul McCartney says, like it comes from a higher place or whatever? Do you. Or the muse, that sort of thing, do you believe in that or do you believe that it comes out of the hard work? Or is it a combo? Like, what is your thought on it?

I think it's both. I think it's like the God concept that you're open to, that's external, and the God concept that you're open to, that's internal. Something that I talk about in My book, the 10, is that I was raised by an evangelical born again Christian whose faith was so all consuming that as a teenager I would say something like, mom, why is the date 1099 important? Excuse me, 1066. What's a tax form? And what's the Battle of Hastings? This is lost on that front. The martinis already too strong. The answer I was looking for was the Battle of Hastings. But my mom's in. My mom's world. Her answer started with, well, if you don't have the light of Jesus in your heart, X, Y, Z, you'll be invaded by the Anglo Saxons.

And that meant that I had the former believer's rigidity about not believing. I was devout in my faith of not believing, as I was in believing when I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and savior. And what's so interesting about the artist's way is it starts with the word God. Understanding that that's going to turn off a lot of people. And what Julia Cameron writes is, if you can't be cool with the word God, just consider it an acronym for good, orderly Direction. And for me, I do. I am open to the a God concept that is not of me. I think when we're talking about where does the work come from? It's similar in a conversation about God in that the best we can hope for is a metaphor that resonates with us. So my metaphor is, yes, that it comes from some godly intuition. Whether that's a deity that has awareness of itself and of me. I'm not really interested in that, and I'm not really interested in dissecting what that is. But I do feel like it's external in that way. I do feel like I receive it from something or maybe that it just rises to the surface from within. But I'm. I'm not too bothered. It. It shows up. That's all I care about. What about for you?

I think part of that magical thing is believing that it's there and being open to it.

Yeah.

And then the second part is putting in the work. Like, when I get stuck, I go for a walk or you take a bath or whatever. But I don't quit. And I'm not waiting. Like, I will just work. And even, like you said, kind of if it's trash, like, I'm just gonna keep going. And then, you know, a lot of it, too, is like, the first draft is always not that great, but it feels really, you've started when it's done. Because when you have a first draft now, you can move stuff around, you can fix it, but until you have it, you're just playing around. And so I think that a lot of people think that it's luck and it's fate and it's, you know, hooking into this higher thing. I think that higher thing is being open, but really the work is what makes it good. Like, you have to give a piece of yourself. And I think at some point, if you're going to do really good work. It's selfless. It isn't about you. You can't be doing it for the worship of it. You got to be doing it because you really want to. To tell a story or convey a thing.

You hit on something which is like, there is such a thing of sweat equity in your own process. Right. Like, yes, be open to a God concept touching you in the mysteries of a creation. But you gotta be at the desk, right? You gotta show up, you gotta have the tools necessary. My beloved school supplies. You know, you have to be present to receive direction. Right. And then you have to do it.

And you have to know yourself. Like, you have to know your shortcomings. Like, yeah, I know that sometimes I need to get up and go for a walk and then come back. Like, you got to be open to the fact that you're unique. And.

Yeah.

You know, I'm not. I'm not Bukowski.

Otherwise, the martini, whenever.

Yeah. But if I drink a bottle of wine while I'm riding, it's usually not as good as if. Yeah, I'm not drinking, you know.

Well, I think one of the reasons why artists, and maybe writers in particular, love talking about process is there's no judging process. You. You judge the product of your process, and that's when you can make adjustments. But there's no. Like.

That's a great way to say it, I think. I think it's about the outcome.

It's about the outcome. And no straight line. Yeah. Jerry Seinfeld has this line of like, it doesn't matter how you get to the island. It just, you have to get there. If you're swimming or you're scuba diving or you're dive bombing from the sky, it doesn't matter. It's just, how do you get there and can you deliver when the red light goes on, you know, as it were, you know, I'll see on YouTube people who, like, I tried Virginia Woolf's writing schedule for a week, or I tried, you know, Murakami's writing schedule for a week. And I think that's interesting. I certainly think that's savvy content making. But if I were to talk to that creator, writer to writer, I was like, this is, I would say this is not good for you.

Like, you know, if you're disrespectful to yourself.

Yeah.

Like, you should maybe be more in tune with, like, you said, the outcome and how you get to that outcome, because you're not.

Yeah, I think there's, like, there's space for kind of trying things on. But you have to drop it as soon as you real realize it doesn't work for you. Like the instantly you have to drop it. And then you have to get curious about what your indigenous process is, what comes from you. And you can take some things from the outside, but I think, you know, you really have to be curious about what works for you. And sometimes what works for me is like, I think I need to watch Amadeus right now. Like I think, and try not to be so puritan as to think. Like, no, I have to write this many paragraphs today or I need to finish the scene. Thinking led me to block. I have to finish this and it has to be perfect. No, maybe you need to go for a walk and listen to an audiobook of Animal Farm. Or maybe you need to go for a walk and think about that Edward Hopper painting. Or maybe you need to go and think about that postcard you got that was by Gregory Crewtson. And it felt like a short story. Like, you know, you just, you have to. You have to give yourself permission to not produce. Because we're not in a factory, we're not making art on a line. You know, you have to respect your own timing and you have to respect your own process.

How does space work into your process? Like giving yourself space?

Physical space?

No, mental space.

I mean, physical space is fascinating too. But I just mean, like, to be.

Honest, you're hitting on an open wound there because I feel like, aren't we all kind of currently navigating how much of the outside world we're engaging with dependent on how much it throws off our day? Like if I get up and I don't go straight to reading, I go to the newspaper. Because we get a real newspaper in my house. If I sit down and instead of reading a book, I'm reading the news, I'm not getting to the desk that day. Now I'm completely invested in another different struggle. So there is a degree to which from the hours of seven to two, my mental space, and this is something I'm working on. My mental space needs to be syncrasy. It needs to be the holy of holies where nothing and almost no one is getting access to me. And I think that is something I'm getting better at as I get older.

But saying no.

But saying. By saying no. Yeah, yeah.

Which is, you know, you gotta protect that space. Like it is the most valuable real estate.

Yes.

And that is one little thing can take you off one phone call. Oh, all, you know, like you said, reading the Paper emails?

Yes. I mean.

The outside world will always have something to distract you and not necessarily with bad things, you know. Hey, I have an extra ticket to the Dodger game. You know, I wanted to check out this restaurant today, and I finally got a reservation. Do you want to come for lunch? Or, you know, whatever it is. I am fine tuning that muscle of saying, no, I'm not available.

Do you struggle with that?

Yeah.

Are you a pleaser?

I'm not so much as a pleaser as I am a social animal.

That fomo, you don't want to miss out.

No. I just love the people I love and I want to see them as much as I can because we're all going to die one day.

True.

Let's drink that on that. No, seriously?

Yeah.

So did you grow up here?

I was born here, and I lived here till I was around 5. And then my parents split and I ended up living in Sacramento in Northern California. And so I basically grew up with just my mom and my older brother.

Why Sacramento?

That's where she had family time at the time her mother was living there. And so one day my dad came to pick us up from school. Cause it was his weekend, you know, or his week. And the teachers looked at him and said, colin and Elizabeth haven't been here for weeks. We thought they were home with you or sick or something like that. And so what had happened is my mom had just absconded with us to Northern California. Oh. And that's how we ended up there.

Was the divorce not friendly?

No.

Extremely acrimonious at 5 years old. Do you remember that tension?

No. No, I don't. But it. You know, it's funny. So, like, yesterday was my. My first day with no longer having anonymity. Like yesterday, a People magazine story came out about my family and this mystery at the heart of my book. And. And I was on ktla, and it turns out a lot of people watch daytime and suddenly it felt like I could hear all these conversations of like, tom Hanks has a daughter. Like, how did. How do I. How do I not know that? It's like, well, you don't know that because I grew up in Sacramento and I wanted to work for the magazines rather than be in them. One of the pictures that People magazine ran with my permission because I gave it to them, is the only picture that exists where it's my dad, my older brother, my mother, me and my stepmother. And it's the only time in my life that I've ever stood with all three of my Parents and my older brother. It never happened before, it never happened after. And it was at my high school graduation and at the time in the photo you can see my mom's hair is a little crooked because she's dying of cancer and she's wearing her very best wig to come and put herself in this incredibly vulnerable space.

