Speaker 1: Hi there, It's Ruby Jones and I'm back to introduce
Speaker 1: yet another episode of Read This Out Sister podcast. It's
Speaker 1: hosted by the editor of The Monthly and book nerd
Speaker 1: Michael Williams, and it features conversations with some of the
Speaker 1: best and most beloved writers from Australia and around the world.
Speaker 1: In this episode, we're going to hear from New Zealand
Speaker 1: born chef and author Ben Schuri. Before we do, Michael
Speaker 1: is here to share a bit about their conversation. Hello Michael,
Speaker 1: Hi Ruby. So Michael, your guest today is the chef
Speaker 1: and the owner of Attica, which is a very famous
Speaker 1: Melbourne restaurant. But for anyone who isn't as familiar with
Speaker 1: Ben Shuri, could you tell me a bit more about him.
Speaker 2: Ben's a really fascinating figure. And if like me, you're
Speaker 2: a big fan of Kitchen Confidential, or you watch The Bear,
Speaker 2: or you really like the little rat inside the Hat
Speaker 2: and writer tooy, like you have an idea that a
Speaker 2: celebrity chef is like all about McKeay mow and kind of.
Speaker 3: Sweaty rages and big egos.
Speaker 2: And the thing that's most remarkable about Ben Shuri is
Speaker 2: not just that He is a culumnary genius in many ways,
Speaker 2: but he's widely described as a fundamentally decent human being.
Speaker 2: And the man that I got to talk to was
Speaker 2: a man who's so thoughtful about what he does. Vocational
Speaker 2: about food and about feeding people and about you know,
Speaker 2: producing the best that he can and everything that he does,
Speaker 2: but actually really interested in the cultural questions around food,
Speaker 2: in the ways in which we build community in a kitchen,
Speaker 2: in a restaurant across the country through the things we
Speaker 2: put in our mouths.
Speaker 1: And so his book, it's called Uses for Obsession. It's
Speaker 1: described as both a memoir and as a manifesto. So
Speaker 1: what does that actually look like on the page?
Speaker 2: Look, the most important thing to note is there are
Speaker 2: a couple of recipes in here. In particular, he goes
Speaker 2: deep on his approach to Lazo, and he has a
Speaker 2: number of differing ways that he does that. But yeah,
Speaker 2: this is not a memoir. In there, I was born,
Speaker 2: then I worked in my first kitchen, then up to Attica,
Speaker 2: then kind of overcoming the hardship of COVID shutdowns or whatever.
Speaker 2: It's not a linear story. It's very much a memoir
Speaker 2: informed by the way he sees the world by the
Speaker 2: way in which his philosophy informs the way he works
Speaker 2: the obsessions that he has, and the way he conducts
Speaker 2: himself with those obsessions around other people. And it's a
Speaker 2: really fascinating.
Speaker 1: Mix coming up in just a moment. Uses for Ben.
Speaker 2: Shuri, Uses for Obsession is an excellent title. It conjures
Speaker 2: up what we imagine we might want from the chef.
Speaker 2: Uses for soliriac or uses for a mandolin or uses
Speaker 2: for Marjoram, something grounded and relatable that translates a familiar
Speaker 2: but intimidating media into a space we think we might
Speaker 2: navigate the achievement of this book, though, is that Ben
Speaker 2: Shuri understands that the intellectual, philosophical, creative facets of life
Speaker 2: can be equally served by the methodology of a chef.
Speaker 2: After all, what is a great chef if not a storyteller.
Speaker 2: For Ben, the spinning of a tale is central to
Speaker 2: how he does what he does.
Speaker 4: It's probably more influenced by oral storytelling, actually, and that
Speaker 4: comes from my earliest memories my childhood, which was about
Speaker 4: making the most of what you had and getting on
Speaker 4: with things. One of the main family traditions for shuries
Speaker 4: and the Turners. Our form of entertainment as a family
Speaker 4: and our extended family was around a fire or around
Speaker 4: a dinner table telling stories. And my aunties and uncles
Speaker 4: and my mother and father were to tell these tremendous
Speaker 4: stories about overcoming odds, and often they were very funny,
Speaker 4: and it was how we kind of made sense of
Speaker 4: the things that were hard that were happening in this
Speaker 4: time in the seventies and.
