Think Again Podcast – Mixtape – The Writers' Room

Hey there, this is Jason Gots, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast. Since 2008, Big Think has been bringing you big ideas in little doses from some of the most creative thinkers around.

On the Think Again podcast, we step outside of our comfort zone, surprising our guests and me, your host, with unexpected clips from Big Think's interview archives—ideas that we didn't necessarily come here prepared to discuss. This is the fourth mixtape that I'm doing of some of the highlights of the first year of the show, just time to reflect back and think about where we've been.

As you may have noticed, if you're following the show, I have a lot of creative writers on. I'm a writer myself, and I think a lot about the craft of writing. Some of the guests have given our listeners advice that I find incredibly powerful and that stays with me all the time. This episode is an attempt to round up some of those best moments, some of those most powerful moments—advice about writer's block, how to work with a creative team, how to deal with success and failure, and how to deal with the psychology of being a writer. I hope that you'll find these moments as meaningful as I do.

This first segment is from a conversation with the acclaimed playwright and screenwriter, Sir David Hare. He really surprised me; there was a really interesting and unexpected turn in the middle of this conversation that I found delightful. The surprise clip is with Sheila Heen, talking about the psychology of happiness.

“If you look at the neuroscience, the way that we're wired has a profound effect on how we hear and respond to feedback. We took a look at three variables that are particularly important in terms of your reaction to feedback. The first is your baseline; it's sort of how happy or unhappy are you in the absence of other events in your life. Where's that level that you come back to? It's a scale of 1 to 10. Some people just live their lives at nine, right? They're just so unbelievably happy and cheerful about everything. This research comes from looking at lottery winners a year later; they're about as happy or unhappy as they were before they won the lottery. And people who go to jail, a year later they're about as happy or unhappy as before they went to jail.

Now we look at the second variable, which is swing. When you get positive or negative feedback, how far off your baseline does it knock you? The same piece of feedback can be devastating for one person and, you know, kind of annoying for another. And then the third variable is how long does it take you to come back to your baseline? How long do you sustain positive feeling, or how long does it take you to recover from negative feeling? Taken together, that's where the big variation in sensitivity comes from—that some people are extremely sensitive and other people are pretty insensitive. Or maybe I should say even-keel, but I suppose if you're insensitive, you don't really care what I call you, so it doesn't matter.

There's a lot in there. Yeah, there's a lot in there. Well, there are two principal things, yes, about what she's saying—the feedback thing. I work in the collaborative arts. I choose to be a playwright rather than a novelist or a poet, and therefore, for me, collaboration is absolutely essential. If I'm working on a movie set or if I'm in a rehearsal, then the whole day what I have written is put under a degree of scrutiny, and the actors in particular will say to me, ‘You think that in the interest of the general story you have achieved this scene. But let me tell you, from my point of view, playing it as one person in this scene, there is not enough for me here. I haven't got what I want, or I can't make sense of this change,’ to which I can only respond either by arguing or going back and rewriting in order that the woman or man who’s playing this particular part will fit into the general picture and be able to play what they want to play.

In other words, they're going to put it under a scrutiny that maybe you have overlooked in your rush to follow the main narrative through, and so you're making adjustments all the time and you're accepting feedback. My experience is you can do that from a position of confidence. In other words, if you're confident about what the general movement of the play or film is, then there is no end to the amount of input that you're open to because you know that it will not be destructive. You know that the resilience of the basic idea of what you're doing will see you through and that the thing can't be damaged by minor adjustments.

And if you're working with great actors, as I've spent my life working with some of the greatest actors in the world, you're just crazy not to listen to them because what they're going to bring to it is going to be incredibly useful to you. So from that point of view, feedback is what I live on. That's my element.

An opinion, remember, is the element that any creative person has to swim in. In other words, you know, a play doesn't exist until it's put before an audience, and what the audience's opinion is, is what finishes that play off. You know, when people want to become actors, young people, I say to them, ‘You think you're going out there and you're going to create other people? It's going to be creative.’ I said, ‘Half your job is going to be being judged. Half your job is going to be out there and sensing that the audience doesn’t like you. Are you up for that? Do you have the kind of temperament that is going to be able to cope with the dislike of large numbers of people? You're going to fail in certain roles, and when you fail in certain roles in front of people, it's going to be deeply embarrassing, shaming, humiliating, and upsetting. Are you up for that? Are you up for being judged?’ And that's what working in the collaborative arts involves.

