I WAS PLAYING around in the surf one day in Hawaii and someone zoomed passed me on a boogie board and I thought, “That’s amazing!”. And then someone went by on a surfboard and I thought, “That’s even more amazing!”. It’s hard to explain how invigorating and joyful surfing is.

WHENEVER I SURF, I feel something deep inside me. That’s the same feeling I have when playing on stage in front of a lot of people.

OUR CHANGING THINKING on spirituality fascinates me. Where quantum physics meets with philosophy meets with mathematics meets with engineering; how they’re all coming to the same place from different starting points and how the numbers and teachings vindicate one another. We’re all one. We’re indivisible.

THAT KIND OF IDEA is not for everyone. You basically have to say goodbye to everything you thought was real. It gets craaazy!

WHEN I LISTEN TO MUSIC—even classical music—I have a tendency to imagine that all the instruments are guitars and that makes it all so much more interesting. Play an oboe passage on guitar and it can sound amazing. Translate a French horn passage in the harmonics of a guitar and the result can just be incredible.

I KNOW ONE DAY my children will come into a lot of money and that bothers me. I still don’t know what I’m going to do about that, especially as I grew up with very little and know that when I had some disposable income I went a bit crazy. I’ve had pretty much everything I’ve ever dreamt of having.

THE TRICK always is to want what you already have, not to keep on wanting.

WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER and inspiring to be a rock musician, I was taken with rock ’n’ roll’s glamour, the romanticising of the lifestyle. Well, then you experience it—and it’s all bollocks.

BELIEVING in sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll is a quick way to ruin your life. Pretty much all of my peers bought into all that and didn’t come out at the end of it—addictions, narcissism, just inappropriate behaviour, all that changes people for the worse. The problem is that it seems like a good idea at the time. Yes, it was fun, but every day I have regrets [about it].

WHERE METALLICA STANDS in culture is very important to me. The band just gets bigger every year and when people hear your music for the first time when they’re younger, they just latch on to it. There’s only a handful of bands that are like that. In our case, it speaks to people who are pissed off and don’t know why, people who haven’t had enough of a voice or who haven’t yet found a way to express it.

WHEN we’ve all run out our lives, Metallica will still be this living entity. For some reason, it’s so much bigger than the four of us [band members].

IT’S SO HARD to find stage clothes—something that’s unique, that you don’t see everywhere but has a flashiness to it because it also needs to be something you can see from 50 feet away.

WEAR ALL BLACK—as you do in heavy metal—and the stage gets dark and then suddenly it’s like, “Where’s Kirk gone?” It took time for me to realise you can really express yourself through clothing and that clothing can be fun.

WHEN I WAS YOUNGER I never really understood what machismo was. And then one day I realised I was neck-deep in it. All my friends, my father, my uncles and cousins—they were macho so I was naturally drawn to that way of thinking. It wasn’t like we were all Clint Eastwood exactly but there is a covert kind of machismo—the aggression and hostility, the need to be the toughest guy in the room. For me that even meant writing tough, scary riffs. It’s still hard for me to write happy-sounding music. It needs to sound like scraping a shovel along concrete.

I TELL MY CHILDREN never to feel pressured by dad’s day job [or] by the idea that they have to rise to some kind of standard [of success]. I tell them to just try to do what makes you happy—as long as it contributes to your well-being—and pray that you can make a living from it.

THAT and be nice to people.

I DON’T KNOW where the points come from but you get extra points for being nice to people. It makes you a lot more positive. And positivity is progress.

I’M A HABITUAL COLLECTOR, BRO. My friend called me the other day and asked me, “Why do you collect plastic bags?”. And I thought ‘I’ve been completely rumbled here’ because I do. I have OCD and collect anything.

I’M AT THAT AGE when I can look back on my life and see patterns when I go hard on certain things—guitars, vehicles, watches... plastic bags.

THE TRICK IS to not care what people think [about you]—not the way you’re dressed or your music or anything.

EVERYONE WILL HAVE AN OPINION—that’s what my parents told me—and it just doesn’t matter, especially since everyone’s opinion is coloured by where they are at in their lives.

UNFORTUNATELY, social media has turned that around.

WHO WOULD BE A COACH? That is the question that might have formed on the lips of anyone watching former Australian rugby coach Eddie Jones’ terse press conference following the Wallabies’ 40-6 thrashing by Wales at the Rugby World Cup in France earlier this year. Jones was in the hot seat, a position in which all coaches at the highest level find themselves at some point. It’s part of the job, if you can call what is a multidimensional, intensely scrutinised and, for some, all-consuming obsession, a job.

“I don’t consider coaching to be a career in any way, shape or form,” says Michael Cheika, coach of the Argentinian rugby team, a former World Rugby Coach of the Year and one of the few people who might have had a real understanding of how Jones was feeling in that moment, having coached the Wallabies from 2014 to 2019. “One day when I grow up, I’m going to have to get a proper job, just like everyone else. I think this is... it’s a lifestyle.”

Cheika, 56, who is speaking to me today from his living room in Paris where he currently lives, loves the real-time, week-by-week, game-by-game accountability of his role (he refuses to call it a job). “That is the best because you know that the day-to-day will get you to the better results later on,” he says. “The ups are never as good if you haven’t had the downs. So, the thing I enjoy most is that attention to results.”

Cheika’s attitude is one that’s built not so much on self-confidence—though, of course, that is important—but supreme self-belief. “Confidence can come and go,” he says. “You can be swayed with confidence. Because after a bad result, you could have your doubts. But what brings you back is that sense of self-belief, that you know what you can do, and what you can achieve.”

If you want to know whether you truly love something, you can get pretty clear confirmation when the things you enjoy about it are the same ones as those you find challenging. Or as pop culture’s most recent coach du jour Ted Lasso has said: “Taking on a challenge is a lot like riding a horse, isn’t it? If you’re comfortable while you’re doing it, you’re probably doing it wrong.”

“Mental health in COACHING is a case of whatever doesn’t KILL you makes you stronger.”

Comfort certainly isn’t something you’ll find in abundance in elite-level coaching. This is a role that puts you on a war footing with failure. One in which pressure is a ceaseless companion, scrutiny can be forensic, and all that really matter, regardless of how much an organisation might bang on about about culture and development, are wins and losses that are there for all to see. Succeed and you’re a saint. Fail and you’re a sinner. As Tom Sizemore’s character says in Michael Mann’s Heat, “The action is the juice”. And if it’s not, well, you should probably find another gig.

In that sense, you could call the coaching environment at the top level of professional sports a cauldron. The mental strength required to operate under such a cutthroat dynamic is difficult to fathom. But mental strength is built on mental health. And while the psychological demands faced by players have become a major focus in the past decade, the same can’t be said of the mental burden carried by coaches. Does the authority and visibility of the position preclude it? Could an admission of weakness and vulnerability put your job at risk? In all likelihood, yes. But there is also the possibility that coaches, the ones who’ve survived, are mentally stronger because they have faced adversity, shouldered responsibility and been held accountable.

“I think that mental health in coaching is a case of whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Because if you are to survive long enough as a coach, you’re going to encounter all kinds of anxiety and depression, but you’re going to overcome them,” says Dr Bill Steffen, a former division one soccer coach in the US, and assistant professor in sports science at Wingate University in North Carolina, whose primary research focus is mental toughness in coaching. “You’re going to inoculate yourself to those two conditions. Yeah, you get depressed. Yeah, you get anxious. But you figure out how to handle it, or you don’t, in which case you exit coaching.”

If that is the case, could it be that the seat Jones was occupying at that press conference back in September, while hot enough, perhaps, to scold or even brand him, was one he could endure? Because coaching isn’t so much a cauldron as it is a crucible.

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WHEN BRIAN GOORJIAN WAS appointed head coach of the Boomers in 2001 after more than a decade as an NBL coach, he had a very human reaction: am I good enough? “I was excited when I got the position, but as soon as I got it, I’d have to say I felt overwhelmed because the responsibility is huge,” says Goorjian, who’s enjoying a view of the Melbourne skyline on a clear Friday morning, as he speaks to me from his apartment in Prahan. “I thought, Am I good enough to do this? Everyone has those doubts in them and people don’t realise that. You feel insecure. This isn’t just you and your team. This is a country.”

Goorjian, whose heavy Californian twang remains strong despite emigrating here in the late ’70s, found his doubt disappeared once he entered the Boomers’ camp and immersed himself in the day-to- day minutiae of coaching, otherwise known as the X’s and O’s. There, the players and support staff would likely have never twigged that their loquacious, at times temperamental, always passionate coach might have felt unsure of himself. And Goorjian wasn’t about to tell them.

In a leadership position that hinges on authority and respect, there’s not a lot of room for outward expressions of uncertainty.

The popular image of the coach as a solitary figure on the sidelines of games means they’re easily reduced to caricature, at least by their critics in the media and in the often hackneyed archetypes they inhabit in popular culture—stubborn, taciturn, volatile, tight-lipped and inscrutable are a few of the more common adjectives used to describe top-level coaches. Lasso, in his unrelentingly cheesy and avuncular nature, clearly bucks the stereotype. But you do have to wonder how much coaches’ public profiles match their private personas. “I’ve spoken with coaches that say, ‘Yeah, I’m screaming just to scream, just to be a presence so that it looks like I’m doing things, even though I know I’m not’,” says Steffen.

Anson Dorrance, coach of the division one women’s soccer team at the University of North Carolina and former coach of the USWNT that won the inaugural Women’s World Cup in 1991, says many people are surprised when he describes himself as an introvert. “I’m a radical introvert,” says Dorrance from his car on the way home from practice in Chapel Hill. “So for me, even on this phone call, this is a performance. This isn’t me. This is me acting like the women’s soccer coach at the University of North Carolina.”

So, what defines mental toughness as it relates to coaching? Steffen conducted a study in which he and his team asked 22 elite-level coaches in the US that very question. The coaches surveyed came up with 46 characteristics, which were then narrowed down to a top 10. Confidence was rated the most important component in a coach’s mental make-up, followed by resilience, consistency, positivity, energy, passion, optimism, adaptability, inner strength and patience. The coaches were then asked if they thought these traits needed to be innate or could be developed. “Most thought it could be developed because a number of them said they weren’t mentally tough when they started coaching,” says Steffen. “Resilience is adversity and adjustment, and if you don’t have adversity, you can’t be resilient. Most coaches had some difficult times, yet they adjusted, they adapted, then they developed that resiliency.”

Cheika agrees coaches need to be mentally agile to succeed. “I’ve got an open mind as a coach but can also be very authoritarian,” he says. “I think that’s a real skill: to be able to be flexible, but to have single-mindedness when necessary. And then not be afraid to change if you feel like, Oh, no, this actually is better.”

Underpinning all of these traits is often an insane level of competitiveness. “Most people that think they’re competitive, I don’t think are competitive,” says Dorrance, who gleefully tells me he was the subject of a celebrated book, The Man Watching, which includes a chapter in which “everyone who hates me gives their opinion on me”.

It was Dorrance’s competitiveness that drove him, during one year of his 47-year tenure at UNC, to take a single Thursday afternoon off. “I was ok with that,” says the 72-year- old, who elevates plain speaking to an art form. “In fact, as my wife will tell you, I hate vacations because what’s going through my head is someone’s getting ahead of me.”

Clearly this level of commitment is not for everyone and even for those who possess it, is surely a double-edged sword. “The beauty of it [coaching] is that it’s not a nine-to-five job, and the curse of it is it’s not a nine-to-five job,” says Steffen, who also used to coach division one college soccer in the US and once had a year where he was away from home for 49 weekends on recruiting trips, a workload that hastened his transition from coaching into academia.

Dr Will Vickery, a senior advisor in coaching at the Australian Sports Commission, confirms that work- life balance is an alien concept to a majority of coaches. “It consumes your life, so you don’t really have a lot of time to switch off,” he says. “You forget the fact that it’s your job as opposed to your life.”

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GOORJIAN KNEW HE MIGHT FACE a little extra heat when he stepped off the plane from Japan after the Boomers’ lacklustre FIBA World Cup campaign back in September. He expected it from the traditional media, who he has long courted and enjoyed a fruitful, symbiotic relationship with. But these days, of course, the real criticism, the stuff that might keep you up at night, doesn’t come from those who report on sports for a living. It’s from the anonymous keyboard combatants on social media. Fortunately, or perhaps astutely, Goorjian isn’t on social media. “My daughter’s like, ‘Don’t worry about what they’re saying’, so I’m like, Jesus, it must be fucking horrible.” Goorjian didn’t care to find out. “I’m oblivious.”

But he’s all too aware how such criticism affects the younger coaches he mentors, calling trolling the work of “cowards with no responsibility”. “Man, you’ve got to watch your mental health because some of that stuff is vile, really nasty,” he says. “I had a guy on the phone the other night and he was like, ‘They’re talking about my wife and my kid’. It breaks my heart.”

