TRIGGERnometry - “I Hired Them. They Reported Me for Missing a DEI Meeting” – Oliver Malcolm

00:00:00.000 I was actually reported once for not attending a D&I meeting. Caving into staff on some of these

00:00:08.100 smaller issues and maybe not even debating them is much easier than saying no. It is a problem

00:00:14.740 when the publishing industry and the thoughts and teams within that are almost like an Islington

00:00:19.700 dinner party. What I really rage against is when there's a suppression of ideas.

00:00:26.000 I kind of saw the real side of publishing, maybe.

00:00:31.000 I had this really surreal conversation where I sat down with the same editor

00:00:35.000 and she said to me, we are not going to be promoting the book.

00:00:40.000 We're going to focus on digital sales, which means they weren't going to print it.

00:00:44.000 You had an experience which I've seen multiple times over the years.

00:00:49.000 Part of the antagonism just came, oh, it's him from trigonometry.

00:00:52.000 Don't want to do it.

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00:01:16.440 Oli, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:18.360 Thank you very much.

00:01:19.020 I really look forward to speaking with you about the publishing industry.

00:01:23.000 uh with some inside stories francis francis's book being cancelled is one of them of course

00:01:28.680 that you were involved in uh and what happened to you as well uh before we get into all that tell us

00:01:33.480 a little bit about your background your story how you eventually ended up here sure um so first of

00:01:38.840 all i've noticed by the way i'm mimicking your body language which hopefully is a good sign yeah

00:01:42.760 um but yeah i i was a uh originally a history graduate um i studied um fundamentally nazism

00:01:50.280 well modern history of nazism at the university of sheffield um that was probably in the years of

00:01:55.720 maybe around about 2000 um and i actually went to sheffield uni because i because ian kershaw was a

00:02:01.880 bit of a bit of a hero of mine at school um he'd obviously written his incredible biographies of

00:02:06.360 hitler um and obviously had a huge amount of exposure to a new framework of ideas and i found

00:02:13.160 incredibly motivating um and so having done that and a degree i did the uh the thing you'd always

00:02:19.080 do is go and work for GlaxoSmithKline and I did a I think I did about 18 months to two years there

00:02:26.600 and when I say I work for GlaxoSmithKline really I was working as a sale rep for the Ribena brand

00:02:33.080 so what looked good on paper the day-to-day wasn't quite so motivating so didn't last long

00:02:40.040 in that sort of corporate world but saw an advert to work as a key account manager for what was then

00:02:46.440 random house um came down to london um i was obviously brought up in a very very different

00:02:53.080 environment i was brought up in the peak district um and actually my my father's i guess fairly

00:02:57.480 itinerant uh in that he was born in bombay um the i i worked in publishing for maybe four or five

00:03:04.840 years at random house uh followed by a decade um at harper collins and then a couple of years at

00:03:11.000 her shirts i think what was quite interesting these are for people who are not familiar with

00:03:14.840 the publishing world these are big publishers really really big some of the biggest publishers

00:03:20.600 in the world sure i mean they are the big biggest three publishers in the world um and i guess

00:03:25.560 what's quite privileged about my experience is that i work not only um with different publishers

00:03:31.160 in different houses but i worked sort of cross-functionally i worked in sales i worked

00:03:36.040 in editorial and i worked as a managing director i was also very fortuitous i got to work on the

00:03:41.480 the board across the uk and australia um but yeah i think i've got a fairly interesting insight as

00:03:48.340 on you know what actually happens behind the curtain and what have you seen over the years

00:03:53.520 that means you're sitting here today because the reason i say this is we were talking before we

00:03:59.400 started and we remembered our friend sean walsh who came on the show and i remember saying to him

00:04:04.060 you know you've been on live at the polo you've been on this show you've been on that show you've

00:04:07.940 been on um mock the week all of them right and now you're on trigonometry what happened sure and i

00:04:15.360 think your story is actually very much along the same lines because uh you're reacting to things

00:04:21.560 that were happening in your industry sure that have ended up in in a very different place for

00:04:25.800 you personally sure sure sure well look i think i think you know my corporate and professional

00:04:30.420 motivation is of course that i'm setting up a new publishing house um we're setting up highline

00:04:35.440 Publishing Studio, which is a transatlantic new publisher. And I guess the motivation

00:04:42.400 is that we're sort of sick of the monoculture of publishing. But look, if I was trying to

00:04:48.200 explain it to someone who doesn't know our industry well, if you look at media and particularly

00:04:54.000 newspapers, I guess what you have is no matter who the owners are, you have the Times, you have

00:05:00.080 the Telegraph, you have the Daily Mail, you have the Express, the Independent, the Guardian. You

00:05:04.440 do have a spectrum of ideas um and i think you have a spectrum of people um but sort of almost

00:05:11.080 by stealth albeit slow tectonic stealth as such a thing um the publishing industry now is almost

00:05:17.680 in effect the guardian the guardian the guardian the guardian the guardian and what's unusual about

00:05:23.420 that is that not only does it create what i think is a you know exacerbation of monoculturalism

00:05:28.120 but you ultimately end up getting the same publishing experience or the same sort of

00:05:33.340 censorious behaviors no matter who your originating publisher is and I find that obviously deeply

00:05:39.500 disturbing and it was becoming more disturbing the deeper into my career I got but yeah I'm

00:05:45.980 propelled obviously by I guess wanting to do something different from traditional publishing

00:05:50.160 but also I'm propelled by creative expression that I genuinely think the best ideas come out

00:05:55.660 in environments where you have to synthesize different perspectives I obviously embrace

00:06:01.140 the dialectic. I like an open forum for debate. I don't mind antagonism. What I really rage against

00:06:07.900 is when there's a suppression of ideas and sort of a premeditation of curation.

00:06:14.820 I just want to judge books by what's on the page, not by what I had as a sort of premeditated

00:06:19.720 perspective. But is that happening? I mean, you know, we were talking, you helped publish a couple

00:06:26.360 of works by Douglas Murray.

00:06:28.040 Sure.

00:06:29.140 I had my book published, Francis eventually.

00:06:31.540 We'll talk about that.

00:06:32.520 I had his book published.

00:06:33.980 Lots of people with all sorts of different opinions

00:06:36.200 are getting their books out there.

00:06:37.820 Sure, sure, sure.

00:06:39.120 Is it really true?

00:06:40.920 Well, so look, that is the question, the best question.

00:06:44.680 But why I'm rallying against it so much

00:06:48.020 is that what you don't often realise as an author

00:06:50.580 is that your book is not actually getting

00:06:53.720 the best possible opportunity.

00:06:55.180 because even if an editor buys your book and even if your title gets acquired to be within that list

00:07:01.260 that ultimately every single book has to have a boutique team around it to make it successful

00:07:06.200 so nowadays you have to have a great publicist you have to have a brilliant marketing team and

00:07:10.460 a digital marketer you have to have a production team and sales reps and the thing is that at any

00:07:15.340 one time any of these individuals can bring in their own subjective bearing into that publication

00:07:20.320 so what happens if your jacket doesn't get designed particularly well or it misses its on sale date

00:07:25.400 What happens if the rep doesn't actually decide to actually present that book to the retailer?

00:07:30.020 What happens if the retailer doesn't even put it on sale in the space that they said they put it on sale on?

00:07:34.140 And so I guess that when you look at these sort of micro-sensorious behaviours across the whole value chain,

00:07:40.820 do I think that books of certain persuasions have as good opportunity as others?

00:07:45.140 No, I don't. And that's a problem.

00:07:47.260 Because ultimately, if you want people to, again, get access to the full spectrum of ideas,

00:07:52.080 I think that it's a lot more difficult

00:07:54.820 for certain authors to actually achieve that

00:07:56.720 And why is it that this is happening

00:07:58.840 You said it's, you know, publishing is

00:08:00.600 the Guardian, the Guardian, the Guardian, the Guardian

00:08:02.260 Sure

00:08:02.620 Why is that?

00:08:05.180 Because I imagine, look, I don't know

00:08:06.940 but correct me if I'm wrong, I always thought

00:08:08.680 publishing is a business

00:08:09.620 So what you want to do is make money

00:08:11.440 The best way to make money is to publish books that people buy

00:08:15.080 Am I?

