Leading In The Time Of Virus
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 137: Stephen Garrett
Hi. I’m Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative companies. I coach and advise their leaders to help them maximize their impact and grow their business.
This episode is part of Season 2 - which we’ve sub-titled, “Leading In The Time Of Virus”.
In today’s world, leadership means meeting the challenges of two viruses - COVID-19 and racism.
Today, unlocking creative thinking has never been more valuable or essential.
This conversation is with the film and television producer Stephen Garrett.
During his career, Stephen’s been responsible for an extraordinary range of content - from The Night Manager, to the long-running series Spooks (which is known as MI-5 here in the U.S.). Life on Mars and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen are just two of his many other productions.
He brings stories to life. And he has a rare gift for observing humanity.
As almost everything about our world seems to be changing by the minute, I talked to Stephen about the stories that will be told going forward, about who are today’s heroes and who are the enemies and about how and when production will come back.
Here’s Stephen Garrett.
Charles: (01:18)
Stephen, welcome to Fearless, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Stephen Garrett: (01:21)
It's a pleasure to be here, wherever here is.
Charles: (01:24)
Tell us where you are locked down, and who you are locked down with.
Stephen Garrett: (01:29)
I am in my house in Hampstead, where I have been for the last three months. It's not a space I'm sharing with anybody, though I have a partner who's in a different part of London, and we created our own bubble some time ago, so meet up a couple of times a week. But she's got kids living with her, and I have a grown-up daughter just down the road. There are sort of health appropriate, barely intersecting circles. Venn diagrams of protectedness.
Charles: (02:13)
What's it like being by yourself? That's relatively unusual, among the people that I've talked to. How have you coped with that? How have you found that?
Stephen Garrett: (02:21)
My partner and I kind of spend some time together, so I don't feel completely alone. But there are, I suppose, three days a week when I'm not in, as it were, the physical company of any other human. But strangely, and that may make me a tragic creature of the digital age, I find these, whether on Zoom or SquadCast or any other technology, these encounters oddly connected. I created early on a kind of digital cocktail hour at 6:00, and just sent out a barrage of emails to friends, old and new. It generated, really, an extraordinary cluster of, oddly, particularly for Brits, intimate exchanges.
I think everyone felt, because the end of the world seemed to be nigh, and who knows, still might be. Everyone felt exposed and vulnerable enough to be more open than they might otherwise be. I found myself in conversations even with people I saw relatively often that were very significantly different in quality and openness. I was reminded, there's a Borchert short story which is about the quintessential friendship between English men. He writes, I'm probably getting this wrong but the gist of it is correct, of two Englishmen who became friends at Eton and their friendship began as school boys by excluding intimacy, and has climaxed now as old men, as they sit opposite one another in deep arm chairs in their clubs reading the Times by abandoning conversation altogether.
I think that's something that's very characteristic with certain kinds of Englishmen, and I rather like kind of poking sticks at that. I think this time has provided a giant stick. To your question, alone, I don't actually feel alone. I think I've actually formed deeper bonds with some people that I was already close to, and somehow doing it on a screen hasn't felt too weird. That said, three months in, I'm now ready for three dimensional physical contact to resume.
Charles: (05:03)
The three dimensional part makes a very big difference. It's remarkable, actually, isn't it, when you suddenly see somebody in person, to suddenly realize how much of that we have missed. I was reading a series of lectures that you gave at Oxford about 10 years ago, I think, and I was struck in reading those how much of a student of human behavior you seem to be, whether that is by intention or whether that is by instinct. How much of the change that you're feeling at the moment do you think will continue once we are over and through the pandemic?
Stephen Garrett: (05:42)
Well, you're rather fulfilling the spirit of what I was just talking about. Good question. I think, given what I do is tell stories on largely TV screens, or try to, I think, I may have even said this in the lectures, that I always felt that I was in the entertainment business. Those two, entertainment and business, feel like very odd bedfellows, and they are very odd bedfellows. The one can often be in conflict with the other. Though of course, if you succeed in entertaining people, and they're prepared to pay for it, then you have a very good business. I suppose, I think a lot of the work I've been involved with would not fail this challenge.
