Henry Oliver - The Common Reader

A discussion with Henry Oliver on The Rasheed Griffith Show

Rasheed Griffith

and

Shem Best

Sep 18, 2024

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

Show notes

Would V.S. Naipaul have made a good venture capitalist? Join us for a whirlwind episode with prolific British writer, Henry Oliver as we tackle thought-provoking inquiries surrounding the age of heroes, cities as imaginary spaces, the tragedy of unique talent and, the late bloomer.

To best describe a place you hold dear, you must leave it. Or perhaps you find it oppressive to your ideas. Again, you must leave it. Henry describes cities written by icons like Joyce as meta-physical spaces, distinct from their geographical analogs, but often more real. We all experience a city differently, but those who step out of it can best perceive and concretize those collective experiences.

We theorize that the Great Man Theory of History may be to blame, or rather its rejection. Henry attributes this shift to a backlash against the idea that history is shaped solely by individual actors, emphasizing the importance of systems and broader forces. This "impersonalisation" of history from the common man has removed the reverence once attributed to various figures and barred new ones from joining their ranks. But perhaps it is time to give the relevant thinkers their laurels once more.

The right people, with the right ideas, at the right time, can change the course of history. Take Paul Kagame, the savior of modern Rwanda. Can we replicate his genius elsewhere or even again within Rwanda to continue his legacy of forward momentum for one of Africa's fastest-developing economies? What does the theory of personalities have to tell us about the rare harmonization of variables necessary to produce such development?

And what of talent, whose capabilities present themselves later in life? Are we doing a disservice to the workforce by disregarding the late-bloomer? Shouldn't the collective experiences of those who find calling in non-traditional phases of life count towards their contribution potential within organizations?

The Common Reader - Henry Oliver

Annie John: A Novel - Jamaica Kincaid
A Small Place - Jamaica Kincaid
A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul
A Bend In The River - V.S. Naipaul
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul - Patrick French
Jane Austen - Elizabeth Jenkins
Manfield Park - Jane Austen
Whitesun Weddings - Philip Larkin
The Analects - Confucius
Borges y la Economía - Krause Martín
La llamada de la tribu (Hispánica) - Mario Vargas Llosa
A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It - Stephen Kinzer
Drown - Junot Díaz
Dubliners - James Joyce
Gullivers Travels - Jonathan Swift

Full Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated by AI and lightly edited by our team. We don’t catch every error, so if you spot one, send us a message/email via shem@cpsi.org.

Rasheed: Hi everyone. And welcome back to the podcast. Henry Oliver joins me on the podcast today for a whirlwind conversation from the geopolitics of Jane Austin, to the theology of Silicon Valley. Henry has one of the best sub stats around call the common reader and he is the author of a recently published book "Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success And Reinventing Your Life". This will be a very fun conversation. So, let's dive in.

Hi Henry, and thank you much for coming on the podcast today.

Henry: Thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to this.

Rasheed: So, I'm going to start with a very straightforward question. What unique insights did Elizabeth Jenkins have about Jane Austen that you believe are essential for us to understand?

Henry: Oh, this is a really good question.

Oh, I love this. So Elizabeth Jenkins, I get in trouble for saying this, people write to me, but she wrote the first proper biography of Jane Austen. By which I mean, it wasn't like a memoir by her brother, it wasn't like a book that sort of said, "oh, what was domestic life like in the world of Jane Austen?"

It started when she was born, and it ended when she died, and it took the novel seriously. So in some senses, her unique insight, it sounds really, banal, but she made us take Jane Austen that seriously. And that book, you still sometimes see people reading it. It's beautifully written because Elizabeth Jenkins was able to inhabit history in her imagination very vividly in a way that I think is very difficult for most people.

And so I remember particularly, she said, "think about this world where it's not that there's no TV or radio, there's no advertising, there's nothing anywhere to look at. It's a very quiet world. Imagine the excitement, you're living out in this rectory in a village of all, when a new book arrives through the door."

This is so intense, like you've been waiting and waiting. So she can really take you back and make you feel, what must it have been like to be young Jane Austen reading these novels? And that is so important because the central question of Jane Austen is, How did this young woman in a rectory in, like, rural England become this great genius?

So it's less that there's one particular insider, more that she was able to really say to us, to really immerse us in the feeling of Jane Austen.

Rasheed: Jane Austen is still, to me, an enigma. Because it is this young lady in rural England, and she understands intricate colonial politics. Some people's minds, some people's hearts it is sometimes.

And How do you think that kind of insight could have come about in her worldview?

Henry: I increasingly think of her in parallel with Virginia Woolf. So Virginia Woolf had brothers who were sent to fancy schools and given a good education. And of course, she wasn't sent there, but she had a relatively liberal father in the sense that she was just allowed to read whatever she wanted.

And I think Jane Austen must have had a very similar experience, because I agree with you. She has, she's very good on that kind of politics, but it's also increasingly clear from scholarly work that she knew Adam Smith's work. And in my view, Adam Smith is very fundamental, not just to how does she depict morality in a character's behaviors.

But how she actually uses narrative technique, how she uses free and direct style, and where the camera goes, if you like. That's really quite a deep level of interaction with Smith, right? And I think that comes from, if you think that Mr. Bennett is not her father, but she is very good at depicting that mildly negligent, quite liberal, sort of encouraging combination of fatherly qualities.

