Exploring Philosophy and Writing with Author Jonny Thomson | Glasp Talk #1
This is the first session of Glasp Talk!
Glasp Talk delves deep into intimate interviews with luminaries from various fields, unraveling their genuine emotions, experiences, and the stories that lie behind them.
The first guest speaker is Jonny Thomson from the United Kingdom. He is a writer at BigThink and is teaching philosophy to students at St Edward's School, Oxford.
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Transcripts
Jonny: Hello, how are you guys?
Glasp: Good, I'm good. How about you? How are you?
Jonny: Yeah, I'm really well, thank you. Can you, can you hear me?
Glasp: Yes, thank you for the time. So, yeah, I'm Kei from Glasp. Nice to meet you. So this is a Glasp Talk session, and we want to start this kind of like a hub. You know, Ted Talk and Google also have Google Talk, and we even have Glasp Talk. So that we interview great minds, like from writers, content creators, and YouTube influencers, to understand what they care about, their philosophy behind what they do, their curiosity, and so on. So yeah, this is the first interview for us. It's great, thank you so much!
Jonny: Oh, thank you very much! I'm very flattered, I'm very flattered. Thanks, yeah, let's get started, and yep.
Glasp: All right, so, okay. Welcome, Jonny, to Glasp Talk. Today, we'd like to ask you some questions about your philosophy, writing, and so on, and your history. So, first of all, can you introduce yourself to the people who don't know you yet?
Jonny: Ah, yeah, okay. So, I'm Jonny, I'm Jonny Thomson. I am the author of one book already out called Mini Philosophy: A Little Book of Big Ideas, and my second book is coming out in two weeks' time, it's called Many Big Ideas. But I'm also a staff writer at Big Think, which is an American outlet that focuses on smart ideas and kind of academic pieces and explainers, videos, and written content as well. I cover mainly philosophy and psychology, but I kind of branch out wherever I'm needed. And then separately to that, I run an Instagram account called Mini Philosophy, which explains philosophy. But yeah, essentially, I'm a writer for Big Think and for Hachette, which is my publisher.
Glasp: Yeah, cool. Yeah, I've been following your Instagram account. It's great!
Jonny: Yes, thank you!
Glasp: So, and yeah, philosophy is a really interesting topic. What is philosophy? I think people have different definitions of philosophy. In your case, in your perspective, what is philosophy? Sorry, this is a big question maybe, but you know...
Jonny: Yeah, no, it comes up quite a lot, that question actually. So, yeah, if you're looking at, well, the basic roots of the word are, it means "the love of wisdom," but I think that's such a broad term that I'm not sure it kind of gets to grips with it. I mean, different people have different answers. Some people will say philosophy is just an academic discipline that you have to go to university for or be a writer to engage with. Some people will say it's just maybe asking big questions about the world. I kind of come somewhere in between. I think that anyone who has academic curiosity, I would say, is a philosopher of sorts. So, if you go way back in time a little bit, you'll see that philosophy actually isn't limited to necessarily people doing logic and studying these big philosophical names, doing epistemology and things like that and ethics. It's just the study of everything. So natural philosophy was the study of the sciences. A philosopher, let's pick one out, for example, Descartes, would have done everything. He did maths, he did science, he did philosophy, he did literature, he did poetry, and he was just a curious man. I think if you're using Descartes or Plato as representatives of philosophy, then I think what you're seeing is it's curiosity and wanting to just learn, to find out, and to study things. Does that make sense?
Glasp: Yeah, totally makes sense. Yeah, I know the philosophy comes from "philosophia," like "love of wisdom," and yeah, I love the world. And it's interesting people call PhDs "Doctor of Philosophy" when they finish their doctorate, you know?
Jonny: Yeah, I've got some friends who have PhDs in sciences like physics and chemistry and stuff, and I always wind them up a little bit saying they're doing philosophy. But of course, in their mind, they're doing stuff that is serious and proper and intense, whereas yeah, you're right, a Doctor is a Doctor of Philosophy. It's a good point; that kind of explains it really, doesn't it?
