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The Current Transcript for June 27, 2017

Host: Mike Finnerty

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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Thomas. Ooh. Fire department. Oh, you almost said no. He’s holding a little kitten. It’s a match. Oh my god. That’s exciting. Send a message.

MIKE FINNERTY: Amy Schumer having some fun there with another woman’s Tinder account. Now that she's got a match with firefighter Thomas and maybe after a bit of online flirting, imagine if she sends him this message: So how are you planning to vote in the election? Coming up—sex, politics and the Internet. The future is now. Also the simple therapeutic pleasures of reading—

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It's a great way of quieting the mind. It takes us out of the crazy world we live in and it's almost like a form of meditation. Far more than that, reading books gives us a sense of empathy.

MF: Author Will Schwalbe wants to inspire you to pack some books for your summer holidays. I'm Mike Finnerty. Welcome to the summer edition of The Current.

How British activists used Tinder to get young people to vote

Guests: Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Colin Horgan

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[Sound: Applause]

So if there is a message from tonight's result is, is this, the prime minister called the election because she wanted a mandate. Well, the mandate she's got is lost conservative seats, lost votes, lost support and lost confidence. I would have thought that's enough to go actually and make way for a government that will be truly representative of all of the people of this country.

[Sound: Applause and cheering]

MF: Well, he did not become prime minister after the UK’s general election earlier this month, but Jeremy Corbyn and his Labour Party had a strong showing—far better than many had predicted. And that was thanks in large part to the support of younger voters. It seems younger Brits and Mr. Corbyn really clicked with each other—or shall we say swiped? Believe it or not, for some voters it may have been a match made on Tinder. Our first guest today was part of a pair of young women looking for new ways to get young Britons better engaged or at least hooked up with the political process. Their invention was a chat bot—an artificially intelligent computer program—that chatted up progressive policies inside the flirty world of the GPS dating app Tinder. Yara Rodrigues Fowler is with us now live from London to explain. Yara, hello.

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: Hello. Thank you so much for having me.

MF: It's a pleasure. Listen, how did you first hatch this idea with your friend and partner?

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: So what happened is a couple of weeks before the election, there was a deadline for voter registration. So in the UK, you can't vote if you're not registered beforehand. And young people who are eligible to vote are disproportionately unregistered and everyone on my feed was sharing a register to vote statuses and I thought well, what is the point of all these statuses? We’re just reaching the same people over and over again. How can I reach people who aren't in my bubble? And that's when I turned to my Tinder matches to convince them. And then after that, we thought how can we do this on a larger scale and reach people in the constituencies? So the voting districts where they’re marginal, where their votes really matter.

MF: So you took it to that next stage and involved what, an AI program, a chat bot.

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: Well, we got two wonderful developers involved and we're really proud to have been a women-led team and we created basically a chat program. So if you sign up your profile, it would put your profile in one of these [unintelligible] and swipe yes to young people and then begin a script which is sort of quite similar, I suppose, to kind of a canvassing script. So it would say hi, who are you going to vote for? And it would encourage people to turn out to vote or to vote tactically. So what you could then do would be jump in and have this conversation yourself.

MF: Let me just have you reverse course just a minute because there are going to be people out there. I mean there’s a whole bunch of people listening who know about Tinder or other GPS dating apps or dating apps so this will be familiar. But there are going to be a lot of people who haven't probably tried them out. So how does it work? So you sign up. You're a member of this app. You are interested in hooking up, finding someone that you want to spend some time with. How do you and your group of let's say Progressives or at least anti-conservatives get involved and get on their feeds?

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: Well, basically we put out a kind of recruitment ad on our Facebook saying if you're interested, you can sign up with us. I guess, is your question more ‘How does Tinder work’ or how—

[Crosstalk]

MF: A little bit, yeah. So you're recruiting likeminded people and they have Tinder accounts already?

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: Yeah. Some people are really enthusiastic and signed up to Tinder to do this. It was all like real people, real people's accounts and real people chatting.

MF: Okay. And you express an interest. You swipe interested to what? Everybody out there? How does the bot work?

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: So yeah. The program would swipe yes to everybody and it would place you in a marginal constituency. So straight away, you're talking to really important voters who are 18 to 25 in those seats. We pick seats where if young people turned out at the national average, they would be able to swing that seat.

MF: And the people who connect with you are people who have looked at the photo and said I'm interested in this person.

