How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S15, Ep7 How To Fail: Nihal Arthanayake on fatherhood, chicken bongs and the most difficult conversation he's ever had

Episode Date: October 12, 2022

Nihal Arthanayake is a broadcaster and author. He is the host of Radio 5 Live’s Afternoon Show and won interviewer of the year at the 2019 BBC Radio and Music Awards. His new book, Let’s Talk: How To Have Better Conversations, investigates the art of good dialogue - a skill that has served him handsomely in his chosen career.He joins me to talk about his academic failures, his failures as a son, husband and father, and his failures in friendship. Plus he makes me burst out laughing with an anecdote involving Method Man and a chicken bong (not a typo). Listen to the full episode to find out more...--Nihal's book, Let's Talk, is out now and available to purchase here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/lets-talk/nihal-arthanayake/9781398711464--How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted and produced by Elizabeth Day. To contact us, email [e-mail]--Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayHow To Fail @howtofailpod Nihal Arthanayake @therealnihal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger. Because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. I'm your host, author and journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned

from failure. Nihal Arthanaike is a broadcaster and author. He's the host of Radio 5 Live's afternoon show and won interviewer of the year at the 2019 BBC Radio and Music Awards. Over the course of three hours, his guests can range from hostage negotiators to former presidents, from rock stars to TV presenters, to ordinary people who simply find themselves caught up in extraordinary events. His interviewing style is warm, open, informed and empathetic. No surprise then that Ricky Gervais said Arthur Nyaker was well on his way to becoming a national treasure. But in his new book, Let's Talk, How to Have Better Conversations, Arthur Nyaker says the most influential person on developing his own conversational skills was not a celebrity, but his own mother, who worked as an NHS nurse for 40 years. It's a skill that has served him well in his career. After growing up in Essex, he became a music industry promoter before joining Radio 1 in 2002. His TV appearances

include Masterchef, Nevermind the Buzzcocks and Celebrity Mastermind, when his specialist subject was the Tottenham Hotspur footballer Glenn Hoddle. When asked a few years ago what advice he'd give any aspiring broadcaster, Arthur Nayaka replied, stay curious about the world, ask questions, you don't have to fill up the space with your own opinions. Ni hao. Welcome to How to Fail. And I'm so intimidated to be interviewing you. You're not interviewing me. I've listened to your podcast. It's incredibly conversational and warm and empathetic. It's all the things you just described of me. So this will be a breeze. This will be an absolute breeze. Well, thank you so much for coming on. And I have to preface this by saying your failures and the way you wrote them were so moving and open and thought provoking. And you sent me six rather than the requisite three,

which I think is so interesting. Are you very comfortable with failure? And I don't mean that. I don't mean that in a judgmental way. But is it something that you are au fait with? Or was it difficult for you to come up with those failures when you were having your conversation on how to fail which is about how men find it difficult to admit they've failed at anything right so you know the typical man might just say look if I've made any failure at all maybe I've just given too much of myself to the world right and you go well mate that's not a failure right like you're actually bigging yourself up right so it's a kind of constantly moving forward Elizabeth and looking at failures as a way of kind of constructing a better future through them I love that and and one of the things that I noticed in the very early seasons of this podcast and I've spoken about this before is the fact that a lot of the men I approached didn't conceive of themselves as ever having failed and couldn't really get their head around the concept. Because

I think there are two things at play there. One is cultural conditioning and the very cliched and limiting belief that quote unquote, cis hetero men can't be seen to fail. It's not manly. And then there's also the sense of if you're lucky enough to be born into a world made in your image, if you're lucky enough to be a white man, then the chances are that you don't see failure as something that you can't overcome, that it's just an obstacle on your path to eventual success. And I wondered how much of your position on failure is informed by the fact that you are not born into a world made in your image, just as I'm not as a woman or other marginalized people are not. How do you think that's affected your take on it? Oh, that's such a brilliant question. told from birth almost that we have to work twice as hard as white people to accrue the same results.

It means that failure has attached to it a kind of catastrophe that perhaps white people don't have, because failure for us is failing our parents who left the country to give us a better life. our parents who left the country to give us a better life. Therefore, if we've failed, we've in some way failed them. And we've failed our relatives at home who are looking to us to have been a success because we left the countries where our parents and our grandparents were born. So when you are told that you are going to have to work harder to get the same results, it does focus the mind. And you think of failures as amplified by that. So you try to avoid them at all costs. What an amazing answer. And you mentioned your parents there. And I really love to talk about your mom, who I mentioned briefly in the introduction

and who you write about in the book. Tell us about her. What was she like? Effervescent, cheeky, poetic, warm. She had a joyless childhood. Her father was murdered and her mother died six months afterwards of a broken heart. I actually did a documentary for the World Service about trying to discover what happened to my grandfather. He was shot. He was a lawyer, prominent lawyer. Some say that he was thinking of running for politics and a political rival had him killed. But it led to the dismantling of this middle class, led to the dismantling of this middle-class affluent family. And my mother was sent to live with a wicked step-mom,

an auntie that made her very much feel as though, as she did with her siblings as well, that they were not worthy, that they were not the equal of this wicked step-mother's own children. And what my mother decided to do, because she was hit and because, as I said, she was bereft of love really, was to be the opposite of that with her own children. To the point at which, which is a great source of, I think, consternation in my own marriage, is that I had a very liberal, a very soft, a very loving upbringing, right?

Which makes me a very relaxed, laid back kind of person who's not great on disciplining my own children. And she is marvellous in that respect. When we get older, we think about what our parents went through. You know, when we're younger, we're just kind of annoyed that they're parenting us. But then as soon as we get older and we think about what they've had to go through, we marvel at who they are. And I marvel at who my mother was to me and my brother and what she became and that she devoted her life to the NHS as a nurse, as a staff nurse. And she's getting older, obviously, and she's in her mid 80s and she's getting more and more frail. And that's I think the Queen's passing reminded me very much of my own mother's mortality and that she won't be around forever.

