Simon Parkin: The Seeds of History

E440 Simon Parkin is a video game critic, journalist, author and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.  He’s contributed to The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Guardian, among others. His previous book, The Island of Extraordinary Captives, is a New Yorker Book of the Year and winner of The Wingate Literary Prize. His new book, “The Forbidden Garden: […]

Episode Transcript

(00:08):
Hey, humans. How's it going? Susan Ruth here.
Thanks for listening to another episode
of Hey Human podcast.
This is episode 440,
and my guest is Simon Perkin.
Simon is a video game critic, journalist, author,
and is a fellow of the Royal Historical
Society.
He's contributed to the New Yorker, Harper's, The

(00:30):
Guardian, among others, and his previous book, The
Island of Extraordinary
Captives,
is a New Yorker book of the year
and winner of the Wingate literary prize.
His new book, The Forbidden Garden, The Botanists
of Besieged Leningrad and Their Impossible Choice,
is the true story of the botanists at
the world's first seed bank who faced impossible

(00:50):
choices
during the siege of Leningrad,
eat the collection to prevent starvation
or protect their life's work to prevent world
hunger.
I
learned of Simon on Blue Sky app
in my first days of being on that
app. And
I he was posting about this book, and

(01:11):
I thought, this is an interesting person. I
need to talk with him. He was very
kind. He answered me right away, and we
set up this conversation. And
it is a delightful one. I think you'll
really enjoy Simon and our conversation.
Check out heyhumanpodcast.com
for links and to learn more about my
guests and the show.
Hey Human Podcast is on YouTube under official

(01:34):
Susan Ruth. I'm on Patreon at susanruthism.
My TikToks and Instagram and blue sky
is susanruthism.
And check out susanruth.com
to learn more about me and my other
artistic endeavors and
find my music, my albums on Spotify, Apple
Music, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your
music.
Rate, review, and subscribe to Hey Human Podcast

(01:56):
on Apple, Iheart, Spotify, wherever you get your
podcasts.
Thank you for listening. Be well.
Be kind.
Be love.
Happy New Year. And here we go.
Simon Parkin, welcome to Hey Human.
Hey. Thanks for having me. It's lovely to
see you. Welcome.

(02:16):
You too. Yeah. I saw you on Blue
Sky,
the new place.
The new place. Yeah. And
just started digging into your
body of work, and I immediately
said, this is a person I have to
talk with. So thank you so much for
saying yes.
Yeah. No. My pleasure. Yeah. Well, let's jump

(02:36):
right in. I like to start these conversations
finding out a little bit more about you,
how your upbringing was, and how that shaped
you. Yeah. I grew up in the south
of London
in a place
called Q, which
is near Richmond, if anyone knows Ariel Kingston.
And I went to school in a place
called Wimbledon, which people will know because of

(02:57):
the tennis. Quite
a book loving family. My dad is a
book collector, and so
he would take me to
events like jumbo sales, whatever, but also, you
know, places where you buy secondhand books and
all of that. And he would go around
looking for 1st editions of

(03:18):
Daphne du Maurier books he'd like to collect,
and Jean Lucare, and people like that. Those
are the kind of things he was into.
And so, yeah, I was around that
and got into books myself and, you know,
read lots, and I had a little collection
of Enid Blyton books, if you know that
children's author from the fifties sixties. And I
was into sort of English and all of

(03:39):
that from a young age and wanted to
be a writer, quite young really, I think,
and got some encouragement from my English teacher
as young people who go on to become
writers often do,
and that stuck with me. For a little
while I wanted to be in a band,
so I was also playing music and all
of that, so also like lots of young
people, you know, when I was at school,
everyone was in bands. And

(04:00):
so that was the thing I wanted to
do. And,
we had some successful musicians came out of,
you know, that area that I was living
in and the school that I went to.
And
so that was inspirational, but it didn't that
kind of part didn't quite work out. And
I was sort of a writer on the
side during that time, and then slowly
just the writing became more and more of

(04:22):
what I did until it was pretty much
totally my my job.
All encompassing? Mhmm.
Yeah. Which instrument did you play?
I played guitar and I sang
and did all of that. Songwriter too?
Yeah.
Nice. Do you ever go back and listen
to the songs?
No.

