Omslagafbeelding van de show The Numlock Podcast

The Numlock Podcast

Podcast door Walter Hickey

Engels

Technologie en Wetenschap

Tijdelijke aanbieding

2 maanden voor € 1

Daarna € 9,99 / maandElk moment opzegbaar.

  • 20 uur luisterboeken / maand
  • Podcasts die je alleen op Podimo hoort
  • Gratis podcasts
Begin hier

Over The Numlock Podcast

Numlock News is a daily morning newsletter that pops out fascinating numbers buried in the news, highlighting awesome stories you're missing out on. Every Sunday, Walt Hickey interviews someone cool. Sometimes he records it in quality befitting a podcast. www.numlock.com

Alle afleveringen

30 afleveringen

aflevering Numlock Sunday: Chris Dalla Riva explores Uncharted Territory artwork

Numlock Sunday: Chris Dalla Riva explores Uncharted Territory

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Chris Dalla Riva, author of the new book Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves [https://www.amazon.com/Uncharted-Territory-Numbers-Biggest-Ourselves/dp/B0F78P8RZN]. Chris is a fixture here at Numlock, we’re big fans of his newsletter Can't Get Much Higher [https://open.substack.com/pub/chrisdallariva] and have been eagerly waiting for this book, which tracks the history of music by coasting along the top of the Billboard Hot 100. The book can be found at Amazon [https://www.amazon.com/Uncharted-Territory-Numbers-Biggest-Ourselves/dp/B0F78P8RZN] and wherever books are sold, [https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/uncharted-territory-9798765149911/] grab a copy! This interview has been condensed and edited. Chris Dalla Riva, it is great to have you back on. Especially great this week, because you are finally out with a book that I know you’ve been working on for a very long time, Uncharted Territory. Thanks for coming back on. Yeah, thrilled to be back, but also thrilled to have the book come out. The book publishing world is one of the only worlds left in the world that moves slow enough where you’re waiting for so long for something to happen. You have guest-written for Numlock before; you have been a staple of the Sunday editions in the past. You are definitely familiar to the audience at this point because you are doing some of the best music data journalism out there. You’ve been working on this thing for, I feel like, as long as I’ve known you, and it is just great to have it come out finally, man. Yeah, actually, I met you because I was working on this project. I was trying to track down some data that you’d used at FiveThirtyEight, and you responded to my email with your phone number. You were like, “This is easier to explain over the phone.” Yeah, I remember I had scraped the radio for months at FiveThirtyEight just to see where it went, and you hit me up with that. I think that you focused some of your energies on the newsletter, and that’s been so fun to follow, but this is truly what you’ve been working at. It is great to get you on finally to talk all about it. What would you describe this book as? How would you describe it, either to folks who might be familiar with your newsletter or unfamiliar with your newsletter, about what you’re setting out to do with this particular project? The subtitle, I think, is helpful. It’s What Numbers Tell Us About the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. My typical pitch is that it’s a data-driven history of popular music that I wrote as I spent years listening to every number one hit song in history. You get a balance of music history, data analysis, just random music chart shenanigans. I wrote it over such a very long period of time that you get a little bit of how my life was intersecting with this book over the years as I tried to get it published. I love the angle on the No.1s being a place to go with, because it gives you a pulse on what’s popular at the time and not necessarily what’s the most influential at the time. You can see there’s a lot of stuff that hit number one at one point or another that have no musical legacy whatsoever, but nevertheless are still interesting. It’s dipping your toe in the stream, right? You can see that a lot of things that we assume about how the music industry works weren’t always the case. You wrote a little bit about the early transition from big bands to singers as the front-facing people in their operation. That was informed in no small part by what was performing on the charts, but also, I think, labor action, right? An under-discussed part of music history in the last 100 years is that when thinking of any band now or any musical artist, you almost certainly think of the front person being the singer. But if you go look back at big bands of the 1930s and 1940s, anyone whose name was attached to the band was often not a singer. Some that come to mind are Glenn Miller, the Glenn Miller band. Glenn Miller was a trombone player. Artie Shaw was a clarinet player. If none of these names are familiar to you, that’s okay. But you can ask your grandparents. Why does this transition happen: suddenly, the lead singer is always getting top billing in a band? There are a bunch of things that contributed to this. One thing I talk about pretty extensively is just the advent of better microphones. If a voice cannot be heard over the roar of an orchestra or a big band, you need a choir of people to sing. It makes the singer less identifiable. As we get better amplification, better microphones, you can get a wider range of vocal styles. Those vocalists can now compete with the sound of a ton of instruments. At the same time, something you mentioned that I think is a fun bit of history is how music used to be much better organized. They had better labor organization, the same way that Hollywood has much better labor organization than music these days. There still exists a group called the American Federation of Musicians. For two years, they had a strike for a work stoppage, when no new music was being recorded. This was during World War II. You weren’t allowed to strike during World War II. They were frowned upon very much, it seems, yes. Yes, even if you were a musician. People were like, “Come on, why are the musicians striking?” There’s a lot of interesting history there. One of the weird loopholes was that singers could not join the American Federation of Musicians. Because of that, some labels would get around the strike by just recording acapella songs or songs with instruments that were not eligible to be membership because they weren’t “serious” enough, like the harmonica. There were weird harmonica songs that were popular at this time. By the time the strike ended, by the time World War II ended, suddenly, singers had a much more prominent role because they were the only ones allowed to perform. There is tons of weird stuff about this strike. Like, labels backlogged tons of recordings because they knew the strike was coming. “White Christmas,” maybe the best-selling record of all time, was one of those backlogged recordings — recorded in July of 1942 and put out however many months later. That’s fun. That’s basically why Tom Cruise is in a union but Bad Bunny isn’t? I guess so. Music and labor have a history that I’m not an expert on. For some reason, musicians have had a much more difficult time organizing. It seemed to be a little bit easier back when there were these big bands that needed to be rolled out to perform in movie theaters or local clubs. You needed a tuba player and a trombone player and a sax player. I guess it was easier for those musicians to organize. Whereas now, things are so scattered and productions can be super small, and you could record something in your bedroom. They never got that level of organization. I think it’s actually hurt artists to some degree because they don’t have the protections that the film industry does. Because you’re able to just coast along at the top of the charts throughout basically the century, you’re able to get lots of different interweaving stories of labor and also legal disputes/legal outcomes, as well as this technological evolution. What are some of the ways that technology has informed how the music that we listen to changes or evolves over time? Or even some of the litigation that we have seen over the course of the century of musical creation. It just seems like it’s a really fun way to track some of these bigger trends that we don’t even know are really trends. Yeah, totally. I think one of the key themes of the book is that musical evolution is often downstream from technological innovation, which has a nice little ring to it. But in general, there’s this idea that creativity is being struck by the muse, and you create something. Whereas in reality, there are usually physical constraints or technological constraints that shape the art that we make. One of the most basic examples is the length of songs. From the ’40s up till the early, mid-60s, the pop song sits around 2.5 to three minutes. The reason for this is that vinyl singles could literally not hold more sound without degrading, which is completely backwards from the idea that there was an artist who chose to write a 2.5-minute song. I was like, “Well, you had to work within the constraint.” Then technology gets better, singles start to get longer. During the disco era, they actually made bigger discs to put out these long dance mixes. The single sat around like 3.5 to 4.5 minutes for decades until about 10 years ago, when it started to shorten again. People typically point to music streaming for this reason, because artists are paid if a song is listened to for more than 30 seconds, so it’s really just a volume game. If you have a 14 minute song that someone listens to one time, they get paid once. But if I listen to a two-minute song seven times (which is again, the same amount of time spent listening), I will be paid out seven times. There is this financial incentive to shorten songs. I don’t think artists are sitting in the studio thinking about this constantly. But what I see, what I saw again and again, is that artists were rational beings to some degree and would work within the constraints that they were given. They would usually push against those constraints. That’s where a lot of great art comes out of. Even new mediums are offering new opportunities. You wrote a little bit about MTV and how that really changed a lot of what was able to be successful at the time. You had new types of acts that were able to really start competing there, and other acts that just weren’t. Do you wanna speak a little bit about like what video did? Yeah, video certainly changed the game. There were artists who had visual presences earlier. The Beatles had a very visual presence. I think part of their success is tied to the fact that television was becoming a thing, and mass media was really becoming a thing. However, we associate musicians with visuals so much these days. That really emerged in the 1980s, where you needed your visual concepts to be as strong, if not stronger than, your musical concepts. I think because of that, you start seeing some artists break through who I don’t think are considered great musicians. I always sadly point to the song, “Hey Mickey” by Tony Basil. If it’s your favorite song, sorry. I don’t think it’s a masterful musical creation, but it had this fun music video where she’s dressed up as a cheerleader. A lot of that song’s success was just the fact that MTV was willing to put that in heavy rotation because it was a fun video to watch. We live in the shadow of that era where visuals matter just as much as anything else. When you think about the most popular artists, outside of maybe a handful, you think of their visual concepts. You think of what Beyoncé looks like, what her videos are like, same with Taylor Swift, as much as you think about their music. That really reshaped our relationship with popular music. We expect to know what artists look like. It’s odd to think about that; it really wasn’t a thing decades before. You could be a fan of an artist and not really know what they look like. How would you know? Maybe you saw them in a magazine. Maybe you caught them on one television show. The idea that we have access to what everyone looks like is a pretty new phenomenon. That’s fun. It’s just so interesting to see how a simple change, whether it’s today an algorithm or then a medium of distribution, can just have material impacts on the popularity of British synth music in America. Yeah, that’s the perfect example. There’s a great book called I Want My MTV, and it’s an oral history of MTV. They talked to one of the founders. Early MTV would play, as you’re saying, all these British new wave acts. Think A Flock of Seagulls, Duran Duran or even someone like U2. They asked the founder, “Why were you playing so many British artists on early MTV?” He was like, “For some reason, British artists happened to make music videos. And there were about 200 music videos in existence. We had to fill 24 hours of programming.” A Flock of Seagulls was gonna get played a bunch of times just because they happened to make music videos. It is a weird thing. Why would anyone make a music video if there was nowhere to really play them? I don’t know why specifically the British had more videos, but there were occasional times where television shows might show a video. They do love that over there, like Top of the Pops. I can see why. Music and television have always been connected. You even think Saturday Night Live still has musical acts. Back then, say your label didn’t wanna send you out to Britain to go on Top of the Pops. Maybe they would send a video of you instead. There were videos that would float around on these variety shows, and some early videos were just concert footage. It was like, it was a chicken or the egg thing. Once some people had success on MTV, everyone started producing videos. MTV somehow pulled off the miracle of convincing labels that they needed to make videos and that they needed to front the cost for that. Then they had to give MTV the video for free. I don’t know how MTV managed to do that. Well, all of Gen X can’t be wrong. If you do wanna get it out there, you do have to get it out there. One really fun recurring thing in the book — which again, like I really enjoyed. I think it’s a phenomenal work. I think it’s a great history. I’m telling stories that I learned in your book to everybody. It is a really fun read in that regard, I wanna say. I do love how you occasionally clock a genre that really only exists briefly. There’s one that always goes around for like the strangest things to hit number one, like the Ballad of the Green Berets. I think like there’s a Star Wars disco track that I definitely have on vinyl at home about that. You wrote a lot about like teen tragedy songs. What are some of the fascinating like brief trends that only made a small splash and that all of us have forgotten ever existed, but nevertheless achieve some measure of immortality? Yeah, the teen tragedy song is a good one. That actually inspired the writing of this whole book because I got 50 No. 1s, and I was like, “Why are there so many number ones about teenagers dying? That’s a little weird.” And then I did a little digging and tried to piece together why that was. The teenage tragedy song, late ’50s, early ’60s, there are all of these songs about two teenagers in love, usually high schoolers. One tragically dies often in a car crash, and the other is very sad and maybe says that they’ll reunite again one day in the afterlife. Some of the big ones are “Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-Las and “Teen Angel” by Mark Dinning. It’s a very weird blip in popular music history. I won’t say it has cast a long shadow, but there are some occasional people who pull from that tradition. The craziest teen tragedy song ever was “Bat Outta Hell” by Meatloaf, in which Jim Steinman tried to write a nine-minute motorcycle crash song. I think that’s a really interesting one. Disco: bizarre in the amount of people that made disco songs. I really came to like disco and the best disco music, I’m like, “These are the greatest sounds that have ever been recorded.” But it got so big and so popular that everyone felt the need to record disco songs. Not everything is “I Feel Love,” right? No, most things are not. It strikes me that this happened with disco, but has not happened with other genres. Frank Sinatra recorded disco songs. Basically, every television theme song got a disco remix. I Love Lucy had a disco remix. The Rocky theme song had a disco remix. What? I’m sorry, Frank Sinatra did a disco song? Is it good? It’s not good. It’s “Night and Day” over a disco beat. And it’s not clear to me if they just remixed it or if he actually recut the vocal because I just cannot imagine him doing that. In the mid-60s, there was a nun who topped the charts, The Singing Nun with a song called “Dominique.” Of course, during the disco era, it was remixed as a disco song. There are examples of this where people went sort of disco. The Rolling Stones record “Miss You” and it has the disco beat, or Pink Floyd does “Another Brick in the Wall” or Queen does “Another One Bites the Dust.” Everyone was gonna give it a try. There was so much money being made in the disco world at the time. You can always find some artists you would never think would do a disco song probably tried. They probably gave it their best. That’s great. It’s just fun because the things that hit number one for a week don’t necessarily have to be good. They just have to be popular for like a week. Even the construction of the Top 40 chart, which you get into in the book, isn’t exactly science. A lot of times, it’s a little bit of intuition. It’s a lot of what’s selling and what’s selling where specifically. It is a little bit woo woo, right? Yeah, definitely. The goal of this chart is “What’s the most popular song in America in a given week?” Back in the day, that meant what were people buying? What were people listening to on the radio? What were people spinning in jukeboxes? Today, most music is done on streaming. It’s consumption-based, rather than sales-based. So the chart’s the same in name only, but it’s really measuring very different things. The equivalent would be if we knew after you purchased your copy of “I Feel Love,” how many times did you actually play it at home? You could have purchased it, went home and never played it again. Something like that would not register on the charts these days. I respect the people at Billboard because they have an impossible task. It’s like “We’re gonna take all the information and we’re going to boil it down into choosing or measuring what the most popular song is.” It’s an impossible task to some degree. I have watched the evolution of the chart, and I go back and forth on whether they have given up on actually trying to rank stuff or if they are just ranking things in a different way. I think that the apples-to-apples between the era stuff is just so hard to do. One thing I really enjoyed about your book, in particular, is that it’s not a story of why these songs are the best. It’s a story of why these songs were popular at the time, just dipping the toe into the river of human sound. One thing that I’ll ask as you wrap: as you were going through these eras, who did you hear a lot more of than you thought? Who did you hear a lot less than you expected? I joked with some people that if you just looked at the top of the charts, the greatest rock band of the 1970s is either Grand Funk Railroad or Three Dog Night because they both had three number one hits, and many other bands in the classic rock canon have none. Led Zeppelin does not really exist on the pop chart, the singles chart. Led Zeppelin really only put out albums. The Eagles were also big during the ’70s on the music charts. But Three Dog Night, they’re the legends. There are tons of people that I didn’t realize how much I would see of them. Someone like Lionel Richie and Phil Collins, of course, they’re tremendously popular, but they were so popular. Phil Collins was popular at the height of the bald pop star era, which I think is a thing of the past. You had multiple bald men who were regularly topping the charts in the mid-80s. You see a ton of Phil Collins, more than I was expecting, even though I know he’s very popular. Who don’t you see a ton of? Sometimes you don’t see people until a bit later in their careers. This is actually an interesting phenomenon. Artists do not score a number one hit during their most critically acclaimed period, and then a decade later, they do. For example, Cheap Trick. They have a number one hit, but it’s at the end of the ’80s song called “The Flame.” Whereas if you hear Cheap Trick on the radio, it’s probably their live album from the 1970s. This is a phenomenon you see again and again. Some old timer will get their number one much later in their career. Tina Turner gets her number one when she’s probably in her 40s. It’s always interesting to see that. There are also some artists where I feel like there’s a divergence between what their most popular songs are these days and what was topping the charts. Elton John is a good example there. “Benny and the Jets” was a number one hit, still a tremendously popular song. But he’s got a lot of weird No. 1s that I don’t think have as much street cred these days. He has a song called “Island Girl.” Did not age like fine wine. I don’t even think he plays it live anymore because it’s considered somewhat racially insensitive. But it was a No. 1 hit at the time. “Philadelphia Freedom” is another one by Elton John. I feel like when people think of the Elton John catalog, it’s probably not the first song that comes to mind. But it was a No. 1 hit, huge smash. His cover of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was a No. 1. Elton John has been very popular throughout the decades, but I feel like the reasons he’s been popular have changed. People have just gravitated towards different songs as time has gone on. You get distortions at the top of the charts. But I think, as you mentioned, it provides a good sample of what was actually popular. You have the good, the bad, and the ugly. Whereas if you look at some other sources, people are just gonna be like, “Oh, listen to these records. These are the best records.” In reality, the bad records are important, too. Yeah, bad records are great. They’re at least interesting. I imagine also some of this process must have been missing out on a lot of interesting music because one song was just dominating the charts. Were there any songs in particular that come to mind that wooled the roost for potentially a little bit too long? Yeah, the quintessential example is the “Macarena” in the ‘90s. Oh, no! I think it was No. 1 for 13 weeks. Christ! There’s a great clip of people at the Democratic National Convention and ’96 dancing the “Macarena.” It’s so bad. Yeah, so a very popular song. There are tons of stuff that gets stuck behind it. There’s a great No.1 hit in the ’90s called “I Love You Always Forever.” It’s a very nice song by Donna Lewis. It’s stuck at No. 2 because it just happened to be popular during the “Macarena’s” very long run. Y Your life’s work, your greatest accomplishment, being stymied by the “Macarena” feels like a level of creative hell that I have never envisioned before. Yeah, there are other artists who got unlucky. Bruce Springsteen never performed a No. 1 hit. He wrote a No.1 hit for another artist. His closest was “Dancing in the Dark” got to No. 2, but that was also when Prince released “When Doves Cry,” so it’s a tough, tough week. Bob Dylan, similar thing. He wrote a No. 1 hit, but he only ever got to No. 2. I think he got to No. 2 twice. Once, he got stuck behind “Help” by the Beatles, and another time he got stuck behind “Monday Monday” by the Mamas and the Papas. This is another thing when I talk about the charts. There could be many fewer units sold in a given week, or there could be many more units sold. There’s a lot of luck involved if you’re gonna go all the way to No. 1. You could be Bruce Springsteen: you release the biggest record of your life, and Prince also releases the biggest record of his life at the exact same time. Incredible. So again, I have read the book. I really, really like it. People are doubtlessly familiar with the newsletter at this point, but I am also a big fan and booster of that. But I guess I’ll just throw it to you. Where can folks find the book, and where can folks find you? Yeah, you can find me, Chris Dalla Riva, basically on every social media platform under cdallarivamusic. I’m most active on TikTok and Instagram. The book, Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us About the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves, should be available from every major retailer online. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Walmart, Booklist, all that good stuff. Not available physically in stores, so definitely order it online. Like I said, I spent years listening to every No. 1 hit in history, built a giant data set about all those songs and used that to write a data-driven history of popular music from 1958 to basically 2025. So go pick up a copy, buy one for your mother for Christmas. Or your father, I don’t discriminate. Yeah, check it out. I’m hoping people enjoy it, and I’m really excited to finally get it out in the world. It’s been a long, circuitous journey to get it published. It’s a really fun read, and I wish it nothing but the best. And yeah, congrats, thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me. Edited by Crystal Wang If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock. Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey [http://www.twitter.com/walthickey] or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news [walt@numlock.news]. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.numlock.com/subscribe [https://www.numlock.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