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: Yes.

MF: So there's already a connection right and an interest.

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: Exactly. So they've seen your profile. They've decided they want to chat with you. They've agreed to chat with you already, which I think is important because perhaps that's why people were so receptive.

MF: So what was the reaction?

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: A lot of it was really, really positive. People were really engaged. They wanted to talk about politics. I think people really liked being asked about their political opinion. People were pretty engaged with the election, particularly young people. We got some really fantastic responses from people who said I don't know because the bot response was to send some policies to them and often also the people whose profile it is would then jumping and help convince. But lots of people saw the policies and said actually, I will turn out to vote. And a couple of people messaged us, several people messaged us saying oh, I turned out to vote. I'm really pleased with the result or whatever.

MF: And there were actually some dates?

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: Yeah, this is really lovely. A couple of people did arrange dates. I guess because then you find someone you are politically compatible with. That's actually a pretty important thing.

MF: Because you can at some point in your program override the bot and start talking yourself, is that right?

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: Yeah, absolutely. So basically you can see all the conversations on your phone and you can jump in at any point. And loads of people did because actually it's really fun.

MF: In the conversations typically, what is the ratio of flirting versus politicking?

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: I would say it's pretty political rather than very flirty. I mean we want to keep it friendly and not preachy so it's never like you know you should do this. So this is why this party are rubbish. So it's very friendly and chatty.

MF: What was in the in? How did politics come up?

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: So the sort of initial message that it sent was—I think it’s “Hi lovely.” Sunflower emoji. “Are you voting and who for?”

MF: Right off the bat?

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: Yep. Right off the bat, yeah.

MF: And they're ready to engage right off the bat like that?

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: Yeah, lots of engagement after that, yeah.

MF: Do you know if it affected the outcome? It was really close, the election. I mean a few couple more thousand votes and you might see a different prime minister.

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: Absolutely.

MF: Do you have an idea whether it worked?

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: We don't. What we'd have to do is sort of compare it to areas where we didn't run the bot and see if there's a sort of a difference. And there were so many, so many things about this election that was so different, particularly with young people and the use of online technology was really, really alive and living. So we don't know if our campaign had an impact that we can isolate. We do know that we sent 30 to 40,000 messages—that’s what we estimate in the two nights before the election—to young people in marginal constituencies. And we're really proud to have worked in Dudley North, which was held by the Labour Party by 20 or 30 votes.

MF: Right. So you might've made the difference there.

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: Well, who knows. Who knows.

MF: Can we discuss the ethics of it? There's a thing online with these dating apps called cat phishing where someone will create a false profile, use someone else's attractive photo and chat people up for the thrill of it. I mean it's pretty disingenuous and a bit creepy. How was what you're doing different?

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: Well, I think it [inaudible] we didn't use fake profiles and everyone had sort of agreed to talk and as you pointed out, the messages were political right from the outset. So no one was ever, ever forced to engage if they didn't want to. And on Tinder, it’s sort of in some ways more comfortable than going to someone's front door because they're not in your face. You don't have to respond to the message. And so there wasn't that kind of element of misleading people or harassing people that there often is in political campaigning and in kind of cat phishing.

MF: But if I swipe on one of your participating profiles, I know that there is actually a real profile there, but I am going to get a bot response, right? I mean if I'm on Tinder, I'm looking not to hook up with a bot. So there is an ethical issue there, no?

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: Yeah. Well, in the sense that you get sort of three or four messages that are about politics and then it runs out. So there's never any kind of like if you say let’s meet up, the bot will never say yes, let's meet up or anything like that. So it’s sort of a quite limited interaction.

MF: But sex is the entry point.

[Crosstalk]

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: If that makes sense.

MF: Yeah, it does make sense but I suppose one way or the other, sexual attraction and people who are in the mood to hook up is your in and you're using it to advance a political agenda.

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: Oh, I mean it's definitely true that there's that willingness to engage though, which is to do with the possibility of sex. That's what Tinder is about I guess. The reason I think like Tinder is such a good platform for it is because Tinder is a place where people go to chat. We wouldn't have done it on a site where people were looking for sort of very serious emotional relationships or connections or partners. That might have been upsetting I think. So I think that's an important point.

MF: Did anyone get upset?