(04:45):
No. I don't. Although, I got the,
the new Coldplay record I got the other
day, and the first track on that
is they're accompanied by a guy called John
Hopkins. He's a sort of pianist electronic musician,
and I looked him up because I was
just interested who it was and I
as soon as I looked him up recognized
his picture I was like oh, yeah, you

(05:06):
were I went to school with you'. I
remember him being like a virtuoso
pianist and all of that, and playing in,
you know, the bands that we were all,
you know, we would
share each other's bands and, like, you know,
guest on each other's things that they were
recording, and I remember all of that. So
that literally just happened last week. So it
brought it back to me a little bit,
that era of my life. Oh, that's cool.

(05:28):
Maybe it's time to pull the guitar out,
noodle around a little. I don't know.
You write a lot about around
war time, world war 2 and ending the
world war 1 things. Tell me why
did you get drawn to that particular time
period?
Mhmm. And not the Roman empire like every
other.

(05:50):
Well, I'm actually so my background is a
journalist, and I started out right at the
beginning writing about technology. So something completely different,
and I've covered,
the video game industry in particular, like, that's
kind of where I started doing game reviews
and meeting people who make games, and that's
where I kind of cut my teeth as
a journalist really. And then

(06:13):
after a while I was drawn to feature
writing, so writing longer pieces, and,
I started to write outside of tech and
just finding interesting stories and writing long form
things and learning how to do all of
that. I was working on
a, on a piece for the New Yorker
about
war games, which is,

(06:34):
for anyone who don't doesn't know, war games
are played
by militaries and governments
to, sort of, foresee potential outcomes of events.
So in wartime, you might play a little
war game if you've got a, you know,
upcoming
battle, you might have it's all sit around
and, you know, different players will play different

(06:55):
roles. 1 of you might be the the
opposing forces or whatever. 1 of you might
be the air force commander, etcetera, etcetera.
And you play through this, you know, the
the real battle that might happen next week
or whatever,
and try and see, you know, what the
enemy's thinking, where you might go wrong in
your in, you know,
just all the different potential outcomes of that

(07:16):
battle. And it also happens with politicians. So
for example,
when former president Donald Trump visited London a
few years ago,
in Whitehall
the British government and the civil services
ran war games to sort of see, right,
You know, we've
got a controversial
political figure coming to the city. Could there

(07:39):
be riots? Let's have one of you play
as the police, one of you play as
the army, one of you play as the,
you know, press or whatever. And then they
go through the events of the day and
see what might happen, where their weaknesses are.
So anyway, this is this happens, you know,
all the time. All governments do it. It's
a really useful way of foreseeing,
you know, potential events

(08:00):
and and how they might shake down. And
I was meeting with,
an army major here in the UK who
designs these games for the British Army. This
was what the the radio piece was was
that I was making. And I said to
him, have you got an example where something
you found out in one of these war
games has proven useful in the real world?

(08:20):
And he said, well, back in
19 sixties, fifties, whatever, in America, in Washington,
there were war games being run, and all
about nuclear war and the cold war.
And
they came up with this idea of, oh,
if there was a if the world is
on the brink of nuclear attack between the
Soviets and the US, it makes sense for

(08:40):
the American president to be able to have
a direct line
to the Kremlin, to be able to sort
that through without having to go through lengthy
diplomatic channels.
And so, you know, in movies of that
era, you know, the red telephone that links
the White House to the Kremlin, that's an
idea that came out of real war games
that were played during the Cold War.
And then he gave another example and said,

(09:02):
and also during the 2nd World War
when the British
Navy was losing loads and loads of merchant
ships to German submarines in the back of
the Atlantic,
there was a little group of young women
and a retired naval captain who came up
with a war game that helped us understand
why we were losing so many ships. And
that revolutionised