16 nov 2025 - 27 min
aflevering Numlock Sunday: Across the Movie Aisle artwork

Numlock Sunday: Across the Movie Aisle

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Alyssa Rosenberg, Sunny Bunch and Peter Suderman, the three panelists of the outstanding film podcast Across the Movie Aisle. I really enjoy the show and have been a longtime fan of their individual work. I think that they’re a group with genuinely diverse opinions but who have a lot of love for cinema and as a result have some of the most deeply interesting conversations about the art form of any show I listen to. The show just split off from The Bulwark’s network and is striking it out independently. Do check them out! This interview has been condensed and edited. Hey, Across the Movie Aisle. Thank you so much for coming on Numlock. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. Thank you for having us. Yes, this is the first three-on-one conversation that I’ve ever done here, so we’re gonna have to juggle a bit. Either way, I am just such a fan of the show. I really, really enjoyed it, subscribed to the Bulwark for it when I heard that you guys were going independent. I was really excited to see what was motivating that, what opportunities you were seeing out there. It’s just such a really fun program, and I think it’s so unique in the space. Before we get into talking about the movies, do you wanna talk a little bit about where this show came from, where it started, then what you would say your perspective on the film industry is? Sonny: Sure. Alyssa: Who wants to tell the story? Sonny: The origin of the show was back in 2019. I started working for an independent film studio that’s based in Dallas, where I live now. I moved here for the job. The pitch was, “it’s like Fangoria,” but for action movies and thrillers and heist movies, that sort of thing. And one of the things I wanted to do when we came over was a little podcast network. We were gonna have some shows, some storytelling things, et cetera. And one of the things I had wanted to do for a while (and hadn’t really had an outlet for) was a show I had envisioned as like Crossfire or McLaughlin Group or something like that, but by way of movies. So Across the Movie Aisle — I’ve always shorthanded it as Siskel and Ebert meets Left Right Center. And the idea here is that I am a conservative. I don’t know how other people would describe me, but I still think of myself as a center-right person. Alyssa is the center-left person. Peter: Would you even say that you are a neoconservative? Sonny: Well, I’m a neoconservative with libertarian tendencies, which is a funny thing. Peter: “You work at the Weekly Standard,” is a good way to think about your politics? And they basically haven’t changed since you worked at The Weekly Standard. Is that fair? That’s the long and the short of it. Sonny: Then Peter is whatever Peter is. I’ll let him define himself. But the idea here was you have three people with differing political views talking about movies and other stories about movies. The show has two segments. The first is called Controversies and Nontroversies. The second is a review. And the Controversies and Nontroversies segment was initially thought of as we tackle some dumb internet outrage of the day and decide if it’s really worth being mad about. And that evolved into something slightly different, right? Right, guys? I feel like it’s now more about the business of Hollywood. Alyssa: Yes, exactly. But I think it’s worth noting that our story actually starts way before 2019. The three of us were all critics in some respect or other. I was over at ThinkProgress running their culture and sports verticals. Sonny, were you at the Weekly Standard when we started or were you at the Free Beacon then? Sonny: I think I was at the Washington Free Beacon when we met. So it must’ve been 2012 or 13. Alyssa: The three of us were going to screenings every week and somehow just gravitated towards each other. We would sit together. We were the people who were hanging out and hashing things out together after the screening ended. When I moved to the Washington Post, I ended up bringing Sonny over as a contributor to the blog that I was working on there. They were invited to my wedding. We were authentically contentiously friends years before we started the podcast. I think that’s been a little bit of the special sauce for us, right? We are capable of having conversations that are somewhat harder to have elsewhere because (even before we started working together) there were five, six years of trust built up in in-person conversations and discussions over beers at the really terrible bar near the former AMC in Friendship Heights. Nobody is here on this podcast to blow each other up. But it’s also not like “We’re friends for the camera!” I think the show has always been like both a reflection of our dynamic. It’s also the way that we hang out every week, even though Sonny lives in Dallas, and Peter lives in Boston some of the time. So for me, it’s like my night out. I mean, as a listener, I really find the appeal to be exactly that. I think that having different perspectives on something as universal as film makes the show super compelling to listen to, even if I don’t always necessarily agree with the perspective on it. What makes movies just so good to view from multiple different angles? There are lowercase “c” conservative films, there are lowercase “l” liberal films, that stuff. How do you guys find approaching the current state of the film industry from these different points of view? Peter: Alyssa talked about how our story goes back even before 2019, when the podcast started. And just for people who may not be familiar with the dynamic of Washington that all of us came up in in our 20s, Alyssa was working for ThinkProgress, which was the journalism arm of the Center for American Progress, which is this leading democratic or democratic affiliated think tank. Sonny was working for the Weekly Standard and then for the Washington Free Beacon, these feisty, conservative journalistic outlets. I actually started writing movie reviews for National Review for a couple of years. When I moved over full-time to Reason Magazine, which is where I’ve been for more than 15 years now, and also to the Washington Times, which is someplace that both Sonny and I wrote for. It’s a conservative-leaning paper that has undergone many transformations. If you live in Washington, your social circle and your conversations and your life are so frequently segmented by politics. What we liked about being friends with each other and seeing movies with each other was that we saw that it didn’t have to be the case. Movies and art and pop culture, even disagreements about them, were ways that we could come together and maybe not even agree, but like learn about each other. We’re really good friends, but we also like each other’s minds. This is something that is really important and drew us all together. I have learned a lot about movies from Sonny. I have learned about culture from Alyssa. I don’t know if they’ve learned anything from me. Maybe they’ve been annoyed about how I’m fine with A.I. Having those perspectives, it’s not just that it’s like, “Oh, that’s nice that you’re a little different.” This is a learning opportunity for all of us. It also makes the act of watching movies together much richer. When you’re watching the movie, if you’re watching it next to Alyssa, I know what she’s thinking. Maybe not what I’m thinking, but it’s like having another set of eyes. If you’re a critic, if you’re somebody who likes movies, if you are somebody who likes movies for the social aspect of them, seeing them with somebody else and talking about them afterwards just makes it so much more enjoyable. The fact that we then get to have that conversation in public for an audience that seems to enjoy this is really rewarding. Alyssa: I have a very hard time with certain kinds of violence in movies. But I can sit in a theater with Peter, and he can tell me when I need to cover my eyes, but also when I’m gonna be okay when it’s over. And he’s always right, right? And that’s the thing that we get. Peter: But also when we see the Taylor Swift movie, I show up, and Alyssa has friendship bracelets for us. Everybody’s bringing something to the party here. Alyssa: Peter, you joked about whether or not we’ve gotten anything from you. And I actually think that in some ways, I’m the one of us whose politics and aesthetics have changed most as a result of doing the show with both of you. I came up in an era of lefty cultural criticism when there were real incentives for tearing things apart. And I think I, in some ways early in my career, helped advance a fairly doctrinaire vision of what political conversations about art should be. And I have some regrets about some of the things that I wrote and some non-regrets too. I did a lot of work at that point in my career that I liked a lot. But one of the things I’ve come to believe in my conversation with these guys is that art is at its most politically powerful not when it affirms an agenda or a worldview that is defined by a political movement, but it is at its most powerful and interesting when it creates space for conversations that are not possible in conventional political formats and political venues. I think the unpredictability of movies and the inability to shove movies neatly into a partisan schema is where their power comes from. It is not in being subordinate to an agenda, but in opening the space for new possibilities. And I think that having a space to come to that conclusion made me a better critic and a better person. Maybe less employable as someone who writes about this stuff full-time in a predictable way. But I really enjoy seeing the world through the lenses that Peter and Sonny helped me apply to all of this. Peter: And just to underline that really quickly, a little bit more. One of the things that brings all of us together is that we are all three people who moved to Washington to work in political journalism, to work in discourse about politics. We have very strongly held beliefs. At the same time, I think all three of us come to movies, to art and to culture thinking, “You know what, you can make good art. You can make a great movie that maybe I find doesn’t in any way align with my beliefs, right?” It has nothing to do with my political world or is even critical of my political worldview, but it’s still a great movie. And this is a thing that you see very rarely in Washington and political discussions of art and film, but also in criticism. You have so much criticism that is out there, especially in the movie criticism world, that is just straightforwardly, politically determined. I don’t think that that is the best way to approach art and to live a life that is about art because. Of course, it engages with politics. And of course you have to talk about that. And of course, you have to deal with that, but it’s not just politics. If what you want from a movie is for it to be an op-ed, then what you want isn’t a movie, it’s an op-ed. I think that’s really interesting. And actually, let’s dive into that real quick. We’ll go around the horn, perhaps. Peter, you brought it up. What is an example of a film or a piece of media that maybe either subverts or goes upstream compared to your personal politics that you nevertheless enjoyed? Or you, nevertheless, in spite of where you were coming from on that, really tended to like? Peter: So we all had mixed reactions to Paul Anderson’s, P.T. Anderson’s One Battle After Another, which is quite a political film, just came out. All of us thought that on a micro level, scene by scene, as a piece of filmmaking, it’s genius. But on a macro level, its big ideas are kind of a mess. I go back to another Paul Anderson film from the aughts, There Will Be Blood, which is fairly critical of capitalism and of the capitalist tendencies that are deeply rooted in America. And it’s not just a polemic, just an op-ed. It’s not something that you can sum up in a tweet. It is quite a complex film in so many ways. And I’m a capitalist. I am a libertarian. I am a markets guy. And it is, I love that movie. Sonny and I frequently have arguments over whether There Will Be Blood is the first or second best movie of the last 25 years or so. Sonny thinks it’s maybe the best. I think it’s the second best. This is a movie that I think offers a deep critique of my ideology and my political worldview. But it is so profound on an artistic character narrative, just deep engagement level. I could talk about it for a long time. It’s a movie I really love that doesn’t support what I believe about politics in the world. Yeah, Sonny, how about you? Sonny: Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor is commie agitprop, but it’s also very good. It’s one of those movies where the lesson of the movie is literally “The elite overclass needs to be taught how to pee correctly in a bucket, so as not to annoy the normals.” But it’s a beautiful movie, including the bucket. You don’t have to agree with a film’s politics to recognize that it is a great movie. It certainly doesn’t hurt. I flipped through my rankings, and a lot of it does line up. But another one is JFK. Oliver Stone’s JFK is a movie that is nonsense as history. If you look at it as a history text, you are reading the film wrong. What it excels at and the way that it is great is that it’s the absolute perfect distillation of sitting next to an insane conspiracy theorist and hearing them ramble. The way that Oliver Stone edits together all of these disparate ideas — the way he edits is like hearing a conspiracy theorist talk. The way a conspiracy theorist talks is that they overwhelm you with information. They will just throw out random things and be like, “And this is connected to this, and this is connected to this.” And you are not able to actually judge these things because you have no idea really what they’re talking about. You’re not steeped in this stuff like they are, but it all sounds right. And all of a sudden, yeah, I believe that the military industrial complex murdered JFK at the behest of a fascist homosexual conspiracy, which is just another amusing little element to JFK by Oliver Stone. Those would be two examples, I would say. I love that. Alyssa, how about you? Alyssa: I would say Dirty Harry. I did a huge project about 10 years ago on depictions of the police in pop culture. And the ways in which law enforcement, as an industry, has actually really shaped their depictions on film. And look, I don’t think the police always get everything right. And I think that shooting people is not a viable solution to a crime, especially without a trial. But God damn, does Clint Eastwood make like a sweater and a blazer and a real big gun look awesome, right? Sonny: Those are things that look awesome. Of course, they look awesome on Clint Eastwood. Alyssa: Of course, they look awesome, but they look especially awesome on Clint Eastwood. And they look even more awesome when he’s shooting a crazed hippie who has commandeered a bus Sonny: Full of children. Alyssa: Yes, a bus full of children. The evil hippie deserves to get shot, and Clint Eastwood is the man to set things right. The thing about aesthetics is that they can get you to set aside your politics momentarily in a theoretical way. But I also think that good movies can get you access to spaces and mindsets that you might not have access to otherwise. When you asked that question, the movie that I immediately thought of, not necessarily of challenging my politics, but like bringing me a place I can’t go, is Alex Garland’s Warfare from earlier this year. It is one of the best movies I’ve seen this year. And also a movie about (both as a social and cultural environment) an all-male combat unit in the US military and a situation (the war in Iraq) that I have no access to. I cannot go there. My being in the space would fundamentally transform the space. And that opening sequence with this platoon watching this music video in a weird, sexualized