 Welcome everybody to the 42 Courses podcast. I'm really delighted today to be talking to Alice Sherwood. Alice Sherwood is the author of Authenticity but has many other strings to her bow of a very, very interesting career in many areas the arts, business, TV documentary, most lately, trustee at Hay Festival. And of course, now, do you give yourself the title? Is your predominant title author, Alice, when you introduce yourself? Well, thank you. Thank you for that. And it's brilliant to be here. I would say two things. One, I'm attached to the Policy Institute at King's College London. So I have the catchy title of visiting senior research fellow at the Policy Institute at King's, which is quite difficult to say with a single breath. And, but I would say author as that being the most recent and relevant, I think. And Alice, when we first met, which was back summer of 2022, it was just as the book Authenticity was being published. And since that time, you've gone on a long journey as it were with the book and traveled the length and breadth of Britain and visited Ireland, I know, talking at festivals. Maybe you can just kick off by telling us initially what you felt your aim was with the book and then maybe we'll move into where possibly your line of thought might have developed and changed over these last couple of years. Well, there were two real reasons for writing the book, the germ of the idea was something very personal, which was that many years ago, I found out that one of my best friends, who was also my boss, was a complete fantasist and a fabulous and everything he told me about his life from that he was related to aristocracy, that he had a terrible tragic illness, that he'd been a member of the security services, all of these rather dramatic life stories, none of them were true. So that really set me off, but there were a great many other things once you start getting interested in what's real and what's not real from art to what does it mean to say work of art is authentic to brands, big brands very much selling themselves on authenticity and obviously technology and the changes it's done now it's caused with the authenticity of information. And I think the umbrella term if you like there is that we all say what really fascinates me is we all say how important authenticity and the pursuit of authenticity is to us. You know, it's almost a spiritual quest, we want to be authentic, we want to live our best life, we want to live our real life and yet we've created this world that is arguably less authentic than ever before. And so when I tell the stories in the book because it's made up of stories that was really what was on my mind, which is can we understand the big forces? Why are we doing this? You know, why do we say one thing and do another? And of course the essence as you say of what started off your exploration into authenticity is of a shocking story, Alice. You know, for people unfamiliar with the story, you know, it's the equivalent of the type of story that one would only expect usually to come across in like, you know, a Netflix series. It's quite a shocking experience that you went through, Alice. Well, they should make a Netflix series of him. I've called him Alistair, obviously that's not his name, but everything else is true because he was this fantasist who made up stories and he more or less deceived everybody. And importantly for me, he deceived two of my friends that he got engaged to simultaneously, which put me in an awkward position and them in an awkward position because they didn't know about each other. And over time, because when Bush came to Shav about having two fiancés and you can't really have two fiancés at once because sooner or later you're gonna have to, there'll be a date in this case, New Year's Eve 1999 when you will have to either be with one or the other and the other will be quite cross and start wondering why. But fast forward about 20 years during which I didn't see him because he vanished after the fiancés episodes. And you say something you might see on Netflix or read about in a paper, I literally opened the paper and it said, company director stole millions. So he turned up again. And I think that's one of the interesting things about the essence of someone who is a con man is they don't just con or lie once, they just do it again and again and again. And that is, well, for me, that was a very important point to understand. And of course, as you said, the book is very much made up of stories delving into the meaning of authenticity in many different areas. You dip into business, you dip into advertising. What I'm curious about at this stage, Alice, as I said, you've spent two years with this book now talking presumably to thousands of people. How do you feel, where are you at now in terms of your feeling about authenticity? Has your, have any opinions changed? Have any dynamic news stories emerged? Have my feelings changed? No, except so many people come up to me after and tell me about the imposter they knew or the con man that they knew. So it is much more prevalent than you might have thought. One of the things that has changed, what was interesting was which areas I was asked to talk about. Definitely imposters and con man. Everyone loves the con man, especially financial audiences, by the way. All the big finances, how will you please come talk about, you know, how to be a con man or rather, sorry, the anatomy of a con. And people are interested in authenticity and art and brands. Nobody has asked me to talk about but I think the Guardian have put somebody, not Guardian Prospect have put a very good journalist on the story about fake drugs, falsified drugs. And of course everybody wants to talk about tech and I wrote about mainly about the internet deception and I wrote a little bit about AI because at that time it was only chat GPT2, not free