Cheika too, shuns social media but is similarly aware of its psyche-shredding potential. “All of a sudden you can be receiving everybody’s judgment,” he says. “It’s probably more in the domain of those who are just starting off in coaching. Whereas a coach my age, I wouldn’t know what anyone’s saying on social media. So it has no effect. And this is the thing, right? It’s a choice.”

While Cheika and Goorjian’s absence from social media removes it as a stressor, they don’t shy away from scrutiny from the mainstream media and are accepting of the fact that reporters, like them, have a job to do. “I always look at it like I’m getting rewarded for my work,” says Goorjian. “People say, ‘You can’t hide this’. I like that. I’m proud of what I’m doing, I’m proud of my team. I love that if I lose a certain number of games, my ass deserves to be in the firing line. It helps drive me.”

Cheika too, is not overly bothered by criticism of his performance; invariably, he’s already judged it for himself. “I’m an extremely harsh auto critic,” he says. “What role have I played and how has my performance been? I’m already asking those questions before any media ask me. I feel like the whole pressure thing is a bit overplayed.”

Of course, pressure also comes from within an organisation, particularly if you’re a coach who’s been brought in to help a team take the final step toward a championship, premiership or medal. Goorjian admits that his outstanding record as an NBL coach, including a three-peat with the Sydney Kings, has created expectations he’s found tough to deal with. “You can’t help but feel it within the organisation and to be truthful with you, that’s why I’ve coached overseas [in China] a lot in the last 15 years,” he says. “You don’t want to let people down.”

The perception created by a team’s position on the ladder can see pressure on a coach mount quickly. “Their win-loss record is their litmus test,” says Vickery. “If they’re not winning, then they’re almost seen as failing, which is absolutely not the case. But the public perception is often that way.”

Steffen, meanwhile, believes the focus on results warps perceptions around the job the coach is actually doing. “I think coaches get too much blame when they lose, but they also get too much credit when they win,” he says.

The fact is, when a team is underperforming, it’s not the star player who’s going to get the axe, even if fault lies within the locker room. “It’s easier to get rid of the coach,” says Steffen. “To sack one person versus sacking an entire team. It’s just easier to change it that way.”

In such a transparent, results-driven profession, job security will always be an issue, says Josh Frost, a researcher at the University of Melbourne’s Orygen Institute, who is currently completing his PhD on the mental health of elite coaches. “In last year’s Premier League season in the UK, 13 out of the 20 football clubs sacked or fired a coach. In some sports coach turnover is very prevalent.”

“It consumes your LIFE, so you don’t switch off. You forget that it’s your JOB as opposed to your life.”

Not surprisingly, those who’ve been in coaching for a while have developed strategies to deal with the precarious nature of their position. Cheika, for example, came into coaching from a successful business career and was already financially secure. “No one is forcing you to do this,” he says. “It’s a choice. I’ve always had my own businesses. What that does for you is give you that autonomy so you don’t make compromises for the reason of job security or because you need that salary to pay your mortgage.”

Earlier in his career, Goorjian, too, leaned on a teaching qualification as a form of insurance, allowing him not only to shelve worry about his financial future but also to take risks. “I always had a plan B,” he says. “I taught when I came to Australia. So, I had a mindset of, I’m in a casino, I’ve got five grand in my pocket that I’ve won,I’ve got the other 500 sitting on the table and I’m playing with the bank’s money. Risk-taking is a very important part of coaching. You’ve got to play a little bit by the seat of your pants.”

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AS A FORMER PLAYER WITH THE Melbourne Demons in the AFL, Alistair Nicholson remembers his first coach, Neil Balme, being fired after a string of losses in 1997. “I got quite a strong dose of the instability and impact that can have on a football club and player group,” says Nicholson, who these days is the CEO of the AFL Coaches Association. “And then my time under Neale Daniher, there were times where I’d go, ‘You’re looking after us and looking after us well, but who’s looking after you?’ And I think that’s probably where the conversation is now.”

A 2020 study by the Orygen Institute conducted in partnership with the Australian Institute of Sport of 252 elite coaches found that 41 per cent of them had psychological symptoms that warranted treatment from a health professional, while 42 per cent reported potentially risky alcohol consumption. Almost a fifth (18 per cent) reported moderate to severe sleep disturbance and 14 per cent experienced very high psychological distress.

Frost believes the broad remit of modern coaching makes it inherently mentally demanding. He cites pressure from clubs, fan expectation, job insecurity and social media as contributing factors, which are compounded by long hours and frequent travel, often robbing coaches of the ability to access a support network. “I think a range of things can be very demanding and with a lot of social isolation and travelling, not having your social support around you can really contribute towards being more vulnerable to mental health challenges,” he says.

And while the argument can be made that adversity forges resilience in the longer term, the fact is, not all coaches are equipped to deal with the pressures of the job as well as others. This is only exacerbated by the fact that those who are struggling may not feel comfortable disclosing their difficulties due to concerns about the reaction from their organisations. “Coaches are leaders in their environment and might feel less inclined to exhibit or express emotions at the risk of receiving judgment from players or members of the hierarchy or board,” says Frost. “And that’s why it’s really important that organisations cultivate a psychologically safe culture to allow coaches to be able to express their emotions or challenges in an environment that has fewer consequences.”

Steffen returns to the sink-or-swim dynamic of coaching. “Sinking could lead to problems with mental health or you just get out of coaching,” he says. “I know a number of coaches that have just left coaching because of the demands. They felt like it wasn’t healthy.”

Sometimes coaches just need to refresh themselves, something often only afforded by default after contract termination. Increasingly, though, at least in the AFL, some coaches are choosing to take time off on their terms. “We’ve seen in the AFL some experienced coaches take a sabbatical or time -out and the boards have confidence that they’re going to bring something back to the club. Clarko [Alastair Clarkson] and Brad Scott and Ross Lyon came back after a period away and hopefully their energy levels will continue to let them do it because there’re only so many people that can do it at the top level, and do it well,” says Nicholson, whose organisation helped found, in 2018, a mental health education programme

for AFL community coaches and players called ‘Tackle Your Feelings’. Not surprisingly, the mental toll of the profession is something coaches will often only acknowledge behind closed doors, sometimes with other coaches who are equipped to understand the struggles they might face. Goorjian and Cheika both talk regularly to other national- level coaches. Both also see the advantages to be gained in seeking outside counsel. When Goorjian began coaching he employed a performance coaching consultant to evaluate him on and off the court. “Once a week, it’s like I’m sitting in the chair and he would say, ‘Let’s talk about you. You look tired, let’s talk about your...’ so I know that side of it.”

Similarly, after the World Cup, the 70-year-old sat down with a circle of trusted confidantes. “They knew I was going to call. They’ve watched every game. So it’s like let’s sit down and talk. If I have a problem and it’s affecting me, I have people I can go there with. You need it just like the players need it. You need to be evaluated. I’m like everybody else. I’m not made of steel.”

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IF COACHING AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL does ultimately come down to winning and losing, you have to wonder how coaches mentally approach this inescapable, sometimes oppressive dynamic. While there is something to be said for attempting to embody Kipling’s immortal line, "If you can meet with triumph and disaster... And treat those two impostors just the same", coaches do have to allow for their own humanity.

“I think coaches get too much BLAME when they LOSE and too much CREDIT when they win.”

“On wins and losses, I have a rule where at midnight, that game is in the rear-view mirror,” says Goorjian. “If we win, I’ve got to celebrate with my staff, ‘Let’s have a meal together’. But at midnight I put it in the rear view mirror and it’s the same thing with a bad loss.”

Of course, the really big victories, the championships or Olympic medals should be savoured, he adds. “I got a three-peat with the Sydney Kings. You carry those rings around in your heart with that group for the rest of your lives. The bronze medal [at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics], I think about that every single day. I wake up and that’s something I carry. It never goes away.”

Cheika, who’s coming off a fourth- place finish with Argentina at the Rugby World Cup, is in a period of reflection when I speak to him. “Look, it’s hard for me because many would say we had a successful World Cup, finishing fourth. I’m still going through the last game where we could have finished third. What could I have done better in the lead-up? Not because I’m looking to be hard on myself but because I know that will serve me so that when that scenario or something similar occurs again, I’ll be able to make good decisions or better ones.”

That is, of course, all you can do, for soon enough victory and defeat are reduced to something altogether less august: statistics. And those, well, those can be damning, even for the most successful of coaches. “If the only time you’re happy is when you win the championship, you’re going to have a horrible career,” says Goorjian. “I’ve been in this close to 40 years; I’ve won six. It’s very, very rare that you finish a season with a win.”

This all serves to underline the fact that in this business, you need a healthy relationship with failure. Sport’s great conceit is that results mean everything and nothing. The stakes are a construct, the drama confected. “The greatest thing about sports is failure because it doesn’t matter if you fail,” says Dorrance. It’s a lesson he tells his players but one that might serve anyone compelled to embark on coaching as a career. “If you want to really grow, fail as often as you can and recover, because it’s in the failure that you’re going to learn about who the hell you are and you get to make a decision on who the hell you want to be.” Well said, coach.

Originally published on Esquire AUS

WE ARE AT A CROSSROADS. One road leads to extinction and the other could lead to a more peaceful, sustainable, healthier and joyful planet. Unfortunately, our emotional and spiritual development has not kept up with scientific knowledge.

IT IS WITHIN our power to reverse this calamity, and that can change if humanity has a shared vision. If we complement one another’s strengths, if we have maximum diversity of knowledge and if we connect, emotionally and spiritually... then it could emerge into a new paradigm.

ALL PEOPLE are interested in, is how many likes they get on their selfies. We have sacrificed ourselves for our selfies.

YEAH, I think celebrity is another way on how we replace ourselves with our selfies. It’s the human condition. They like to think that there’s somebody who’s superior but there isn’t.

I USED TO MEET people on the streets who told me, I read your books. Now they say my grandmother used to read your books.

TRANSCENDENTAL MEDITATION is one particular aspect of mantra meditation. And the mantras that I use take you beyond thought. But now we see that that’s only one form of meditation. [There are others like] mindfulness, reflective inquiry, body awareness, awareness of mental space.

FUNDAMENTAL REALITY cannot be accessed by a system of thought. Whether it’s science or philosophy or any other system. If you want to know reality, you have to go beyond human constructs. Meditation is the only way to go beyond human constructs.

EVERYTHING WE TALK ABOUT IS A story. Stories are maps of reality, not reality. You can’t eat the menu, you have to eat the meal. And so if you want to eat the meal, you have to go beyond rational thought.

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A post shared by Deepak Chopra (@deepakchopra)

MY FAVOURITE BOOKS haven’t changed. Have you heard of Lost Horizon? It was by a guy called James Hilton. It was the first time people were introduced to the idea of Shangri-La. I have other favourites like W Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge; Rudyard Kipling classics; Arthur Conan Doyle... Shakespeare’s my favourite. I used to be able to recite every play of Shakespeare.

ACTING is a very interesting profession for good actors. I occasionally watch movies and the last one was Oppenheimer because I was curious about the person who had the insanity to create an atomic bomb.

YOU SAW OPPENHEIMER, RIGHT? What an ordinary guy. Do you read Einstein’s biography? I mean, the amount of human problems he had. When you look at famous people, whether they are in the arts or humanity or science or spirituality... everybody is fake. Including me.

IF THERE WAS a biography made on my life? [It’ll be an] authentic fake. At least, I don’t deny it.

HOW OTHERS depict me is a projection of themselves. The story you write about me... isn’t about me, it’s about you because of the questions you’re asking, right? It’s like using AI for a prompt: you’re asking me questions that the next person will not. Every story you write is about you.

IF I HAVE A GRAVE, it would say on the [tombstone], “Where you are, I once was. Where I am, you’ll soon be”.

I HAD A GOOD TIME. Been there, done that.

I WAS NOT SELF-AWARE as a physician-in-training. I graduated medical school in 1970 and went to the United States immediately. The first 10 years of my training, internship president’s fellowship, neuroscience, I was very much part of the system.

IN THOSE DAYS, doctors smoked; we all smoked. Even during the medical conference, doctors would advertise for Lucky Strike or Camel cigarettes. A very interesting time.

WORK doesn’t start until it’s 11am. When I get up at six, I reflect. Meditate; I do yoga. After five I don’t work any more. Weekends too.

I HAVE NO SOCIAL LIFE. I find social conversation very boring. Other than, spending time with friends and family, I don’t go to parties or watch movies.

IT’S DISTRESSING but I watch the news just to keep up with the world. Everybody’s fighting over nothing.

I WANT to be known as an interesting guy. But he’s not there any more. Move on. [laughs]

DO YOU know your great-grandfather? Do you know the grandfather of your grandfather? No. But because of him, you’re here. Every cell in your body has the genes of your ancestors. That is the legacy.

MY NEW BOOK is called Digital Dharma and I think AI, like any other great scientific discovery, can be used to heal the world or to destroy the world. But, at least, we have the intelligence to not allow that to happen.

THEN AGAIN, humans are crazy.