(09:23):
our anti submarine tactics.
And so that was it was just like
one of those things where a light bulb
went off in my head with it, and
I was like that sounds like an incredible
story. I'm going to try and find out
more about it, and talk to see if
anyone's still alive who was involved in that,
or the family members.
And that turned into the first book that
I wrote about the 2nd World War. A

(09:44):
Game of Birds and Wolves. So it was
like completely unplanned really. It's not like I
was like oh I wanna write loads of
books about the 1940s.
It's just I did this
one, and then during the course of writing
A Game of Birds and Wolves I found
another story, and I was like I'd like
to do this maybe as my next book.
And, that's happened three times. So, I've just

(10:05):
had my 3rd book out The Forbidden Garden,
which is also a
sort of broadly unknown
story from the 2nd World War. So that's
the 3rd of that sort of trio of
books, but I'm gonna move away from that
era for a little bit now, I think.
Are you tired of it or you just
have something new on the on the plate?
It's a little bit of both. I'm I'm
not tired of that era. I'm just I

(10:27):
suppose, you know, there are some
writers,
historians who write books and they have, like,
one era. Like you say, it could be
the Roman Empire, it could be the 2nd
World War. And in here in the UK,
there are loads of historians who just write
books about the 2nd World War. That's like
a whole section of the bookshop,
and, that's just not really what I want

(10:48):
to do or become. I've got sort of
broader, a broader lens, I think, and broader
interest. So to it's partly to avoid being
pigeonholed maybe, but also because I just there's
other stories I wanna I wanna investigate. But
I would argue that you're not really writing
about
the war is the backdrop,
but you're writing about people and
how they

(11:09):
operate within the confines of this situation they've
been given.
Yeah. I think yeah. That's kind of you
say, and that's definitely what I hope I'm
doing is I'm not so interested in, you
know, this
this battalion for this battalion, and that's what
happened. I mean, there are loads
of military historian writers who handle that kind

(11:29):
of thing. I'm much more interested in human
stories and what the effects of
living your life against the backdrop of war,
you know, the stories that emerge from that
or the behaviors that emerge from that. And,
yeah, that's what I've tried to tried to
do in my work so far. Let's get
into the new book. It's
such an interesting story. Firstly, how did you

(11:51):
come upon the story?
Also, I felt so bad for the guy
that was running it, and he gets
get an old crazy pants stolen. It's like,
you're coming with
me. But let's get into how you discovered
the story in the first place and then
move into it a little bit with that.
No spoilers, of course. Okay. I love saying
that for historical

(12:11):
because, I mean
Okay. So the
the the book is about the world's 1st
seed bank that was situated in Leningrad, which
is the Russian city now known as Saint
Petersburg.
And I came across the story when I
was,
just reading a newspaper article about a land

(12:32):
dispute in the suburbs of the city. There
was a developer who wanted to build some
apartments
on some land that belonged to the seed
bank.
And loads of scientists and botanists around the
world sort of threw up their arms and
said, you can't build houses here because there
are loads and loads of rare trees and
plants
that were all brought to Leningrad in the

(12:53):
19 twenties 19 thirties and planted in this
land. So if you sort of level the
land and build houses there, we'll, we'll lose
all of that biodiversity
and those interesting trees.
And in the newspaper story, there was just
like a throwaway paragraph
saying,
Oh, and during the 2nd World War, the
botanist who worked at the seed bank protected

(13:14):
the collection of seeds with their lives during
the siege of the city.
Yeah. Again, it was just like one of
those little throwaway lines that made me think,
That sounds fascinating. Why did they do that?
What happened to them? How many of them
survived? And all of those questions that you
ask when you hear a little thing like
that. And
so I went off and just started reading

(13:34):
about
everything I could find about the story, seeing
what had been written about it before, which
it turned out was not much.
It's one of those stories that I think
peep if you were a seed banker and
you're someone who works in that area, you
you probably know or have heard about the
basic story. But most other people, even even
people who know a lot about, you know,

(13:55):
the Eastern front of the 2nd World War
don't know this story.
So then it was a case of writing
to the seed bank, which is still there
in St. Petersburg and saying,
you know, explaining who I was and saying,
I'm really interested in exploring maybe writing the
story about this. Can you let me know
what archival material you have? Do you have