But I think it's always felt to me that it's not quite enough just to entertain. I think, if you can have some kind of value added, and I don't mean beating people over the head with a message, but add some value, whether it's to inspire them to do something, or to feel better about being a human or what humanity is, then that's worthwhile. I look at something like The Night Manager, which was now three or four years ago. I think at the time we were making it, we felt we might, as well as entertaining people, be spreading some kind of important message about how evil the arms trade is. But we're really fooling ourselves if we made any impact in that space at all.
I don't think we did, and it's probably not the purpose of that kind of story to do it. We wrestled at times with bits of story we never quite managed to find a voice for, that might have made that message more potent. But I think, and it's part of conversations I've been having, both inside my head and with other people, I think if you are a thoughtful person, you can't help but have been recalibrated by this experience. I think of course, people want to be entertained, and perhaps now, more than ever, distracted from this dullest of horror stories that we find ourselves in.
I've been thinking about how many pandemic or veering towards the zombie apocalypse story that you get pitched, and they all feel rather dull. But at least they have variations on a theme of 28 Days Later, where if you wander into the streets of London, there are zombies ripping each other's heads off. Here, we have the zombie apocalypse, but there are no zombies, and everyone's sitting at home slightly bored. That's a very low concept horror film. But I think the stories that we want to tell in the future just might need to be more mindful and certainly the pieces in general, not entirely, that I've been consuming, found satisfying, have been those that felt to be about something. I think that's really it.
Not just make me laugh, make me cry, but what's ... I remember talking to a writer, he had a very simple formula for what made any script good. It would be, you'd ask two questions. One is, what's it about? Then what's it really about? I think there are too many stories that are just, what's it about? What's it really about, it's a hard challenge to meet. But I think if you can answer that question, then you're doing something that is valuable, and not just frippery.
Charles: (09:42)
It strikes me that there's a lot about going on that satisfies what Aaron Sorkin once described as the foundations of a really good story. He said, all you need is intention and obstacle. If you have those two pieces, you've got the beginnings of a pretty compelling narrative. Does that resonate with you?
Stephen Garrett: (10:01)
That's right. I mean, there's a good example of that, which is, it's a genre I've never even tried, because I think it's, I would say, it's possibly the hardest to get right. This is going to sound bizarre, but it's the romcom. The romcom is the seemingly the simplest of formula, because you've got usually a boy and a girl, but let's assume two people who you know at the beginning you’re introduced to them because they're going to get together at the end. If they don't, take the com away, it's just a rom or a drama. But the romcom is, boy and girl, boy and boy, girl and girl, whatever, they're going to get together at the end.
To Sorkin's point, the only way they work, that works, is if there's an obstacle or eight, en route. Because you know the ending. That's never going to surprise you. On the contrary, it's got to satisfy you and move you and make you laugh and make you cry. I think it's a very good definition, because obviously, without obstacles, you have no drama. The spy story that I spend my time on, if you could just take down the bad guy without that being difficult, that's five minutes gone, and then where do you go?
You reminded me of something, I can't remember who the writer was. But I think he was a pulp novelist. He said, "Writing, it's easy, you just pick up a pen and open your veins." Someone like Sorkin can make it sound effortless. It's so difficult. The species within my world of whom I am most in awe and most adore is the writer. Because without them, I have nothing.
Charles: (11:49)
I'm conscious of the fact that I think a lot of us feel that in many ways, what we are living through at the moment, both in terms of the pandemic, and in terms of Black Lives Matter, both in the short term and the long term, indicators of a massive failure of leadership, almost a total failure of leadership. As you look forward, as you're living through this period and as you look forward, what kind of heroes do you think we're going to be interested in engaging with? What will leaders look like going forward from a story standpoint? And maybe in a real world standpoint as well.