Well, let me ask you this because I understand from your memoir and just from the way you write that you're a sensitive person. You know, you are a very sensitive person. So when you were just starting out as a playwright, you know, if somebody had said that to you—if somebody had come and said, like, ‘Do you have what it takes? Is your skin thick enough?’—would you have recoiled in horror?

Completely. I would not have chosen this job if I had known the degree of judgment that it would involve. I have sat in audiences where the audiences rejected the play and did not want to hear what I wanted to say to them, and it caused extreme pain; it ripped my soul out. There was a night in Seattle where a film of mine was laughed off the screen in 1987 with a test audience at a preview audience. I will never go back to the city of Seattle.

But listen, in the time available to us, let's go back to the other point, which is really interesting—the happiness thing. You know that a year later, the person who is in jail is at the same level of happiness that they were before they were in jail. I'm afraid I think this is true. When you're young, you have a fantasy that you can change, and that you can change your life, and you will achieve something, and then when you achieve that thing, that will make a significant difference to your contentment index. In other words, you're driven by fantasy. When you're my age, there is no fantasy left. You know, I am extremely happily married to a completely wonderful woman whom I absolutely adore. My children I adore, therefore my private life could not be any happier than it is. There is no fantasy about my—I do not go to sleep dreaming of meeting some other woman who will transform my life. I adore the person that I am with and can imagine no better.

Do you see? Nor will I do I dream of writing a hit play. I've written hit plays. I know what a hit feels like; I've lived through it. It doesn't significantly change your life. You still have to start again and try and write the next one. So I fear that what she says about how the sort of basic level of happiness you have in your life doesn't really change very much.

One of my favorite conversations was with Turkey's arguably most celebrated living novelist, Orhan Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here, he's talking about something I've never really heard a writer discussed before, which is the psychology of sitting down every day to write and how a creative writer should manage that. I find this to be incredible advice, and the surprise clip is from psychologist Bessel van der Kolk on trauma.

"Psychiatry has always had a complex relationship to trauma. It started off as a discipline that looked at way back in the late 1800s—people have very bizarre reactions to trauma, and so there was some interest in it, and then they put a kabash on it. People were no longer allowed to study hysteria. The First World War breaks out, a huge number of traumatized guys probably had a lot to do with the rise of Nazism, and then in 1947, the last book about war trauma gets published, and there's nothing till 1982 or something. So it takes a long time where psychiatry really doesn't want to see trauma.

In the current DSM, the what people call the Bible of Psychiatry, now we live with weird diagnoses like oppositional defiant disorder where people don't ask, ‘Why did these kids become defiant?’ Bipolar disorder—kids being mentally unstable, going up and down in their emotions—and psychiatry doesn't really want to look at what's behind there. And as a consequence, instead of looking at social conditions as being at the origin of these disorders, these kids get drugged up. Last year in the US, kids got $8.1 billion worth of psychotropic drugs, and these drugs do calm people down, but they also work on the reward system in the brain and decrease curiosity, openness, experimentation, engagement with people.

So the issue of trauma in the US, in particular, is a very serious public health issue for me. The biggest trauma of life is, of course, unrequited love. My novel, Museum of Innocence, is extensively about the illusions of love. I chronicled an upper-middle-class Turkish man's obsession, infatuation with his twice-removed cousin, just like a trauma. He can never get out of it; he's ridiculed and made fun of.

A trauma means you are almost in a war. You're panicked; you don't know what to do. You want to survive, and you lack the central logic that will control and heal you and perhaps pave the way out of the traumatic situation. My understanding of trauma is that you want to get out of a situation, but you're so much under pressure that your mind does not give you the clue out of that situation. In fact, love is like that. Perhaps psychology and psychiatry should focus on love, treat it as a trauma.

