Eric Schlosser's 25 year fight against the fast food industry

0:00Your team just added its 67th AI tool and also your 67th security blind spot. The good news? The Vanta agent works like a GRC engineer in the background, finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk, and drafting fixes for you. Vanta is the platform used by over 16 ,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at Vanta.com.

0:29Hi, it's Ollie. I'm going away on paternity leave for a couple of weeks. So whilst I'm off, we're going to be bringing you some conversations that we pre-recorded and some conversations from my esteemed colleagues at The New Statesman. I hope you enjoy this episode. The New Statesman.

0:5125 years ago, Fast Food Nation changed the way millions of people thought about the fast food industry. The book became an international bestseller and helped transform public debate around everything from public health to labour rights. But, as its author Eric Schlosser tells us in this conversation, he never saw it as a book about food. And he still doesn't consider himself a foodie. For more than three decades, Schlosser has been one of America's foremost investigative journalists, writing about everything from the prison system to nuclear weapons, exploring the hidden systems underpinning modern life.

1:25In Fast Food Nation, Schlosser set out to investigate the economic model behind one of America's most recognisable industries, a system built on low-paid workers, dangerous conditions and the exploitation of migrant labour. I'm Oli Dougmore and you're listening to The Exchange from the New Statesman, marking the book's 25th anniversary. Schlosser joined me to reflect on the enduring corporate power of the fast food industry. In this conversation we discuss America's complicated relationship with McDonald's, the rise of fast food as both a cultural symbol and an economic system, and how Britain seeks to replicate it.

2:04Eric Schlosser, hello. Hi. How are you? I'm okay. We're talking about your book, Fast Food Nation. 25 years. Incredible. It is incredible. In 1968, McDonald's operated about 1 ,000 restaurants. Today it has about 30 ,000 restaurants worldwide and opens almost 2 ,000 new ones each year. The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross. I mean, how did fast foods take over America and then the world? And the sad fact is I think there are 40 ,000 today. Crushed. Okay. Which is just, I mean, that 30 ,000 came from an earlier version of the text. Yeah. So fast food emerged at a particular moment in American history.

2:47You know, McDonald's was around in 1948, 1950. It grew very slowly. The huge growth of McDonald's and the fast food industry coincides with a period of static or declining income in the United States. and the need for women to enter the workforce. And, you know, many women enter the workforce for feminist reasons to, you know, not just be confined to a domestic sphere, but numerically probably more enter the workforce because you needed two wage earners in the family in the United States in the 1970s in order to just keep your head above water. So you have this phenomenon of the people who in the family who traditionally made food, women, were entering the workforce and wages are stagnant and fast food is providing cheap, convenient food.

3:48And it sort of feeds upon itself because you have stagnant wages and then you have a low wage workforce that depresses wages. The fast food industry is still the largest employer of minimum wage workers in the United States. And you have a profound, profound reduction in the minimum wage in real terms. You mentioned the year 1968. 1968 is the peak of the real value of the minimum wage in the United States. So to just give you a comparison, in today's dollars, the minimum wage of 1968 is about$15 an hour. Today, the minimum wage, the federal minimum wage in the United States is$7.25. So in real terms, the poorest workers in the United States have seen a wage cut a 50 % since 1968.

4:46And the fast food industry played a huge, huge role, and to this day does, by fighting against any minimum wage increase. This is a way of maintaining a poverty workforce. And it's remarkable how many fast food workers in the United States are dependent on food stamps. there was a study found in california that there were thousands of fast food workers in california who were homeless and working um anyway so that really explains that's you know one of the major driving forces of the acceptance of fast food is that it's cheap it's convenient and families are feeling stressed yeah my i mean my first job was at mcdonald's and i was 17 years old we have tiered minimum wage in this country and my for that first year when i was 17 before i was 18 i was paid about three pounds 50 an hour and i mean you're working long hours long shifts to come away with like 40 quid 30 quid you know it's like what skills what skills did you come away with honestly um well it's kind of what skills did i come away with because i was a young man it opened my eyes to sort of social interaction with people from completely different backgrounds to me.