Stephen Garrett: (12:27)
It's so difficult. I mean, in those lectures that I gave that you so sweetly alluded to, now nearly a decade, more than a decade ago, I taught then, there was one lecture which was devoted to the idea that the hero then of the first decade of the 21st century, had devolved dramatically from the heroes that you and I grew up to, being men of a certain age. But let us say we were consuming stories on screens from the '60s onwards. I think in the '60s, the hero had a very clear makeup. They were the good guys, unequivocally the good guys. At that time, I suppose you look at someone like Kennedy, who felt heroic to the whole world, even to Khruschev.
Yet of course, as time has passed, we've realized that he was a deeply flawed individual, no better, and in some cases worse, than many of the leaders we now decry. Of course, he was protected by the absence of social media and a global press who, whatever they knew, had a certain etiquette about what they would and would not reveal. The flaws were rarely presented to the world, and he was allowed to be a hero, unfettered, untrammeled. As the century drew to a close and the press became increasingly willing, I suppose, to take down their gods, and that might have started with Nixon, it probably did.
I think the heroes that have been created for screen have, in a way, had to become similarly flawed. I think our gods and heroes are certainly not in politics anymore. But whether on the sports field, or on screen, or in the music industry, or even great writers, we now know too much about them to be fooled into believing that good people thrive, and that the pure hero is someone who exists, let alone to be admired. You saw, I think, as the 21st century began, a whole new set of really compelling protagonists. I think my favorite is Tony Soprano, who was utterly compelling. And you were rooting for him. Yet, step back, he's an appalling monster of a man. And he's not alone.
You can think of something like The Shield, but there's a whole host of dramas that riveted the world, not just the United States, deeply flawed human beings. I think in a way, the two worlds mirror each other. I think screen heroes, heroes from all fictions, forms of manifestations of fiction, reflect the real world. And equally, the real world reflects the heroes they see on screen. They're probably encouraging each other. And certainly, given that in the States, you now have a president who is a monster and a fool, which is a terrifying combination, and a kind of mini-me version of him in the UK in Boris Johnson.
I think we've certainly got to the point where we already have very morally compromised heroes. It's interesting the way in which the word is used, and I don't know whether it happened in the states. It did, I think, after 9/11, with key workers in fire departments and police and hospitals. It's now certainly happened here, in the UK, where we have called anyone who works for the National Health Service our heroes.
So we would come out every night, and again, I think the same thing happened in Surrey. Every Thursday night, we'd come out and clap, and cheer, and bang sauce pans in celebration of them. And it stopped, because people working in the National Health Service said, "We're not, this is a distraction, and a rather brilliant distraction manufactured by governments." They were heroes, if you peeled it back, because they were getting very ill and dying in many cases, and that was happening because of governmental incompetence, and bureaucratic incompetence. Calling them heroes distracted from the real message which was, we're in chaos and the world is being run by people who haven't a clue what they're doing, who are making it up as they go along. These people are the collateral damage in idiocy.
So, you will get stories about the doctors, the nurses, the care workers, who have made extraordinary sacrifices and probably in the good old fashioned way genuinely are heroic. But rightly, they resist that tag, as probably all true heroes should. I think we just don't know.
Here's the thing. I'm sitting in lockdown like everyone in my position, whether we're drama producers or writers or directors, creating stories in our heads, or in collaboration with others. Because we can do that. And actually our lives are, in that sense, the development world, we're totally unaffected. This is what I do normally. But as time passes, you do increasingly find yourself wondering whether this is the fiction equivalent of fantasy sports games, where you're creating imaginary stories for imaginary audiences. We have no idea how we tell these stories anymore. Again, I think of something like The Night Manager, where we traveled to three continents.