Because you kind of have this assumption, weirdly, because, of course, it's not true that they'll just be in your life forever. But I lost my father 22 years ago to a heart attack. And since then, my mother has been very much still this person who finds joy in the world and seeks it out, seeks out happiness. And I think that's an extraordinary talent to have. Extraordinary, given what she went through. And that was a childhood in Sri Lanka.

And you mentioned there that she was an NHS nurse for 40 years. How did she teach you about talking and connecting to people? What was it about that job that showed her the importance of real conversation? Well, if you're a medical professional, especially one that is, you know, customer facing, as it were, or patient facing, you are presented with, Elizabeth, my gosh, I mean, cross section of society, aren't you? At their most vulnerable, when they're angry, frustrated, scared, and you have to be there for them. You know, you're not there to be their friend, but you're certainly not there to make their life any more difficult than it already is. And how could it not imbue in you colossal amounts of empathy being a nurse? And it just meant that, as you know, as I write about in a book, we walk through Harlow Town Centre in Essex, where I grew up. And she can't walk 10 metres without someone stopping

and giving her an update on their intimate medical issues or saying, hello, nurse, how are you? And these were, you know, short, tall, rotunda, slim, old, young, black, white. So suddenly, you're just kind of by osmosis watching this woman talk to everybody in exactly the same way with no judgment there might be a little bit of gossip afterwards but with no judgment and listening to them because you have to right and that was annoying right for me and my brother because we want to get off and go and buy some sweets or go and look at trainers or something right and she's stopping there and talking to these people and we and buy some sweets or go and look at trainers or something right and she's stopping there and talking to these people and we're kind of tugging like come on mama come on

and she's like she'll just sit there and talk and I'm the same right like I'll talk to anyone for the longest amount of time you know I'm fascinated by people the other day I was actually in a car going back from the Cotswolds to Stockport where I live so that's quite a long drive as you know that's hours oh my gosh that guy who drove me I knew everything about his love life by the end of it but it was amazing his baby mother who he's not getting on with and then there's one girl that really likes him, but he doesn't like her. And then there's this other girl that he really likes, but she's not showing him the love.

And she took a picture that he felt was inappropriate and put on Instagram. I like this whole story was just unfolding. And in fact, about three days later, he sent me a text thanking me for listening to him because he needed to offload. I know you needed to offload. Okay, you said part of me is like, oh, how amazing. And part of me is like, for listening to him because he needed to offload. I know you needed to offload.

Part of me is like, oh, how amazing. And part of me is like, do you ever just want to be silent? Do you ever not want people to offload their entire life stories on you and just have a little quiet time in the back of the car? Well, I think the sad part of that is that quite often it's my wife, and this is a failure, it's my wife that is the one who gets the least of me because I come home and I don't engage enough with her. And that's something I'm working on. That's something I'm really trying to carve out time for because I've allowed it to become the case that I just come home

and I just want to be silent because I've given it to all these other people but actually my wife's the most important person in my life and that's a realisation that I've come to which I hope is not too late but I definitely need to make sure that I'm not all talked out for the people that love me and that I love. That's so interesting and I want to come on to talk about your book in a second. But before I do, do you think there's a psychological thing where you feel that your love for your wife is beyond question? It will always be there. So it ends up maybe being taken a little for granted. And everyone does that. It's very human.

But that you need to put active effort into making other people like you i think yes and i think part of that is still being that little brown kid in a white school trying to make allies because when it comes on top when the racism rears its ugly head you need allies and also as well part of it as a person of color is trying to build bridges to say look white people we're good people we're just like you right and several instances which will i'm sure go on to talk about in the book where you've seen how the power of conversation just connects people, connects people from different backgrounds, people who otherwise would be mistrusting of each other,

Elizabeth. And that's really, I guess, deep down, there is definitely a part of that. And that's very perceptive of you to ask. I think there is that for sure. But also as well, on a very human level, I am genuinely curious about people. And I genuinely want to know about them because I know how much my life has been enriched by talking to people. So Let's Talk, which is so everything I believe in, and I'm so glad you wrote this book because you're the perfect person to do it. And it's really overdue. And it taught me so much. to do it and it's really overdue and it taught me so much. And you look at difficult conversations and speak to lots of different people about how they do it. And one of them is this hostage negotiator, John Sutherland. And he talks about the Chinese symbol for listening, which I'm

fascinated by. Can you explain to us the relevance of that symbol? you explain to us the relevance of that symbol? So in English, we just say, are you listening? Right. And it's fairly innocuous and it doesn't really specify what you should be doing while you're listening. It doesn't impose upon you how important it is to actively listen. The Chinese have a very different attitude to this. And the symbol is called King, and it's split into four different quadrants. And each quad represents how you should listen. And the first one is the ears, obvious. Second one's the eyes, of course, nonverbal communication is very important. But then it encourages you to listen with your heart and also with your mind. And it also encourages you to focus entirely on that person that is talking. Therefore, for the Chinese, listening is active listening.

It isn't passive listening. It isn't listening while kind of glancing to your phone. Oh, yeah, really? Cool. Yeah. Yeah. No, really. Cool. It's not any of that. It is you have to be entirely involved with the person who is speaking you need to give them that respect and it's interesting that you could have said oh john where did you get that from some yoga retreat that you went on to some kind of mindfulness place that you went to this is what he used in teaching cadets about hostage negotiation.