AI IS AUGMENTED HUMAN intelligence: it doesn’t say anything original. It’s a large language model that has no consciousness; doesn’t feel hungry; doesn’t have sex; doesn’t fear death... but it’s super intelligent as a language model..

A LOT OF PEOPLE think I am crazy. Maybe. I don’t know. If war and terrorism and eco-destruction and extinction of species, and poison in your food chain and chronic health and absence of joy is normal, then I don’t want to be normal.

I HAVE NO FEAR. I’ve no fear of death or anything. Zero. My stress level is zero.

TO GET TO THAT STAGE [of having no fear] is to recognise that you’re not your body and you’re not your mind. The only thing that’s real is consciousness; consciousness without form. It doesn’t have borders, therefore, it’s infinite.

Photography: Gan Kah Ying
Art Direction: Joan Tai

“It is frustrating that people still think of board games as being like Monopoly, just going on forever and ever, with players sat there circling the drain until it’s over,” laughs Chris Backe, “when there’s a new generation of board games that allow us to explore aspects of ourselves we don’t generally get to explore. It’s like the movies or novels, only with games you’re not a watcher but a participant. With games, we get to step out of our skin”.

Backe is a rare beast: he’s a full-time board game designer, always working up 20 or so new concepts for his company No Box. He’s testing them, seeing what works and what doesn’t, and over recent years seeing his industry enjoy a huge revival—to the tune of USD16b in annual sales, thanks in part to the pandemic. Over his years in the business, he has concluded this: it’s not that people like to play, but that they need to play. And not just in structured ways, as with games or sports, but in manners that have no purpose at all beyond the pleasure of doing them. We’re not just talking about children here; we’re talking about grown-ups too.

“I’m a strong proponent of the idea that adults should play, by which I mean play that is defined as self-chosen and self-directed, not driven by coaches, not something you have to do,” says psychologist Peter Gray, author of Free to Learn and one of the world’s leading scholars of play. “All play in a sense has rules, maybe handed down [from] generation to generation, sometimes implicit, sometimes just made-up on the spot. But we all need to play more. Play has made us what we are”.

And not just us. All mammals play, from dolphins to dogs. One theory proposes that those mammals are capable of using objects as tools. Like a monkey using a stone to break open shellfish, for example, or the first instance when a stone is used as a toy. Utility came later. Others stress how, despite its energy expenditure, and even the occasional injury, natural selection has not weeded play out, as might be expected.

In part that’s because play is often a process of exercise or stress relief, both good for us. But it also has a much more important role. One key idea—first proposed by Karl Groos in his The Play of Man (1901)—is that play not only allows the nervous system to develop ready for certain activities later in life but it also functions as a kind of practice. Of those skills required for survival, learning to cope with unexpected events, and preparation for doing things as a competent adult.

The skills and values explored in play can be specific to a child’s culture—Groos suggested the likes of hunting, skiing, canoeing or horse-riding. It seems that children’s readiness to play at these is instinctual; they observe and mimic without being prompted. The skills can also be more universal. Play, for example, is often social—first is the need to decide together what and how to play, so cooperation and communication are essential.

In fact, animals that are more dependent on their group for survival tend to play more, with, as Gray argues, hunter-gatherer societies positively suffusing nearly all they do with play. From religion to work and ways of settling disputes, all the better to suppress any drive to dominate. In play, you have to learn to control your impulses, like in play fighting where you’re almost hitting your opponent but never actually. It’s as much mental as physical too. Being self-directed, play also fosters creativity, imagination, experimentation and independence.

It’s why, argues Rene Proyer, professor of psychology at the Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, while some of us play in more obvious, more socially acceptable ways—he cites those who play video games, use colouring books for “mindfulness” or who build the complex sets LEGO created specifically for adults (“Adults welcome,” as its ad has it)—we all tend to play in one way or another. Humour, fantasy, daydreaming, sexuality all offer forms of play, as does language, as the very phrase “wordplay” suggests. People often use play as a means of getting through repetitive tasks, inventing challenges for themselves, he notes.

“[If you play with children] you soon learn that almost anything and everything can be play. But, in a way, adults are more free to play because our worlds are larger [than children’s],” Proyer suggests. “And there are good reasons to continue to play as adults, even the opportunity it brings for continued learning. But the easiest answer to the question of why adults should play—and the most correct one—is that it’s fun. Play can be used to maintain alertness, or to keep you in the moment. It’s through play that you can enter a ‘flow state’.”

This idea, of being fully immersed in a feeling of energised focus and enjoyment, is now more commonly cited about sport or the production of art—but it was first proposed, by the psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi in 1990.

And yet the evolutionary necessity of play has long been side-lined, even denigrated. Sebastian Deterding, professor of design engineering at Imperial College, London, and a researcher in playful design, says play got in the way of industrialisation and its need for reliable labour. Capitalism saw play as a waste of time; play became associated not with positivity but with the Bacchanalian wildness of festivals.

“Even in the Medieval period kings would complain about peasants playing cards rather than improving their archery or doing something ‘useful’. And religions have often had bans on games because of their relationship to gambling,” he says. “Today in the [first] world the norm is to have roles and duties — as an employee, as a parent—while caring for oneself and one’s dependents. And play doesn’t fit into that. It’s seen as trivial in a culture in which everything is measured in terms of productivity. Even sleep and fitness are about improving your ability to fulfil your social role, while sport is considered to have the necessary function of being a community ritual.”

Historically some games got what Detarding calls a “free pass”: early board games—the likes of Snakes and Ladders—were morality tales dressed up as games, while chess or backgammon were associated with a kind of brain-training. Even when play is discussed today there is, he says, often some vague kind of attempt to legitimise it—it’s a way of getting the family together, or it’s for the improvement of one’s well-being, “even that the PlayStation you just bought was in the sale,” he laughs. “But attitudes to play are changing—there’s more institutional approval, for example, with big museums running exhibitions on video-gaming; there’s more questioning of the values we’re expected to subscribe to. There’s also been a lot of boredom over recent years”.

“In one sense play is on the up, especially coming out of the pandemic. People had a lot of time on their hands that previously they hadn’t, and turned to play as something to do, even as a way of dealing with the situation,” says Jeremy Saucier, assistant vice president at The Strong National Museum of Play in New York and editor of the American Journal of Play. “Sure, play has long been associated with childhood—play is ‘what kids do’—even as many adults became more open to it, and even if they might not have called it ‘play’. Yet there’s still a certain risk in revealing that you ‘play’ in modern culture. Play is still considered to be frivolous in a highly competitive world”.

Unless, of course, that highly competitive world co-opts play in the pursuit of improved efficiency in business or consumer engagement with a product: the so-called ‘gamification’ of the workplace and education, in training and marketing. This reveals a philosophical conundrum. “Play has so many possibilities and there are ways to harness it to bring all sorts of benefits. But if you assign a purpose to play, is it still really play?” asks Saucier. “The danger is to recognise that play is good for us and then trying to throw play into everything. Then it just becomes performative”.

Remarkably, even play among children is under attack. Ana Fabrega, founder of Synthesis—an educational system based on the idea that children are hard-wired to learn skills the likes of collaboration, autonomy and competence through play—was a career teacher with experience in school systems around the world. She notes how with the notable exception of the education system in Finland, time for free, unstructured play has increasingly been squeezed out of school timetables in favour of academic study and the pursuit of higher grades.

It’s not just in schools either. “We’re seeing the rise of a culture of safetyism in which parents don’t want to expose their children to even the slightest risk, even though the instinct to explore risk [through dicing with heights, speed, dangerous tools or elements, and so on] is fundamental to children from a very young age,” she says. “Play is being trained out of us, so it’s no wonder that by the time we leave education, we tend to think of it as not being serious. But we have to take play seriously—it matters, not least because it’s the engine of invention”.

According to Peter Gray, the last 50 years or so have seen other cultural influences gradually erode children’s access to free play too, notably the rise of TV and, more recently, gaming devices keeping children within the domestic sphere rather than being “free range” and out in the world. In parallel, this period has seen a huge rise in all sorts of mental disorders among young people.

“The whole reason why childhood is so long is to acquire the characteristics necessary to be an adult. You’re gradually given more and more freedom and so must learn to solve your own problems—how to keep your playmates happy, how to deal with differences,” says Gray. “Now we have generations who have grown up without that [training] and absolutely it’s had a [negative] impact on them”.

In 1955 the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, in his book Homo Ludens (playful man) proposed that human culture arises and advances through play; that the pillars of culture, from art to literature, philosophy to the law, arise at times when adults had the freedom and time to play. It’s through play that we innovate. That might not bode so well for a globalised world in the 21st century.

Indeed, Gray says there is evidence to suggest that the good mood fostered by play allows people to perform better at the kind of problem-solving that requires novel thinking. And that, since the 1980s, curtailed childhood play has had a marked negative impact on creativity, as far as it can be measured. “Play teaches creativity, so now we’re producing far fewer creative people in an era when society really needs people to be creative,” he argues. But, he adds, we’re also seeing it reflected starkly in what he notes as the reduced independence and competence of current late teens and 20-somethings. He worries that this will likely become the norm for future generations unless the greater free rein to play, which was historically given to children, is rapidly reinstated.

“We’re seeing high rates of emotional breakdown among college students, for example, often for what would have been considered very trivial reasons a generation ago,” he observes. “Lacking the beneficial childhood experience of play, they haven’t learnt to steel themselves [against challenges], to understand that you can have a negative experience and somehow you survive. There’s an inability to accept negative consequences and to take responsibility for their own failures. Our changing regard for the importance of play [in childhood] is behind all of this”.

That also suggests why we need to take a more positive view of play more broadly, not just for tomorrow’s children and the adults they will become, but for adults today. Rene Proyer notes that the huge popularity of smartphone- and console-based video gaming—an industry that has long since eclipsed the film business, for example—suggests that the desire is there. The average age of a gamer now? 33, with players equally split between men and women. We just need to be more open about embracing the benefits of play—and to recognise that playfulness as a state of mind is a skill that can be developed.

“For a long time, it was thought that video games were just for kids. Back in the ’80s I was almost embarrassed to tell other grown-ups what I did for a living,” says David Mullich, the leading video-game designer for the likes of Disney, Apple and Activision. “Now everyone is slowly discovering how essential play is. It’s in play that we cast off our responsibilities, fears and certainties to engage in challenges that have no material outcome. It’s through play that we find catharsis. We find new meanings in the world. Without play, we wouldn’t be fully human.”

I KNOW FOR SURE that many different types of species are operating hyper-advanced aerodynamic platforms, and they’re visiting Earth, coming and going like taxis. As to who these operators are, I don’t know. Are they interdimensional, inter-realm, interplanetary?

I’VE HAD FOUR vivid sightings of craft that were not jets, helicopters, or planes.

I WAS ON MY MOTORCYCLE about eight o’clock at night, and I saw a red beacon flying over the high-tension power lines. There was no sound. It stops right above my motorcycle and shines a light on me. I look up, totally delighted. And the light winks off, and this thing drifts off over the field again.

MY DAD WAS an absolute absurdist. He would go to a grocery store, grab a roll of paper towels, and whip them over to the next aisle to hear the reaction. “Oh, whoa, whoa!” He was wonderful.

I WAS VERY MOUTHY in class all the way through high school because I knew I could get laughs. I was not a good student, but I was an entertaining one.

My parents enrolled me in the St Pius X minor preparatory seminary for boys, which was a priest school in Ottawa. So I went there from grade 9, 10, 11, and I was asked to leave, dismissed in a letter saying, “We believe your son is not a suitable candidate for the priesthood.”

A LITTLE UNDER HALF THE YEAR, I’m at the farm in Ontario. It’s where the family settled in 1826.

WE HAD A FAMILY MEDIUM, and frequent séances took place in the old farmhouse in the 1930s and ’40s, usually on a Sunday morning. The big black Chryslers, Packards, Cadillacs, and Lincolns would come in with the big bosomy matrons and their tiny, skinny little husbands. They’d sit around the table and my great-grandfather Samuel would host.

I WAS STUDYING criminology at Carleton University and expecting that I would go into the corrections service, having worked a summer as a Clerk 5 in the Penitentiary Service of Canada doing inmate catalogues.

I WROTE A MANUAL for deploying weapons in riots for the commissioner. And I thought, “Well, it's an interesting profession.”

BUT I HAD MET A WOMAN named Valri Bromfield in high school, and she said, “You’re not going to be a prison guard. You’re coming with me to Toronto.” And she dragged me off with our audition tape that we’d made on cable TV in Ottawa. It got the attention of Lorne Michaels.

I HAD A PRETTY GOOD LIFE going in Toronto. We were running an after-hours booze can, selling liquor and beer and wine illegally over the counter and making a massive 80 per cent markup. I bought a Harley. I bought a car.

I HAD AN ORIGINAL 1971 Ontario provincial police Harley motorcycle that had been in the display team of the Golden Riders. It went around the world with these stunt riders from the provincial police. Paid USD1,200 for it. And I kept that for a long time.