group bonding ritual, I just found fascinating and oddly touching in a way that I think is interesting to watch, especially if you’re steeped in left-leaning critiques of traditional masculinity in all-male spaces. And I found that movie, despite how harrowing it was, kind of beautiful and tender to watch in a way. And I just felt very grateful for it. Awesome. Yeah, again, I really appreciate how much thought goes into viewing not only movies as cultural entities, but also their space in politics, but also how the culture can overwhelm that. I really think that you guys have such fun takes on this. I wanna back out a little bit and talk a little bit about this year and this moment. I think one thing I really enjoy about your show is that it’s obvious how much you guys really enjoy going to the movies, enjoy consuming this stuff. I know that there’s a lot of fairly understandable doom and gloom sometimes around the movie industry, around the exhibition industry. A lot of that, I think, comes from some of the more industry side of things and infects the viewing public’s view. I’ll just throw it to you. What is a trend or something going on these days within movies or Hollywood that you actually think is a good thing, that you’re actually enjoying? Or a transitional moment that you think could be fun? I guess, Sunny, I’ll start off with you. I don’t know. Sonny: That’s a hard question to answer because everything is bad right now. Alyssa: To be clear, this is Sonny’s default position about all eras and all things. All things. Peter: He’s a cheerful man. Sonny: All things, really. No, everything is bad. But if I were looking at a few green shoots, I like the rise of the draft house style theater, a combination of dining, bar, movie space. I know some people have issues with the waiters scurrying back and forth. And it’s not my real cup of tea either, but that’s all right. You mentioned this question right before we started taping. I was trying to sketch something out, so I didn’t have nothing. But I do think the rise of the boutique Blu-ray and 4K UHD retailers has been a good thing. I don’t know that it’s enough to save physical media in the film context, but the rise of your Vinegar Syndromes. Criterion, of course, is the longest player in this space, and they’ve been doing it since the days of Laserdisc. They’re very good at what they do, and they have a great catalog. But even smaller places, like your Vinegar Syndromes or your Shout Factory and your Scream Factory. The studios themselves are getting into it. Lionsgate has their Lionsgate limited thing that they do, which is just sucking money out of my pockets. A24 has also been good in this space. I like the idea that there is a small but committed cadre of collectors out there. And it’s not just ownership for the sake of ownership. It’s not the high fidelity, “the things you own matter. So you should show them off so everybody can see them and see how cool you are” kind of thing. There are actual quality differences to having a disc as opposed to a streaming service, which always come in at lower bit rates, and they look and sound worse. But this is so niche. Very few people who collect this stuff (Blu-rays, 4Ks, et cetera) really understand how niche they are. If you look at the monthly pie chart of sales of discs every month, it’s still 50 percent DVD, 20 percent to 25 percent Blu-ray, and then 25 percent to 30 percent 4K, depending on what’s out at any given time. But 50 percent of discs are still being bought by people browsing Walmart shelves, like “Ooh, I’ll watch this new movie for $5. Sure, why not?” Yeah, having something for the sickos is always something viable, right? Peter, I’ll throw it to you. Peter: So, on this podcast, I have probably been the biggest MCU, Marvel Movie Universe booster. What I think is a good thing that is happening right now is that the MCU is in a decline, or at least a reset period. It’s not overwhelming Hollywood in the way that it was throughout the 2010s. It’s hurting theaters and exhibition because those movies are not performing the way they used to, and that’s a downside for real. But what it is doing is creating a space for young filmmakers and for young acting talent to rise up without having to immediately be sucked into the MCU or something comparable, like the DC movies that were trying to start up and never really got going. Now they’ve rebooted the DC universe with the James Gunn Superman film. But, it really felt like in the 2010s, anyone who was in their 20s or 30s and was a really promising actor or a really promising director was gonna make one or two movies. And then they were gonna get sucked into the Marvel or maybe the Star Wars machine, one of these big franchise things. It wasn’t like even 25 years ago when Sam Raimi was making Spider-Man films, and they were very distinctly Sam Raimi films. I mean, you watch the Dr. Octopus POV sequence in Spider-Man 2, and it’s the same thing he was doing in Evil Dead, except he had $150 million to make that movie, right? These weren’t even altruistic superhero films. They were just being brought in to lend their names a small amount of flavor to whatever it was they were doing. And now, in an era in which the MCU is not gone, but is diminished, a lot of acting talent and a lot of directing talent are going to be free to spend that formative period of third, fourth, fifth, sixth movies to make the things that they wanna make and to experiment. Like I said, this does have downsides. This is not great for theatrical exhibitors who are suffering right now because there are fewer movies and because the big movies are not as big. But in that space, you get the opportunity to try new things. And I love seeing new things, and I love watching new talent develop. That is cool. I like that. Alyssa? Alyssa: I’m glad you said that, Peter, because what I was gonna say is I am delighted to see some of the directors who did time in the MCU or other franchises coming back and making original movies. Obviously, Sinners is one of the big success stories of the year. It’s also a success story because Ryan Coogler is not only making franchise movies. I saw Seeing Fruitvale, which turned Fruitvale Station, at the Sundance Film Festival. It was like a seminal moment for me early in my career as a critic. I was like, “Holy God, this guy is great.” Even though I like what he did with the Rocky movies and I like the first Black Panther, I just felt this sense of profound regret for him getting diverted from telling these original stories. I’m really excited for Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet. I expect to be emotionally incapacitated by that movie. Honestly, it is great for people who love movies that Immortals was just such a disaster. Peter: Eternals. Sonny: Eternals, that’s how good it is we can’t even remember the title. Alyssa: Yes, Destin Daniel Cretton is working on a Shang-Chi sequel, but he is also collaborating with Ryan Coogler on a project that I think is drawn from their childhoods. Sonny: He’s directing a new Spider-Man movie right now. Alyssa: But there’s other stuff coming. There’s the possibility of life outside franchises. And, I’m excited to see what some of these folks do when they’re not in front of a green screen and when they’re telling stories about actual human beings. I am excited to just see more movies like Weapons, like Materialists, coming from younger directors who are still figuring things out, but have interesting things to say. And this year, at least, appears to be able to do okay at the box office. I love that. People are recovering from their exile in Atlanta and have a chance to make some cool movies. You guys have been so generous with your time. I do want to just finish on one last note: where do you assess Hollywood’s position within the world to be? Obviously, in the States, they’ve had a lot of pressure from things like TikTok coming from below, things like the federal government coming from above. But even internationally and geopolitically, you’ve seen international players start to compete with Hollywood at the Oscars. For instance, in Best Animated Film last year, as well as some big markets shutting down for them, like China is not really doing anything. From a political perspective, where do you assess the state of Hollywood right now? Peter: From a political perspective, I think Hollywood is going to start producing movies that read less overtly liberal, less conventionally left-leaning. I think we’re already seeing some of that. I don’t mean that Hollywood is suddenly going to be MAGA, that it’s suddenly gonna be like reading Buckley’s National Review or anything like that. I just mean that at the margins, you’re gonna see more movies that don’t toe the line in the way that you saw movies before. There was a moment, especially right before and right after the pandemic, where it really felt like too many movies were towing a very predictable left-of-center political line. And it was obvious and there was no nuance to it. Again, I do not oppose movies that may have a different worldview than mine, but it felt like they were running scared in a lot of cases. I mean, in sports, if your team is behind, that’s the time when you try new stuff. You don’t use the same strategy if you are losing. Hollywood’s losing right now. They’re losing economically and they’re losing as a cultural force. While that’s in some ways not great for the art form, that is going to be good for experimentation. And that’s gonna be formal and craft experimentation. That’s going to be talent. We’re going to see new and interesting people. And that’s also going to be ideas both for stories and for politics and ideology. Sonny: A big question is what happens with the retrenchment of the global box office? Because I do think, for a long time, you could count on basically two-thirds of the box office of a major Hollywood release coming overseas and one-third coming domestically. And those numbers have, in some cases, inverted. It’s closer to 50/50 for more of them. It’s not universally true. F1 did more business overseas than domestically, which you might expect for something that’s based on F1 racing. But the big question is what happens if the rest of the world is like, “We’re not that interested in the big Hollywood blockbuster stuff that we have been eating up for the last 15 or 20 years”? This goes hand in hand with Alyssa’s point about originals. That’s probably a good thing, honestly. It’s probably a good thing to get away from the theory of the movie industry being like, “We need to make things that appeal despite language barriers.” Language matters; words matter. And tailoring your words to the correct audience matters. American movie studio should tailor their stuff to American audiences. Alyssa: And also getting away from the idea of appealing to the Chinese censors who controlled which American movies got access to Chinese markets, which was not the same thing as appealing to Chinese audiences. But yeah, I totally agree. My father-in-law works in the foreign exchange industry, and he said something that I’ve been thinking about a lot. They’re just seeing real declines in people who want to come here or feel comfortable coming here. Until July, I was the letters editor at The Washington Post, and it was astonishing to me just how much rage Canadians were feeling towards the United States. I don’t know that these will translate into a rejection of American movies. American culture exports have been unbelievably strong for a long time. But I do see an opening for Korean pop culture, which has already been very popular abroad. I think there’s a real chance that we will see a rejection of American culture in some ways. And, it will take Hollywood a while to respond to that. It always lags a little bit. But I do think it would be very interesting to see what more aggressively American movies look like. And I think that could take many forms. But scale is in many ways the enemy of interestingness. If there is not and opportunity to turn everything into a two billion dollar movie because you sell it overseas, what stories do you tell? What actors do you put on screen? What voices do you elevate? And I think the answers to those questions could be really interesting. Peter: I agree with all of this in the sense that I think it will be good for the art form, like I have been saying. But there’s a cost to this that all of us should recognize. When budgets get smaller and the market shrinks, that is going to be bad for people who work in the industry. And in particular, it’s going to be rough for the below-the-line talent, the people whose names you see at the end credits — when these credits now scroll for 10 minutes after a Marvel movie because they have employed hundreds, maybe even a thousand people. And there was a story in The Wall Street Journal just this summer. You mentioned the time in Atlanta about how Marvel has moved most of its production out of Atlanta. There are people there who had built lives, bought houses, had earned pretty good middle-class incomes, but weren’t superstars by any means. Now they don’t know what to do because they thought they were living in Hollywood East, and suddenly, Hollywood East doesn’t exist anymore. We may be in a position where Hollywood West, as we have long know it, L.A., the film center, also doesn’t exist anymore, at least or at least as much smaller, much less important and much less central to filmmaking than it has been for the last nearly 100 years. And again, as a critic, I like the new stuff. I often like the smaller stuff. I’m an American; I want movies made for me. But also, these are people with jobs and livelihoods, and it is going to be hard for them in many cases. Sonny: Oh, I’m glad to see the A.I. King over here take the side of the little guy who’s losing out on his on his livelihood. Peter: I think A.I. is going to help the little guy. Small creators are going to have a leg up because of it. Sonny: Sure. All right. Well, I love some of those thoughts, love some of those lessons. Publicly traded companies are famously risk-taking, so we’re going to be fine, definitely. Either way, I really do love the show. I really, really enjoy it. I think it’s one of the best discussion shows, chat shows about any movie podcast out there. It is really, really fun. It is very cool to see you guys go independent. I just want to throw it to you a little bit. What is your pitch? What is the show? Where can they find it? What’s the best way to support it? And where can they find you all? Sonny: The show’s a lot like this, like what you just listened to. Alyssa: Peter has developed this catchphrase when Sonny asked him how he’s doing to kick off the show, and he always says that he’s excited to be talking about movies with friends. We want to be your movie friends. You should come hang out with us. Hopefully, we will be going live a little bit more, maybe meeting up in person some. I will hopefully be doing some writing for our sub stack, if you have missed my blatherings about movies and movie trends. But yeah, come hang out with us every week. We’re fun. Sonny: Movieaisle.substack.com. That’s where you should go. You should I’m I’m I’m sure I’m sure there will be a link to it or something. Movieaisle.substack.com is where it lives now. We’ll have a proper URL at some point. Terrific. And wherever you get your podcasts? Sonny: And wherever you get your podcasts! That’s great. Peter, Alyssa, Sonny, thank you so much. This is really, really fun. Again, I really dig the show so much. I’m very, very happy for you guys being able to spring out independent. So really, thanks for coming on. Edited by Crystal Wang If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock. Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey [http://www.twitter.com/walthickey] or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news [walt@numlock.news]. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.numlock.com/subscribe [https://www.numlock.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