Speaker 3: Eighties and rural New Zealand.
Speaker 4: Often they were against the odds, stories of going up
Speaker 4: against the man. You know.
Speaker 3: That was always the council, which I think is hilarious.
Speaker 4: But there was always humor, and there was always heart,
Speaker 4: and it was always truthful. And so as a child
Speaker 4: I just loved sitting there.
Speaker 3: I lapped all of this up, and eventually, when I
Speaker 3: was old enough.
Speaker 4: I was able to become a part of that. And
Speaker 4: so in a lot of ways in this book, I'm
Speaker 4: actually honoring my own family's history of storytelling, even though
Speaker 4: it's not a written history.
Speaker 2: But the oral tradition. Like part of what's so lovely
Speaker 2: about this book is structurally it has an episodic energy
Speaker 2: where it's not a linear narrative. If it's not a
Speaker 2: conventional this thing it is then attica, then you know misfortune,
Speaker 2: and then triumph over adversity. You know, it's not that.
Speaker 2: It's a book that draws deep from your personal philosophy
Speaker 2: and from anecdote and kind of moves between them freely,
Speaker 2: like all the best fireside chats.
Speaker 3: I think, well, thank you.
Speaker 4: I was well aware of the pitfalls of writing a
Speaker 4: memoir as a well known person, and I just didn't
Speaker 4: want to add something else bland to the market. You know,
Speaker 4: whenever I do anything, I think about that product and
Speaker 4: the need for it, and so it's no different with
Speaker 4: a book. If I'm going to write a book and
Speaker 4: use those resources, you know, how is my book going
Speaker 4: to be meaningful and useful to people?
Speaker 2: This book does many things beautifully, and it has all
Speaker 2: these kind of parallel tracks going on. But one of
Speaker 2: them is about your journey from not knowing to knowing,
Speaker 2: and a journey that is a constant and ongoing one,
Speaker 2: and that's part of the joy of it. But when
Speaker 2: you write about those early days, you know, when you
Speaker 2: write about the certainty, a knowledge that comes from a
Speaker 2: French cooking tradition, and then there's certainty a knowledge that
Speaker 2: comes from getting access to a tie cooking tradition. One
Speaker 2: of the early engines is a book. Is you going
Speaker 2: into a second hand bookshop and finding a book that
Speaker 2: tells you that the stuff you've learned before then might
Speaker 2: not be adequate for the task. Can you describe that
Speaker 2: for us?
Speaker 4: It's a rather beautiful moment. I'm living in Wellington, New Zealand,
Speaker 4: and not long before had completed two years of rigorous
Speaker 4: brutal training under French chefs. It was two years of
Speaker 4: formal training at Waikato Politech and the one thing that
Speaker 4: I took away from that I was really young. I
Speaker 4: was sixteen to eighteen, and the one thing I took
Speaker 4: away from it was, yes, there there's a level of
Speaker 4: mastery in these techniques, and there's a history, but that
Speaker 4: history does not feel like this place. It does not
Speaker 4: feel like anything that I know. In fact, it seems
Speaker 4: from a world far away from us in New Zealand.
Speaker 4: And so whilst I didn't really know what my cooking
Speaker 4: would become, I did know that that didn't feel like home.
Speaker 4: And so several years later, I'm in Wellington and I
Speaker 4: go to this bookshop which is still there to the
Speaker 4: stay called Artibs, and it's the second hand bookshop. It's
Speaker 4: a really great secondhand bookshop. And I'm in there flicking
Speaker 4: through the covers of the cookbooks that are around, you know,
Speaker 4: And this is a moment where there's a very very
Speaker 4: famous French chef called Thomas Keller, and he has a
Speaker 4: book out about his restaurant called The French Laundry Cookbook.