00:08:16.440 No, no, no

00:08:17.400 No, look

00:08:19.700 look you're completely you're completely right and you've got to be very careful don't you to

00:08:24.260 suddenly sort of generalize in such broad terms about the whole of publishing not least as

00:08:28.340 ultimately the fastest growing components of publishing now is like self-publishing

00:08:32.500 on tick tock and areas which aren't traditional publishing at all in some ways the actual global

00:08:36.660 books market is incredibly buoyant look at the digital marketing look at the growth of audio

00:08:41.460 and also particularly for english language publishing because of course people are now

00:08:45.540 preferring to read in english languages and so you'll often see for example you know in countries

00:08:50.180 like germany and and poland and france right now the you know sometimes the english spoken book is

00:08:55.860 doing better than the native tongue which is a huge change in our market um but look the reason why

00:09:02.660 things have changed so much in in my opinion is that look publishing has always been slightly

00:09:08.020 more on the on the left liberal side and you know the old expressions like bollinger bolshevism and

00:09:13.940 champagne socialists um but you know it is a problem when the publishing industry and the

00:09:19.700 thoughts and teams within that are almost like a an islington dinner party but it's but it's got

00:09:24.420 worse and worse and worse because of the nature of i think the um the markets that are doing well

00:09:30.980 because what's happened uh you know rapidly in some ways is that for example you know romanticy

00:09:37.620 or, you know, the new form of romance is doing so, so well.

00:09:42.820 And so what publishers do is that they have to chase the market

00:09:45.560 and that can have a huge bearing on the mix of staff.

00:09:49.320 And so, for example, I think publishing is now probably at 68%, 69% female staff,

00:09:54.400 which, look, you have to chase the money. 0.98

00:09:57.040 Of course you do.

00:09:58.140 But what if the net bearing of that is that it's no longer representative

00:10:02.220 of the public or the readership, or rather to the point,

00:10:05.080 what happens if in time that stops young boys wanting to read or them being a priority?

00:10:11.160 That's not going to create a more sort of hospitable long-term environment between male and females, I don't think.

00:10:18.620 So in some ways it's come about slightly organically by oddness.

00:10:22.860 The other reason is a slightly more worrying one in some ways,

00:10:27.400 which is that publishing, in my experience, has always felt like it's going to collapse.

00:10:33.600 since like for the 20 years it's always feeling like oh my god this is the you know this is the

00:10:37.820 the violinist on the titanic the string quartet um but what happens is is that you know there's

00:10:44.680 a quite a large wealth gap between those at the top at publishing and those at the bottom 0.92

00:10:48.680 and so once you get to the top and i had a huge privilege to do that i was you know i was the pig

00:10:53.980 in the trough and you chomp at your swill and you enjoy your swill um but then if you want to appease

00:10:59.540 the young staff coming through, it's much easier to appease them

00:11:03.040 with things which have no commercial bearing on the actual business

00:11:06.860 and ensures that you continue to get rewarded handsomely.

00:11:11.640 So in some ways, you know, caving into staff on some of these smaller issues

00:11:16.080 and maybe not even debating them is much easier than saying no.

00:11:21.220 And I think over time, you know, we've seen, for example,

00:11:24.120 a huge amount of unionisation take place in publishing.

00:11:28.220 So, you know, for example, in the US right now, one of the biggest publishers have now got a 500, 600 strong union.

00:11:35.620 And that's when the youngest staff are being paid just under $60,000.

00:11:41.720 I mean, for me, it's not, publishing is not like working down a coal mine.

00:11:46.340 But, yeah, that's sort of, I think, the macro thing that's taken place over this time.

00:11:53.660 You know, one of the things that I've always struggled with, with that thing that you just said,

00:11:57.820 which is people in positions of power caving to younger staff. Is there not a part of a person

00:12:05.100 in that situation just goes like, how fucking dare you? Who are you? Why are you telling me 0.98

00:12:08.940 what I'm supposed to do with this thing that I've been working on for 15 years, or even in some

00:12:13.420 cases, this thing that I built from the ground up and I own? Sure, sure, sure. Is there not a part

00:12:18.860 of there's a righteous indignation against this well there is on my behalf yeah um but i i think

00:12:25.900 you know i don't i don't want to sort of um necessarily you know critique senior people

00:12:31.740 saying that it's all down towards uh so it's all down to their sort of defensive play um partly

00:12:36.780 it's just down to the fact that publishing has reached the point of being so um manual laborious

00:12:42.300 fragmented um that just getting through the day is almost like a huge achievement and i know every

00:12:48.220 industry says that um but of course in the old days it was simply getting a book on a shelf in

00:12:53.820 physical form nowadays it's getting a book on a shelf in physical form in audio form in digital

00:12:58.540 form through hundreds of fragmented ways around the world the the market is just fragmented and

00:13:04.140 fragmented and fragmented and so it's become incredibly laborious um and you'll have seen

00:13:09.020 that you know in recent months this huge um sort of conflict around the salt path that it hadn't

00:13:14.540 had a sensitivity read and in some ways you know people go into the politics of whether it should

00:13:19.260 or shouldn't have had a sensitivity read should have had a fact check on all these things

00:13:22.540 and i sort of thought to myself probably one that's just slipped through the net just one

00:13:25.820 of those ones where you know it seemed like a very reasonable sort of nice um narrative piece

00:13:31.740 of travel you know non-fiction um and that it's sort of been caught up slightly in the culture

00:13:37.180 wars but yeah that partly that the um the the world of publishing has got very very sort of

00:13:43.260 fraught and frantic um but i do think there's also that that that you know people have been

00:13:48.040 trying to get to the top all that time um and it's just easier to appease people by putting in

00:13:54.240 you know big big big departments to deal with the problem hence why you've got massive uh sprawling

00:14:00.240 hr functions at quite a few of the publishers um so yeah hopefully that sort of surmises where i

00:14:06.700 and so for everybody listening and watching we know each other because ollie you bought my book

00:14:13.800 i did indeed yeah you bought my book for hodder and storton and it initially went really well i

00:14:19.480 went everyone in publishing is lovely sure we're having this great time we're right i'm writing

00:14:23.860 this book there's loads of support and then it ended up taking a bit of a turn a nasty turn

00:14:30.460 Yes. And I kind of saw the real side of publishing, maybe.

00:14:36.380 Yeah, I think so. I think that, A, I feel incredibly responsible in some ways because I'm the person who, having acquired that book, then left and went to a different publisher.

00:14:48.120 So, look, there's always a degree to which don't sign with a publisher and have your book orphaned.

00:14:53.940 Because, of course, sometimes books are successful because it's based upon the passion of the individual that published it.

00:14:58.800 I was particularly passionate about Francis' book because, one, I love the podcast, two, my parents are both teachers, and also because of your sort of South American connection, because when I left school, I did a year or so as a teacher in Chile, so with your sort of Venezuelan connection.

00:15:15.120 But also, it just taught common sense.

00:15:17.140 It sort of said, look, you know, you have to gain some discipline of the two or three bad apples in the classroom, or the entire thing goes to, you know, the dogs.

00:15:25.340 And so, you know, I like the fact that someone was actually coming up with a solution to how to get things back on track.

00:15:31.700 Unfortunately, as we know, I think that it was as much what you represented rather than what was read.

00:15:40.700 And that's one of the most difficult things for me, because, you know, having, as you guys know, published the likes of Douglas Murray and Piers Morgan,

00:15:49.320 that a huge amount of antagonism comes

00:15:53.620 prior to anyone I've actually read the book.

00:15:55.920 So I was always fighting off arguments

00:15:57.640 or having to stand in front of committees.

00:16:00.320 And it was clear that literally nobody had read the book.

00:16:03.280 So one might presume that the same thing happened to you, Francis,

00:16:06.280 that part of the antagonism just came,

00:16:08.320 oh, it's him from trigonometry, don't want to do it.

00:16:10.700 And I experienced that a lot.

00:16:12.400 And actually some of the other authors I tried to bring in

00:16:15.320 was in the process of negotiating books with when I left.