So I suspect she was just given more freedom than a lot of other young women might have been given. And I think maybe that's where her, is anger the right word? Like, sometimes she's very angry at other women who really weren't given that freedom, right?

Rasheed: Do you think that it was justified for Bob Dylan to have won the Nobel prize in the literature?

Henry: I don't know Dylan's work and I don't find him compelling in the way other people do. The songs I have listened to, I did think were lyrically quite impressive. I don't think we should be surprised that a pop singer or a musician of that sort could win. A lot of what we think of as great Elizabethan poetry came out of songbooks, and the lyric poem was often a sung thing before that.

I think Noel Coward should be in the Oxford Book of English Verse for some of his lyrics, so I don't think there's any reason why it shouldn't be. And Christopher Ricks, who might be the best living literary critic has written a very long book on Dylan's lyrics. Some people say the book is crazy and they don't know what happened to Christopher, right?

But there's no reason in principle why that shouldn't be a great decision.

Rasheed: I've always wondered about that because in some ways, not always, you can argue that the purpose or the end of the song doesn't stop at the lyrics. The reason why it has the extra oomph of it is that it adds to the music. It's part of the musical melody.

So where as a poem has to primarily stand alone on the merits, where you don't really say that, "Oh the lyrics of Dylan stands alone in many cases, they have to be added into music because it's not complete to just read the lyrics." But you did mention in passing that many poems of older English literature were songs or were lyrical.

So maybe that's not the strongest counter argument to the prize at all.

Henry: I think an awful lot of the lyrics that are written for music don't particularly stand on their own, you're right, but it is quite possible. I think you can take, for example, Feste's songs in Twelfth Night, and read them as poems in an anthology and not think about singing them or having music, even though, whenever you see it on stage they will be sung, and they will be accompanied.

Now that's a different thing to writing a sort of a really good pop lyric that relies on the music, but it does happen for sure.

Rasheed: You once wrote that the strongest minds in modern technology might best be understood, surprisingly, by reading literary criticism. Henry, why is that?

Henry: One of the ideas that is relatively prominent in literary criticism today, and has been for a couple of generations, is influence.

Now, there are lots of different ways of thinking about influence, but essentially, it's an important idea that you come along and you think, "Oh, all this great poetry has been written. What am I supposed to do?" This kind of what is called the burden of the past, it's a very important thing for poets. And it distinguishes the great poets, if you like, how they respond to that book.

It's very striking to me that the burden of the past is felt by people who are not poets. So Neil Armstrong, when he was an undergraduate. "I've missed the great age of flight". And he was really irritated. He was really upset, right? He really felt like all the world had been discovered and what was he going to do?

And then of course they open up a new frontier. I've spoken to people in Silicon Valley about this and they talk about in the 90s, people would get to Silicon Valley and say, "I've missed it. We've invented computers. Like, it's all been done." And I think that's the same feeling that Wordsworth felt when he said, "what am I supposed to do? I can't be John Milton. He's been John Milton." And Hollis Robbins just wrote a really good piece about Peter Thiel today. And I think Thiel's interesting because, in a way, we think he's talking to non tech people. But in a way, he's constantly talking to the other tech people saying, "You should take the humanities more seriously. That's really gonna be a value add for you guys."

And this is one of the ways in which I think it's difficult to call this instrumental value. But just coming to a better understanding of the way that, like, achieving really significant things. Yes, it's about technical expertise and innovation and stuff, but it's also about these very complicated matters of influence and other things you can learn from poetry.

And I think Silicon Valley is much more driven by its emotions than it might realize.

Rasheed: Yeah, I think also Peter Thiel is a very good, entry point into this theme, this very grand theme that you're building in the sense that, for example, I have a friend who wrote a very good essay about Peter Thiel's 'Zero to One' book in the sense of how it's actually a theological story.

And Peter replied to him, and said "yeah, you're right. It is actually about the Bible and theology and so on." So he embodies this thing, which is, "I am a master technologist," he used that term. Broad term, but "I am doing this because this is the way to move society forward, to move history forward, to move everything we think of solving the problem of evil, you can only do it via technological growth and change."

So he seeps into that himself. And I do agree. I think he actually really wants to get the other tech people into that kind of mindset. I think you use a good phrase where you said Silicon Valley is a civilization project. And I think essentially that's what Peter Thiel wants too.

Henry: So much. And it's so notable to me, the major figures of Silicon Valley, Patrick Collison, Marc Andreessen, there are half a dozen of them, right?

Elon. They get that it's a civilizational project and they are actually very interested in Western philosophy or the Renaissance or like Rome or whatever. And I think it's, slightly misleading to look at the median. We've just had the vague tech canon. That's what the median person in Silicon Valley is reading, and that's very interesting and important.

But the people who are making the most significant change in Silicon Valley, they have an implied ‘Great Man Theory of History’ over there, which I fully endorse. And that's not the whole reading list for the most influential people there, right? So tech, in a way, tech's leaders are trying to say to its people, "We're more into the humanities than you."

Probably they would all deny this in explicit terms, but I think you're right that, this is one of the tensions over there.

Rasheed: If you were to have, let's say, the entire YC cohort read five books, this is a big question. Off the top of your head, what five books would you make them read?