And to be present for me. And the state of my parents post divorce relationship is really informed by the fact that my dad is going on to become one of the most famous people on the planet as my mother descends into a mental health state that is unable to keep reality in its own lane. And so it was acrimonious not because they were fighting over custody or because my mom wanted more, you know, child support. They were fighting because my mom thought my dad had sent the CIA to kill her.

Which makes things tense.

Wow.

Yeah.

At a young age. What does that do to you as far as your like view of authority and parents and because like I grew up in a very Christian Pentecostal thing, but my stepdad ran away with a 21 year old girl from the church he was a pastor of. And like I always had this view of like what the adults say is what you should do and what actually is going on are the world apart and the adults seem like they have like they have the asylum. But I felt like I had common sense. Like you didn't have to look that hard to tell that the religion thing, the way that it was packaged and delivered was not construct and kind of to the point you made earlier is there's an externalization of control. Right. They externalize it to fade in God and God's will. And I'm always like, well you could get a job. Like.

You know, like yeah. How much of this is, is this like we'll try to be good and then we'll be blessed if we're good, but if we're not blessed, it's because we were bad.

We're putting paradise on layaway. Yeah, yeah.

So how young were you when you were like woohoo. This, this doesn't add up. You said you're not good at math, but how young were you when you did that math?

So there's two kind of like threads to my childhood experience of my mother which was that she was a hard using addict who was clearly self medicating for mental illness, which she never saw a professional. So I don't have a clear diagnosis on her, but let's just say she heard the voice of God and acted on it and she was incredibly Paranoid. And she had high highs and low lows. So however people want to kind of constitute that from their armchair, I support their understanding of it. But the great miracle of my mother's life is that she got clean and sober through a 12 step program. And to my knowledge never relapsed, which is a very normal and healthy part of living in recovery, relapsing and coming back to the program, which is wonderful. The downside to that is that she took me as a child to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, Cocaine Anonymous meetings, Narcotics Anonymous meetings, Love and Sex Anonymous meetings. And just instead of getting a babysitter, just had me set up the whiteboard and the styrofoam cups and the cigarette, you know, the ashtrays and everything and the folding chairs. And I would sit there and as a seven year old, as an eight year old, as a nine year old, as a ten year old, listening to people describe their rock bottoms, their use of, you know, I thought I was doing great, but whoops, I paid that twink to inject heroin into my eyeballs again. That's our second heroin reference of the day. I'm just, let's just clock it, let's just make note of it, as my therapist would say. So.

Even as a child, I had a very rich vocabulary for understanding my mother as an addict. Because I was reading the good book, I was reading the big blue book as an 11 year old. So I had a very clear understanding of the process that she was going through to get clean and sober. And you know, she would bring her sponsees to our home and have them sleep in our house.

Cause that's a big part of it, right? Is you give back and you sponsor, you send the ladder back down.

Yeah, exactly. And so I had a vocabulary for her as an addict, but I had no vocabulary for her as someone who could not keep reality straight. I thought everyone hosted 12 step meetings in their house. I thought everyone either had 12 course meals or.

Taco Bell seven to eight times a week because there's no food in the house. I thought everybody's mom slept with a shotgun on the bed next to them. I thought everybody's mom, as they were tucking in their daughters would say, just so you know, there's men in your closet hiding and waiting until you fall asleep. Your father sent them to kill us. Good night. You know, like, I just thought that was everybody's experience of adolescence.

But what do you do when she says that? Do you go check the closet?

I knock on my brother's door and say, can I sleep in your bedroom tonight.

Was your brother kind of your rock?

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's the only reason I'm here.

And what was his take on all of it?

I'd rather not get into all of that because that's his story for him to tell. But I can say that, like, I was my mom's greatest defender. I would lie through my teeth to anyone who said, what's going on at home? I have three meals a day. I go to the dentist every six months. I have clean clothes and I'm being taken care of. And meanwhile, I'm showing up at school wearing the same outfit the ninth day in a row. And it's very obvious. No one's brushed my hair, no one's packed me lunch, but I will. You know, I'm like Gavroche on the pile of garbage, waving a flag, saying, like, everything's fine, everything's great. No one bother. My mother, the devotion that I felt for her and the protectiveness I had for her was rooted in my understanding that she made people uncomfortable, that she talked out loud to God, that she was always kind of in a state of undress, that she smelled like cigarette smoke and I smelled like cigarette smoke. And this idea that, like, she and I were kind of like a less glamorous Big and little Edie Beal of Gray Gardens, you know, we didn't have cats and raccoons. We did have a lot of pate, but, you know, we didn't have. The roof wasn't actually falling down, but it was just our house felt like it was this enclave away from the world. And my job was to keep the world at bay so that my mom could.

Maybe get dressed that day and have the courage to go to the bank and the grocery store. My concept of adults and authority was that they were the ones to be that I needed to take care of.

Yeah. So you grew up quick.

Yeah.

You were an old soul. Early kind of.

Yeah, an old soul. And also, like, I think anybody who grows up with the shadow of violence kind of present every day is very good at reading people. Moods, tones, vibes.

You become very an empath in a way.

Yeah. It means that you're objective, not subjective. You are always watching. You don't get to be in a family. You watch how other families work. I don't get to be in relationship with my mom. I'm just watching her because I'm trying to find out if it's going to be a rough night. And it means that I'm hyperverbal. I can talk My way out of a tense conversation. It means I'm funny because I need to lighten attention. It means that I pick up social cues that are nonverbal. It just means that I'm like wildly attentive to other people's anger.

When I was in high school, yeah, I was voted funniest. And when they told me, I was like shocked because I was like, no. Like I realized very quickly, like, no, that's my survival.

Yeah.

I'm not, I'm not a comedian, right. Like, I'm not a stand up. I'm just trying to navigate this chaos.

Yeah.

I had no aspirations of being funny, but other people perceived me.

No, what you aspire to was survival.

Yeah.

Well, I think a huge part. You know, I mentioned earlier this kind of cataclysmic artistic block that I had. It was because there was a whole part of myself that was walled off because I didn't have the time or space to go to that place. Everything had to be about keeping my mom safe and unangry. And you mentioned a ladder earlier. I had no ladder for myself there. I had all of these feelings that there was never any safe space to navigate them because I was constantly navigating someone else. And all of the coping mechanisms that I had built that allowed me to survive how I grew up eventually started working against me. Right. Being on the outside of relationships helps when you're navigating an alcoholic, mentally ill mother, but it does not help you date for the first time. It doesn't let you be present in intimacy, in any in platonic or romantic dynamics. It doesn't let you connect with people. So by the time I had survived long enough to be in my mid to late 20s, I'm sitting there going, well, everyone thinks I'm funny and nice, but I don't feel close to anybody. And realizing that all of these kind of like bespoke systems that we build to help ourselves survive our childhood and end up actively working against us as full grown adults. And so it's like, you know, it's a very scary process to go, well, all of these things I needed to survive and now I'm going to put them back on the shelf. And you have to constantly tell yourself, you know, I don't need this anymore. I don't need to make a joke every time I'm uncomfortable. I don't need to lead the conversation because someone's going to get hit if there's silence. It's really about deprogramming yourself to a degree. And I think the Most radical thing you can do in that deprogramming is to make vulnerable art.

The thing that I kind of. And this is just my experience is through all of that, I hated small talk. Like, I crave deep connection.

Yeah. And I, I see you.

You can't. Like, everybody's, like, very behaved in the moment.

Yeah.

But it doesn't seem real if you say, like, hey, how are you doing? And then you're looking over there like.

Do you think your, your desire for that deep connection comes from seeing adults as hypocrites and liars? You want the. You want.

I think it's a combination of that and then being an empath and, you know, the, the thing. And I'm curious what your experience is with this, but one of the things when you're growing up and you. And you feel things deeply is you don't know how to develop boundaries. And so you end up overextending yourself over and over again. I mean, I don't know if taking advantage is what it is, but you don't. It's not an equal exchange. You're always on the.