00:16:19.320 were effectively cancelled

00:16:21.840 I remember I got told the other day

00:16:24.240 I tried to sign up Zuby

00:16:25.540 and I don't know if everyone knows

00:16:28.120 or your listeners know who Zuby is

00:16:29.440 but I think he's been on the podcast

00:16:30.800 and I love Zuby because he's

00:16:33.600 almost

00:16:34.640 he represents his own world view

00:16:37.440 and he has opinions which are not popular

00:16:40.200 and he's prepared to back them up

00:16:41.420 he's sharp

00:16:42.200 he's very worthy of a book

00:16:44.340 and I like the fact that the book was different

00:16:47.140 to everything else which was out at that time

00:16:49.760 Of course, you know, in the midst of that deal,

00:16:52.820 suddenly gone, no more what was happening.

00:16:56.780 And so, of course, I have to always be careful

00:16:58.700 when you talk about deals that you're working on

00:17:00.720 because of, you know, privacy.

00:17:02.700 But you weren't alone and you won't be the last.

00:17:07.100 But that's the sort of thing which, you know,

00:17:09.180 really, really impacts me and motivates me

00:17:11.880 that you've got to have a new type of publisher.

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00:18:23.160 trigger.

00:18:24.580 It started off as

00:18:26.420 it was meant to be called Classroom Confidential and then it went

00:18:29.160 to a new publisher, thanks to

00:18:31.020 Andreas Kampamar and Little Brown

00:18:32.980 who effectively saved the book. It became

00:18:35.020 uneducated. But I remember this

00:18:37.180 getting the call and I was actually

00:18:39.200 in America from the

00:18:41.120 editor and saying, oh, Ollie's gone. And I was like, what? Okay. And then she went, no, no,

00:18:47.400 but it's all going to be fine. Don't worry about it. And then I spoke with Constantine because I

00:18:52.140 was, I was really shocked. I was taken aback because it was instantaneous. And then everything

00:18:57.800 was fine. The processes were fine. And then I had this really surreal conversation where I sat down

00:19:03.260 with the same editor and she said to me yeah um we are not going to be promoting the book i'm sorry

00:19:12.000 but we agreed on serialization sure he ended up getting serialization in the times and in the

00:19:16.680 daily mail and two-page feature but she was just saying no no no that's not going to happen and i

00:19:23.640 was shocked and she went oh and also the print run the uh we're going to focus on digital sales

00:19:30.040 which means they weren't going to print it and I just felt as if it was this kind of surreal

00:19:38.300 experience where everything you'd been promised so we're going to do this and we're going to do

00:19:42.440 this and it was like oh no no we're not going to do that why not well that we just don't feel like

00:19:47.840 it yeah and it got me incredibly angry because number one it was my book and you know I put so

00:19:53.060 much work into it but number two it got me so furious because if you're going to do this to me 0.97

00:20:01.080 which is one of the stupidest people to do this to in the entire country what are you going to do 0.94

00:20:06.940 to authors who don't have a huge channel youtube channel what are they going to do with people 0.99

00:20:12.640 that they can't call on one of the first people i called was douglas murray asking for advice

00:20:16.720 Most people don't have access to that.

00:20:19.540 Sure, sure.

00:20:20.860 Well, look, you had an experience which I've seen multiple times over the years.

00:20:28.120 Sometimes, actually, oddly, the authors who've been, you know,

00:20:32.760 had the worst possible treatments are the ones who are not actually alive.

00:20:37.400 And, of course, you know, with Roald Dahl having his entire backlist,

00:20:41.420 you know, basically censored and reworked because of his historical views.

00:20:45.700 and that, you know, in that instance, I think the family tried to sort of intercept.

00:20:52.000 But also when you're someone who's, you know, you've created this baby,

00:20:55.680 you've put a lot of work into it, and then the rug is just pulled from underneath you.

00:20:59.980 It's unacceptable, but it's also, you know, there are many, many, many examples like that.

00:21:06.160 But it also shows you that publishers do have influence.

00:21:09.740 People sort of can sometimes think, oh, if I'm a self-published author,

00:21:12.840 I don't need a publisher anymore.

00:21:14.720 And yet you see when you do have a publisher,

00:21:16.820 the impact they can have when they really want to put the marketing

00:21:19.220 and energy behind it, or equally what happens if they decide to drop it.

00:21:22.420 What they were doing there is they were dropping it like a bull,

00:21:25.020 and therefore all the ramifications, it wouldn't have been properly sold.

00:21:29.200 It's not properly marketed. It's not properly PR'd.

00:21:32.120 And that makes it very, very difficult to succeed in, unfortunately,

00:21:35.960 an industry where you have thousands and thousands of new books

00:21:38.900 coming out per week.

00:21:39.940 And what that must lead to is a culture of fear and a culture of silence.

00:21:44.180 particularly if you're an author, like I said, who doesn't have a huge public profile,

00:21:48.620 maybe this is a first book, you're going to think to yourself, I'm not going to say this.

00:21:52.960 I'm not going to actually push the boat in any direction. Because the moment I do,

00:21:58.200 there is a chance that some individual in the HR team or the marketing team or whatever it may be,

00:22:05.300 will look at it and go, I didn't like this.

00:22:07.700 Sure, sure, sure. And we've seen that a lot. I mean, again, another example,

00:22:12.040 when I published Wake Up which was Piers Morgan's book it's very hard to identify when someone's

00:22:20.460 doing a piece of subjective cancellation within probably marketing and PR because that's just not

00:22:25.220 doing work but you can't tell always but what if it is in the design department for example

00:22:31.360 and then they just refuse to do a front cover and so you're forced to go out of house to find

00:22:35.340 a designer somewhere who'll do you a front cover but I'm dealing with this right now with Highline

00:22:40.380 publishing studio, you know, trying to work with specific agencies or businesses, and they just

00:22:46.000 look instantly at our mission and say, no, not doing that. So, you know, that sort of, they're

00:22:51.540 welcome to work with whoever they want to work with. But within publishing, that sort of soft

00:22:57.660 cancellation of individuals and authors is a daily occurrence. And with your own experiences,

00:23:04.300 How did this manifest for you?

00:23:07.180 So, I think it's probably no secret that I've always been on the cusp of cancellation.

00:23:13.500 I was never overtly cancelled.

00:23:15.480 But when you publish, you know, the likes of Douglas and the likes of Piers,

00:23:19.560 you are going to make yourself unpopular.

00:23:22.800 But I think the things which, you know, when I look back on my career,

00:23:25.880 feel really quite, I guess, a bit more personally painful,

00:23:29.260 is that, I guess, back in the day, you just bring in staff

00:23:33.860 because you thought they'd be good and you'd hire them based upon their meritocratic qualities.

00:23:38.460 And I hired a couple of staff maybe very early on at my time at one of the publishers

00:23:44.160 and supported them hugely.

00:23:47.220 Actually, one of them, I even wrote a letter to the bookseller

00:23:51.400 to recommend that they were a rising star because I thought they were so brilliant. 1.00

00:23:56.960 And so it was incredibly painful when the identitarian cultural madness started

00:24:01.260 that I was actually reported once 0.68

00:24:03.500 for not attending a D&I meeting.

00:24:07.260 I wasn't there on the Zoom call during the pandemic

00:24:09.560 and I was reported to my boss saying,

00:24:11.780 he's not there, why wasn't he there?

00:24:12.660 What are you going to do about it?

00:24:14.560 And what makes it even more painful

00:24:17.160 is that, of course, these guys wanted a bit of revenge

00:24:21.160 for me publishing, you know, your Douglases and your peers.

00:24:24.640 But oddly, at the same time, I was publishing Sia Khaleesi.

00:24:28.500 so I don't know if you guys know who Sia is

00:24:31.960 but Sia is

00:24:33.480 was the first ever black

00:24:36.080 captain of the South African

00:24:38.360 rugby team, the first black captain

00:24:39.960 in 128 years

00:24:41.520 rugby has always been associated

00:24:44.140 with apartheid, here's a guy who was

00:24:46.100 born and raised in Vida

00:24:48.000 province, he's a

00:24:50.200 Corsair and

00:24:51.800 he was basically brought up in abject poverty

00:24:54.320 incredible story, so I published this

00:24:56.180 book thinking, oh my god, this is the thing

00:24:58.180 i want to do i'm passionate about um and as part of you thinks as well that you know isn't this

00:25:02.440 just proof that i'm not a racist uh no because it's not he's not the right type of person i guess

00:25:09.500 in the way that when i did pierce the first question in the q a afterwards was why are you

00:25:14.880 publishing this and not ash sarkar so it's an interesting it's it's not about necessarily

00:25:21.320 supporting a cause it's about having the right you know opinions of the cause because you know

00:25:26.660 Sear was an incredible icon, pushing ideas around unity.