(14:15):
any diaries or memoirs
or
whatever it might be? And, yeah, someone got
back to me from the C Bank, and
she she said, yes, you can come and
visit. You can come and look at our
archives. We've got material here that relates to
that period.
So that was my plan. And then,
Russia invaded Ukraine, which made it very, very

(14:36):
difficult for a British person to travel to
Russia,
because,
Russia refused
Britain and particularly British journalists,
not with the most favorable view. So it
would have been risky to do so. So,
thankfully, my contact at the seed bank said,
I'll scan all of our documents and send
them to you. So she started doing that,

(14:57):
and then from that, I was able to
get them translated
and start to piece together the story of
what happens during this 900 day siege. So
it's extremely
the the longest siege in of a city
in recorded history.
Yeah, this group of scientists that started off
about 50, and then as some evacuated

(15:17):
and, you know, others left or whatever, it
gets down to about a dozen,
and they were there protecting the seed bank
through this appalling
situation
where many people in the city are starving
to death, where they've got their own hunger
pangs, the seed banks being bombed.
There's all of this stuff going on around
them, and they're trying to defend this scientific

(15:38):
collection.
Such an incredible story. And what I found
so intriguing
was the
the bit about
the man in the hospital
who died
with the seeds
strapped to him,
and the them asking him, you know, what
in the world? Why did you not eat

(15:58):
this?
The idea that a body of work that
is going to live on forever,
you know, that that idea that a scientist
or a writer or anybody has that is
that gets that that we are it it
makes me think of the Spock thing of
the needs of the few versus the needs
of the many,
that some things are worth dying protecting

(16:19):
because they have to live on.
And I just think that seems like such
a rare quality
anymore
Yeah. To have something that one believes in
so strongly
that one would die for it.
It's maybe common among
curators of collections. So you do see that
in
war zones where you've got museum creator curators,

(16:43):
people looking after a collection of artwork or
whatever it might be that that's their job,
but it's more than that. It becomes, you
know, they they feel like stewards of things
from the past, and you do see that
in museums
even in recent years.
I think what made this a little different
is that,
you know, seeds are not artworks, and they

(17:04):
are things that can regenerate, and so it
makes it more
you kind of think, okay, why would you
give your life for something like that?
And I think it's worth talking about the
background of the seed bank. So you mentioned
the the director,
Nikolai Vavilov,
and he he started
putting the seed bank together in 1921

(17:25):
with a group of his students.
And his idea in in the Soviet Union,
there'd been so much famine.
And so he wanted to
run experiments that would help help eradicate famine,
not just in the Soviet Union, but everywhere.
And his theory was,
let's go around the world, visit every continent,

(17:46):
and meet with scientists, meet with farmers,
and go, like, walk up onto the mountains
or wherever it might be, and collect seeds,
bring them back to the middle of our
city, to our seed bank,
and we'll run experiments on them. We'll see
if perhaps
some, like, wild varieties of wheat for example
had been overlooked by farmers 100 of years

(18:06):
ago when they were selecting what seeds they
were gonna use to make wheat. Maybe some
of these wild varieties have useful properties. They
might be resilient to the cold, or resilient
to,
disease or whatever it might be, and we
can cross breed some of these qualities into
the seeds that we use to feed feed
everyone.
So that was kind of the mission, and

(18:28):
they travel everywhere. They go to North America,
the UK, Japan, Taiwan,
5 continents,
dozens of countries,
Vavaloov and his little team on these seed
collecting expeditions.
And by the late 19 thirties, they've got
quarter of a 1000000 of these seeds. And
some of them
have been, sort of irreplaceable

(18:48):
in the way that an artwork would be.
In that the
habitat has been destroyed, or they've done building
there, or there's warfare, or whatever reason, you
wouldn't be able to get the seeds again.
So
part of the motivation, I think, for the
scientists when it when the seed begins and
they're faced with some of these terrible decisions,
they're thinking, well, you know, these some of

