why do people answer the questions you ask?

10 things to think about this week

The Conversation, 1980 by David Hockney

1. “Why do people talk?” asks Chuck Klosterman of Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris, in the first chapter of Chuck’s 1999 book Eating The Dinosaur. “Why do people answer the questions you ask them? Is there a unifying force that prompts people to respond?”
   
   

2. I often find myself thinking about the tension of conversation. Not a ‘tense conversation’ necessarily—the gritted-teeth back and forth, the steady hum of passive-aggression’s bassline—but what we hope to achieve with conversation, the pressure we put on ourselves to have a ‘good’ conversation, the deflating sense of self that comes from a stilted dialogue, how easy and innate it all feels when things just click. Despite their sometimes fraught nature, we’re all inclined—in some way, shape, or form—to talk.
   
   But do we talk to learn about the other person or to learn about ourselves?
   
   

3. “The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters
   
   I’ve been around enough wide-eyed, nose-numb afterparties to know that everyone’s favourite topic is themselves (or, if you’re really posh, your school for some reason). 

   In order to “investigate the possibility that self-disclosure is intrinsically rewarding”, Harvard eggheads mapped subjects’ brains as they spoke about themselves. 

   Tracking changes in blood flow in various neural regions, researchers asked participants to discuss their own opinions and the opinions of others, comparing the contrasting brain activity when we focused on ourselves and those around us.

   As expected the prefrontal cortex—the area of the brain governing self-related thought—lit up like a Christmas tree. But two other areas sparked too; areas that even the nerds didn’t expect. They were the nucleus accumbens (ah yes, that old chestnut) and the ventral tegmental area (easily one of my top three tegmental areas) that both relate to the mesolimbic dopamine system, the delicious cluster of neurons that make you feel good when you do something inherently pleasurable, like eating a that secret Crunchie you hid behind the flour or finally giving up reading one of Zadie Smith’s novels.
   

   But what role does an interviewer play in this game of dopamine-dredging?

4. Let’s talk about Elmo. Last week Elmo posed a question to his half-million Twitter followers: “Elmo is just checking in! How is everybody doing?”
   
   People—Americans, anyway—loved it. It was a perfect opportunity to flaunt the void they carry in their souls.
   

   Everyone’s favourite poet, Hanif Abdurraqib, quote-Tweeted Elmo (show this cluster of letters to my dad and I think his brain would melt) and said: “Elmo each day the abyss we stare into grows a unique horror. One that was previously unfathomable in nature. Our inevitable doom which once accelerated in years, or months, now accelerates in hours, even minutes.”
   

   Hey, look, I understand the needs for quasi-ironic sadfishing on the internet and I’m glad we’re at least getting to experience it with some style. But I also think the recent deluge is instructive, too (thank you, burnt-out social media team behind the Twitter account of a beloved, grammatically-wonky, fuzzy red puppet, for sparking debate!):
   
   An interviewer—any interviewer: whether it’s a stranger in the street or Terry Gross—gives you permission to dig, to explore, to share, in a way that makes us feel good and which—even if we’re talking about things which are, on their surface, quite bleak—brings us a little closer together.
   
   And sometimes we start talking and we surprise ourselves. We share more than we thought we might and we say things we didn’t even realise we thought.
   
   

5. Can I, in good faith, call Elmo an interviewer? I guess I already have. But as a probably more-sane example, let’s go back to Errol.

   
   So, back in Dinosaur, Chuck asks if there’s a unifying force that prompts people to respond to Morris’ questioning. And Errol says:

   “Probably not, except possibly that people feel this need to give an account of themselves. And not just to other people, but to themselves. Just yesterday, I was being interviewed by a reporter from the New York Observer, and we were talking about whether or not people have privileged access to their own minds… “My mind resides somewhere inside of myself,” he adds. “That being the case, one would assume I have privileged access to it. In theory, I should be able to ask myself questions and get different answers than I would from other people, such as you. But I'm not sure we truly have privileged access to our own minds. I don't think we have any idea who we are. I think we're engaged in a constant battle to figure out who we are. I sometimes think of interviews as some oddball human relationship that's taking place in a laboratory setting. I often feel like a primatologist.”