Glasp: Okay, so you are writing about philosophy for Big Think, right? What kind of philosophy or area do you cover at Big Think? I think it can be a variety of topics, right?
Jonny: That's a really good question. So, it kind of varies a little bit. It starts out as kind of just explaining major philosophical schools. I think actually the first article I ever wrote for them was talking about Democritus and the atom. And then since then, I've explained American pragmatism, skepticism, stoicism, Nietzsche, Descartes, and things. Basic explainers were kind of my starting point. But since then, I have liked to talk about the philosophy of anything because I think everything has a philosophy. We could debate anything really. So anything established in the news often gets kind of like the treatment. So, the philosophy of, I think, the cringe humor, like cringe jokes, and stuff about why things like the television program The Office are funny, it kind of branches into psychology a little bit. Ethics—we did one about who programs the ethics into driverless cars. That's an interesting question. We look at the borderlands between philosophy and technology; it's really important. We did one about CRISPR technology as well, about genetics and manipulating your DNA and what the ethical connotations are for that. So, yeah, it starts out as explainers, and now I tend to do philosophy of anything and everything. What the process is normally, I have an idea, and I'll pitch the idea to my editor, and he'll say mostly, "That's a good idea, Jonny," and occasionally, "That's just a stupid idea. Let's not do that." But he's great. I've got two editors actually, Alex and Steve, and they're both really nice people, and they're both very honest and very straight with me.
Glasp: I see, yeah. You're talking about working with editors, and you said you pitch some ideas. But do you usually decide what to write about, and then editors say, "Oh, this is a good idea or not," or do editors tell you, "Oh, can you write about this?" How does it work?
Jonny: It's a combination, actually. Sometimes my editors will say, "Do this article; this is a good idea. Write this article about this topic." Or maybe someone else in the wider company has a good philosophical idea, and they say, "Let's get Jonny to write that." But other times, it's yeah, I pitch ideas to them. I've actually got this joke with some of my friends that if we're having an interesting conversation over dinner or in a bar or pub, I'll get my phone out and say, "Is this a good idea for an article?" and then I'll kind of make a list. My editor only recently said, "Jonny, can you stop sending me lists of 20 pitches at a time? It's just too overwhelming. Stagger it a little bit." So, yeah, sometimes they come to me, but they come from conversations I have with friends. I'm very lucky to have a lot of friends who are quite intelligent and interesting people, so those conversations do spark ideas. But it's kind of half and half; occasionally my editors say, "Yeah, do this," and occasionally I'll say, "Right, this might make for a good idea," which is part of most editor-writer relationships, I understand.
Glasp: That's pretty interesting. And sorry, I'm so curious about your idea-insighting process. You said your friends sometimes talk about ideas, but how do you usually come up with ideas to write about? Do you read some books or articles, or listen to podcasts, and then ideas come to you? What mainly brings you ideas?
Jonny: Yeah, that's interesting. So, I subscribe to a few magazines and newspapers. Over here in the UK, we've got two called the London Review of Books, which I subscribe to and read—not cover to cover, but it gives me lots of inspiration for ideas. And then the other one is called Philosophy Now, which is somewhere between an academic paper and very layman's term philosophy. I would say that if you don't know anything about philosophy, you might find it tough, but then of course, if you're a professional philosopher, you might find it really hard as well. But it's called Philosophy Now, and it's brilliant for people like me; it pitches ideas. I go through that often, and that'll spark an idea. But also, social media to me is really interesting, both in terms of what hashtags are popular at the moment and what other people are talking about. Again, I follow some really interesting accounts, and they've got some ideas, and I'm like, "Oh yeah, that's a good idea." But you know, sometimes they'll just come from a book I'm reading. For example, I was really into Taoism about two months ago; I was reading a book about Taoism, and I was pitching about five articles a week about Taoism, and one or two of them are on Big Think and they've done pretty well actually. Because I also write this newsletter for The Well—sorry, The Well is part of Big Think—I write a newsletter for them, and you can kind of tell a little bit if you know me very well, which obviously my wife and my friends do. If you're reading the newsletters, you can see that I clearly read something last week, and it kind of feeds into my unconscious, which then feeds into my writing. But then I think that's true for every writer. I think all of our writing is essentially a bubbling up of what we've digested through what we've read at some point in our lives, be it last week or last year or when you were a young child. I think that's how writing works personally.
