If I Speak - 61: Can friendships cross class lines? w/ Natasha Brown

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

Ash speaks to author Natasha Brown about the big questions raised by her acclaimed second novel Universality, a ‘whydunnit’ mystery about identity, class and how we (re)invent ourselves. Plus: a dilemma about selling your soul. PSA: We’re going live at EartH in London on 21st May! Get your tickets now from Dice. Send your dilemmas to […]

Hello and welcome to If I Speak. It's Ash Sarker piloting solo today, as unfortunately my co-pilot and comrade, Moira Lothian-McLean has been struck down by the flu. But never fear, I am not alone. I'm joined by the brilliant author, Natasha Brown, to discuss her new novel, Universality, out with Faber right now. It's a compact and thrilling why done it, starting with a viral news,

yeah, see, I came up with that myself. I love it. Starting with a viral news article about a squatter getting their head stroved in with a gold bar at a banker's farmhouse. But it turns into something else. It turns into a forensic dissection of how we market ourselves in a media environment where everything about ourselves is up for sale. Natasha, welcome to If I Speak. Hi, Ash. Thank you for having me. Before we really get into it, me and Moya are doing a live event on the 21st of May.

We're going to be doing a live If I Speak at Earth in Dalston. We do have ambitions to do some out of London events as well, but this is just the first one while we get the machine in operation. So if you want to get tickets, I'm sure you can get it from the Navara Media website somewhere. I don't actually know the link for it, but I'm sure you can purchase them. Right, so before we get into the book, I've got some warm-up questions for you, Natasha. Are you feeling... Sounds good. Are your loins girded for it? Are you pulling into your core?

I am. I'm doing the pilates posture. Yeah. I'm really scared of doing pilates because I'm scared of the machine. Oh yeah. The machine is a bit terrifying. Yeah. I stick to floor pilates in the living room. That makes sense. That makes sense. Okay, question one. I heard a rumour that you're a big Agatha Christie fan. What's your favourite country house murder? Ooh, country house murder. That is a good one and do you know what? I don't even know if it's a real country house or if it's made up, but in Geo Marsh's A Man

Lay Dead, it's kind of like this country house they all go to. I'm not even sure where it is, but somewhat slightly outside of London. And it's like a bunch of people go there and they play a mystery game where there's like a fake murder, but it turns into a real murder. And I just love that they're forced to sort of stay on for what was meant to be just a weekend for like a few days and it just gets more and more toxic and I feel it just feels so real like when you spend too much time with your friends in one place. I mean I this is it confirms all my suspicions about leaving London I'm like see bad things happen bad things happen. I don't like when it's too quiet at night. No, I can't sleep if it's too quiet. That's the mark of a real city rat. Question two, how would you rate your own detective skills?

Oh, that's a tough one. Thankfully, I don't think my own detective skills have ever really been put to use. Like I think the biggest mystery I've ever solved is like trying to solve a secret Santa, which I was competent at. I'd give myself competent as the rating. I think if there were a real a real murder that I found myself in the middle of, I would not be useful. You'd like I could write a great novel about it once someone else has solved it. Yeah, exactly. Fair enough. Truman Capote, eat your heart out. And finally, what is your ideal sandwich? Oh, that's a good one. I, you know, it's, it's terrible. I am like an obnoxious London living vegetarian, but I love like mushrooms.

And you know, and you, I know people won't believe me, but mushrooms can, I believe, taste like bacon. If you roast them, like, you know, add some maple syrup, lots of salt, some pepper. Add some bacon. You roast them in the oven. No, it's the, you know, it's the salt and the fat, like enough olive oil and salt and anything tastes like bacon, I think. And then you put that in your sandwich you know slice your bread and then toast just one side of each piece of the bread and then

put it in shred your lettuce put that in as well some tomato you've got like a proper vegan blt and I think it's very good you know what I'm really into as a sandwich condiment at the minute is pistachio pesto. Ooh, that sounds very good. It's banging. It's totally banging. All right, now we are into our chunky middle segment. And I suppose I really, really enjoyed this book. I love the way in which writing and how people tell stories and how people tell stories about themselves was so central

and the gear shift in the middle going from this sort of viral style first person news writing into the novel proper was just so into it. I don't want to give away too much about the plot because hopefully listeners will want to read it for themselves, but for me, the challenging part of it is that there are lots of characters whose journalistic work and interests resemble my own.

And then it made me feel a bit worried, like am I just a shill like everybody else? So my question for you really is, you know, in writing this work, did you feel like every act of communication, particularly journalistic communication, is it just all self branding? Well, I guess it's a big question. And you're speaking to me as someone who's been accused of being a neoliberal shill, so we can shill together. But I think what fascinates me so much about journalism and particularly journalism today is how it's funded, and the way that most newspapers make a lot of their income now and magazines from online advertising. And it's not the sort of advertising we think of where someone pays for an advert in a newspaper and everyone sees the same thing. How it works now is that every time we click on a link,

this profile that's been built up on us, you know, whenever we get the cookie notice, it's because this profile is being built up on us of everything we've done across the Internet to make this sort of image of who we are. And based on that, advertisers decide on how much we're worth to view a particular advert. And there's a high-frequency auction going on that decides which adverts we'll actually see. And that's how the news is funded.