Henry: I am thinking of blogging about this, so I'm like, thinking about my list. Obviously some Shakespeare, probably the Henriad, because notions of death, oblivion, things being uncontrollable, the best leader gets wiped out in his prime and the worst leader lingers on for a long time and stuff.

I think these would be a very good reinforcement to the biographical understanding they have of history. Mills, Bentham, and Coleridge essays. are the second. It's hugely important. I would probably throw in the Civilization Essay and the Genius Essay, but Bentham and Coleridge is, I think, the best thing ever written about rationalism, effective altruism, any form of utilitarianism, to say.

You have to balance it with an understanding of history, with an understanding of poetry, like all these different things. Otherwise, you're going to have too narrow a view of things. Maybe Gulliver's Travels. I don't know how many people would actually read it though. And the other big one for me would be 'Mansfield Park' by Jane Austen, because to me it's like the best novel about corporate life.

Which is, any like, literary people will think this is a dreadful way to talk about Jane Austen. But Mansfield Park is a stately home. It's got a kind of implied hierarchy as well as the explicit hierarchy, i. e. some people in the org structure have dotted lines to each other. And it's a novel of dialogue.

And it's a novel about, the first time I read it I thought, wow. What's happening to Fanny is she's going to meetings and she knows that she has something interesting to say in the meeting. But she can't get herself heard above all the politicking, the bickering the grandstanding. This is meeting culture, but like analogous because it's said in this country home. So I would give them that one and strongly reinforce the idea that it's a corporate novel. After that Maybe a Milton sonnet about feeling like your youth has already left you and that time's going to overtake you.

Rasheed: Do you think to be a good cosmopolitan, is actually too much to ask of someone? In the sense of, if you are very into literature, people are perhaps into western canon, to use that term, but they've never read 'Three Kingdoms' from China, never read the top books in Arabic and so on. Do you think we lose too much if we're trying to be cosmopolitan?

Henry: I'm not a cosmopolitan. Maybe I'm the wrong person to ask. I haven't read a lot of these books because I find that sometimes I read in translation I can get a lot out of it, like Anna Karenina. I feel like that's coming across to me really strongly. Other times I read in translation and I feel on every page I'm just getting a very small amount.

I can feel all the limitations. And so partly I want to read where I can get the most value. And partly I feel like I need to find another way to get to that because I have this with Dostoevsky's longer novels. I just don't think they're really coming across in the same way. I think it probably is too much to ask and I think a lot of people have jobs, kids, well, etc.

If they haven't yet read Shakespeare, or whoever, Dante, whoever. Yeah, maybe it is a bit much to start saying, "Oh, but world literature. Oh, but this." Because they have to start somewhere and they should start somewhere where they'll actually get it and want to read it and they won't be turning the pages thinking, "Really? Why is this great? I don't understand." Let them get obsessed with King Lear and then maybe we can move on to Tolstoy and then maybe we can move on to, you know, the Bhagavad Gita. To go straight to a culture that you know nothing of, I think is, very hard for most people.

Rasheed: For you personally, do you think you are deeply missing something in terms of human insight if, for example, you don't really understand a fifth of humanities literature like China, for example, and the thousand years of metaphor and lyricism that it has in itself. Do you think you are just missing something? Or do you feel like, "you know what? We can probably get enough just from reading Western European literature."

Henry: No, you are missing something, of course. That's indisputable. I read Chinese poetry in translation. There was a great wave of West Coast American translators who were poets, who were translating Japanese poetry, Chinese poetry, haiku. There's a lot of really good material and I read different translations.

I feel like I'm really getting that. I've read the Analects. That's been quite well translated. The Tao. It’s well translated and again, that generation did a good job of that. So I'm not against it. I just think that it's much, much harder to get into. And so you have to be very considerate about where your marginal gains are and what you need to do to help you build up.

I would say if you want to read Chinese literature, which I am not well read in at all, reading the Analects probably is the first thing you should do. In the sense that, I would say, if you want to read the Western canon, you need to do Plato and Homer at some point, just relatively early. Not because you'll be constantly going, "Oh look, there's a reference to the Republic", but because it just gives you a broad sense of the foundations that many people have built on. So you are missing things, but as I say, it's hard work.

Rasheed: Do you have a rank order list of British authors that you would consider to be libertarian?

Henry: Novelists? No, I think British writers aren't very libertarian.

Milton's pretty good. Like, he's very good on free speech and stuff like that. But no, in general, I don't think we're good at that.

Rasheed: Why do you think that is?

Henry: Ugh, I spent so much time thinking about this and the related question of why fiction is bad at depicting capitalism. I really don't know. I don't actually. A reason often given is that it's impossible to depict the invisible hand of the market in fiction.

And libertarianism would share a kind of problem with that. In a way, it's a philosophy of absence. I don't believe that is, particularly, like a challenge that can't be overcome. But there is a problem there. Novelists tend to split between being conservative and liberal, as opposed to libertarian and conservative.

I don't have a good answer.

Rasheed: There is an aspect of literature that I'm now becoming more familiar with. This is primary Latin American and in those writings, you tend to find a lot more libertarian-leaning work, which I think people actually tend to not realize because, of course, people don't read many Latin American novelists per se.