6:06A lot of the workers in the Madonnas I worked in were Polish. So I've got some very good mates who are Polish, got some very good mates who are a lot older than me. And so it taught me a lot of social skills about interacting with other people. It taught me how to make eight cheeseburgers in less than 90 seconds. It taught me how... I learned arithmetic as well, obviously, like sort of handling sums of petty cash. But I mean, did it, I think a lot of those lessons, apart from maybe how to make eight cheeseburgers in less than 90 seconds, you would pick those up in like your first job anyway, right?

6:38So I don't know how unique they were to working in McDonald's. I mean, the thing that I'll give the fast food industry credit for is that it provides employment to a lot of people in society who would find difficulty finding work elsewhere. The thing that I criticize the fast food industry is that it treats those workers as interchangeable and disposable and has not set up a kind of work structure so that this can be a career with meaningful opportunity for advancement. It's not like it's teaching people how to cook and that they can then have that as a skill that they continue to do at a fast food restaurant or can do at a different restaurant.

7:20not it's just um anyway yeah i should probably maybe i should refer to myself i should as a chef a chef at mcdonald's um let just let's let's talk about the sort of reaction to you publishing fast food nation i mean there was there was a backlash um you needed bodyguards at some point and there's there's a there's a story of you in a car park being confronted by a man he gets you in a headlock and he's shouting you know why do you hate america why do you hate america so much I mean, can you talk to me about that perceived connection that makes this work anti-American and perhaps that connection between fast food and American identity?

7:58Could you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. Well, you know, you know, I did get a little paranoid because, you know, in general, as an activist, I'm pretty chill. I'm pretty grounded. I'm not yelling and getting people into people's faces. But I continually had to deal with disruptions of my public appearances. And I suspect that people were being paid to do this. It was remarkable in different cities how the flyers that were being handed out would be identical, but with maybe different names of the organization handing them out. And, you know, I believe in dialogue. And if someone completely disagrees with everything I say, I'm glad to engage in that conversation, which is really different from people running up to where you're standing and holding up, you know, placards criticizing you.

8:50So it was unpleasant. And there was only one incident. But I mean, it was crazy that at one point, I would make a public appearance and there would be armed private security. And in one case in Indiana, I was greeted by the state police when I arrived and they were with me in all public, whenever I went in public till I left the state. And it's not like I'm writing about the Cosa Nostra or, you know, organized drug gangs who want to do a hit. Writing about a company that sells hamburgers whose mascot is a clown and, you know, the fast food industry. Anyway, what happened to me was trivial. And in one instance, after a public appearance, someone came up behind me and, you know, got me totally by surprise and put me in a headlock and was yelling, why do you hate America?

9:43And, you know, this is just a period of time in which criticizing the status quo can be depicted as being un-American. at it. Your observations on the book 25 years on, how do you feel about it? It was my first book. I wasn't sure if anyone would publish it. All the New York publishers turned it down. It was one of the last independent publishing houses that agreed to do it. There was certainly no sign that it would be a bestseller. And the fact that it's in print 25 years later, let alone, you know, being republished by Penguin as a classic is, it's amazing. And it's a real privilege to be able to write about what you care about and have it still seem relevant so many years later.

10:43And I'm very fortunate in writing about what I care about because I don't stop caring about it once the book is done. So even though I really haven't continued to write about food. I've remained engaged as an activist on many issues that pertain to our food system. And so it's just really great to be part of the conversation and an ongoing dialogue about these issues. So what do you care about then? Well, I got involved in food issues through immigrant rights. And I spent a year following migrant farm workers in California. And most of them were undocumented. At the time, there was a governor in California, Pete Wilson, a Republican governor.

11:34This is in the early 1990s, who had ambitions to be president and decided to demonize undocumented workers in the state of California. he was calling them parasites welfare cheats saying that they were coming to california to live off of the hard-working taxpayers of california and i was living in new york city at the time but instinctively that just didn't seem true because my sister lived in california i had lived there for a time and every time i went to california i saw a lot of um latino workers doing all kinds of jobs that white people didn't want to do And instinctively, it felt like they were not parasites.

12:16So I started investigating and I found that at that point in the 1990s, agriculture was the single biggest sector of the California economy. And as California was developing and there was more and more real estate development, there was more and more pressure for farmers to grow high value crops that were bringing more revenue per acre. and those were fresh fruits and vegetables. And it's remarkable in the 21st century, and this was the 20th century, but almost all fresh fruits and vegetables need to be harvested by hand. So if you want to produce a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables, you need a lot of hands.