Yes.

You know, losing end of a deal.

Yeah.

And you set yourself up for that. Like, you, you go and you'll do it over and over again. Like. Or I did.

Yeah.

And so I think the boundaries is a part of that Rubik's Cube too.

Yeah.

Did you experience that?

Can you pose that question in another way?

Well, like, just like, say with relationships or whatever, like, you would date or. I would date people that weren't the right people for me. But I. I wanted belonging so much. I didn't have enough self esteem.

Yes.

To say, oh, this doesn't work. Like, this doesn't work on paper.

Yeah.

Why? They're showing me that they're not interested. And I keep trying really hard.

So I was basically single my entire life up until I was 39, and I was only able to fall in love once I finished this book, which is basically me saying to my mom, I love you to the moon and stars and back. But I'm also not ashamed of how I grew up anymore. And I don't need to protect you anymore, and you don't need to be protected anymore. So I'm gonna tell the story of what our life was like together. And I think letting her go 20 years after she died and all of the therapeutic work that went into me being able to write again and to write this book and to finish it and to put it out into the world was like this great kind of.

Shaking off of dust in a big, beautifully empty room where suddenly there was space. And, like, the doors were opened and the sheets were p all the beautiful old furniture, and suddenly there's fresh air. And it was like I had finally left the crumbling mansion of my childhood and could invite someone into my space. Not my mother's house, but my house. And I had had romantic relationships, but they were all passing and inconsequential. Not the people. People are never inconsequential, but the connections were inconsequential. And the moment I said, I love you, mom, but I'm letting go. I met a person of incredible worth and honor and dignity. And it was so clear from our first interactions that this was.

What I had been hoping for the whole time. The romantic connection is, I think, easiest for most people to understand because we all have a concept of the romance that we would like in our lives. But at the same time, I was saying to my oldest friends and my newer friends, like, we need a new blueprint because you have known me since before I finished this, but I've done this now, and I'm not the same, so this can't be the same. And it was much harder with older friends than it was meeting my partner, because my partner only knows me post this book right or in the middle of it, kind of like wrapping it up. Whereas my oldest friends have known me since before I started therapy, since before I finally buried my mother, since before I was able to heal from artistic block, and since before I was able to finish the book. So they know an EA that that is still playing out the patterns of codependency that they.

Didn'T benefit from, but were.

Deeply familiar with in the way that I could show up for them and not ask anything in return because that was so similar to my mother. And it wasn't about pleasing them, it wasn't about being a people pleaser, but it was about being a people protector, which is very different things. And I think that the combination of sort of saying to the people that have known me for a long time, I love our relationship and I want to keep it, but I need you to relate to me in a different way because I'm not the same person anymore because I got better and there's been resolution, and that's going to be evident in how we treat each other now. And I'm really grateful to say that all of my friends knew exactly what I was talking about and were able to kind of change with me, almost rooting for it. Yeah, that's great. And that's.

They wanted you to be the best version.

Yeah. And that's love, right?

Yeah. It's beautiful.

Yeah.

That's great.

I picked some good ones.

I was gonna ask you if everybody survived the change, and that's. That's great.

I would say that, yeah, I think everyone's kind of has survived the change. I think what hasn't survived is my well intended but misinformed.

Romanticizing of pain. I don't think pain is romantic. I don't think mental illness is romantic. I don't think addiction is romantic. I don't think any of those things make you better at art or art making. And I have no patience for the cult that foments around dysfunction. Yeah, I don't think dysfunction is romance.

So many people think that that's their driver for their creativity or their addiction or whatever.

And I think that's.

That's why you got to put in the work.

You got to put in the work. And I think, like, you can't show up if you're, you know, hungover like a dog.

Well, your unconscious mind knows that you're not taking it serious. You're hiding from it.

That part. Yeah.

You're sabotaging the work.

I think if you think to be an artist you have to be in pain or dysfunctional or an addiction. You don't want to make art. You just want to look like an artist. You want the. And you want the aesthetic of a library that has no books.

Yep. Yeah, that's a. An insight that a lot of people need because they, like you said, it's a cult.

Yeah.

Like, and they build a country around it.

Yeah.

And they justify. And you can, like, you can justify it and you can find other people to validate it.

And by the way, like, that person might get lucky with a couple. You know, they can finish a couple things, but they're never going to finish the thing they really need to finish. They're never going to be able to convey the heart work. They'll be able to pass on vibes and aesthetics and, you know, all of that. But that's not the same thing as the work.

So what was that process like, writing that book? Like, how many times during that process did you find yourself, like, emotional, dude?

So the book took 10 years, which is ironic because it's called the 10. That's five years of kind of having the rough idea and trying to sell it, trying to find a home for it. And then once everything kind of finally came together and I had all the missing pieces, then Five years of writing it and I can't believe I'm sitting here with a finished book. Because the amount of times, not like everything from I don't know if I have the physical wherewithal to finish this book because my body hurts. From sitting in a chair, you know, 12 hours a day on a deadline, to I'm in an editorial, you know, scrum of like, what is the nature of this book? What is it really about? Is it about my famous dad? Is it about my crazy mom? Is it about what I have to say about America and the places Interstate 10 goes through? Like, it was a real rabble rouser, like a peck and paw melee for what is the. What is this book about? And there were so many times where I thought, I'm not gonna win and I don't wanna publish something that isn't ex. Exactly what I mean to say. On every possible level. There were moments of, I don't think this is going to happen spiritually, physically, economically, professionally. There were so many times where I thought, you know, maybe this isn't going to happen. And maybe I need to start the process of getting okay with letting this go.

Maybe that's the lesson I'm learning here, which is that you can put your bone marrow into something, it doesn't pan out. That's a brutal lesson. But if that's what's going on, I gotta get cool with that right now.

How many times did you hit that?

I would say, seriously, twice in 10, in. In 10 years.

What was the gap between when you hit it and when you went back.

Getting really vulnerable and asking other artists, what do I do?

Saying, I gave you the best advice.

There's a writer named Ann Patchett who's an incredible writer. She owns a bookstore in Nashville called Parnassus Books. And I got to a point where I was just like, I don't. The most frustrating part was like, I built this arena. I laid the sod, I determined where the goalposts are. And now I'm realizing I might not be able to get there. So what do I do? Do I give back the advance and say, so sorry, this here's another book deal I'm not fulfilling. Do I push through? Do I like, how do I navigate this? And Ann Patchett said, you know what this book is and you know that you are 100% capable of fulfilling the brief that you set up. So just do it. Don't think about it, just do it. Just write the book that you intend to write and have faith that it will be so Good. That it is its own argument. And that's exactly what happened. I just kind of said, what if I just don't pay attention to what everybody else wants this book to be? And I hold true to my own compass. And, you know, there's plenty of. If Tom Hanks fans want to pick up the book to discover something new about their. The person that they really care about, Tom Hanks, there's something in there. There's quite a bit in there for them, but that's not all that's in there. And I think that Ann gave me permission to have faith in myself. And sometimes you need that from someone a little bit higher up the food chain to say, like, I see you. You're doing it. Keep. Keep doing it.

Is that the most vulnerable you've ever been writing that?

Oh, yeah.

Were there points where you. You had to decide whether you were going to censor it or not?

There were certainly conversations around.

Are you sure you want to go there? And to me, there's nothing in the book. Oh. Oh, yeah. Perfectly timed. It's almost like you've done this before.

I have therapy on Tuesdays at 9. Do you want to. Are you available? Okay, great. Perfect. I wish this was what my therapy felt like.

There are things in the book I had people say, are you sure?

Yeah. But were you sure before they gave you that opinion?

I. It never occurred to me to not put it in.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah. Because don't be like, I'm a. Are you.

There's in. In the last book that I wrote, there's a. There's a little book in there.

Yeah.

That.

No, it'd make me cry.

Yeah. Here's what I will say. There's one thing in the book that makes me nervous because it's the one thing I'm still wrestling with everything else in the book.