How do we do that? How do we take A-list stars to Morocco and Spain and Switzerland in a three month period? At the moment, as I speak, you can't get insurance for it. I think that's going to change, but these things are un-makeable because there's no insurance. But what is the present of '21 and '22 going to look like? Street scenes? What percentage of people will be wearing masks? Will we meet in bars? How do people have affairs? All the stuff of stories. Will people be going to offices in the old fashioned way? What's interesting is drama is made up, even going back to something that again, you and I grew up with as the soaps, British soaps, which are a staple of mainstream television. The core set of all these soaps is the pub, because that's where you bring a community together.
Now, how do you bring a community together? And when will that happen ever again? The impact on stories is going to be fascinating but very hard to predict.
I was working exactly a year ago in New York on a show for HBO called The Undoing, which will appear in October. It feels to some extent, it's a period show, because it happened before January 2020. It was a world where when people met, they kissed or hugged or shook hands, and they went to parties, and their preoccupations were the banal preoccupations of people who didn't have to wonder whether their jobs or businesses were falling away. As I say, I think it's, if you can be detached about it, it's completely fascinating to wonder what it's going to do to stories. I think the stories that will be told about now, the best of them probably won't happen for 10 or 20 years. I think the best stories about World War Two or Vietnam happened decades later.
That won't stop people making tens of them, and most of them will be dire and the last thing anyone wants to sit down and watch. But I'm dodging your question about heroes because I don't actually know. I think certainly, I think it's really hard to be a hero, because everyone is exposed in social media and there are good people who have been taken down in cancel culture. In the most sort of draconian and Stalinist or Maoist of ways, and they may never come back. Heroes, I think, are people who are brave and outspoken and put their head on the line. You really do that at your peril these days. Which is why politicians are, at best, full of hot air, and at worst, liars. Because if you tell the truth, you're dead.
There's, I feel, watching politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, there's a radio game show you will know, but your American listeners may not, called Just a Minute, where you have to speak on the subject provided by a host without hesitation, deviation, or repetition. Listening to politicians, you feel that's what they're doing. They're trying not to be interruptible, and simply trying to get through the interview without giving anything away that might come back to hurt them. I think the heroes of the future are the Greta Thunbergs and there aren't very many of her like who are just fearless, to invoke the name of your podcast, accidentally.
But I think that's an increasingly rare quality. It is about taking risks and being fearless. It's very scary, I think, for people to do that. But I don't know how you are heroic if you're not fearless. The consequences of fearlessness, I think, can be devastating.
Charles: (22:56)
This is such an extraordinary time, because as you're describing is, it just, I think, heightens my own awareness of how absolutely everything is in flux. There is nothing that we can count on and depend on that we, to your point, that even five months ago was completely reliable in our lives, and the future is very much there to be made. That is both exhilarating, and I think terrifying in many ways. Let me ask you another question, which I'm sure is completely unfair and impossible to answer. But I'm fascinated to get your instinctive response to it. On the flip side of the equation, what do you think, or who do you think the enemies will be, going forward in stories?
Part of your lecture series, you talked about the very classic, clear narrative structure that was provided by World War Two. And the Nazis were the worst of enemies and the clearest of enemies, so therefore they created many, many, many great stories because it was easy to have good versus evil in so many manifestations. I'm struck by the fact that we are now dealing with, as I describe it in the opening to these podcasts, I describe the fact that we're living through a moment of two viruses. One is the pandemic, one is the virus of racism that has been part of our lives throughout both of our lives through the entirety of our lives.
I think one of the things that we're beginning to see interestingly sooner, it's happening sooner in England than it is over here, which is the beginning of the separation from Black Lives Matter as the reference point to anti-racism. I've noticed in some cases in England, people are beginning to pull away from Black Lives Matter as a pure representation of the fight against racism. They're beginning to talk more specifically about being anti-racist, because they don't like so many things that the leaders of Black Lives Matter stand for. So I think we're seeing all of that.