This is how important and vital it was. It isn't some kind of new age hippie idea. It is imperative that this is how we see listening, that we conduct listening with all of those powers, with our eyes, with our ears, with our heart, with our mind, so that we are fully involved, fully engaged with the person who is in front of us. Sorry, my attention just wandered there. No, kidding. Kidding. That was just a joke. That's completely fascinating. And I wonder, I wonder, I ended the introduction with that quote that you gave about opinions. How much do you think opinions, preformed opinions get in the way of active listening? Oh, I mean, they are complete. You're putting up a shield, essentially, to try and bat away

other people's opinions. And social media encourages that kind of narcissism that we think that all that matters in the world are our opinions and that, my gosh, everyone's queuing up to hear our opinions. But a good conversation is about you moving into someone's space and you allowing them to come into your space. And also it's about having our orthodoxies challenged, Elizabeth, you know, and this is something that I've certainly been thinking about much more since I wrote the book, specifically with one example in the book, which is Dia Khan, who made this extraordinary Emmy award-winning documentary called White Right Meeting the Enemy, where she is a Muslim woman of colour, went and spent time with white supremacists and neo-Nazis. And she had to say to herself, the subtitle of the documentary

Meeting the Enemy, she said, actually, I had to recognise that to them, I was the enemy. And I had to interrogate that. Why would they see me as the enemy? What is it that has happened to them that turned them into these kinds of people who have these kinds of abhorrent views? And that's made me think a lot about how people that just project their opinions into the world are not listening. They're just projecting. John Sutherland, the police crisis negotiator, said this, you have to be set to receive, not constantly set to broadcast. And that's important. Set your mind to receive, to expect other opinions, to have your own orthodoxies challenged. And that I think makes for a much more fertile environment for

knowledge accumulation and just conversation. You know, we all become better people by listening, not by talking. What do you think is the most difficult conversation you've ever had? Don't say this one. This is the most pleasant one I've had in a long time. I think when I rang my brother up after he'd left a message on my phone saying, call me, something's happened to dad. And then I called him on the phone. We're outside a restaurant.

He was in Notting Hill. And I said, is he dead? And he said, yes. And I remember feeling like someone had just taken a run up and punched me in the gut. Yeah, I think that without question is the most difficult conversation I've ever had. Because I didn't want any of the details. I just wanted to know if my dad was alive or dead. And sadly, he wasn't alive. And he died in his armchair in our house in Essex of a heart attack.

And I think without question, that's the worst. Niall, thank you so much for sharing that. And I'm so sorry for what you went through yeah look I'm tearing up now I think it's something I'm still going through you know you can't ever really get over over that I don't think I don't think you ever should get over it it's a life-changing moment for everybody you know for me for my mother who'd been married to him for many years the love of her life for my brother yeah that's without question the most difficult conversation that i've ever had to have yeah yeah i do think grief is something you don't get over you live alongside and it's like a red paint drop in a big can of white paint. And it will forever change

the colour of the paint. You can't go back to the whiteness of before. That was a terrible metaphor, but you get what I'm saying. Yeah, you know, I mean, it is, it's there, isn't it? It's every time there's a funeral, every time your children achieve something, and you want to tell him about it, every time there's a funeral every time your children achieve something and you want to tell him about it every time you achieve something and you want to tell him about it and you know he's not there to stay how he feels about that i mean we were at my mother's this weekend and my children were saying i would have loved to have met him and i was saying well he would have definitely loved to have met you yeah he would have he would have doted on them

we're going to talk a bit more about your father in a minute but my final question about the book for now is you're a buddhist and i wondered what buddhism has to say about conversation if anything i think i need to set up my store by saying I'm culturally Buddhist more than I am a practicing, you know, it's not like I'm in the temple every day. I think one interesting thing about Buddhism, and pardon the kind of sexism of it, but is that man has no refuge but man. So I've always thought of that. And it's humans have no refuge, but humans in the sense that you can't just pray away your sins. You can't just give money to an organization, a religious organization and think that goes, you have a responsibility to yourself to be the best

person you can be and to believe in karma and to believe what goes around comes around and to believe what you put out into the world you shall receive and i think that very much informs how i see the world now look i'm not the dalai lama right i can be a complete dick at times as my wife would attest to right and various people perhaps in my career would attest to but i very much live by the fact I think one small fact is I've had the same mobile number since 1996 and lots of people in my position they have to change their numbers because they get crank calls or they got people that hated on them or they've messed with people and they've had to change their numbers

I never have and also you know when I did the launch for my book, a lot of people came out, and a lot of them came and said, you were the first one who did this for me. You were the first one who did that. You were the first one that believed in me. You were the first one that put me on TV. You were the first one that put me on radio. So I think that comes down to a degree of Buddhist thought and philosophy about just putting things of positivity out into the world and yeah I think as far as Buddhism goes that's probably where I would source that to I got my first mobile phone in 1998 and it was one of those Nokia 31011 yeah did you have that one probably a Nokia yeah because Nokia like owned the phone game didn't they until Apple came along and and Samsung

and various other people but yeah it was it was almost certainly a Nokia yeah and I've still got you know that same number which is amazing you know and now I'm you know I'm interviewing people and my mobile phone number is older than them which makes me feel quite oh my gosh right I recently hosted this event with and I introduced introduced on stage, Professor Matthew Goodwin, who was then going to do an In Conversation with Gordon Brown. And he started off by saying, because he's still a university lecturer at the University of Kent, he started off by saying, my recent crop of graduates were born in 2004. Stop. How is that possible? I'm trying to do the maths really quickly. I'm like, no, hang on a second. Yeah. 18 years ago. Yeah. 18 years ago. Oh, wow. Okay. Well, we'll leave that there. That's going to depress me for the rest of today. Let's depress ourselves some more.

Elizabeth, that was the exact reaction in the room of all these CEOs and, you know, CFOs and directors of all these companies that were amassed for this summit that I was co-hosting. And that was exactly the reaction. There was this audible gasp of, what happened? Where did my life go? It was just, it was quite miserable. Peyton, it's happening. We're finally being recognized for being very online. It's about damn time.