00:25:34.380 But he wasn't the right type of person.

00:25:36.800 But doesn't it speak to just the culture of fear that exists in publishing

00:25:40.980 that you didn't attend a DEI meeting and you got reported?

00:25:45.700 They didn't know what could have happened.

00:25:46.980 Your child could have been sick.

00:25:48.060 There could have been a family emergency.

00:25:49.600 Maybe you had to be pulled into another type of meeting.

00:25:52.020 Maybe you weren't.

00:25:53.500 And actually, it's a good point as well, because, you know, when you do fight the good fight, as it were,

00:25:59.240 I speak to a lot of people who have fought the fight in environments where you're on your own.

00:26:03.200 And sometimes it just becomes cumulative and you get slightly worn down by it all.

00:26:09.440 And so you're missing of any meeting.

00:26:10.880 Might be just do the fact that, like, wow, every time I go on to one of these meetings,

00:26:14.300 I get an absolute annihilation from the 400 people who are on it.

00:26:18.060 I remember once, for example, I said I used the word cancel culture.

00:26:20.900 and someone shouted, you know, that's, they didn't say it was libelous, they said it was

00:26:27.100 pejorative term, you cannot use the word cancel culture. We were talking about American Dirt at

00:26:32.200 the time and I just said as a moral argument or a philosophical argument, you know, American Dirt

00:26:38.800 was such a huge book because the author had essentially written in the voice of an ethnicity

00:26:43.400 that wasn't them. And I said, I just said the argument, well look, do you just cancel that

00:26:49.980 all together? Or do you just sell that book

00:26:51.960 to people who aren't bothered about that particular thing?

00:26:54.180 Because we just want them to be creative

00:26:55.880 and it's fine, you know,

00:26:58.040 as long as they're not pretending to be

00:27:00.080 that person, it's fiction, right?

00:27:02.040 We're just trying something out. You're developing

00:27:03.860 as a writer, it's creative.

00:27:06.140 But I was the,

00:27:07.960 you know, woe is me, but

00:27:09.840 that's not the view within publishing.

00:27:12.520 Absolutely, no way

00:27:14.060 should anyone be appropriating.

00:27:17.060 But that's insane.

00:27:18.320 What, they're not going to publish Othello?

00:27:19.980 Well, it's happened many, many times.

00:27:24.580 And appropriation also often only acts in one direction.

00:27:28.740 It's quite a misogynistic work, if I remember correctly.

00:27:31.400 Yeah, it is.

00:27:32.440 Yeah, among other things.

00:27:34.940 And this is why I always push back on this type of progressivism,

00:27:39.220 woke, whatever you want to call it, because for many different reasons.

00:27:43.380 But primarily for me, the thing that angered me the most

00:27:46.480 is because it's the enemy of art.

00:27:48.120 It's the enemy of free expression. It's the enemy of creating anything truly, truly significant.

00:27:55.380 Because what you are doing is you are being utterly censorious.

00:28:00.280 Well, I think I've said many times that for me, I'm not taking premeditated publishing decisions.

00:28:07.480 What I want to do is just publish completely across the spectrum.

00:28:11.160 I want to trust the readers to make the decisions for themselves.

00:28:14.680 I think I've probably got a limit.

00:28:17.380 I probably won't publish hate speech.

00:28:19.400 And I'm sure there are people on the line as well

00:28:21.180 where you sort of have to have a serious conversation

00:28:23.560 whether that's something you can or cannot publish.

00:28:26.660 Obviously, it can't be something that's criminal.

00:28:29.660 But ultimately, you have to allow synthesis of arguments.

00:28:36.700 I mean, I believe that education is through synthesis of perspectives.

00:28:39.960 As a historian, I would read Eric Hobsbawm,

00:28:42.580 who's obviously on the left wing.

00:28:44.020 but I'll also read Alan Bullock, or I'll read Ian Kershaw,

00:28:47.380 or I'll read Anthony Beaver.

00:28:49.000 The whole point is you build up your knowledge set

00:28:51.120 through reading a real sort of eclectic range of views.

00:28:54.400 And, funnily enough, you know, in the old days,

00:28:56.180 I think being well-read was something which was considered

00:28:58.740 an incredibly important characteristic.

00:29:00.620 That person's well-read.

00:29:01.680 You don't talk about that that much more.

00:29:04.620 And yet, you know, here we are as publishers,

00:29:06.340 maybe actually restricting the breadth of perspectives

00:29:09.660 that you can actually read.

00:29:11.120 Go into a bookshop right now

00:29:13.080 and then look at the displays.

00:29:15.540 If you can really try to be as objective as possible

00:29:18.160 and try to say whether that's because it's the best possible curation

00:29:23.460 for the people in that area

00:29:25.420 or whether there's a sort of degree of propaganda occurring.

00:29:29.360 Well, this is the thing about it.

00:29:31.320 This is why I was asking you about this publishing being a business,

00:29:35.200 but it seems to me like with many other industries,

00:29:37.540 I mean, the BBC is a very good example of this, right?

00:29:39.480 A formerly great institution, in my opinion.

00:29:41.380 um but what and we saw this in the comedy world when we were in it once the people at the top

00:29:48.160 feel that a their position is secure the business is secure what they realize then is actually

00:29:56.420 i have something that's much more valuable than money which is power yeah i have the ability

00:30:02.800 to impose my worldview on the world and therefore i can prevent comedians from appearing on shows

00:30:10.060 who are good comedians but have the wrong opinions,

00:30:12.700 or I can prevent opinions being expressed on my program

00:30:16.080 or on our channel that I don't wish to have,

00:30:20.300 even though they may be very popular in the country.

00:30:22.720 And with books, I can prevent books from being published

00:30:25.580 or, as in France's case, allow it to be published

00:30:28.820 but with a clear communication that we're not going to do anything

00:30:32.420 for anyone to actually buy this book.

00:30:33.960 It's not going to appear in shops.

00:30:35.700 Sure, sure.

00:30:36.680 And that is not being done because it's not a book

00:30:39.360 that will sell is being done because I am able to say

00:30:45.280 my worldview is this, this doesn't match,

00:30:49.080 therefore we'll prevent this from going out to the public.

00:30:51.660 And I completely agree that it's a status game

00:30:55.980 and that having the power to determine what doesn't get read

00:30:59.940 is incredibly important.

00:31:01.540 And I'm seeing this more and more at the moment, for example,

00:31:03.840 because my kids are doing, they're 11 plus

00:31:06.620 and so I'm looking around schools.

00:31:08.620 And I feel unnerved as I go into some school libraries right now in that, you know, there's one thing having, I guess, some sort of propaganda in bookshops.

00:31:19.960 But what about if it's in school libraries and how does that impact behavior?

00:31:24.320 And also, you know, trying to get a child to learn how to think, not to be told what to think.

00:31:30.420 and there's evidence already that children are starting to be put off reading because it's been

00:31:37.080 seen as a sort of a metric for success rather than an enjoyable entertainment exercise and

00:31:42.080 enterprise but of course is that because you know the great and the good have been intercepting and

00:31:48.960 putting in their ideas into those books I don't know but ultimately the data is there to show

00:31:53.700 that for whatever reason over the last four to five years kids are being a little bit less keen

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00:33:56.980 Coming back to the Francis book and what you were talking about internally,

00:34:01.160 somebody saying, oh, he's from trigonometry or whatever.

00:34:04.060 What does that mean?

00:34:05.340 Like, what is implied in that statement?

00:34:07.560 What are the, when you see this soft cancellations within publishing

00:34:11.840 or hard cancellations within publishing,

00:34:14.020 what is the stated rationale for why somebody shouldn't have their book published

00:34:20.100 with a particular publisher?