Glasp: I see, interesting. Yeah, thanks. But I think what you found interesting is that in philosophy, some ideas are really complicated and hard to understand and digest, and sometimes you need to convey or simplify these ideas for people. I think your Instagram account is doing a pretty good job; it's very easy and visually understandable. How do you convey ideas or make them easy to understand or digest?
Jonny: Thank you, thank you. That's really kind; it's really kind to say that. Well, two things I'll say actually. The first thing is I'll say that I was a teacher for 12 years. So, I taught from 12-year-olds up until 16-year-olds, 17-year-olds, and 18-year-olds. You kind of get used to simplifying language for students but also for different abilities of students as well. The second thing is that I always think that everyone listening to this, reading this, or watching this has philosophical ideas. You might be at a certain time in the evening when you're talking to your friend and you're saying, "Do you think this is right or wrong?" or "Have you ever had this thought?" or "What are your views about God?" or "What does truth mean?" whatever. I think we have those conversations, but I think the difference with philosophy and those kinds of conversations is that philosophy has a certain language around it and a certain structure about it. So, what I try to do with the Instagram account and at Big Think is strip away that language and present the questions, which I think everyone has the thoughts everyone has, in a slightly more accessible way. But yeah, it's hard sometimes. Philosophers have a great tendency to use Latin expressions or ancient Greek. When I'm writing an article or doing a post about that, you use the expression and then explain it in English and move on. But there are certain expressions that just work their way into the philosophical lexicon really, and I try not to use them as much as possible. It's really difficult for, when I was teaching philosophy and also now when I'm trying to explain it, if you go to the primary texts, if you go to what the philosophers were saying, it's really quite dense often. I can't think of any philosopher who makes it easy. I think, weirdly enough, sometimes translations are better. When I was teaching it, someone like Descartes' Meditations translates easier than if you read someone like John Stuart Mill, who writes in English but can be quite hard because you're separated by centuries of English. Then you've got someone like Nietzsche, who I found really easy when I first read him, but my students today actually find him quite hard. What I find with a lot of philosophers is that you have to get your ear in; you have to spend an hour or two hours reading them and getting used to what they're saying, what they mean. After that, it becomes easier. I think we're living in an age now where the idea of investing an hour or two hours, which is a slog and a struggle to get your ear in, is not really that popular. So, I try to introduce the ideas first and then suggest going away and reading them because it helps you get your ear in a little bit. Does that answer your question?
Glasp: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it does, totally. And you're talking about "getting your ear in," and I think you have a really interesting background. I'm curious about your history and what made you become a teacher and then a writer later.
Jonny: That's a good question, and there's an honest answer to this and a good answer. The good answer would be that I've always wanted to be a teacher to inspire thousands of students. But the honest answer is that when I first started out, I liked two things: I liked philosophy, and I liked being able to afford food. So, teaching was the only way I could do that really, unless you become a professional philosopher, which at the time I didn't choose to do, or you do what I'm doing now, which is writing. But at the time, when I first started teaching, that wasn't really an avenue or even a possibility. As it happened, I did end up loving teaching. I didn't resent it the whole time; I did take to it, and I did love it. I wouldn't have stayed there for 12 years otherwise. It's a really great experience teaching; you get to see children transform into adults, and you get to change a lot of lives, particularly in philosophy. Philosophy is a really unique subject in that you have some very deep and important conversations with students. Because you're often studying a text or an idea, it kind of distances you from the person, which invites them to be open and honest about what they believe and what they think. So yeah, I was very privileged to have some really valuable conversations with students because we were talking about these ideas, particularly existentialism, like the French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Frantz Fanon. Really honest and important conversations. When I left the school last year, I got some really heartwarming and heartbreaking messages from the students. So yeah, it was good; I loved it, but new horizons beckon.