19 okt 2025 - 38 min
aflevering Numlock Sunday: Alissa Wilkinson on We Tell Ourselves Stories artwork

Numlock Sunday: Alissa Wilkinson on We Tell Ourselves Stories

By Walt Hickey Double feature today! Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Alissa Wilkinson who is out with the brand new book, We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine. I’m a huge fan of Alissa, she’s a phenomenal critic and I thought this topic — what happens when one of the most important American literary figures heads out to Hollywood to work on the most important American medium — is super fascinating. It’s a really wonderful book and if you’re a longtime Joan Didion fan or simply a future Joan Didion fan, it’s a look at a really transformative era of Hollywood and should be a fun read regardless. Alissa can be found at the New York Times, and the book is available wherever books are sold. This interview has been condensed and edited. All right, Alissa, thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s good to be back, wherever we are. Yes, you are the author of We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine. It’s a really exciting book. It’s a really exciting approach, for a Joan Didion biography and placing her in the current of American mainstream culture for a few years. I guess just backing out, what got you interested in Joan Didion to begin with? When did you first get into her work? Joan Didion and I did not become acquainted, metaphorically, until after I got out of college. I studied Tech and IT in college, and thus didn’t read any books, because they don’t make you read books in school, or they didn’t when I was there. I moved to New York right afterward. I was riding the subway. There were all these ads for this book called The Year of Magical Thinking. It was the year 2005, the book had just come out. The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion’s National Book Award-winning memoir about the year after her husband died, suddenly of a heart attack in ’03. It’s sort of a meditation on grief, but it’s not really what that sounds like. If people haven’t read it’s very Didion. You know, it’s not sentimental, it’s constantly examining the narratives that she’s telling herself about grief. So I just saw these ads on the walls. I was like, what is this book that everybody seems to be reading? I just bought it and read it. And it just so happened that it was right after my father, who was 46 at the time, was diagnosed with a very aggressive leukemia, and then died shortly thereafter, which was shocking, obviously. The closer I get to that age, it feels even more shocking that he was so young. I didn’t have any idea how to process that emotion or experience. The book was unexpectedly helpful. But it also introduced me to a writer who I’d never read before, who felt like she was looking at things from a different angle than everyone else. Of course, she had a couple more books come out after that. But I don’t remember this distinctly, but probably what happened is I went to some bookstore, The Strand or something, and bought The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem off the front table as everyone does because those books have just been there for decades. From that, I learned more, starting to understand how writing could work. I didn’t realize how form and content could interact that way. Over the years, I would review a book by her or about her for one publication or another. Then when I was in graduate school, getting my MFA in nonfiction, I wrote a bit about her because I was going through a moment of not being sure if my husband and I were going to stay in New York or we were going to move to California. They sort of obligate you to go through a goodbye to all that phase if you are contemplating that — her famous essay about leaving New York. And then, we did stay in New York City. But ultimately, that’s 20 years of history. Then in 2020, I was having a conversation (that was quite-early pandemic) with my agent about possible books I might write. I had outlined a bunch of books to her. Then she was like, “These all sound like great ideas. But I’ve always wanted to rep a book on Joan Didion. So I just wanted to put that bug in your ear.” I was like, “Oh, okay. That seems like something I should probably do.” It took a while to find an angle, which wound up being Didion in Hollywood. This is mostly because I realized that a lot of people don’t really know her as a Hollywood figure, even though she’s a pretty major Hollywood figure for a period of time. The more of her work I read, the more I realized that her work is fruitfully understood as the work of a woman who was profoundly influenced by (and later thinking in terms of Hollywood metaphors) whether she was writing about California or American politics or even grief. So that’s the long-winded way of saying I wasn’t, you know, acquainted with her work until adulthood, but then it became something that became a guiding light for me as a writer. That’s really fascinating. I love it. Because again I think a lot of attention on Didion has been paid since her passing. But this book is really exciting because you came at it from looking at the work as it relates to Hollywood. What was Didion’s experience in Hollywood? What would people have seen from it, but also, what is her place there? The directly Hollywood parts of her life start when she’s in her 30s. She and her husband — John Gregory Dunn, also a writer and her screenwriting partner — moved from New York City, where they had met and gotten married, to Los Angeles. John’s brother, Nick Dunn later became one of the most important early true crime writers at Vanity Fair, believe it or not. But at the time, he was working as a TV producer. He and his wife were there. So they moved to Los Angeles. It was sort of a moment where, you know, it’s all well and good to be a journalist and a novelist. If you want to support yourself, Hollywood is where it’s at. So they get there at a moment when the business is shifting from these big-budget movies — the Golden Age — to the new Hollywood, where everything is sort of gritty and small and countercultural. That’s the moment they arrive. They worked in Hollywood. I mean, they worked literally in Hollywood for many years after that. And then in Hollywood even when they moved back to New York in the ’80s as screenwriters still. People sometimes don’t realize that they wrote a bunch of produced screenplays. The earliest was The Panic in Needle Park. Obviously, they adapted Didion’s novel Play It As It Lays. There are several others, but one that a lot of people don’t realize they wrote was the version of A Star is Born that stars Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. It was their idea to shift the Star is Born template from Hollywood entities to rock stars. That was their idea. Of course, when Bradley Cooper made his version, he iterated on that. So their work was as screenwriters but also as figures in the Hollywood scene because they were literary people at the same time that they were screenwriters. They knew all the actors, and they knew all the producers and the executives. John actually wrote, I think, two of the best books ever written on Hollywood decades apart. One called The Studio, where he just roamed around on the Fox backlot. For a year for reasons he couldn’t understand, he got access. That was right when the catastrophe that was Dr. Doolittle was coming out. So you get to hear the inside of the studio. Then later, he wrote a book called Monster, which is about their like eight-year long attempt to get their film Up Close and Personal made, which eventually they did. It’s a really good look at what the normal Hollywood experience was at the time: which is like: you come up with an idea, but it will only vaguely resemble the final product once all the studios get done with it. So it’s, it’s really, that’s all very interesting. They’re threaded through the history of Hollywood in that period. On top of it for the book (I realized as I was working on it) that a lot of Didion’s early life is influenced by especially her obsession with John Wayne and also with the bigger mythology of California and the West, a lot of which she sees as framed through Hollywood Westerns. Then in the ’80s, she pivoted to political reporting for a long while. If you read her political writing, it is very, very, very much about Hollywood logic seeping into American political culture. There’s an essay called “Inside Baseball” about the Dukakis campaign that appears in Political Fictions, her book that was published on September 11, 2001. In that book, she writes about how these political campaigns are directed and set up like a production for the cameras and how that was becoming not just the campaign, but the presidency itself. Of course, she had no use for Ronald Reagan, and everything she writes about him is very damning. But a lot of it was because she saw him as the embodiment of Hollywood logic entering the political sphere and felt like these are two separate things and they need to not be going together. So all of that appeared to me as I was reading. You know, once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It just made sense for me to write about it. On top of it, she was still alive when I was writing the proposal and shopping it around. So she actually died two months after we sold the book to my publisher. It meant I was extra grateful for this angle because I knew there’d be a lot more books on her, but I wanted to come at it from an angle that I hadn’t seen before. So many people have written about her in Hollywood before, but not quite through this lens. Yeah. What were some things that you discovered in the course of your research? Obviously, she’s such an interesting figure, but she’s also lived so very publicly that I’m just super interested to find out what are some of the things that you learned? It can be about her, but it can also be the Hollywood system as a whole. Yeah. I mean, I didn’t interview her for obvious reasons. Understandable, entirely understandable. Pretty much everyone in her life also is gone with the exception really of Griffin Dunn, who is her nephew, John’s nephew, the actor. But other than that, it felt like I needed to look at it through a critical lens. So it meant examining a lot of texts. A lot of Didion’s magazine work (which was a huge part of her life) is published in the books that people read like Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album and all the other books. What was interesting to me was discovering (I mean, not “discovering” because other people have read it) that there is some work that’s not published and it’s mostly her criticism. Most of that criticism was published in the late ’50s and the early ’60s when she was living in New York City, working at Vogue and trying to make it in the literary scene that was New York at that time, which was a very unique place. I mean, she was writing criticism and essays for both, you know, like National Review and The Nation at the same time, which was just hard to conceive of today. It was something you’d do back then. Yeah, wild stuff. A lot of that criticism was never collected into books. The most interesting is that she’d been working at Vogue for a long time in various positions, but she wound up getting added to the film critic column at Vogue in, ’62, I want to say, although I might have that date slightly off. She basically alternated weeks with another critic for a few years, writing that until she started writing in movies proper. It’s never a great idea to be a critic and a screenwriter at the same time. Her criticism is fascinating. So briefly, for instance, she shared that column with Pauline Kael. Pauline Kael became well known after she wrote about Bonnie and Clyde. This was prior to that. This is several years prior to that. They also hated each other for a long time afterward, which is funny, because, in some ways, their style is very different but their persona is actually very similar. So I wonder about that. But in any case, even when she wasn’t sharing the column with Pauline Kael, it was a literal column in a magazine. So it’s like one column of text, she can say barely anything. She was always a bit of a contrarian, but she was actively not interested in the things that were occupying New York critics at the time. Things like the Auteur Theory, what was happening in France, the downtown scene and the Shirley Clark’s of the world. She had no use for it. At some point, she accuses Billy Wilder of having really no sense of humor, which is very funny. When you read her criticism, you see a person who is very invested in a classical notion of Hollywood as a place that shows us fantasies that we can indulge in for a while. She talks in her very first column about how she doesn’t really need movies to be masterpieces, she just wants them to have moments. When she says moments, she means big swelling things that happen in a movie that make her feel things. It’s so opposite, I think, to most people’s view of Didion. Most people associate her with this snobbish elitism or something, which I don’t think is untrue when we’re talking about literature. But for her, the movies were like entertainment, and entering that business was a choice to enter that world. She wasn’t attempting to elevate the discourse or something. I just think that’s fascinating. She also has some great insights there. But as a film critic, I find myself disagreeing with most of her reviews. But I think that doesn’t matter. It was more interesting to see how she conceived of the movies. There is a moment later on, in another piece that I don’t think has been republished anywhere from the New York Review of Books, where she writes about the movies of Woody Allen. She hates them. It’s right at the point where he’s making like Manhattan and Annie Hall, like the good stuff. She just has no use for them. It’s one of the funniest pieces. I won’t spoil the ending because it’s hilarious, and it’s in the book. That writing was of huge interest to me and hasn’t been republished in books. I was very grateful to get access to it, in part because it is in the archives — the electronic archives of the New York Public Library. But at the time, the library was closed. So I had to call the library and have a librarian get on Zoom with me for like an hour and a half to figure out how I could get in the proverbial back door of the library to get access while the library wasn’t open. That’s magnificent. That’s such a cool way to go to the archives because some stuff just hasn’t been published. If it wasn’t digitized, then it’s not digitized. That’s incredible. Yeah, it’s there, but you can barely print them off