Creative Process and Future Projects

Hi, it's Ollie. Uh I'm going away on paternity leave for a couple of weeks. So whilst I'm off, we're going to be bringing you some conversations that we pre-recorded and some conversations from my esteemed colleagues at the New Statesman. 25 years ago, fast food nation changed the way millions of people thought about the The book became an international bestseller and helped transform public debate around everything from public health to labor rights. But, as its author Eric Schlosser tells us in this conversation, he never saw it as a book about food, and he still doesn't consider himself a foodie. For more than three decades, Slosher has been one of America's foremost investigative journalists, writing about everything from the prison system to nuclear weapons, exploring the hidden systems underpinning modern life. In Fast Food Nation, Schlosser set out to investigate the economic model behind one of America's most recognizable industries. A system built on low-paid workers, dangerous conditions, I'm Ollie Dugmore, and you're listening to the Exchange from the New Statesman, marking the book's twenty-fifth anniversary. Schlosser joined me to reflect on the enduring corporate power of the fast food industry. In this conversation, we discuss America's complicated relationship with McDonald's, the rise of fast food as both a cultural symbol and an economic system, and how Britain seeks to replicate it. Eric Schlosser, hello. Hi. How are you? I'm okay. We're talking about your book Fast Food Nation. Twenty-five years. Incredible. It is incredible. In nineteen sixty eight, McDonald's operated about one thousand restaurants. Yeah. Today it has about thirty thousand restaurants worldwide and opens almost two thousand new ones each year. The Golden Archers are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross. I mean, how did fast foods take over America and then the world? And the sad fact is I think there are 40,000 today. Which is just I mean that 30,000 came from an earlier version of the tax. Yeah. So fast food emerged at a particular moment in American history. You know, McDonald's was around in 1948, 1950, it grew very slowly. The huge growth of McDonald's and the fast food industry coincides with a period of static or declining income in the United States , and the need for women to enter the workforce. And, you know, many women enter the workforce for feminist reasons to, you know , not just be confined to a domestic sphere , but numerically probably more entered the workforce because you needed two wage earners in the family in the United States in the 1970s in order to just keep your head above water. So you have this phenomenon of the people who in the family who traditionally made food, women, were entering the workforce, and wages are stagnant, and fast food is providing cheap , convenient food. And it sort of feeds upon itself because you have stagnant wages and then you have a low wage workforce that depresses wages. The fast food industry is still the largest employer of minimum wage workers in the United States, and you have a profound, profound uh reduction in the minimum wage in real terms. You mentioned the year 1968. 1968 is the peak of the real value of the minimum wage in the United States. So to just give you a comparison, in today's dollars, the minimum wage of 1968 is about $15 an hour. Today, the minimum wage, the federal minimum wage in the United States, is $7 .25 . So in real terms, the poorest workers in the United States have seen a wage cut of 50% since 1968. And the fast food industry played a huge , huge role, and to this day does, by fighting against any minimum wage increase. This is a way of maintaining a poverty workforce. And it's remarkable how many fast food workers in the United States are dependent on food stamps. Uh there was a study found in California that there were thousands of fast food workers in California who were homeless and working. Anyway, so that really explains, that's, you know, one of the major driving forces of the acceptance of fast food is that it's cheap, it's convenient, and families are feeling stressed. Yeah. My I mean, my first job was at McDonald's and I was seventeen years old. We have tiered minimum wage in this country. Mm-hmm. And my f for that first year when I was seventeen, before I was eighteen, I was paid about three pounds fifty an hour. And I mean, you're working long hours, long shifts to come away with like forty quid, thirty quid, you know, it's like and what skills what skills did you come away with, honestly? Um, well, it's it's kind of what skills did I come away with? Because I was a young man, it opened my eyes to um sort of social interaction with people from completely different backgrounds to me. A lot of the works in the McDonald's I worked in were Polish, so I got some very good mates who were Polish, got some very good mates who were a lot older than me. And so it taught me a lot of social skills, about like interacting with other people. It taught me how to make um eight cheeseburgers in less than 90 seconds. Um it taught it taught me how I I learned arithmetic as well, obviously like sort of handling sums of petty cash. Yeah. But I mean did it um I think a lot of those lessons, apart from maybe how to make eight cheeseburgers in less than 90 