I mean, it's hard work being this opinionated. And correct. You're such a Leo. All the time. So if you're looking for a home for your worst opinions. If you're a hater first and a lover of pop culture second. Then join me, Hunter Harris, and me, Peyton Dix,

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Like, it's not a question of if Drake got his body done, but when. You are so messy for that, but we will be giving you the B-sides. Don't you worry. The deep cuts, the niche, the obscure. Like that one photo of Nicole Kidman after she finalized her divorce from Tom Cruise.

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Let's get on to your failures, because I want to give them their due space. They are, I mean, they're just so profoundly expressed. Your first failure is your academic life. Tell us why you chose this. By the way, when I say profoundly expressed, there are whole paragraphs I'm not reading out loud, but it's not just that your academic life is an abject failure, which you have also written, but I want you to put it into your own words for listeners. So your academic life, you've picked that as an abject failure. Why? Because I think it's going back to a comment I made earlier on about the expectations of Asians, or indeed any immigrants, to do better than their white counterparts in order to get the same

results. And sadly, I didn't get the results. I barely scraped through my then O levels as they were called in CSEs and then I got a CD and an E in my A levels and at the same time my cousins in Sri Lanka were off to universities in America and my uncle and auntie were boasting about their achievements and I was this kid who was just trying to be in the music industry or trying to rap and get a record deal and all this stuff that my parents didn't really understand the value of. And quite frankly, they would have been very, very worried. They kind of hid it from me, but, my brother, you know, went on to do accountancies now an IT systems analyst and is successful. But my eyes were not on that prize. That wasn't the prize. And I let them down. You know, I let my parents down without question. I remember when the A-level results were due, just going to the postman every morning to try and get that envelope before my parents did, because I was so terrified. I knew

I hadn't done well. I knew I hadn't worked hard enough that I saw college after the kind of strictures of my comprehensive school called Burnt Mill School in Harlow in Essex. The freedom of being at college, I totally abused. My incredibly sarcastic, Liverpudlian, Tory voting history lecturer left a note in my pigeonhole at college, which said, have you left? If not, why not? That was the note because I because I never just never went. Because I just never went. You know, I just was like, I go and hang out in the town centre, talk about music, generally kind of live this charmed life where I didn't do anything, right? You know, I was acting like some kind of minor aristocrat

with a trust fund. I'm just off of my, you know, year around Europe, like Byron, except I was just wandering around Harlow town centre for what seemed like two years. It wasn't quite Byron. Your grand tour. My grand tour, exactly. It was my grand tour, exactly. There was no opium and there was no velvet smoking robes.

It was just being in Harlow Town Centre, hanging outside a McDonald's for two years, pretty much. It was about as far from a grand tour as you can imagine. But yeah, so the failure was not realising my academic potential because I now interview people who come away from it saying that it was a brilliant interview. And it's people like Steven Pinker or Sebastian Foulkes. You know, these are incredibly clever people, many of whom went to Oxbridge or Harvard or Yale or Princeton.

And I'm kind of toe to toe with them. You know, I'm interviewing Carlo Rovelli, right? You know, the physicist. And he's saying, I never thought about it like that. Or that's a brilliant question. And you think to yourself, wow, you know, if I'd committed myself and now my children go to single sex schools. And my son is at a school where his academic prowess is nurtured, and he's blossoming, right. But I went to a school where I worked out pretty quickly, Elizabeth, that if I was going to be a nerd, I was going to get double picked on.

So I wasn't going to be that guy, I was going to be right, I've got to be one of the lads, I've got to not be a kind of studious Asian, they will go, oh, yeah, you're just one of them. And then thus be the kind of target for bullies. I'd be the guy that, you know, if you call me the P word, I'll punch you in the face. And then hopefully you won't call me it again. And then be a bit Jack the lad, you know, and that was to the detriment of my academic achievements. you know and that was to the detriment of my academic achievements but although I did end up going to a university called St Mary's College in Twickenham and the people who've been there are the brilliant Tom Grennan the singer Mo Farah Joe Wicks and Clara Amfo so there's I mean that's quite a cool alumni right from that's very that's the coolest alumni list I've ever heard it's I mean we don't have prime ministers. Looking back though, Nihal. Well, you've probably got more influential people than actual prime ministers, but looking back,

do you feel any sense of anger that because you were in an environment that was racist and bullying, you haven't used those words, I am, that you couldn't fulfil your potential, that actually you were hamstrung by your environment. Do you feel cross about that? Look at the life I have, right? And actually that was all formative. And just to be clear, the racism and the bullying started off in the first couple of years and then pretty much

disappeared for the kind of three or four remaining years. And any arguments I had weren't really ever about race after that. So I definitely don't want to paint the picture that my entire time at Burnt Mill School in Essex was one of racism and bullying. It certainly wasn't. And also, I don't live in a past encased in anger. I live in a past in joy. I had the most amazing experiences, more so in my 20s than in my teenage years. But when I was 15, 16, I was promoting rap events at the local venues. I was promoting them. Me and another few guys were putting them together, putting the bill together, performing on stage, choosing the DJs. We were doing that when we were teenagers. We had scope. I was going to London. I was at Notting Hill Carnival when I was a teenager, before there was a curfew, when you'd end up the

night being that there would be a mini riot ending up as the police tried to shut it down. And then we'd just find our way back to sleeping on a couch in someone's flat somewhere in South London you know I was going to Covent Garden every Saturday afternoon to meet up with the hip-hop community in the 80s with graffiti artists break dancers rappers hearing the latest news from New York that was coming out on god knows how because it was the 80s going to rap events going to see Run DMC play Public Enemy came out when I was 18, you know, and changed my life. So like I said, I encase my past in joy and positivity. What I don't do is allow it to be polluted by the negative things that happened.