I am against all this glorification, sugaring, putting on a pedestal the idea of love as a sweet thing. I agree it's the sweetest thing, but it all comes with a bad package of trauma—longing, jealousy, anger, miscommunication, self-obsession, making you not see the whole picture. I'm a writer, and I want to be, I'm a self-conscious writer—a writer who wants to know the effects of what he or she is doing. But also, there is one side to me that makes me survive. Perhaps that is letting things go—just follow the music that is spontaneously coming inside of me: colors, notes, words that I'm possessed with.

In the end, if you write every day like me, sit at a table every day, trauma vanishes perhaps because I know that life would be hard if I was working in an office. I choose the life of the solitary artist, writing every day, which avoids me from the pressures and the traumas of everyday life. But it's inevitable; life is in the end daily life. I mean, you are working hard; you create a structure. You sit down every day; you have a discipline. So somehow, those structures are sufficient; then you don't have to worry as much about trying to control the rest.

In fact, I argue that a creative writing professor should teach more about this than what should be the plot, what should be the… because normative structural policies about writing fiction are less important than teaching the would-be writer how to behave in life—how to take ease; the regular systematic traumas, writing blocks, unhappiness, manic happiness, and depressive slowing down.

Being a writer is more about minding your mental health, navigating according to your moods, what section, chapter of the book you should write first because it's appropriate to your mood. Now, what to do when you're blocked, and how to skip one chapter, skip one trauma, skip one problem, and continue?

I understand that psychiatry addresses traumas. I thought they were already doing that. I thought, why are people going to people and paying money, and because they had traumas? Now I learn they go for other reasons. I would go to a psychiatrist because I had a trauma—if I were to fall in love and never get out of love and feel that I'm hurt or if I'm blocked by my writing and feel that I'm scared of something. I had traumas—political repressive traumas in the past. In the end, they gave me nightmares, but in the long run, they just pass away if you're busy with something that makes you happy.

And it's writing, writing, writing. Oh yes, it gave me lots of problems, but in the long run, the achievement of finishing something and being like a child playing with his toys, being busy with all the time, solves all the traumas of the world.

I want to ask you, like when you sit down and your brain isn't working that day—does that happen?

That happens all the time.

Then what do you do?

Hemingway has a nice piece of advice. He said, at the end of the day, if you know what you’re going to write, don’t write the last sentence. Keep it for the next morning. So start with that sentence. Once you write a beautiful sentence, that sentence will tell you what will be the next, what will be the next, what will be the next.

When you're writing fiction, if you're in it, eight sentences, you have a magic feeling that it's unfolding on its own. You look out of your window; you look at, say, the New York silhouette or Boston that I see from my window, and my mind, as if possessed because I'm so deeply in it. You continue like that.

I think if you work three hours a day, if you write three pages, if you work nine hours a day, you write not nine pages but 18 pages. Once creativity goes up exponentially, once you devote your whole life to it—even your sleep to it. The way to get out of our traumas, in fact, is to invent a second world, a fictive world or artistic world that will avoid the trauma.

But perhaps going to a psychiatrist who understands you may be something, but then maybe you can't write anymore.

Yes, this is the thing that my friends always tell me: ‘Orhan, I see you're traumatized. I can give you this pill, but maybe tomorrow you feel happy, but you cannot write again.’ It’s the central contradiction in my life. Perhaps because I'm happy, I cannot write. Perhaps because I'm so unhappy, I can write.

These are reasonable contradictions. I think a writer’s life has all of these variations. But in the end, sailing with goodwill and believing in the wind is essential, and you sail on and on and on, and I'm writing fiction for the last 40 years. After 40 years of sailing, I have a sense that this wind will take me to a nice, quiet, good, beautiful place. I trust the wind and sail and sail and write and write.

Earlier this year, I sat down with author James McBride, who won the National Book Award for The Color of Water, to talk to him about his memoir-biology investigation into the life of James Brown. Here he brings up his recent experiences in what must have been one of the most interesting writer rooms ever.

The surprise clip is from journalist Charles Duhigg, who wrote The Power of Habit, talking here about creative teams.

About five years ago, Google started this interesting experiment. They wanted to figure out how to build the perfect team. So what they did is they started collecting huge amounts of data about all the teams within Google. The teams that at a glance looked most productive oftentimes aren’t. But if you can create this conversational turn-taking equality of voices, if you can convince people to really listen to each other by being sensitive to the non-verbal cues we're giving off, then you create psychological safety.