seconds, um you would pick those up in like your first job anyway. Yeah. Right. So I don't know how unique they were to to work in. fast food industry credit for is that it provides employment to a lot of people in society who would find difficulty finding work elsewhere. The thing that I criticize the fast food industry is that it treats those workers as interchangeable and disposable and has not set up a kind of work structure so that this can be a career with meaningful opportunity for advancement. It it's not like it's teaching people how to cook and that they can then have that as a skill that they continue to do at a fast food restaurant or can do at a different restaurant. It's just um anyway. Yeah. I should probably I maybe I should refer to myself as should uh as a chef, a chef at McDonald's. Um let just my uh let's let's talk about the sort of reaction to you publishing fast food nation. I mean there was there was a backlash. Um you needed bodyguards at some point and there's there's a there's a story of you in a car park being confronted by a man, he gets you in a headlock and he's he's he's he's shouting, you know, why do you hate America? Why do you hate America so much? I mean can, you talk to me about that perceived connection that makes this work anti-American? And perhaps that connection between fast food and American identity. Could you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. Well, I you know, you know, I did get a little paranoid because , you know, in general , as an activist, I'm pretty chill, I'm pretty grounded, I'm not yelling and getting people into people's faces, but I continu ally had to deal with disruptions of my public appearances. And I sus pect that people were being paid to do this. It was remarkable in different cities how the fly ers that were being handed out would be identical, but with maybe different names of the organization handing them out. And um , you know, I believe in dialogue. And if someone completely disagrees with everything I say , I'm glad to engage in that conversation, which is really different from people running up to where you're standing and holding up, you know, placards criticizing you. So it was it was unpleasant. And there was only one incident. But I mean, it was it was crazy that at one point I would make a public appearance and there would be armed private security. And in one case in in Indiana, I was greeted by the state police when I arrived and they were with me in all public whenever I went in public till I left the state. And it's not like I'm writing about the Cosa Nostra or, you know, organiz ed drug gangs who want to hit do a hit . Writing about a company that sells hamburgers whose mascot is a clown, and you know, the fast food industry. Anyway, what happened to me was trivial. And in one instance, after a public appearance, someone came up behind me and you know got me totally by surprise and put me in a headlock and was yelling, Why do you hate America and you know this is just um a period of time in which criticizing the status quo can be depicted as being un-American. Your observations on the book, Twenty Five Years On, how do you feel about it? It was my first book. Um I wasn't sure if anyone would publish it . All the New York publishers turned it down. It was one of the last independent publishing houses that agreed to do it. Um there was certainly no sign that it would be a bestseller. And the fact that it's in print twenty five years later, let alone you know being republished by Penguin as a classic, is it's amazing. And uh it's a real privilege to be able to write about what you care about and have it still seem relevant so many years later. And I'm very fortunate in writing about what I care about because I don't stop caring about it once the book is done. So even though I really haven't continued to write about food, I've remained engaged as an activist on many issues that pertain to our food system. And so it's just really um great to be part of the conversation and an ongoing dialogue about these issues. So so what do you care about then? Well I I got I got involved in food issues through um immigrant rights and uh I spent a year following migrant farm workers in California, and most of them were undocumented. At the time, there was a governor in California, Pete Wilson, a Republican governor, this is in the early 1990s, who had ambitions to be president and decided to demonize undocumented workers in the state of California. He was calling them parasites, welfare cheats, saying that they were coming to California to live off of the hard-working taxpayers of California. And I was living in New York City at the time, but instinctively that just didn't seem true because my sister lived in California. I had lived there for a time. And every time I went to California, I saw a lot of Latino workers doing all kinds of jobs that white people didn't want to do. And instinctively it felt like they were not parasites. So I started investigating and I found that at that point in the 1990s, agriculture was the single biggest sector of the California economy. And as California was developing, and there was more and more real estate development . There was more and more pressure for farmers to grow high-value crops that were, you know, bringing more revenue per acre. And those were fresh fruits