Yes. There's this brilliant phrase in your book, actually, which is simply that you believe pessimism to be a luxury. And I'd never thought about it in that way. And I think that that is so right, that to be able to indulge yourself in thinking the worst means probably that you know, deep down, it will never happen to you you and I thought that was revelatory so I just wanted to thank you for that little light bulb moment well it's something I've always thought about and you've articulated it perfectly Elizabeth that I grew up around hip-hop culture and hip-hop culture was always about I'm the biggest I'm the baddest I'm the best it was all about projecting positivity. That's entirely what it was because the majority of people that practiced it from the roots of it were from places like Compton in South Central Los Angeles, from the South Bronx in New York,

places where there was no hope, right? So you had to make your hope. Whereas if you're sitting there in a privileged position you can say oh god everything's just so bad i don't know how people cope i really don't you know that you don't have that option yes yes well talking of hip-hop i'm a huge 90s hip-hop fan and i had the realization yesterday that dr dre's 2001 which for me is one of the seminal hip hop albums of all time, is 21 years old. Yeah. Wow. Wow. I know, right? I mean, and I was blessed enough that in the mid to late 90s, I was working for Hip Hop Acts. I was their PR and I got to spend time with Most Def and Nate Dogg in LA LA hanging out in most def's hotel

room at the chateau marmont talking about how erica badu had tried to snog him like it like mad 90s life that I had as a PR in the music industry going and doing gangstar as they came over to the UK and I got them on later with Jools Holland and being there in that audience to watch Guru and Premier picking Guru and Premier and their entourage up at the airport hanging out with Guru in his hotel room at like 9 30 in the morning talking about hip-hop you know it's extraordinary the 90s were crazy for me and the things that I experienced plus writing for Hip Hop Connection meant that I got to interview Snoop Dogg. I got to interview Method Man and Red Man,

both of whom were so high on marijuana that they were trying to work out how to turn a chicken carcass into a bong at a hotel on Park Lane. That's what. I mean, that's almost impossible, I would have thought. Yeah, it was a carcass.

They needed a chicken. Yeah, exactly. That was the issue. that's almost impossible i would have thought yeah it was a carcass of chicken yeah so yeah exactly that's the issue that was like just the rib that was so high they'd eaten the chicken yeah yeah exactly so they've got the munchies and then worked out and then i remember them i remember him blowing smoke into a glass evian bottle like a 1.5 litre bottle and then trying to suck the smoke out of the bottle into his nose and I was like thinking this is my life is there's actually a picture of me sitting in between them Method Man and Red Man with like a pile of marijuana on a table at the Metropolitan Hotel in Park Lane in the 90s I love It's like a walk down the 90s memory lane. The Met Bar. Just mentioned the Met Bar. Oh, burgeoning. But listen, before I get too diverted,

because I could talk about this for years, and I've also interviewed Snoop Dogg, but we'll chat about that after this interview. I thought just briefly, he was so charismatic and so intelligent. I thought just briefly, he was so charismatic and so intelligent. He's one of my favourite interviews of all time. In the email that you wrote to me, you talk about how the failure of your academic life, how you wonder how much strain it put on your father. And this was an unexpected turn when I read this and I found this very moving. Tell us more about that aspect of it. So my father was an academic success story, you know, degrees in maths and physics.

He won the academic prize at his all boys school, Arnanda College in Sri Lanka, in Colombo. He excelled academically in the sciences and mathematics specifically. He was a brilliant, brilliant man. And I wasn't. I didn't have that type of education. I didn't understand maths. I didn't get sciences. So it kind of felt disappointing.

I mean, I was very much my mother's son in that I leant much more towards the arts. My brother, who I said before, is a chartered accountant. So he definitely knows about numbers and I feel like our lack of academic success I say oh it's mine it's not my brother's my lack of academic success would have been a sense of embarrassment and shame to him because immigrant families do like to boast about their children's achievements and my achievements weren't academic and they weren't at school and in fact they really didn't happen until he died i mean you know i became a radio one dj in 2002 and

he died in 2000 okay i was a pr in the music industry and i was working with elton john and i was side of stage at madison square gardens while elton's performing to 20,000 people, or I'm in LA with Most Def, or I'm writing for Hip Hop Connection or Mixmag or The Face. But none of those things meant anything to him. There wasn't a way of him being able to process those things as the signs and symbols of success. So in that respect, Elizabeth, I just feel as though I could have given him more, you know, and you sometimes think about his heart attack and you ask yourself questions about maybe I gave him a lot of stress that was a factor in him dying at 62 of a heart attack. You know, you can't help ask those questions, you know, and however

much you'd like to go, no, of course not. It was, you know, his diet and lack of exercise and all that. But, you know, cumulatively over the years, when he died, I was 29. And, you know, I was beginning to forge a career, but it would have been hard for him to see a lack of stability, I guess, in my life. Have you ever said that to your family, that heavy load that you carry, which I'm sure absolutely was not a factor whatsoever, and that must be such a difficult thing for you to live with that. Yeah, have you ever spoken to your mum or brother about it? No, I don't think there's any purpose in doing that. I think it's

self-indulgent to do that because you're making his death about you, aren't you really? So in that respect, I think it's something I think about, not all the time. I'm not weighed down by the fact, I don't wake up in the morning and think, oh my gosh, I killed my dad. I'm aware that there were lots of other factors that did that. I just feel as though I wish he could have seen me become a board member of the British Council and for me to tell him that I went to Lebanon and stood beside the Lebanese foreign minister and the British ambassador to Lebanon while we opened our new building. And I gave a speech to the assembled. But those kinds of things he would have got. He would have loved the fact that my birthday is in the Times, right? The fact I was in Who's Who. He would have loved the fact that I was