And psychological safety is the single greatest determinant in whether a team comes together or whether it falls apart. One of my favorite examples of psychological safety and a team really coming together is the early days of Saturday Night Live.

So when you think about it, Saturday Night Live never should have worked, right? You have a bunch of comedians who are kind of misanthropes to begin with, and yet for some reason, when Lorne Michaels put them in a room together, everyone was willing to kind of get along. They were willing to put aside their ego and create this amazing show together—not only an amazing show—but a show that was put together under these incredible time pressure. They have a week to put together a live show.

When I talked to the early writers and performers on Saturday Night Live and I asked them why this happened, all of them said the same thing: because of Lorne Michaels.

So Lorne Michaels has this very unique way of running meetings. He sits down, and the meeting starts, and what he'll do is he’ll make everyone go around the table and say something. And if someone hasn't spoken up in a little while, Lorne Michaels will actually stop the meeting and he'll say, ‘Susie, I noticed that you haven't chimed in. What are you thinking about right now?’ And it all works out, but it's because he creates an environment that feels safe, where everyone feels like they can speak up, and they feel like everyone else is genuinely listening to them because they're sensitive to all the cues that they're sending.

I think that kind of analysis is a dream killer for me because I think when you analyze stuff too much, the next thing you know, it's like, you know, analyzing sex. I mean, should we write a report when we're done? You know, should we have a checklist of, you know, true-false, one to five—how was it?

I mean, yeah, I think that kind of thinking is dangerous for the creative process. Like if you come in with that method and try—I mean, whatever method to follow—no, yeah, I wouldn't. I mean, look, I wouldn’t follow what's his name? Lorne Michaels? I wouldn't follow his method. I follow my method. Everybody has a different solo; everybody has a different way of singing their song.

I think the collaborative process, which is really what the journalist is talking about, is dictated by what you need to create and who's in the room. And so that process works for that particular group of people, given the time constraints that exist. I don't know that that would work if you were writing for a six-part miniseries like I did. I was one of the writers in a six-part miniseries for David Simon, creator of The Wire, and so forth. It hasn't aired yet; it's called Parting the Waters. It's about Taylor Branch's three-book series about the Civil Rights Movement. I'll be watching that myself.

The code is Taylor Branch, David Simon. Okay, okay, now we're going there. What was it like being in a writing room with David Simon? Tanasi, and like, how did that go?

Well, it was great. How did that work?

It was free. I mean, David didn’t point to you and say, ‘What are you thinking?’ He did it a different way. He said, ‘You know, we have to decide which story we're going to tell and who’s going to tell it.’ He’s like Count Basie, you know? I mean, he’s like Duke Ellington, really. Duke Ellington had a band of great soloists, okay? And he’d say, ‘This is the composition; now put your thing to it.’

David is the same way. You know, he says, ‘These are the parameters; you’re all small little kings in your kingdom. Let’s bring our kingdoms together and see which one of us can come up with the best idea. Whoever has the best idea will run with that.’ You can't bring a lot of ego into a room like that. You have to be—you're there to service the story, and a good writer will service the story, a good musician will service the music.

As a novelist, how do you work? Do you plot out everything before you write, or do you just…?

No, I don’t. I have no standard way of doing it other than getting up at 4:00 in the morning and getting to work.

You can write at 4:00 in the morning?

Okay, well, I go to bed at 9:00. Alright? If I go to bed at 11:00, I get up at 4:00 anyway. Then I take a nap at 11:00 a.m. until, you know, I mean, the discipline of music taught me how the necessity of practice. But going back to your earlier statement about this room full of writers—if you're a real serious writer, you are a servant to the story. Writing chooses you; you don't choose it.

So when you're working with other writers, you have to service the idea, and that's really where craft comes in. The trade sure shows itself; because then you have to be able to throw left-handed and bat right-handed, or bat right-handed and throw left-handed. You have to be able to hit a curveball in the bottom of the seventh with two outs and a guy on base. You just have to be able to do it because if you're done, you're bringing the whole team down.