00:34:21.480 sure it's a again it's a great question but the uh when you look at a publishing year ahead you're

00:34:27.320 publishing so so many books and the reality is that you almost need to see a a publishing year

00:34:32.440 like an old school cd which is that you've got four or five major singles which you have to do

00:34:38.040 brilliantly and the rest of tracks some of those tracks might unexpectedly break out and become

00:34:42.440 the singles but for the most part you're governing the rhythm of the year um by those singles now as

00:34:47.960 as long as you do the singles well you can pretty much get away with anything else it's a blockbuster

00:34:51.560 market um and you'll notice that if you really want to sort of find the hole in my argument here

00:34:57.080 you know the three biggest authors in the world probably don't get on with or agree with what's

00:35:01.560 going on in the industry and yet the industry is still backing them and doing you know you know

00:35:06.760 hugely so you know jk rowling um as far as i understand she is um having probably the best

00:35:13.720 sales of her entire career right now hugely different to what the media narrative is but

00:35:19.160 you know massively successful um but she doesn't agree with the sort of group think um and publishing

00:35:25.320 is sort of complied you know we all know that x many years ago 85 members of staff walked out uh

00:35:31.640 because of her kids book because they didn't want to be working with her and someone had different

00:35:36.040 views on gender identity um but even so she's now been tolerated um we're an incredibly privileged

00:35:43.640 position on our board, our spokesperson's lead child. And he's got some fascinating ideas that

00:35:49.720 he is incredibly against what he says is cultural boycotting. It makes no sense to him that to put

00:35:58.240 pressure, for example, on Israel, the right thing to do is to boycott events held by Israeli writers

00:36:07.660 or jewish writers um the rationale being is that you know why would you boycott um an entire

00:36:13.740 community as if it's totally homogeneous and in fact with the israeli community and the jewish

00:36:18.060 community it's anything but homogeneous the most pluralistic of all um and so you know his view is

00:36:23.740 that um you know again slightly different to publishing um or i mean look the other classic

00:36:29.980 example is is sam and rushti and at the literary end of the spectrum who has been super pro freedom

00:36:36.300 of speech and yet I've attended an awards ceremony when he actually won an award for I guess at the

00:36:43.260 end of the night for a long-term commitment to free speech and it was almost a chilling silence

00:36:49.600 in the room that he'd won that award so why is Salman Rushdie controversial with woke people

00:36:57.020 well only because he's you know he backed freedom of expression and in particular he'd said that the

00:37:02.760 you know, what was happening to the redaction of all the Roald Dahl novels was disgraceful.

00:37:07.800 He believes that, you know, you shouldn't be changing history for the sake of modernist

00:37:12.380 principles. And ultimately, you know, Roald Dahl liked him or loved him. He's a controversial guy,

00:37:16.660 but he got a lot of people reading. And, you know, you have to weigh up the pros and cons

00:37:20.760 of anyone. We've been through this with Churchill and everyone else, right? But yeah, so Salman,

00:37:25.380 despite the fact that this is a guy who's been stabbed in the eye, he's had a fatwa on his head

00:37:29.380 and has written some of the most incredible novels

00:37:31.080 of the last 25 years or longer,

00:37:33.840 there was a chilling silence the day that he won an award

00:37:39.760 for services to free speech in publishing.

00:37:43.020 And it's quite a big moment for me.

00:37:45.760 Don't you think it smacks of a,

00:37:49.140 I'm going to be brutally honest about it,

00:37:51.040 despicable arrogance that you look at somebody like Roald Dahl,

00:37:55.700 who I believe is a genius, I believe as a children's writer,

00:37:59.180 He is a man of unique brilliance.

00:38:02.360 And you then go, I'm going to change works of brilliance

00:38:07.220 purely because they don't agree with certain people's politics

00:38:12.340 in, I think it was 2024.

00:38:14.680 Well, I agree.

00:38:15.860 I think that, you know, it's like going back to Picasso

00:38:18.180 and this blue phase and then turning it green

00:38:20.320 because blue's no longer in.

00:38:22.420 It's unacceptable.

00:38:23.600 It's a changing of the historical record.

00:38:25.960 And I, you know, I personally feel like if it was just Roald Dahl, but of course it's not.

00:38:32.540 We've had lots of examples of that.

00:38:34.060 You know, Dr. Seuss, we've had Agatha Christie.

00:38:37.180 We've had truly iconic names whose works, their original creative works, have just been altered for modern sensibility.

00:38:45.300 By the way, that modern sensibility isn't a sensibility.

00:38:47.700 It's the priority of a specific group.

00:38:50.240 And ultimately, you need to allow things, I think, to have the oxygen in which they are written.

00:38:55.960 And actually, if you then learn about that time, if the entrance into, for example, Agatha Christie was like, oh, she used to say this sort of thing.

00:39:01.920 And that's how they thought. Maybe that's good.

00:39:04.040 Maybe that's actually the reader will get more insight into that period, more understanding of that phenomenon.

00:39:10.100 And yet, no, the preference is just censorship, cancel.

00:39:13.180 But how do you, I don't understand how you come to that, either in a kind of philosophical sense or a commercial sense.

00:39:23.060 Roald Dahl's books still sell in their tens, hundreds of thousands.

00:39:28.780 Children always loved Dahl.

00:39:31.120 When I was a primary school teacher, we used to do reading time.

00:39:34.460 I always used to read Dahl to the kids.

00:39:36.480 They adored it.

00:39:38.180 No wonder you got cancelled.

00:39:41.920 Well, look, I think that sometimes you can overestimate the precipice

00:39:46.560 upon which publishing is standing, and you do internally as well.

00:39:49.880 but publishing for whatever reason you know it always finds a way and i think that's great in

00:39:54.840 some ways because it means that people continue to read um but it's also slightly odd because the

00:40:00.360 way you continue to do well as a publisher is you just publish more and more and more and so

00:40:05.880 what happens well probably the quality of service for each individual book has to go down

00:40:11.080 but it also means if you do slice away at some of your backlists like you know agatha christie

00:40:15.160 Roald Dahl whoever else well it's okay because you then you know sell you know hundreds of thousands

00:40:20.260 of the new Richmond Osman novel you've bought and also you don't just do one Richard Osman novel

00:40:23.860 you then encourage him to do two a year and then you do the adjacent sort of short story one and

00:40:28.260 by the way on the on the topic of Richard Osman it's an interesting one isn't it that a guy who's

00:40:33.900 emerged as by far the biggest fiction writer of the last decade in the UK and he made it in America

00:40:40.580 by the way um who do we think he's selling to i mean he's not selling to the metropolitan london

00:40:46.220 elite is he he's selling all around the uk to occasional readers what he's doing is amazing

00:40:50.240 he's getting very occasional readers to read again to become loyal to his book to his books

00:40:55.540 he also writes them himself it's not like they're reading you know what they would be reading instead

00:41:00.380 is probably not of the same quality but i guess the point i'm just making there is that um we

00:41:05.120 mentioned Lee Chao being slightly disjunct to the industry. You mentioned J.K. Rowling,

00:41:10.100 but also Richard Osman, who is now becoming one of the biggest fiction writers in the UK.

00:41:14.720 He's very, very different in what he's writing and for whom and how big that is relative to

00:41:19.920 what's happening in the metropolitan circles of publishing. But there's also this idea of

00:41:25.020 that the artist has to be a nice human being. And there's a lot of great artists. I mean,

00:41:32.420 We've talked about Picasso.

00:41:33.660 I mean, Picasso, I mean...

00:41:35.240 Yeah, of course.

00:41:35.960 Yeah, I mean, if he'd been around,

00:41:37.500 he might have had a Me Too moment or two.

00:41:39.500 Of course.

00:41:40.060 But undeniably a genius.

00:41:42.480 You had Dahl, who had pretty...

00:41:44.800 I would say, you know, he'd be on a pro-Palestine march.

00:41:47.640 You know, he might be a member of the Green Party

00:41:49.580 when it comes to his views on the Middle East.

00:41:52.800 Yeah. 0.95

00:41:53.880 And it carries on.

00:41:55.600 Hemingway, again, another great writer.

00:41:57.660 But why do we have this idea that if you are a brilliant artist, somehow you have to be this perfectly PC individual?

00:42:07.480 Sure, sure, sure.

00:42:08.760 I mean, the one example of that which always comes to mind, not as an artist, but obviously it's Mahatma Gandhi.

00:42:14.320 Right.

00:42:14.600 With, you know, Gandhi sort of tried to remain celibate by dissuading himself from being tempted and therefore having really young girls in his bed.