and vegetables . And it's remarkable in the 21st century, and this was the 20th century, but almost all fresh fruits and vegetables need to be harvested by hand . So if you want to produce a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables, you need a lot of hands . So I looked at the role of undocumented immigrants in the California economy, and they were basically propping up the most valuable sector of the economy, and I spent a year following strawberry workers because every strawberry is picked by hand. And strawberries are extremely fragile, so they have to be picked carefully by hand . And the thrust of what I wrote was that, you know, far from being parasites or welfare cheats, that these people are feeding us. And that was really my introduction introduction to the American food system. And uh so I would say of all the aspects um of the food system that that I care the most about, it's the exploitation of immigrant workers mainly undocumented. And I've just stayed really engaged in that issue for 30 years now. I mean there's there's so much in what you've just said. Thank God none of that's happening in the United Kingdom. Oh God, no, no. The treatment of migrant farm workers here is just exemplary. Yeah. I mean, they just get incredible food and housing. And it's really um it's true throughout the Western industri alized world and it makes the far right scapegoating of immigrants all the more desp despicable. The primary issue for these people isn't where they come from, it's the conditions they're subject to when they work in the UK or indeed any other Western economy. I mean can you g can you talk to me a little bit about it? What matters are the wages and working conditions and you know absolutely union rights. And then once you've established that the work is well paid, has dignity, it doesn't really matter who's doing it. It just needs to get done. And in the United States, simultaneous to this demonization of immigrants was an extraordinary active recruitment by big business of undocumented immigrants because they could be paid lower lower wages . They were so much less they are so much less likely to complain about working conditions, um, so much more vulnerable to wage theft. Um so what's remarkable in the United States and in so much of the Western industrialized world is that the crackdown again and again is on the immigrant worker and not on the major corporations who are knowing ly employing and recruiting undocumented workers. In Fast Food Nation, I wrote about the meatpacking companies, which were taking out ads in rural Mexico and basically maintaining a bus service to bring in undocumented workers and you know workers who had phony documents maybe. And this was part of union busting. And in the United States right now, you have poor immigrants being terrorized , and at the same time the industries that profit from them, almost no enforcement against them whatsoever . So, you know, if you were to look at the book Fast Food Nation , the whole thing was structured to take you into the slaughterhouse. And it's not an original idea of mine. It was something that Upton Sinclair did almost a century before I did, which was using the slaughterhouse as a central metaphor for the ruthless ruthlessness of monopoly capitalism. And that's what I did . But what was interesting about the reception of Fast Food Nation, and I am I mean like quite sincerely like what I said at the outset of this conversation, I am so grateful it got published that its success allowed me to write other books. And it's amazing to me that twenty five years later it's still relevant. In some ways I'm very sad that it's still relevant 'cause I would have liked these problems to have been solved. But of all the aspects of the book, the one that I probably care the most about is the one that has gotten the least attention and that people have been less interested in. And that's just the way it goes. It's very, very hard to get people to care about the poor people who feed us Let's let's get back to Fast Food Notion and I want to revisit a foreword you wrote in 2012, about a decade after publication . I'm quoting you here. I hope that ten years from now this book really is irrelevant and that the world it describes, so full of greed and lacking in compassion, is just a bad memory. Yeah. You sound very optimistic. Yeah. And I'm you know I don't w I don't want to call this a pessimistic conversation so far, but it's a different it's a different register to the way that we're talking right now. Um I'm not optimistic, by the way. Okay. I I I mean this may be splitting hairs, but uh an optimist believes everything is going to be okay. I've never thought that. But I'm hopeful. And flesh out that distinction for me. Talk to me more about that. Hopeful versus optimistic. Again, an opt-optimistic is a kind of a certainty that things are going to be all right. It's like, you know, you're going through real problems. We've just met, but Ali, I'm giving you you've got some personal issue and I'm talking to you through it. And I'm just gonna tell you things are gonna be okay, it's gonna work out fine. Now that's bullshit. It may all go to hell. So if so I don't have any certainty that, you know, um the utopian future just lies around the corner. But I'm hopeful because I see how it's possible. And the