So you have to learn how to play every position. You're a person who's collaborated. You've done music, so you've collaborated with other people. You've done theater. Tanasi has written a comic book just now. You know, so there's just—I think of like some of these folks, you know, William Faulkner, you know, the folks sitting alone in their room for their whole lives would probably freak out if they suddenly had to share the table.

Well, maybe. Maybe. I don’t know. I mean, but I must say that writing is a lonely life. And so working with other writers in this particular situation was just a lot of fun. And my problem is that at my age, you know, I walk into a room and I start talking, and people get intimidated. They think that, you know, I know what I'm talking about, you know, and I'm—I reach the point in my life where I don't really feel like I'm not. I stop working hard at trying to make people feel comfortable. If they can't accept me on my own terms, just, you know, they'll see shortly that it's cool, and if they don’t, then there's nothing I write or play or do is going to make them feel comfortable anyway.

So I didn't have that problem when I was working with David and Eric over at T.H.E.I. and Taylor Branch. They were just cool. We were all there for the same purpose, and I really liked them all.

And I ended an earlier mixtape with a spontaneous monologue from one of my favorite writers, poet and rapper Kate Tempest. But the whole conversation with her was incredibly illuminating. She had just finished her first novel, The Bricks That Built the Houses, and here she talks fascinatingly about writer's block.

The surprise clip is from author Augustine Burrows. He's talking about writer's block, which he believes is a real thing, and we'll see how Kate responds to that.

“The worst thing to do with writer's block is kind of like the worst thing to do with back pain. You know, if you have back pain, you don’t want to stay in bed for the next five years. You need to begin physical therapy; you need to maybe do yoga or Pilates. You need to move. With writer's block, don’t stay away from the writing and think, ‘I’ll wait until the solution comes to me,’ because that's not how it works for a writer. The solution comes to us as we're writing; it comes mid-sentence. The solution to writer's block is to write about the writer's block. Why do you have it? Why does it suck, really? Why?

It could be a case of, you know, you're off plot or off point; it could be that there’s something deeper, better, truer, juicier that you really need to write about that maybe you're too embarrassed to write. I'm of the opinion that there's no such thing as writers' block. I don't think it exists. I think that there is the fear of writing badly. That's what it is, and if you're afraid of writing badly, then you're not going to be writing because it's a crippling fear. But you just have to take that fear away from it and tell yourself, ‘If I write a load of rubbish today, it doesn’t matter.’

Right, right? You know? It doesn’t matter if it's no good. Like who? Because the point of it is, right? Anyone can have an idea—anybody. But finishing an idea—that's what I'm saying. That's the agony; that's—it's difficult, right? It's always difficult. It's hard work. And apologies for swearing.

No, no, it's all good.

Yeah, but the point is that, you know, you're kind of in competition with yourself already because you're trying to improve. You're trying to be better tomorrow than you were yesterday. That's one thing. But having a beautiful, perfect idea is going to—you know, it's going to change the world. It’s going to be the best thing you've ever done. The actual finished thing is going to be clunky. You're going to be ashamed of it; you're going to pick it apart. You can't get to sleep; you're going to hate yourself for doing it. That's the point. Like that's why you move on and have another idea.

You finish things; you finish things. The stepping stones towards finding your voice—it's like on a writing day, if I don't feel—if it's not happening, if it's not coming out, I don’t force it. I take a walk. Like I stop.

Uh-huh. I'm in a slightly different situation because I'm usually quite up against it with deadlines. So I wrote the majority of this, The Bricks That Built the Houses, kind of while I was on the road touring.

Yeah, so in a tour bus full of other people?

Yeah, in a tour bus or in a cafe or in a service station, or like in the three days that I had off between in my bedroom or whatever it was.

Yeah, and the thing is, like you can make all kinds of excuses about that. You can say, ‘Oh, I need some space, and I need time, and I need natural light, and I need a room with a view, and I need…’ or you can just, you know, you can just finish it.

Yeah, yeah, it's really hard, but it's what will make you better.

Say you don't take a walk and, say, you sit down and you make yourself write one day, and it comes out. Do you delete it? Do you rewrite it?