And so, of course, newspapers are motivated to, and incentivized to make us spend longer on each page, because the longer we spend, the more ads we see, the more they're paid for us looking at that ad, and also the more just generally they make income out of the same piece of content. And I'm really interested in the way that feedback loop that now newspapers hire data scientists to measure this and to incentivize this kind of reading. I'm really interested in how that feedback loop changes the type of media that we're exposed to. And the people who are writing

and working as journalists today, and particularly the journalist in this novel, Hannah, she comes into it, she doesn't have industry connections or anyone she knows, anything like that, she's right at the bottom of this industry. They're forced to write things that feed into this content machine. And I was just really fascinated in the way that changed the type of news that we're exposed to. I mean, where did your interest in this sort of, you know, viral news investigation come from? Were there pieces for you that you read and you were like, ah? Yeah, I think one of the big things that shaped my thinking on this wasn't journalism at all. It was Cat Person, which was the viral short story in the New Yorker from maybe 10 years ago or so now.

But that was huge. And basically, everyone I know has read this. But the fascinating thing about it was it was a short story. But once it went viral, people didn't realize it was a short story. And they're reading it either as a personal essay or a piece of journalism, and they thought it was real. And it was so fascinating to me that the types of nonfiction we read are now so close to fiction that if you don't have the context and if you're not really paying attention, it's easy to make a

mistake about what's what. And I was really interested in when I was researching for this novel, Tom Wolfe and his new journalism movement from the 60s. These were a bunch of journalists who were writing narrative nonfiction, long form magazine pieces. And they decided to very explicitly take techniques from novel writers so they would bring you inside the internal thoughts of the people they were profiling. They would set up their scenes and give you all the details as though you're there in the moment. They'd make themselves a character in the novel, and they'd have an arc where people change and grow and you get the satisfaction of reading a story. And I think that style of writing,

particularly with the model of funding that I was mentioning that is behind source of online media today, has made it read more and more like a pulpy novel. So I was really interested in, can I explore something about how journalism has changed and that style of writing has changed by pulling it back inside the novel that's been such an influence on it. You mentioned that the journalist becomes a character in the piece that they're writing. And there was a piece that I wrote, this was I guess a couple of years ago now, where like I wanted to do it. And it was a who done it style piece where I was trying to find out who was behind these hoax top secret documents that had been left at train stations.

And I did feel like I was writing inside a genre. Like I felt like, you know, here are the character traits of writing like this, you know, here's the three acts structure, here are the beats that I've got to hit. Do you think that there is something cheap about it? Because I felt a little bit like I knew I was doing a bit of like, putting on for wreaths.

Like I felt like I was trying was doing a bit of like putting on for ritz like I felt like I was trying to introduce a bit of shymanship. I felt it worked for this particular story but you know do you think that it's a way of disguising low information journalism by sort of bringing us into subjectivity and it's a way of concealing the fact it's not that nutritious. Well, I don't think I draw the line quite that firmly. I think it's really good for the media that informs us to also be engaging, because there's so much competing for our time and attention now. And I know what I'm reading while I'm eating my pret soup.

There's a limited amount of time I have to read. So I think that's really good and really natural and makes sense, you know, in terms of all of the stuff that's competing for our attention. Bringing something in that makes it more engaging and less dry completely makes sense. I think the problem is when we use these techniques to mislead, perhaps, or to get people riled up or upset about something rather than to make information feel a bit more tasty. I think making information appealing is not a bad thing at all, it's a good thing. I mean, I want to discuss one of your characters in the book. So Miriam Leonard, who is a columnist, she seems a bit Julie Burchill,

a bit Janet Street Porter. She revels in the fact that she can't easily be pigeonholed by publishers and editors, so she's anti-Brexit but anti-woke at the same time. It seems like you had a lot of fun writing her and had a lot of fun getting inside her mind. Is she a hero or a villain? Yeah, I think that's a great question. First off, she wants to be called Lenny, and I think she would not appreciate being called Miriam. Why does she want to be called Lenny?

I think she really has that, she's very sensitive to gender, I think, and particularly as someone who started as a journalist in the 90s, when she was pigeonholed into kind of writing for women, lifestyle, gossip, this sort of thing. For her, embracing the more aggressive side of her writing to her means embracing a more male persona in a lot of ways. And for a lot of her career, we sort of find as we get to know more about her, she was writing for men. So this name that's a lot more gender neutral to her is a much more powerful thing, whereas Miriam to her feels like a sort of old fashion stuffy woman's name and she just doesn't feel she can be as effective with it. So I think that's why it matters so much to her to have that punchy name. And is she sincere in her beliefs?