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: We had a filter for abuse. So if people are going to be very abusive which of course does happen—particularly if you're a woman or a person of colour on the Internet. So we didn't see abusive messages, but I also think that that's just part of being on the Internet unfortunately. And I think it's particular to our project. A couple of people, one man said “I'll tell you who I'm voting for if you send me nudes.” We did get some responses like that but in general actually, people really liked being asked about their politics on Tinder.

MF: Yara, were you working for Labour or a political party?

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: No. No, I wasn't working for the Labour Party or any other party.

MF: It was an anti-conservative movement.

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: Yeah, exactly. So we encourage tactical voting. And so in one seat, we encouraged people to vote for the Liberal Democrats, which is a sort of centre-left-centre party.

MF: It’s fascinating and you can see the potential for it. You saw the potential for it firsthand. What if the conservatives started using it or a far-right party?

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: Well, I supposed I don’t think it would be effective because young people don't tend to vote far right in the same way. I think the way that we communicate with each other is changing. I don't think that’s reversible. I think we've seen that in the UK. On Facebook, the way memes are being used is amazing, really, really creative. As this kind of any new technology, it can be empowering or it can marginalize people. So I think it can go either way. And I think what we did was great and creative and grassroots-led. For example, we had disabled people who couldn't go out canvassing on foot were able to campaign on their mobile phones and that's because of the technology and what we were doing with it.

MF: Yara, thanks for telling us about it.

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: Sorry, go ahead.

MF: We’re going to move on to another perspective and I want to thank you very much for telling us about it. Appreciate your time.

YARA RODRIGUES FOWLER: Thank you so much for having me.

MF: Bye-bye. Yara Rodrigues Fowler, who started a tinder campaign to organize votes against the conservative party in the recent UK election. She was in London. We contacted Tinder for comment. No match yet. For another perspective, we're joined by Colin Horgan. He was a speechwriter for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during his successful election campaign, also a writer for the Guardian and Maclean’s. Colin’s live in Toronto. Colin, hello.

COLIN HORGAN: Hello.

MF: What do you think of the Tinder bot political experiment?

COLIN HORGAN: I think it's as you said, it's overall really fascinating. And I think that your last question was probably the most prescient one as in you know, what would happen if this was used by a political party and not grassroots activists? And I think that when we start asking that question is when we sort of get into a more maybe frightening conversation for the implications in 2019 in our own country.

MF: What frightens you about it?

COLIN HORGAN: I think that—actually maybe my use of frightening is sort of wrong—but I think what's a concern perhaps for us is that really that what this shows is sort of that there's a campaign that goes on during elections that people don't really see. In this case, it was a group of grassroots activists who obviously used the technology available completely fairly in most cases. You say you raised the ethical issues but apart from that, it's not really that much different than going to a door as Yara said. However, if we did discover in the aftermath of this the Labour Party or the Conservative Party had been the ones who were running this Tinder bot, would we feel the same way? And I think the answer would be no. But as a matter of fact, obviously as we know from experience in our country and as anybody saw in the UK in the past month and anybody saw in the US in the fall, online campaigning is a massive thing. And a lot of what goes on, people don't know about until someone tells them about it afterward.

MF: And Yara was saying that she didn't think a far right message for example would appeal to the young. But the people who might start using this could be sneakier than that and have been in the past, couldn't they? Instead of an overt far right message, they could just give them wrong polling information or something like that.

COLIN HORGAN: Sure. I mean I think when you start to look at the election laws in Canada and in the UK, there tends to be a fairly gaping hole in terms of what people are allowed to do online and what is revealed about what parties or anybody else does online. So for instance Elections Canada, it stipulates that political parties must tell them how much they spent on their online campaigns but it doesn't ask them how they do it or where they've targeted their ads or any details like that. Same thing in the UK. And the other thing that Elections Canada doesn't really, really require or doesn't really have a law for yet is groups that are outside of political parties, third party groups that may want to purchase ads or political messaging on something like Facebook. To be a third party advertiser in Canada, you would have to register. But if you're from outside the country and you're buying time on Facebook with a political message, are you necessarily covered by the same law? Not really. And Elections Canada doesn't really have anything—they can't really do anything about that. So there is a huge grey area that exists currently in this country and it's kind of highlighted by stuff like this Tinder bot where it's sort of correct but it might not be something we want in the end.

MF: We requested a comment about this from Elections Canada. We haven't heard back. Is there a solution to it?