But even probably one of the most famous ones, Borges, there is a lot of actually good writing in Spanish about his political philosophy, about his underlying aspects of the stories where the thematic elements, for example, in Alice, it's very individualism, philosophy comes out very clear and so on. And you tend to see a lot of that now. Even Mario Vargas from Peru, he has a lot of very explicit actual statements about philosophy, but also in the writing it comes across quite visibly.

But I tend to not see that kind of, call it underlying politics in other cultural writing besides Latin America. I've always found that. particularly curious.

Henry: I think Borges is a really good example. I was talking to someone about this yesterday, about how he's becoming newly relevant in a world of new technology and AI and stuff.

And I think you're right about the sort of political angle. Essentially, I think maybe in English writing, the problem is that we're very empirical. So we're very interested in the close details of life rather than this. Is there an English Borges? It all sounds like a contradiction in terms, but also English fiction is typically quite concerned with issues of class. And so I think that framing... Where is the English novelist who would say with John Stuart Mill that social life is so restrictive here and we need to throw the doors open and get rid of all this nonsense? I think novelists are more interested in satirizing it and attending to it and maybe like Austin, embedding it within a liberal philosophical and economic framework, but not in order to advocate for a political thing, in order to advocate for a moral or social thing.

Rasheed: There's a very good book, non fiction book , it's called 'Borges and Economics'. It's not in English, it's only in Spanish. I'll recommend it, I'll put it in show notes, but hopefully someone can translate it into English at some point. Especially in political philosophy and politics, it's very apparent to me there is a disjoint between the anglophone and Hispanic world when it comes to political philosophy.

Now in this particular topic, classical liberalism and libertarian philosophy, it is a complete separation where everyone that speaks Spanish knows the great English writing but almost no one who speaks English only knows the great Spanish writing and it's a big problem that hopefully at some point we can address somehow.

Henry: I agree. But again, I wonder if it's the translation problem.

Rasheed: So we were recently together in Dublin and I have a couple of Dublin questions. We're going to go into it via Joyce. So you wrote, this is a quote from Joyce, "I always write about Dublin because if I can get to the heart of Dublin, I can get to the heart of all the cities in the world." But yet, most of Joyce's work, he was in Paris and other non Dublin cities.

And I always figured that-, and no offense to Dublin, but I have a larger point. that it is too suffocating in many ways to do work in. And the greatest kind of Irish work are people who are always from Ireland or from Dublin but leave. And I always wondered if you have a view on that idea of place where you have a perception of a place but you never really inhabit that place.

Henry: I think Joyce inhabited Dublin very strongly and vividly when he was young and reached a point where he could see too clearly that Dublin was not going to accept what he wanted to write. And the reality of any place that you live in is always maybe largely, but always partly imaginative. There are however many people walking around London right now, and we all have very different conceptions of what London is and what it means to us, even though we're all on the same street.

And I think, in a way, leaving is the best way to write about a place that has affected you so strongly, because it leaves you just with the imaginative role. It's interesting to contrast this to Dickens, who, he, again, the British empirical attitude, he had to walk the streets every day. He wanted to see and document and journalistically provide himself with this evidence.

Whereas Joyce was, oh, he's treated so badly by Dublin that this was just not possible for him. It's interesting that Frederick Douglass was a Dickens obsessive and saw in 'Bleak House' a lot of very resonant messages and details for the abolition movement. That's what I mean by a place being largely imaginative.

A lot of people read Ulysses, read Bleak House or David Copperfield and they've never been to Dublin or London. But that is not a problem for them in any way. So I think it's because of the role of the imagination and as I say Joyce had a very unhappy time as young man and that's the bigger part of it.

Rasheed: You know, I was working for a long time on an essay about Irish-Caribbean connections. This is probably over a year. It's a surprisingly long time to be trying to write this kind of essay. But I just couldn't find a good pivot point to encapsulate my meta-theme. Until actually I read your piece on Joyce. And I finally got it.

So hopefully I can finish this essay uh, quite soon.

But the idea is this. It says exactly what you just said. The imagination becomes the real place. And you have, in many times, to leave a place to properly see it. So this reminds me of a similar ethos quote from a Caribbean author named Junot Díaz, I'm not sure if you know his work. He's from the Dominican Republic.

I think he won the Pulitzer in 2008. In any case he had a line where he said, "We're all in the Caribbean if you really think about it." And in that sense, that is to me, the connection. It is a mental framing, the mental model of the world. And in the Caribbean, you know, it has such an essentially vivid embodiment of this entire meta concept and you see it in many other places. So for a long time, every time I visit Dublin.

I think I've been there four times now. There's always been this weird anxiety I get from being in Dublin. And I just realized no, the reason why for me Dublin gives them this impression is because it's a Caribbean city. I feel it a thing where you actually have talent, you have to leave, you have ambition, you have to leave. And the people who are there, there is this stultifying nature to their personality that is very underwhelming in many ways. But again, to truly embody the culture you have, you have to leave. And you get that very much also in the Caribbean. I remember Tyler, he had a line where he mentioned that, you know, "the best Haitian culture right now is in New York." And that's the core meta point. The space is not the real place. The imagination, the mental model becomes the real core of the basis that we think is the culture. Very true in the Caribbean. Very true in Irish culture as well. It is the mental model that is the real thing. Imagination becomes so strong that the space itself is no longer to actual basis of it anymore.