Because you know she's a showman, she understands the impact that she has on her readers and her audience and she can play them like a fiddle. But does she mean everything that she says? Or is it all for effect? I think that's such an interesting question at the heart of this woman, you know. I wanted to write this woman who, as I mentioned, started out in the 90s. She's about half generation younger than a lot of the women we saw who made their names in journalism at that time and just popped up out of nowhere with these very distinctive

voices and became big household names. And the interesting thing about them is as journalism has moved more global and we're sort of competing with writers all across the world, they haven't quite been able to capture, I guess, the public attention in quite the same way. And I saw Lenny really as this woman who looked at what they were doing and felt that she understood what they were doing wrong. And now this is her moment to do something different. So I think for Lenny, it's much less about sincerity and meaning what she's saying and much more about connecting with people. She is this woman who just represents pure charisma. She knows how to whip up a crowd and get them behind her. She knows how to talk to you one-on-one. She's very elastic with her class

identity and can relate to people sort of in different economic brackets. She understands sort of in a way that I think is very difficult for any real person to understand, just how to use sentiment and how to connect with people. And I thought, can I take someone like that and bring her to life on the page? Can I bring us as the reader inside of her? So I suppose we feel the distance between what she says and what she believes, but also I suppose the sincerity in how she presents what she's saying.

And also, I guess, just the sheer joy of being able to communicate and connect with people. It's a joyful act to her. I mean, she's got the confidence of a high wire trapeze artist. She knows what she's doing and people can't lay a glove on her. I mean, quite central to the book is the relationship she has with her son, her son Jake, who is very troubled, it's fair to say. Feckless in her parlance. Yeah, I mean she says reckless, you know, I think,

oh, mental health issues, although that's not language which is attached to him in the novel. Why does she, does she hate him? You know, what's the reason for that sense of repulsion that she feels towards him, the desire to keep him at arm's length and far away from her physical self? I think he's really hurt Achilles heel and she had this kid as a teenager and really resents him for the difficulties he introduced in her life. But at the same time now she finds herself in a position where he on paper is who she's advocating for, young working-class men who aren't finding their space in our society and in this world.

So she writes and she advocates for people like him. But at the same time, I think she really resents that he doesn't have the get up and go that she sees herself as having. And we see her throughout the novel having these little moments where she's trying to find someone to take on the mantle from her and be this person she can mentor and help up. And we feel a slight sense of the disappointment she has towards him, and yes, something of a repulsion because he's so different to her while she looks for someone who and she finds this young woman who she does see a spark in, someone who has more of what she sees in herself. So I think it's very difficult for her that the type

of rhetoric that she, that is her bread and butter and is the position that she's embracing is represented by this person who is perhaps so close to her that she can't romanticise him, she sees him for what he is. I mean, there is, there is a sort of, I mean, I don't want to say trope, but like maybe a pattern of people who've, you know, who did pull themselves up by their bootstraps as it were, who loathe their own children because their children don't have the sort of grit or resilience that they did. I mean, I'm thinking of like Logan Roy, who just can't stand his own kids, can't stand what he's created.

I mean, were there models for that relationship elsewhere in fiction that, you know, you were thinking of when you were writing the relationship between Lenny and Jake? Yeah, that's a fascinating one. I don't know if it was really fiction more than, as you say, it's just this general archetype we have. And also I think the way a lot of media people romanticize their children in the way that they write about them, but in reality perhaps the situation is a bit more complicated. But I think this whole idea of you can't make your child like you, particularly when you've changed through so many sorts of spheres in society, it's so difficult to have a child who'd be the same. I think we see the same in the novel. There's a banker, Richard, who also has a child that he feels a bit estranged from, not because she's not – I mean, she's

only a toddler, you can't really say how successful she's been yet – but she's confident and articulate and just different to who he was at that age. And I think for him, he finds it really difficult to relate to this child who's had totally different experiences to him. I think for a lot of people today, because of the types of jobs that we do and the way they change sort of our upbringing from what our parents had and we had, it can be very difficult to understand who your child is and what they believe in. I mean, in the book, various characters complain about not having the right identity characteristics for like the zeitgeist, which basically means like, I'm not brown or, you know, all people want right now is brown people.

But there is also an exploration that there is a sort of identity politics of class as well. So, you know, Lenny playing up the accent at particular times and dropping her T's, you know, because she knows that's what her, you know, posher editors and, you know, publicists want from her. And, you know, how have you personally sort of seen the like era of identity politics and how class fits into it? Do you think of class as something which operates separate from the kind of what we would traditionally call identity politics or is it in there as well? Yeah, you know, I think class is such a fascinating one

because we talk a lot about how all of these things that make up what we think of as identity are constructs in one way or another. We talk about it with gender, with race. With class, I think is the one where it's so clearly a construct, it's the one where it's easiest to understand it. You know, when you see an actor move from one persona to another persona and just completely convince you that they are that person and class is a part of that, it becomes so clear that so much of how we decide what class someone is, is down to how they speak,

how they inhabit the world, what they say they're interested in. It's not really to do with anything material about the person. I think Lennie embraces this very consciously. She's wealthy. She lives in a nice townhouse. She puts her son up in a flat in Kensington and then off in a farm. She has access to all of the things that we consider a wealthy person having, you know, but she is able to perform a class identity that's completely compelling. And I think it really is harmful sometimes that we put so much on the identity of class, rather than understanding sort of who people are, you know, really what I think matters more than anything, the household assets. It means that we're kind

of drawing lines between ourselves where they probably don't deserve to be. I mean, why do we do that? Do you think it's a British thing? Because we have had these institutions which put a cultural stamp on class. So you're socialized to speak a certain way and present yourself a certain way. Whereas in America, it's a little bit more bottom line. What have you got in your bank account? What's in your property portfolio? Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think in America, I guess they're just now old enough that they're kind of having a new money, old money distinction.