(19:10):
these seeds are irreplaceable in the same way
that the priceless
paintings in the Hermitage across Saint Isaac Square
are also
irreplaceable.
So I think what you have to, sort
of, think about this biological plant matter in
the same way that a curator might think
about some rare gold from a 1000 years

(19:30):
ago or something like that. That's really the
mentality
that was leading them to make some of
these decisions.
People like this throughout history,
they tend to not live very long.
Something happens. It just seems that people with
this sort of spirit
can't endure a planet such as ours. Well,
yeah. I mean, it's

(19:51):
that's especially true in 19 thirties Soviet Union
when when you become,
you know, Varvalov became famous. So he he
was known around the world. He he
partly because of, you know, his great vision,
partly because he was very personable.
He was, like, an attractive person. And I
mean that in the sense that people wanted

(20:13):
to, you know, follow him and
Enigmatic.
Yeah. Exactly.
And so
that's those qualities
certainly put him at odds with or in,
risk with Stalin, who was suspicious of anyone
who had these international links,
who was also suspicious about some of Vavilov's

(20:33):
just background that he couldn't help. You know,
he was born into a more well-to-do,
academically family rather than peasant stock, which is
what Stalin was looking for. So, yeah, he
was to a certain degree sidelined in in
the 1930s. And
then before the siege begins, so in the
summer of 1940, he's out on one of

(20:53):
his seed collecting expeditions
on the mountains.
And he
a black
car pulls up and 4 shady looking men
get out of the car and say, If
I have a lot of you needed in
Moscow come with us on important business.
But they
they were Never get in the car man.
Never get in the car.
He got in the car and they were

(21:15):
Yeah. Soon found out that they were members
of the NKVD which is the precursor to
the KGB.
And so he was
then subjected to I think 900 hours of
interrogations
which extracted from him a false confession that
he had spied for the British which wasn't
true.
But I guess you know after that amount

(21:35):
of physical deprivation
and all of that
he just thought this was a way to
stop the beatings from continuing, and to stop
his friends and people on the outside from
getting harmed as well.
And he's tried and then sentenced to death
which is that sentence is then commuted to
I think 25 years in prison. And so

(21:56):
he's sent off to Saratov to the Gulag.
So when the siege begins the following year,
the Germany invades the Soviet Union, the German
Army makes it to Leningrad very quickly.
And the Botanists
who work with Avolov are kind of Left
directionless. They don't have their leader. They don't
have anyone saying look we should evacuate the

(22:17):
seas, and get them out of the city
as quickly as possible, which was happening at
the Hermitage Museum.
They're, sort of, they had a charismatic,
director who organized all of that, but the
the botanists are left floundering. So that's also
puts him at a disadvantage,
I think, when the siege begins.
Did he
die

(22:37):
after the siege or before it happened? Do
you know the timeline? Did he live long
enough to know that, that his seeds were
safe?
No. No. Sadly not. He, he died
during the, in the middle of the siege.
This, the siege is happening
a long way away. He's in Saratov, which

(22:58):
is
about a 1000 miles or so from from
Leningrad. So he doesn't know anything that's going
on. I don't even know if he knew
that the the city was being besieged.
Mhmm.
So, yeah, it's it's a real tragedy, and
he's he dies of starvation as well,
in in the prison.
So, yeah, it's a real double tragedy.

(23:18):
When you're reading about these things as you're
doing your research,
do you become of it?
Are you able to maintain an observer's point
of view?
Yeah. I mean, you
you you are trying to put yourself in
that situation and use your imagination
based off

(23:39):
the the true things that you read, the
eyewitness accounts, you put your you naturally, as
a human being, you imagine what it would
like be like to be in those rooms.
You
the the siege begins in September 1941,
and by November it's getting very cold and
most households
have eaten all of the food in their
cupboards.
And so you do, you start to think,

(24:00):
right, how long could I survive for with
what I've got it in my home right
now? And
it's important I think to, to think of
those things. That's how if you're writing
history,
that's how
you have empathy
with the, with the people you're writing about
and you bring that to readers as well
and you bring it to life and you're