Speaker 4: And this book is just looming larger in the chef land,
Speaker 4: in the culture, and it just didn't speak to me either,
Speaker 4: with the most respect to him. But what landed kind
Speaker 4: of in my lap in that second hand bookshop was
Speaker 4: the small, thin paperback cookbook with hand drawn pictures, no photographs,
Speaker 4: which sort of seem to be exuding in internal confidence,
Speaker 4: saying something to me like this is a bastion of
Speaker 4: unheralded recipes and ideas and thoughts on Thai cuisine that
Speaker 4: cannot be found elsewhere. And I opened it and I
Speaker 4: began to read it in the bookstore, and immediately the author,
Speaker 4: David Thompson's words transported me to another place. And I
Speaker 4: remember kind of buying it and clutching it and sort
Speaker 4: of skipping home excitedly to begin working from it. And
Speaker 4: what I discovered from working within this cuisine Tay cuisine,
Speaker 4: classic Taye cuisine, or dishes that are hundreds and hundreds
Speaker 4: of years old from the Royal Thai Court, is that
Speaker 4: one Tay Cuisine is one of the world's greatest cuisines,
Speaker 4: right up there with more celebrated cuisines like French cuisine
Speaker 4: or Italian cuisine. And two more importantly, Tay cuisine is
Speaker 4: a cuisine of the mind. And by that I mean
Speaker 4: following recipes is foolhardy on a lot of levels. You
Speaker 4: can follow a French recipe. You and I could follow
Speaker 4: one to day Michael, and to be completely honest, we'd
Speaker 4: get a pretty similar result. But if we both tried
Speaker 4: to follow it an advanced Thie recipe would get incredibly
Speaker 4: different results. Now that's cool, because you know ties the
Speaker 4: way that they Seeson is personal.
Speaker 3: That's correct as well.
Speaker 4: Some people like it's sweet, as some people like it
Speaker 4: more sour, more spicy. But I was I became transfixed
Speaker 4: by this book, and it would actually be you know,
Speaker 4: the factor that would mean that I would leave my
Speaker 4: home country. I would move to Australia in pursuit of it,
Speaker 4: and eventually London it would consume my entire life for
Speaker 4: six years. I would be largely owned by it. It would
Speaker 4: drive me close to the edge of madness because it
Speaker 4: is so complicated and complex that it's impossible to have
Speaker 4: any level of mastery over it.
Speaker 3: Well, it was for me.
Speaker 2: But one of the things I love about that is,
Speaker 2: you know, you say at the point at which you
Speaker 2: read that book and you went home in Wellington and
Speaker 2: you decide, Okay, you're going to try and master this.
Speaker 2: Not only had you not eaten typhood. I think you
Speaker 2: say in the book you might not have even met
Speaker 2: a tie person. And that's true. This is entirely an
Speaker 2: abstraction that you're trying to make real. And when you
Speaker 2: get to Sydney and you eat your first proper Thai meal,
Speaker 2: the thing that hits you is you can't learn this
Speaker 2: from books books. I can't do it for you.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 4: And the thing that I write about that meal was
Speaker 4: that it was the most ruthlessly beautiful meal that I'd
Speaker 4: ever eaten. And it destroyed me in the best way
Speaker 4: because I learned that I knew nothing, And so I
Speaker 4: love this feeling of being humbled. You know, this is
Speaker 4: incredibly powering and compelling to human growth if we choose
Speaker 4: to see it in that way. But at some stage
Speaker 4: I realized, really what Thai cuisine didn't need.
Speaker 2: Was me creativity and the twin engines of creativity. It
Speaker 2: seems to me that you kind of tease out in
Speaker 2: this book, both in the book itself, but also in
Speaker 2: the way you talk about cooking and you talk about food,
Speaker 2: and they're on the one hand technique and precision and
Speaker 2: learning and those very possibly rigid things. And then on
Speaker 2: the other hand there is joy, and there is discovery,
Speaker 2: and there is play, and there's those things, and they
Speaker 2: seem to me to be potentially intension in any creative process.
Speaker 2: Where do you sit on that spectrum?
Speaker 4: Well, you know, I think they serve each other in
Speaker 4: so many ways. I guess as a part of the
Speaker 4: book which says that before you can subvert something, you
Speaker 4: must completely submit to a rigorous understanding of it. And
Speaker 4: the ways in which people go wrong in all kinds
Speaker 4: of context in human life when they racing to change something,
Speaker 4: And if you haven't humbled yourself by absolutely committing to
Speaker 4: a complete and utter focus on that subject for a
Speaker 4: sustained period of time, you've really got no business mucking
Speaker 4: around with it.
Speaker 2: You know. I love that idea of humility in the
Speaker 2: face of something that matters to you. You know, but
Speaker 2: whatever it is, if this matters, you have to be humble.