Henry: Think about it. There are two books I want to refer to. The first is 'Confessions of an Opium Eater' by Thomas De Quincey, which is often called psychogeography. But essentially, that's a really good example of the point you're making, which is that this guy who's totally topped up on opium and he goes completely mad, his vision of London and the way he describes London is a really good example of how a city completely changes based on the imaginative experience of the person. Obviously, in this case, London, hopped up and everything. But it reminds me also of 'Annie John' by Jamaica Kincaid.

Rasheed: Ah, yes.

Henry: It's the only one of her books I've read, but I really, I love that book.

And when I'm like, less busy, I want to sit down with her others. But that's another good example of she had to leave to write that book. And oh my god, it's so vivid about place. It's so compelling about the nature of the culture, the family culture, the local culture in the town and everything. But presumably it would have been too raw, too suffocating somehow for her to write that.

I'm pretty sure she wrote it when she left. And I think also partly books like this are written from the perspective of having grown up a little bit. And that is the idea of "I left that." I don't like these phrases, but "I left that version of myself behind, both in time, but also physically. And now I'm on this side of the river of growing up, and this side of the ocean. I can look back and depict it all very clearly."

There's a line in Philip Larkin's poem, 'The Whitsun Weddings', where he says that he's been on this train and people keep getting on and he hears all this kind of larking around. And he thinks it's the porters, the train porters, putting the bags on and messing around, so he hasn't paid any attention.

And at one of the stops he looks up and he realizes that at every station it's wedding parties making all this fuss. And all these couples are getting on and he says, "I looked out more carefully this time and saw it all again in different terms." And this is a very central metaphor. The idea that you're on this journey, life is a journey, it only goes one way.

He calls it a frail traveling coincidence. And at some point you look at the same thing that's been happening to you all the time and you see it all again in different terms. And that's what happens to Joyce and Kincaid and all these others. What is it that my imagination is telling me about this place?

I need to leave it, look back at it and see it all again in different terms. Otherwise, the words we've talked about, emotion recollected in tranquility. If you don't leave, you don't get the tranquility.

Rasheed: There is a long essay actually by Kincaid, you mentioned, it's called 'A Small Place', where she actually really concretizes that thing you're getting from 'Annie John'.

And again, as a Caribbean person living outside the Caribbean, it's a very anxious read, literally.

Henry: I've never been to the Caribbean and didn't know much about it, and I found that book very effective. I couldn't believe it. That's partly why I didn't go and read her other work straight away, because I thought, this is quite a big hit.

Rasheed: Are we all in The Truman Show now?

Henry: I can't actually remember what I said about 'The Truman Show.' I've been writing about it again recently. I think what's interesting about it is that it could have ended in a lot of different ways. One way you assess a good piece of art, a good piece of literature is, "could this story have branched off differently?"

And in a funny way, the real lesson of the Truman Show is not that there's this like, very obvious crude metaphor stuff at the end where the studio, the head of the studio, director guy speaks to him out of the sky, "Truman, I am your father." Yeah, we get it. And it was a reaction against all sorts of things like widespread surveillance in society, and it came out just the same time we had the show 'Big Brother' in the UK.

So in an obvious sense, yes, we all do live in the Truman Show because all those questions of surveillance and so forth are completely ballooned with social media and phones and I remember growing up and everyone worrying about CCTV and now, whenever you go on the street, like, everyone has the best quality camera in history.

You can just, you know, pointed at you whatever they want. CCTV has become a pitiful concern next to that. But I don't really think that's the proper lesson to take from the Truman Show. I think the question is how much attention you're paying to your surroundings and what kind of response you make to it.

And it's worth watching that film again and thinking about, what if they killed Truman rather than saved him? What if they let him out halfway through, and he was like one of those prisoners who, when they come out of prison after 20 years, they can't adjust to the world. Like, they just can't, and it's really awful for them.

And he says, "do you know what? Send me back." What if they let him marry the right girl? And he says, "okay, that's a fair cop, I'll just stay and do it." I think it it's an interesting, there's an interesting sort of nest of thought experiments in there that would make us maybe reconsider how crudely we would map it onto our own lives now.

And the extent to which you can turn off the algorithm is deeply underappreciated let alone the fact that the way we talk about the algorithm is not very sensible. It's just the question of agency is central to Truman and it's not central to the way we always talk about it.

Rasheed: In an essay you wrote on this topic, you had a throwaway line where you mentioned that you think the Truman Show has deeper philosophical questions than The Matrix.

Do you stand by that?

Henry: I haven't rewatched The Matrix since I was a teenager, whereas I've seen The Truman Show several times. Probably shouldn't make these sort of throwaway comments. But I think The Matrix, what The Matrix gave us is like, red pill, blue pill. And that's been quite useful, and it's memed, and it's an interesting way to think about it.

But the Matrix took an already existing philosophical thought experiment and played it out. It's like brain in the jar stuff. Is it actually that interesting a question? Do we live in a simulation or whatever? Isn't it one of those philosophical questions that sort of resolves in nothing very useful? I spend a lot of time trying to get to grips with it.

I don't know where it leads. If you're Derek Parfit, the question of are you a brain in the jar does turn out to be very useful, right? And does lead you to some very interesting insights. I think the Matrix doesn't, whereas Truman, because it's closer to the reality of our lives, and it's got that wonderful quality of like, it looks a bit like the 50s, but it's very obviously the 90s, and like, actually guys, the 90s were more like the 50s than we're comfortable with recognizing and stuff.