But certainly didn't used to have that. Whereas in the UK, even if you didn't necessarily, you know, your family for whatever reason had lost its assets, you could still be of a particular class and look down at say a very wealthy merchant family from a city who owned a factory. I think we've long in the UK embraced these sorts of soft markers of class identity. So what school you went to, what university you went to, what you do for work, certain jobs are seen as lower class even if they bring in a lot of income. And I think that's such a huge part of

how the UK arranged itself for such a long time that in the last 20 or 30 years when things have changed quite a bit and people have had access to education they didn't have access to in the past, jobs have popped up that didn't exist 30 years ago. We don't quite know how to apply those rules anymore. And I think some people are weaponizing that confusion. But in general, it just I think means that we have to perhaps reassess this class structure we've had for so long, because is it really useful for us? I mean, does social mobility even really exist because this is something which Hannah experiences. She's from a working-class background

but she did go to you know an elite uni I think and she's got her posh mates and she enters journalism but she still finds that there is this thick glass wall between her and everybody else. Is that drawn from real-life experience from you or your own observations? I think Hannah for me was a really difficult character because as you say she's this woman who her identity is either working class or sort of somewhat middle class. It's such a big part of how she sees herself but she really struggles to become a part of the social sphere that she idolizes in some ways. And I think for me, Hannah's so strange because she chooses to go into journalism. To me, becoming a journalist is like becoming an astronaut.

It's just not on the sphere of options that I considered. For me, a good old-fashioned STEM job was what seemed like the sensible thing to do. And I've spent a lot of my life encouraging other young people to pursue STEM careers because STEM, I think, is one of the areas which really does offer social mobility. You study STEM, you get a STEM degree, you move into a STEM career, and there's just an opportunity for you that never existed before. The type of work I've done in my career didn't exist 30 years ago. People like me just simply didn't exist. And it's an opportunity that I think sometimes we do a lot of work, but a lot of the cultural, I suppose, institutions that we have don't acknowledge it exists, these kinds of jobs. And so for me, it's really important to let people know that these careers exist. And one thing I used to say, I remember at job fairs, when people say, oh, they want to go off and do this

or do that, I'd say, that's great, do it, but do five years in STEM first. That's all I asked, try that first. And then go off. But is this a little bit like, you know, arts, culture, journalism, you're like, look, this is for the idle, aristocratic, you know, windswept and interesting, but if you're not already there, you know,

if you're marginalized on the basis of your class or your race, get into STEM. Is this sort of the- Yeah, I mean, I'm a pragmatist in that sense. Like I think for me as a novelist, this book I wrote wouldn't have been possible had I not had a career beforehand. This isn't the sort of book that publishers would take a punt on because it's

a weird book and it's a book that goes into areas which might sort of attract anger from the spheres that you need to embrace a book. And so for me, being able to have the knowledge that this isn't my career, this isn't how I make my money, I can do what I want here and then go back to real life and real work gave me a huge amount of freedom which when I see people who move into writing books far earlier in their life and without sort of the security blanket I suppose of their own career, it's a lot tougher if you don't have parents who can bail you out. Why did you think that this book would make people angry? Because I think there is an expectation for what books should say and what's considered, I suppose, appropriate for a book to do. And I think this book has no clear moral centre and it also perhaps criticises,

not even criticises but I suppose takes a non-loving look at some institutions that we're encouraged to love and that I think can be risky. But like the Hay Festival which isn't called the Hay Festival but it's definitely the Hay Festival. I don't know if it's necessarily the Hay Festival, but yeah, it's certainly a festival that probably feels familiar. But I think all of the cultural institutions and particularly I think the media and the magazines and newspapers that are such a huge part of deciding what is and isn't culturally relevant and what people should or shouldn't read, you know, when we think about the media, it's kind of accountable to no one in a lot of ways. Like, it's one of the few sort of,

what you call it, sectors that really has no body that can actually audit it and ensure that what it's doing is right. And in some ways that's good, because it should have freedom to be able to take risks and do interesting things. But at the same time, that's really risky because if you get a bunch of people who all have the same point of view and all see the same sort of person as a bad person, there's no one to really measure whether or not what's actually being said is correct. And so I think when you turn, I suppose, how do I put it, I guess a critical eye on that area of society that has operated with such impunity, people will of course get cross. And I think, look, I think they need to be made cross a lot more often. I was really fascinated by your portrait of Richard. So, you know, he's

a banker and when you meet him in this viral article, you just think, twat, right? Like, philanderer, you know, knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, You know, notice the price of everything and the value of nothing, vain, arrogant, obnoxious. And then when we meet him in a way which isn't mediated through, you know, that particular news article and that particular journalist and her aims, he is all these things, but he's also broken, right? Like, broken in this like really profound way he sort of feels this immense sense of responsibility for his family that he feels crushed by and he