Speaker 2: You have to concede what you don't know. And I
Speaker 2: think as a society, as a culture, we're very bad
Speaker 2: at saying I don't know, or I can't or I
Speaker 2: need to learn.
Speaker 4: Well, I think you're right, and I think as a
Speaker 4: society we would benefit from more thinking along the lines
Speaker 4: of we're all just making this up as we go.
Speaker 4: When I cook, I don't have enough time left on
Speaker 4: this planet to really have any real understanding of what
Speaker 4: is happening and what this is about. And I've been
Speaker 4: humbled time and time. I'm in time, particularly in this
Speaker 4: country with sixty five thousand years of continuous cooking and
Speaker 4: cuisine by Aboriginal people and tourist for out other people.
Speaker 4: Because there'd be moments, as a highly creative chef where
Speaker 4: I would have thought that I've reinvented the wheel was
Speaker 4: some concept or some dish that I've made, I've brought
Speaker 4: two ingredients together. And there's a great story about bringing
Speaker 4: nerdy Gugoni word for green ants together with raw fish,
Speaker 4: and there's a synergy between these two ingredients in my
Speaker 4: mind as I developed this dish, and I'm like, hmm,
Speaker 4: you're pretty damn good, you know, Like it's like that
Speaker 4: feeling of like, well, I've discovered something here. And then
Speaker 4: six months later, being in Maningrida, a community in Arnham
Speaker 4: Land and sitting down for a coffee with an elder
Speaker 4: with Auntie Lila Nimbajia, and Auntie starts telling me this
Speaker 4: story about how her mother they couldn't always get fit,
Speaker 4: she had an appetite for fish, that she would try
Speaker 4: to quench her thirst for fish, if you like, by
Speaker 4: eating green ants, and green ants is a medicinal and
Speaker 4: culinary food from that area.
Speaker 3: And she said, we always served.
Speaker 4: Green ants with fish, and I was like, oh my goodness,
Speaker 4: how little do you know?
Speaker 3: You know, it's absolutely remarkable.
Speaker 4: You're just a speck of sand in the desert.
Speaker 2: A gettl Again. The culture tells us that professional food
Speaker 2: culture isn't open or generous. It's aggressive. It's a particular
Speaker 2: kind of matcho, it's a particular kind of self aggrandizing.
Speaker 2: The prevailing picture in pop culture is that someone who
Speaker 2: devotes themselves to restaurant excellence at the highest level is
Speaker 2: inevitably some kind of monster.
Speaker 4: That's an unfortunate truth. As an industry, we've been incredibly cruel.
Speaker 3: We've had our.
Speaker 4: Whole mindset around the wrong way, and many of the
Speaker 4: people that we've looked up to and admired and celebrated
Speaker 4: haven't deserved it. And for me, coming into this world
Speaker 4: as a sensitive young man from the back country of
Speaker 4: New Zealand who'd barely been around large groups of people
Speaker 4: in his life, I thought, as an outsider that I
Speaker 4: would find a home in professional kitchens. But I was
Speaker 4: quickly taught that because I didn't fit into the status
Speaker 4: quo that quite often kitchens were an incredibly unkind and
Speaker 4: unfriendly place for me, And if it was bad for me,
Speaker 4: it was devastating for women. So for me, that's always
Speaker 4: been through line. Women have been held back by men,
Speaker 4: have been treated appalling by men and kitchens, and for me,
Speaker 4: when I had the chance to run my own place,
Speaker 4: that's something that I wanted to stamp out immediately to
Speaker 4: the best of my ability, knowing that I have many
Speaker 4: blind spots as a man, but listening to women, making
Speaker 4: sure that there were women in possessions of power making
Speaker 4: decisions at the company. I've wanted to prove in my
Speaker 4: career when I had the opportunity that it could be
Speaker 4: done a different way, that this is not actually connected
Speaker 4: to any thing good. You know that yelling and shouting
Speaker 4: and macho behavior and the abuse of drugs and alcohol
Speaker 4: are not things to be celebrated. In the book, you know,
Speaker 4: I write about the influence of certain parts of Anthony
Speaker 4: Bourdain's memoile Kitchen Confidential. You know that book and parts
Speaker 4: of that are incredibly sexist and incredibly damaging, I believe
Speaker 4: to our industry because generations of young male chefs have
Speaker 4: looked at that book and looked up to it and
Speaker 4: worshiped it, and still to this day.