Aren't those sorts of Social science thought experiments, much more philosophically useful to us than the very abstract ones? I think that's what I would say. And people, have you ever had a conversation with someone about The Matrix and gone away and thought, "Wow, that person had really interesting things to say"?

Rasheed: Why don't we admire heroes anymore in the modern age?

Henry: Several reasons. The first is that we had a very legitimate reaction against Great Man Theory of History to say that other things are important too, like systems and processes and what Auden called the vast impersonal forces of history. But we took it way too far because historians professionalized the idea that history is a system.

It is not the result of biography. And it became respectable to be that sort of a historian. And Professor Sir David Cannadine, who is maybe the most eminent living historian, certainly the most eminent living English historian, has actually said, "if you write biography, you are not practicing real history."

And so I think a lot of it's to do with that. A lot of it's to do with the Great Man Theory of History becoming the Bad Man Theory of History, because Carlyle was obviously an unspeakable racist. And I'm not convinced about this, but may have been inspirational to the Nazis. And on the whole, it is much easier to see the outsized influence of Napoleon or Hitler or whoever.

And obviously, lots of men on the internet are obsessed with Alexander the Great or whatever, so that only reinforces the broad cultural perception that, like, the Great Man Theory of History is about dudes invading other dudes or what, right? But rephrase it as the Great People Theory of History, who sometimes collaborate.

People say, "oh, you say Newton discovered calculus, but so did Leibniz." And I'm like, well how long is the list? If it's the Great Two Men Theory of History, that's still a lot closer to the Hero Theory than this, right? Anyone who's worked in a very effective organization or who's read a lot about that sort of thing knows that there is irreplaceable talent.

VCs are constantly saying it's not money, it's not ideas, it's people that are the binding constraint. Someone like Elon. I'm a great admirer of Elon Musk, but he has done the Great Man Theory of History no favors by being simultaneously the most interesting and the most irritating person alive. And it's basic human nature that people will politicise against someone and that then stops them saying, "no, okay, he's really irritating on Twitter or whatever, but dude, SpaceX and Tesla, get real."

Somehow the partisanship that he is engaged with, it instinctively prevents a lot of people from seeing the other side. So I think those two things combined are the problem. But when I speak to someone like you or someone interested in progress studies or tech or whatever, they would never say Great Man Theory of History, but it's implicit in a lot of those discussions, right?

I think you see it everywhere. The idea that we're looking for this very sort of niche level of talent. No, I don't like the phrase top 1 percent because I think it's more evolutionary than that and more best adapted to doing weird innovative stuff that a lot of other people would find difficult or irritating.

Isn't that one of the main focuses of these areas? And yet there's so much discussion about systems and history and vast impersonal forces. So I think we need a revival.

Rasheed: So I agree with you. I am a big advocate, we can say of the Great Man Theory of History, and in a way that people, I guess often find annoying, at least when I have conversations with them. Because I usually give a particular example.

I try to visit African countries every year as part of my Mercatus activities. And it is. Interesting, the disparity in policies in different African countries. But one of the things I find almost pessimistic was my first visit to Rwanda. So Rwanda before I went, I heard all of the things. Okay, you have a transformative society in a very quick way. Everything happens so quickly. You know, so on and so. I don't have to recount here. But when I went for the first time I realized, "oh, well, all these things are definitely true. There has been a massive improvement in quality of life, in social management in almost any metric in a very short period of time". But somehow that made me more pessimistic in some ways, because we know why it happened at his name is Paul Kagame. It was a particular person in a particular place doing particular things.

It was not a mystery black box of policy.

You can have all the fantastical theory and models and philosophy you want. But unless you have good people, in the correct places, nothing else matters. And maybe in some ways that could be an optimistic story and he thinks that we know what works. Good management from good people at the correct time. But sometimes, oftentimes the good people they go to work at Facebook are Stripe or something like that.

And they don't actually engage in government tanning, concrete way.

Henry: Yeah. I so agree with that. I prefer to think of it as the personality theory of history. And I agree with you. We know the ideas, right? Apartheid in South Africa. Everyone knew that was wrong. The whole world was saying that we didn't need think tanks to write papers saying, "Hey, do you think this is a good idea or not? We've done enough. No."

Everyone knows. What you needed was the personality of someone like Nelson Mandela that everyone could get behind. And that's the persuasive force. Martin Luther King is the persuasive force. In a funny way, a lot of the more liberal minded people who would take a more impersonal view of history in theoretical terms, they speak all the time about the great men of history, right?

Frederick Douglass, my goodness. So I agree with you, but I'm not so pessimistic about it because I think the nature of these personalities is that they aren't easily satisfied. And if they're currently working at Facebook, checked out. But if they are, I like, it's not going to be very fulfilling for them.

Rasheed: So you had a throwaway comment at a different occasion where you said that Borges has influenced every book after him. You wrote a book recently. How has Borges influenced your book?

Henry: I don't know. It wasn't a very conscious influence. I suppose what I was trying to get at is that it's difficult to find a prominent writer who would deny the influence of Borges in some way.