I'm line up.

I've done the work. It no longer holds emotional weight for me. The one thing in the book that I struggled putting in and that I'm ashamed of is that I have what's called skin excoriation disorder, which is that in times that for other people are really relaxing, like being in the bath or falling asleep or watching television on the sofa with your loved one. To me, that feels like you're letting your guard down. You gotta wake up because mom can get angry and you gotta be ready for that. So times of relaxation are really anxiety provoking for me because I feel like I'm fallen asleep on the job. And so to stimulate my nervous system, I Hurt myself by picking at my skin. And what I tell myself is, you know, it's a zit. You need to get rid of it. It's, you know, a small infection. You should get it out. And that quickly becomes. I'm bleeding and gouging at myself in an action that is clearly self harm. It's.

Fantasy to think that there's any reason that I need to continually make myself bleed. That's not rooted in reality, and that's something I'm still struggling with. So that's the one thing in the book that I. That has that emotional weight. But it's also one of the things that, you know. The book isn't out yet. It's. It will be available for purchase April 8, but the few people who are starting to read it now, it's been fascinating how many people have said to me, I struggle with this too, and I can't believe you put this in there.

Are you ready for that? You ready for the amount of people that you're going to give a voice to that wouldn't say anything, but because you're saying it, they're gonna feel. They're gonna feel like they have a voice.

Yeah, I don't think you can prepare yourself for that. But I think I can carry that. I think I can carry that.

I mean, in a sense, you're helping a lot of people if. If you can carry it.

Yeah. I don't think that's why you do it. It's just the.

No, it's an outcome.

Yeah, it's the outcome.

You usually don't expect it, but a lot of people won't say anything. And then when you tell your story, like, oh, yeah, me too.

Yeah.

Which it's surprising how many people say, me too.

Yeah. I guess not everyone feels the need to put their deepest thoughts and greatest fears on the page for public consumption. Weirdos.

Yeah, Weird. Okay.

Yeah. Should we talk about a book?

Yeah.

Should we talk about that?

Let's talk about. This is quite a book. When did this come into your life? Where. What was going on?

So I had graduated. This book is published, I believe, in 2004, 2005. I read it in 2006, 2007, I've graduated college, which was to me, heaven on earth. Even though I go to college two weeks later, 9, 11 happens. A handful of months later, my mother dies after a short and brutal fight with cancer. So it's as bad as it can get. The Iraq and Afghan wars begin, and still college was a dream. I loved it every day. It was get up, go to a library, read, go to class, talk about great books with smart, funny people that for four years, like heaven, it's like this, but for four years, my idea of paradise. And then I'm spat out into the world. And where everyone thinks it's kind of sweet that I want to talk about books. And everyone thinks it's like, oh, that's so nice. You're someone who works at a magazine who actually reads. That's so charming. I realized that my romanticism was going to die a horrible death unless I protected it and kept that softness. And how to do that, except to be in deep community with other people who really, really love books and who really, really love talking about books. Not copy, not content, not a post, not a piece. Books, literature, the good stuff. Not necessarily the serious stuff, not necessarily the smart stuff, but the good stuff, right? And a dear friend of mine who had graduated a couple years before lived in Boston and worked at the Harvard bookstore. Not the school, not the, like, university's bookstore, but just. It's called the Harvard Bookstore. It's in Cambridge. And he always had the best book recommendations. And at the time I was working at Vanity Fair. It was a pretty brutal job. For example, I was hours late to meet my friends to see the Devil Wears Prada because I was doing Devil Wears Prada. Shit. Running around in a rainstorm trying to deliver a bottle of wine to Giorgio Armani's Major Duomo. Or, you know, running around with a, like. With a binder of morning television show producers so I can deliver them the secret copy that features Suri Cruise, who's never been seen before. And it's a great, huge coup for the magazine. And that's my life, which was a great adventure, a wonderful cavalcade of ridiculousness and human folly. That taught me a lot. But I was hungry for a big bite. I wanted to throw deep, as it were. And so I said to my friend Dave, who worked at the Harvard bookstore, do you have a book recommendation for something really meaty? I want a deep throw. I want to think about big things. And he was like, I have the book for you. It's Cloud Atlas. And I read it and could not believe the high wire trapeze act that David Mitchell pulls off in this book. I could not believe that someone was this.

Good.

It shocked me what the magic trick he's able to pull off in this book. For readers who don't know, the story is broken up into sections. And if we were to kind of give each section a letter, the book Basically goes section A, B, C, D, D, C, B, A. So the book goes forward in time and then backwards in time. And it's kind of a mirror image of itself. So some sections stop mid sentence and don't pick up until the back half of the book. It's very structured and it's very particular in how it's structured. The author has a very heavy hand. You can't really forget that you're reading a book because it's so, you know, you can't. There's no such thing as a cliffhanger in a chapter that immediately gets picked up. So you, you know, go through the whole thing. It's a very formal, stylized book that rewards the reader. I find really stylized books like this to be kind of tedious. And I find that the author is kind of showing off, like, look at this puzzle that I've built. Look at this MC Escher maze of a book that I've written. And then the meat, the guts of the book don't deliver on its high concept premise that this book, he does both. Yeah. And to me, that's a miracle. So when I read this book for the first time, it felt like I was starving and I was given this feast to ponder for the rest of my life.

How many times have you read it?

Counting the speed read I did this week for this conversation, I think I've read it.

Four to six times.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Do you get something different every time?

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

I'm gonna go to the end.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

So I'm gonna read this and then you tell me.

Sure.

Your thoughts?

Yeah.

So belief is both prize and battlefield within the mind and in the mind's mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes and colosseum of confrontation, exploitation and bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being. And history's Horaxes, borehaves, gooses shall prevail. You and I, the money, the privileged, the fortunate shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it is our conscious itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage and our legacy? Why fight the natural, oh, weaselly word order of things? Why? Because of this one fine day and purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the devil shall take the hindsum until the foremost is the hinds. Most in an individual selfishness uglifies the soul. For the human species, selfishness is extinction.

That's a lot.

Yeah, it's a deep throat.

That's the end.

Yeah.

Well, there's A little bit more.

But please finish it, because it that's grim and it ends on.

Who would do battle with the many headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain. And his family must pay it along with him. And only, only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

That's the good stuff.

What is any ocean but a multitude of drops? I think.

The reason I chose this book is that it gave me a workable vocabulary to describe what I consider evil, which is the continued dismissal of human dignity and joy to prop up the great fallacy that is the natural order. I think all evil on some level uses this fantasy of the natural order the way things should be. That is the great excuse for every crime that's committed on grand scale. And that it is so revolutionary to think that I might be one person trying to do good in the world. I'm just one drop. I'm just one person trying to do good. But what is any ocean but a multitude of drops? When I was in college, I knew I had some game. I knew I was smart. And I went in to meet with my advisor. I said, there's this Shakespeare class I really want to be in. And my major advisor is a lovely writer named Peter Antille said, you know, you're very smart, but you are not ready for that class. I promise you, you're not ready to read on that level. And it was the first time anyone had kind of rebuffed me in my intellectual game, maybe ever. And I was deeply insulted. But I listened to his advice and I didn't take the class until I was a senior. And he was right. I had never read on that level. And when I say on that level, I mean the professor of the class, a wonderful human being named Everett K. Whedon, who looked like an Egon Schille painting and every day wore crocheted vests that he made himself that each featured his two beloved cats. One was named Desdemona, and I think the other one was named like it was another Shakespeare name. Maybe what's the name of what's what's in the Tempest? Caliban's mother's name is Sycorax. I think his cat's name were Desdemona and Sycorax. And every, you know, vest that he crocheted featured his two Shakespearean cats. And he only ever called anyone by their last names. Ms. Hanks, what do you think of this Mr. Tracy. No, you know, he was very. And he was, you know, at a time when everyone talks about, you know, campus culture being made of snowflakes, this guy was like. He would look you dead in your face and say, no, you're wrong. You're an idiot. You should read it again. I mean, it was. He was kind of a badass in that way. It was the kind of reading where he would say, where does Shakespeare cut off the troche? If you're reading Shakespeare? Iambic pentameter in syntax. Where does he cut off the trochee? Where does he split the. The syllable? Where does he. And does that inform the story? Does that inform us to his authorial intention? And I remember once being kind of snotty and thinking it would be a really smart idea to say that the ending of the Scottish play is a bit overdone, little overwrought, little, you know, campy. Because here comes, you know, they're carrying Macbeth's severed head onto the stage. And I was like, you know, that's plain the cheap seats, isn't it? And Professor Weedon said, oh, Ms. Hanks, I invite you to reread the first paragraph. And in it he pointed out that Shakespeare splits the line of poetry between his and head. I believe it is. Someone in the comments will let me know that I got it horribly wrong. But basically, in the first opening monologue of the Scottish play.