COLIN HORGAN: I think really what the solution is—I mean ultimately you know the private companies like Facebook are not going to say this is how people advertise on our site and here's what they did because obviously if you're a private corporation, as an advertiser you're not going to want Facebook to suddenly start divulging information like that. So really it's kind of up to the parties. And we hit a bit of a snag there because there's clearly some strategy involved in how they place their ads and how they target people. So the onus is still on them. But there's not really a lot of willingness I'd imagine to come out with this information. And that really is kind of the only solution that appears to be obvious at the moment.

MF: Can we just come back to the ethics of it for a moment because I mean sex is a powerful motivator and obviously particularly for younger people. You tweeted about this when the story first emerged more publicly. What kind of reaction did people have to it?

COLIN HORGAN: Yeah, people were a bit creeped out actually, I think partly because it was Tinder but also partly because there’s this general feeling I think in politics right now where a lot of stuff happens—especially online—a lot of stuff happens beyond our sight lines. So if a party like the Conservative Party did in 2015—buys full page newspaper wraps in every major city in the country, everyone is going to see that. If there's a debate, everybody can watch that. If there's an ad on TV, most people are going to see that. But right now, I could sit in my house and be on my Facebook feed and see perhaps a different ad than you would if you were next door to me, simply based on our browsing history and the profile of these social media has made for us. And so when that starts to sort of seep into the general consciousness that there is this campaign going on that we don't know about or we don't see, it sort of undermines the legitimacy of the entire system itself. Right, to some point where you're kind of like well, I don't trust what is going on because I don't have any ability to watch it. So it gets a little bit dicey.

MF: And can you imagine for instance in the next Canadian election, an army of sort of Russian hotties, men and women on Tinder are politicking bots, you know?

COLIN HORGAN: I think the thing is that like it doesn't even really necessarily have to be—the lesson to take away from the Russia stuff or the idea that a foreign entity could somehow influence an election is that it actually doesn't need to happen. The idea of it happening is all that really needs to occur to sort of ruin the trust in the system. So in 2019, nobody might do anything to Canada and there’s little evidence anything like that happened in the UK last month. However, the idea that there is a sort of campaign that you can't see, in the sort of void that's left by that, the stories or the ideas that people come up with about how the election was actually decided can kind of proliferate because nobody's really sure what happened. So even if it wasn't “hacked”, somebody could potentially argue that it was then we would have no real evidence to show that it wasn't. If a political party came out and said this is what we did and the other party said well, this is what we did and then there's all these ads that other people saw that nobody knows where they came from, well then, there's a starting point to sort of say well, what happened there? But otherwise we don't know.

MF: Colin, thanks for speaking to us. Appreciate it.

COLIN HORGAN: No problem.

MF: Colin Horgan, writer with Maclean’s and the Guardian and former speechwriter for Justin Trudeau. during his 2015 election campaign. He was in Toronto.

[Music: Sting]

MF: In our next half hour, book lover and author Will Schwalbe explains why he believes reading is really the best thing we can do both for ourselves and the other people in our lives. I’m Mike Finnerty and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

ENCORE: Life-altering books? Author Will Schwalbe has 26 that changed his

Guests: Will Schwalbe

MF: Hello I'm Mike Finnerty. You're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

MF: Up next—why finding a real page turner can really help you turn some pages in your life.

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A mad tea party. There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it. The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together in one corner of it.

“No room, no room,” they cried out when they saw Alice coming.

“There's plenty of room,” said Alice indignantly. And she sat down in a large armchair at one end of the table.

“Have some wine,” the March Hare said in an encouraging tone. Alice looked all around the table but there was nothing on it but tea.

“I don’t see any wine,” she remarked.

“There isn’t any,” said the March Hare.

“Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer,” said Alice angrily.

“It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited,” said the March Hare.

MF: That’s John Gielgud reading from one of the great classics, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. It's a book full of mad encounters like the story we just heard and it's a book that's cherished by many, including the Argentinian-Canadian writer Alberto Manguel. The author of a famous book about books, A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel says that Alice in Wonderland is an all-time favourite with some important lessons for living in the modern world.

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Alice is a Victorian girl who is brought up to respect adults and she realizes that those adults are crazy and they are absurd and they do things that are unjust and unfair. And she rebels from her childhood logic and manages to overcome all these absurdities. Alice has taught me that reason will help you to overcome absurdity and it won't go away, but at least you will recognize it for what it is and be able to point your finger at it.