And just the fact that we've both talked about it and brought it up, and I find him coming into my writing all the time. I used to think, I used to read it and think, "I don't understand this. I'm not interested in it. This is silly." And now I read it and think, a bit like with Jonathan Swift, how did he know? How did he know? So I'm sure that he has influenced me, but I can't, it wasn't conscious.

Rasheed: Okay, now to be more concrete, you have a book called 'Late Bloomers', . And one of my favorite late bloomers is Philip Glass, the American composer and he was essentially not very well known until he was 40 years old when his major opera became a hit.

He was still driving a taxi I think up to that time to make money and of course now he's known as the one of the most important composers in history. And I had a very deep interest in your book also on a personal level in the sense that it depends on where you draw the threshold on 'late' in many ways. But I'm now 30, well I'm 31 in a couple days and I'm only now actually doing the things that I think I should be doing. And in my 20s, people that know me really, I wasn't doing anything particularly meaningful, although of course you gotta look back and say everything leads up to a good thing, so on and so on. But in many ways, I fit that late bloomer category. I'm going back to law school. I'm going to get into politics. I am being invited now to speak at us Congress, UK house of Lords. I am. Starting a think tank. I'm talent hunting all at the same time. So all of the things that I'm now doing. And therefore it made me realize, well, you know, this is a topic that I think most people think about, but no one really concretized it until the great Henry came along to write this book. So why did you push to write this book?

Henry: That's very kind of you. I'm very pleased to hear all of that. I give different answers to this every time, and maybe you shouldn't trust anything I say.

Essentially, I got ill and I had to take time off work, and this gave me a lot of time to sit around and read. It's not like I wasn't doing that anyway, but it gave me more. And I decided, well, you know, I say I want to be a writer. Here I am with the spare time. I'm gonna start a blog and I started blogging about, without realizing it, I was blogging about late bloomers like Penelope Fitzgerald, Samuel Johnson. So the book has a very literary origin. Then I heard Tyler Cowen talk about, I think he was talking about his talent book and he said "people who haven't done anything yet, but maybe they will". And I was like, "oh, I inadvertently happened to know quite a lot about that."

And so I started blogging about it in a more formalized way and gave it a little name and whatever. And then I was working in employment marketing. Which is, "we don't sell chocolate, we sell jobs at big companies, right?" You can decide whether you think that's better or worse for the world on that. And I was the guy where clients would say, "where are the people we can hire? Where's the talent pool?"

And I would say, if you look at all this labor market data from different countries, it's like the over 50s are a big group right now. And you need to be talking to them because they're leaving the workforce, they've got potential, they want to change jobs, whatever. No one was interested.

High upfront costs, mild ageism, various factors. And of course, if you start talking about Samuel Johnson and Penelope Fitzgerald in your labour market presentations, people go, "Would you get this idiot out of here? I don't know what this has got to do with my-". But I knew that there was this bigger thing going on.

And then I read there is a book about late bloomers, which I try not to talk about because I don't want to say unkind things, but I just don't think it's a very good book, and I don't think it gave any sort of answer to the question. That made me grumpy, and being grumpy is very motivational. And in a way I liked the idea because it gave me the opportunity to do everything I wanted to do.

Promote a biographical view of talent, write biographical chapters, teach myself about, I'm interested in social science. And make this case, not just to the people I was working with, but to the culture at large, that actually these 50 year olds might legitimately be your best bet. So it was a very messy process, and I feel like that's not a great answer, but I agree with you that it now seems much more obvious and it's in the culture, right?

It's in the news all the time. "So and so, age 70, does cool thing." There was a TikTok video of a woman who became a park ranger in her 80s and retired at a hundred. Ruth Bader-Ginsburg! The amazing late bloomer pin up, right? It's everywhere now. So I hope it's changing. I hope we're getting better at acknowledging the talents of people who have demonstrated potential.

Rasheed: We are connected via Tyler Cowen . And in my case, it is, I know exactly when I pivoted into the path I have now. And that was when, I did a podcast years ago with Tyler and he posted it on MR and there was a very glowing review of that podcast saying it's like completely new material, really good, so on and so on. And I started getting emails just from that one post. And then everything ballooned from there where we actually work together now doing talent selection from a very weird, obscure Caribbean podcast. And I'm curious how you now think about viewing talent. 'cause you obviously worked in employment, HR type things.

You've now written a book essentially about talent. How has that changed your mental model for thinking about talent selection?

Henry: The two things I take much more seriously now are networks and motivation, which I always, I was very resistant to the whole concept of network science. In the sense that people would say, if you want to have a career, you need to do networking.

Because networking just sounded like pure, unmitigated hell to me. And I wanted to just stay at home and not have to do that. But the book, doing all the research, I realized I had to make networking quite central to the idea. And that networking, it doesn't work the way we always think it works, but it is hugely fundamental.

And the second thing is that , someone said this to me recently, I was very pleased. They said that the book is good at understanding people's motivations, which I think is never discussed. What you get in a lot of talent books is describing people's qualities or saying that people are resilient or all this blah, blah, blah.

And it's like, the number one thing is, "Why does someone like Margaret Thatcher keep going?" We think it makes sense because we know that she gets there in the end. But if you just drop yourself into 1973 or 1977 and say, "Why does she keep doing this?" It's very weird. Almost everyone else would have quit long before.