But I'm also conscious of the fact that the definition of enemy in the threats has become pretty existential, because the virus is a threat to us, so therefore we, if we get it, become a threat to everybody around us, and our loved ones, and that should cause us to change our lifestyles entirely. I also think that to some extent - this is getting a little esoteric - but to some extent, the fact that we have all lived with racism, for basically our entire lives, also has challenged us to look at ourselves in a completely different way and say, "I haven't done enough." So therefore to some extent, I am also part of the threat when it comes to racism, and if I don't change my own behavior, my own expectations of myself, I will go on being the enemy, perhaps the invisible enemy.
So with all of that, what do you think enemies look like going forward? Who are the adversaries that we have to battle in stories? And again, in real life?
Stephen Garrett: (25:38)
Well, I think it's interesting. Because I think like the virus, like the pandemic, the enemy has now become very hard to both identify and pin down, and attack and stop. Again, as we're talking now, Facebook is experiencing a fairly significant advertiser boycott. One has to hope that this is not just sort of temporary grandstanding, but it is profound, that it spreads and grows, and lasts, unless and until the big social media players get their act together and find a way to stop the mixture of hate and genuinely fake news. Not the stuff that Trump bills as fake news that is simply hostile to his particular position.
It feels to me, if you were to ask me what is the greatest threat to our civilization? Again, the kind of Marvel movies, it's always the threat to civilization, the world is always under threat. It always sounds a bit grandiose to talk in those terms, but it does feel a great threat to our civilization, is what is happening on social media. Without it, the world stands a chance of regaining what vestige of culture and sanity it once had. How you depict that, and screen drama, are particularly challenging. I was having a conversation with a colleague only yesterday about a story she had come across about someone who used to be a hacker, who then took down a virus or worm that was just going to wipe out the health system, first in the UK and then in the US.
I said, "Well, look, it's an amazing story, this guy is an extraordinary character. But the problem with any dramas relating to the digital world is how you dramatize people sitting on keyboards feverishly tapping away, looking ever anxiously at a screen as numbers, digits cascade before their very eyes. How many times have we seen that? And how fabulously uncompelling it is to watch?" That's difficult. Again, we're living in a world where there does seem to be a resurgence of political ideology that I don't see how you describe it other than fascism. I do wonder quite how we are seemingly like citizens in the late '20s and early '30s, sailing into a sunset, allowing these belief systems to thrive.
I go back to social media, because without social media, it would be a lot easier for a counterbalancing to prevail. I think linked to that are, again, going back to the question about heroes, I think scientists who are fighting their way through to some kind of solution to what's happening to us, in terms of global health, are as close to gods as we'll get. Again, as we know, science has of course replaced religion in many people's eyes. So perhaps to call great scientists gods isn't so far-fetched. But those who seek to poo poo science and grow a generation around the world who just don't believe science, because they've been told by so many people that it's nonsense. Again, they are the villains of the current piece.
How you properly dramatize them in ways that are compelling, I'm going back to what I was saying earlier, you know, have a kind of purpose. So that anyone watching this would go, “This is behavior that we need to try and help disappear.” It's challenging. It's really challenging. Because look at someone like Putin, who is clearly a rather brilliant bad actor, if he had been created by Ian Fleming, it would be Ian Fleming at the absolute top of his game in terms of his threat to global peace. And yet, what he's doing, it's kind of invisible. He's got these bot factories, and he's disseminating nonsense that people are sharing with each other, so unbelievably cheaply.
I actually have the rights to a book, which is called Russians Among Us, which is great. But it's sort of the true story of the Americans, it's about the real program that the Russians undertook stunningly effectively to insert Russians masquerading versus Canadians and then Americans into society, and they played a very long game, I mean, over decades. In one particular case, there were a couple, who were actually a married couple from Russia who had to conspire to find one of them in Vancouver, another in Toronto, and they met accidentally at a memorial, and then documented on social media their courtship, which of course was all fake, for nine months.