has done all these bad things but it doesn't mean that he's devoid of any moral feeling or moral sensibility. How did you how did you come up with him as a character? What was he like to write? What was he like to live with when you were writing him? I think Richard was one of the most natural characters for me because I've met so many people like Richard. He's this guy, he grew up in Essex, very working class family, a family of builders, and he took the 11 plus, which he could at that time, and went on to university, studied physics, and then went into banking. And all of a sudden, he's in this totally different world. He's earning money

he'd never imagined he'd earned before. He has this lifestyle, suddenly this wife he'd never imagined he'd have. And then this huge financial crash comes, and he's lost it all. And not only that, but he's doing everything he can to help his family, his parents stay afloat throughout this. And that really cast a shadow on him. And even though he managed to build his career up again and become comfortable once again, he's never quite lost that fear that everything could go at any moment. And I think that's one of the really fascinating things about the financial services industry that I haven't really seen as much in the more cultural publishing journalism industries. These people who really came from backgrounds where this was totally alien

and understand, I suppose, how easily everything can be lost. And so for me, Richard was this person who's very real and there's a lot of people out there like him but he's also not a perfect guy like he makes a lot of mistakes he mistreats his family despite trying to help them he is his own worst enemy and doesn't know when to keep his mouth shut but he's also not a bad person necessarily he's just a human person with like strong points and flaws. Is there a part of you that feels that you can afford to be sniffy about money when you've come from money? Of course yeah absolutely I mean it is there a part of you that feels that you can afford to be sniffy about money when you've come from money? Of course, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's very easy to take a job that pays

nothing when you have everything you need already covered. And it's very easy to think money doesn't matter when you have never had any concern that you won't have money. And you know, one of the things about Richard that he keeps facing with all these characters is they sneer at him. They sort of openly sneer at him because he's earned his money in this mucky way. And I think that certainly is something that still exists today. We look at people who work in industry who do these sort of grubby jobs as less than for earning their money in that way, rather than having the decency to be born into it. I completely hear you and agree with you

in all sorts of ways, right? And I always think about, you know, there's a skit from one of Frank Ocean's albums where his mom is like, stop thinking about it as just money. It's not just money. And that's always ringing in my head that it's not just money.

And if you've grown up without it, you know that a lack of money isn't a lack. Like it's actually the very present existence of anxiety, worry, a lack of freedom. When you don't have control over the place where you live, you're subject to intrusions all the time. It can be landlords, can be bailiffs. Like I understand all that. But does that mean that we can't have any sense of a moral boundary when it comes to how you make your money? I think that's completely fair. And I don't say that I would justify how Richard makes his money.

But I think the interesting thing is we don't draw that line when it comes to say our education. A lot of us are very happy to go to universities where all of their money is invested in these investment banks. A lot of us are happy to invest in our pensions where they're all managed by these investment banks. We could divest ourselves, but we don't choose to. And I think it's very easy to see the person who works in this job as the person who's the bad guy, yet we're very happy to engage with the financial products that they facilitate. And I'm not saying that to say that people are hypocrites and shouldn't do one thing or shouldn't do the other thing, but I think we should lean

into why it feels uncomfortable, why it feels uncomfortable to be the person who's working in the industry that finances these things, but it doesn't feel uncomfortable to get our education from an institution that uses that finance to sort of propel itself indefinitely or to consume products that are funded by these companies or to fund our own futures and our own sort of retirement on these companies. I think we have to ask ourselves why it feels so different and why it feels wrong in one case, but just a necessary compromise in other cases. There is one bit of the book which for me anyway read like a horror story and it was The Dinner Party of Nightmares. I read that bit in a single sitting and my husband was at one point a bit worried about me. He was like, you look horrified by what you're reading, what's happening. I'm like, Oh God, it's just

like, it's just the worst dinner party ever. I'm sorry, but I'm also happy to hear that. Oh God, I hated it. I hated it. Like every, every sphincter in my body was just clenched. Just so clenched. I mean, I don't, I don't want to spoil it too much about what happens and what characters say what, but it's a dinner party which is hosted by Hannah. She lives in Edmonton. Everyone is then very, very down on Edmonton.

Which is like, I feel very like, come here and say that. I live near Edmonton. I went to school in Edmonton. So I'm part of the EDL, the Edmonton Defence League. But it's just, I mean, it is a brutal portrait of how transactional and careerist people in middle-class professions can be, the way they look each other as vehicles for advantage or not, the way in which there's so much ego in what could be, you know, a discussion or a debate around current affairs, like there's something much more profound about themselves that feels like it's on the line.

Do you, did you see that as a portrait of the professional managerial class and the white collar world? Or do you think that there's something which is more universal, more human about that? there's something which is more universal, more human about that? JG Yeah, I think it really is this question of how do friendships across class lines persist? Because I think these people met at university, these four friends, and university is this weird bubble where we meet people from totally different worlds, from different countries, from different economic backgrounds, social classes, and you're all thrown into this bubble. You live close to each other, you have your loans, you've got some money so you can sort of get by. And it gives you this moment where you just get to make friends with people you

probably never would have been under normal circumstances. But then when you leave and you go back home to your cities or wherever, and you're trying to maintain these friendships, suddenly becomes really difficult. Suddenly your postcode matters, in terms of just being able to get to last minute hangouts or whatever.