I knew that this was important going in, but I went into a lot of, maybe too much detail about it in the book. And I'm much more interested in that now. In a way, I've become a bit skeptical. I think it's very hard to understand a person's motivations without knowing them quite deeply. And I'm very impressed by people like you who have a good way of like- I've uprated my view of talent selectors, like people who select in sports or wherever really a lot, because I think writing the book is easy, actually doing it. What the book persuaded me of is that actually spotting talent is really hard.

Rasheed: There's an obvious answer to this question, but I don't want the obvious answer. What kind of talent, do you think V.S. Naipaul had?

Henry: You think the obvious answer is he was a literary genius blah blah blah blah blah.

Rasheed: Yes.

Henry: What's so interesting about Naipaul? Let me like, circle around it and then get to a central point. I've only read three of his novels so I shouldn't really be like, proclaiming but 'A House for Mr. Biswas' is a kind of Jane Austen-esque novel. It's got the father, it's got the family, it's got the local community, it's got wonderfully subtle irony.

It's got that kind of, he walks a difficult balance of compassion and disgust. Like it's just, it's just wonderful. By the time you get to 'In a Free State' or 'A Bend in the River', we are talking about someone more like Conrad, who can think politically, who can make quite strong predictions about the future.

And who can look into parts of the world, which ‘Mr. Biswas’, he grows up in that world. He knows those people, right? These, presumably, these are all his cousins he's putting in the book, or whatever, like his parents are in the book. It's coming, when he's writing his father, it's coming from a place of real, instinctive personal emotion.

'A Bend in the River' is about geopolitics, it's about what's in the news, and places he's visited, and that, I think is a much different level of accomplishment and a much more synthetic way of thinking. And you see this in some of his non fiction, not the travel books. I've picked some of those up and I don't find them very readable actually. But like in his lectures and stuff where, you know, there's his idea of the universal civilization.

In a funny way, this is the answer to your earlier question. He's the closest we have to a classically liberal novelist, but he writes from an inverted perspective of anger and misanthropy and. Uh, These things are not classically liberal. Grr. As opposed to the other way around. So that's his talent.

That's what I think. He's able to get beyond the social novel into the Conradian novel. I don't know how many other writers have done that, that combination. Because 'Mr. Biswas' is like A++ at that. And 'A Bend in the River' is A++. That's two really big peaks he's getting up there.

He's another one that had to leave. And he's very good at writing about places where he doesn't want to be. People think he's very good at writing about places where he has bigoted feelings towards the people. And that's obviously true, and I'm not trying to diminish his gross, at times, attitudes. But he's very good at being the well educated, accomplished, socially secure English immigrant who is constantly going to places that make him feel a bit scared that he's going back.

And in a free state, is it in a free state where the opening of the stories is about the Indian servant going to Washington DC? Am I getting this, it's been a few years. What an unforgettable piece of writing. How did he do that? Because he's living that and he's able to transfigure what was originally a very personal version of that experience into a much more objective, observed, and as I say, quite political view. That's not a very straightforward answer, but something like that is what I think of his particular genius, his uniqueness.

Rasheed: If we were to run the counterfactual differently, would V.S. Naipaul make a very good VC in Silicon Valley?

Henry: Sorry. And no, I don't think he would. No. I don't think he was properly motivated for that. And I think he would have absolutely despised the social codes and the behavioral expectations. I'm actually more interested in your answer to this one. What do you think?

Rasheed: I actually think he would be a very good VC in Silicon Valley, particularly in the sense of a lot of the climbing you have to do to get top of any of these high tech firms or essentially firms that do investment allocations or so on. You have to be a bit anti human in some ways, while at the same time acknowledging that you have to have some particular insight of people that you will be able to manipulate. I'm using very harsh language here. But I do think as a person, because especially if you read the biography, his biography, you realize that as a young person, I think he had those traits as well. And especially growing up in the Caribbean, you see it in the writing, there's just a bare metal vulgarity, a lot of Caribbean way of thinking of the world, that I think puts him in a very good position to be very credible in like large, politically innocuous organizations, especially ones where the bar is actually very high.

Because when you have a very low bar, the fight is bitter and very weird and mis-allocated. When the bar is actually very high, the kind of motivation and push and drive you need to have and the kind of way you want to think about people and humans and try to read the room and read the actual organizations and read the founders; I think that kind of Napoleon universality that he has would actually be very well placed in that situation. And because I think based on how his drive was to get out of the Caribbean, I do think that drive is there where he would actually push and push to be inside the organization to be very top level.

So I want to say if I run the counterfactual, he would probably go quite well.

Henry: No, I can go for that. I think that's really well reasoned because I do think that Jonathan Swift would have been a great investor. He would have been, oh my god. Oh, he would have been so good at that. I suppose the thing that's holding me back on this is that both Swift and Naipaul, I fully agree with your assessment of their abilities and everything, but personally they were motivated by very personal psychological things and I suspect Naipaul would have felt a sense of shame at not having followed his father, or a sense of inadequacy, or somehow, some kind of right. And I don't know whether that would have been too much of a blocker for him. But I agree. I'll follow you on that. That's a good answer.

Rasheed: So, Henry, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This has been a very fun conversation.

Henry: This has been amazing. You ask such good questions. I wish we could do three more hours.

Rasheed: That's it for this episode. For updates about the podcast, please subscribe to our Substack blog found on cpsi.media. You can also read our newsletters and long form content on Caribbean policy improvements.