6. “Conversation is this ancient technology for aligning our brains so that we can be on the same page,” says Thalia Wheatley¹, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth College and studies neural, biological, and other markers of connection during conversations. “It’s the most ubiquitous social behaviour that we do, yet we don’t really know much about it.”
   
   A key fact omitted from my retelling of the aforementioned, dopamine-hitting self-disclosure study? In the early studies, participants were not told who, if anyone, would ever see their answers to the questions they were asked. By contrast, a later study made it clear that there would be someone reviewing their answers. Near-identical results were found across all of the studies. Suggesting, according to nerds, “that individuals value self-referential thought even in the absence of either a real or an implied audience”.
   
   This is an interesting consideration for the way we use social media, when—even, thanks to our pal the algorithm, those of us with a sizeable following—fucking your thoughts out into the ether does not guarantee anyone will read or respond. And yet we do it anyway. Because it feels good.
   
   But what’s the difference between a conversation and an interview? With a heavy heart, I have to say: it’s the data.
   

7. Sometimes when I’m interviewing someone—sometimes famous, sometimes not—for an article, I mess up, and think we’re having a conversation. Probably out of my own need to be liked, I want the subject to feel comfortable. I make eye-contact, mirror body language, I laugh at their jokes. And sometimes, often even, I’d forget my questions. I’d want so much for the conversation to be as painless as possible for both parties, that I’d forget why I was there, to ask questions, find interesting answers, and then write about them. 
   
   Anyone who has tried to transcribe a casual conversation knows that the actual content of that chit-chat—however pleasant—is—when assessed as raw data—at best boring, and at worst absolute drivel. 
   
   I’m better at this now, having been scared straight by days spent staring at a blinking cursor on a blank page wondering how I was going to write about a conversation I thoroughly enjoyed that was about absolutely nothing. Now I remember why I’m there, and that the person I’m interviewing—even if they’re Reacher from the TV show Reacher—is not my friend.
   
   I think about GQ’s interview king Zach Baron talking about his technique a lot: How he makes it clear the parameters of their chat is not ‘two bros chatting like bros’. There’s a pact there, somewhere: I will ask questions in order to find out answers.
   
   There’s a way of doing this softly—much unlike the character of Reacher, but much like the way I interviewed Reacher from Reacher: I created a space that is clearly defined but comfortable and safe.
   
   Crucially, my interview with Reacher (he has a name, it is Alan Richson, but he is called ‘Reacher’) was via Zoom. I used to hate this—and IRL interviews definitely add something—but now I’m not so hardline, especially after reading that it’s essentially what Errol Morris uses, only he has a far better name for his set-up.
   
   It’s called the Interrotron.

   

   Morris using the Interrotron during 2008’s ‘Standard Operating Procedure’.

8. [Something you should know about the Interrotron. It’s essentially just a teleprompter with Morris’ live-image on it, allowing the subject to speak directly to Morris/the camera without having to look away from the camera and at Morris, who used to sit next to the camera. The audience watching the interview feels like they’re experiencing it in first person rather than as an observer. In the original version of this excerpt, Morris makes a fucking pig’s ear of describing what is quite a simple technology, but I like his justifications only some-the-less.]
   
   Q: (from a 2004 magazine interview from a magazine I’m pretty sure no longer exists) Is it true that you interview people using a machine? 
   
   A: (from Errol Morris, in the same) Yes, the Interrotron. It’s a machine that uses existing technology in a new and novel way. [Now] when someone watches my films, it is as though the characters are talking directly to them... There is no third party… I was worried at first. Would it frighten people? Would they run out of the studio screaming? Who could say? I used it for the first time in Fast, cheap and out of control. And it worked like a charm. People loved the Interrotron.
   
   Q: Did you make up the name?
   
   A: No, it was named by my wife, Julia Sheehan. She liked the name because it combined two important concepts—terror and interview.
   