00:42:24.140 and that was the way in which he would prove his resistance um and meanwhile you've got i'd like to

00:42:31.160 i'd like to see him explaining that explaining that on news night quite tricky um and uh you know

00:42:39.460 you've obviously we mentioned churchill earlier but you know a similar figure who um i guess has

00:42:45.300 been through the sort of uh so i've lost my thread sorry sorry i i constant joking around

00:42:50.360 But I think your broader point was that people who've achieved great things throughout history

00:42:56.940 or written great books are not necessarily perfect human beings.

00:43:00.280 And one of the interesting things to me about all of this is Roald Dahl in particular,

00:43:05.740 his sin was anti-Semitism, right?

00:43:08.840 What's fascinating to me is the very people who are cancelling Roald Dahl for anti-Semitism 0.55

00:43:13.120 are exactly the sort of people that would go on a pro-Palestine march

00:43:16.300 and shall all sorts of actually equally, well, not maybe equally,

00:43:20.180 but anti-Semitic things at the same time.

00:43:22.020 There's no consistency about that. 0.98

00:43:23.560 Sure, sure.

00:43:24.240 Well, I think that's probably the biggest motivator for me

00:43:28.320 is often the hypocrisy, which is that, for example,

00:43:33.920 someone like Julie Bindle, who is described as a TERF

00:43:38.700 and has been ostracised a huge amount in publishing and beyond.

00:43:42.120 But for me, that's someone in the 70s and 80s who, as a lesbian, 1.00

00:43:45.120 earn the right to essentially, without, to basically babysit kids. 1.00

00:43:53.120 Because before then, it's like, I can't have a lesbian babysit my kids. 1.00

00:43:56.040 It's too dangerous. 1.00

00:43:57.360 And so she's got to this point where over 20 years, she's become accepted.

00:44:03.380 And yet now in the new world, because she's questioning different other values,

00:44:07.200 she's literally cancelled.

00:44:08.040 You can't engage with her.

00:44:09.680 She has to have security for certain events. 1.00

00:44:12.180 And I don't think that's acceptable because it's not because she's ferociously right wing. It's because the values that she stands and are so dear to her are under threat. And so, yeah, I think, again, would it be easy for authors like Julie to get published right now outside of a very, very small number of publishers? Well, no. And yet she's enriching the debate around certain topics around gender identity.

00:44:39.820 So I guess that what we now have is there is this monoculture,

00:44:45.480 but that also leaves room for opportunity, doesn't it?

00:44:50.120 Sure.

00:44:50.460 Because, I mean, like Andreas at Little Brown,

00:44:53.640 who's one of the few people who took on my book,

00:44:55.480 but also you starting your own imprint, that's exciting.

00:45:01.620 Because that's a real opportunity, isn't it?

00:45:04.340 I think so.

00:45:05.200 And the market's there.

00:45:07.680 That's the thing.

00:45:08.260 The readership is there. The one thing I know which is definitely true is that having worked across those big three publishers I mentioned at the beginning and beyond is that what's quite odd is often that those divisions often sell a lot of books are incredibly lucrative.

00:45:23.120 I mean, they tend to get put in Nashville or they tend to get removed from New York and from the scene and that they're not part of the part of the gang.

00:45:30.620 But there is a commercial opportunity there.

00:45:33.180 It's made harder.

00:45:34.740 You know, for example, if you're Jordan Peterson, let's say,

00:45:37.340 and the New York Times refuse ever to publish the fact

00:45:39.980 that your book was the number one bestseller

00:45:41.520 for basically years in a row.

00:45:43.760 And it means it's like, with the pace of social media,

00:45:48.340 you have fear of missing out.

00:45:50.600 And that sort of accumulation of good news is so critical.

00:45:54.140 So if all lots of outlets don't cover it,

00:45:56.480 or someone just decides,

00:45:58.300 oh, you're not going to be on our bestseller list,

00:45:59.880 That harms the opportunity for that book.

00:46:02.960 But Jordan's an interesting point.

00:46:04.840 I don't love the books.

00:46:06.760 I find them quite hard to read.

00:46:09.900 But it's one of the biggest nonfiction books of the last decade.

00:46:14.300 It's a huge book.

00:46:16.360 I mean, 12 Rules for Life.

00:46:17.380 I don't think there's many bigger nonfiction sort of polemics or books of the last decade.

00:46:23.440 And yet, most of the publishing industry was resisting it.

00:46:27.500 you know, most of the sales were taking place online and on audio because there's no resistance

00:46:34.200 taking place. Do we think, do I think that a Canadian academic with a different worldview

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00:48:12.480 What I've always thought is that if we talked earlier about, you know, staff,

00:48:18.780 trying to impose the world view through sort of collective protesting

00:48:24.160 or threatening to resign over J.K. Rowling or whatever.

00:48:28.800 What I don't understand is why there hasn't been one person,

00:48:33.040 one man or woman at the top who actually owns or runs the thing,

00:48:37.260 who just goes, OK, 80 people who are not mission critical

00:48:43.180 don't like this, they've walked out, we're going to put a marker down.

00:48:47.000 Sure.

00:48:47.360 You're all fired. Bye-bye.

00:48:48.780 Thank you. Thank you for your service. Bye-bye.

00:48:50.560 Sure. Well, that has happened, Konstantin.

00:48:52.380 That has happened, which is what was fascinating, of course,

00:48:55.300 and again, a slightly odd paradox here,

00:48:58.380 is that, you know, Penning Random House is owned by Bertelsmann.

00:49:03.340 Bertelsmann, obviously, they are being the original publishers of Mein Kampf.

00:49:10.360 Excellent.

00:49:11.500 You've got Hachette, which is owned by Vivendi.

00:49:14.140 Don't forget that Vivendi is owned by Vincent Bolloray.

00:49:16.980 Vincent Bollaret is the sort of the, I guess, the tycoon

00:49:19.900 who has always underwritten Marine Le Pen.

00:49:21.900 And he's a very, very, very wealthy right-wing,

00:49:24.600 I guess a right-wing Rupert Murdoch, but French. 0.94

00:49:27.520 Of course, HarperCollins is owned by Rupert Murdoch. 0.97

00:49:30.200 But so what's so, so odd is that you do have these companies

00:49:33.460 owned by what is seen to be, or probably are,

00:49:36.220 quite right-wing or right-leaning financiers.

00:49:40.180 But the editorial has sort of total self-governance, which I guess it should do.

00:49:49.840 However, in France recently, there was a case where a very senior, very liked publisher refused to work on a certain book.

00:50:02.340 And he had a big fallout with that management who said he had to do it or that he couldn't refuse to do it.

00:50:08.960 and the result was that 40 or 50 authors all left all at once.

00:50:14.940 So, you know, the other example is actually,

00:50:17.600 so one of our founders is, or our founder is Neil Blair,

00:50:20.960 who is J.K. Rowling's agent.

00:50:22.860 He actually said, look, this is who I am, this is our business.

00:50:26.720 If you don't want to work here, you don't have to.

00:50:29.080 Four people did actually leave.

00:50:31.940 Did his business survive?

00:50:33.260 Business is thriving.

00:50:34.140 Yeah, I imagine.

00:50:34.920 Fantastic.

00:50:35.280 Well, this is my point.

00:50:36.360 there's this sort of like revolt in the kitchen.

00:50:41.560 Sure.

00:50:42.020 It's not that big a deal. 0.97

00:50:45.040 And if more people had the balls to stand up to this, 0.96

00:50:47.820 I don't think we would have had this entire woke moment 0.97

00:50:50.800 that we've lived through and probably continue to

00:50:53.160 because I don't understand this entire upending of hierarchy,

00:50:58.040 actually, from just a broader perspective.

00:51:01.480 I don't understand when this thing happened,

00:51:03.600 when the children started running the house.

00:51:07.500 But it was technological, right?

00:51:08.800 As in, there's always been, you know,

00:51:10.660 the young have always pushed against revolution.

00:51:15.680 But that when we saw, you know, hashtag me too,

00:51:18.940 when we saw Black Lives Matter,

00:51:20.500 you had a genuinely, the first global moments

00:51:23.540 where entire countries of people

00:51:25.620 were coming together online socially.