because they’re in PDFs. They’re like scanned images that are super high res, so the printer just dies when you try to print them. It’s all very fascinating. I hope it gets republished at some point because I think there’s enough interest in her work that it’s fascinating to see this other aspect of her taste and her persona. It’s really interesting that she seems to have wanted to meet the medium where it is, right? She wasn’t trying to literary-up Hollywood. I mean, LA can be a bit of a friction. It’s not exactly a literary town in the way that some East Coast metropolises can be. It is interesting that she was enamored by the movies. Do you want to speak about what things were like for her when she moved out? Yeah, it is funny because, at the same time, the first two movies that they wrote and produced are The Panic in Needle Park, which is probably the most new Hollywood movie you can imagine. It's about addicts at Needle Park, which is actually right where the 72nd Street subway stop is on the Upper West Side. If people have been there, it’s hard to imagine. But that was apparently where they all sat around, and there were a lot of needles. It's apparently the first movie supposedly where someone shoots up live on camera. So it was the ’70s. That’s amazing. Yes, and it launched Al Pacino’s film career! Yeah, it’s wild. You watch it and you’re just like, “How is this coming from the woman who’s about all this arty farty stuff in the movies.” And Play It As It Lays has a very similar, almost avant-garde vibe to it. It’s very, very interesting. You see it later on in the work that they made. A key thing to remember about them (and something I didn’t realize before I started researching the book)was that Didion and Dunn were novelists who worked in journalism because everybody did. They wrote movies, according to them (you can only go off of what they said. A lot of it is John writing these jaunty articles. He's a very funny writer) because “we had tuition and a mortgage. This is how you pay for it.” This comes up later on, they needed to keep their WGA insurance because John had heart trouble. The best way to have health insurance was to remain in the Writers Guild. Remaining in the Writers Guild means you had to have a certain amount of work produced through union means. They were big union supporters. For them this was not, this was very strictly not an auteurist undertaking. This was not like, “Oh, I’m gonna go write these amazing screenplays that give my concept of the world to the audience.” It’s not like Bonnie and Clyding going on here. It’s very like, “We wrote these based on some stories that we thought would be cool.” I like that a lot. Like the idea that A Star is Born was like a pot boiler. That’s really delightful. Completely. It was totally taken away from them by Streisand and John Peters at some point. But they were like, “Yeah, I mean, you know, it happens. We still got paid.” Yeah, if it can happen to Superman, it can happen to you. It happens to everybody, you know, don’t get too precious about it. The important thing is did your novel come out and was it supported by its publisher? So just tracing some of their arcs in Hollywood. Obviously, Didion’s one of the most influential writers of her generation, there’s a very rich literary tradition. Where do we see her footprint, her imprint in Hollywood? What are some of the ways that we can see her register in Hollywood, or reverberate outside of it? In the business itself, I don’t know that she was influential directly. What we see is on the outside of it. So a lot of people were friends. She was like a famous hostess, famous hostess. The New York Public Library archives are set to open at the end of March, of Didion and Dunn’s work, which was like completely incidental to my publication date. I just got lucky. There’s a bunch of screenplays in there that they worked on that weren’t produced. There’s also her cookbooks, and I’m very excited to go through those and see that. So you might meet somebody there. Her account of what the vibe was when the Manson murders occurred, which is published in her essay The White Album, is still the one people talk about, even though there are a lot of different ways to come at it. That’s how we think about the Manson murders: through her lens. Later on, when she’s not writing directly about Hollywood anymore (and not really writing in Hollywood as much) but instead is writing about the headlines, about news events, about sensationalism in the news, she becomes a great media critic. We start to see her taking the things that she learned (having been around Hollywood people, having been on movie sets, having seen how the sausage is made) and she starts writing about politics. In that age, it is Hollywood’s logic that you perform for the TV. We have the debates suddenly becoming televised, the conventions becoming televised, we start to see candidates who seem specifically groomed to win because they look good on TV. They’re starting to win and rule the day. She writes about Newt Gingrich. Of course, Gingrich was the first politician to figure out how to harness C-SPAN to his own ends — the fact that there were TV cameras on the congressional floor. So she’s writing about all of this stuff at a time when you can see other people writing about it. I mean, Neil Postman famously writes about it. But the way Didion does it is always very pegged to reviewing somebody’s book, or she’s thinking about a particular event, or she’s been on the campaign plane or something like that. Like she’s been on the inside, but with an outsider’s eye. That also crops up in, for instance, her essays. “Sentimental Journeys” is one of her most famous ones. That one’s about the case of the Central Park Five, and the jogger who was murdered. Of course, now, we’re many decades out from that, and the convictions were vacated. We know about coerced confessions. Also Donald Trump arrives in the middle of that whole thing. But she’s actually not interested in the guilt or innocence question, because a lot of people were writing about that. She’s interested in how the city of New York and the nation perform themselves for themselves, seeing themselves through the long lens of a movie and telling themselves stories about themselves. You see this over and over in her writing, no matter what she’s writing about. I think once she moved away from writing about the business so much, she became very interested in how Hollywood logic had taken over American public life writ large. That’s fascinating. Like, again, she spends time in the industry, then basically she can only see it through that lens. Of course, Michael Dukakis in a tank is trying to be a set piece, of course in front of the Berlin Wall, you’re finally doing set decoration rather than doing it outside of a brick wall somewhere. You mentioned the New York thing in Performing New York. I have lived in the city for over a decade now. The dumbest thing is when the mayor gets to wear the silly jacket whenever there’s a snowstorm that says “Mr. Mayor.” It’s all an act in so many ways. I guess that political choreography had to come from somewhere, and it seems like she was documenting a lot of that initial rise. Yeah, I think she really saw it. The question I would ask her, if I could, is how cognizant she was that she kept doing that. As someone who’s written for a long time, you don’t always recognize that you have the one thing you write about all the time. Other people then bring it up to you and you’re like, “Oh, I guess you’re right.” Even when you move into her grief memoir phase, which is how I think about the last few original works that she published, she uses movie logic constantly in those. I mean, The Year of Magical Thinking is a cyclical book, she goes over the same events over and over. But if you actually look at the language she’s using, she talks about running the tape back, she talks about the edit, she talks about all these things as if she’s running her own life through how a movie would tell a story. Maybe she knew very deliberately. She’s not a person who does things just haphazardly, but it has the feeling of being so baked into her psyche at this point that she would never even think of trying to escape it. Fascinating. Yeah, that idea that you don’t know what you are potentially doing, I’ve thought about that. I don’t know what mine is. But either way. It’s such a cool way to look at it. On a certain level, she pretty much succeeded at that, though, right? I think that when people think about Joan Didion, they think about a life that freshens up a movie, right? Like, it worked Very much, yeah. I’m gonna be really curious to see what happens over the next 10 years or so. I’ve been thinking about figures like Sylvia Plath or women with larger-than-life iconography and reputation and how there’s a constant need to relook at their legacies and reinvent and rethink and reimagine them. There's a lot in the life of Didion that I think remains to be explored. I’m really curious to see where people go with it, especially with the opening of these archives and new personal information making its way into the world. Yeah, even just your ability to break some of those stories that have been locked away in archives out sounds like a really exciting addition to the scholarship. Just backing out a little bit, we live in a moment in which the relationship between pop culture and political life is fairly directly intertwined. Setting aside the steel-plated elephant in the room, you and I are friendly because we bonded over this idea that movies really are consequential. Coming out of this book and coming out of reporting on it, what are some of the relevances for today in particular? Yeah, I mean, a lot more than I thought, I guess, five years ago. I started work on the book at the end of Trump One, and it’s coming out at the beginning of Trump Two, and there was this period in the middle of a slightly different vibe. But even then I watch TikTok or whatever. You see people talk about “main character energy” or the “vibe shift” or all of romanticizing your life. I would have loved to read a Didion essay on the way that young people sort of view themselves through the logic of the screens they have lived on and the way that has shaped America for a long time. I should confirm this, I don’t think she wrote about Obama, or if she did, it was only a little bit. So her political writing ends in George W. Bush’s era. I think there’s one piece on Obama, and then she’s writing about other things. It’s just interesting to think about how her ideas of what has happened to political culture in America have seeped into the present day. I think the Hollywood logic, the cinematic logic has given way to reality TV logic. That's very much the logic of the Trump world, right? Still performing for cameras, but the cameras have shifted. The way that we want things from the cameras has shifted, too. Reality TV is a lot about creating moments of drama where they may or may not actually exist and bombarding you with them. I think that’s a lot of what we see and what we feel now. I have to imagine she would think about it that way. There is one interesting essay that I feel has only recently been talked about. It’s at the beginning of my book, too. It was in a documentary, and Gia Tolentino wrote about it recently. It's this essay she wrote in 2000 about Martha Stewart and about Martha Stewart’s website. It feels like the 2000s was like, “What is this website thing? Why are people so into it?” But really, it’s an essay about parasocial relationships that people develop (with women in particular) who they invent stories around and how those stories correspond to greater American archetypes. It’s a really interesting essay, not least because I think it’s an essay also about people’s parasocial relationships with Joan Didion. So the rise of her celebrity in the 21st century, where people know who she is and carry around a tote bag, but don’t really know what they’re getting themselves into is very interesting to me. I think it is also something she thought about quite a bit, while also consciously courting it. Yeah, I mean, that makes a ton of sense. For someone who was so adept at using cinematic language to describe her own life with every living being having a camera directly next to them at all times. It seems like we are very much living in a world that she had at least put a lot of thought into, even if the technology wasn’t around for her to specifically address it. Yes, completely. On that note, where can folks find the book? Where can folks find you? What’s the elevator pitch for why they ought to check this out? Joan Didion superfan or just rather novice? Exactly! I think this book is not just for the fans, let me put it that way. Certainly, I think anyone who considers themselves a Didion fan will have a lot to enjoy here. The stuff you didn’t know, hadn’t read or just a new way to think through her cultural impact. But also, this is really a book that’s as much for people who are just interested in thinking about the world we live in today a little critically. It’s certainly a biography of American political culture as much as it is of Didion. There’s a great deal of Hollywood history in there as well. Thinking about that sweep of the American century and change is what the book is doing. It’s very, very, very informed by what I do in my day job as a movie critic at The New York Times. Thinking about what movies mean, what do they tell us about ourselves? I think this is what this book does. I have been told it’s very fun to read. So I’m happy about that. It’s not ponderous at all, which is good. It’s also not that long. It comes out March 11th from Live Right, which is a Norton imprint. There will be an audiobook at the end of May that I am reading, which I’m excited about. And I’ll be on tour for a large amount of March on the East Coast. Then in California, there’s a virtual date, and there’s a good chance I’ll be popping up elsewhere all year, too. Those updates will be on my social feeds, which are all @alissawilkinson on whatever platform except X, which is fine because I don’t really post there anymore. Alyssa, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much. Edited by Crystal Wang. If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock. Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey [http://www.twitter.com/walthickey] or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news [walt@numlock.news]. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.numlock.com/subscribe [https://www.numlock.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

16 mrt 2025 - 34 min
aflevering Numlock Sunday: Olga Khazan on how to change your personality artwork