(24:21):
for me anyway, you're constantly looking for the
little details that humanize
these scenes. And,
so it doesn't just become like dry history
of Oh, X number of people died in
this world trying to do this. You want
to like take people into this is what
it was like on October 21st when 5
bombs landed on the roof and the, you

(24:41):
know, 3 of the botanists run up and
they have to kick the, the incendiaries
off the roof and someone down in the
courtyard then chucks sand on it. And, you
know, all the while they haven't got my
strength because they haven't, they aren't taking enough
calories. And
so you're trying to find those details
that put you in that situation as much
as possible. Certainly with the kind of books

(25:03):
I'm interested in writing. Has it made you
buy extra things at the Tesco?
Stockpiling,
you mean? Yeah. No, I've not become a
prepper as a result, but,
I can see why people would, would do
that. Yeah.
Yeah. It doesn't take much for these things
to break down, you know, the supply
lines and supply chains. And

(25:24):
when
you,
you know, like I have grown up, I
haven't grown up in a backdrop of war.
And
so,
you don't have that
firsthand
awareness of
how our food gets to a supermarket or
whatever. And,
actually how fragile some of those things are.
It doesn't take much for,

(25:46):
for those things to break down and suddenly,
suddenly everyone's panic buying. I mean, that happened
a little bit in the pandemic, but,
yeah. Yeah.
Well, I think too, books like yours
create
a a remembrance
that, oh, wait, this food doesn't just come
as is.

(26:06):
Somebody grew it and they grew it from
a seed, and that seed had to come
from its original source, and someone fostered that
into my belly eventually.
And we just don't have thoughts like that
in our day to day
world, and I think they are very important
to have those thoughts.
Yeah. And I think I think that's true

(26:27):
as well for the citizens in Leningrad. You
know they it's an urban city, it was
sophisticated,
multicultural, it was all of those things that
we would
associate with living in a city today,
and then they go through this fur- particularly
this first winter where suddenly there's no food.
There's, you know, you're there's no firewood. You're

(26:48):
having to
burn your books to keep your room warm.
You're having to barter
items that before the siege
would have been very valuable, like a sewing
machine or something, or a typewriter,
and you're bartering that for some bread because
the economy has been rearranged.
And so I think for those people they

(27:09):
had a stark realization of actually, it brings
you back to what are the important things
that our bodies need on a week by
week basis. It just brings you back to
that real that base layer of the hierarchy
of needs.
And then in the spring of 1942
suddenly there's this city wide growing campaign, and
every green space becomes you get given a

(27:31):
little plot, and you can grow your cabbages
on there. And you're gonna do that because
just 3 months ago, you
had a such a keen awareness that, oh,
if I'm not growing food,
then I've got no there's no, like, stopgap.
There's no safety net here. So
it just I think
for urbanite,

(27:51):
Leningrad
has connected them. So in this real elemental
way to what it means to, like, grow
your food and have to eat it. So
interesting. Like, I stockpile seeds because you never
know.
Maybe I'm 1 fourth prepper.
Yeah. I think it's good to be prepared
for the unknown. And if it never arrives,

(28:14):
then great, but just in case.
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Pea shoots that's what they
they eat those because you can grow those
at relatively
low temperatures, and they grow quite quickly, and
they have quite a high yield. So that's
what the first things They they don't eat
any of the collection and they don't grow
anything from it, but they they have some,

(28:37):
pea seeds that I think are from outside
of the collection. And so that's one of
the first things they start growing inside the,
inside the the Plant Institute.
Do you know if there's any kind of
memorial
erected for him, for Babylov?
Yeah. So the the seed bank is still
there, like I say, of St. Isaac Square,
and there are 2 or 3 rooms of

(28:57):
the building given over as sort of a
memorial to his life and work with paintings
and his notebooks and things on the glass.
I'm glad to hear that. That's good that
it wasn't lost.
Yeah. But it took a long time for,
you know, it they have had him on
a stamp in Russia as well, but this
took decades, you know,