00:51:27.820 And the, you know, it's a generational thing

00:51:29.420 where by the sheer weight of people,

00:51:31.060 all visible all at once shouting all at once but it's not like it's not existed before and i think

00:51:36.120 that basically the publishers weren't used to that they weren't you know they're not brilliant

00:51:39.500 technically or technologically at the best of times um and so what what you start to hear when

00:51:45.040 these views come out on twitter the the way that you know comms teams work is like just just just

00:51:50.620 just appease that person it might only be two people um because of course you know twitter's

00:51:54.860 only a very, very small percentage of the population, X. But the rationale is always

00:52:01.540 just path of least resistance. That's just appease, appease, keep it quiet. Because it

00:52:06.140 feels like, oh, that'll all go away. That'll all go away. But going back to Francis's point,

00:52:10.980 is there an arrogance here, an entitlement? Well, I was quite struck recently by two things. One

00:52:16.640 is that despite the fact, for example, that the salt path was proven to be fiction,

00:52:20.820 How has the publisher responded to that?

00:52:23.140 They've done nothing.

00:52:23.840 They haven't said it's fiction.

00:52:24.920 They haven't put a sticker on it saying, by the way, this is fiction.

00:52:27.180 In fact, it's sold loads of copies and they've made loads more money from it.

00:52:30.260 You'd have thought maybe they would have said, oh, look, issuing a statement saying, no, no, no, I haven't done that.

00:52:36.460 And then also inevitably we'll talk about the Jason Harday.

00:52:39.520 But the UK publisher still pursued the publication of that book as a work of nonfiction.

00:52:45.400 The US publishing team decided not to.

00:52:47.800 And that's still available to buy as a work of non-fiction.

00:52:51.060 Now, look, wherever you stand on that particular topic,

00:52:54.660 it's more that publishers almost can feel a little bit like,

00:52:57.260 maybe because it's a slightly more tectonic industry,

00:52:59.900 they're almost like, oh, we don't have to do that.

00:53:02.980 But I don't know whether other industries would be so happy

00:53:06.620 to not adjust in that way.

00:53:08.640 Yeah, I think one of the things that happened,

00:53:12.420 I think it's interesting what you say,

00:53:14.180 because technologically perhaps that was a key part of all of this, 0.67

00:53:17.580 where big corporates just suddenly would shit their pants

00:53:21.120 because 30 people on Twitter got upset about something.

00:53:24.360 And I think there was a massive over-indexing of online sentiment

00:53:30.000 converted into real action in the real world

00:53:33.600 from people who really, really didn't need to panic over this kind of thing.

00:53:36.780 Exactly, exactly.

00:53:38.360 And I don't know if that's adjusted now or not.

00:53:42.000 Perhaps people have kind of worked out that, you know, a bit of a social media storm, as you say, may actually be a good thing, you know, and certainly not a terrible thing and not a catastrophic, destructive thing, which I agree in the sort of 2020 moment would have felt very real to a lot of people.

00:53:59.820 No, I don't disagree with any of that. But I still keep coming back to the fact that the people were feeling very discombobulated at that moment and that they were feeling lost and that obviously they wanted to gravitate towards movements and things where they felt par or something.

00:54:16.040 couldn't get a church you know they're not actually going into the office and realizing

00:54:19.600 that people who are not of their age group and not of their generation are actually okay

00:54:22.840 they're just in their little mad bubbles but i guess it's the the continuity because i actually

00:54:30.140 think right now politically it's actually quite a nice moment because you've got labor and the

00:54:35.460 tory standing for different things and like for the first time in these party conferences you've

00:54:39.780 got the kemi bay not stands for sort of old school traditional conservatism um and then you've got

00:54:44.940 andy burnham who's standing for i guess in some ways sort of standard labor values and that's great

00:54:50.060 but the problem is is that publishing is it's still here in this identitarian madness where

00:54:55.980 there's only one way to think and that's all about you know some of the big issues of the time

00:54:59.740 critical race theory it's like okay it's always a little bit behind but it's a long way behind

00:55:03.740 actually that the world's moving into some very clear spaces right now and that's good i think

00:55:07.900 you know again we're starting to see that when things feel a bit amorphous politically uh people

00:55:13.580 don't really know how to think because they just go to the loudest noise um whereas yeah the the

00:55:19.260 i think we're in a situation where um the industry is behind the sentiment of what's happening in the

00:55:25.140 uk do you think what they really need is to just feel the hit financially and then that's the

00:55:33.160 moment they'll wake up like what has happened to a lot of movie companies like a lot of what's

00:55:37.620 to people like Disney, et cetera, et cetera,

00:55:40.160 and go, oh, we can't keep doing this critical race theory stuff.

00:55:45.040 Sure.

00:55:45.400 People aren't buying it, and we, I mean, look at the bank balance.

00:55:49.460 Well, look, it's hard to do a net P&L on all the books

00:55:53.740 that were acquired in the madness of 2020 onwards,

00:55:57.220 because one would suspect that they are hemorrhaging

00:56:01.460 inordinate amounts of money.

00:56:03.200 But as we're always with publishing, there's always a moment,

00:56:05.020 an unexpected moment which sort of offsets it all and that moment was was you know the ya

00:56:10.260 explosion almost a category between adult and kids and it's basically soft porn and again do

00:56:17.360 i agree with it i don't really know but you know we know that um the readership likes rather than

00:56:22.220 visual um porn they like essentially narrative porn so they're women i'm just kidding the market

00:56:31.700 The market's being sustained, right?

00:56:33.480 The market's being sustained.

00:56:35.160 And if you look right now, every single – if you look at where employment's taking place in the market,

00:56:41.320 the categories in which people are actively recruiting for,

00:56:43.900 it's into a category which is essentially just dishing out soft porn.

00:56:48.320 So my issue is that not only are we censorious, we're bringing –

00:56:54.880 the main crux of the people coming into the business are of a certain sort of preference.

00:57:00.240 What's the long-term effects?

00:57:01.700 of course i'm worried a little bit about the commercials of the here and now what i worry

00:57:05.060 about more is the necessity of having cross-spectrum views being published making sure that all types

00:57:10.820 of people want to love and read books in the future and that includes boys as well as girls

00:57:15.540 um and create an environment where as i say the only thing that really matters to me is is this

00:57:20.740 place creative can we can we debate and argue and have fun or is everyone really quite similar now

00:57:26.580 And as I say, having just done a time as a consultant and working for the publishers,

00:57:32.660 it's quite difficult, even though they're all different. But they're all the same.

00:57:36.820 They're all the same. It's not like Nike and Adidas and On with slightly different

00:57:40.500 marketing campaigns and strategies. Or it's literally, you can close your eyes and you

00:57:45.300 couldn't tell the difference between any of them. Can I be slightly pedantic, may I?

00:57:49.380 Yeah, go on. Dean, fact check me on this with Venice AI. You've

00:57:53.140 You've both used the word censorious.

00:57:55.280 I looked this up.

00:57:56.420 It doesn't actually mean practicing of censorship.

00:57:59.280 It means very critical.

00:58:01.400 Really?

00:58:01.840 Yeah.

00:58:02.320 Dean will fact check me on this, but it's a word that people like to use because we talk about censorship a lot.

00:58:06.440 Yes, used it, yeah.

00:58:07.320 But it doesn't actually mean practicing of censorship.

00:58:10.420 Doesn't it?

00:58:10.980 So what is the word that means to practice censorship?

00:58:14.420 I don't know.

00:58:15.160 Is that censorous?

00:58:16.860 Censorious, perhaps.

00:58:18.100 Oh, no, no, no.

00:58:18.880 No, we just said that.

00:58:19.840 Is there a separate word, yeah, for censorious?

00:58:21.440 Is it censorious?

00:58:22.300 Yeah.

00:58:22.760 Maybe.

00:58:23.140 Yeah. Well, anyway, this is a literary side that will interest no one, but it interests me.

00:58:27.300 Yeah. It's a really good topic that you're getting into there because of

00:58:32.420 the people mistake mastery of the vernacular in publishing for mastery of the art.

00:58:36.820 And so people know how, what to say, but they're not actually thinking. This is this whole idea of,

00:58:42.340 I mean, we can go on. If you want to talk about that, we can, but it's fascinating that people

00:58:46.260 think they're really good at publishing because they're embracing the ideas which exist. They

00:58:50.660 They should be finally the opposite to the ideas that exist

00:58:52.480 because the market's going to change.