reason that I write what I write for the New Statesman, getting back to Marx, I don't believe in any inevitability in history. I don't believe that they were working from one stage to another. And that's actually quite empowering because if things aren't inevitable, then they don't have to be the way they are. There isn't this plan , there isn't this logical progression of things unfolding. And that means that you have agency. If you believe in inevitability, then in some ways you're giving over your agency to the plan, to the party, to the you know, the scheme that's unfolding. So when I wrote that um 12 years ago whenever, I was just wrong, you know, I was completely wrong. I but it was hopeful. I would love all of my work to become irrelevant in terms of my writings. I would love the social issues and the problems that they've addressed to just to have been solved. And for the whatever I've written, eventually just be of kind of historical interest, of a reflection of the time in which it was written. But when you talk about fast food nation, the central issues in the book are unquestionably worse now than when I wrote the book in 2001. And I I mentioned you know this to you before we started the podcast. The book isn't really about food. Um it's very disappointing to some people who meet me, but I'm really not a foodie. And if you come over and ask me to cook for you , I can make a pretty good bowl of microwave oatmeal or a sandwich, but I'm not I'm not going to give you the best olive oil that I found through multiple test tastings. Fast food nation is about the rise of unchecked corporate power in America as seen through the food system . And the food system was a very good place to look at it because of how central the food system is to the American economy . But uh by any measure you want, uh monopoly power has gotten worse since the book was published, and, you know, it's approaching levels that we haven't seen in the United States since the late 1890s. Certainly wealth inequality right now in the United States is approaching the levels that we had in the 1890s. But you know, I'm not so delusional as to think that I could write a book and it would lead to the breakup of massive multinational corporations , but I'm just part of the process of trying. Schlosser's uh theory of change is sort of writing a book about every every 10 years or so and and the things will just collapse and fall apart and something something something else will be rejuvenated and appear from the ashes. You have to believe that to get up in the morning and sit down and pour through all these government documents. No, I am not deluded in the power of one writer or one person , but I'm I'm encouraged by being part of the process, and this sounds so pretentious again , but being part of a movement. I mean, on a personal level, the people whom I've met, the people who I've worked with on these different issues have helped give me hope and have, you know, helped create a sense of community. And it's a reminder that there are other people who care and are willing to spend the time to wage the fight, et cetera, et cetera. I think that the worst position of all to be in is to feel overwhelmed by the constant barrage of bad news, to be isolated and to do nothing about it. Because again you know getting back to the kind of post-war existentialist point of view just the process of trying to do something about it uh helps you know that's what you can control. You can't control these gigantic social, econom ic, political forces in the world. You can to a certain extent , control what you do with your life and how you think about these things. And and even if it's just this sounds so corny, but even if it's just once a week devoting a few hours to something other than just self-aggrandiz ement can make a difference. I really believe that . Both in the relationship the food system, but also corporate power, because I I actually think but particularly with a European a European parallel, I do believe that that the prep fast food is more prevalent here than perhaps even just on a sort of a can purely anecdotal on my personal experience when I visit European countries, the sort of the the density, the saturation of both these these chain restaurants, whether it's McDonald you could say McDonald's, but it could be you take your pick, right? Versus in France, in Italy, in Spain, whether or not they're there as um as dense there. And I just wonder I'd invite that comparison from you, uh both in relation to the food system, but corporate power and the politics. I mean, I I know this conversation is very broad raised broad ranging, but just on that point about the US-UK parallel, to what extent you believe it to to be there, to what extent you believe them to be similar, or differences you identify, perhaps? Um well let's let's start with immigration and then move off. Okay. Uh one of the things that I love most about the United States, and maybe it's because so much of my formative years so many of my formative years were spent in New York City, which has always been a gateway to immigration, is that you more than anywhere else in the world can be an American if you just believe in a certain set of values. And you know, it's a hugely imperfect history, and we can go through, you know, the Chinese exclusion exclusionary