I RODE THAT BIKE up and down the thruway from the farm to SNL, the entire four years I was on the show. I never flew or took a train or a bus. I never commuted to New York on anything but that bike. Seven hours. Rain or shine. That was my ride.

IT WASN’T SO MUCH my public exposure that I felt in that first year of SNL. It was Chevy’s. I didn’t get much recognition, but Chevy did. I used to walk down the street with him and they were calling his name out, “Hey, Chevy Chase!”

I SAW HOW Chevy was exposed and thought to myself, I don’t want that.

I TRIED COCAINE a couple of times. I didn’t like what it did. It made me speedy. It didn’t help me creatively. But there were others who liked it a lot more.

I STARTED TO PLAY harmonica when I went up north as a road surveyor and tundra-crawler mechanic for the federal Department of Public Works, a job my father got me through pure nepotism. I played the harp up there around the campfire. I kept it up enough so when Blues Brothers came along, I was modestly proficient on it, and still am today.

MY MOTHER USED TO type my essays up when I was in college. Sometimes they were unfinished and I’d say, “It’s ok. They’ll accept this.” And she’d say, “No, you have to round this out. You’ve got to ride home on a third act or a conclusion here. I’m not letting you go until you compose that.”

MY STYLE IS basically all black. Black jeans, black shirt, black jacket, black tie, black hat. Sometimes I’ll go with a white shirt. I really don’t care about clothes. I prefer just to have a rack of black stuff to put on every morning that’s clean.

YOU CAN NEVER SPEND enough time with your children. You can never listen to them enough, give them enough focus and attention. Accept their advice and their criticism. You can never do that enough.

IF THEY’RE COMING after you and saying, “Dad, you were a little profane today” or “Dad, don’t smoke cannabis in the house”“You know, Dad, you’re driving a little too fast,” instead of being defensive, I’ve learnt to back off the throttle, take the smoke outside. Just listen to them. And cut back on the profanity if I can.

WRITING IS HARD. Alone, it’s arduous. With a partner, you can play back and forth. So I prefer to work with a partner.

I'VE WRITTEN EIGHT SCREENPLAYS that got produced. And every one of them, at some point I'd be stopped cold. Where am I going to go next? So usually, I would just go to sleep and dream on it and get up in the morning and I go, “Well, I got a solution to go forward. It may not be the best one, but it's a solution.”

OK, I’VE BEEN sentenced to death. They’re saying, “Well, Dan, this is your last meal. What would you like?” Oh, jeez, Warden, thanks. Well, let me see. I will have a T-bone steak with green peas, Yorkshire pudding and gravy, garlic mashed potatoes, roasted Brussels sprouts with maple syrup, button-cap mushrooms, preceded by a lemon-zest Caesar salad.

AFTER THAT, I’D LIKE to move on to a Black Forest chocolate cake, all washed down with a fine Brane-Cantenac Margaux. I would like a cigar. [And a helicopter.]

This year, Aykroyd appeared in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, the fifth film in the series he helped launch as a cowriter and costar of the 1984 original.

Originally published on Esquire US

Having started in comedy with his group Dutch West, Sam Reich was later hired as director of original content at CollegeHumor, an Internet comedy company. Responsible for boosting the content team, Reich produced shows for TV and online that include Adam Ruins Everything; Rhett and Link’s Buddy System and Badman starring Pete Holmes.

In 2018, CollegeHumor launched a subscription-based streaming platform called Dropout. According to Reich, who was CollegeHumor’s chief creative officer at the time, this was in response to the “difficulty in receiving advertising dollars on traditional media platforms for mature content”.

Then, the bottom dropped out. In 2020, CollegeHumor’s parent company InterActiveCorp (IAC) withdrew funding, which laid off all but seven employees. Still able to see the potential, Reich bought CollegeHumor. With the newly-minted title of CEO, Reich placed more focus on unscripted productions like Um, Actually, Dimension 20 and Game Changer; rebranded CollegeHumor to Dropout; and rode out the pandemic and SAG-AFTRA strike. At the tail-end of 2023, Reich announced that Dropout subscriptions had grown to a point where it was profitable enough to go into profit-sharing with its employees.

On the wave of a new season of shows, we talk to Sam Reich about Dropout, puzzles and the joys and trials of Game Changer.

---

SAM REICH: I can't believe it's 1:30 in the morning over there. I can't guarantee you're not dreaming up this interview.

ESQUIRE SINGAPORE: [laughs] Oh no, not again. Do you guys work from home?

SR: We do for the most part. We have a studio space and there are a couple of people who come in for post-production. For the most part, we just come in for shoots and the full-time staff works from home.

ESQ: Let's get this interview started. Sam... where are you from?

SR: [laughs] The fact that this joke has travelled internationally is really annoying.

ESQ: But are you surprised that Dropout is known outside of the United States?

SR: Are you kidding? I’m super surprised. And flattered. We went to the Edinburgh Fringe [last year] for the first time and had an amazing time. I was shocked by how many Scots knew about Dropout. It’s really cool to see our work getting out there.

ESQ: What’s the ratio of American subscribers versus the rest of the world?

SR: It’s predominantly US. I want to say... something like 60 per cent US. And then, there’s the second tier, which would be English-speaking countries. So, a fair portion of Europe, Australia, Canada... we’re popular in Germany for some reason. That ranks high on the list. Germany and India. I think that English is spoken in enough places now, for better or worse, that we have more international fans than I could ever imagine.

ESQ: You’ve mentioned before that you were hesitant to be in front of the camera. But you dropped out of school to be an actor.

SR: Yeah, originally I got into this business to be an actor... a dramatic actor. I took an acting class where the teacher said that I should act based on the first impression I gave when I walked into a room. For instance, Sam is short so he should do comedy. And that was the beginning of my comedy career.

I found a lot of warmth in comedy but not a whole lot of work in show business. It’s just really hard to make a living at this. The farther I stepped away from acting, the more money I made. I became a director, then a producer and then an executive... by the time, I became an executive, I worried that casting myself in things would be an abuse of power. I wanted to put myself in a position where I was supporting the careers of other people, who wanted to do what I wanted to do originally. It wasn’t until Game Changer came along. This was a show that no one really wanted to make. I kinda pitched it and got a lukewarm response. No one could wrap their heads around the idea and no one wanted to host it. I said, all right, I’ll take this particular bullet and now I am a gameshow host-CEO, which is a hyphenate I don’t think I share with a lot of people.

ESQ: The title will look great on your LinkedIn profile.

SR: [laughs] Exactly. It’d be a good business card where it says CEO on one side and gameshow host on the other.

ESQ: We discovered Dropout by chance with a Breaking News episode on YouTube—"True Facts About Grant Anthony O’Brien"—where embarrassing facts about Grant (a Dropout writer and performer) were revealed. And that led me down a rabbit hole of other Dropout content and I decided to buy a [Dropout] subscription.

SR: I love hearing about people's different entry points into Dropout. Game Changer and Dimension 20 are usually the popular ones.

ESQ: You’re also a presence on your social media. It’s a little endearing... that someone of your bearing is doing TikTok and [Instagram] Reels.

SR: [laughs] Yeah, I get made fun of for this a lot. Just before signing on to this call, I posted another sketch that I made in my spare time on Instagram. I didn’t have time to do TikTok but I’ll go back and upload to it afterwards. I think I’m one of the few people who loves what’s happening to comedy, thanks to platforms like this. I love how democratic they are. By the way, the House just passed [a bill] to ban TikTok in the US this morning; I’m very sceptical that that will happen.

Anyway, my interpretation of what happened is that TikTok was the first platform that you leaned into this idea of discoverability. So, what you were presented with, first and foremost on the platform, was people you didn’t know. Then given its rise in popularity, Instagram followed suit and created Reels; YouTube followed suit and created YouTube Shorts... TikTok created an opportunity to get seen. That hasn’t existed in our space for a long time. It’s really hard to find an audience doing this, it’s really hard. So, I love it and I want to participate in it. Even though... [laughs] the other day, one of my cast members/writers asked me, so what are you getting out of this financially? The answer is, less than nothing. I’m wasting money doing this. Money and time.

ESQ: You’re one of the rare exceptions as an independent streaming subscription platform to crawl out of a hole and find success. Do you have any advice for people trying to do what you do? Or were your circumstances akin to a perfect storm that will never happen again?

SR: If somebody wants to become a CEO/gameshow host of a niche subscription platform, I probably can offer a lot of advice. I think how we’ve ended up here is pretty niche and unique, and lucky, in terms of breaking into the business in general. This, at least, holds true in the United States. I don’t know whether it’s the same over [in Singapore] but it is still very hard and very privileged [that I get to] do this for a living.

I think that our industry has—that is the same in so many other industries—a kind of hollowing out of the middle class that’s occurred, where it’s just harder for folks to float to the top. It’s a system that right now, especially with all the consolidation we’re seeing, is rewarding people who are already at the top way more than it’s providing an avenue for younger and aspirational folks. On the other hand, the Internet has afforded young and hungry entrepreneurial creators better opportunities than ever before. So, if I was just starting, I’d focus on how I get attention online.

ESQ: How different are you from your Game Changer host persona? Is that the real you on camera?

SR: I mean, it is. You know, I think that there’s a very nuanced distinction between Sam on stage and Sam in real life. I do think when I’m in presenter mode, and then I break because one of my players does something funny and I laugh, that’s sort of a quick jump from one Sam to the other. But I was raised on Monty Python and there’s something about comedy in a suit that’s always resonated with me. I love stuff that’s formal and a little surreal. There are a few episodes of Game Changer that require me to be a little bit more of a “straight man”. For those episodes, I do try to unnerve my players with my common confidence, my stoic-ness. In this last episode of Game Changer, I say, Sam says “Don’t flinch” and a body falls from the ceiling... I have to play that straight or the joke doesn’t land. But inside I’m giddy all the time. [laughs]

ESQ: One of your more famous catchphrases is "I've been here the whole time". It's something that you utter at the start of every Game Changer episode. Is there more to the statement?

SR: You know, there's a very pragmatic reason I say that. The original reason is because as the other players take the stage, I'm announcing the show as well and you wouldn't normally know that the announcer and the host were the same person. So, when the camera cuts to me, I'd say, "I've been here the whole time" as a sort of welcome.

But it has taken on a kind of a different quality as the show's gone on. I've introduced the idea of my great-grandfather magician counterpart, Samuel Dalton [from the "Escape the Green Room" episode], who exists somewhere deep in the lore of Game Changer. There's a Loki, god of mischief, quality to the phrase, "I've been here the whole time". I'm always watching. So I embrace it, even though it's not what I meant.

ESQ: But as the seasons go on—and I wish longevity for the show—is it getting harder to come up with themes for the show? Because one of the factors for Game Changer is, you know, the element of surprise.

SR: You’ve just encapsulated the stress of the show. Every season we back ourselves further and further into a corner where it’s harder to be original. And for a show called Game Changer, that’s the pressure. How do we keep reinventing the wheel? And every season we have to step a little further outside the box to find ideas that feel like they’re going to surprise, not only the cast but, also the audience of the show. And, by the way, remain true to, what I feel is, the show’s character.

ESQ: And what is that?

SR: For instance, I’m not super inclined to leave the set altogether. There’s more and more reason to do so [as demonstrated in] our two-part season finale, where we leave the studio for a completely different location. But it’s almost like when someone gives you a cardboard box and you have to put something wildly different in that cardboard box every episode but the box doesn’t change its shape so how do you do that? Every season we say, how are we going to top the next season? And every season we say, that’s next season’s problem.

ESQ: I can't wait to see the new season and what you have in the years to come. And also how you're going to get yourself out of the corner you painted yourself into.

SR: [laughs] You and me both. I think this next episode of Game Changer—the one that airs in two weeks—is a good one. And the one that airs two weeks from now is also one of my favourites we've ever done.

ESQ: It sounds like every episode that's coming out is the best one you've ever done.

SR: [laughs] The one coming out that I'm excited about is called "Bingo". You'll know when you see it.

ESQ: I’d assume the writing room for Game Changer is small.

SR: It’s small. Really small. It’s myself; my creative writing partner and head of development, Paul Robalino; it’s a writer whom I love and trust a lot, Ryan Creamer; it’s our head of production, Kyle Rohrbach, and my production designer, Chloe Badner. Recently, we brought in my director and editor, Sam Geer, early into that process.

Except for Ryan, the people who work on Game Changer lead departments on the show. That conversation is more of a production. It’s one part creative and another part logistical. I want those meetings to be practical. What’s the point of having a room full of creative folks if the moment I present my ideas to production we can’t do them?

What I did this past season is that I have 10 folks that I go out to for pitches. Then I take those pitches to the group. With them, we mull the pitches over; beat them up; cut ideas in half; sew two ideas together... that’s how we write a season. As the seasons wear on, I lean less and less on comedians and more and more on game designers. Now, the folks pitching the ideas are those with backgrounds in escape rooms and interactive experiences. I find their backgrounds are better suited to where the show is going.