Shakespeare divides Macbeth on the page from his own head. He tells you how it's going to end in the first sentence. And on the first page of this book, David Mitchell has a character say, the weak are meat and the strong do eat. And that is his basis for a definition of evil, which is it is the natural order that some people only exist as fodder for the powerful, and they will do everything to make sure that system goes on for eternity. Because how more natural can it be of a metaphor to say, well, I eat you, you're my food chain. And if you were to, you know, upend that, you upend the natural order. But if you look at any successful re. Terror, its inherent logic is we're only doing what's natural. It is natural for the white man to have power over the black because we're naturally better. It's in our science. Look at the shape of our skulls. It's not us, it's nature. It's God. And I think Cloud Atlas is the best.

Kind of depiction of that logic and how innate it is for the powerful to believe they have power because they're morally Superior. And it's the idea that wealth and power is a signifier, not of. Of. Of nothing but morality, that to be poor is immoral. It's a weakness that should be rectified by confession and.

Death.

So to me, Cloud Atlas is a conversation about the nature of evil and how we pursue power over human dignity and human joy at all costs. And it will be our undoing.

What is. What is the plus?

It's funny.

No, it doesn't sound funny at all.

There's some laughs in there.

It's a real knee slapper.

Yeah, right.

What is the antidote to it.

According.

To me or according to Cloud Atlas to you?

If my definition of evil is the support of a fantasy of natural order at the cost of human dignity and human joy.

I think my antidote is to be curious about our definitions of what's natural. What is supposedly God's plan for us? In any conversation where someone says, that's unnatural. It's unnatural for two people not of the same race to have a child together. It's unnatural for someone to change their gender and expect me to recognize it. It's unnatural for a collective of unempowered laborers to tell the CEO what's going to happen. I don't have a prescription to upend that system, but I do have.

A deep conviction that curiosity is how we start breaking up that sort of laid, dysfunctional bedrock of concrete and of logic.

So in that analogy, put me in the mind of the CEO.

In that analogy, if you are the CEO, you think you've gotten to where you are because there's something innately about you that's better, that deserves it more.

What are the menu items that. That could be? So it could be education. It could be hard work.

It could be hard work. It could be privilege.

It could be family. You're doing what dad did.

Yeah, yeah. It could also be, you know, that CEO could have an innate logic that says, my skin is the skin color of CEOs. Your skin is the skin color of people who work on the factory floor. So now I'm not making the rules. It's just the natural order of things.

And so what should be different about that?

Everything. I think we should be curious about how Americans relate power and wealth with moral superiority.

Okay, so now let's.

By the way, I know leadership is you. There's language of leadership in what you do, right? You talk about leadership, and you. You. You are trying to foment an empowering.

Identity through being a leader. Accurate.

Yeah.

Right. I think leadership and power are very different. I think someone could be an incredible leader and have almost no power, but I think we equate them as being the same.

Well, I agree with that. I think leadership has more to do with courage and owning the responsibility. Somebody has to say, okay, I'll own the responsibility. I'll organize this. I'll. Yeah, I'll take. You know, I'll take the. Yeah, I'll take the fire. Yeah, I agree with that.

And I think that leadership can come from anywhere, as opposed to being some sort of like. Almost like a primogeniture system where you inherit leadership for some from someone else.

That's the reason why I wrote the book, actually, is my fascination fixing businesses with how many people had a position of authority.

Yeah.

That everybody assumed they were a leader because they were in a position of authority. And I've fixed thousands of businesses, and I could count on one hand how many leaders I worked with. Yeah, they're not leaders. Because you're the boss.

Right?

You're the boss. Like, you have the opportunity should you decide to be a leader. It could be a great thing for everybody. But unfortunately, most people don't. Don't do that. Most people lean on the authority, and the authority only goes so far. And people. You know, if you really lean on the authority, people start to hate you and have questions. Yeah.

Yeah. I think if your leadership.

Precludes questions, you're not a leader. You're a boss.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, so if we talked about the CEO, now let's talk about the guy on the factory floor. Because to me, the person on the factory floor is more flawed than the CEO.

Why?

Because they don't believe in themselves.

Yeah.

It's harder to get somebody to believe in themselves than it is to take the CEO and put him down a couple notches.

Mm. Why?

Well, the fear of success is, like, the number one cause of underperformance, you know, unhappiness, all of that, because people don't believe the thing. I guess that's different about me. And I'm only. I only have my personal experience, but, you know, I'm 17, working in a car dealership, and I'm looking at this thing, and I literally asked the owner, I go, how much does it cost to own one of these?

Right.

And he's like, I don't know. Probably at the time, he's like, 7 million. I was like, I could do that. I have no. I come. I come from nothing.

Right.

But for some reason, I thought, oh, I could do that.

Yeah.

Nobody else thinks that. Way ends up everybody else there was thinking about, I want a raise, and when I get a raise, I'll get a more expensive car and I will trap myself in bills and I'll marry a person I don't like, and I'll have kids. And it's just this thing where they trap themselves. And I never thought that was the way. I just thought, oh, I could do that. And so the person on the factory floor in this, this. This hypothetical scenario we're talking about, the CEO loses all their power if the person on the floor sees themselves as the creator.

Yeah.

But what happens invariably is how we control the person on the floor is we externalize the news. They're worried about tariffs. They're worried about God blessing them. They're worried about fate. They're buying lottery tickets online gambling. You externalize control to outside forces, and hence you control them.

Yeah.

And so the externalization of responsibility ends up being the biggest cause of dysfunction in that scenario. You know, the follower in the leadership scenario has a vote.

Yeah.

They just don't feel like they're worthy of casting the vote.

A lot of times I think there's. Yes, yes. And is the veal lamb externalizing the cage around them, or is there a cage around them that impedes their ability to build muscle to be able to walk?

I think there's material realities that inhibit collective action that would question and promote curiosity about the power hierarchy. Right. This idea that there is, I agree with you, some innate fear of power and success. Right. And we shouldn't fear power. I think I said this, you know, in our conversation about this, which is like, obviously Dr. King has lots of quotations that are very famous, but one of them is in. In conversation with Nietzsche, around Nietzsche's idea of power and the beasts of prey and the will to. To exist over others, which is like, what is needed is realization that love without power is sentimental and anemic and power without love is. And now I've lost the actual quote. But power without love is abuse, essentially. Love at its best is rectifying everything that stands in the face of justice. And power at its best is love rectifying everything that stands against justice. So this idea that we shouldn't be afraid of power, we shouldn't be. We shouldn't, you know, we should not step out because power is the means by which we achieve justice. Right. And the idea being that I think Cloud Atlas puts on the table is if your concept of power is that you deserve it merely because you are you, your thinking is flawed and exists on a hierarchy that was developed by Victorian social Darwinists. This idea that the people who have power have it because they deserve it. We know that this isn't true. I think you raise an interesting question, which was what impedes the fomenting of disruption? Is it fear of success? Is it fear of state violence? Is it fear of. I don't know how to do this. No one's ever talked to me about how to get a better wage. No one's talked to me about what a union is or isn't. So there's all sorts of things that kind of go into this conversation about who has power and who doesn't. What I think David Mitchell is asking us to explore is how do our ideas about power inform.