You know, it depends what you're working on. So if I'm working on a play, yeah, you can hear—you can feel when it's a bad line. It's suddenly you're like, ‘What? Nobody would ever say that! Like this character would never say that!’ or like…

But the thing is when I'm up against the deadline or usually I'm under a lot of pressure because of my schedule, because I—I mean, that's the way I work, and I'm happy about it; it's good for me. But sometimes there isn't time to be having an off day.

And that's—and that's like it's crazy pressure but it works. Sometimes it works; other times, I'm in a really great situation because writing can be quite a lonely pursuit. But then when you have an editor or, in music, I have a great music producer who I work with, or when I'm making theater, I have, you know, the director I work with, the director, and there are these other people, these kind of midwives that populate a writer's life that help you to kind of get over yourself enough to just kind of deliver it, you know?

And, you know, with this, for example, with the bricks, the most exhilarating part of this process was deleting 30,000 words and feeling how good that was—like, right? It got lighter, and it kind of held its shape a bit more successfully, and I could just feel this thing that I'd only ever heard writers talk about but I'd never experienced, which is like the kind of joy of just cutting, cutting, cutting, cutting, and just watching it kind of grow.

Yeah, you know, it's a really interesting moment.

So yeah, a lot of it will stay there for a bit, and then you lose it; it’s alright, you know?

Yeah, so it sounds like a big part of your process is kind of the gun to your head, like just saying basically, ‘I got to get this done’ and putting yourself in a position where that's the case.

Cas, yeah, and even before when there weren't deadlines, when I had no publisher or anything else, I was still inflicting that kind of pressure on myself because I've always felt that time is kind of against me. I don't know why— I don't know if you feel like that.

Yeah, well, increasingly. But I'm—for me, it was interesting because I grew up relatively privileged and had the privilege, slash curse, of being able to kind of wander around, and like it took me longer to feel the gun of time to my head.

Right, yeah.

And I mean, I don't know much about your background, but I know from the fact, you know, that so much of the press is about your being from Southeast London and the neighborhood that you focus on and stuff—I'm guessing you maybe didn't have people sending you off to wander around.

No, I didn't get sent off to wander around. But no, I grew up, you know, in a really good, supportive environment. But the way that South London figures in my work and myself is like—it's such a huge part of me because if you grow up in a big city, especially in a part—in a city that's so South London.

Okay, so I suppose for an American audience to kind of— to say, ‘Oh, Southeast London,’ it probably doesn’t mean anything like, you know, unless you’ve spent some time in London. But the kind of character of it in my head, the way that it is, it’s a very creative place in terms of people who are really making something happen there. I felt it's a very mixed place, culturally, racially, and economically, of different people living very close together.

There's a certain sensibility that it gives you if you're from there, which is—it's quite a rough area. It was like the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and murder amongst teenagers when I was growing up in Lewisham, which is the area where I grew up. But at the same time, there's a huge amount of music and a huge amount of amazing, vibrant creativity, and I found it to be a really positive place.

I grew up in a really good home. My dad was a lawyer; my mom was a teacher. We just lived in this area that was like full of life, you know? It was just full of life, and every time I walked out of the door and down the street, every time I ever went anywhere, I would pass by thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people because it's London; it's a big city.

And I just always felt so close to life, you know? It was just everywhere. And I have a huge love for people—a deep love. I know it's so obvious to say, but I'm really moved by just like being amongst strangers and feeling connected to their humanity and feeling this thing I'm talking about earlier on about this kind of current of reality that we are denied access to.

I think there is something about a kind of frequency that exists, looking for the kind of internal experience of strangers, you know? I don't really know why, but you—I watch somebody walk down the street and the way that they're carrying their car keys, something about the way they just dropped their shopping bag. Like I feel so blown away by a tiny movement that it kind of sends me into this deep passion for these people, you know? For somebody.

And I think that the writer is constantly feeling kind of outside of life, which is what sends us to the page often, you know, trying to write ourselves into this existence that we're kind of constantly—because we observe so much, we're kind of outside of things.

But the observation is one of like pure love, really.

Yeah, I got lost in South London, and I found myself there, you know? I got into all kinds of trouble and all kinds of beautiful, beautiful things happened. And I still live there, and it's still home, you know?