00:58:54.340 There was this really funny moment in publishing

00:58:56.680 where about 2020, 2021,

00:58:58.920 when all these woke books started to be published.

00:59:01.460 Yeah, yeah.

00:59:01.840 Obviously, we had the big boy for...

00:59:05.000 We shouldn't...

00:59:05.640 The big book, 0.73

00:59:07.060 which was obviously White Fragility. 0.88

00:59:09.460 Sure, sure. 0.99

00:59:09.800 But, you know, like,

00:59:10.420 Ibrahim X. Kendi's, like, anti-racist baby

00:59:13.120 and all this stuff. 0.89

00:59:14.400 And you go, this is mental.

00:59:16.280 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:59:17.040 Didn't sell very much as well, oddly.

00:59:18.720 Shocking.

00:59:19.080 You know, what's quite, I mean, I'm scared to say this, I guess, but, you know, the one that sold really, really well was called We Are No Longer Talking to White People About Race. 0.74

00:59:29.140 Oh, yeah. Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race. 0.62

00:59:32.060 But the takeaway from that is that it's like the one book that's definitely appealing to white people, right? Why am I no longer talking to white people about race? 0.53

00:59:39.580 Then you get the other ones, which are not as overtly title-led like that book. They're selling far, far fewer copies.

00:59:49.080 But, yeah, going back to how publishing operates,

00:59:53.540 certainly, you know, the use of the vernacular and the words

00:59:57.400 and keeping it incredibly complicated is part of the strategy, right?

01:00:00.760 The more convoluted it seems.

01:00:03.460 I mean, when you look at publishing contracts, you know, for example,

01:00:08.260 you get a three-fifths royalty on, you know, your TPB escalator

01:00:13.440 or, like, this is stuff that is, you know, it keeps out.

01:00:19.080 new ideas posting is not a lover of innovation i'd say um but oddly it's on this particular

01:00:25.000 aspect it's been um hungry for political change but maybe not for technological or systematic or

01:00:33.800 any changes actually improve the you know the number of uh readers and participants

01:00:38.920 dean yeah you're right of course i am of course i'm right so there you go censorious means very

01:00:46.120 critical it does not mean the practicing of censorship uh great ollie great to have you on

01:00:51.240 um we always ask the same question before we go to questions from our supporters what is

01:00:56.520 the one thing that we're not talking about that we should be ah that's a great question um

01:01:03.160 i think the the one thing we have to be talking about now is whether and this is a difficult

01:01:10.680 topic um whether there's genuinely anti-semitism taking place within the publishing industry

01:01:17.640 um because i didn't know the answer to that question when i embarked upon this

01:01:23.560 but i've had some really quite scary experiences i'm not jewish but the one thing that really

01:01:28.680 struck me about building highline was when i went over to new york i spoke to a young female editor

01:01:34.600 she'd been an editorial assistant um and then she got up to editor her whole life she'd wanted to

01:01:39.880 work for a big company a big publisher and it's her passion um she started to do really really well

01:01:45.960 um started to acquire books her career was going forwards october the seventh happens suddenly

01:01:52.360 she doesn't get invited to lunch anymore um suddenly the books that she brought to acquisitions

01:01:57.480 don't get through acquisitions the ones that people even approve start to get smaller numbers

01:02:03.080 so that it's much harder to buy them and so what you're seeing is that are we building an industry

01:02:09.240 now which is more or less likely to buy some of the most iconic names in publishing your philip

01:02:14.360 roths um even your larry davids but i worry that you know there's a group that's played a huge

01:02:21.720 over sort of overly delivered for the industry i worry now that that group has been so ostracized

01:02:29.160 that it'd be very very hard for us to discover those next big name authors ollie you've been a

01:02:34.440 a little bit cryptic for my are you saying people don't buy books uh publishing commissioners don't

01:02:41.800 commission books by jewish authors because of what's happening in israel i think that is that

01:02:47.240 is the big question um and um that one of the reasons why we set up highland publishing studio

01:02:56.200 is that we've got a dedicated imprint called a desk for editions to create a safe home for jewish

01:03:01.960 and Israeli talent because, you know, people have been essentially culturally boycotting that talent

01:03:09.580 as if it's going to make an impact on something far, far away, which some of these authors or

01:03:14.360 talents might not even sit on a particular side of the argument, but they're just being cancelled

01:03:19.980 slowly or sometimes overtly. And if I show you one example of that, so Elie Shirabi, who is the

01:03:26.960 hostage or one of the hostages of course when that book was on sale not a single UK publisher

01:03:34.940 wanted to buy it this was a hostage for October 7th yeah but not a single UK publisher yeah why

01:03:41.040 well because it because of the the difference in worldview the difference in ideology in the end

01:03:46.080 a very small but brilliant publisher came to assist they don't necessarily have the infrastructure

01:03:51.600 to make it huge but I thought it was very very revelatory indeed I've seen it before I mean don't

01:03:56.900 wrong like 20 odd years ago george w bush um his autobiography uh he couldn't find a uk publishing

01:04:03.060 home in the end it ended up at virgin books and it made me laugh actually if you read tony blair's

01:04:07.300 biography which of course did get a huge amount of support he describes george w george w bush

01:04:11.860 is one of the most credible brilliant men he's ever worked with and yet you've got george w

01:04:17.460 bush's autobiography couldn't find a home so look it's always been there a little bit and so it

01:04:21.140 might not be solely the jewish question however i'm i have witnessed what i think is not anti-zionism

01:04:27.780 anti-semitism um and i say that as someone who studied anti-semitism at university and it's a

01:04:32.980 horrible worrying trend sorry to well not sorry uh to dig in a little bit i horrific as i think

01:04:43.220 I think boycotting a hostages book from October 7th would be.

01:04:50.220 From an ideological perspective, I can understand it because it challenges directly the world

01:04:55.240 view of the pro-Palestine people, the pro-Palestine world view.

01:05:00.780 So when you say you see anti-Semitism, I can see how somebody might boycott that book without

01:05:09.360 being anti-Semitic, I guess is what I'm saying.

01:05:11.760 Is there more to what you're talking about?

01:05:14.040 Maybe I'll go back again to the experience of that individual.

01:05:17.680 So a young female editor who is working through the publishing industry

01:05:22.160 and finds that the comms within the industry, the people working with her,

01:05:27.320 that the environment is becoming cumulatively so, so intolerant

01:05:32.400 or so overtly supporting in one direction,

01:05:34.400 it can only ever feel like something else in the other.

01:05:36.840 I mean, this is why, you know, for me, I'm now working with Highline

01:05:39.800 and I want to support Jewish writers and I want to support...

01:05:42.500 Look, during World War II, there wasn't a single institution,

01:05:45.500 whether it's a charity or whether it's a business

01:05:47.200 that supported the Jewish community.

01:05:49.500 We've got the chance to do that now

01:05:51.020 when there's a similar sort of situation occurring.

01:05:53.440 And what's happening is that I'm picking up brilliant staff

01:05:55.580 and hopefully brilliant books because it's not a safe space.

01:05:59.960 And I'm sorry to use that very weird term,

01:06:02.020 but it's not a safe space for some of these editors,

01:06:05.120 for these marketers.

01:06:05.840 and I can only as well sort of speak from how they're treated at a personal level rather than

01:06:12.180 the theory and from a personal level they are sort of saying look I need to leave the industry

01:06:19.200 because I can't work in this environment any longer so hopefully they don't leave the industry

01:06:23.400 they'll come and work with us. Well no business has ever gone bankrupt employing Jews so you're 1.00

01:06:27.640 you're in no country's ever succeeded when it suddenly turns anti-semitic yeah no it's always

01:06:34.100 bad sign for the country itself as well as jews themselves of course all right ollie thank you so

01:06:39.620 much head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where ollie's gonna answer your questions we have got a lot of 1.00

01:06:47.380 people asking questions about george rr martin when's a book gonna come out are we just gonna

01:06:53.060 to wait till he dies and then take the unfinished manuscript and somehow bashing a book out of that.

TRIGGERnometry - October 17, 2026

“I Hired Them. They Reported Me for Missing a DEI Meeting” – Oliver Malcolm

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