Our ideas about humanity, who has it, who needs it. You have humanity, but it's not the right humanity. You wear grass skirts when you should be wearing pants. You're savage. I'm civilized. I'm here to share my civilization with you. Because otherwise, if you don't get civilized, if you don't adhere to my concept of power, if you don't adhere to my concept of the natural order, you will be meat. And what do we know about meat? It's eaten by the strong. So it's this idea, I think, that Mitchell is inviting us to have conversations about how we understand.

Concepts, really big concepts like justice and power and equality and isms, like racism and colonialism and all of these kind of superstructures of human interaction, whether they're based on commerce, whether they're based on artistic kind of exchange and saying, you know, we're all told that the world is the way it is because it's natural for it to be this way. There's prey and predators and prey. And I think that's extremely limited. And I think the conversations we're having about identity, about, you know, you're a man or a woman, or you're rich or you're poor, or you're American or you're everybody else, or essentially because we're comfortable with very clear cut organizations, categories of people, tribes, tribes, tribes, hierarchies, hierarchies. And it makes sense for us on some level to say, well, if there's two groups, one is always going to be above the other. And in reality, what something like Cloud Atlas that pulls on all of these philosophies of Nietzsche's concept of power, of ideas of reincarnation, of ideas of political unrest, ideas about the logic that was used in the 19th century to prove racism was right and holy and Good and moral is basically.

What if we weren't so comfortable in our categories? Why do categories make people feel safe? And titles. Yeah, it was interesting rereading this for. Most recently, I picked up something that missed me entirely, which is there's quite a lot of references to Keats, the poet, John Keats in this book, which I love because I'm a huge John Keats fan. And John Keats main sort of philosophy was this concept called negative capability. And he got the idea from reading Shakespeare and realizing that in all of Shakespeare's works, we don't really know Shakespeare's politics. He doesn't really have any. We don't really know anything about him. He's not writing to work out how he feels about his b. Tch of an ex wife. He's not writing something that makes you think, oh yeah, this guy was really dealing with something and he was worked it out on the page through metaphor and analogy. We don't really know anything about Shakespeare when we read his plays and his poetry. Keats called this negative capability, which he described in a letter to his brother who had moved to America, as the ability to exist without irritable reaching after fact and reason. Why can't we exist in the gray? The point of diving into a lake is not immediately to swim to shore. And that's also how he described what it means to read a poem. You don't read a poem and instantly try to figure out what it means. On some level, Cloud Atlas is asking us to think of humanity in the same way. To meet someone and not immediately try to figure out.

What tribe are you in? Are you a man? Are you a woman? Are you rich? Are you poor? Are you a CEO? Are you a laborer? On one thing, those categories don't really mean anything anymore. Because you walk into a bar, it might be collectively owned by its employees. You know, according to Marx, is a bar that's owned by the employees. Is that, do they own the means of production or do they own the factory? It's both, right? So what Cloud Atlas is inviting us to do is to be curious about the tribes that we see all around us and that we identify with or we fear. And asking, what if you lived in the gray a little bit longer before you made up all of your decisions about what is natural and what is right and who is good and who is evil? That's what. When I say, like, I wanted a big swig, we can't get much bigger than trying to define what is good and evil.

But it's funny how relevant that is to today.

Yeah.

Automatic judgment. Right. Like, it. Like, we're quick to judge, and then we get a little dopamine hit.

Yeah.

And we feel powerful and good.

I know exactly what I think of that. Yeah, I know. My brain's so, so good.

We get rewarded for it all the time.

Yeah, all the time. I mean, it's to bring that, you know, a mic macro thought into a very micro space. You know, I've never done a press tour. I'm used to being in that chair. Right. I'm used to being the person who asks. Asks the questions as a journalist and as a reporter, as a freelance writer, all of these things. And being on this side of it, I realized people get very uncomfortable when they ask you a question and you go, oh, I don't know. You know, in this setup, I'm supposed to have all of the answers. So when someone says, what is your prescription for evil? It's like the best I can say is, I don't know, but maybe an invitation to be curious.

It's good.

I'll take it. You'll take it. All right. Let's drink to that.

I like it.

Yeah. Pretty good. Cheers. Let's get curious.

What about the. Back to the factory worker.

The factory worker. Yeah.

So Dostoevsky said, salvation is to accept responsibility for all mankind. And then he proceeds to say, go down to a courthouse.

Yeah.

Find somebody who's just sentenced to jail. Trade places with them and serve their time.

Empathy to the nth.

But taking responsibility for something you didn't do. And maybe the thing is to take responsibility just for ourselves, to take responsibility for our thoughts, our actions, our work ethic, the energy we bring, the collaborative energy, the care for others. If we just took responsibility for that, if we just had an internal locus of control for that, what would the world be like? You judge less because if you start taking responsibility for yourself, you have to face your flaws. When you face your flaws, you realize that you're a lot closer to the people that you're judging.

Yeah, right. Yeah. I mean, I think. I think that's a process that could eventually get to the point where you realize, I'm taking responsibility for myself. There's a lot on the plate to take responsibility for, but maybe in that process, you become aware that people who have a different life experience than you do, their responsibilities, might be more difficult to take on. There are some people whose existence in society is never allowed to be individual because they're always being told you're responsible for the actions of your group. You have to be better than the actions of your group. And not everybody is told that. Right. There are some people in society who are allowed to act as individuals. And actually, that's the great American dream. Right? We're all individuals. We all have our own bootstraps. We all have the ability to make our lives better separate from everything around us. All you have to do is be responsible for yourselves. And I think that's not wrong. I think that's true. But I also think there are people who never get the opportunity to only exist as individuals because they're always lumped in with their tribe. Even if they try to act as individuals, they're judged by the whole group. And that's a different process. It doesn't negate the other experience. It's just an addendum, too. Like, you know.

Yeah. No, I would say we take it.

For granted, thousand percent. Being able to only be responsible for yourself and your own trajectory might be the greatest privilege of all.

I agree.

Because you're not 100%. You're not trying to vindicate your ancestors, save your future, your future generations. You're not trying to overcompensate for generations of economic bounty that completely missed your tribe. You're just responsible for you. If I. You know, that's pretty cushy. It's not easy, but it's pretty cushy in. In comparison. But I think that's. Again, we come back to being curious. Get curious about what your responsibilities are, and then get curious about what other people's responsibilities are.

And then collaborate. Don't try to win.

There we go.

Collaborate.

Now we're trying to understand. Now we're cooking with gas.

When you. When you try to win.

You aren't listening. You're not curious anymore.

Who's interested? Yeah, winning. Winning what? Yeah.

You get the best penthouse to watch the wave that's gonna kill us all roll in.

Even just talking, you know, like, people always say, don't talk religion or politics, and I'm always like, you can change my mind.

Yeah.

But what happens invariably, which is disappointing, is people, you know, their parents, they haven't really thought about it. And so they're just following a narrative, but they're not researched. They don't understand. And so you can't change my mind if you don't have information I didn't have or a perspective that's well thought out. Yeah, I love to change my mind. Yeah, I love to learn. It feels good to, you know, challenge whatever your preconceived thoughts were. That doesn't happen a lot.

No, it doesn't. Because knowing what you're talking about feels really good. Being right feels really good. Winning feels really good. And making an innate idiot on the Internet look like an idiot on the Internet feels really good. You know, those are all little candies that, you know, taste great, but they don't fuel you, they don't keep you going. And I think, like, something like Cloud Atlas is an unflinching look at how rewarding it is to get it wrong, to up.

To realize you've signed up to the wrong tribe. Everything you've been told by your parents, by your church, by your country, by your tribe, by your block, that's so important to maintain. Is it? Is it? Or is it more important to be honest and intimate and vulnerable in community with people who can meet you where you are?

Yeah.

You know.

Okay, the big question.

Yes?

How did Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell change your life?