Speaker 2: I think it also valorizes a particular kind of not
Speaker 2: just agro, but ego, I think, and I'm curious about
Speaker 2: that relationship between creativity and self belief. You know, to
Speaker 2: be a creative person, to be making things that you
Speaker 2: put in the world, you have to believe that your
Speaker 2: voice is worth hearing, or people should come and eat
Speaker 2: the thing that you make, or they should come and
Speaker 2: invest in the thing that you are creating. And so
Speaker 2: inevitably there's a requirement for a bit of ego, But
Speaker 2: why does that ego in the context of restaurants, in
Speaker 2: the context of chefs, why does it curdle in the
Speaker 2: way that it does into something so ugly, Because.
Speaker 4: That kind of ego and that kind of behavior has
Speaker 4: been rewarded time and time again. You know, it's been glamorized,
Speaker 4: as you point out, by books, by movies right through
Speaker 4: the culture and still ongoing to this day. You know,
Speaker 4: largely these stories are to by other people. They're not
Speaker 4: actually told by chefs either. But I think that you know,
Speaker 4: that is all just a way of men controlling the industry.
Speaker 4: You know, there's still a huge imbalance in industry between
Speaker 4: men and women, and of course there are other groups
Speaker 4: of people who are also affected in various ways, But
Speaker 4: most restaurants are still owned by men, and the legal
Speaker 4: and the moral obligation for this behavior to stop begins
Speaker 4: and ends with them.
Speaker 2: When we returned, Ben shares the risks of writing a
Speaker 2: tell all food memoir and reveals the one thing that
Speaker 2: he allows himself to be a little bit chitter. We'll
Speaker 2: be right back. You are someone who has a de
Speaker 2: awareness of your responsibility to others. And I'm curious about
Speaker 2: what effect that had on the writing process, because this
Speaker 2: is your story, but it's a story about many people
Speaker 2: in your life, and your awareness of the ways in
Speaker 2: which putting it down on paper, you know, has has repercussions,
Speaker 2: that has ripples. Was there an anxiety about that for you?
Speaker 4: Well, first of all, there's stories of others that I've shared.
Speaker 4: I've always thought that there's an incredible and grave responsibility
Speaker 4: for writers to consider when sharing other people's stories. So
Speaker 4: that weighed heavily on me in the writing about others
Speaker 4: or the sharing of other people's stories. And then kind
Speaker 4: of to other point, to reconcile the risk involved, you know,
Speaker 4: long and hard conversations with those closest to me, you know,
Speaker 4: and none more so than my wife Kylie, who has
Speaker 4: bravely encouraged me to write this, you know, and at
Speaker 4: every stage even you know, her own frankly brutal story.
Speaker 4: But also the immense amount of peril and risk that
Speaker 4: we've potentially put our company in. I think that we're
Speaker 4: very resilient and I am not somebody that gives up easily.
Speaker 4: I also don't mind a fight.
Speaker 2: It seems important, and not as a sad thing because
Speaker 2: it does tap into the recurring thing through this book,
Speaker 2: which is the relationship between the art of what you do,
Speaker 2: the business of it, the life that you live when
Speaker 2: you're doing it, and what those relationships look like that
Speaker 2: come out of it, and how we extract meaning I
Speaker 2: guess from what we do. Are you at a point
Speaker 2: in your career where you feel happy with where you've
Speaker 2: landed between those different imperatives.
Speaker 4: I'm made a point in my career or where I
Speaker 4: feel like letting it rend. I feel like we all
Speaker 4: have limited days on this earth. And there was probably
Speaker 4: some questioning about whether or not I'm too young to
Speaker 4: write this book, but I thought, if I don't write
Speaker 4: it today, if I don't take this risk, and if
Speaker 4: I don't face up to these truths, both.
Speaker 3: My own failings and the failings.
Speaker 4: Of others, I might not get another chance.
Speaker 2: I want to talk for a bit about obsession, because
Speaker 2: you are an incredibly driven human being, and you were
Speaker 2: driven by a desire for excellence. You hold yourself to
Speaker 2: a standard, you push yourself to that standard again and again,
Speaker 2: and I'm interested in how hard it is to both
Speaker 2: honor that on the one hand and not let it
Speaker 2: descend into something corrosive. On the other what do you
Speaker 2: let yourself be shit at?