Glasp: Yeah, and I think knowing about philosophy or following curiosity, teaching philosophy is a really hard subject, but knowing about it at a younger age is a great experience for their life. It opens their eyes, I feel. And at the same time, I'm curious, what made you interested in philosophy? Looking back at your history, what point in your life made you decide to go in this direction?
Jonny: That's an interesting question. So, both of my parents are psychologists—doctors of psychology. My dad is a cognitive psychologist, focusing on child development, and my mom is a counselor, a therapist, and a psychotherapist actually. She's a card-carrying member of the Freudian school of counseling. So yeah, growing up, we had these open, honest conversations with them, and there was a lot of academic curiosity around the table. As I was talking about earlier, philosophy is about academic curiosity. There's a lot of that, a lot of being unashamed to learn and ask questions. To be honest, if my parents weren't psychologists, I might have done psychology at university, but they were, so that kind of put me off doing what my parents do. The other factor was that I had a really inspirational teacher who was just a really good teacher. He knew exactly how to teach students, but also me particularly. I think my first forays into reading philosophy were pretty much just to impress him. But once I started reading, a bug set in. I actually started with Nietzsche; I was talking about Nietzsche earlier. I started with him, and I found him really exciting. I felt like he was deliberately trying to provoke you as a reader, and he was quite evocative. I liked that. Then I actually didn't go into deep philosophy for a long time. I looked at William James next, who's an American pragmatist philosopher, again very readable and evocative. He gives lots of examples. I read his book called The Varieties of Religious Experience. It's big, but it's really readable because it's actually a series of lectures, so it's written in a way that's meant to be digested easily. Then from there, I went to university, and that's when they throw the dense texts at you. That's when you start reading Plato's Republic, John Stuart Mill, Descartes, and Hegel if you're feeling particularly masochistic.
Glasp: Cool, wow. So you mentioned some books you recommend. Do you have any other books you'd recommend for people who want to start learning about philosophy, not advanced ones, but for beginners?
Jonny: Other than my own book, of course, I would say for me, Nigel Warburton is a good start. He's actually not an Oxford philosopher; he wrote A Brief History of Philosophy. Whenever I recommend books to students, I recommend that one; it's really good and accessible. But yeah, as a primary source, I would still suggest someone like Nietzsche because I think he does deliberately provoke and is quite exciting. Or again, William James or Bertrand Russell, who's also quite readable. Particularly, he wrote lots of essays. If you're looking for a primary text of a philosopher, Bertrand Russell—not on logic because Russell, like a lot of British analytic philosophers, had kind of one leg on either side of the maths department and the philosophy department, so if you read his stuff on logic, that’s going to take some chewing. But he wrote lots of stuff about other philosophers, so you've got The History of Western Philosophy that he wrote, which is really accessible. Other than that, I would say actually novels are good. If you find a good novel, they really do unpack some philosophy really well. Recently, I'm really into a short story author called Ted Chiang. He wrote a book called Exhalation, his most recent one, and The Story of Your Life was his first collection. They're short science-fiction stories, but everyone is like a real extended thought experiment. They're brilliant; I really recommend reading them. Actually, science fiction more broadly is usually a thought experiment from a seminar room expanded into many pages and many books. In fact, I feel like the Asimov series behind me is a good example of that. Or reading new books, like my new book, coming out in two weeks.
Glasp: Right, your new book is coming out in two weeks?
Jonny: Yeah, in two weeks, my next one comes out. It's a bit different actually; it's not actually philosophy per se. It's the history of ideas—these ideas that changed the course of human history, which we look back on and think, "I can't imagine a time before that idea." So, it's 150 examples of those, and it was really fun and exciting to research for that.