Suddenly, can you afford to go out to dinner? Can you afford to go on the group holiday? All of these things come back into play. And it can be really difficult, I think a lot of us find in our 30s to maintain some of those friendships that were built across all of these things that separated us in the first place. And Hannah definitely feels this. She feels she's grown apart from these people, but she also has this deep yearning to be a part of this world that she sees as so much more romantic, I suppose, than the life that she's used to. And I think there is

something kind of more general as you're asking about it, because this question of who do we see as an aspirational friend? Who do we see as someone we try to impress and we want to be viewed and seen by? I think Hannah really has a problem with that. She looks down on people like Richard, but she really looks up to someone like Gwen, who's inherited her money and works in the arts and has this very poetic kind of life. And then we see the other two people at the dinner party who are kind of floating in between. One's this guy Martin who's making a very good living for himself in the cultural sphere and can kind of view all of this with a sort of sarcastic remove. And then this other guy, John, who we get the sense has quite a middle-class background, but sort of a very middle-class

background if you know what I mean. Not the middle-class, but it's not really middle-class. You know, it's actually a normal middle-class upbringing. And for him, he feels deep resentment that he can't swan into situations in the way that his wife Gwen can, but at the same time he really looks down quite harshly on Hannah as someone who he sees as it's very important to draw a line between himself and herself. So I think these kinds of differences between us and when we romanticise them and when we're sort of repelled by them is such a human instinct, but it does lead for really nasty dinner parties. I mean, it was, oh God, it's just like, it made me so queasy. But like, I don't know, I guess,

like, sometimes when I've interacted with people who are, and I'm sure that people see me the same way, right, which is everyone looks at the class that's immediately proximate to them, the one that's immediately above them and sort of thinks, God, you people are fucking weird. But I'm also fascinated by you and envious and all these complicated feelings. But I do often think that the people in the class immediately above aren't as nice. Like that has sort of been an observation where I've been like, oh God, the way in which you talk to each other is crazy. Like it just doesn't seem like you want to make each other feel comfortable at all. Like is that just me being sort of a bit like self congratulatory and be like, and I of course, I'm the right class.

Or is there something in it? I'll push people a bit, crap. I think, well, I mean, you know, Jane Austen is like the queen of this. Like she writes these dinner parties, which are always terrible and always really drawn out and on class lines and that whole idea of judgment. I think it's definitely there. And also that feeling of people who we just aren't familiar with their upbringing and their background and the way they've moved through the world, it's very easy to see them differently to people who we share an understanding with because we've had a shared upbringing. We have a shared sort of understanding of what it means to move through the world. So I think there's always that sense of being disliked

or disliking other people and whether or not it's justified, I think it is a very real feeling. But of course, I think there is also, as you were mentioning before, this sense of economic uncertainty and a lack of feeling of security. It creates this snipiness and this real need to draw lines and to say, no, this is how I'm different, particularly I think as these class differences are more and more eroded. There's the book, Class in the 21st Century, I think, by Mike Savage, where he talks about how it's not just working class, middle class, upper class anymore, it's sort of fragmented into these seven different groups. And it's really about different things than what we considered it to be about before. And I think that feeling of,

I'm no longer secure in my class identity and secure in my children's and my grandchildren's class identity, when you have that taken away, you perhaps have to draw lines. And that does make you seem a bit nastier to the people you're interacting with. I suppose my last question, because I know I've focused a lot on the sort of the middle class world, even if everyone within it isn't middle class. But you are also talking about this, you know, squatters movement. So a lot of them met at Occupy in 2011. They've decided to live outside of the rat race and kind of a bit off grid as a way of trying to build

a model of a society that, you know, may one day become hegemonic and one day become dominant and has run along, you know, non-hierarchical anti-capitalist values. I mean, have you had any experience of that world of squatting and anarchists yourself? Only tangentially. I remember I was working when Occupy was happening. So working in the city when Occupy was happening. So working in the city, where not Occupy was happening. And I remember the thing that really amazed me when I saw it was how? How did they, didn't they have any responsibilities like financial responsibilities?

What were they living off of by not going to work every day? It was a complete lack of understanding of how one could live that way. And that was quite eye-opening to me that that was really the first question I had about it. And as I've sort of grown a bit older and met people in many more different spheres, I've met some of these people, and it's not true for all of them, but a lot of them, the how is their parents. Their parents make this possible that they could reject society and do something different and do something a bit more radical. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think if you have that security, to take your own security and use it to advocate for other people is a wonderful thing. But I think it was really eye-opening to me to realize that some people really had this

safety net, I suppose, that could allow them to reject society as it is and try and prove something different. And the sort of hippie anarchists in this novel, they call themselves the Universalists, their leader Pegasus is incredibly sincere. He really believes in what he's doing and he really objects to some of the intentional living communities in the UK where you have to pay, like sometimes 20, 30, 50k to join, he objects to that and he wants this to be something that's accessible to everyone because he feels this is a way that everyone should be able to live. But at the same time, the reason he's able to reject, I suppose, the rat race and earning enough money to live is because he has