ESQ: You're also a magician.

SR: Sure. But an aspiring one.

ESQ: Was magic something you took up during the pandemic or when you were young?

SR: It's funny, I was just reviewing some home VHS footage from when I was two and three years old and it was my first ever magic show. I've been into magic for almost my whole life. My school assignment was to create a coat of arms for myself. We had to come up with a sort of a [motto]; mine was "Imagination. Illusion. Humour. Art." I was seven at the time, just to give you a sense of how long this kind of stuff has been in my DNA.

During the pandemic, I found a magician offering lessons—Jason Ladanye on TikTok—and I started two years of training and some sleight of hand with him. It was really fun and really humbling because you learn fast that the stuff is not at all easy. It takes years and years to get good at. Jason is one of the best there is.

ESQ: What's your forte? Cards? Coins?

SR: Cards. I love the elegance of a simple Bicycle deck and this notion of portable magic, you know? Magic that you can take with you. Magic that you can do with someone else's deck of cards. Mentalism is interesting to me. I find it very intimidating and big stage magic like David Copperfield's kind of magic, I've no interest in at all.

ESQ: There's this weird crossroad with magic and humour that magicians often get made fun of by comedians. Do you get to perform for your peers?

SR: I do and people ask, for sure. I also think because they run in the same circle of performers, you'd be surprised about how little I get made fun of for magic as a hobby. It's like all of us here on the east side of Los Angeles are nerds and geeks. You have to be a particular kind of person to love and learn that kind of stuff.

I think it was Teller from Penn and Teller, who said, "Sometimes, magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect." And that's how I feel towards Game Changer, where we put so much effort into creating the fun and surprises of it.

Do you know the Dimension 20 e-art puzzle in "Escape the Green Room"? Took me hours to figure that out. But the whole time, I was just thinking, oh, they'll love this. It's like a little gift for your friends.

ESQ: By the way, I loved that episode because I thought it was going to be a normal escape room. But then you added lore to it. There’s a storyline. I was like, Oh my God, he went that extra mile.

SR: Yeah. It’s pretty high. My creative partner on that episode was Tommy Honton an escape room designer and I learnt a lot from him. Tommy has a terrific escape room here in Los Angeles called Stash House and he told me that the most exciting escape rooms are the ones with background. So, that’s where the seed started.

And then he said, the biggest advantage we have going into this episode, is that it only needs to happen once. As opposed to a traditional escape room, which you can reset over and over again. At that point, it became, Oh, we can put breakables in the room. A breakable clock, a breakable guitar and then it all started to fall into place.

ESQ: It just shows the kind of mind to conjure up themes for Game Changer. It's almost akin to a supervillain's mindset where they set up elaborate death traps and schemes.

SR: If you go back and watch season one of the show, we were still figuring out its identity. [We only figured it out] until season four. If you were to describe the show as a cocktail, it's one part improv comedy; one part British panel show; one part prank; one part magic trick and one part avant-garde art project.

Part of this for me is education. As I'm out in the real world, I'm doing escape rooms or playing social deduction games or seeing theatre. I'm taking notes, Oh that's a really interesting fact. I bet that could be incorporated into the show at some point.

ESQ: What are you watching and reading? Do you even have time for that?

SR: I do. I read a lot of fiction. My favourite book last year was Sea of Tranquility. It's this perfect little time travel book. I watch a lot of mystery. I've been watching The Tourist on Netflix. It's awesome. Amazing performances, an engrossing mystery. The show manages to spin three plates at the same time. It's really good.

I'm also watching shows at the Magic Castle. I'm playing games... I've started playing Blood on the Clock Tower. Again, awesome. I've been seeing a lot of theatre shows again like last year's Fringe. Now that was instructive because people were putting up shows that I'd never considered. It blew my mind. I went to a show called Temping, where only one person can be in the room at a time. You sit in a cubicle and there's a computer in front of you. The "show" centred around the e-mails and the phone calls that you were getting as you temped for this actuary office. Totally outside-the-box stuff... that gets me so excited.

ESQ: Would you like to bring Game Changer to the Fringe?

SR: I would love to if I can convince my business partners that there's any good business reason to do that. And—spoiler alert—there isn't. It would be pure joy if I could. We're toying around with more live stuff in general.

ESQ: Do you watch Taskmaster?

SR: Of course, I do. Alex Horne (creator of Taskmaster) is actually a new buddy of mine. It's funny, I was afraid to watch Taskmaster because it was during the pandemic season of Game Changer and folks started telling me that I should watch it as the shows have so much in common. I didn't want to watch it because I was afraid to derive too much inspiration from it. I didn't want people to feel like I was ripping it off.

But I watched a few episodes, got totally hooked and now I've watched every single one of them.

ESQ: Can we talk about the pandemic? I know, it’s a period that many would want to forget-

SR: It’s still happening.

ESQ: I’d always thought that the pandemic started in 2020 and I realised that it’s called COVID-19... so it started a year earlier. We saw the smoke but we didn’t think the fire would reach us. Your Game Changer season set during the pandemic was amazing. The ingenuity that came out from doing episodes with everybody remotely working from their homes. Did you just want to pause the series during the pandemic or did you feel like doing something...?

SR: We needed to do something. We had a season of Game Changer and a season of Dimension 20 in the can but the clock was ticking and [these episodes] were going to run out and we needed to produce content. We’ve signed a deal with IAC to take over [Dropout] two days before lockdown in Los Angeles and we needed to satisfy these subscribers. In a way, coming up with that season was [brought to a bear] but, in another way, I’m a firm believer that restrictions help assist with creativity.

It’s easier to write poetry that rhymes than poetry that doesn’t. So, the restriction helps. We did episodes that we would have never done in the studio. Not nearly as many people have watched the remote seasons, I get it. Even when I go back to watch the stuff that was filmed over Zoom. It’s... triggering. Thank god, we’re not doing this any more but I am proud of it. There are a few of those episodes that are some of my favourites.

ESQ: You managed to get people like Tony Hawk and Giancarlo Esposito to guest on that season.

SR: That was a really rare situation insofar as no one had anything to do during the pandemic [laughs]. We have some higher-profile guests on next season's Make Some Noise, which is a short-form improv show that I'm excited about. Our experience has been that once people get a flavour of working with us, they will be excited to work with us again. Case in point, the drag queens from [Dimension 20's "Dungeons and Drag Queens" episodes] have been back a bunch. Paul F Tompkins recently started to play with us and he's been back a bunch. It's really fun to have the family expand in that way.

ESQ: You’ve cultivated a nurturing workspace. Your staff and performers look like they genuinely like one another. More family than workmates. In Singapore, it’s rare to see that sort of camaraderie in the workplace, let alone a CEO of a company putting his employees’ welfare before profits.

SR: I can’t take sole credit for this. This new version of the company meant that we could, sort of, start over. And we think long and hard about the kind of people that we want to work with at every level. Especially in a corporate environment, where there are many invisible powers, where [at Dropout,] it’s just us and that’s humbling. And I think that’s something people respond to; they are watching people who make that stuff.

There isn’t some sort of mysterious force behind us or the people who own the company that aren’t us... we are it. When you boil it down that way, we’re just human beings trying to make something and trying to get other people excited to make something with us. To do that, we need to show them—not only kindness and respect—but also reverence for their talent. And talent is really what powers the platform. The reason why Dropout is successful—and you can point to a lot of things like “the organic marketing strategy is clever” or “we’re making good decisions about finances” or “the P&L is well balanced... but the real reason why Dropout is successful is that someone comes out on stage and does something amazing. And for that to happen, you better respect it and have reverence for it.

I think it could be—and maybe it’s a little cynical of me—that in our industry, there are a lot of folks who get into content creation, they aren’t creatives. When you have too many people who get into our business from non-creative positions, meaning they were promoted through [fields that] aren’t like writing, directing, acting, etcetera. They don’t have quite enough respect for what it actually takes to make the product. I think that’s maybe the biggest difference in terms of our company’s DNA or how it’s set up: all of us at a high level are creative folks and we care deeply about other creative folks.

ESQ: We wanna keep to the theme of our discussion and incorporate a puzzle within this interview. Maybe readers who have come this far can figure out how to finish the rest of this url (http://esquiresg.com/_ _ _-_ _ _ _-_ _ _ _-_ _ _-_ _ _ _ _-_ _ _ _ ) and win a prize.

SR: Wow, very cool. You’ve permission to rewrite my responses [to fit the puzzle].

ESQ: Is there any point in Game Changer that you’d want to be a contestant instead of being a host?

SR: You know, truthfully, no. I know fans are so eager to see it happen. I’m nervous for whoever has to host instead of me. But I’m the show’s quality controller. If you take me out of that part of the creative process, it just wouldn’t be very hard for that episode to live up to the others. Forgive me if that statement is a little bit self-aggrandising but I feel so badly for the person who has to take on the stress of trying to come up with a Game Changer episode instead of me. It’s hard at this point. It is hard to come up with this stuff so I wouldn’t necessarily wish it on them.

ESQ: Hypothetically, if you could have someone to fill in as host, who'd it be?

SR: Folks have talked about who'd take on that mantle. Most specifically Brennan [Lee Mulligan]. A lot of people on Reddit want me to play in an episode and have my wife, Elaine, host it. But never say never. Maybe one day.

ESQ: I feel that the closest thing to you being a participant and getting pranked is on Breaking News.

SR: Breaking News has become where Grant [O’Brien] and the cast get their revenge on me. The next season of Breaking News, there are no less than three episodes targeting me. It is [starts laughing] wild. What they will do, I left to their own devices.

ESQ: One last question, how has your wife, Elaine [Carroll] contributed to the Sam Reich of today?

SR: This is an amazing question that I’m so glad I got the opportunity to answer. So, thank you. Being in a loving secure relationship for as long as I have has allowed me to focus on work and creative output in a way that’s extremely privileged. Elaine is unbelievably supportive and our relationship is so profoundly uncomplicated compared to what I often see in the world.

Because we live in a [time] of dating apps and the huge amount of choices they bring, I can’t recommend enough for falling in love and marrying young. [laughs] I think it allowed us to start building a life early, which contributed hugely to what I’ve managed to do now in my 30s—I’ll be 40 this year—yeah... it’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

Game Changer, other originals and more are streaming at Dropout

Not to be all doom and gloom, but it appears we (and by we, I mean the tech bros running YouTube) have finally nailed the coffin shut when it comes to keeping the human brain focused for more than a mere handful of seconds, if not less.

YouTube – which is not just the new competitor against Netflix, but basically every single platform striving for human engagement – is experimenting with a new feature called “jump ahead”, which will allow members to skip to the ‘best’ part of the video. As if YouTube reels, three minute videos, nevertheless TikTok, weren’t short enough, this new feature will allow time sensitive or simply attention lacking individuals to skip ahead to the juiciest seconds of a video, and then move on to the next one. This evokes an image of the downloading sequence in The Matrix where Neo is plugged in and ‘kung fu’ is downloaded into his brain in a matter of seconds and voila, suddenly, in the words of Neo himself, “I know Kung Fu.”

This “Jump Ahead” feature may just be a “small experiment” to the tech giant, which is owned by Google, but its potential reach is gargantuan. Last month, YouTube surpassed 100 million Premium and Music subscribers, a number which includes those participating in a free trial. YouTube Premium, which is basically just ad-free YouTube, costs SGD 11.98, and as a standalone, YouTube music costs SGD 9.98.

Although many still view Netflix to be the undefeated champ of online streaming, YouTube does have more usage, although not more paying members, as Netflix has 260 million worldwide. Still, YouTube made more than SGD 41 billion last year in ad revenue.

Based on a recent study from Nielsen, the global leader in audience insights, data and analytics, YouTube represents 9.3% of TV and streaming viewership as of February 2024. Netflix came in second at was 7.8%, and Hulu and Amazon Prime Video tied in third place. But what is perhaps most surprising of all, is that standard, TV is still the most popular place to watch shows and movies at home. Streaming “only” made up 37.7% of the viewership pie.

Considering the “jump ahead” feature, one must also bear in mind that many YouTube videos contain 90% fluff, especially the guaranteed inclusion of “and don’t forget to like and subscribe”, which can become repetitively annoying, so the intentions behind this feature may not be as mind zapping as they initially appeared. For example, amongst YouTube fitness channels, many videos can reach up to 30 minutes with a title Best Bicep Workout.

As any avid gym goer can tell you, training your biceps does not require thirty minutes of explanation, and for those who subscribe to such channels, in recent years, many fitness YouTubers are making contrasting, shortened videos that get to the point much quicker, which isn’t due to lack of attention, but rather a more succinct explanation. And if you read the comments section, you’ll see an influx of reactions like, “thank you for immediately getting to the point!”