In the book, there's— you talk about gentrification, and there's this sense—I mean, it seems like you feel like the heart of South London is still intact, but that there's this threat somehow of it being co-opted. Or…

Yeah, it's strange because I think it's more helpful because this conversation about gentrification happens all over the world, and it's a tragedy. But at the minute, what I've been thinking about is it's more useful actually to pan out a little bit and think about what this means in a kind of wider framework, which is this kind of symptomatic greed and the exploitation of land for profit above people.

This is—you could—okay, yes, it's a real shame South London is changing; my God, it hurts. But if we pan out a little bit and we think about land, land is being exploited for profit, the people that live on that land are being destroyed, their communities, their cultures being destroyed. This isn't just happening in cities; this is happening all over the world. It's happening to the first Australians; it's happening in the rainforest in Peru.

You know, it's like there is a greed that is running the world.

Yeah, it's greed, and it's not—there's no empathy to it. And I think that alienation happens not only to the communities that are destroyed, but to the destroyers as well.

I mean, I just think that the world that is built up upon the wreckage of these communities is also a world in which it's difficult to form community—like new community.

It is, yeah. I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know—I think that like this has to go both ways. So if I say that I love people and that I'm for people, I can't be just for people that I already agree with, you know? I can’t—like, this has to go both ways. You have to...

Recently, I've been thinking, okay, so you need to empower even the very powerful to be more real with themselves, to actually think about the cost.

The only thing I can think to say is just empathy. We just need more empathy. It's very easy for artists—anybody—to basically cut themselves off from all the rest of that humanity and find some way to categorize people and say like, ‘Oh, that person is too— you know, that's a greedy corporate person’ or ‘that's a this person’ or ‘that, you know what I mean?’

Like I think it's hard for anyone to remind themselves and try to figure out how to not shut off.

It's so difficult because part of me just recoils and kind of wishes that the world was kind of run by these reptilian monsters. But the reality is that they're human beings.

Yeah.

These are human beings that are making these decisions. And so at the beginning of this conversation, we were talking about, you know, whether this kind of grappling between what we're capable of and what we are—what our inherent nature is—and actually right, I believe that inherently we are physiologically empathetic beings, right?

There was a study that took place where I learned about this in the science museum in London. So I know it's true, right? So they took two strangers, put them in a room separated by a glass partition, and one of them stood on a block of ice, and the temperature of the other person's feet dropped in response to watching another human being who they didn't know stand on a block of ice.

Like our bodies are tuned into each other. It's like if I see like a— I see a wound on you, I will recoil. It will hurt me at some level, right? So we have to learn. People have to learn not to be able to do that, you know?

Right, yeah, but so like, but we kind of fed this thing about humanity being this inherently like aggressive, competitive, selfish—I don't believe that. I think that that is something that has encouraged this kind of myth of the individual which is very helpful for capitalism but not very helpful for humanity, you know?

Yeah, but I mean fear seems to be a pretty strong force within humanity as well, and it seems to me that a lot of this stuff arises from fear, right?

I mean, primal fear goes all the way back, right? I mean, we're afraid of death; you know, is probably where it begins. I don't know, but fear of scarcity, fear of whatever—like fear of somebody taking what's ours?

I don't know. I think it's probably pretty old.

Yeah, I know I'm with you. Yes, of course, but like once you are—it sounds so kind of far-fetched and also so easy, but this is kind of where I'm at at the minute. If you're there, if you're present with yourself, then suddenly like the worry of things, the anxiety of things to come—it's not important because you're just in—you're just where you are, you know?

You can deal with it when it comes.

But I don't know. I don’t know. I'm suddenly was about to say something extremely kind of new-agey and transparent, and I stopped myself just in time.

Let's talk about something else quickly.

Shoot.

Yeah, okay, good.

Next.

[Music]

And that's it for this Think Again mixtape which I'm calling The Writer Room—gathering some of the most poignant and interesting advice that I've heard from writers on writing over the past year. If you're listening and liking the show, you're probably sick of hearing me say it, and I wish that I could personally remove this message from all the future episodes of everyone who has gone and done this.

But at any rate, I can't. If you could go and rate or review the show on iTunes, Stitcher, wherever it is you're listening, it really doesn't take very long and it makes a major difference in terms of the show's sustainability. We have an amazing season coming up now that it's fall, and I hope to see you next week!

[Music]