parents who can support him through that. And once again, I don't think it's one of these things of being a hypocrite necessarily, but I think it's this understanding of who has the ability to take risks and to do things that are difficult and risky, but hopefully make things better for everybody. I mean, I've got some friends who are still squatting, friends who call themselves anarchists, whereas I love a big state me. I love things at scale. So that's the distinction between us. But if I was to imagine what my friend Charlie might say, who is politically very much an anarchist, part of the uprisings in Chile, has squatted, stuff like that, he'd probably say, well, one, it is a bit of a stereotype that all these squatters

are middle class. But two, maybe we're doing something that more people should do, which is bringing yourself into community with people who are, you know, hyper marginalized. Because when you live in a squat, yeah, you might have someone whose parents have got, can provide that kind of safety net. You've also got some people who come from working class backgrounds that are doing this because they believe in it. And also inevitably you've got people who are living there often who have been long-term homeless living on the street, may have mental health issues, may also have problems with substance abuse. And at least we're living with them and treating them like human beings.

And it's easy to dismiss us because we're idealistic and there's no way everything in our background can possibly align with our politics because our politics are about demanding this radical rupture from what we've got now. But isn't there something admirable about doing it? So not just like, oh, I understand it, but like actively admirable. I think that's completely fair. And you know, I'm a big believer in the idea

that the people from minority backgrounds who do these boring sort of safe jobs today, it's gonna be their kids who are off squatting and you know, doing the radical things in a generation's time. And I think that's a good thing. Like I'm completely happy that that's how it works. But I think not everyone is pragmatic, but sometimes you have to be pragmatic because I think even when it comes to, you know, when you talk about climate change and protesting climate change, some people are at a much

bigger risk going out to protest than other people. And I think it is important to be aware of that and to acknowledge that and to ask what's the best way that everyone can contribute to things that we all agree are problems. Well, I mean, you know, taking that example of, you know, just stop oil, right? You're completely right, which is not everyone will be treated the same way by the criminal justice system and certainly

just stop oil, you know, they're very white, there's lots of white people, but aren't they putting their money where their mouth is, which is, you know, it's not white people telling black and brown people to go get arrested, you know, you've got white people who are like, no, we're going through the prison system, we're going to do it. There's actually a remarkable lack of hypocrisy there because they're the ones getting banged up. MS I mean, absolutely. I'm not trying to call anyone a hypocrite here. I think it's absolutely true and it's a really good thing and a really selfless thing. And I think these questions are complex, and I don't think it ever does to criticize someone who's trying to do the right thing in the way that it seems is possible

to them. I think it kind of comes back to this question of drawing lines between ourselves, whereas we should be kind of looking more to understand one another and build bridges, as trite as it sounds with one another. But I think it really is true, you know, different people have different freedoms today. And that's true. And that's something we can acknowledge in the sense of trying to hopefully leave behind a world that's closer to what we want for everybody than the world we were born into. for everybody than the world we were born into. Helping people do the right thing. This is such a perfect segue into our regular segment. If you're in big trouble, whether that trouble is large, medium or small,

email us at ifispeakatnavaramedia.com. That's ifispeakatnavaramedia.com. Caveat, we reserve the right to give you bad advice. There's not a gun to your head. You don't have to take it. Just don't sue us. Right. Are you prepared? Have you ever been an agony aunt before? Is this your first time? No. So take anything I say with a big pinch of salt. A big old pinch of the old Malden. Okay, here we go. Dear Moya and Ash, and of course, Natasha, big fan of the pod, Moya, love your hair, hope you win.

Ash loved your book. I am now literally a communist. That's what I like to hear. I'm writing because I have a classic dilemma that boils down to the question, should I sell my soul to take funds from an evil bank? I'm a self-employed illustrator and drag performer living in Switzerland. Currently, I am working on a comic book that I have been developing on and off for four years. I've been able to get in touch with a publisher and have a good chance of a publishing contract,

which means I will be working mainly on this book for the coming 12 months. However the comic book industry pays miserably which is why I need funding. I've been able to get some money from different cultural funds. There is one fund I could apply for that would finance a lot of my work but, and it's a big but, the fund comes from a UBS, an evil Swiss megabank, these are their words not mine by the way, an evil Swiss mega bank that invests in fossil fuels and is responsible for a substantial amount of the country's CO2 emissions. On the one hand, I really hate this bank and wouldn't want to be associated with it. I'm a member of the leftist party in Switzerland which is trying to pass a bill to force the bank

to cut their investments in fossil fuels. I'm actively using my autistic platform for anti-capitalism. I even have a song I sing in drag about the evils of UBS. In addition, my comic is about queer identity and UBS has consistently tried to pinkwash their businesses. I've been criticizing their funding of local pride events, so getting money from them would feel very hypocritical. On the other hand, I feel very tempted to just take the money and run or walk. I don't really run. Being a self-employed artist has really worn me out over the years. I'm constantly underpaid, never going on holiday,

having no contract and doing a lot of volunteer work on the side. I live off way below minimum wage, which I can only afford because I share the flat with five other people, occasionally steal from the store, have no kids and come from a fairly privileged middle-class background. By no means broke right now, but my outlook isn't too bright.