Depending on how you view the “jump ahead” feature, it can be seen as a force for good when considering the type of content you are watching, i.e. informative fitness channels. And with Elon Musk’s Neuralink raising eyebrows and interest across the internet – will it expand the possibilities of human cognition or destroy the human mind? – one thing is for certain: attention spans are dropping faster than interest in a Robin Thicke concert.

Originally published on Esquire ME

For the longest time Bassem Youssef was motivated by revenge. Not exactly of the arch kind—there were no cunning plans or dastardly schemes—this vengeance was career motivation, plain and simple. The way he looked at it, if he could succeed as an Egyptian stand-up comedian in the US—after everything he’d been through—he would prove everybody wrong. There was only one problem: He wasn’t actually very good.

“I started five or six years ago and, like anything new that you try, in the beginning you’re not good. So, yeah, I sucked big-time,” confirms Youssef via Zoom from his home in Los Angeles. “The problem was that I had come from a point of high expectations, especially from an Arab audience who had seen me on Al Bernameg. Many people would come to my show and be disappointed. I got it—I was disappointed too. I was in my mid-40s competing with kids in their 20s doing shitty open mics and stand-up comedy clubs. To be honest, it was a little bit humiliating.”

The move to stand up was meant to be Youssef’s big pivot. Well, his second one if you count the initial transition from cardiac surgeon to TV show host in 2011 (and you really should). But in 2014 he had cancelled Al Bernameg—his groundbreaking Egyptian show that dared take a satirical sideswipe at the country’s elite—as the pressure had simply become too great. The show had been a staggering success, regularly attracting 30 million viewers across a three-season run, but the country’s Mohamed Morsi-ran government was fragile in ego. In March 2013 a warrant was issued for Youssef’s arrest, claiming he had ‘insulted Islam’ as well as the current president. Four months later Morsi was deposed by military coup, but Youssef believed that his own fate was written, too. In 2014, for the safety of his family, he left Egypt for good.

When it came to stand up, Youssef got better. “Bit by bit things improved,” he says. “I became more comfortable with the material, and the nuance of doing the show in English.” But while the Arab audience was where his fame lay, there was a time when he refused to perform in Arabic at all. That choice feels like it stems from somewhere raw. Perhaps a subconscious kickback to the treatment he received on leaving his homeland.

“What happened to me in Egypt, when I quit for the safety of my family,” he explains. “I didn’t want to do it anymore because it was just too much pressure. But I was called a coward, a sell-out. The epitome of love [from the people] had turned into the depths of hate.”

But of course you can only deny self for so long, and eventually Youssef began performing in Arabic again. Now he tours two shows at the same time, one in English, one in Arabic. “It was hard to begin with,” he admits. “A couple of times they [the Arabic shows] didn’t go so well, but eventually I found my voice. But they are totally different, the Arabic show has nothing to do with the English one. Doing this is difficult.”

There’s a tension that often lies beneath the surface of the best comedians. A dark that fuels the light. You sense it in Youssef, too—and not just because he’s under the weather today and with a big show at the weekend. The experience with Al Bernameg almost broke him, being labelled the ‘Voice of The Arab Spring’ could do that for you. You still feel that a big part of him wants to speak out on issues surrounding the Middle East—his actions tell you that—but he hates it too. The pressure, the expectation. That kind of weight can be debilitating.

On October 18, 2023, Youssef was interviewed about the Israel-Gaza war on Piers Morgan: Uncensored. It would have seismic results.

“The producers at Piers Morgan: Uncensored had actually approached me to discuss [the situation in Gaza] twice, but at that moment it just felt like any comment would have been career suicide,” he says wearily. Youssef had appeared on the show some months earlier, speaking out on the Afrocentrism row that surrounded the Netflix docu-drama Queen Cleopatra, and had put in a typically indefatigable performance.

“But at that point it just seemed impossible to speak out against the narrative that was being told [on Palestine]. That changed when I saw Ben Shapiro’s comments going out on his show. I got very upset. When the producers called me a third time I said ‘yes’.”

The interview currently sits with 21 million views on YouTube (the most-watched Piers Morgan: Uncensored episode of all-time) and saw Youssef engage with a typically satirical approach, exaggerating all the points made before him. It was a tactical strategy that took guts.

This is how the conversation with his wife, Hala—herself half-Palestinian—went prior to his appearance on the show.

Bassem: “Hey, I’m going on the Piers Morgan show tomorrow to talk about Palestine.”
Hala: “Are you sure—what are you going to say?”
Bassem: “I don’t know.”
Hala: “Good luck.”

And then after the show (after he had joked how Hala, as Palestinian, was indeed ‘difficult to kill’)…

Hala: “Don’t do a second one.”
Bassem: “I’ll just do one more.”
Hala: “OK, do what you want.”

“This is why our marriage works,” he smiles. “We give each other the space to be ourselves.”

Youssef’s strategy was something approaching shock and awe. A first, slightly-over-the-top exaggerated first interview that would lead to something deeper; a face-to-face with Morgan which duly came on October 31.

“To be honest, the whole thing really felt like a lose-lose situation to me,” he admits. “I thought, ‘If I do well I could lose my whole career, and if I do badly I could be cancelled by my own people’. But I took a chance. For the first interview I wanted to make a splash. But for the second I worked with some amazing people around the world to educate myself further on the situation. There were so many nuances we don’t know, even though we’re Arabs.

"The first [interview] was sensation, the second was education. This approach was risky from beginning to end and I can’t sit here and say that I planned it all. I could have lost everything; but I got lucky. If you look at the videos, the first is on 21 million views while the second has 11 million, but the second has more clips being cut from it, and has been viewed far more.”

The fallout from the interviews has been mixed. “It’s been mostly positive from my people,” he says. “I’ve actually been selling-out shows because people saw it. But I’ve had to tell them that one has nothing to do with the other. On the negative side, I lost a couple of jobs in Hollywood. Movie roles that got cancelled, I’m still working out whether I want to make a fuss about that yet. On a personal level, people have been extremely nice. Although I did have a couple of incidents where some comedians I had worked with were a little nasty about me. I didn’t respond. Why give them any fuel?”

There were also other issues at play here. Since leaving Egypt in 2014, Youssef had made LA his home and is now officially a US citizen—something that he remains positive about the situation. “I haven’t really worried about my position here,” he says. “I’m an American citizen and I do believe in this country. Of course, like anywhere, there are problems. But I would rather live here than any other country. I think that the people growing up in the US can make positive changes. I still believe in the idea of America.”

---

“I’m not a news agency, I’m not a politician, I’m not an activist. I’m just a comedian that was in a position to serve a cause in some way.” BASSEM YOUSSEF

---

Inevitably, since the interview, there has been the inclination to push Youssef to the forefront of the conversation when it comes to Palestine. And to an extent, he has continued to highlight the plight of the people. Things like Instagram live check-ins with Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza, for example, show his desire to do something. But there’s a level of unease you see on his face when he discusses it. The shadow of that Al Bernameg pressure creeping back into his life.

“I’m not exactly sure what I will do next. It would really be up to people like Motaz—he has to figure out that risk,” he says before trailing off… “I don’t know if it’s even helpful.”

There’s a real internal struggle at play here. In our social media age, any perceived missteps are publicly called out. And the pressure heaped on high profile accounts can be unbearable for anyone. For Youssef it’s a frustration.

“I don’t like doom scrolling or posting. If you look at my feed I don’t really put ho­rrific images there. Because, at the end of the day—and this is a problem with Arabs especially—we just want to be doom, doom, doom [mimics scrolling on a phone] and then we cry with each other. I’m not saying that people should stop doing this, maybe it is effective.

"But from my point of view, if people started unfollowing me because of that then it doesn’t matter what I’m posting, because it’s not going to be seen. I want to continue working, to become more successful, more vocal, so I will be invited and asked to talk at higher profile shows and opportunities… Piers Morgan, Joe Rogan… suddenly your message can reach a lot more people. But right now I have people cursing me, and judging me if I post about my upcoming shows. ‘You didn’t post about Gaza today’. But they forget that this is my livelihood.”

So the internal conflict continues. The desire to simply be himself, a comedian, and not have the pressures of a people, versus the knowledge that sometimes he cannot remain silent.

“I do what I do because you feel it’s the right thing,” he says. But then it comes: ‘you are our voice’. Basically you are putting all your expectations on a human being and, at a certain point, maybe they won’t be able to speak up. Maybe they’re tired, maybe they’re afraid. But people are so frustrated by politicians that they come to comedians, actors, footballers. There is a weight on us because people follow our work. But really, we don’t have the solution.

“At a certain point you start to become erased for it, too. For the cause. You’re suddenly responsible for talking only about this subject. I’m not a news agency, I’m not a politician, I’m not an activist. I’m just a comedian that was in a position to serve the cause in some way. Maybe I will do it again. This is life. Life is variable.”

The variable of Youssef’s life has certainly been evident since leaving Egypt; from Netflix documentaries to appearing twice last month in the UAE at COP28, to working his way up to become a successful—as he puts it—‘mid-level’ comedian in the US. But that profile has suddenly gone stratospheric. It’s an uneasy career boost, in all honesty. But he has too many years on the clock to take it all too seriously.

“Before Piers’ show I was doing well. I was filling theatres, shows in Europe, the Middle East, which is great, a good life. Then that show catapults you to a totally different level. But you remain humble. You don’t take this world too seriously. It’s better to enjoy what you have right now, and not to get too hung up about your achievements. Nothing stays forever.”

The sheer exhaustion felt by Bassem Youssef when he left Egypt for the safety of himself and his family over a show that would, anywhere else in the world, have presumably seen him honoured. How do you come back from that? The frustratingly simple answer is: with time. But the years only attach a band aid, they don’t erase. If you’re lucky, however, those scars can take you someplace else.

On November 17, 2023, Bassem Youssef’s stand-up show sold out the Sydney Opera House. Nine years, pretty much, to the day that he had left his homeland. It was a groundbreaking experience that followed a wildly popular extended tour of Australia. In those moments, when we actually get what we dream about, we’re often drawn into introspection and reflection. But when you ask Youssef if he misses Egypt you get a quick-fire “no.” Almost as if he’s trying to say the word before anything else slips out (although he does caveat it with Red Sea beaches and Egyptian mangoes). As for the haters, well those nine years have brought perspective.

“I’ve been on a lot of rollercoasters,” he says before quickly adding the word “emotional” to ensure we don’t think he’s been obsessing over theme parks all this time. “I think when I left Egypt there was a lot of bitterness and a lot of anger. I felt that I was treated unfairly, that I had done something spectacular for the Egyptian media and was punished for it. So, you want to succeed to show the people back home who doubted you, who celebrated your failure, that you’ve still got it. But you know what I found when I did it? Nothing. When you get to that good place, you really don’t care anymore.”

At the Sydney Opera House Youssef had once again done his research. He had spoken to the Arab community and was sad to hear that they felt the Palestinian flag was becoming synonymous with terrorism. Determined to do something special in their honour, he promptly learned a traditional Dabke dance; something to perform on the night at the end of his show. And so, he duly danced with Palestinian dancers in a rare moment of hope. “It was a way of humanising Arabs,” he explains, before pausing. “Maybe if they see some of our culture (before they steal it) they might actually respect us as humans and, hopefully, allow us to live.”

And there you have the complex realities of Bassem Youssef wrapped up in just a few lines. The funny and the fundamental, the gag with a sting in its tail, his art and identity combined. It’s an internal struggle that you feel could play out for some time. Ultimately, the man from Cairo might not want to be a hero. The truth is that he looks set to play the role for the foreseeable future.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY Amina Zaher
STYLING BY Laura Jane Brown
PRODUCTION BY Steff Hawker
SET DESIGN BY Yehia Bedier
H&MU BY Kasia Domanska
STYLING ASSISTANCE BY Christina Leighton
LIGHT ASSISTANCE BY Mostafa Adbu
PRODUCTION ASSISTANCE BY Sarah Kuleib

Originally published on Esquire Middle East

He hardly looks like a man with a green thumb, let alone a whole garden. Darren Loke, who is behind Omitir, Veblen Supplies and handles operations at Aa Furniture, collects plants—mostly aroids and caudiciforms.

His interest in them was first piqued during his time with his ex. She had plants, and in those heady days of romance, he lapped up her overspilt passion. He started his own collection; a few here and there initially. Until his hobby blossomed into an obsession. When the pandemic hit, he was plunged even deeper into his garden.

“Obviously, when you start a hobby, you want to explore and understand the craft,” Loke explains. “There are plants that grow around us but then you discover others from the highlands [ecosystem] or more temperamental ones like cold-loving plants that won’t survive in Singapore. It came to a point where I had to concede to only growing plants that can thrive in our climate.”

Before the use of hashtags, interest in plants stopped short of simply knowing their general nomenclature, not even their genus. When it comes to describing a tree, most can say that it has leaves and is covered with bark, but falter if pressed for specifics.

Then, social media made it easier to identify plant types. COVID brought about a heightened insularity that accelerated plant interest for shut-ins. “It used to be that any plant tips you get would most probably be from a US writer with knowledge about plants in their region,” Loke said. “Now it’s more varied.”