acts in the late 19th and early 20th century. We can talk about the racist immigration legislation in the 1920s, et cetera. But more than any other country in the world, the United States was welcoming to immigrants and embraced a wide variety of backgrounds. And again, you know, New York City is the melting pot that I grew up in, where you had every kind of person from everywhere in the world, not necessarily loving one another, but sharing the same streets and finding a way to live, you know, relatively in peace with one another. And you could have a governor of California named Arnold Schwarzenegger with a thick Austrian accident, and you could have a president of the United States named Barack Obama, you know, with a with a mixed race background. And that's the America that I love . At the same time, you know, you have these waves of anti-immigrant sentiment. In the 19th century, it was anti-Irish and anti-Catholic. Later on, it's anti-Chin ese. Then it's anti-Eastern European . Now it's anti-Mexican. There's always been a real strain of uh anti-Mexican, and then there's just been the profound racism uh towards black people that was there since 1619. So it's a highly imperfect society , but has as a central value , the embrace of immigrants, how imperfect ly realiz ed. And I think in Europe there's much less of that. I think that if you look at the core nationalism of the different European states, they don't have the welcoming of immigrants as part of the nationalism, and have had to try to broaden the nationalism and broaden the definition of what it is to be Engl ish, so that it it can include it could include people who don't look traditionally English. And that's true in Germany, it's true in Austria, you know, Scandinavia, um any way, getting back to fast food, I think what you're talking about is a business model that um sort of favors cheapness, uniformity, and conformity, and has certain advantages over independent businesses. You know, um Starbucks, for example, would come into a town, find an independent coffee house, and then open one or two Starbucks in the neighborhood, and you know, when you have economies of scale, um can wipe out independent businesses. And I and I do find in the United Kingdom now, looking at the high streets, it's a remarkable degree of uniformity, not just in fast food restaurants, but all kinds of chain stores that you might not find in other parts of Europe . And it's just um it's something that I, you know, I'm not drawn toward, which is this sort of everywhere, everything the same. Yeah, it's not it's not a way that I'd like to lead my life. I think that's that's where the beauty is, right? But th that's the things you appreciate. Yeah. People that are differ ent for for whatever reason or in whatever way, different points of view. Um I'd I I'd appreciate this and I I'm sort of asking to do a little bit of an explainer here. If you could talk a little bit about McLibel because uh I think there there is some knowledge in the UK about it, not least because uh our Prime Minister is one of the lawyers who worked pro bono on that case, now Keir Starmer, but I don't the the average person might not necessarily And specifically the kind of uh collusion, shall we say, the synergy between private corporate power and the power of the state and the way those two things came together. I just wonder if you could talk about that a little bit for me. Yeah. It's a it's an extraordinary, extraordinary story. And there was a a great documentary made on it by Franny Armstrong called McLibel. The McDonald's corporation really took advantage of the LIBEL laws in the United Kingdom, which are much more favorable to corpor ations or people who want to sue. And basically, if you're sued for libel in the United States , your behavior as a journalist, for example . You needed to be reckless in spreading something that was false. You needed to be willful, deliberately doing it. And um you know there's much more tolerance for an honest mistake. In the United Kingdom, the burden of proof is on you as a journalist to show that what you wrote was 100% accurate. Whereas in the United States, the burden of proof is on the person suing to show that you were being irresponsible and that you knew what you were writing or saying was false. So the McDonald's Corporation in the United Kingdom for years used the libel laws here in the United Kingdom to sue people who it disagreed with and threatened to sue them. And this corporation with multi-billion dollar corporation , you know, had such an advantage in these lawsuits because they could win an enormous amount of money as a judgment, and just having to defend yourself would cost you an enormous amount of money. So there's a long list of people who they threatened to sue, and again and again, those people would back down and apologize and issue apologies, even if maybe what they were saying was accurate. And then they decided to sue these activists from London Greenpeace, which was an offshoot of Greenpeace, not even part of the main Greenpeace. And two of those activists refused to apologize, Helen Steele and Dave Morris. They just said no. Sue us and let's go to court. And what they'd been doing is they had been distributing a pamphlet, and the pamphlet was, What's wrong with McDonald's? And it had a list of the environmental