They then got married. He was a traveling diaper salesman for a decade. I mean, they could not have been more dull. But all the time, just burying themselves into the fabric of Canadian society. He then ends up going to do a master's in political science in DC. And of course, starts to meet people who are going to be climbing up the greasy pole. They're playing a game. And just to become friends with them and pick up stuff. But the first 10 years of this, they've got no more intelligence than you would get from watching the news. You can imagine, this is a very expensive process to manage. They have tens of these people scattered through North America.
Now, by the way, that was rumbled because the guy who was running the scheme from Moscow also happened to be working for the CIA. From the get-go, the FBI and CIA knew exactly who all these people were, and exactly what they were doing, and surveilled them to within an inch of their lives, for decades. So I mean again ...
Charles: (32:43)
Unbelievable.
Stephen Garrett: (32:43)
... sorry, this is deeply detailed. But it's a fantastic story, and you have some of the FBI agents who've been effectively living with these families for years, know their kids better than the parents themselves. They're sitting there watching conversations about where little Natalia should go to school, or what she should study, and they said, "I think she should go and do physics." And the FBI agent is going, "No, no, no, she doesn't like physics, she wants to do poetry." Anyway, that's all by the by, very expensive, and ran for years.
Now, these bot factories are just cheap as chips. If you, like we, in the west, do all the disseminating for them because we go, "That's a fun piece of nonsense, or an idea that panders to my hideous sensibility. I'll send that to all my friends." And they send that to all their friends. So again, the virus is a fantastic metaphor for what's happening, and it's just as challenging to characterize in some sort of physical screen manifestation. Because it kind of starts with Putin, you know? And there's a limit to what you can do with him.
Charles: (33:44)
I don't know if you've seen the most recent Lincoln Project, I don't know if you're aware of the Lincoln Project, have you come across them so far? The Lincoln Project are a group of Republicans headlined by George Conway, Kelly Ann Conway's husband; Steve Schmidt, who in a past life, brought us Sarah Palin, when he was running John McCain's campaign; and a guy called Rick Wilson, among others, there are many others. But they have turned against Trump and are producing some of the most extraordinary political messaging. I would actually say, messaging of all time. It is so fast, the quality, production quality, is through the roof.
They just produced a spot that is all in Russian with a Russian voice over, as though from Russia, thanking Comrade Trump for all of his help and support in helping them to meet their objectives. Look up Project Lincoln, they're a phenomenal modern communication, incredible. I'm conscious we're running long, but I would be remiss if I didn't ask you quickly about the practical side of production going forward. You eluded to part of it earlier. But I'm curious, within your group, how are you moving forward? How are you conceiving stuff? How are you thinking about getting back to the ability to actually be on-set and putting stuff together? What does that look like at the moment from where you sit?
Stephen Garrett: (35:07)
Well to be honest with you, and I've always, it's tempting when you go and see broadcasters to ask them what they're looking for so that you can calibrate the stories you tell to their perceived needs. I learned quite quickly that that's a terrible mistake.
Charles: (35:26)
Right, that story you told, when you tried to sell them Spooks and they didn't want it in the end, yeah, that was amazing.
Stephen Garrett: (35:33)
So you just have to ignore them. Because the truth is, I love broadcasters, because I can't do what I do without them. But they don't necessarily know what they want, because I think the shows we've all loved, and that have popped, have been shows that kind of couldn't possibly have been asked for by a broadcaster. They had to come from the crazed imaginations of the writer or director or producer or novelist or something. They're the ones that just is surprising and all the more brilliant, and zeitgeisty for being surprising. That's relevant to your question because I think if you start conceiving stories to what you imagine a new world order to be, that way, madness lies, because the goal points are going to keep moving.