Ficuses are his jam. While commonly found in Singapore, a ficus plant has different subspecies; some hail from Myanmar, others from Japan. Loke is attracted to their forms, finding them “interesting”. Driven by aesthetics, Loke would pair a plant with the pot.

You may have heard people say that having a garden helps them relax. Not Loke. It’s the opposite for him. He used to enjoy tending to his plants whenever he returned from work but his obsession led him to constantly fret about them. “If you think about it, it can be a chore,” Loke says.

He has stopped counting but Loke reckons he has about 400 plant species. Then, catching himself, he adds a disclaimer: “But I’ve cut down a lot.” His current collection is stored in two places: at Aa Furniture showroom and Chwee Nursery in Seletar.

Plants at the nursery blossom due to the humidity. Once they are ready, Loke propagates them and transfers them to the showroom for display and sale. These plants are suitable for indoors and their presence helps customers to visualise, and inspires them to spruce up their own homes with a plant.

He waters the plants twice a week at the showroom and once a week at the nursery. Knowing that his plants are in an environment where they can thrive, assuages his fears about their survival. “I believe,” Loke adds, “that some plants thrive in neglect. Just give them the basics and let nature take care of the rest. In the end, they are plants, right? We shouldn’t be working for them.”

He tried growing a Pachypodium namaquanum but the species is found in dry rocky deserts and thrives in harsh conditions—extreme summer heat and wind. They can survive in a tropical setting, he says. “Think of it as a controlled situation. Air-conditioning with artificial grow lights just to maintain that environment but it’s not sustainable because, at the end of the day, these guys won’t reach their full growth potential.”

To Loke, a plant is only ready when it starts flowering. “That’s when the plant goes through a full cycle of growth, which means it’s healthy in that current condition. That’s something I definitely learnt. There are a lot of expensive mistakes.”

It is an expensive hobby to get into. The pandemic brought about a price inflation in the plant market, where the entrepreneurial and, depending on who you ask, the exploitative, took advantage by flipping plants for a higher profit. These days, plants are more affordable, the best time to get into the hobby, if you ask us.

Loke doesn’t refute that this can be considered an old man’s hobby. “Gardening taught me to slow down. For the tangible side of things, there are some rare plants that only a few importers can bring in. You’ll just need to make the right contacts. With enough money, you can get almost any plant you want.

“Even so these are life forms that will come and go,” Loke says as he plucked the leaves of a frankincense plant and crushed them between his fingers. With cupped hands, he breathed in the balsamic and woody fragrance.

From the ashes of the pandemic, the local plant community has grown ever larger. While some might opine that it’s just another consideration to create a space for a garden; think about this: it was all green before we intruded. Maybe, space can be made for both.

Photography: Jaya Khidir

It was a decision made during COVID. To not give a damn. To not care if the brands that he worked with knew what he does in his art practice. It may seem unusual for a marketing person to take on this stance, but Eduardo Enrique isn’t the average marketing person.

“All I do for work is to convince brands to stay true to what they believe in and connect with the public in a very sincere way,” Enrique shares. 

Like many major world events—9/11, a reality-show star becoming president, the Rohingya refugee crisis, Covid—it is these sorts of grand incidents that one would be cast into an existential funk. For Enrique, he wonders if he should stop hiding who he is and what he does. 

He is no stranger to taking on a nom de plume. His earlier endeavour was Dick Worldwide, where he took fashion accessories and turned them into phalluses. Dick Worldwide blew up when Hypebae reported on his project. He didn’t give a lot of information about himself. He specifically kept away from using pronouns that might give away his gender identity. 

“I didn’t want to attach an identity to the project because it plays a role in what licences you have as an artist,” Enrique says. “It's not a celebration of masculinity. I chose penises because [they are] the oldest form of mockery where there are graffiti of penises back in Renaissance times. If I said I was a woman in the Middle East, the public will see the work in an entirely new way.” 

Identity defines what sort of roles you can have, or even what sort of roles the public expects you to inhabit. As an artist, Enrique finds it challenging to play with sexuality in his work because there’s too much tension around the subject. For Brand Love, Enrique’s last exhibition in Singapore before he left for Hong Kong, he continues questioning pop culture’s fixation with brands with a what-if: What if there was a Nike retail bondage store? 

Taking the identity of a well-known sports brand, Enrique reconstituted it and created fetish garments and bondage equipment. He made sure to keep the installations to be ‘fair’ across genders. “There were two mannequins—one male, one female. I wanted to make sure there’s a good balance between the sexes,” he says. 

“Because we’re in the age of representation, everybody represents something; [they] represent the voice of a certain thing. That’s why my identity as an artist has only to do with the fact that I’m also [a] marketer; it’s never a celebration and a critique against consumerism. It’s an observation because I’m also [a] huge consumer.”

For New Painting, which was held at the Substation in 2020, there was a piece of work with the spray-painted words ‘God’ and ‘Gucci’ with checkboxes next to them. On the first day of the show, a woman, who was smoking mere minutes ago, came in and approached Enrique. She asked him which one he’d pick. He looked at the painting, then back to her. Both, he replied. The woman looked at him and, with a smile, said thank you and left.

WHAT IS EDUARDO ENRIQUE’S BRAND? 

“I’m a creative trying to bridge disciplines. Especially in Singapore, everything is so young and arbitrary,” he admits. 

At this point in time, Enrique feels that he is at a perfect intersection to talk about consumerism because he represents the companies in selling the product while commenting on the commercialism part of it. “There’s a love-and-hate relationship,” Enrique says. 

But does that make him a hypocrite? Or can one man embody opposites? 

Enrique funds his own shows. That keeps him free and honest; he is untainted by favours that come with other people’s money. But Enrique thinks that is just how he is. He’s never asked for permission. For his first show, New Painting, he eschewed asking people for permission lest he heard the word no. 

He’s a one-man operation, a self-starter. He chose the Substation, put up his own money, created the artwork which he mounted himself, and opened his exhibition to the public. In his head, he has calculated all possible scenarios of things that could go right and wrong. If he had dwelled on these scenarios, he’d never have put up an art show.

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Eduardo Enrique’s bio on The Artling states that “the artist explicitly denies talking about his nationality, as he maintains that one should not be judged based on their geographical origin”. Fair that. But it is in this writer’s opinion that to know where you’re going, you need to know where you’ve started from.

Enrique grew up in Caracas, Venezuela. It’s a setting he describes as “very conservative”. His family model isn’t traditional: his parents divorced and his mother raised her kids by herself.

He sees parallels with his mother. “We have the same work ethic,” Enrique reveals. “She’s a go-getter and she finishes what she starts. I don’t think her parents allowed her to be creative. My mum wanted to study architecture but she was forced to choose something else. 

“But she is a fount of creativity and while she never articulated it, she taught me that, to a certain extent, there always needs to be an element of joy in what you do.” 

His childhood was idyllic, but living in a third-world country that’s prone to coups and political upheavals, he became familiar with uncertainty. His family were nomads; Enrique never spent more than four years in the same place. It’s a transient lifestyle that is rather normal to him. He remembers that when he hired someone to help him move, the person asked where the rest of the furniture was. “I’m like, no, this is it,” Enrique says. “As a minimalist, I’ve to let go. Materialism is cyclical.” 

Even the artworks?

“I think you need to be detached to them emotionally,” he says matter-of-factly. “I dispose of a lot of my artwork. I’ll tell people on Instagram that I’m getting rid of a piece and it’s up for grabs.” There is an item that he cannot abandon.

Nike shoes.

He was never much for brands, even when he was living as a stereotype of a Brooklyn hipster when he was working for the creative agency, Swell in New York. Biking, buying vinyls... Enrique was into fashion but he wasn’t into the hype of it. 

“My whole background is in fashion advertising; fashion was about vanity,” he notes. “As a child, vanity was my way of patching up a lot of my insecurities. You buy things to feel empowered, to feel cool.” 

So, when he saw a black pair of Nike Air Force 1, it spoke to him. Enthralled by the silhouette, he forked over money for the sneakers and became a returning customer. He has a collection of Air Force 1s that he can’t bear to be rid of. He lugs them around, this minimalist and his yoke of passion. 

His mother and he lived separately but they still saw each other. Enrique was working at Fabrica then. “She ended up in Singapore. She called me one day and said, hey, I’m going through breast cancer treatment. I quit [my job] and moved to Singapore.”

She got better and Enrique expected to be in Singapore for six months but it stretched to six years. During his tenure, he worked for two creative agencies and made his foray as a full-fledged artist.

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A friend—who prefers to remain anonymous—owns, according to Enrique, “one of his best pieces today”. It’s called "Nude Model in Air Jordans". Taken from his exhibition New Paintings, the piece is a large canvas with the title spray-painted on the back. “When I started, it was important for me to land the idea that I’m not interested in technicality. I’m a conceptual artist. I don’t care about the quality of things. I want people to feel like they could have done what I’ve done. 

“New Painting was about classic themes with a twist of modern consumerism. For the front, I tried to render nude modelling or Jordans in so many different ways. But I’ve decided that the front will remain hidden. The painting only exists in your mind and that to me is the best painting I’ve done. 

“This guy looks at it and says that he loves it but can’t articulate why. I told him that I’ll sell it to him if he promises never to see what’s on the front. He agreed, and knowing him, he never did peek at the front.”

---

The original plan for Brand Love was to put up a pop-up in the middle of the street. Enrique’s name wouldn’t be on it, but it would be a pop-up that was selling these art pieces. “I’m not Banksy. I’m not somebody with a following,” he states. 

So, Enrique got local art gallery Art Now to house his exhibition during Art Week. “I wanted to make it clear that is art,” he explains. “So we put up all the signs that say I’m not affiliated with Nike. There was only so much planning we could do until Nike sends in the cease-and-desist. It would have been a much different show but I’ll be happy with that outcome as well.” 

This time, he got collaborators to design the interior. He set aside a space for Nike’s cease-and-desist letter. A space in the corner, almost like a taunt. It remained empty throughout the showing. 

Sexual liberation, a commentary on materialism, but there’s another takeaway from Brand Love that not many people will pick up. It’s about courage. “I wanted people who viewed the exhibition to tell me that it took a lot of courage,” Enrique says. Remember, this man is an overthinker and that sort of trait can eclipse that first step in doing. 

Can you imagine doing something that doesn’t shake things up? You can chalk it up to Enrique’s revolutionary South American way of thinking. But to have a true revolution in the culture, you’ll need to challenge the status quo. Love Brand is Enrique’s own little coup in the local art world. He hopes that it’ll at least inspire people to take bigger risks.

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Enrique’s life is a series of happy accidents. Recently married (he met his flight-attendant wife on the plane), they are moving to Hong Kong for his new job with Edelman. “Motion represents so much of my life and Singapore is such a dream to live in. There’s no safe place than here, but I am curious about what else is out there,” Enrique says. “Hong Kong seems like a chaotic place, and having come from the chaos I need a little bit of it.”

But first, they would need to travel to Russia so that his wife can get her travel permit. It would be weeks after they arrive there that Russia would invade Ukraine. The battle reminded Enrique of his past, but what he thinks of current events will be another story of his to tell. 

Still, his life is never boring. “My biggest fear in life is to get stuck," Enrique says, "so I’m always challenging myself to just keep blooming."

Originally published April 2022

I LOVE BLACK. I love leather jackets, and I like having my old favourite T-shirts. I end up buying the same outfit over and over.

I WAS NEVER Mr Hardcore. When we first started playing together, there was a big trend of who can play the fastest. And it was like, “Well, I don’t want to do that.” That’s not really musical for me. It became almost a bit macho, which is something we were definitely trying to get away from.

WE DIDN’T WANT TO be a bunch of tough guys. We would rather have bigger hearts than bigger muscles.

I’M ONE OF SIX KIDS. I’m the youngest. It was loud. Everybody was funny. Everything seemed pretty much like a normal big family, whatever that means. But then that dynamic really switched when my father passed away when I was 10.

IT WAS DARK. Everyone was sort of forced into dealing with that pain. It was that ghost that was always there. It still is.

THIS WOMAN NAMED Mrs Fiatarone taught me how to sing when I was really young, four or five. I was almost like this child lounge act. I’d sing show tunes. I would sing at veterans’ hospitals. Children’s hospitals.

I MADE A RECORD when I was five. It was called “Look for Love,” and it was recorded at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. It got local radio play. That moment stuck with me my whole life. “Oh, you can make records.”

I MARRIED THE RIGHT PERSON. That’s a big deal. My wife really was smarter than I was. I was more spontaneous and wild, where she could be more practical and knew how to make plans better. But we were the right people for each other.

WHATEVER THE CRITICISMS WERE, though, I had enough of a chip on my shoulder that I wasn’t going to let anybody hold me down.

I’M OBSESSED WITH MUSIC. I just am. If I wasn’t in a big band, I would be working at a record store or teaching guitar lessons or doing anything to support my musical habit.