harms McDonald's was causing, the labor harms, you know, what's wrong with the food, et cetera, et cetera . And they were just handing out these pamphlets at McDonald's , but you know, the corporation was kind of drunk with its own power of shutting people up and you know acting in a very authoritarian way until they came up against these two activists who would n't apologize. And it became the longest civil court case in British history because Morris and Steele, with help from Keir Star mer, who was a brave and crusading human rights attorney, turned the tables on McDonald's and basically put McDonald's on trial. And I can't remember, but I mean the trial lasted for years . But there was a whole other hidden side of it. Some of it came out in the trial and some of it's only been revealed since then. You know, McDonald's had hired private investigators to infiltrate London Greenpeace . And at some of the meetings of London Greenpeace, there were more McDonald's private investigators than there were actual London Greenpeace members. And the McDonald's private investigators were from different firms and were basically spying on one another. So that sort of reveals not only the eagerness to sue people who disagree with them, but infiltrating activist groups with private investigators also reveals sort of McDonald's view towards civil society and freedom of speech. But what's come out since then is that Scotland Yard was simultaneously infiltrating London Greenpeace and the pamphlet that was being handed out by London Greenpeace was partially written by an undercover agent from Scotland Yard, which is kind of classic agent provocateur work . One of the issues that's being examined now in the in the ongoing public inquiry that's happening right now is how much did McDonald's know about Scotland Yard's infiltration of London Greenpeace. The likelihood is they knew a great deal. The head of security at at uh at McDonald's was a former Scotland Yard superintendent. He had a lot of friends who were still at Scotland Yard. And one of the most interesting points of all is the Scotland Yard uh undercover agent at London Greenpeace was handing out these pamphlets all the time , but McDonald's never sued him , which is a sign that McDonald's knew who was Scotland Yard and who was actually a real Greenpeace activists. The infiltration of a small organization campaigning for healthy food, labor rights, and animal rights, not only by a multinational corporation, but by Scotland Yard, is really disturbing for anyone who believes in free speech and anyone who's concerned about the excessive power of multinational corporations in a so-called free society. The one other element that's just beyond belief disgusting is that these Scotland Yard undercover agents who were infiltrating many different uh organiz ations were also sleeping with members of those organizations while collecting information. At least fifty women who belonged to these organiz ations were unknowingly sleeping with undercover agents, in some cases having children with them. And we're not talking about a one-night stand. We're talking about long-term, sometimes multi-year relationships with undercover police officers, some of whom had families and children, uh, while they were, you know, sleeping with these activists, and they would just then disappear. And you know, it's just, you know, one of these women who unknowingly had a child with one of these Scotland Yard uh agents referred to it as state rape, which it really was . So you know there is this public inquiry going on right now, and I think it really deserves more and more attention. The Guardian did a terrific job at exposing a lot of this. But when you have the collaboration of the state and big companies like this , it really is pretty revealing about, you know, who the state is representing and who it's not acting on behalf of Yeah. Who are you governing for? Yeah, I just encourage listeners if they do want to learn more about what Eric's talking about their uh police spies out of lives is the name of the campaign and they can find all of this information. I mean it is utterly extraordinary. Eric, we're we're running out of time and sort of my my final question to you. I mean we've obviously been quite wide ranging conversation. Your work is wide ranging, I know that you said it's about power and it's about uh multinational corporations. But nevertheless, I mean you have worked on a range of projects, not just writing, right? Not just books. I mean you're um co-executive producer on There Will Be Blood. I I just I would slightly introspective question for you, and you might you might not like talking about it, but I'm just interested to hear what draws you to a project. What is it that you look for when you're when you're thinking about pursuing something creatively. What is it that that that gets your interest? So I started out as a playwright and I was really unsuccessful. I I later I've had two plays produced in London. One of them got amazing reviews. One of them got probably the worst reviews of 400 years in theatre in London. And I am determined to have another play produced, because I just can't end on that note. Um, I was a novelist and I was a profoundly unsuccessful novelist. And then I had the beginnings, a real beginnings of a career as a screenwriter