Glasp: Great, so let's get back to your writing process. I remember you talking about how you come up with ideas, but what kind of tools do you use? Do you use a knowledge management system or a note-taking system?
Jonny: It's interesting. I used to use Google Reader, which was an RSS feed reader, about eight or nine years ago. Then they discontinued that because it wasn't making enough money, so I was basically searching for something that allowed you to import your RSS feeds. I found Feedly; it's like a little green icon on the App Store, and that did it really well. But I made a mistake with Feedly of over-subscribing to things, and I got bombarded with too many things I didn't really want to read. I was putting them into categories and stuff, but it didn't really work, so I kind of let that go by the side. I tried Pocket as well, but with Pocket, I find that once I've bookmarked it, I assume that future Jonny is going to read it, and then future Jonny never does read it because he finds some other article to read. If I'm honest, I'm a multi-chrome tab person. I'm lucky enough to have a computer with quite a lot of RAM, so my Chrome has something like 17 tabs open at any one period of time, and I'll dip into them. Of course, you occasionally press the X and close the tab accidentally, and you lose all these things. You go to history, but when I used to work at the school, they had a policy where they didn't save your history, so I'd lose all of my articles; what a disaster. But then when I bookmark it, I have the same problem: I bookmark it, and it's out of my sight, and I never come back to it. To be honest, nowadays I'm just researching anyway for articles I'm writing, so I'm reading them, I'm learning from them, and then I'm writing them, and then they’re just ditched from that. Occasionally I'll come up with something really good while I'm researching for an article, which I want to recommend to a friend, and I'll bookmark those or send them directly to my friend. The other thing I do, which is probably quite strange, is that I've got a WhatsApp group with only me in it. So, I'll just send photos of things, or I'll send an article or a little text memo to myself. WhatsApp syncs across my phone and computer, and it’s quite good.
Glasp: Yeah, I know people who email themselves as a way to organize data. That's interesting. Do you read articles on mobile or desktop? I'm sure you read on desktop, but what kind of articles do you read on mobile?
Jonny: Yeah, I read on mobile occasionally, but I find desktop better. Maybe it's the headspace I'm in when I'm at my desktop. I think I process it in a different way than I would if I'm on my phone reading it. The phone is just too distraction-heavy. You know, on the basic level, if you get a notification, you're checking that application when it comes up. But on the desktop, it is a little bit more like, "This is my job; I'm going to read it, I'm going to go through it," and stuff. But yeah, I mean, I will sometimes send it to myself to read on the sofa or something like that, but to be honest, I don't do much article reading on my phone. I'll do social media on my phone, and I've got a Kindle, so I'll do my books on my Kindle. But yeah, it's mainly desktop, actually. Also, because I use a website called JSTOR quite a lot, which is a repository of academic articles, they don't do very well on mobile. I mean, you can get them on mobile, but because a lot of them are scanned in from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, you're constantly zooming up, and they're PDFs, which again doesn't do particularly well on a phone. You have to open different apps, and it's confusing. So mainly desktop; that’s where I do most of my article reading or, as I say, those newspapers and articles from magazines that I read.
Glasp: And what writing tool do you use? I mean, you said you use tabs, but when you write something down, do you use Google Docs or...?
Jonny: Yeah, so I write my articles in Microsoft Word. But for anything collaborative, we use Google Docs at the company. I don’t know why; I think it’s easier to share that way. But in terms of copying and pasting small bits and bobs, as I say, I'll tend to WhatsApp them to myself because it seems easier that way. Or I'll copy and paste it straight into the article I'm going to do. The more I'm talking about it, the messier it sounds, but it doesn’t feel messy, possibly because I'm on the, you know, control tabbing and alt-tabbing and stuff like that, and at the time it feels okay. But actually, tell you what the problem is though, if I'm in this kind of workflow stage where I'm writing and alt-tabbing and shift-tabbing when they go away and you come back, it takes a while to get back into that mode—you know, which tab is where. But yeah, I don’t think I'm this chaotic, but I sound chaotic, sorry.