and you could only get hold of it if you were a researcher. So I played around with it and I was very impressed but I didn't write about AI. Now, all anybody wants to talk about is AI. And that is really interesting because it has thrown up so many issues. What happens when you, you know, you can train an AI on your voice and it can actually phone your mother and fool your mother that it's you calling. And at that point, all your issues about identity. Identity is really, as it were, an up and coming subject because however difficult the internet made it with identity theft, AI just turbocharges it. So that would be the big change. Of course. And that was such a major, a major development, chat GPT being released for public use and the speed of creation of the new apps and ways in which it can be used, which as you say, was just very much in its fledgling state when the book was published. But also the other thing, obviously, the big C that we can't not mention, it was published very shortly after COVID. And I think to what degree do you think that that had an impact on our wanting to be authentic or do I mean showing our more authentic selves by sitting as we are now in our front rooms at home and chatting rather than in a sort of swanky studio or in a boardroom? Are we more ourselves? I think that's really interesting. I mean, when I wrote it during lockdown, wrote up my research as it were, during lockdown, wrote the stories. And I thought that COVID would be the end of internet misinformation, at least I did at first, because I thought you can't actually lie about a matter of life and death. So I was incredibly wrong. One thing it did do was give extra oomph, very big extra oomph to all the efforts and the alliances on the web who might have individually been fighting misinformation. They all joined up together. So actually it made the fight against information much more misinformation, much more powerful. And then yes, it did that strange thing that we all got to see each other much more without the kind of disguises and the face we, the work face we put on, which I think is really interesting. And I think the effects I've seen of that are twofold. There was a small and particular small, no, but it was American, particularly, I know you have many listeners in America, that the Authenticity at Work movement was primarily American, having come out of Bill George and True North in Harvard. But after seeing people as their home selves, I'm assuming a home self is more authentic self, in work conversations, I think it got extra velocity over here because people were stripped of their pretenses and stripped of their, you can't really wear a tight jacket and you can pretend, in fact, you've shown me how to put false backgrounds you know, onto your Zoom, but that would seem to be very bogus. So I think people became more relaxed and if that relaxed means authentic, I think that's very interesting. And people lobbied more to bring the right to bring themselves, their characteristics and their problems and their needs to work. And the last thing I think that is really interesting and I'm not a great, you can tell by looking at me, I'm not a great fashionista, but I do look at the fashion pages and the constant refrain is, since the pandemic, work is much more dressed down, it's much more casual, it's much more you, it's much more individualistic than it would have been. And I think that is a change. That's so interesting, Alice. And also it's making me think, I mean, we speak with so many people in advertising and in marketing and in PR and in, to a large extent, you can sort of be within your own vacuum, but I don't think anybody would say they've missed, for example, the Dove campaign that shows real women. And I know you do talk a bit about authenticity within advertising and within marketing in the book. And I wondered sort of somebody on the outside of that industry as it were, to what degree you think, or you get any impression that the industry is trying to be more authentic in its work or not. I think what the industry has done is that it's moved on, as it were, from where it was in the second half of the 20th century, where the real innovation there was to sell brands as having personality, which was a very new thing to add personality to a product. So I write about, I think it, gosh, I'm trying to remember, I think it was Omo, the clothes washing powder, which was marketed as your wash day friend, which is quite odd if you actually step back and think about it that some powder will be your friend, but we know what they mean. And I think obviously the big change in our time has been purpose and adding in making your brands have a purpose both for themselves and presumably in the hope that it will resonate with your customers, so that you have Harry's razors who give 1%, I think of their, I don't know whether it's their income or revenue, to men's mental health charities, and you have a lot of sustainable brands, and then you have some people slightly pushing back on that. I think it was when Hellman's, is Hellman's Unilever? I think so. Anyway, when Hellman's decided that they were going to add purpose to their brand, and there were quite a lot of emails saying, come on, the purpose of Mayo is just to go on your sandwich, please, you know, don't push it, but actually they did have some point, which is actually if you put anything, any leftovers in your fridge with Mayo, mix up with Mayo on bread, you know, you've stopped wasting food, you've eaten it instead. So they had a good point. So I think purpose, adding purpose into your brand, which feels more authentic, I think, I'm not sure whether it always is, and that thing of encouraging you to choose brands as though they were your friends rather than products. My, you know, Harry's razors, well, my mates would give to charity, so I'll use Harry's razor. Well, that