I LOVE THE BACHELOR. I love watching Bachelor in Paradise. You could play a drinking game and every time they say, “Welcome to Paradise,” you drink.

I NEVER GREW UP in any kind of religion. I tried to go to Sunday school, but it never really worked out.

SURFING IS ONE THING for me that has really been kind of spiritual. When you’re out in the ocean, it’s the most powerful force in the world.

I DO PRAY. I try and think of something out there that is a higher power, just to make sure I’m keeping my ego in check.

I DON’T LIVE IN LOS ANGELES. And when I do go to Los Angeles, you really get to know what all the perks are of being a rock star. It’s like you’re almost on someone else’s vacation.

I LIKE BEING A NORMAL PERSON. I like being someone that just lives in a community and has good friends and strong relationships that are based on the same life experiences that we’re all going through.

THEN I’LL PLAY A GIG in front of a hundred thousand people and I go, “Holy crap!” That doesn’t get old. It’s fun. But I don’t ever want being a rock star to be an excuse for being lazy.

I WAS TALKING to someone once and they asked me, “Why are you afraid of dying?” And I said, “I’m afraid of the darkness.” And they said, “How do you know it’s dark?” And I was like, “That’s a really good question. I have no idea what it’s like.”

SOBRIETY IS NOT a one-and-done kind of thing. I’ve definitely fallen off the wagon several times.

RIGHT NOW I don’t drink. And I like myself. If I was to put one thing that would get in the way of everything I wanted to achieve in my life, alcohol would be it. I make no guarantees. But right now it feels better.

PUNK HAS NEVER BEEN DEAD. It’s alive with the kids. When kids get together and want to play music together or create art or create fanzines, that’s what keeps it alive. Not what’s popular or anything like that.

Originally published on Esquire US

"It's absolutely false to think that we in democratic countries have it any different to China," insists Frederic Lemieux. "The only difference is that China is open about what it does and we have a more layered, subtle approach. Governments say they’re not bad but the fact is that they have access to everything if they want it. Frankly, it's hard to grasp the scope of the surveillance apparatus today."

Lemieux is a professor at Georgetown University, US, specialising in information technology, and he uses a virtual private network. He avoids Zoom and social media; has "privacy settings through the roof". Lemieux is only "friends" online with people he’s met several times in person. He watches what he says in emails, won’t wear a smartwatch. And he is not remotely paranoid.

Just look, he says, at the mobile surveillance spyware Pegasus—technically illegal in the US. And yet the FBI has just been caught out. They are forced to cancel its arrangement with a government contractor that used the tool on its behalf. It’s the latest instance of an abuse of power. And the data breaches that underscore it are uncovered somewhere around the world every few months. Many more, one can only assume, are not. "So am I hopeful of some correction to this surveillance culture?" says Lemieux. "No."

Perhaps this culture has been a long-time coming. After all, the idea of systematic surveillance is not new. The Panopticon was the name given to an ideal prison devised by philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1787. In it, every prisoner would—as an encouragement to improved behaviour—be observable without ever knowing if they were being observed. It would, as Bentham put it, create a "sense of invisible omniscience". And, he added, more darkly: "Ideal perfection would require that each person should actually be in that predicament, during every instant of time. This being impossible, the next thing to be wished for is, that, at every instant, seeing reason to believe as much, and not being able to satisfy himself to the contrary, he should conceive himself to be so."

In Bentham's time, this was no more than a thought experiment. Today the situation is very different. As the tech entrepreneur Maciej Ceglowski put it to a US Senate committee in 2019, "Until recently, even people living in a police state could count on the fact that the authorities didn’t have enough equipment or manpower to observe everyone, everywhere". Now, it seems, it looks as though they "enjoyed more freedom from monitoring then than we do living in a free society today."

It’s easy to see why. The aforementioned spyware, with advanced processing power, can now collate, save and analyse truly awesome quantities of data. Increasingly prevalent CCTV has morphed into often erratic facial-recognition technology and biometrics. That includes the unevidenced idea that people’s emotional state can be read through their physical appearance. Drones have provided 'eyes in the sky'. These digital currencies—actively promoted in many nations as a stepping stone to doing away with cash—will allow the tracking of all financial transactions. So-called 'smart cities'—the UN recognised Singapore as a world-leading example—see the mass deployment of intrusive sensors to monitor its citizenry. Supposedly with the intention of improving the urban environment. And there's ever more wearable tech, RFID tags, GPS dots and the growing Internet of Things to provide anyone sufficiently well-resourced with a detailed picture of what once was considered private.

“But then we have also become largely indifferent to matters of privacy,” stresses sociologist Dr Gary Armstrong, co-author of The Maximum Surveillance Society. “Generation Facebook/ Tik-Tok / Instagram have a different perception of privacy than my generation—over 60s—and think nothing of self- revelation and self-promotion. As it stands the state knows less about me than, say, supermarket chains do.”

How so? Invariably because the greatest tool in the snoop’s armoury is, as Lemieux puts it, "our own complicity". We let Alexa listen and Ring Video doorbells watch. We sign up for loyalty schemes. Given that 86 per cent of the growing world’s population owns a smartphone, we willingly allow the means of our own monitoring. David Lyon, director of the Surveillance Studies Centre and professor of sociology and law at Queen’s University, Ontario, argues that while CCTV might remain the most powerful symbol of surveillance, to still think of it as the most powerful means of surveillance is way out of date. That's the gadget in our own pocket. Our self-imposed, frantically upgraded, style-conscious ankle monitors. He calls the result 'dataveillance', our supervision and assessment through a melding of state and corporate interests.

"And that’s been mutating and accelerating at a rapid rate," he says. Lyon cites a recent case in Canada. A user of the ordering app from a Tim Hortons put in a "freedom of information" request about its function. He discovers that, even when he thought he had disabled it, the app continued to track his movements. It even recorded when he visited one of the company’s competitors.

What he still didn’t grasp, however, was "the other uses that data was undoubtedly put to. His data was sold to and among other corporations and institutions in what has become a globally-significant economic system," says Lyon. "It's not just about being tracked but analysed, and then treated according to the profile then created and from which all kinds of judgments are made—by employers, healthcare providers, banks, insurers, law enforcement. The thing is that most people just don’t get that this is even happening."

Small wonder then that when the public reaction to surveillance is discussed it is, at best, rather muted. As Lyon puts it, "we've become seduced [through our smartphones] by the idea of the world organised around our needs, living in a very consumerist society in which efficiency, convenience and comfort have been elevated into core values"—"luxury surveillance" as it has been dubbed. And even if we give it some thought, our rationalisations justifying our acceptance of surveillance tend to be misguided, adds Juan Lindau, professor of political science at Colorado College, US, and author of Surveillance and the Vanishing Individual.

People dismiss the encroachment of surveillance because "they have nothing to hide"—"but it's a bullshit notion that they wouldn't mind if every detail of their life was out there for all to see," Lindau notes. Or they say they're too irrelevant to be of interest—"but if you ever do anything of even remote political consequence then you’re immediately not irrelevant to the state," he adds. Or there's the argument that any one personal revelation is now merely lost in a giant sea of revelations and so doesn't matter.

"But its evil brilliance... is that tech gives the veneer of distance and [us the sense of] anonymity that is entirely fictitious," he says. "It is not impersonal. We spend our lives now interacting with machines that observe all, that never forget and never forgive, such that the delineation between our inner and outer selves is [breaking down] by stealth."

It's also because thinking seriously about the boundaries for surveillance is relatively new. Before the seismic revelations of Edward Snowden, much concern about surveillance was dismissed as so much conspiracy thinking, argues Professor Peter Fussey, an expert in criminology at the University of Essex, UK. That, and because much of the surveillance apparatus is, governments so often argue, for our own safety. That's the line Myanmar has taken in the junta’s crackdown on protests. Or for more effective, worryingly "proactive", increasingly militarised crime prevention.

That's concerning. As Armstrong argues, we're well on our way to systems that look for the potentially suspicious or merely inappropriate. "Doing that requires a database of both known and potential offenders. And such schemes are always sold on the benefits of apprehending these known offenders," he says. "But these schemes are expansionist and soon develop databases of 'people of interest' too".

But it's also concerning when national emergencies are used to bring in more surveillance. We see subsequent spikes in favour of its expansion. A TNS poll conducted in 2014—three years after 9/11, but also not long after Snowden—found that 71 per cent of respondents thought the government should prioritise reducing the public threat "even if this erodes people's right to privacy".

"The idea that surveillance is for our own safety holds water, but only up to a point. Surveillance doesn't inherently make us safer. And that’s aside from the misplaced assumption that surveillance always works, as many cases of misidentification suggest," says Fussey. (He also an independent human rights observer of London’s Metropolitan Police while it trialled facial recognition technology from 2020.)

"The problem with people being suddenly more accepting of surveillance after, say, a terrorist attack is that the powers then given [to the machinery of state] don't tend to be rolled back later," he adds. "And then there is the fact that if we keep creating these tools that can be used for surveillance—even if that's not their intended use—they will be. There is simply just so much evidence for their misuse."

Furthermore, the expanding means of surveillance—from gait recognition to remote heartbeat analysis—are developed at such a pace that campaigners and legislators can barely keep up. It says something concerning that a hugely powerful business like Amazon has been entirely open in its ambition to create tech products with what it calls "ambient intelligence". They are always there in the background harvesting your life.

There's mission creep to contend with as well. If it wasn't bad enough the state and commerce wanting to watch us, remote working has encouraged a culture of surveillance among employers too. There was a boom in monitoring software. Tech used to map the behaviour, mood, eye movement, location, online activity and productivity of often oblivious workers. The American attorney Zephyr Teachout has predicted the coming of "surveillance wages". This is where each worker’s pay is constantly changing according to that worker's perceived alignment with their employer's expectations. Data would be used for hiring and firing decisions.

Could a new ad-free business model be devised for the web, disincentivising data collection? Could the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation be adopted beyond its borders? Even as Facebook obtusely moaned about how it and other regulations "may be costly to comply with and may delay or impede the development of new products, increase our costs, require significant management time and subject us to remedies that may harm our business".

Is there scope for a rebalancing of the interests of the surveillance industrial complex and individuals' rights? This segment makes billions from monetising data flows, with China and US the leading exporters of surveillance tech. Surely the transparency and accountability necessary for the relationship between state and citizen to function requires it? And yet, right down to how certain parts of your smartphones algorithms work, all is opaque, and getting more so.

"We have to have a much clearer sense of how surveillance will be used, whether it's legitimate and the necessary limits on its use," implores Fussey. "We're invited to think that the technology is just too complicated, but actually the standards we need to protect—standards in international law—are basic. The problem is who enforces those standards. We need the right policies, programmes and oversight."

"My concern is that so much surveillance now isn't just about watching where you go and what you do but what information you consume and what thoughts you express," adds Lemieux. "Surveillance can now be used to gauge opinion and so influence opinion too. It's not just about watching us through data but manipulating us through data."

Indeed, the instruments of surveillance only look set to get more invasive, more clever, more wily and devious. The tide might be turning. Lindau argues that after a long period of being "promiscuous with sharing our information", some of us are waking up. With low download rates for various government-driven tracking apps during Covid, the pandemic opened the doors to data collection and tracking on a scale that would have been imaginable just a few years before. Some cities— Portland, Oregon, for example—have banned the use of facial recognition in their stores and restaurants. And there’s a growing academic interest in surveillance overreach too.

And yet the more a surveillance mindset is applied, the more ordinary it seems. "Citizens are allowing greater and greater intrusion, to the point where the distinction between public and private has really broken down at this juncture," suggests Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of The Rise of Digital Repression. "The smartphone has normalised surveillance but it's a slippery slope. You continue to push at the boundaries and surveillance just becomes more and more acceptable. And there are no concerns about this because there is no political will [to make changes]. And there's no political will because nobody seems to care about it. We're seeing a greater level of omni-surveillance made possible and that needs more push-back."

In fact, we're moving towards TIA or Total Information Awareness. "The goal to know everything about everyone in real-time," as Lindau explains. "And so far all that has limited that most totalitarian of ambitions has been the tools."

The really bad news? The tools are coming. The AI Global Surveillance Index suggests that at least 75 out of 176 countries, many being liberal democracies, use AI for automated surveillance purposes. "All considerations we have about surveillance get put on steroids with AI," Lindau says. The French government, for example, has passed a law allowing the use of AI in mass video surveillance at next year’s summer Olympics in Paris. For AI to work, the data must flow. Your data. Everybody's data. "The ease with which AI will be able to amass and process information, combined with facial recognition, well, that’s ominous," he says.

He cites by way of example his recent experience of returning home from a holiday in Norway. Passing through the notoriously aggressive and prying US Immigration, he expected the typical barrage of questions. Instead, he was just asked to look into a small camera. That was it. Lindau asked if they wanted the usual details about where he had been and for how long and why. No, they said casually, we already know that.