Glasp: Yeah, and we have talked to some writers, you know, they, as we mentioned, cooperate with editors, so they use Google Docs so that they can leave comments and insert source information on it. People have different workflows with editors, and so that makes sense.
Jonny: Yeah, so at Big Think, it's mainly Google Docs. But for my actual books, I write them in Microsoft Word and send them as a Word document. My editor will put comments in on Microsoft Word, send that document back to me, and then I'll either resolve them or fix the problem. So she uses Word. Google Docs and Microsoft Word—there's a cigarette paper separating them really; they're very similar, aren't they?
Glasp: I see. This is just out of curiosity, but how long does it take for you to write an article? Is that week?
Jonny: No, no, no, not weeks, no. Most articles take me about a day to write. My process is usually that I spend the morning researching, getting my ideas and a template for the structure of the article together, and in the afternoon, I'll actually be writing it. If I'm honest, the actual writing process probably takes, you know, half an hour to an hour. It's just the researching for that writing, and then it's the editing, and then it's the uploading to the system, which takes a long time to do, and the formatting, and of course the grammar and the spell-checking and stuff. I think, I can't remember who said it, but there's a quotation where someone said, "I'm sorry that my letter is so long; I didn't have time to make it shorter." I think the idea was that editing is a time sucker; the writing itself, anyone could do. Like, if I asked you to write an account of what you did today, it would be pretty easy to do; it's just making it interesting.
Glasp: Yeah, that makes sense.
Jonny: Yeah. So, into that, of course, AI is an interesting tool to use. I don’t know if you want to go into talking about AI. When it first came out, I think the whole world was just experimenting with it, trying to see what we could do. I was doing things like, "In the style of a philosopher, write this," and at first, it did come across as really plausible. I think most of the world was like, "Oh my God, it's going to take our job. This is the end of writing as a human thing." But two things happened. One is that it is what's called hallucinating—sorry, hallucination in AI language—where it just makes up stuff. It wants to come across as plausible, and I haven't researched enough to know why that is, but it needs to give an answer, even if it's wrong. So, when I would say, "Write this article including quotes," and you look at it, and that's just clearly not a quote from Descartes or Nietzsche. And then you challenge it, don't you? You say, "What book is that from?" and they say, "As an AI, I can't—I made it up." I found in the early days, the first few weeks, I was spending far more time fact-checking and disproving AI than I was just using it. The second thing is that I'm still finding as a writer personally that it doesn't get my voice; it doesn't quite get the way I think a lot of writers will speak. It's kind of a bit like someone learning a language as a foreign language. If you're learning English as a foreign language, there are lots of little hurdles on the way where you'll choose a word that sounds right, but actually, a native speaker or someone writing wouldn't use that word. I think AI sometimes does that. I'm trying to think of an example, like angry, frustrated, irritated, and furious. They are very overlapping related concepts, but each of those words has a time and a place to use, and I found that AI, it gets that wrong slightly sometimes. It's hard; maybe I need to get better at my prompts, like "In the style of Hemingway" or "In the style of Mark Twain, write something," but at the moment, I find it doesn't quite get my voice. But what AI is really good for is two things I use it for mostly: the editing process—kind of like doing spelling and grammar. I sometimes use it like, "Imagine you were a really pedantic Facebook commenter, how would you critique this article?" And that's quite good; it kind of rips your article to pieces, and you say, "Well, that's a good point, actually, that might be a bit of a weak argument, let me change that," or that word. So, I do that quite a lot. Then the other thing I do is sometimes I'll get hit with a block. Are you guys on Reddit? You know Reddit? There's a great subreddit called "tip of my tongue," where all those words you know exist, but you don't know what they are. So for AI, what I do occasionally is type in a sentence, put an asterisk in the word that's not quite right or I don't quite know, and say, "Finish this sentence in 10 different ways." Eight of them will be rubbish, but two of them will be like, "Oh yeah, that's actually really good." So, in that way, I'm using it as a kind of inspiration board, throwing stuff at a wall and unpicking it. So I like to think in this process, I'm still relevant, that I still have the main creative input into it, but it's a really useful tool. I think I've now got the balance right where it's helping me rather than wasting my time. I have tried inputting my own text and saying, "Learn this guy's style and then repeat it," and thankfully, touch wood, it's not quite there. But, you know, ChatGPT 5 is coming out, who knows when—probably before Christmas, and then we'll have this conversation again, and I'll ask you for a job because I'll be unemployed!