Speaker 4: Ben Suri, Well, I love skateboarding, but I'm not a
Speaker 4: great skateboarder. You know. It's been something that I've done
Speaker 4: my whole life. It informs the work at Attica, and
Speaker 4: even the writing in the book is there's references to skateboarding.
Speaker 4: But the thing that I loved about skateboarding was the
Speaker 4: skateboarder doesn't just sort of fall off and then give
Speaker 4: up the first time they try a trick. You know,
Speaker 4: they get back up and they try again, and so
Speaker 4: that's very compelling to me. And it also offers up
Speaker 4: a level of kind of pain and intensity in suffering,
Speaker 4: which I think is not necessarily a bad thing. I
Speaker 4: know we're going to try to avoid that in the future, probably,
Speaker 4: but I don't think we should.
Speaker 3: I think there's a level of going.
Speaker 4: Through stuff that's healthy for humans.
Speaker 3: On being obsessed with things, I think, you know.
Speaker 4: Anybody of power or anybody of influence needs to be
Speaker 4: really mindful of their ambition, especially when that person works
Speaker 4: in teams. And so I've always had the ability to
Speaker 4: kind of consider the people that I'm working with and
Speaker 4: ask the question in which ways do these affect our
Speaker 4: team and it is a neat or positive or is
Speaker 4: it some positive and negative? And by that I mean
Speaker 4: there's a lot of people in the world that are
Speaker 4: perfectly happy to shell ten thousand baby pas or pick
Speaker 4: twenty thousand lemon time leaves, both insufferable jobs. I would
Speaker 4: analyze whether or not it's actually worth it, does it
Speaker 4: actually make an impact on the plate, or is it
Speaker 4: pure ego, Because if it's ego, then it's kind of cruel,
Speaker 4: and if it's not ego, if it's necessary. Look, let's
Speaker 4: be frank, it's never necessary to pick twenty thousand lemon
Speaker 4: time leaves. But if it is necessary to do this menial,
Speaker 4: mind numbing task, then work out a way within the
Speaker 4: team to make it fun. And so that just means
Speaker 4: that the whole team does it. Maybe there's twenty cooks
Speaker 4: on a shift at Attica, and all twenty will shell
Speaker 4: the peas, and therefore this job that would take somebody,
Speaker 4: you know, eight hours, which I would say is a
Speaker 4: bit soul destoring if you're a qualified chef, for eight
Speaker 4: hours is shared by a team of twenty and that's
Speaker 4: done in twenty minutes, and you listen to music and
Speaker 4: you can have a conversation.
Speaker 3: So it's just.
Speaker 4: About a reframing kind of a lot of the times
Speaker 4: of that ambition and how we'll get there in a
Speaker 4: better way that doesn't break people down.
Speaker 2: Part of what I like so much about the book
Speaker 2: is that you are very honest about those personal eccentricities
Speaker 2: and peccadillos and the ways in which obsession can be
Speaker 2: such a personal thing. And so they're navigating your personal
Speaker 2: obsession through the world is its own kind of set
Speaker 2: of challenges, And I'm curious, when are the moments when
Speaker 2: it all feels worth it to you? When are the
Speaker 2: moments when you feel like you've made a perfect thing,
Speaker 2: or you're proud, or it's enough.
Speaker 4: First of all, being with this tremendous group of people
Speaker 4: at Attica every day, it feels like it's worth it,
Speaker 4: you know, having the privilege of cooking for people every night,
Speaker 4: and then you know, fighting for your creative freedom on
Speaker 4: a daily basis, pushing against the market sometimes, you know,
Speaker 4: but ultimately there's this one thing that happens, and it's
Speaker 4: sort of this pursuit of the completion of a dish.
Speaker 4: So I'm working on a lot of different dishes at once,
Speaker 4: and daily we're working on something and we're trying to
Speaker 4: bring a group of ideas together.
Speaker 3: I've had a.
Speaker 4: Vision for a dish or an idea for a dish, and.
Speaker 3: We're working on it.