MF: Alberto Manguel, who these days is director of the National Library of Argentina and like him, many of us can point to a particular book that's changed our life forever. Here in Canada, we remain fairly enthusiastic readers today. More than 80 per cent of us say we've read at least one book in the past year. And now that summertime is finally here, lots of us will be looking forward to spending some time on a beach or a dock or a backyard with a book we've been looking forward to for months. You can bet that author and long-time book editor Will Schwalbe will be enjoying his summer reading time. He's the author of the bestselling The End of Your Life Book Club and a new book entitled Books for Living. Will Schwalbe talked to Anna Maria in January.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Alberto Manguel says Alice in Wonderland carried him from his early years to adulthood. What's that childhood book for you?

WILL SCHWALBE: For me, the childhood book is E.B. White's marvelous Stuart Little. That's the story about the human family that gives birth to a mouse. And I just love that book. For me, it was really a tale of a radical acceptance. A story that you could be whatever you want and your parents would still love you.

AMT: And how many times have you read that book?

WILL SCHWALBE: Oh, as a kid I read it dozens of times. Every couple of years I go back and reread it.

AMT: Do you give it as a gift?

WILL SCHWALBE: I love to give it as a gift, along with Charlotte's Web, which is another E.B. White classic.

AMT: Mm, you’re right, yeah. So what is the importance of reading books?

WILL SCHWALBE: Reading books does so many things for us. It's a great way of quieting the mind. It takes us out of the crazy world we live in. And it's almost like a form of meditation. But I think far more than that, reading books gives us a sense of empathy. It puts us into someone else's soul as it were and it causes us, at least for a moment, to put aside our own prejudices, our own opinions, and listen, really listen to someone else. One of the things I love about books is you can rant about them, you can scream at them, you can even scribble in the margins or throw a book across the room. But what you can't do is change the words on the page.

AMT: Mm. Is there something actually better about reading books than reading magazines or a blog post or a tweet?

WILL SCHWALBE: I really think there is something better. It's because books are composed to stand the test of time. For the most part, magazine articles and newspaper articles, blog posts, comments on Facebook are by their nature, ephemeral. When you think about a book, someone has taken time and effort, composed words to last forever in a particular way. So I think books are more timeless, more thoughtful and have more to offer us. You can also, which I love, you can read the same book again and again throughout your life. And a book which means something to you or maybe even nothing to you when you are in, say, your twenties may mean something incredibly different to you when you’re forties or fifties. And you're really not the same reader at the end of a book as you were at the beginning. That every book changes you.

AMT: Why is the question “What are you reading?” much bigger than it seems?

WILL SCHWALBE: “What are you reading?” is the most terrific question and I love to ask it of everyone. I ask it of people standing in front of me at line at the deli. I ask it of all my relatives, friends, strangers. It really allows someone to share something of themself and it opens up a conversation. That most of the questions we ask each other really just require yes or no answers or a number. But “What are you reading?” is an opportunity for someone really to share something. I’m very frequently amazed by what someone is reading and also by how thrilled they are to be asked that question.

AMT: Mm. You have made a list of 26 books and we will put them on our site. What do these books mean to you?

WILL SCHWALBE: These 26 are all books that found me at a time when I really needed them. They're not, I think, the 26 greatest books in the world—although some of them are—nor are they even really my 26 favourite books. But they're books that taught me something and that I think have the opportunity to teach others something.

AMT: Mm. Well, we asked a few other people about the books that changed their lives. Neil Pasricha is the author of The Book of Awesome and The Happiness Equation. He says the book that taught him most about the modern world was one from 2,000 years ago: Seneca's long essay, On The Shortness Of Life. Listen to Neil Pasricha.

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A couple of key phrases really stuck with me. One is that “life is long if you know how to live it.” And another is that “we don't protect our time the way we protect our property.” You know, somebody builds a fence on your lawn in the backyard, you are up in arms. Somebody books an hour-long meeting with you on a Wednesday afternoon, you hit accept mindlessly. And yet time is really the ultimate finite resource. We only have 30,000 days of life each. That's a Canadian lifespan for you. So life is long if you know how to use it. But the key thing is to overvalue your time.

AMT: Will Schwalbe, what do you think?