And though I could probably get by without this funding, I feel like I sure as hell deserve it. I feel very conflicted about this. It would feel a bit embarrassing if UBS were mentioned in the imprint of my book, but then again I feel like it won't change anything if I refuse the money just for the sake of protecting my morals. I might lose some credibility, but I could back it up with my activist and political work. Am I a fraud for wanting this money? Thank you for your help

and for your amazing work. Greetings from neoliberal hellhole." Natasha, I feel you're so perfectly placed to give some advice. Well, that is a tough one. I think for me it comes down to, when it comes to these sorts of questions Making sure morally what the company is doing is not beyond the pale for me there's things I can disagree with but Aren't completely where I draw the line and I think it's important for everybody to have their line So if you're in that gray, you wouldn't be taking grants from Philip Morris or Lockheed Martin. That's the line.

I love it. But when you're in that gray area of, I disagree with this, but it's not completely beyond the line. And I guess it comes back to that question of places where we're all slightly hypocritical because just to be a member of society, we're engaging with these things. I think it becomes a lot more complex then, and this sounds like one of those sorts of situations. For me, I really think it's a question of number one, if you take this money in 10 years' time and you look back on it, what would make you feel comfortable with that? Is there nothing that could make you feel comfortable with it and you'd always regret it, Or could you see a path through where you've taken the money, but you've been vocal about your concerns and about the compromise that you made and that would make you feel

comfortable? I think ultimately it comes down to looking back on it, how would you feel, and kind of making the decision based on that. So that would be, that's not really advice, but I think that's what would come into it if I was thinking it over. I mean, what I think, special one, is that you already know what your politics are on this. And you already know that for you UBS is beyond the pale because that's been the consistent theme of your work. And now you're in a moment of temptation. And I would normally never do this because I'm not a religious person. However, you know, it's not as if Satan came to Jesus when Jesus was in Westfield

and was comfortable and was fine. No, he was in the desert. I don't know why he was in the desert. I didn't get to that bit of the Bible, but he was in the desert. I don't know why he was in the desert. I didn't get to that bit of the Bible, but he was in the desert. He was hungry and he was thirsty and he had nothing. And that's when Satan came. How these things work is that they come to you when your need is real. The need is real. And it wouldn't be a political stance if you only took it when it was easy. And I'm not saying that there is a line here which is super hard and it exists the same way all the time. I mean, I think that it's, you know, Philip Morris and Lockheed Martin is like, come on,

don't take the blood money. And I can understand that the line moves around elsewhere. But for me the key point here is that you know you've already said that you want to you know I'm sticking with the biblical analogies and I'm Muslim oh my god like um you know you've already you know said that you want the money lenders kicked out of the temple you can't't be like, Oh, but you know, Oh, but like, like you've, you've taken the stance. And I think, I think that maybe you do, I think you already feel morally compelled to maintain that stance. So I think, I feel like it would be bad for you if I were to advise you to take the money and run. But I think it's difficult.

I think it's difficult. Money's inherently tempting. It's inherently tempting. I think this is a perfect question because it cuts the line down exactly between our differences. I mean, so if you were in that situation, right, and let's say it's not UBS,

but let's say it's an organization that you've been publicly very critical of, but they've come to you in your time of need with money, would you take it? Would you not take it? So this is going to sound like I'm dodging the question, but this is why I really do appreciate STEM careers, because they allow you to fund yourself in your artistic endeavors. But would you? Would you? I think no, because I'd never want to do art where I feel I have to fit in with someone's sort of, you know, you put a proposal together and you say this this is what I'm going to do. And so then presumably you can't change your mind if you change your mind about it. I think

for me, making art, that's why making art isn't, I suppose, a lifelong passion for me or a career for me. This is something that I look at very much as just something I'm doing for a little while because I wouldn't want to be in that position. But the consequence of that means I spend a lot of my time doing work that a lot of people wouldn't want to do and would find boring and soulless. But for me, I like that trade-off. I mean, I think there's something here which is important, which is there's no such thing as clean money, right? Like, there is no such thing as clean money. And whether you're a raging Marxist like me or a neoliberal shill like yourself but like you know I think I think maybe that is something that we can all agree with which is that you know all money has its roots in some

kind of exploitation somewhere and so we're talking about what degree of exploitation can you happily embrace? What kind of exploitation can you accept but kind of ignore and put towards the back of your mind? And what for you is just too, I don't know, like overwhelming and blaring for you to be able to put in either one of those first two categories. And I think for this particular dilemma writer, they already know what it is. They already know. I think that's true. I think if you're writing the question, you know how you feel. That's wise, wise words, but I don't want anyone to take that to heart

because then we wouldn't have a show. Natasha, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. I really gotta say like, universality was just so much fun to read and it didn't go down easy but it was fun. Thank you, I take that as the highest praise, thank you very much. Like MDMA in that way, it doesn't go down easy, but it is fun. Can I put that on the back of the book? Yeah, sure as long as my mom never sees that I said that. This has been If I Speak. I've been Ash Sarka and you have been...

Natasha Brown. Thank you so much for joining us goodbye bye