on the Andrew Neil show having a robust discussion with Diane Abbott about race. He would have loved the fact that I wrote a piece for the Times or the Sunday Times or for GQ. He wouldn't have known what GQ was, but he would know that it was a prestigious magazine to write for. So all of those achievements. And then, of course, having grandchildren, to have met his grandchildren, to have discussed philosophy with his 14-year-old grandson, or talked about kickboxing and drumming with his granddaughter, all of those things. my mum and say something like that because that may then open up her own questions about a perceived complicity in what happened to my dad which of course is absurd and self-defeating elizabeth i think you'd have to ask your question what good would come of this yeah it's sort of weird for me to say this but i feel a compulsion to say it which is that I'm just so proud of you I really am I don't know why that's made me emotional but I just I I just felt a compulsion to say that not that I've had anything to be proud of because I've not been involved in your life

but I just am of everything that you've done and everything that you represent and actually you talk about your children there can I just say your daughter sounds like a legend kickboxing drummer yes please kickboxing drummer who also at 12 years old was flown to Los Angeles business class to have a part in an Apple TV drama that comes out in 2023 I mean this is I know this is who she is. She's like, yeah. Wait, what year was she born in? Depressed me even more. 2009. Okay. But actually that brings us onto your second failure, which is that you sometimes

feel like you're failing as a husband and father. So tell us more about that. Well, I think we already touched upon that in terms of the kind of how much and the way I communicate with my own wife and also there's times I've been too aggressive with my kids like too angry with them and that's always been a failure right you know when you lose your rag with your kids and I know a lot of parents are going to go, God, you know, stop making us feel bad about the fact we shout at our kids. I interviewed Brett Anderson from Suede because he became a parent later on in life. And he said, I don't want to be the dad telling my kids to stop eating crisps on the sofa. That's not what I became a parent for.

And I kind of slightly subscribe to that idea, which is infuriating. I'm a parent for and I kind of slightly subscribe to that idea which is infuriating it's infuriating for my wife because you can't just be good cop all the time as they've got older it's getting easier with my son still more challenging my daughter I think is reasoning with them she is mercurial and I love that about her and I don't want to suppress that. But my God, that can manifest itself in some pretty challenging behaviors at times. And she's 13, right? She's a 13 year old girl. He's a little bit more laid back. But then he's also kind of a bit slack, like I am about, especially about his room and all that. But I don't want to be a police officer officer but part of parenting is that you have to set boundaries and in fact my daughter Elizabeth when I asked him you know how can I be a better dad she actually said you could be a bit more strict like you could like give us a few more barriers and boundaries I was like okay all right I'll work on that. Because I don't know. How interesting.

Yeah. I've always wondered this because I don't have my own children, dot, dot, dot, yet, let's hope. But I have been a stepmother in different iterations. And as a step parent, one of the worst things you can do is to want those children to like you and to sort of cut your cloth accordingly and to change your behaviours because you're desperate to be accepted and liked. But it's also completely natural that you want that. And I've always wondered what it's like for a parent. Do you want to be liked by your children in the same way that you wanted to be liked by people at school

I am so needy for my kids love me too I'm just like I'm so needy getting a cuddle from my kids just getting a I love you back because I say it all the time to them getting a sense that they need me right and I am counting the days and part of the reason why I think I'm not strict enough is because I'm counting the days until they leave like my son's going to be 15 in November my daughter just turned 13 if they go to university I have a maximum of five years with them until they're off and I can't just take it for granted that they'll be there every evening and be there every morning and I feel that you know however sad that is I feel that and that's part of the reason I just don't want to get bogged down in the micromanaging of their lives but that's excruciating for my wife that I'm that guy,

because it means that her priorities diverge from mine. And my priorities are largely kind of fun, organisational in the sense that, you know, ferrying them from one place to another. And hers are, you know, you can't keep your room like this. You can't have your bathroom like this. You have to muck in. You have to help make dinner dinner you have to do these things you have to hoover you have to these things you know you have to do your own laundry and begin to hang it out and these things and you can imagine you know any mother listening to this right now who's in a relationship with a man like me is just thinking oh my god it's so annoying right right? And that's a failure, right? That is definitely a failure.

And I need to keep dragging myself towards a place of caring about the minutiae of parenting. My job as a parent is to love you, is to make sure you know that you're loved, which forms a solid foundation for you to go and take on the world and is to pour experiences into you that will manifest themselves at later parts of your life when you look back and said oh yeah my

dad did this and oh i did this with my mum and dad oh and i did that and help shape who you want to be that's kind of the macro that i see what i'm not very good at and what is a failure is the micro of parenting. And I need to sort that out. You know, I really do. I think so many parents listening to this will feel very seen in your words. So thank you for opening up about it. Within this failure, you said to me with your wife that you haven't sufficiently told her how amazing she is, but I have been too quick to criticize and that really surprised me Nihal because you don't strike me as a critical person I think that you know a relationship is very different and I've been too quick to say well you shouldn't have done this you shouldn't have done that while not being there to support her in a way that means she doesn't have to react in a way that she does because she's at her wits end and she's had no support and then to turn up and say after i've been away

on a jolly at soho farmhouse for two days why are you shouting at them saw you there yeah exactly i know you know for me then to come in and go why are you shouting at them is outright like i'd want to headbutt me if i did that but i say i can't help myself of course i can but i just uh it's like you know what now you don't have to say everything you think and i don't perhaps sometimes elizabeth admit enough that my kids can be little shit. I sometimes don't do that enough and go, actually, that's not acceptable. You shouldn't be doing that. You need to go to your room and think about how you've just behaved. So I'm just not very good at that because I was brought up in an atmosphere where really I was allowed to get away with stuff. I wasn't a brat,

but I was out as a teenager, leave the house in the holidays in the morning, come back way after dark. I did all that stuff. I had all those freedoms. So I find it quite hard to parent in a way which has lots of rules attached to it. I find that quite hard. And my wife, because of how busy she is and how many things she's juggling she needs those rules to be in place in order for her not to have to be constantly putting fires out and i'm shit at that i'm shit at it yeah i think it's really courageous of you to talk about this because loads of people wouldn't like to look their flaws in the face and in this way and what I take from that is your extremely high level of emotional self-awareness and the fact that you give your kids unconditional love. Those are two