Also, we'll end up with a vast array of monologues, relationships, affairs conducted over Zoom, political thrillers conducted over Zoom. I actually have one project, which is actually in development with Quibi at the moment. Which happens, coincidentally, because it started long before this, to be unbelievably post-pandemic friendly. It's a black comedy set in a rehab facility for young women in New York, as it happens, inspired by the experiences of the writer who's putting it together. It takes place organically in a confined space. It's actually very well suited to some of the strictures that are already being talked about.
But for obvious reasons, that's not a very interesting way to plan an entire slate of work. For example, I've just bought the rights to a thriller that's very Night Manager-y in terms of its globe trottingness, to use a magic word that doesn't exist. You know, will involve foreign travel for the A-listers who take part in it, should it ever happen. It bears no relation whatsoever to anything that is remotely possible or feasible, not just now, or in the foreseeable future. But I think you have to just assume that something is going to change. Whether it's a vaccine or a treatment.
You go back to those awful years of AIDS, when it was a death sentence, and it changed behavior. Because if you behaved in the way that made it quite likely you'd catch it, it was a death sentence. So sex and death became enmeshed, and behavior changed. But as soon as treatments appeared that made living with AIDS in a very fulsome way for a normal span of life, as soon as that came along, all bets were off and behaviors returned to pre-AIDS days. I think that's going to happen with us in some way. And I have to plan and I suspect my friends and colleagues and rivals in this world will be doing the same, for a world where we can pretty much do what we did before. Because under current strictures, not only can people not have sex, they can't kiss, they can't shake hands.
I remember reading, I think the first show in the world back on the blocks was the very famous Australian soap Neighbors. They turned their studio into kind of like a chessboard. They marked out grids. So you'd have your sound team in square D3, your lighting team in C1, actor A would be on B5, actor B on E2. And so the point of having the grids is that if anyone got ill, you'd know that you only needed to quarantine the people who'd shared the grid of space with that other group of people, so you didn't have to close down an entire production. They would use, as they put it, the magic of long lenses and editing to create the illusion that people were closer to one another than they actually were.
But you still can't create the illusion of physical contact. You can't have actual crowd scenes. So yes, of course, they can be faked with CGI. But you can't have someone, the classic kind of Doctor Zhivago, Zhivago, Omar Sharif, running the wrong way through a crowd. You just can't do that. You can't have people nose to armpit on public transport. These are some of the tropes of stories, of just living in the real world. As I said, I can't really ... I don't know how you plan for stories that have to take account of these protocols. I've got a 36 page document that tells me what we should do, and they're right. But it's theoretically right. It doesn't really make any sense in the real world.
Mercifully, there's nothing I need to be making this side of Christmas. So we'll wait and see. But you know, if you talk to me again in two years and say, "Hey, what have you been doing over the past years?" And I say, "Well, actually, I haven't been able to make anything because all my ideas are ludicrously ill-suited to the way the world works." Then I'll look like a fool.
Charles: (41:19)
Wow, extraordinary times, aren't they? Last question for you, what have you learned about yourself over the last four months?
Stephen Garrett: (41:30)
Well I think, going back to a question you asked earlier, I think I sense this about myself, but I think I'm quite good on my own. Again, I don't want to paint a picture of some tragic, solitary confinement. I have actually spent time with humans. It's interesting how easily time passes when there isn't another human being in the space. As I say, it's maybe an illusion just because technology allows us to sort of connect with people, think we're connecting with people, when we're probably not. I don't know how reassuring that is, because obviously I'm not really planning a life in a monastery, in a cell, or on a desert island. But I suppose that's vaguely consoling. Can I throw the question back at you?
Charles: (42:28)
Yeah. It's a really interesting question. I think even more than I understood before, I am aware of how interested I am in the stories of other people, and recognizing both how different people are, but also how joined together we are in so many ways. I think it's made me more conscious of the humanity that connects all of us. That sounds rather esoteric. But I think that kind of the basic needs to be connected, and to want to share experiences, and to want to support each other and the need that we have to be supportive of each other, and to need each other.