Speaker 4: It's a process that goes for really for months and
Speaker 4: occasionally years, depending on how big the concept is. And
Speaker 4: we're working, and we're working, and we're failing, and we're failing,
Speaker 4: and that's completely utterly normal. But we keep working. We
Speaker 4: keep honing it, we keep tweaking it. We learn what
Speaker 4: we learn, and we make notes and we come back
Speaker 4: to it, and we keep going and it gets closer
Speaker 4: and it gets closer. And then there are other people
Speaker 4: coming in. There's makers and art artists. They're making plates
Speaker 4: or they're making baskets or cutlery, and they designing things
Speaker 4: for this project as we're going. So we're getting the
Speaker 4: dish ready, and then is a moment when all of
Speaker 4: a sudden it clicks into place and is a moment
Speaker 4: of clarity. And this moment is the moment I live for.
Speaker 3: This is standing in the kitchen and plaiting.
Speaker 4: That dish for the last time and taking a spoon
Speaker 4: and bringing it to my mouth and realizing that it's
Speaker 4: that it's there, and there's this euphoric hit that shrieks
Speaker 4: through my body and I beam and everybody knows, you know,
Speaker 4: and this is the sort of end of this journey.
Speaker 4: And I've said often if I couldn't feel this feeling,
Speaker 4: that I'd hang up the knives, you know, because this
Speaker 4: is actually the reason, feeling this sense of joy from
Speaker 4: following an idea through to its completion and then just
Speaker 4: being so excited to share it with other people.
Speaker 2: Have you felt the equivalent feeling as a writer on this.
Speaker 3: Book multiple times?
Speaker 4: Writing this book has been one of the greatest joys
Speaker 4: of my life. It's also been one of the hardest
Speaker 4: things I've ever been through in my life.
Speaker 2: I get the feeling been true that if it wasn't
Speaker 2: one of the hardest things, you couldn't find the joy
Speaker 2: like that joyful experience, that beaming moment that you describe
Speaker 2: almost needs the pain and the journey to get there
Speaker 2: to be fully realized. Is that fair?
Speaker 3: I think it is.
Speaker 4: And I think it's kind of a well known fact
Speaker 4: that that exists within creativity. And I'm not talking about
Speaker 4: the tortured artist trope.
Speaker 3: I don't believe in that.
Speaker 4: You know, But I do believe that anything that's truly
Speaker 4: worth doing entails some level of suffering at some point.
Speaker 3: And there were moments in book that were incredibly joyous
Speaker 3: to write.
Speaker 4: The chapter Chipgate, I wrote it in response to coming
Speaker 4: out of a really dark time from writing and being
Speaker 4: affected heavily by writing writing about the stories of survival
Speaker 4: during COVID, for example, which is something that I hadn't
Speaker 4: really wanted to do, but something that I decided to
Speaker 4: do as a sort of a man in the whole
Speaker 4: narrative structure of the book. But it was too soon
Speaker 4: to revisit that struggle for me, and it depressed me,
Speaker 4: and I didn't realize it went on for a couple
Speaker 4: of months and I wrote Chipgate, which is absolutely silly
Speaker 4: and hopefully funny.
Speaker 3: It's important.
Speaker 2: It's a manifesto for outside well it is, and I mean,
Speaker 2: you know, who doesn't love a hot ship?
Speaker 3: Is that not just the best food ever?
Speaker 2: Look, it's on the list. And I do like that
Speaker 2: when you acknowledge that love, you also have to you
Speaker 2: pay a little apology to the lasagne because you're like, well,
Speaker 2: i feel like i'm playing away here that you know,
Speaker 2: I'm being unfaithful.
Speaker 3: I'm holding two thoughts at once.
Speaker 2: I think it's possible to be to love both hot
Speaker 2: chips and lasagna. I embody that idea.
Speaker 3: Me too, Me Too.
Speaker 2: Venture's memoir Users for Obsession has just hit bookstores and
Speaker 2: it's available now.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for listening to another special episode of
Speaker 1: Read This. Join us each Sunday to hear our favorite
Speaker 1: interviews from the show. Listen out for upcoming conversations with
Speaker 1: Robbie or Not and Santilla Chincape. And if you don't
Speaker 1: want to wait until next Sunday to dive in to
Speaker 1: Read This, you can search for it wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to podcasts.