of the greatest gifts you could ever give as a parent. So I actually think you're doing really well in that respect. And kudos to your wife. Yeah, I mean, but you know what, I'm giving them unconditional love, but I'm not giving them enough time. And so when I'm with them, I give them unconditional love. And I love them. But at times I've not been very good at that, you know, at times where they've pushed my buttons, I've reacted in a very negative way to them. And they remember that, you know, they remember those times where you've been very, very angry. So it's not that I've just kind of strewn petals in front of them wherever they've walked. There have been times when I've not been very good at that. I try never to miss

anything that my son does sporting wise. I also relish time I have with my daughter you know and I need to make more time for her because she feels that I spend too much time with him because he has all these sporting events so we'll sit in the car and we'll talk or I'm helping him with he's doing a thing from this thing model UN that they have at various different schools and they get together as UN delegates and we're working on that at the moment so you know i went to the gym with him last night we'll go and do a workout and then we'll go and sit there and we'll go through all these things for model un so i'm spending a lot of time with him and i need to spend more time with her you know for sure but yeah you're right kudos to my wife i don't know how she's done it I can't wait to see what your children become in later life because

I think this level of articulacy and insight is so rare you know you'll just have to like trust me on that but let's get on to your final failure there are others that as I said at the beginning you gave me six and I will wrestle through the final three because I also think that they're really funny. But the one that I've chosen, which I find fascinating because friendship is one of my obsessions, is that, as you put it, you failed to make new memories with your friends. And the reason you chose this was prompted because you moved away from London. So explain a bit more about this one. So men, in our 20s, we have a bigger social group than women. By the time we get to our 50s, it has shrunk, almost disappeared in many cases. And I'm very conscious of that. We lost a very good friend, one of my groomsmen at my wedding during COVID. I'm so sorry. Yeah. And Simon De Winter. And he was a friend

of mine from uni days. And I'm conscious of the fact that every time I get together with guys, we're just reminiscing. That's all we're doing. But what we're not doing is going, right, let's go and do this. Now, that's not for all groups of men. I know there are groups of men that do constantly and are conscious of this. But once I left London and moved up here to the northwest of England this sort of weird thing goes on you kind of make these initial friendships and then you kind of realize you're probably not doing them for the right reasons and then you get quite selfish and go it's a very kind of man trait I think which is a oh well I don't need to see my friends as much as my wife does you know women need to be around

their friends men we can just catch up every six months but actually that's not true that's not true at all and I've got two friends Andy and Terry who I speak to pretty much every day Andy I love because I love Terry as well but But Andy and I always finish our call saying I love you. Right. Always. Right. And he's about as alpha or geyser as you can possibly imagine. Right. Big kind of heavyweight in TV production. Another friend, Terry, is, you know, very, very big in fashion menswear. We share with each other. But what we're not doing at the moment is we're not meeting up. You know, we're just not meeting up now i wonder whether when the kids get older we'll we'll make more time but we need to carve that time out and we need to be more organized in it and i consider

it a failure because you have to be organized you have to actually put these events in when you live 200 miles away from someone you know luckily i did an event for mont blanc recently at their store and two of my best mates andy and terry turned up to that another mate who i've really become friends with in the last four or five years he came as well and the four of us went to jay sheiky's for dinner where even though i'm in my 50s and they're in their late 40s we were probably the youngest people in there by about 30 years. It's like a kind of fish based care home. It looked like it was very bizarre.

Not having dinner at J. Cheeky, but we were there. And it was great because we then formed a WhatsApp group off the back of it. And we got a joke from the night. So one of our friends went to the toilet and then we said, oh, he's gone for a, you know, he's taken a long time. He's gone for a. So then as a joke, we said, oh, maybe he's gone for his 9 p.m. Wank. Right. So he's gone off. And then our mate just piped up and went, oh, yeah, that happened to me the other day. And we were like, what he goes yeah i was i was we were i was having a pee at the blue water shopping center and a guy next to me was

masturbating and then he goes in blue water of all places but then and then he said oh yeah and the guy had one leg and i was like what is this story one-legged public masturbator in blue water shopping center so wait by the urinals or in a cubicle he's in the urinals like shut up that's awful it It's horrific. I mean, it's horrific. But, you know, something like that, a story like that, you'll be forever bonded by the bizarreness of that story, right? However kind of toilet humour it is, pun intended, it just kind of, that's a new memory. That is a precious new memory. It's beautiful.

I mean, I'm getting us all crystal decanters with it engraved on it blue water wanker is going to be put on these crystal decanters and we're going to all share them um at christmas but yeah but it's just it's just the fact that we were together and we got to have a conversation that wasn't. And the great thing was Simon is new to our group. So he came with new stories rather than us three sitting around just talking about the past. I don't want that. I want us to be bonded by the past,

but I want us to make new memories. And that's important. It's so important. I'm so glad you're talking about this because I think for me, I'm writing a book about friendship at the moment, full disclosure. And one of the things that I have discovered is that there are different friendship metrics. So for some people, physical time will be incredibly important in cementing that friendship. For others, it will be shared activities like going

to book club or playing squash and for others it's phone calls like endless phone calls and actually it's very helpful working out what metric best serves you especially if there is now physical distance between you and a lot of your old friends and I'm really glad you spoke about this because you're right. Men hemorrhage friendships. That's a fact. It's a scientifically researched fact. They hemorrhage friendships in their 30s and 40s. And then they're left, as you say, isolated. And it's a very difficult time in life to make new bonds.