(29:18):
for the restoration of his,
reputation,
and for
It was really down to the efforts of
a academic journalist called Mark Popovski, who in
the 1950s
60s decides he's gonna try and find out
what happened to Varolov.
And he goes to the prison where he
was kept, and he interviews some of the
guards there, and he manages to access

(29:41):
the, the interrogation files somehow. He convinces them
to show them to him, which they if
they had they known what he was going
to do, they would never have done.
So he manages to get this information about
what happened to Varolov,
and,
he then writes a book
knowing that it will I think, one of
his friends said to him, there must be

(30:03):
easy ways to commit suicide than writing this
book. So he knows the stakes of writing
this, but any nonetheless writes
writes down
the book that later becomes the Vavilov affair,
and smuggles copies out of the Soviet Union,
where it where it's then published.
And if it wasn't for his work, I
don't know if Vavilov's reputation would have been

(30:25):
would have been restored, and he would have
been on stamps, and all of that.
Perhaps not. I don't know. This is kind
of a crazy question, but I'm always intrigued
by people's dreams.
When
you are immersed in these worlds,
does it change your dreams? Do you end
up
at what do you know what I mean?
Like, does that world then encompass your sleeping

(30:46):
time as well?
Yeah. It's funny. You do you start to
live in 2 places at once. That's certainly
true because you're trying to re
you know, just constantly reading as much as
you can, as as much eyewitness testimony as
you can about one of these situations, and
trying to put yourself in it so that
so that when you come to write about
it, it feels authentic and weighty. And, yeah,

(31:09):
that probably does change your brain makeup. I
can't think of any specific dreams I've had,
but
you do
I don't know. I've heard another writer, Ian
McEwen, over here says, writing a book is
like having an illness,
and it doesn't like lift off you until
you've finished your draft. And there is something
to that because you do,

(31:29):
you do sort of enter a slightly different
state while you're while you're in it,
And, and then you feel yourself emerging at
the end of it. So, yeah, it does
affect affect you in, like, deep physiological ways
probably.
Yeah.
Are you concerned at all at the
the, maybe, lack of reading that takes place

(31:50):
anymore, or do you think that it will
swing back to people wanting to read again?
I, like you, am a big book person.
And I saw something the other day. It
said there's 2 kinds of hobbies, those who
read books and those who collect books.
Yeah. I mean, you know, there's there's so
many things competing for our attention, right, all

(32:12):
the time. And
the people who make all of those things
are very very good at making them extremely
alluring.
And I count authors and writers with that,
like you know the techniques that
you use as a writer to try and
hook a reader in are not that different
to the techniques that someone writing a show

(32:32):
for Netflix does, or whatever, or a video
game, or a movie, you know, it's all
story. It's trying to like make things as
compelling as possible.
The thing that is difficult to compete against
is social media probably, which is
so instantaneous,
and is probably to a certain degree eroding
people's

(32:52):
ability to concentrate.
If you just look at how
social media design
is
reshaping,
even things like clips and comedy,
like now,
there's still comics, obviously, that who will write
an hour long special. But really, what you're
trying to do is, like, do 10 seconds

(33:14):
with captions
that when you're scrolling through TikTok or Facebook
videos or whatever, just grab your attention enough.
And
so that stuff
is makes it harder, I think, for people
who write books, because you're competing against things
that is just the cost of
of, like, watching 50 videos while you sat
on the sofa is very low. Whereas to

(33:36):
read a whole book is a big ask
of people in 2024,
2025.
So,
yeah, it is concerning, but at the same
time,
the books are magical and people who love
them really love them and people find them
still all the time.
And,
so they're not going away,

(33:57):
but yeah, the the the height of their
popularity from 50 years ago,
you know, where a book would become a
huge cultural event,
You know, even later into the 20th century,
those days are
probably gone. That doesn't happen so often, does
it? Maybe the new Sally Rooney comes out
and that that people sort of know about

(34:18):
that, but it's not like it would have
been in the seventies eighties.
Right.
I can't wait to go live in the
woods and just read books.
Here, there's
an impending book ban,
and and it is an extensive
list.
Year old Willie is on there, Willie Shakespeare,
and

(34:39):
which is mind boggling to me. I mean,
he's a bit What what
how did he make the list?
I think because he's slightly saucy, you know.
Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. And these people read
the Bible because that's full of sauce. Look,
I I say that all the time. It's
it's the Bible is one of our saucier
tomes, but the
idea that there is this epic list

(35:02):
being built of banned books
and
horrifying
on one side. But on the other, I
think, oh, think of all the people
that are gonna be like, oh, why is
that banned? And they'll start reading.
Because everyone loves to do what they're not
supposed to do.
So maybe
in a way,
it will That's a very optimistic outlook.