WILL SCHWALBE: I think that's a wonderful message. And actually several of the books that I write about have that exact message. One of the books that I really love and write about is Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gifts From The Sea. And Anne Morrow Lindbergh was the wife of the famous aviator, bestselling author in her own right, explorer, pilot, adventurer. But she writes this wonderful book about a trip to the seaside, and how different shells taught her to value different things. And one of the things it taught her to value is time and especially time alone. And I think in this world, where we're so bombarded by social media, by television, by appointments and obligations, preserving time alone is really more important than ever.

AMT: You learned an interesting lesson from The Odyssey. What was it?

WILL SCHWALBE: The Odyssey taught me something very unusual, which is to embrace mediocrity. I'm sure that's not the lesson most people got from it. But I tell a story about a wonderful teacher I had who gave me a really hard time when I was grade grubbing. He'd given me a kind of mediocre grade and I had argued that I deserved a much higher one, and he gave it to me. He just said okay, here's the grade. And then he said something wonderful, he said, “Your paper was a mediocre paper. It will always be a mediocre paper, but I'll give you whatever grade you like and it won't change a thing.” What he really taught me that day was to appreciate and celebrate mediocrity, because if you don't do that then you'll never really realize what excellence is. The course I was taking with him was a course on Homer and we were reading The Odyssey. Odysseus is an amazing guy, but there's one thing he's pretty mediocre at and that's getting home. It takes him a decade. Everyone else manages it quite quickly. But the message for me and for this teacher of mine was that's okay. You don't have to do a great job getting home. You just have to get home.

AMT: Mm. And that brings me to another book on your list, The Importance Of Living by Lin Yutang. What is this book?

WILL SCHWALBE: This is a book I return to again and again, it's one of my favourite books. It was published in 1938 and was one of the biggest best sellers of the 1930s. The author was a Chinese scholar, and he calls it a book about the noble art of leaving things undone. And in it he presents Chinese philosophy to the West, and the type of Chinese philosophy he presents is the philosophy of relaxing, lying in bed, drinking tea, enjoying nature, spending time with friends. It's a marvelous book, very digressive, very long, with all of these great asides about savouring life. One of the things that really fascinates me about it is at first you think it's this very charming book about kind of goofing off. But then you start to realize Lin Yutang was writing in the late thirties. He writes specifically about Hitler and Stalin. And he writes about a world gone mad and about greed and ambition and lust for power. And what he's really presenting is a humanist response to this. So the importance of living is about human values. One of the values that he champions most fiercely is reading.

AMT: Now, reading Lin Yutang lead you to another book, a book called A Journey Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre. You really took his lesson to heart.

WILL SCHWALBE: Oh, I love this book. It's written in 1790 by a French count and it has a crazy story. So this count was caught dueling, and dueling was illegal, and he was sentenced to 40 days house arrest. So what he decided to do when he was under house arrest is write a travel guide to his room. One day he visits his bed and another day his chest of drawers and another day a wall and another day the bookshelf. And even sort of scooched himself around the room sitting on a chair. And again, it's one of those books that at first it seems quite frivolous and a little silly, but he has a very important message: there are incredible wonders right in front of our eyes but we have to take the time to look at them. And the book also has quite a serious turn at the end, because he spends some time looking out his window and he says you don't have to go anywhere to see suffering. Right outside my window I see children shivering from the cold, trying to keep each other warm. And it's a great lesson too in the responsibility we have to those immediately around us.

AMT: You made a point of traveling around your own apartment?

WILL SCHWALBE: I did. I visited some of my favourite things and there's a really beautiful part of this book where the French count visits the letters that a beloved comrade had written him. And this is a comrade who had died of disease in his arms. And I made a point when doing my own trip around my room to visit letters that had been sent to me by my best friend who had been killed in a tragic accident a couple of years after college. And that was a wonderful way to spend my day and I try to do it quite regularly. I try to turn off all the media, turn off the computer and visit things in my room. Visit a beloved vase or a book on my shelf, or as I said, these letters from my friend.

AMT: Mm. Speaking of your friend, you read David Copperfield in your teens and it's now come to be connected with that friend.

WILL SCHWALBE: Yeah. I remember when I read it in my teens, and I turned the last page of David Copperfield and I was sobbing. And I was sobbing because I thought that's the last I'll ever be able to spend with David Copperfield and Steerforth and Dora and little Emily. But over time, I came to realize that my relationship with David Copperfield and those other characters had really just begun and that they would be with me for life. And I write in this chapter about all the Davids in my life, but one in particular, my best friend David Baer, the one who was killed in this accident. And I write about my total sorrow and misery when he died, when he was killed, and how I thought that that would be the end, that would be the last that I would ever be able to think of or spend time with my dearest friend. But David Copperfield made me realize that when I think back on David Copperfield, I get to choose whether I remember reading David Copperfield or whether I remembered my sorrow when it finished. And when I think back on this friend of mine David Baer, I get to choose whether I remember his life or whether I remember his death. And I try to choose life.