Glasp: Do you feel like, you know, using AI as a cooperative tool, like a discussion partner or helping hand, makes sense? But what do you think the future will look like with those technologies? Will they improve? Do you feel a bit scared about your writing and your job, or do you have any opinions on this?
Jonny: Yeah, no, absolutely, I am scared, and I think we all should be a little bit scared. I can think of very few jobs apart from maybe just manual building jobs that aren't vulnerable to AI in some way. But what I would say is, so far, I don't think it's a threat. As I said, it doesn't quite get there, but in the future, it's definitely going to be producing stuff indistinguishable from the writer. I think it'll get there; the mistakes I talked about earlier, it’ll iron those out, and I think it will be able to do Jonny Thomson's voice; it will be able to do any writer's voice. With the exception of absolute geniuses who are doing amazing stuff with metaphors and poetic language, I don't think it'll do that very well. But I think it will get there. At that point, I just have to hope that it matters that what you're reading is from another human being. It's actually interesting, like relating back to that driverless car article I wrote, there's a question about responsibility and culpability and whose words you're reading. Particularly in philosophy, if I'm writing an article, mostly they're explainers, and I think they're probably more vulnerable to AI. But sometimes I'm writing a slightly argumentative piece. I'm arguing a position or a point of view. I think when an AI is doing that, it's essentially a game for it, isn't it? It's trying to produce an argument because it can. At what point do you say, "Okay, right, I'm going to challenge you, AI"? That becomes a little bit ridiculous. I'm going to say, "Okay, right, ChatGPT, I'm going to take on your views about euthanasia." That doesn’t make sense, whereas I, Jonny Thomson, sitting here, I'm a human. Let's say I'm writing about euthanasia or abortion or whatever controversial issue you want, you can say, "Right, Jonny, you're wrong about this," or "You're right about this," or "I agree with Jonny." That kind of human adversity of being against a human but also that sympathy with another human being—I think that matters in philosophy, and I think in non-fiction writing. Novels, again, the issue is quite similar. I think you could repeat a lot of great novels in the future, but again, it matters possibly that the emotions and the stories someone's telling come from a human heart more than from AI. But if I'm honest, I think I'm being naive, I'm being idealistic. I think if you look at AI art and AI photos, I think most people won't care actually. They'll get something that's cheap and good. That's already happening. I know copywriters, for example—I know a few copywriters who have either been laid off or had their salary reduced because AI can just do basic copywriting very easily. So, basic advertising things, and I think that is an issue. At the moment, I think you can tell if a newsletter has been written by an AI or an article online has been written by that, or even some posts I've seen on Instagram actually—you can tell if they've been written by AI. But in the future, you won’t be able to tell, and I think for most people, that won't matter. I think that's the problem. Hopefully, "human-made" will become a thing. Maybe, like, we have "organic" on things, maybe it'll be like, "This is a genuinely human-made product," and there'll be whole people out there who want to buy human-made stuff, but it'll be a luxury product for a few elites, I imagine.
Glasp: Thanks for sharing. Do you have any advice for aspiring writers who might be listening to this podcast or watching this YouTube video?