Numlock Sunday: Olga Khazan on how to change your personality

By Walt Hickey Double feature today! Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Olga Khazan who wrote the brand new book, Me, But Better. Olga appears all the time in Numlock because I really like her work, she’s a staff writer at The Atlantic and previously wrote a delightful book that I really enjoyed called Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World. The book dives into the science of personality, where it comes from, and the real ways that we can change our own personalities in one direction or another. In it, Olga becomes a guinea pig for all kinds of radical experiences to change her personality. Olga can be found at The Atlantic, and the book is available wherever books are sold. This interview has been condensed and edited. Olga Khazan, thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. You are the author of the brand new book Me But Better. I loved your book Weird which was out just a few years ago. This book is all about how to change your personality. It is a really exciting journey. I know that it started with an article that you published in The Atlantic, but what drew you to the art and science of changing one’s personality? Really it’s because personality is at the root of so much self-improvement and personal growth. I noticed that I tended to see things really negatively a lot of the time, and I was also really socially isolated. it was keeping me from enjoying life and appreciating what I had and just getting the most out of what life had to offer me. I really saw personality change as a way to fix all or improve that in one fell swoop. Great. You talk a lot from the framework of the Big Five. I really enjoyed how grounded in the scientific literature it was. The Big Five is potentially somewhat different from the Myers-Briggs structure that a lot of people know. Before we dive into how you went about doing a gut renovation on your personality, I would love to hear a little bit about what the Big Five are, where you came in on some of it, and what you wanted to see if you could change. Yeah, so generally the accepted scientific view today is that there are five traits that make up personality. You can remember them with the acronym OCEAN. The first is Openness to experiences, which is like imaginativeness and creativity. The next is Conscientiousness, which is being super organized, being on time. The next is Extroversion, which is being friendly and cheerful and sociable. Then there’s Agreeableness, which is being warm, empathetic and also trusting of others. Then there’s Neuroticism, which is a bad thing; it is depression and anxiety. The opposite of that, which is the one that you want, is emotional stability. When I started taking these scientific personality tests at the start of the project, I scored very low on Extroversion, very high on Neuroticism and I scored about average on Agreeableness. Those were the ones that I wanted to change. That’s fascinating. I want to actually follow up with that. I did not hear you put a good, bad valence on any of the other ones besides neuroticism. It seems like most of these…people can have a full and fulfilling life with one or the other. What made Neuroticism pop out? You can have a full and fulfilling life without being on the outer extreme on any of these, but I would say it’s generally better to be higher on all of them other than Neuroticism. You don’t want to be all the way to the extreme. You don’t want to be so agreeable that you’re just like a doormat. It’s generally better for your mental health and well-being and stuff to be pretty agreeable, pretty extroverted, pretty conscientious. Neuroticism popped out to me because that is one that I was super high on. It’s very bad for your mental health. The definition is pretty much having bad mental health. It was keeping me from having a fun life, having a good life. Your happiness is determined by how you feel moment to moment and not by how many goodies you have. Even when I had a lot of goodies, I was sort of still miserable. Fascinating. Just to get into some of the literature on that, there was this amazing study that you cited in the book that says knocking down your Neuroticism by a few points was worth the equivalent of getting a $300,000 annual income increase. It seems like this is a really significant reverberation on just how people assess themselves. Yeah, even a really minor decrease in neuroticism can have a really big benefit for your life and have a lot of benefits for your mental health. This is why people spend so much time in therapy and get on SSRIs and things like that. Both of those have been shown to decrease neuroticism. So it really is a very popular personality trait that people like to work on. So how’d you go about it? For Neuroticism, the technique is really a lot of meditation. It’s really hard to get away from that. People keep wanting me to say something else, but it’s a lot of mindfulness meditation. The other component that I did was gratitude journaling. You can do this exercise where you write a letter to someone in your life that you’re really grateful for, which will inevitably make you just weep hot tears because you’re like “I’m so thankful.” So you can do exercises like that. But really the day-to-day practice that I did and that people recommend is mindfulness meditation. In particular, a lot of the Buddhist teachings in the mindfulness class that I took were really helpful to me. I think often in the day-to-day of life, I get really wrapped up in these negative thought spirals, and it really helped me have a more realistic way of looking at things that were less negative. Fascinating. I always love it when you ask “What’s the one simple trick to solving your problem?” It’s always just “Oh, you just have to exercise every day. Oh, you just have to meditate” I know! Just completely change your life in every way and spend all your time on self-care. Let’s go through some of the other ones. Definitely Extroversion I think is a really interesting one. Again, you have happy introverts in life. You have happy extroverts in life. You wanted to get more extroverted. I think I would still identify as an introvert. It’s not like you have to abandon that identity if that’s important to you, but really it’s about: am I getting enough social connection to fill up that bucket in my life? I really was not. I almost reflexively (even before the pandemic) if people would invite me out for a happy hour or something, I would just reflexively say no. Now as a new parent, I’m kicking myself because I’m never going to get to go to happy hour again. I would kill for a happy hour with people. Please come have happy hour with me. I would just kind of say no because I was like, “Well, I don’t know if it’s going to be that fun. Who all is going to be there?” I was doing these cost-benefit analyses. I found that once I actually forced myself and I was like “Okay, I’m actually going to go out a lot. I’m actually going to socialize. I’m going to do improv. I’m going to go to Sailing Club.” Once I go to these things and do them, I actually do feel happier. I felt better afterward, even if I wasn’t in the mood to go beforehand. Again, you took some incredibly extreme steps over the course of this. People should consult a doctor before joining an improv group. But you went ahead and did that. Yeah. Improv was probably the scariest thing for me to try. But it was also the most efficacious, I would say. Really? Yeah, because it is such good practice with so many things that bother neurotic, introverted control freaks. It’s basically shattering the pretty little world that you live in, if you’re like me. It’s a completely uncontrolled environment. You don’t get a say over what is said or what happens in improv because it’s all up to other people. It’s a performative thing, which makes me very uncomfortable. I have stage fright. It’s silly, and I have issues being silly. It’s spontaneous. It is very whimsical. It involves really reading other people very closely, moment to moment, which can also be really challenging if you don’t get out much and you are super introverted. So I would say improv just plunges you into figuring out other people all in one go. Amazing. I want to back out a little bit and talk about this book in the context of your previous book. Can we talk a little bit about the distinction between personality and identity? Your previous book, Weird, really honed in on some of the advantages of being weird, being somewhat different than those around you had. It was interesting in this book because you were pursuing qualities that not necessarily made you less weird necessarily, but also made it easier to plug in with other people at times, right? Obviously, these are different things, but you’re still a very unique person. You still have a fascinating background. I don’t think any part of this book really comes across as you losing anything. It’s interesting to just have this book and it just in perspective of your previous one, just because it seems like it’s an interesting way to perceive working on yourself without changing yourself too fundamentally. Yeah, that’s an interesting point. I think, honestly, what this helped me to do is to embrace the positive things about being weird or my unusual identity. For people who haven’t read my previous book or don’t know who I am, I am a Russian immigrant and I grew up in West Texas. That element of me was like in this book, Weird, where wrote about other people and how being different from other people around you can be both a source of pain and a source of strength. I think now I am better able to focus on the source of strength element of this because I am less sensitive by virtue of being less neurotic to the slight microaggressions that you sometimes get if you don’t totally belong in your milieu. A lot of the other people who were “weird” that I interviewed, picked up on. There’s a scene in the book where I describe going to a bar and the bartender weirdly asked me if I’m always alone. It sent me on this spiral of like, what’s wrong with me? Like why would someone ask me if I’m always alone. That’s so weird. I was like, was my outfit really bad? Do I look like I’m homeless? I just sort of started spiraling, you know, but that kind of thing honestly happens a lot less since I started doing this. I feel like, now, I would respond to that with “Nope, just for the moment” and not think much of it. I don’t know. So it gave me some perspective on my weirdness, I guess. That’s fascinating. Again, I really enjoyed the book because it talks about a lot of effective ways to change elements of people’s personalities that they might want to adjust. In personality, it just seems like there’s a lot of pseudoscience. There’s a lot of rumors. There are a lot of things that don’t work. What are some of the things that you looked into that never really panned out, or things that aren’t as effective as people might think at changing their personality? Oh, good question. So for me, for Openness to experiences, a big suggestion is traveling. A lot of the studies on increasing openness suggest that you travel. I definitely have had travel experiences where they’ve totally opened up my mind and I’ve been like “Whoa, man,” and had all these ideas and felt more creative afterward. But for this book, I went to Lisbon, Portugal, which has completely exploded as a travel destination recently. I really am not kidding when I say that if you walk around the streets of Lisbon, it’s pretty rare to actually hear Portuguese. Mostly, I heard Australians, British people and people from other Western European countries who were like tourists. I was obviously also a tourist, so I’m not saying that it’s wrong to be a tourist or that it’s bad. But there’s something about it that didn’t work on me. I just felt like I was at Disneyland or something. I was like, “Okay, now we’re all going to this church. Now we’re all looking at this thing.” It didn’t feel, I don’t know, I guess very genuine. Whatever the sojourner effect is supposed to be didn’t work on me. That’s interesting. With the openness to experience element, you wrote a little bit about how there are some people for whom this is just a bolt from the blue. They have an experience, and it permanently changes their personality forever. They’ve been studied a little bit, but that is the exception to the rule in many ways. Yeah. So there's this guy who wrote this book, Quantum Change, which is a very weird book. He interviewed people who said their personalities did change after some epiphany or something happened. And these epiphanies were really weird. They happened in all sorts of circumstances. Some of them were cleaning their toilets. Some of them were smoking pot or doing whatever. A lot of it was rock bottom type stuff, like “I was an alcoholic” type thing. But that, I would say, is the exception. For the people who I interviewed for this book (who changed their personalities), it was more of a methodical pursuit of something over time. They had to build and build and build towards something rather than just snap, I’m different now. Interesting. One of the ones that you wrote about, Conscientiousness, You approached somewhat with trepidation because you scored very high on Conscientiousness already, right? Yes. Yeah. So it also seems that Conscientiousness is (based on what you just said) one of the harder ones to change. If you have to be conscientious about changing your personality, it’s tough to become more Conscientious, you know? Yeah, and one thing that really seemed to make the difference for people…I interviewed one woman who really wanted to start a business, but she was not very self-directed, I guess is the best way to put it. She just wasn’t really a natural self-starter, so she didn’t know how to get up and go and do something like that. Then I interviewed another guy who really wanted to go to grad school for psychology, but he got to college without ever having written a paper before, and he never studied. He actually bought a book called How to Make A’s because he did not know how to make A’s. One thing that really made the difference for folks like that who are like “I don’t know what I’m doing” is having a big goal that was really, really important to them. It was like the big project that they were working toward. What research tells us is that having these personal projects that are really important to you can really inspire personality change when it gets really challenging. Having a good career in academia was just so important to this guy that it didn’t matter to him that he wasn’t really the typical candidate for that thing. For the woman who wanted to start a business, she had ended up in a dead-end job and she really did not want to return to that. So they both had these fires under them. They were like, “I’m going to achieve this thing and it is going to require conscientiousness.” So that is what kept them going. Yeah, I really identified with that chapter just because (not to talk down a previous version of myself too much) I was occasionally living the dissolute drunken journalist lifestyle. Then, I started writing a daily newsletter and at a certain point, that really does give you a long-term daily obligation that was fairly instrumental to my own Conscientiousness. I really identified with that chapter and those folks who managed to get a specific goal to change them up, you know? Yeah. Yeah. There was actually another dissolute drunken journalist in that chapter who was actually one of the most remarkable transformations of all the people I talked to. He did, he was drinking so much, like a case of beer a day, basically. Then the pandemic started and he actually didn’t have an obligation. It was a lack of an obligation. He got laid off when the pandemic started and he was like, “Oh, am I just going to drink the pandemic away? I need to have some sort of structure or something that I’m doing that isn’t this.” So that was, weirdly, what clicked for him. It doesn’t always have to be work, but it often is. I feel like there was this trend for a while: there was a lot of work coming out that was very, very clearly heavily influenced by the pandemic. I do not describe this work as heavily influenced by the pandemic because it’s very clearly very resident beyond simply that era. That being said, the pandemic has come up a lot. People sometimes just needed a big break, a bolt from the blue, something that shook them out of their daily lives to change up one or more of their personality traits. How much is that a factor in this? I know in your own experience, it came up to some extent. Big life changes come around all the time, it doesn’t have to just be a pandemic, but how do those give us opportunities to change who we are? Yeah, there’s a lot of interesting research on this actually about how turning points or breaking points can be like a good time to start something new. I know that a lot of people don’t keep their New Year’s resolutions, but it’s actually a good thing to make them. The reason why we pick the first of the year is because it's turning over a new leaf. It’s nice to have those clean breaks sometimes. I’m not saying that the pandemic was a good thing because it was a nice reset moment for us. But it did play a resetting role for me. It really gave me time to think about what it is that I want and like what’s standing in my way. You do get trapped in your routine — commuting to work, at the office all day, commuting back, now I’m too tired and I don’t want to go back out, I’m just going to sit here and have my wine and watch my TV. I think just having a break in that routine is what shifted it for me. Fascinating. There’s one last one that we haven’t really talked too much about: Agreeableness. What did you find with this? Again, this was a category that you didn’t score particularly low on, but you still had a few opportunities to try to shake up your numbers a bit. Yeah. I think one thing with Agreeableness that I learned is that there’s a lot of room for deepening the connections that you already have. It’s true that I didn’t get out and meet a ton of people, but I also was getting in a lot of fights with my friends. I sometimes found that when I was having conversations, they weren’t very deep or they were surface-y. That would annoy me, then it would make me not want to have any more conversations. One thing that I did that was really helpful for that was go to this conversation workshop in London. This woman, Georgie Nightingale taught us strategies for having deeper and more interesting conversations. One tip that I will share here is to ask someone what something meant to them. Instead of collecting facts (when you’re asking someone how was your day, how did this go, how did that go, what airline did you take to get here) ask why was that important to you. Or why was that meaningful to you? That will generally lead you into a more interesting tangent. Though, it can be initially a little bit awkward than this is where you’re from, this is what airline you took, this is how many pieces of luggage you packed, the typical third degree we give people. Got it. All right. I will take that advice — specifically, what did making this book mean to you? This book made me really happy. I felt like it gave me a reason to break out of some of my habits that I didn’t love. There are some habits that I have kept up. I’m just really glad that I did it before I had a baby. Yeah. I really enjoyed reading it because it felt very intentional. It was a chance to do work on oneself, but also getting into the data of why this is the way it is. What have you held onto from this process? I know that when you wrote the article in The Atlantic a few years ago, you mentioned that you dropped a few of the habits but what have you still stuck with? One thing I have stuck with is that I’ve realized that when I am feeling down or depressed or out of sorts, what I should do is actually connect with people and not disconnect. I often thought that I needed more alone time because I’m feeling sad. But actually, what I often need in those moments is more time with other people. That has flipped my approach to a lot of things now where I actually seek out more socializing and more interaction whenever I’m feeling a little bit withdrawn if that makes sense. That’s really interesting. Is there anything that you tried that you were like, “Oh, this is nice, but I don’t need to be this open to experience.” Is there anything that you dropped off from? Yeah, there was this thing I did in the Neuroticism chapter that involved noting and noting is very weird. It’s like where you make note of what you’re doing, like thinking, seeing. For example, I’m seeing a red bird or I’m thinking that this is strange or I’m hearing yelling or whatever. I have not kept up with noting. I always found it really weird and hard and I have not been doing it. That’s interesting. Yeah. I don’t, I don’t think building some dissociation into my day is a good thing for Walter. So I can understand that. Yeah. Again Olga, thank you so much for coming on. I guess I’ll give you just the floor here a little bit. Why don’t you tell folks a little bit about the book, where they can find it and where they can find you? Yeah. Um, the book is Me, But Better. You can find it wherever books are sold March 11th. I’m Olga Khazan and I have a sub stack under my same name, olgakhazan.substack.com [http://olgakhazan.substack.com]. I also write for The Atlantic and you can find a lot of my writing there. Yeah. I will just personally say, I really dig the substack. I like your work there a lot. It was really fun to follow some of the work that you were doing on the book from there and definitely strongly endorse it. Also, The Atlantic. Pretty good too. Very good. Yeah. And The Atlantic is also good! All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much for the kind words and thanks for having me. Edited by Crystal Wang. If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock. Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey [http://www.twitter.com/walthickey] or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news [walt@numlock.news]. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.numlock.com/subscribe [https://www.numlock.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