AMT: Mm. I have another anecdote of a life changing book to play you. This is a bit of a twist. This one is from Louise Penny, the author of the Armand Gamache detective novels. Have a listen to her talking about Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf.

SOUNDCLIP

I read in school, and with most school books, I paid, you know, very little attention to most school books. It was just something I had to do. But this made an impact, it made an impact not only because the story was riveting but because the teacher mentioned, I think, almost in passing that Farley Mowat is a Canadian. And it struck me then that it was possible to be a Canadian, a writer, and alive all at the same time. And from that moment forward, I knew that not only did I want to be a writer, but that I could be a writer. And that was a seminal change. I passed through a membrane at that time.

AMT: So this is less about the story and more about her experience with the book itself. How much does the life altering ability of books come down to where they land in our own lives?

WILL SCHWALBE: Oh, I think that's a huge factor. And when people talk about the books that changed their life or sometimes even saved their life, it's often because for the very first time, they recognize themself in a book. For me that book actually was Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin. I was a young gay kid in Episcopal boarding school, there had never been an out gay kid or faculty member at this school. So I sort of thought I was the only one. And reading James Baldwin's marvelous Giovanni's Room, which has this joyful scene between the young American David and his Italian boyfriend Giovanni, made me realize that I could be gay and also I could be a writer. And so to hear Louise Penny talk about she could be a Canadian, she could be alive, she could be a writer, really just hearing that now kind of gave me a chill, because that's exactly the experience I had with Giovanni's Room. And I think in some ways it saved my life and I also think it saved the life I have. And by that I mean it allowed me to imagine a life that I could look forward to without dread, which is something very big. It allowed me to go through my teens in a hopeful fashion. And I don't think I would have the life I have today had it not been for James Baldwin and Giovanni's Room.

AMT: That's a lovely phrase, that you can imagine a life.

WILL SCHWALBE: Books, I think that's one of the incredible things they do for us. Another book I write about is Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi, about this extraordinary class she ran in Tehran right after the revolution with a group of young women. And she helped them to imagine a life for them through Nabokov and Persian classics and The Great Gatsby.

AMT: I wonder if writers understand that somewhere down the road someone will pick up their book and their life will be forever altered or they will never be forgotten. It must be a very profound thing.

WILL SCHWALBE: I wonder how many writers think about that and how they think about it. But I think they must, because writers are readers. And you can't be a reader without that in some way having happened to you. That's what reading does. It's a profound obligation but also wow, what a privilege.

AMT: Mm. And we make your book list sound more highbrow than it is. You also read things like Paula Hawkins thriller The Girl on the Train and the Edna Lewis’ cookbook The Taste of Country Cooking. How can books like that change our lives?

WILL SCHWALBE: Well, I loved Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train, and in fact I love thrillers and suspense novels. And one of the things that kind of book can do is really help us hone our ability when it comes to who we can trust and who we can't. And knowing who to trust is an essential skill in life. When I read a thriller like that, I get to test my instincts and my impulses against the characters, and in the end I get to find out if I was right. One of the marvelous things about The Girl on the Train is one of the three narrators isn't even sure she can trust herself and I think that's an incredibly valuable lesson.

AMT: Mm. Very insightful, huh?

WILL SCHWALBE: Yes.

AMT: I have another clip for you. This is from a skeptic. Novelist Russell Smith has his doubts about books as a moral force. Listen to him.

SOUNDCLIP

Psychologists and other scientists have been trying for decades to establish any kind of link between increased empathy and other moral skills and the consumption of large amounts of literature. And although they claim to have results, if you look at them closely, they're really not very convincing. We also have all known personally people who have been very cultured, very well read people who are complete jerks. The other danger in thinking that literature is good for you is that one starts to then think that that is the role of literature and so one starts to then seek out improving literature. And improving literature, moral literature is that in which the good are rewarded and the bad are punished. And it's very simple minded literature and that's actually not what most people turn to literature for. They turn to illuminate moral complexity. And guess what? We also turn to literature for really bad impulses to be titillated for example, to be turned on, to be turned on by badness, to explore our own dark side. And this is why people, particularly religious institutions, and other philosophers throughout history have said literature is corrupting. And as a novelist, that's how I want to be seen. Not as somebody as good for you but as somebody who's possibly bad for you. It makes my literature much more attractive.