Yeah, it really is. It really is, especially when you're here. And also as well, I think that I've been ignorant to the idea of making new friendships here. So there's about three or four people, men, that I've met up here who I really like and I can see staying in contact with. And there's some brilliant women up here as well that I've met. But I want to make memories with my old friends. Yes.

That's kind of what I want to do. Because, you know, making new that's kind of what I want to do because you know making new friendships is kind of hard work and also you're coming to a place Elizabeth where the people that you're meeting by and large have grown up here or have lived most of their adult life here so they already have their strong friendships but you know tonight I'm going out for dinner with someone who I met at Warehouse Project which is the greatest clubbing experience in my life in Manchester. And I met him two weeks ago. We're going out tonight. He's a kind of menswear guy. Very, very interesting bloke. Manages the DJ, Mr. Scruff.

So I'm going out with him tonight, then going to a gig afterwards where I'm meeting up with someone who I mentored earlier on in their career. Now they're a very successful music manager. So, so you know I'm getting out and having experiences but I just want you know the Terry and the Andes and the Jasons and the Glins and the Shabzes and all these guys that I know the Chris's and these people I want to have some time with them you know and try and make some time for them because I don't want to work work work all the time I was about to say that a lot of these failures are time related and how you spend your time whether there's enough of it and I think we're the same age I'm 43 we're similar ages aren't we no I'm 51 I'm way older than you what yeah yeah yeah okay that blows my theory out the water because I I feel like my 40s,

I'm so grateful to be in this decade because I've got much more self-knowledge than I used to have. But I'm also aware of being at a kind of midlife point and wanting to make the most of things and exploit opportunities I have. And knowing that opportunities won't always be around. I won't always be in this place.

And I think I have a tendency to turn the needle too far in the direction of just workaholism because I'm still trying to prove myself to myself. I think there's something about this age that you need to reckon with time. Yeah, I think that that's the curse of us, which Gen Z don't have that curse. This is speaking to friends of mine who are employers who employ Gen Z people,

is that they feed back to me that the attitude coming from that generation is, you guys got this whole work-life balance thing wrong, and we're not doing that. You know, we're going to make sure that, yeah, we work, yeah, we progress, but we're not going to do sure that, yeah, we work. Yeah, we progress, but we're not going to do it to the sacrifice of everything else. Now, you are very, very successful, but your success will be fueled not by working 19 hour days, but by giving yourself the space to enjoy your success. And that's one thing that I've learned. And that's one thing, we just recently bought a house in Sri Lanka because I want to spend more and more time in Sri Lanka.

That's what I want to do. When I get into my 60s, I want to spend months on end in that house, right? Listening to tropical birds and lounging and perhaps writing, perhaps coming back, consulting, going back again. You know, that's what I want to do. I would say don't waste your 40s feeling insecure about your achievements because your achievements are enhanced by the time you give yourself to enjoy them. Because otherwise, what are you working for? Yeah. Oh my goodness. it's like you've literally climbed into my head and turned a massive light on in a darkened room I can't thank you enough you know how much I adore you I hope and how much I respect you as a broadcaster and how honored I am you've come on my podcast I just need to rattle through your final three failures that you offered me one was that your sartorial choices back in the day were

questionable. You had a multicolored shell suit. One was that your son has considered you sometimes to be a failure because you've made him into a Spurs supporter. And the final one, which actually I do want to just ask you a quick question about is your failure in the way that you respond to negativity on social media. How have you responded to it in the past? And what have you learned from that? Look, I've had three day or two day Twitter spats with Tommy Robinson. Now, I've also when anyone's come for me, I've just either I've tried to patronize them, belittle them, quote tweet them to encourage pylons on them. You know, these are people who can be quite unpleasant, racist, etc, etc. And no good came from any of that. And weirdly enough, writing Let's Talk has made me

massively think about how I react to social media, and how allow people. And there's so many times recently since the book came out, since writing the book, Elizabeth, where I have not pressed tweet on a tweet that I've reacted to. And I've just discarded it and gone, nah, I'm just not doing that anymore. You know, following people who I don't need to name them. We know who they are. The people who I don't need to name them. We know who they are, the people who

monetize division, the people who go on social media every day to get viewers for their little TV show or their little radio show. And all they do is kind of stoke the fires of division. And obviously that's despicable. But I do now feel sorry for them because who would want to live surrounded by bile every day? Like what? Who would genuinely go to bed at night going? Yes. Nailed it. I nailed this Wednesday because I managed to get 12000000 likes and 14,000 retweets on me having a go at multiculturalism. And which, of course, by the way, when you do that, there are hundreds of people that will tweet you back calling you the C word and calling you a racist this and a racist that. And again, for those people, why are you doing that? Why are you doing it?

It's rich of me to say it because I wouldn't have used the c word on social media but I would have definitely gone in on people and also there's a kind of disarming charming way of doing it I think which is a West Ham supporter tweeted me yesterday tell me one good thing about multiculturalism just one and I just quote tweeted him with the name of a footballer that i know west ham fans adore a guy called mikhail antonio that's it i just retweeted him mikhail antonio just one there you go and people just found that funny they didn't go yeah yeah let's go and have a go at him yeah you've called him this word let's go i'll go they just thought it was funny

it was a mic drop right i didn't go well i'll tell you this about multiculturalism multiculturalism being brilliant because i didn't try and lecture him i didn't try and talk him around i just used his frankly ignorant tweet to just say a joke really i think if you just step back take a breath before you commit to social media, just don't react. Oh, Nihal, this has been such a wonderful conversation. You have literally written the book on conversation. And this was like all the best conversations, so expansive and enlightening and funny. And I didn't necessarily expect it to include a digression

on a one-legged wanker in Bluewater Shop centre, but I really valued every second of that anecdote. And I cannot thank you enough for coming on How To Fail. Oh, listen, I love How To Fail. I love the conversations you have. So the fact that I've been invited on is a blessing for me. So thank you, Elizabeth. So thank you, Elizabeth.