(35:23):
Yeah. I like it. I gotta be optimistic.
Yeah.
Gotta be optimistic
or I'll uncover the sand with the bomb
and just lie
on
it. Well, so what is next for you?
So I'm in the relatively early stages of
a a new book project, which is about

(35:43):
a
court case from the 19 eighties. So very
different
to 19 forties Russia.
But, yeah, I'm interested in
I I mentioned earlier that I started out
writing about the games industry,
and I just uncovered this really interesting
story from the United States
about a dispute over whether it's possible to

(36:05):
own
the idea of video games, whether it's possible
to patent an entire medium. And there was
a company that was claiming it is possible
to do that. A bit like if, you
know, Warner Brothers had owned the patent for
movies, and suddenly,
you know, went knocking on Disney's door and
said, oh, if you wanna make a film,
you gotta pay us some money. This is
basically what was happening in the 19 sixties

(36:27):
sorry, in the seventies eighties.
And, it comes to a head in this
court case, and that's what my book is
about. It's what happens next. Did you grow
up playing a lot of video games alongside
of reading books?
Well, it's interesting they you know, what you
say about if you ban things they become
more alluring. That was probably the case for
me. Like, I I did have some video

(36:47):
games, but my parents were pretty pretty antsy
the idea and, you know, didn't want me
to didn't wanna set me on that path
for a while, but, which made them all
the more powerful probably.
Yeah. See? I'm telling you, I'm onto something.
Are your parents still with us?
Yeah. Yeah. They are. They're not together, but,
yeah, they're around. Do they read your books?

(37:10):
Yeah. My dad does, definitely.
My mom supports, but I don't know if
she's she's it's not her kind of thing,
I don't think. Yeah, but yeah, my dad
sort of reads I get him to read
stuff before,
before it's out and he always gives me
his feedback.
Like your dad, he's a retired academic and
so
it's yeah. It has loads of feedback to

(37:32):
give me, but it's very helpful as well.
So Oh, that's good. That's good. Well, Simon,
tell people how they might find you on
the evil social medias and in the world
at large. Okay. Well, I'm still on Twitter,
but I don't use it very much, but
I'm just at Simon Parkin on that. And,
I'm on Blue Sky as well, which I'm
using more because that's that seems seems like

(37:54):
a more pleasant place to be, And Instagram
as well, it's all just Simon Parkin. And
my website is simonparkin.com,
and you can see links to my journalism
and books on there.
Yes. And the books are available
all over the place, which is also nice.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And there's an audio book as well.
So Did you read it?

(38:15):
I did not know. They've got the same
actor reads all 3 of my previous books.
So if you so hopefully, you like his
voice if you like, yeah, audio books because
he's done all of them. But yeah. Yeah.
I'm a big believer that audiobooks are still
books and there's they still count as reading
because I think anything that gets people to
read in some way or another, I'm I'm

(38:36):
all for it. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. I agree.
Thank you for listening, everybody, and thank you,
Simon. This has been really delightful.
Yeah. Thanks for having me. It's nice to
to be on here. Thank you. And just
so you know, you're at the top of
my, giving of Christmas gifts because the people
in my family and a lot of my
friends
will dig your body of work. So I'm

(38:57):
excited to to share that.
Oh, thanks. You're so kind. Thank you. Well,
have a wonderful night. Okay. You too. Thank
you so much. Alright. Take care. Bye.
Rate, review, and subscribe to Hey Human podcast
on Apple, Iheart, wherever you get your podcasts.
Thanks. Bye.