makes sense, and it doesn't make sense. So I think that's where I, as an outsider, every time I look at those and I get a warm feeling because, you know, somebody's going to plant a tree if I drink their vodka, and then I think, well, hang on a moment, I could drink their vodka and plant a tree myself. So, you know, the test must be in whether they do actually plant the trees, or whether they do actually give the money, and to see whether it's not just window dressing. This is just a non-advertising person. You have to tell me what advertising people think. Does it work? I presume it does. And last time we spoke, Alice, you weren't long back from actually visiting Dublin, where you were invited to speak at a gallery that was hosting an Andy Warhol exhibition of which there's a whole chapter within your book that a man who will not lay down, we consistently are fascinated with him. Maybe you'd tell us a little bit about that event, Alice? Yes, I will. It was an absolute thrill. It was at the Hulane Gallery, which is the, well, started, it's, why am I telling you what the Hulane Gallery is? You live there. Anyway, it's a very distinguished gallery of 19th, 20th, and 21st century contemporary art, and they'd had an absolute blockbuster, or having an absolute blockbuster of a Warhol exhibition, 250 works, and it was just extraordinary, extraordinary and beautifully laid out, and they had a day of talks. And my one was about how Warhol really upended our idea of what it means to be an authentic painting, what makes an authentic picture. And he did that, and I was first drawn to it by just a quick quote I read somewhere where the author was gushing about Andy Warhol's pictures and how much he loved them. And Andy just said, oh, well, I feel like my pictures, you know, meet Gerard over here because he painted most of them. And I found that very intriguing because in that case, if Gerard painted most of them, in what way are they an authentic Warhol? And then I delved deeper, and it became more and more interesting because Gerard Melanger was Warhol's assistant for years and years and years. When they, at the time, they produced the most famous screen prints, the screen print of Marilyn, the Liz Taylor's, the multiple Elvis's, the car crashes, all the ones that you would recognize. And in the main, Andy would, if you know about silk screening, which is just really, God, any artist out there, you'll kill me, but I'm simplifying, is really stenciling. It's sophisticated forms stenciling. So Andy would choose a photograph, a negative, they'd make an acetate stencil out of it, and then Gerard would, you know, stencil all the colors on. So you had a mechanically reproduced image of a mechanical photographic image. And quite often, Andy just issued the instructions. So you have a great problem of what makes Warhol, especially when he issued instructions to a printing works that wasn't even in his studio, or in the case of the story, one of my favorite stories, was when his assistant Gerard fell in love and went off to Rome to follow the girl he was in love with, ran out of money and did the whole thing himself. Instead of Andy choosing the photograph, Gerard chose it. He ran off prints, et cetera. And he got a Warhol show at a gallery, which all went very well until the gallery discovered that these weren't exactly Warhols. And at which point he was telegramming Andy going, please, please, please, tell the gallery owners that they're Warhols. And finally, Andy did. What Andy said is, yes, they are Warhols, but you send me the money, not Gerard. So he was pretty canny. But the point being that at that point, something that wasn't a Warhol becomes a Warhol, even though Andy never touched it, because Andy said it was, because Andy telegraphed saying a picture he never made, he never saw was a Warhol. So like an act of God, it becomes a Warhol. Well, that's not how we understand what makes an authentic painting, is it? So I thought it was completely gripping. And then there was another story of, by the time that Andy had really got or begun to get into the habit of just sending instructions to a printing place in a screen printing place in New Jersey, he instructed a series of 10 prints of self-portraits, again, which he didn't make, he didn't touch, he never saw until they arrived back. And 20 years later, just after he died, when these were very, very, very valuable suddenly, then it became incredibly relevant about whether that counted as authentic or not. And at that point, the authentication bureau set up by the Andy Warhol Foundation suddenly decided they weren't. So you have a very fascinating story of this character called Joe Simon Wheelan who had sold his house because he'd been a friend of Andy's and he'd sold his house to buy one of these pictures, decided to sell it when it could be worth two million. And suddenly, even though every friend of Andy's, the foundation, everybody said this was authentic, the official people just denied all over it and made it completely worthless. So I think he's completely fascinating. And for this talk, I also had a look at all the very many ways that Andy stays relevant now. And you talk about Netflix, did you see the Netflix series, there was a Netflix series of his diaries? Only because you recommended it to me in our last conversation, Alice. So I can also recommend it now to anyone who's listening to this. Well, what's fascinating and draws together the various things we've been talking about, is Andy Warhol never wrote his diaries. He, I think, phoned them through or spoke them to Pat Hackett who wrote them down. But what they've done for the series is they've created an AI program of Andy's voice because there's a lot of recordings of him. And they have the AI program of Andy Warhol's voice reading entries from his diary and sounding exactly like him, which is