before I started doing nonfiction journalism. So I've done all kinds of writing and it's really led me to believe that no one form is better than any other. There are just different ways of getting at a subject or getting at a story. You know, there used to be a kind of hierarchy where like the poets are at the top and below the poets are the novelists and below the novelists are the playwrights and somewhere far below were the journalists and nonfiction writers. And having done lots of types of writing, it's all hard. And to do something good is an achievement, whatever genre it's in. And it's just different ways of trying to get at the truth of something. So I have been extremely fortunate that I've had plays produced and I've been involved in documentaries and I've directed an experimental film and just tried to get at things in different ways . And they're all valid and they're all just ways of exploring a subject. In the in the case of There will be blood after Fast Food Nation came out, and when I was talking about it, I was constantly being asked questions about Upton Sinclair. And I'd read The Jungle, but I didn't really know that much about him. And I started reading a lot of Upton Sinclair, and he was amazing. I mean, he just he wrote books on every aspect of the American society that he was part of. He wrote a book criticizing organized religion, a book criticizing the universities, I mean, on and on and on. And one of the books that he wrote was a novel about the oil industry. And it really, really resonated with me. And so I did something that I've never done before and I've never done since, which I contacted the estate of Upton Sinclair and I asked if the film rights were available, and I bought the film rights. And I bought them for a ridiculously low sum of money. I mean a tiny sum. I mean it it was a lot for me because I don't have a film company, but it was minuscule for anybody who's in the film world. And I just thought this would be an incredible film. And I started thinking about how to make this as a film. And then I was contacted by Paul Thomas Anderson, who literally was the only human other human being I had ever heard from who had read that book, Oil, by Upton Sinclair . He had, I think, been in a bookstore in London and he'd been looking through old books and he saw the cover and he sat down and r read it. And so the two of us were kind of obsessed with this book. It took us a little while to align in a number of different ways that I won't get into. But eventually I just realized that, oh my God, you know, to have one of the great directors with probably the greatest living actor of my generation making this film. And I think it it wound up being an extraordinary film. Extraordinarily serendipitous that sort of came together in that way, right? Yeah, yeah. And I and I think I think it would have been made into a film because there's a really elemental, powerful story in that book that speaks to all these bigger themes about America. And I mean, with with so many, you know, again, you know, I work for an independent film company and I read hundreds, if not thousands, of screenplays as part of my job. And I think you could take the same story and give it to three different really talented writers or three different talented directors and get three different really good films. And so I think oil had within it, you know, if it hadn't been taught Paul Thom as Anderson, a different director could have made a great film based on it . But his is extraordinarily good. And I feel like I feel there will be blood is one of the great films of the 21st century. I'm not taking credit for it. I'm giving it to him. But I think another director could have made a really totally different, interesting film based on that same source material , but he made I think a classic film. This I promised this was my last question. I hear you keep a soundtrack for each of your books, is that right? No, I kind of I listen to music while I write. What are you listening to at the moment? I'm writing about prisons and I'm listening to a lot of hip-hop. I try to the reason I listen to music when I write and when I I wrote this nuclear weapons book, I was listening to a lot of minimalist techno, which seemed to fit this sort of crazy technolog ical world of nuclear weapons. I find that playing music really loud while I write shuts up the critic and just allows the part of the brain that's willing to put something on the page. When I'm when I'm writing in silence, I'm often you know questioning each word that I put down. Anyway. It's really interesting. Stephen King talks about that when he's in his book on writing. It's like writing with the door open and writing with the door shut, and that even that sort of minor difference is like one psychological state is when you're open to the rest of the world, criticism, feedback, editing, and the other is when you're like, no, I need to put 2,000 words on the page today and I am I'm just gonna I'm gonna go he closes the door that's his way? Yeah yeah yeah it's interesting to have that point of comparison. Um look Eric it has been such a pleasure talking to you. I'm I'm so grateful for your time. I'm so grateful for the conversation. Thank you. Fastod Fo Nation. 25 years anniversary. A penguin classic. Uh Eric Schlosser. Thank you so much. Thank you