It took all these sort of, like, amorphous thoughts I had about, for lack of a better word, evil, and put it in a language that I can understand, which is that if you think that you have power over me because you deserve it, I think that's evil. I think you can have power over me because you've taken it, because you've stolen it, because I gave it to you willingly and joyfully, but you don't have it because you're better than me. And this idea that there's a natural order, that it goes God, men, women, children, and that's the natural order. Or it goes, Britain, the colonies, everyone else, because that's the natural order. Or it goes, there's men and there's women because that's what God intended. So it's the natural order. There's so many times when I'm watching events in the world play out, and the first thing I think is the weak are meat and the strong do eat. Because there's a reality of.

I'm. I'm exploiting you because I have the opportunity because God gave it to me, because I deserve to exploit you. And more than that, you deserve to be exploited. There is a moment in my book The10, where I very naively decide to go to the presidential home and library of former Confederate president Jefferson Davis. After the war, he was gifted a house on the coast of Mississippi in a place called Beauvoir. And the house is called Beauvoir. I naively went thinking I was going to see Jefferson Davis role in American history placed in a responsible historical context. That is not what I saw. What I saw was blatant lost cause propaganda to the extent that the organization that runs Beauvoir, Sons of the Confederacy deserves to be on various lists of white nationalist conspiracy organization groups, hate groups essentially. And while I was there, I took a tour of the House and they pointed out, here's where Katrina messed up the walls and here's how we paid for it with federal funds and tax dollars from all over America. And.

While I was researching the House, I came upon this press statement that they put out in which they requested all the Confederate statues that had been removed from New Orleans by Mayor Landrieu In I think 2016, 2017, kind of in an early pre death of George Floyd. Moment of kind of recognition that these Confederate statues that were not placed around America during the war, they were placed around America in the 20s and 30s and 50s at the heyday of the Klan, very often because the Klan raised the funds for these statues and they put them up as a reminder and as kind of threats. And they were the backbone of Jim. The Jim Crow South. They were basically big waving red flags that said, don't get too uppity. You know, who's in charge here? And if you can't, we'll put it on a stat. We'll put it on a.

Literally on a propaganda.

It was propaganda. And when I was reading about how Beauvoir was trying to collect all of these Confederate statues, they put out this statement about why they wanted these. And it was, you know, classic pr. You gotta explain, you know, change the narrative, as they say. And the statement said, you know, in requesting these statues, we by no means condone, condone.

Condone or endorse slavery, which is an evil practice that has existed since the dawn of time, irregardless of race. I didn't think we needed a clause about slavery to explain it or to make it seem not that bad.

Well, yeah, you're taking it. You give it and take it away all in the same.

Exactly. So they put out this statement that says, you know, this isn't about slavery, but. But also slavery wasn't that bad. Cause everybody's had it. And it was so confounding to me that I wrote it out. You know, I'm living in a van. I'm driving around the Deep south for six months. I'm talking to total strangers, asking them to tell me about where they're from. And I'm trying to figure out how the stories we tell about the places we're from ultimately become the stories we tell about who we are and how the Southwest and Texas and the Deep south, which are the landscapes that the 10 moves through, are the backbone of the great American myth of bootstraps, of individual responsibility, of the fact that anyone can do anything because we're not beholden to old families and, and old customs. The way England was or the way Germany was, or the way any of these societies before World War I were. What kind of family you were from determined the course of your life. We exist outside of that in America. We have the great dream of we're only responsible for ourselves. And that's why everyone can be a billionaire. So you should vote, like one day you're going to be a billionaire. This idea that there was this.

Non political desire for these statues that had nothing to do with slavery, just respect for history. But in their trying to convince themselves that there was no reason to want these statues outside of respect for history, they had to excuse slavery. And I think that's a pretty good bare bones level to start from. As if you have to excuse slavery, you're probably on some thin ice there, buddy. So if it's existed since the dawn of time, what is it? It's natural. It's the natural order. We're just doing what people have always done, so it must be natural. But if you follow that logic, and I did, I called up, I have two friends who are philosophers. What's going on in my life that I have two friends who are literally, their jobs are being philosophers. I can't tell if I'm really right or really wrong. But you know, it's a life and I'm living it. This idea. I called them to say, like, can you help me parse the logic that's going on here? Because I think I know what it is, but you know, I want to hear a professional do it. And they said, well, the logic here is that slavery here has existed since the dawn of time because it's an inherent part of humanity to own slaves, to try to own human beings and to buy and sell them and rape them and murder them and breed them. It's just what we do, it's who we are, it's natural. But that logic means that it is someone's natural existence to be enslaved, to be owned, to be murdered, to be raped, to be bred. And I can't think of a better definition of evil than to tell another human being, it is your natural and right state to be owned by me, to be traded like chattel. And that to me is what I describe in conversation as the Cloud Atlas truth. It is your Duty. It is your natural state to be cattle, to be meat, and the strong must eat. So.

This book changed my life in that it gave me a language to describe what I see wrong with the world. When someone says to me, it's unnatural to be neither a man nor a woman, and I don't care that it's existed since the dawn of time, I'm telling you now, it is unnatural.

When I hear natural, I hear a lineage of political action that almost always ends up with bodies stacked in the streets. And that's what Cloud Atlas gave me.

But I promise it's a fun read. You should read it. I will.

Is this your copy?

That is. You know what?

It's a copy.

It's a copy. I had to. That's our copy to donate to the library, by the way. Nothing has thrown me into more of a spiral than having to pick one book to discuss on the show. There were multiple options. There was a while there where it was Frankenstein, which I love. Cloud Atlas doesn't exist without Frankenstein. So there was this idea where I was gonna go to the source of, like, like, everything. Frankenstein is an incredible book and also has quite a lot to do with the perverse concept of a natural order. But then I finally decided, no, it has to be Cloud Atlas. It must be Cloud Atlas. And then I went to my shelves and realized I didn't have a copy because I keep giving mine away, which I think is actually a great signal that that was the book that I needed to buy. So I went to my local bookstore, which is Skylight Books, and I said, like. And I order for them basically every other week, something like that. They're my dealer. They keep me in the good stuff and have not, as of yet, cut me off. And when I said, like, I need to order a couple copies of Cloud Atlas, they were like, why you keep giving copies away? I was like, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Who did this cover?

I have no idea. No, no, I can tell you.

What, did you pick it?

Well, they gave me some options. One of the funniest things is that the original image that they had in the mirror was a very famous landscape that was, like, very clearly not on Interstate 10. It was a couple hundred miles north of Interstate 10. So I was like, it doesn't have to actually be from the 10. It just can't be very clearly specifically not on the 10. So that is kind of like your classic American highway.

So great.

Thanks.

This was really fun.

Thank you for having me. I really appreciated this time to chat. This is my first press Tour. And it's been. I'm grateful for the opportunities and I'm grateful for the chit chat, but it has been occasionally sort of emotionally cataclysmic in its.

I can't imagine. Yeah, yeah, dude, you're reliving this conversation constantly.

Yeah. But here's the thing. Like, basically, I apologize to my partner because they've heard this bit a billion times, but basically every interview has been. So she was really crazy, huh? Really? And I go, yeah. And then they go, but he's so famous. Huh? And I go, yeah. And somehow that lasts an hour.

I think it. I mean, it's such a.

Sit in an armchair, in a library, in a martini and discuss the nature of evil and have a rich white girl explain slavery to you was a lot of fun.

Yeah. But also your. Your dad's the least interesting part of all this. I know you're. You're fascinating and, you know, on. All on your own.

I'll take it.

And so.

Well, we can continue another time. Thanks.

Oh, rolling.

Just talking. You know, like I. People always say, don't talk religion or politics, and I was like, you can change my mind.

Yeah.

But what happens invariably, which is disappointing, is people, you know, their parents, they don't really. Haven't really thought about it.

Yeah.

And so they're just following a narrative, but they're not researched. They don't understand. And so you can't change my mind if you don't have information I didn't have or a perspective that's well thought out. Yeah, I love to change my mind.

Yeah.

I love to learn. It feels good to, you know, challenge.

Yeah.

Whatever your preconceived thoughts were, that doesn't happen a lot.

No, it doesn't. Because knowing what you're talking about feels really good. Being right feels really good. Winning feels really good. And making an idiot on the Internet look like an idiot on the Internet feels really good. You know, those are all little candies that, you know, taste great, but they don't fuel you, they don't keep you going. And I think, like, something like Cloud Atlas is an unflinching look at how rewarding it is to get it wrong to up.