I think I'm conscious of being more connected to the human race than I think I was before. I think I was pretty comfortable feeling relatively independent and I think I’ve realized what you want to actually be part of this group of people, you really want to connect to that group in as many ways as you can.
Stephen Garrett: (43:26)
The funny thing is, I would say that's also true of me. I've said I can cope alone, but I don't think it's in conflict with what you've just articulated.
Charles: (43:34)
Yeah, I think that's true. I think that's well said as well. I can cope alone, I'm fine with that. I'm lucky I live with my wife, who's the love of my life, so we're lucky to have each other. But yes, I do notice the gap in not having real connection to other people over periods of time, and miss that. I think that's important, when that comes back together. We were saying earlier that the three dimensional components of human connection, I think, is remarkably important. I feel the sort of surge of emotion when we walk down a neighbor's driveway, or somebody comes over and has a drink, a socially distanced drink on the patio or something. There is just the appreciation of being together in the same environment is very special, actually. It makes you realize you’re part of something.
Stephen Garrett: (44:21)
3D isn't necessarily going to quite do justice to what you and I are talking about and really mean, that we're very close to technology, and to some extent it exists where we'll be able to have this conversation as holograms of one another in one another's spaces, and that's going to feel even more weird, and closer to reality, but still obviously, you'll be like a ghost, but you'll be there. I saw earlier, about a year ago now, probably, using technology that's out there and being used to generate revenue, Maria Callas live in concert at the English National Opera. The technology, that we created a hologram of her, which I would say 60 percent of the time looks real, and it's her real voice performing.
There are moments where you believe you are in a room with the long dead Maria Callas, and they're starting to do that with other dead stars. But I think in terms of social life or business life or other encounters, we'll actually be able to ... Because no one's going to get on planes anymore. So we will all manifest ourselves as holograms in one another's homes and offices, instead of actually going anywhere.
Charles: (45:36)
Yeah, it's going to change the physical nature of being in an office, isn’t it, for sure. It already has, clearly. I think one of the things that I've found interesting of quite a few of the conversations that I've had is the people who are directly responsible for creative output in their companies have all said to me, I think universally have said to me, "The quality of work that is being produced by the people that work for them is higher." Because they feel that people have the ability to be more focused and to just get away and think in a different way. I think that we are seeing many benefits from work at home as part of the option. I wouldn't want to be in the commercial real estate business, I don't know what that looks like, terrible business to be in.
Stephen Garrett: (46:20)
Yes. No, I've disliked offices for a long time, and find one of the things, again, back in the heady days of my company Kudos, which I haven't now been with for five years, but the company I helped found, was my partner and I would always employ people we really liked, and if we met people who were very talented, we didn't like them, they didn't get employed. We had an open door policy, and that meant people walked through the open door and talked to us. That was both fabulous and a complete nightmare, because you could sail through days having had glorious encounters with beloved, smart colleagues and achieved zilch, absolutely nothing.
It's scary. It's a truth that’s hard really to articulate, because it sounds misanthropic. People are a real distraction, other people are a real distraction. There are times when teams work, and spark off one another. But I think what you described is absolutely right, that there's a level of productivity which is extraordinary when outside the unbelievable miscellany of distractions that offices provide. Particularly this obsession with open plans. I mean, who thought open plan was a good idea?
Charles: (47:38)
Yeah, I don't think anybody does anymore, that's for sure. Stephen, thank you so much for doing this. I find it remarkable that it has taken us this long to actually connect inter-personally, because as you and I have said and known for some time, our fathers are in fact, we think, each other's only friend, and have been for some years. So I'm grateful and glad to have had the chance to spend some time together, and I hope we can do it again soon.
Stephen Garrett: (48:01)
I look forward to meeting in the real world, in one of our cities.
Charles: (48:04)
Indeed. Take care of yourself, thank you so much.
Stephen Garrett: (48:07)
Stay well, bye-bye.
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