16 mrt 2025 - 25 min
aflevering Numlock Sunday: Olivia Walch on the science of sleep artwork

Numlock Sunday: Olivia Walch on the science of sleep

By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Olivia Walch, author of the brand-new book Sleep Groove: Why Your Body's Clock Is So Messed Up and What To Do About It [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Sleep-Groove/Olivia-Walch/9781524892951]. Olivia’s a good friend of mine and I’ve been hearing about her research and her work for years, and now she’s finally got a whole book diving into why ideal sleep is more than just the eight hours number we hear so much about. It’s a delightful book with all sorts of cool insights that can have major impacts on your life and health. We spoke about the human body's numerous circadian rhythms, why sleep regularity is more important than sleep duration, and why permanent daylight saving time is a bad idea. Walch can be found at oliviawalch.com [http://oliviawalch.com/] and the book can be found wherever [https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1524892955?tag=simonsayscom] books [https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/sleep-groove-olivia-walch/1145929708?ean=9781524892951] are [https://www.booksamillion.com/p/9781524892951] sold [https://bookshop.org/p/books/sleep-groove-why-your-sleep-rhythm-is-so-messed-up-and-what-you-can-do-about-it-olivia-walch/21085327?ean=9781524892951&next=t&affiliate=1688]. This interview has been condensed and edited. Olivia, thank you so much for coming on. I'm so delighted to be here. You are the author of the brand-new book Sleep Groove: Why Your Body's Clock Is So Messed Up and What To Do About It. It's a really, really fun book. It covers a lot of the science behind sleep and actually has some pretty surprising stuff in there for folks who are interested in their own sleep health. You have a really interesting story about how you even fell into being interested in the science behind sleep. You did a sleep study at some point in grad school that changed your life, it sounds like. Well, you knew me before then. We were in college together. Each diabolically bad at sleeping. I would give each of us a failing grade — you maybe a lower grade than me. I was bad, but you were exploring new horizons of bad, like with polyphasic sleep. I tried it once. It was such a bad idea. Maybe a D, D-minus. I knew when I went to grad school something had to change. I was not sleeping; I was not making new memories; I was getting sick. I got MRSA in college and I wonder all the time, was it because my immune system was like a frail Cheeto trying to hold the door closed to the germs? But at the time, I thought at college, you have to do everything. You have to be in every club and miss no opportunity for an experience. And I now remember no experiences from that time period. In grad school, I decided I was going to sleep more. I did, but I didn't actually notice that huge of a difference with fewer things filling my schedule, even though I was sleeping more. It was better, but it wasn't that much better. It took a sleep study in which I had to keep a really regular bedtime and researchers were spying on me. They would know if I didn't, because I was wearing a device, ye olde Jawbone, which is not even a thing anymore. For months, I went to bed at 11:30 every single night. The changes were so profound. I didn't just instantly fall asleep at 11:30, though that did happen. I got faster, I lost weight, skin conditions cleared up. In every dimension, my life was better. And the thing that had shifted was not really sleep duration, but sleep regularity. You get at this idea early in the book. There's this very common number that everybody associates with the right thing to do about sleep, which is that you should sleep for eight hours. The book goes the next level deeper, looks at some of the other dimensions of sleep, and it turns out that eight hours is good, that's a good thought to keep in your mind, but it's really the rhythm. What is the conceit here? Why are rhythms important when it comes to this stuff? Our understanding of sleep health is so fixated on duration that there's a creepypasta on Reddit that goes, "Oh, these Russians were kept awake and they went crazy." The creepypasta [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Sleep_Experiment] has always been funny to me because it's like, "Yeah, and after five days of no sleep, they started eating their own organs." (Spoilers for the Russian sleep experiment creepypasta.) Yet we've kept lots of people up for five days and they don't start eating their organs. We have this conception in our minds that losing sleep duration is going to be really bad. It's not good, but it also doesn't make you self-cannibalize after five days of no sleep. That definition of sleep health is woefully inadequate. The movement in the sleep field is higher dimensional. There are more things that matter to sleep health. There's this big, long list of things. People say you should think about how many times you wake up in the middle of the night, and you should think about how alert you feel during the day. All of those are great, but they're not memorable. People don't keep two things in their head, let alone five. I'm trying to get people to keep two, which is duration and regularity, as the latitude and longitude of sleep health. You don't say Madrid and New York are close together just because they have the same latitude; longitude also matters. You shouldn't say somebody who sleeps eight hours a night is healthy if they have horrible regularity. That's a case where they are probably pretty far from health, just like New York and Madrid are pretty far from each other. A lot of this comes down to circadian rhythms. What are they in your view? What kind of bodily processes are governed by them? The whole shebang. The problem with circadian rhythms is that their UI is terrible. People talk about the circadian rhythm, but that's not really right because circadian rhythms are plural. Sleep is under the subhead of circadian rhythms, but so is everything else in your body: when you're strongest, when you metabolize food, when your immune system peaks, when you repair DNA. There's this real problem. I think that because circadian rhythms are kind of everything, people just say, "You know, the rhythms." This leads to everyone who doesn't study this all day, every day, walking around having no idea what they are and just thinking it's probably the same thing as sleep. Your body has an internal clock, and it schedules things according to when it thinks you need to do more or less of them. That clock is set by your light exposure, and in modern life, we get light whenever we want it, which is not particularly traditional or natural. Circadian rhythms developed as a process because we live on Earth, right? We know there's a certain amount of daylight and when certain things should happen, and we evolved specifically to have a circadian rhythm. Yes. The circadian rhythm is so tuned to Earth that if you put us on a planet with 28-hour days, we probably wouldn't be able to adjust. We would basically continue to have close to a 24-hour period in our rhythms that would continue, even though the sun on this planet would be up and down at different times. It's baked into us, and it's the case that there's just stuff in your body at some times that isn't there at other times. The hormone melatonin, for example. If I made you spit into a tube right now, you would not have melatonin in your spit. We're speaking in the middle of the afternoon. It's very, very bright outside. No melatonin. But 10 hours from now? Different story. The thing to imagine is just a bunch of switches in your body getting flipped on and off depending on the time of day, which has massive implications for health, drug efficacy, how you feel, and people have lost their connection to that. Number one, we can have light whenever we want it, so our rhythms are squished relative to where they otherwise would be. But number two, I think we don't have a great way of talking about rhythmic health, which my book tries to address. I'm sure there's much better I can do and other people can do in the future, but this is my first stab at it. You get at this inflection point where so much of these functions are the result of, if not tens of thousands, then millions of years of evolutionary processes really locking us into a day/night process. Then you have the emergence of electricity, and a lot of your book reflects on how that's actually changed the way our bodies work, in ways we wouldn't ordinarily expect. What are some of those ways? I would say signs of rhythms having different effects on your body in the winter versus summer. Any study that reports on those, I'm always very cautious about, because I was involved in a study where we looked at Twitter patterns over the course of the year. We wanted to know if people tweeted differently at different times of the year in a way that reflected the sun and circadian rhythms, and we saw this pretty incredible trend where things seemed to really shift around the spring. Daylight saving time is happening then, the sun is changing, so you think, okay, maybe it's related to the sun. Then we dug a little more closely into the data and saw that the entire effect was just driven by people going on spring break. You would see that people tweeted later when they were on break because they were sleeping in. The fact that we have light available to us whenever we want it and we're not just sitting around in the dark at 6 p.m. in December with nothing to do means that we're in a sort of perpetual summer. We have light as late as we want, as long as we want, and that's stepping on these natural rhythms that would be emerging in the absence of that light. The title of the book is Sleep Groove, and sleep groove is actually a thing you talk about quite a bit in the book. It's getting locked into a really strong, robust, resilient rhythm, and there are lots of advantages to having that. What are some of the advantages that you have by having that rhythm, and what are some things that can go wrong if you don't? I would say you die sooner. This is a brand-new result, that sleep regularity predicts dying better than sleep duration, but it does. Again, this definition of sleep health being how long you sleep would say, okay, shoot for eight hours on average, it doesn't matter when, and you're good. But if you actually look to see what predicts whether you die, the people who have the worst sleep regularity are highly correlated with dying younger, and it keeps coming out. This is in the last 18 months that connections are coming out between sleep regularity and hypertension, diabetes, mood disorders. The data was all there, but people weren't really looking at sleep regularity. We also didn't have as textured tools for defining sleep regularity as we do now, so that's another reason why it's coming out. But things that can go wrong without sleep regularity are all those bad things I listed. I should say that those are all correlations. You could say, well, maybe stressed people die earlier, and they're also sleeping irregularly as a sign of their stress. Except we also have studies where you put people on weird light schedules and you can watch a melatonin rhythm that's really robust just go away. They go 24 hours without making melatonin, which is weird. You've basically flattened their rhythm altogether. The mental image I always have in my mind for modern life is that we've taken rhythms that would be really high and pronounced — like, hey, now's the time to fix your DNA so you don't get cancer. Let's fix all our DNA right now. It's really clear period for fixing DNA — and you've stepped on it. Now it's like, well, I don't know. I guess it's the time to fix DNA? Maybe I'll do a little bit of that. The science is emerging. I don't want to overstate it, but I think there's a strong theoretical case for why the quashing of circadian amplitude is tied to a lot of bad things. The good thing is that more melatonin means you sleep better, feel better — basically my life after doing that one study. What's a situation where you have a strong circadian amplitude? A lot of light during the day? How do you get there? You do the same exact thing every day. I should say, I'm going to speak from a theoretical perspective because a lot of the experiments haven't been run yet. It's my collaborators and me who are calling for amplitude to be the new thing we go after, because sleep regularity is just circadian amplitude wearing glasses and a mustache. They pick up the same thing. What the theory says will get you the maximum circadian amplitude is to have a super bright day and get tons of daylight during the day, and then have a really, really dark night, and copy and paste that over and over again. That's basically it. I'm always think I should add other things for people to do, but it boils down to that. One of the challenges why people haven't discovered this on their own is that that's actually really hard to do in practice. Light at night is super fun, and we also have to work, and often work is indoors where there's just not as much sunlight. It really does seem like a problem of modernity. We've always had a way to illuminate the night, for all intents and purposes, but there's a vast gulf of difference between a candle and an incandescent light bulb, and then there's an even bigger difference between an incandescent light bulb and a full room of fluorescent light. There's been this subtle shift that we didn't notice over time, but our bodies did. You're speaking my language. This is exactly it: the creeping of light into every aspect of our life. Also, because it literally doesn't have mass, it feels immaterial, right? What, the photons are going to get you? And I don't think they will on a short time span. You can absolutely have a bad night of sleep. You can absolutely have disrupted sleep. People cross time zones. But it does add up over a lifespan, which is why we see sleep regularity being a better predictor of mortality than sleep duration. If you're highly irregular over your whole life, all these rhythms that would otherwise have been high metabolism, high DNA repair, robust ability to sleep, become flat and crappy and you get an accumulation of risk. So, a lot of what we've talked about is that there are lots of negative things when you're out of that appropriately phased kind of sleep. There are actually some really good things about being very attuned to that, too. You write in the book about athletics, about medicine. What are some of the ways we can actually gain quite a bit through knowing about this? By having a better sense of what our circadian time is. Conflict of interest disclosure, I do have a startup that tries to do this, but we'll be able to time drugs so that they're maximally effective and as least toxic as they can be. People sometimes go, okay, timing drugs as in you take sleep medication before you go to sleep. Sure, okay. But what if there were a drug that sometimes made your tumor shrink and at other times made it grow faster? That's a paper that came out in the last year. People aren't thinking about this. They're thinking about a 10% variation over the course of the day. They're not thinking about how this person's glioblastoma treatment didn't work because they took dexamethasone at the wrong time, and they died months earlier. I think the simplicity of the idea has started to act as a reason for people to not do it. They think, well, if timing actually mattered, somebody would have figured it out already. I won't be the one who wastes a bunch of time rediscovering what everyone else has. My stance is that we're just beginning to scratch the surface of all the things that can be controlled by timing, and the magnitude of the effects we can see. Imagine the drug I mentioned that accelerated tumor growth sometimes and squished it at others is standard of care. Everybody gets it with this particular type of brain tumor that it was studied in. Imagine you're testing a new drug and oh, it seems to work in these patients but it doesn't work in these other patients. Must not be a very good drug, so it gets ditched. It could be that that entire efficacy difference was driven by when they were taking this standard-of-care drug that everybody takes according to the clock, according to their body's clock. If you could just control for that, you could get more drugs making it through clinical trials. You even made a point that there's a good shift happening between notes saying you should take this pill in the morning, you should take the pill at night, and changing that to say you should take this pill after waking up or take this pill before you go to sleep. It's getting better at adequately describing the bodily conditions you should take pharmaceuticals under. Right. If you're a shift worker, you could be waking up at 3 p.m., for instance, and morning could be the worst time for you. You should take it when you wake up. Then again, if you're a shift worker, your rhythms are so funky that — I might be biased here — you should be using Olivia's cool app [https://www.arcascope.com/] to track your circadian rhythms and know when to take all these different things. But yes, circadian medicine is all about timing your pills before you go to bed or after you wake up. It's also this idea of introducing grooves where we've removed the groove. An example would be that you have a sick kid and you can't feed them, so you put them on total parenteral nutrition, or TPN. They're getting fed through an IV, and the standard for that is to either do it overnight or do it just continuously, 24 hours a day. But if you think about it, if our whole bodies are rhythmic and we expect some things at some times and not at other times, and you're feeding them constantly, that's like being in the light all the time, which we would consider to be torture. If you put somebody in constant light, they are miserable. These researchers just changed it so they gave TPN only during the day, when the kids are awake and their metabolism is up and running. They were able to leave the hospital on average four days earlier because they weren't being force fed like a foie gras goose overnight. So, it's not just sleep grooves: it's food grooves, it's activity grooves, it's mood grooves, it's all these things. Acknowledging that they're rhythmic will lead to people being healthier. The medical stuff can get a bit in the weeds, but I thought it was really informative when you talked about U.S. Olympians going to Japan. You reflected on when folks went to Japan and how they trained there. There's actually a lot of performance that was hypothetically not being unlocked because people weren't being attuned to their circadian peaks. Do you want to talk a little about that? I was reading what people who are Olympians posted on their Instagram, imagining that we were friends. I saw somebody in the weight lifting category be like, "Can't wait to go to Tokyo in two days to compete!" They were fully adjusted or entrained to U.S. time, and they were going to do this trip to Tokyo that was going to massively disrupt their circadian rhythms. Then they were going to compete shortly after landing. Probably the reason for that is because it's really expensive to go and leave your life for a long period of time, and weight lifting isn't the moneybags, the dollar sign, of Olympic sports. But that probably wasn't the best for optimizing performance, to wait until right before you're supposed to go on and then try and lift something really hugely heavy — though it could have been. The thing is, when you travel, you get tired and you undergo jet lag because your light exposure is changing, but you also have a circadian rhythm in performance where people tend to do best in the evening. Around 5 or 6 p.m., you're strong and fast and can run far and lift heavy things. If in Japan, you were supposed to compete at 10 a.m., maybe what you want to do is not adjust and be really careful about staying on your old time zone for the first day you're there, so that your body is at 6 p.m. during Japan's local time of 10 a.m. When it's most suited to compete. Exactly, to lift a big, heavy thing. Exciting. You wrote a little about how there are two big peaks for performance over the course of a given day. What are those? People tend to be alert in the morning, and then they have a second wave of alertness as the day winds down. The way we think about that is that there are two forces that combine to make you feel sleepy: There's how much hunger for sleep you've built up, and then there's your circadian clock basically shaping the gravity. How heavy is gravity for you right now? In the morning, after you get over this initial wave of grogginess, you have the first wave of alertness and that's because you don't have any hunger for sleep. Imagine you're biking, and you just started biking so you're feeling fresh, you're okay. You haven't accumulated feeling tired from biking. In the middle of the day, though, you have accumulated some fatigue. You've been doing stuff with your brain and the circadian clock is not saying it's a great time to be alert. People often get sleepy in the middle of the day, like you would be sleepy if you'd been biking for four hours. Then later in the day, the circadian clock comes in and says it's time for you to be awake. You need to get your act together before the sun goes down or you might die. That's like the road you're biking on sloping downward. It becomes easier. It doesn't take as much effort to stay awake; it doesn't take as much effort to pedal. Your circadian clock is like, great, be alert. Do stuff in the latter part of your day up until close to your habitual bedtime, when the road starts to swoop up again. Then you basically hit the wall of, it's 3 a.m. I want to die. Why am I staying up super late in the year 2009 next to my good friend Walter? What are we doing? You push through that and you get on the other side, and the road starts to slant down again. It was really cool to see, because this speaks to my experience of being sleep deprived and going over the swing set. It's really cool that circadian rhythm still holds, and that's why you get that second wind in the morning and sleep deprivation madness or whatever you want to call it. You do still see that swing hold even if you get more and more sleep weight accumulating. Exactly. I want to talk about some of the studies that you covered, because they're very, very interesting, but I also want to talk about some policy implications. Two things stuck out to me. One was the conversation about daylight saving time and potentially going either permanent DST or permanent standard time. The other one that was super interesting was basically how teenagers react to light and how we set school schedules. What are your insights on those two potential policy questions? Let's do DST first. This also has horrible UI. Nobody can figure out what they're saying when they talk about DST. So, standard time is brighter mornings, darker evenings. Standard time is what we're on in the winter when everyone's depressed and they're like, "It's 5 p.m. and it's dark. Stupid, stupid DST." That's actually standard time that's causing that. DST is darker mornings, lighter at night. DST is what we're on in the summer when we have lots of light even at 9 p.m. It's really bright at night. The thing most circadian scientists are going to tell you is that permanent standard time is best, then the current system where we switch, and then the last and least preferable is permanent DST. You might think, okay, but why isn't it just better to not switch? There's this penalty of everyone jet lagging themselves when we wake up an hour earlier or have to stay up an hour later when we do these transitions in the spring and the fall. The reason is because having the light late into the day in the summer, and especially having light in the afternoons and evenings in the winter and really, really dark mornings in the winter, is worse than the jet lag from transitioning. If we did permanent DST, where we have really dark mornings in the winter, it wouldn't just be a couple days of us all feeling jet lagged. It would be this chronic buildup of a messed up groove. One of the reasons why it's hard for people to concisely say why permanent DST is bad is because it's about rhythmic health. It's been argued, hey, if you want to maximize the amount of hours that we have really bright light during the daytime periods where people are normally awake, DST is really good for that, because you have light until super late. Think about the summer. But do we want to maximize that? Exactly, because imagine the case that I alluded to when we were talking about the meal timing thing. If you're in bright light 20 hours a day like people are up in the Arctic, you have bad sleep. It's not because you don't know about blackout curtains; it's because you're not able to adjust to a rhythm that's all bright light, little bit of darkness. What permanent DST does is basically, in the wintertime, it forces a bunch of people to wake up in darkness, or dim light. They then stay in the dark for a really long time, and they get their bright light weighted way on the latter half of their day. I'm going to go into a long analogy, but I promise I'll bring it back down. Imagine a sidewalk with alternating yellow and black squares, and I give you a yellow shoe and a black shoe. I say, yellow shoe steps on the yellow square, black shoe steps on the black square. If it's well sized to your legs, you could just do that. You're like, awesome, this is great. But then I do something where I basically take the yellow squares and scoot them up into the black squares. Then I have this brownish, crappy blurring of light and dark: yellow, black, and the blur. If I go, "Okay, walk on this," what you have to do is take one big step with one foot and a little step with your other, and you have to repeat that over and over again. That's basically what DST is doing to you in the winter. If we were to go to that in the winter, you'd wake up in the darkness, but then you'd get light later in the day. It makes it so that your rhythms are thrown off. You wake up with a bunch of melatonin in your body. It's like everybody's popping melatonin pills first thing, if you were to do permanent DST. If you're sitting here thinking, "I'm not convinced by her arguments around stepping on yellow tiles with yellow shoes and black tiles with black shoes," the most compelling reason is the fact that we literally tried this. We tried DST in the winter. We didn't even make a year. Russia tried it in the last decade — they made it three years and they bailed. People have tried DST in the winter and we all think it sucks. Meanwhile, Arizona has been on standard time all year since the 1960s and they're going strong. They seem really thrilled with their situation in Arizona. They're pretty happy. So, moral of the story, the current system would be better than having super dark mornings in the winter, which is what permanent DST would be. But I don't really care that much because I'm so convinced that if we try this again, we'll be like Russia in 2014 and bail. We'll be like us in the '70s and bail. We just need to, as a generation, collectively experience it and realize, oh yeah, this is why DST sucks. The old knowledge has been lost. We must relearn it. We'll relearn it and we'll say, no, we're never going to make this mistake again. And then in 50 years, we'll make it again. People always want the optimization of, I want more sleep. I want eight hours of sleep. I want the most sleep I can possibly get, or I want the most light I can possibly get. It seems like that's a trap. I completely understand why people get into that position, because I like light and I like sleep, but just realistically, if you're seeing how much of this governs the rhythm of lots of different processes that are more sophisticated than just enjoying seeing bright things, it's a real shock to the system. Human brains are just not wired to think rhythmically. It's like if you're in a math class and you're learning about Fourier series, to go extremely niche, really fast. It's not intuitive. People are wired to think, "More of thing good," and we're just less wired to think, well, it's good at some times and bad at other times. Very briefly, then, should kids be going to school as early as they currently go to school? No. At the same time, we also shouldn't make it so late, because what would happen if we made it really late is kids would just stay up later. There are diminishing returns, but now you have kids who are waking up at 5:30. That's absolutely what it would feel like for me to wake up at 3:30. It's cruel to them. There's this idea that, oh, we'll do DST. We'll do permanent DST so we don't have to switch, and then we'll also make school times an hour later. You've basically just got us back to where we started. You've made it so that they're going to be functionally popping a melatonin pill in the morning, just based on how much more melatonin is in their body when they wake up, and then you're letting them sleep in another hour. You cannot make both of those changes and act like you've changed anything. You at best maintain the status quo. My personal vote is we should do permanent standard time or keep the current system and make it so that schools for kids start later. The book is full of really, really interesting studies. Some of them are fascinating, recent, breaking studies that, like you mentioned earlier, reveal incredible things about the link between these biorhythms as well as pharmaceuticals and things like that. Some of them, however, are from a more swashbuckling age of discovery, and you cover a lot of really interesting sleep studies from the earliest days of sleep research. Do you have any favorites? In the book it probably comes across that I am so enamored with these old sleep studies, in part because they really underscore this point that if our definition of sleep health is only duration, it's insufficient. There are a bunch of peer-reviewed papers that went, yeah, this guy said he didn't want to sleep anymore, so he just didn't sleep for a week and we watched him. Actually, that's maybe my favorite. There's this guy who comes into a lab and is like, humans don't need to sleep and I can prove it. And then he just doesn't. They went, whoa, let him cook? Yeah, he might be on to something. In the paper, they're like, we tried to stop him but he said he was going to do it anyway, so we gave him a typewriter to see how bad he got at typing. The answer is, he got so bad at typing so fast that he just went, I can't do this. They didn't make him type anymore because it was too hard for his eyes. He got really snippy. People tend to hallucinate when you keep them up all night. They get paranoid for days and days. But at the same time, he was functioning. He was able to, on the last day of the study, write a vaguely sexist acrostic poem. I have tried to understand this thing. It's confusing, but you get the sense that it's not positive toward women. The original no-sleep creepypasta. Seriously. Obviously, I'm glad we don't do studies like this now. We have human subject protections. Why would you need to run the study? They did that in the '30s and '60s, and it was weird. But the data's been out there for so long. The creepypasta levels of sleep deprivation, people can survive. You should not do it. You should absolutely not do it. It's a bad idea. But it's not an instantly fatal thing, like you pulled an all-nighter so watch out. The punchline is, unfortunately for human brains, which want very rapid feedback and instant gratification, the way to have sleep health is not something acute, like the absence of these all-nighters that are terrible for you, but rather the constant maintenance of healthy rhythms that are on the time scale of weeks, months and years, as opposed to hacks that you can do in one hour of your day. The book is called Sleep Groove: Why Your Body's Clock Is So Messed Up and What To Do About It. There are so many fascinating things in here, Olivia. Why don't you tell readers a little about where they can find the book and you. Sleep Groove [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Sleep-Groove/Olivia-Walch/9781524892951] is a book about the emerging science of sleep regularity and how it matters so much to your overall health, well-being, and how you feel at 3 a.m. in the morning. You probably feel pretty bad; my book will explain why. You can find it where books are sold, including Amazon [https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1524892955?tag=simonsayscom] and your local independent bookseller [https://bookshop.org/p/books/sleep-groove-why-your-sleep-rhythm-is-so-messed-up-and-what-you-can-do-about-it-olivia-walch/21085327?ean=9781524892951&next=t&affiliate=1688]. There's also an audiobook coming out next month. Oh, fun. That's great. Thanks so much for coming on, Olivia. Thanks for having me. Edited by Susie Stark. If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock. Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey [http://www.twitter.com/walthickey] or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news [walt@numlock.news]. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.numlock.com/subscribe [https://www.numlock.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

2 feb 2025 - 37 min
Super app. Onthoud waar je bent gebleven en wat je interesses zijn. Heel veel keuze!
Super app. Onthoud waar je bent gebleven en wat je interesses zijn. Heel veel keuze!
Makkelijk in gebruik!
App ziet er mooi uit, navigatie is even wennen maar overzichtelijk.

Kies je abonnement

Meest populair

Tijdelijke aanbieding

Premium

20 uur aan luisterboeken

  • Podcasts die je alleen op Podimo hoort

  • Geen advertenties in Podimo shows

  • Elk moment opzegbaar

2 maanden voor € 1
Daarna € 9,99 / maand

Begin hier

Premium Plus

Onbeperkt luisterboeken

  • Podcasts die je alleen op Podimo hoort

  • Geen advertenties in Podimo shows

  • Elk moment opzegbaar

Probeer 7 dagen gratis
Daarna € 13,99 / maand

Probeer gratis

Alleen bij Podimo

Populaire luisterboeken

Begin hier

2 maanden voor € 1. Daarna € 9,99 / maand. Elk moment opzegbaar.