AMT: Okay, novelist Russell Smith. Will Schwalbe, what do you think of that?

WILL SCHWALBE: Well, I mean, I love contrarian points of view and in fact it makes me want to read his books. But my own experience and the experience of so many readers I've met presents an opposite picture, I would say. I don't think that you can spend time in someone else's shoes, seeing the world through their eyes and not be a little bit changed and a little bit improved. And of course, the more varied works that you read, the more you'll be changed and the more you'll be improved. No, literature’s purpose is not moral. It's not to change just for the better. But I feel it can't help but do so.

AMT: You know, I spoke to a psychologist earlier this month who argues empathy plays into our prejudices, that we have more empathy for those who are like us. How do we prevent the books we read from reinforcing our prejudices?

WILL SCHWALBE: Well, it is very important to read broadly. And if we just read things that we know we're going to agree with, then I can see that that could have a very bad effect. But I think to be a reader is to be curious and it's to be curious about a lot of different things. And one book leads to another. And in fact, if we're really thoughtful about how we choose what to read and read things that we never would have expected we would like but were simply the answer to that great question “What are you reading?”, then we can't help but expand our horizons. I wish I thought that the world's biggest problem was too much empathy but I don't think that's exactly it.

AMT: If you could convert more people to be readers of books, how would the world change?

WILL SCHWALBE: Well, I think the world would become a quieter place, because people would have their noses buried in books and reading.

AMT: [laughs]

WILL SCHWALBE: That would be a nice thing. I think the world would become a place where people were more capable of concentration, which is a skill that I feel, alas, we're losing. And I think the world would be a place where we were more able to see issues through each other's eyes. And I think that would be a great thing indeed.

AMT: And so I have to ask you finally: what are you reading?

WILL SCHWALBE: Well, I just finished a really marvelous novel by an Australian writer named Joan London called The Golden Age, set in a polio hospital in Australia. And I'm on an Australian kick. I'm just starting a new book, a suspense novel called The Dry by an Australian novelist Jane Harper.

AMT: Fantastic. Okay. And why are you on an Australian roll here? What is it about Australian writers?

WILL SCHWALBE: Well, one of the things that I love about reading is I love how one thing leads you to another. So one Australian writer led me to another and who knows where I'll go next. But I love to follow my impulses, follow one book as it leads to another book. And sometimes for example, if I'm reading a novel about a period of time, it'll make me really want to read the history of that time or another book by that author or book by a teacher of that author. I'd love to follow books as they sort of show me where to go. Because I have a real belief that the universe puts in your path the book you need when you most need it.

AMT: That's a very beautiful thought.

WILL SCHWALBE: You know, I think we just have to listen to it, be open to it. And that's why I have some superstitions. For example, if I'm in a bookstore and I knock over a book, I must buy it because that's the universe telling me I need to read that book.

AMT: Okay. Okay. Well, I'd like to go book shopping with you sometime, Will Schwalbe. [laughs]

WILL SCHWALBE: I'm clumsy, so I must say bookstore owners love that.

AMT: [laughs] It's great to talk to you. Thank you.

WILL SCHWALBE: Thank you, Anna Maria.

MF: Anna Maria in conversation with Will Schwalbe. He's the author of Books for Living. If you want to see the list of his 26 most meaningful books, well then you can head over to our website, www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. And let us know which books you would add to the list, which books changed your life and how and we’ll post a list of your most life altering books. Go to our Facebook page: CBC The Current, tweet us @thecurrentCBC or you can send us an email. To do that, go to our website, again: www.cbc.ca/thecurrent, click on the contact link. And if you want to hear Anna Maria’s conversation with Will about his previous book, The End of Your Life Book Club, we'll post a link to that on our site. Again, www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. And that's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for the summer show, On Drugs. This week: from Nazis on meth to veterans on ecstasy, how drugs have shaped warfare through the ages and right up to the present. I'm Mike Finnerty. Thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current. And we'll see you tomorrow.

[Music: Reading Rainbow theme song]

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June 27, 2017 full episode transcript

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