Jonny: Yeah, I think it was Stephen King who said this—if not, someone can correct me—but he said you have to read something like five times as much as you write. I think that's definitely true. Reading is really good for two reasons: one, it gives you ideas; it gives you content in your understanding. Two, it gives you a voice; it gives you a sense of how to write. As I said earlier, I suspect that my writing style is essentially a mimic of someone I liked growing up. I can't picture it; I can't point to it. I'm sure I'm mimicking someone's style; I don't know who that is. I definitely recommend reading it. But in this day and age, particularly if you're over a certain age, to read that amount—I'm not sure how Stephen King manages to read five times the amount he writes. It's difficult. So in which case, I would say just doing it—doing it is the best thing. Any art, any talent, any skill, any excellence requires habits and doing it over and over again. I was lucky with my book deal, for example, that I had had the Instagram account for about a year beforehand, and I was doing three posts a week for a year. We're talking like 150 samples there, and each time I think I got better and better. Eventually, when I went to my now agent with this proposal, my writing style was much more polished. So, yeah, read and write as much as you can. With that one, it's easy to say and harder to do, but just do it. I know a few friends who are really, really intelligent, really talented writers. They've read a lot, but they get this crippling anxiety when it comes to actually writing because they obsess about it being perfect. I know some people, for example, P.G. Wodehouse, who wrote the Jeeves and Wooster books, would spend days on a sentence to make sure it works in the structure. There are amazing writers who do obsess about their writing, but I suspect that most writers at some point just need the sheer arrogance or confidence to say, "My words are brilliant," and just go for it and write it down, and then assume that someone's going to read it. I think, depressingly true, that 99 times out of 100, confidence wins, even if it's not well-grounded.
Glasp: Thanks, and if people want to reach out to you, what's the best way? Is it Instagram?
Jonny: Yeah, Instagram's the best way. I pretty much pick up most messages on Instagram. Facebook as well, I've got the Mini Philosophy account on Facebook, so I pick up messages there too. If the conversation's good and they're normal people, then they can start emailing me. But yeah, Instagram and Facebook are the best bets. I'd love to speak to people and hear from them.
Glasp: Okay, thank you. And this is the last question. It's a little off-topic, but we're building Glasp, and we empower people by enabling knowledge sharing. By capturing and sharing something, like quotes, let's say, people can collect quotes and share them with others. Do you have anything to tell them? If not, that's okay, but I think...
Jonny: Absolutely, that's so important. I mean, I can't remember what I would say, but extracting quotes and thoughts that you've had is so important. As I talked about today, one of the things it's really good for is my idea board; it's really good. I can remember a conversation well; I can remember an idea well. But the other thing is, what I think separates a really good writer from maybe a slightly mediocre writer is that they have in the back of their head a lot of anecdotes and quotes and stories. That's one thing I don't think AI is there yet at all in doing. If you read someone like Christopher Hitchens or Clive James, these great essayists, their writing is laced with lots of different historical references, cultural references, an anecdote about a famous person, or a story about a historical event. They're basically clippings they found, and they're putting them into their writing. That's what I think makes their writing brilliant. I think when you talk to a really intelligent person or a really interesting person, they can do that; they can talk about those anecdotes and bring in lots of different things. So yeah, I think it's a great idea. I think what it's doing is it's making people interesting; it's making people creative. I think people's writing will be so much better when they have that ability to pull things into one document, speech, or conversation.
Glasp: Thanks so much, and we hope some people capture some quotes from this video or...
Jonny: Exactly! I'll be very humbled if that's true, but thank you very much, guys. It's been great chatting, and I hope we'll do it again sometime.
Glasp: Thank you for joining. See you later!
Jonny: Bye!
Jonny is managing Instagram and Facebook, @philosophyminis, which explains philosophical ideas. Follow him on Instagram and Facebook to learn together!
- Book on Amazon: "Mini Philosophy: A Small Book of Big Ideas"
Also, his 2nd book will be published on August 31, 2023.
"Mini Big Ideas: A Little Book of Big Innovations"