extraordinary that you've got this robot program that sounds exactly like Andy who actually sounded quite robotic. So I thought that was fascinating that he's still relevant. If something's on Netflix, it's relevant. Absolutely. Yes, we seem to certainly have entered into this sort of paradigm of time where it's so important for us to be authentic. Authenticity is given such a weight of value. And yet, as you say, with the birth of chatGBT, chitGPT, that we can so easily use inauthentic tools, which really would just make us more the same as everybody else, the fake videos, the fake pictures. It's really such a paradigm of values that we're all, in a way, having to weigh up to find our own, I suppose, our own opinion of what we think, what's acceptable, is it acceptable to just cut and paste if you've created that text from your original prompts, which I think is a fascinating endless, probably endless, channel we could go down. But what I'm really interested in for you personally, Alice, is the way in which maybe, as I said at the outset, you've lived with these stories for a couple of years now, and obviously there's ones that are sort of, as you said, closer to your heart. But where do you feel we are at today in terms of either the value to us of things being authentic? Where do you think we're at? Where do you see us in mid-2024? Well, my cynical take, in a way, do I mean cynical, is that for most of history, people have believed things that we would now think are absurd, so are absurd and that would never, wouldn't fool us. So we wouldn't say, you know, that we're getting reigned because the reigned gods have reigned on us. So in some senses, we're better off. I think our tendency to believe any old tosh that we want to believe is as strong as ever. So there are, I think there are two conflicting forces. We can, of course, if we put our minds to it and Google intelligently, we can probably find the truth of anything. I was the director of an open-source intelligence company. You can find out anything, it's a lot of work. And you can find out the truth. But our deep instinct to search only for things that we deep down want to believe would probably overpower that. So I think we've got those twin forces. I think it's in a way quite sad that for once in history, we can actually find out whether things are true or not, we're just not doing it. On the subject of the sheer amount of misinformation out there, when I wrote the book, I called the last chapter Armies of Truth and I called the book, How to Reclaim Reality in a Counterfeit Culture. And I definitely saw that we've had time to understand how the internet works and that these armies of truth of all sizes and shapes were beginning to fight misinformation on the internet. And you see whole countries beginning to fight misinformation. Then comes AI. Do we go back to square one? I don't think so, because it took us a very, very long time to react to falsehood on the internet. So I think it was last year that government passed it slightly dodgy, dodgy in the sense of not perfect online arms bills. But I think Facebook started in, was it 2004? But really got going in the mid-2000s. So it took the government 20 years to react. That's just one example to the problems. Compare that to the speed at which we've reacted to the issues of AI. And I think we've learnt something. I think we've learnt, it's not only machines that can do machine learning, we've learnt too that once you see a threat like this, you've just got to move in fast. So I think we're actually in a slightly better place than we were at the turn of the 20th to 21st century. Though facing something that could be horrific, but at least we've learnt that we've got to do something about it. Well, it's a very uplifting note, I think, on which possibly to wrap up this conversation to end it. You always are eminently positive, Alice. And Chris, our CEO, reading your book, said how strongly your positive voice comes through in the book, which I'll hold up here for those when we have it in YouTube. Everybody knows, finally, the book we've been talking about. And Moustache, yeah. Just to wrap up, Alice, as I said, you've spent these two years with the book, your thoughts about things have developed and possibly changed. Where do you think you're going now in terms of are there developments on this theme or new projects? Or are you going completely left of centre in your next direction? It's very, very difficult. I've had one idea which I cannot possibly discuss because I think it's so bonkers that I've actually... My research notes are codenamed bonkers. And I wake up in the middle of the night imagining myself telling my agent that I want to write about this subject. So... Are you an enigmatic, Alice? I have to say, whereas everybody wants to talk about authenticity, I think this would stop the conversation at a dinner. So I have to get it out of my system first. But I think the themes... There will be something similar in the themes which is possibly to do with issues touching on global warming, which is back to the same issue, which is we all know the global warming is happening. We're all afraid of the consequences. Do we act or rather when one actually moves us to act on it? So it's probably something to do with that. I'm sure it'll be fascinating. We'll all be looking on the shelves for a book called Bonkers by Alice Sherwood. But in the meantime, we can all highly recommend that you do read her book, Authenticity. It's a fantastic read, full of stories. As we said at the outset, some of them are quite shocking. Many of them humorous, covering many different areas. Know that you will enjoy it and to say thank you, Alice, for joining me today for this chat. It's been lovely to see you again. And thank you for joining us in the 42 course of podcast. Thank you very much indeed. It's been a real, real pleasure.