To realize you've signed up to the wrong tribe. Everything you've been told by your parents, by your church, by your country, by your tribe, by your block, that's so important to maintain. Is it? Is it? Or is it more important to be honest and intimate and vulnerable in community with people who can meet you where you are?

Yeah.

You know.

Okay. The big question.

Yes.

How did Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell change your life?

It took all these sort of like amorphous thoughts I had about, for lack of a better word, evil, and put it in a language that I can understand, which is that if you think that you have power over me because you deserve it, I think that's evil. I think you can have power over me because you've taken it, because you've stolen it, because I gave it to you willingly and joyfully, but you don't have it because you're better than me. And this idea that there's a natural order, that it goes God, men, women, children, and that's the natural order. Or it goes Britain, the colonies, everyone else, because that's the natural order. Or it goes, there's men and there's women because that's what God intended. So it's the natural order. There's so many times when I'm watching events in the world play out and the first thing I think is the weak are meat and the strong do eat. Because there's a reality of.

I'm exploiting you because I have the opportunity, because God gave it to me.

Because I deserve to exploit you. And more than that, you deserve to be exploited. There is a moment in my book The10, where I very naively decide to go to the presidential home and library of former Confederate president Jefferson Davis. After the war he was gifted a house on the coast of Mississippi in a place called Beauvoir. And the house is called Beauvoir. I naively went thinking I was going to see Jefferson Davis role in American history placed in a responsible historical context. That is not what I saw. What I saw was blatant lost cause propaganda to the extent that the organization that runs Beauvoir Sons of the Confederacy deserves to be on various lists of white nationalist conspiracy organization groups, hate groups essentially. And while I was there, I took a tour of the house and they pointed out here's where Katrina messed up the walls and here's how we paid for it with federal funds and tax dollars from all over America. And.

While I was researching the house, I came upon this press statement that they put out in which they requested all the Confederate statues that had been removed from New Orleans by Mayor Landrieu In I think 2016, 2017, kind of in an early pre Death of George Floyd moment of kind of recognition that these Confederate statues that were not placed around America during the war, they were placed around America in the 20s and 30s and 50s at the heyday of the Klan, very often because the Klan raised the funds for these statues and they put them up as a reminder and as kind of threats. And they were the backbone of the Jim Crow South. They were basically big waving red flags that said, don't get too uppity, you know, who's in charge here? And if you can't, we'll put it on a staff, we'll put it on a. Literally on a.

Propaganda.

It was propaganda. And when I was reading about how Beauvoir was trying to collect all of these Confederate statues, they put out this statement about why they wanted these. And it was, you know, classic pr. You got to explain, you know, change the narrative, as they say. And the statement said, you know, in requesting these statues, we by no means condone, condone, condone or endorse slavery, which is an evil practice that has existed since the dawn of time, irregardless of race. I didn't think we needed a clause about slavery to explain it or to make it seem not that bad.

Well, yeah, you're taking it away. You give it and take it away all in the same.

Yeah, exactly. So they put out this statement that says, you know, this isn't about slavery, but. But also slavery wasn't that bad because everybody's had it. And it was so confounding to me that I wrote it out. You know, I'm living in a van. I'm driving around the Deep south for six months. I'm talking to total strangers, asking them to tell me about where they're from. And I'm trying to figure out how, you know, the stories we tell about the places we're from ultimately become the stories we tell about who we are and how the Southwest and Texas and the Deep south, which are the landscapes that the 10 moves through, are the backbone of the great American myth of bootstraps, of individual responsibility, of the fact that anyone can do anything because we're not beholden to old families and old customs the way England was or the way Germany was, or the way any of these societies before World War I were. What kind of family you were from determined the course of your life. We exist outside of that in America. We have the great dream of we're only responsible for ourselves. And that's why everyone can be a billionaire. So you should vote, like one day you're going to be a billionaire. This idea that there was this.

Non political desire for these statues that had nothing to do with slavery, just respect for history. But in their trying to convince themselves that there was no reason to want these statues outside of respect for history. They had to excuse slavery. And I think that's a pretty good bare bones level to start from. As if you have to excuse slavery. You're probably on some thin ice there, buddy. So if it's existed since the dawn of time, what is it? It's natural. It's the natural order. We're just doing what people have always done, so it must be natural. But if you follow that logic, and I did, I called up, I have two friends who are philosophers. What's going on in my life that I have two friends who are literally, their jobs are being philosophers. I can't tell if I'm really right or really wrong. But, you know, it's a life and I'm living it. This idea. I called them to say, like, can you help me parse the logic that's going on here? Because I think I know what it is, but, you know, I want to hear a professional do it. And they said, well, the logic here is that slavery has existed since the dawn of time because it's an inherent part of humanity to own slaves, to try to own human beings and to buy and sell them and rape them and murder them and breed them them. It's just what we do. It's who we are. It's natural. But that logic means that it is someone's natural existence to be enslaved, to be owned, to be murdered, to be raped, to be bred. And I can't think of a better definition of evil than to tell another human being, it is your natural and right state to be owned by me, to be traded like chattel. And that to me is what I describe in conversation as the Cloud Atlas truth. It is your duty. It is your natural state, to be cattle, to be meat, and the strong must eat. So.

This book changed my life in that it gave me a language to describe what I see wrong with the world. When someone says to me, it's unnatural to be neither a man nor a woman, and I don't care that it's existed since the dawn of time. I'm telling you now, it is unnatural.

When I hear natural, I hear a lineage of political action that almost always ends up with bodies stacked in the streets. And that's what Cloud Atlas gave me.

But I promise it's a fun read. You should read it. I will.

I'm fine. Is this your copy?

That is. You know what?

It's a copy.

It's a copy. I had to. That's our copy to donate to the library, by the way. Nothing has thrown me into more of a spiral than having to pick one book to discuss on the show. There were multiple options. There was a while there where it was Frankenstein, which I love. Cloud Atlas doesn't exist without Frankenstein. So there was this idea where I was gonna go to the source of, like, everything. Frankenstein is an incredible book and also has quite a lot to do with the perverse concept of a natural order. But then I finally decided, no, it has to be Cloud Atlas. It must be Cloud Atlas. And then I went to my shelves and realized I didn't have a copy because I keep giving mine away, which I think is actually a great signal that that was the book that I needed to buy. So I went to my local bookstore, which is Skylight Books, and I said, like. And I order for them basically every other week, something like that. They're my dealer. They keep me in the good stuff and have not, as of yet, cut me off. And when I said, like, I need to order a couple copies of Cloud Atlas, they were like, why you keep giving copies away? I was like, yeah, exactly.

Who did this cover?

I have no idea. No, no, I can tell you.

What, did you pick it?

Well, they gave me some options. One of the funniest things is that the original image that they had in the. In the mirror was a very famous landscape that was, like, very clearly not on Interstate 10. It was, you know, a couple hundred miles north of Interstate 10. So I was like, it doesn't have to actually be from the 10. It just can't be very clearly specifically not on the 10. So that is a kind of like your classic American highway.

So great.

Thanks.

This was really fun.

Thank you for having me. I really appreciated this time to chat. This is my first press tour, and it's been. I'm grateful for the opportunities and I'm grateful for the chit chat, but it has been occasionally sort of emotionally cataclysmic in its.

I can't imagine. Yeah, yeah, dude, you're reliving this constantly.

Yeah, but here's the thing. Like, basically, I apologize to my partner because they've heard this bit a billion times, but basically every interview has been. So she was really crazy, huh? Really? And I go, yeah. And then they go, but he's so famous, huh? And I go, yeah. And somehow that lasts an hour.

I think. I mean, it's such a.

Sit in an armchair in a library in a martini and discuss the nature of evil and have a rich white girl explain slavery to you was a lot of fun.

Yeah. But also, your. Your dad's the least interesting part of all this. I know you're. You're fascinating. And, you know, on. All on your own.

I'll take it.

And so.

Well, we can continue another time. Thank you.