   Q: But doesn't the device intimidate people?
   
   A: Oddly enough, no. It doesn't. People, if anything, feel more relaxed when talking to a live video image. My production designer, Ted Bafaloukos, said, ‘The beauty of this thing is that it allows people to do what they do best. Watch television.’ We often think of technology as working against the possibility of intimacy. But there are so many counter-examples. The telephone is a good counter-example. There are things we can say to each other on the phone that we would never say if we were in the same room. You know, ‘Being there is the next best thing to using the phone…’ The Interrotron is like that. It creates greater distance and greater intimacy. And it also creates the true first person. Now, when people make eye contact with me, it can be preserved on film.
   
   

9. It got me thinking about—as I always seem to end up thinking about—the way we tell stories on the internet. Not just in interviews, but stories of ourselves. And not just waffling personal essays, but the way we filter all works of art through the subjective lens of our own experience.

   
   That’s what criticism is: reframing a subject through our experiences—whether that is objective learned experience or entirely subjective lived experience—in a way which is enlightening to others and—if the criticism is really good—encourages them to turn their own, newly-polished lens onto—not just the subject at hand—but all subjects.

   
   And, in the same way Morris’ subjects—whether war criminals, serial killers, or Iggy Pop—feel more at ease when speaking into the Interrotron, critics feel more at ease when speaking into—or in this case, more like through—a specific subject. It is a way of adding a gossamer-thin layer of remove that allows our truth to filter through that more cleanly. 

   
   The trouble, for me, comes when we are told there is only one way to present that truth. That—you know, just as an example—criticism should be in writing and not delivered via TikTok.

   
   Back to Errol:

   
   His films, he told the New Yorker, “comes out of some dark, contrarian impulse. The documentary police tell you that documentary should be made in a certain way. You should have lightweight cameras, handheld, available light. You should be a fly on the wall. You shouldn’t in any way try to orchestrate what you’re shooting. You should simply be there as a neutral, distant observer. I still hate the whole idea of what documentary is supposed to be. I hate it. Did I say I hate it? I hate it!”

   
   He hates it.

   
   Am I going to finish this point and bookend this newsletter with more Chuck Klosterman? You bet.
   
   

10. First off, for those of you who made it to 10—congrats. I wanted this newsletter to be about the way we tell stories, the way we understand truth, the way we come to that truth, and how we speak to each other on the way to getting there.
    
    And about Elmo. And Errol. And, it would seem, Chuck:
    
    In Klosterman’s 2016 book But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past, the writer explores the idea that we have “no idea what we don’t know, or what we’ll eventually learn, or what might be true despite our perpetual inability to comprehend what that truth is at the time.”
    
    It’s a book about the way we overvalue our present understanding. Like the way Copernicus freaked everyone’s nut when he said the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around, things seem true until a paradigm shifts and the new answer feels so obvious that we cannot ever imagine going back.
    
    Talking about America, he writes: “[Its] ultimate failure will probably not derive from the problems we see or the conflicts we wage. It will more likely derive from our uncompromising belief in the things we consider unimpeachable and idealised and beautiful. Because every strength is a weakness, if given enough time.”
    
    That last line (and the whole book) has stuck with me. Things change. Everything changes. It’s supposed to change. It made me think about the way we may have overvalued McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ mantra. Sure, the medium is a message, but we continue to overvalue the channel of our storytelling rather than the stories themselves. 
    
    If, for example, the standard of music criticism on TikTok is crap, that is because nobody has done it well yet, not that it is not possible. Is the app currently filled with brain-melting sludge? It certainly appears that way. But that doesn’t mean that’ll always be the case. Have you ever tried to watch a TV show from the 1940s? It’s not The Sopranos, I’ll tell you that.
    
    Look at the way the paradigm has continually shifted its power from theatre to film and from film to tv: each change was unthinkable until it happened. Unthinkable until something of real quality came along and it all felt so obvious. 

1. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2023/11/conversations-key-to-wellbeing