12:59So I looked at the role of undocumented immigrants in the California economy, and they were basically propping up the most valuable sector of the economy. And I spent a year following strawberry workers because every strawberry is picked by hand. And strawberries are extremely fragile, so they have to be picked carefully by hand. And the thrust of what I wrote was that, you know, far from being parasites or welfare cheats, that these people are feeding us. And that was really my introduction to the American food system. And so I would say of all the aspects of the food system that I care the most about, it's the exploitation of immigrant workers, mainly undocumented.

13:51And I've just stayed really engaged in that issue for 30 years now. I mean, there's so much in what you've just said. Thank God none of that's happening in the United Kingdom. Oh, God, no, no. The treatment of migrant farm workers here is just... Exemplary. Yeah. I mean, they just get incredible food and housing. And it's really, it's true throughout the Western industrialized world. And it makes the far right scapegoating of immigrants all the more despicable. The primary issue for these people isn't where they come from. It's the conditions they're subject to when they work in the UK or indeed any other Western economy.

14:30I mean, can you talk to me a little bit about the disc? What matters are the wages and working conditions and, you know, absolutely union rights. And then once you've established that the work is well paid, has dignity, it doesn't really matter who's doing it. It just needs to get done. And in the United States, simultaneous to this demonization of immigrants was an extraordinary active recruitment by big business of undocumented immigrants because they could be paid lower wages. There were so much less they are so much less likely to complain about working conditions, so much more vulnerable to wage theft.

15:17um so what's remarkable in the united states and in so much of the western industrialized world is that the crackdown again and again is on the immigrant worker and not on the major corporations who are knowingly uh employing and recruiting undocumented workers in fast food nation i wrote about the meatpacking companies which were you know taking out ads in rural mexico and basically maintaining a bus service to bring in undocumented workers and workers who had phony documents maybe. And this was part of union busting. And in the United States right now, you have poor immigrants being terrorized.

16:05And at the same time, the industries that profit from them, almost no enforcement against them whatsoever. So, you know, if you were to look at the book Fast Food Nation, the whole thing was structured to take you into the slaughterhouse. And it's not an original idea of mine. It was something that Upton Sinclair did almost a century before I did, which was using the slaughterhouse as a central metaphor for the ruthlessness of monopoly capitalism. And that's what I did. but what was interesting about the reception of fast food nation and i am i mean like quite sincerely like what i said at the outset of this conversation i'm so grateful it got published that its success allowed me to write other books and it's amazing to me that 25 years later it's still relevant in some ways i'm very sad that it's still relevant because i would have liked these problems to have been solved.

17:05But of all the aspects of the book, the one that I probably care the most about is the one that has gotten the least attention and that people have been less interested in. And that's just the way it goes. It's very, very hard to get people to care about the poor people who feed us.

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18:37let's let's get back to fast food notion and i want to revisit a foreword you wrote in 2012 about a decade after publication i'm quoting you here i hope that 10 years from now this book really is irrelevant and that the world it describes so full of greed and lacking in compassion is just a bad memory yeah you sound very optimistic yeah and i'm you know i don't I don't want to call this a pessimistic conversation so far, but it's a different register to the way that we're talking right now. I'm not optimistic, by the way. Okay. I mean, this may be splitting hairs, but an optimist believes everything is going to be okay.

19:13I've never thought that. But I'm hopeful. Flesh out that distinction for me. Talk to me more about that. Hopeful versus optimistic. Again, optimistic is a kind of a certainty that things are going to be all right. it's like you know you're going through real problems we've just met but ollie i'm giving you you've got some personal issue and i'm talking to you through it and i'm just going to tell you things are going to be okay it's going to work out fine and that's bullshit it may all go to hell so so i don't have any certainty that you know um the utopian future just lies around the corner but I'm hopeful because I see how it's possible and the reason that I write what I write for the New States when getting back to Marx I don't believe in any inevitability in history I don't believe that there were working from one stage to another and that's actually quite empowering because if things aren't inevitable then they don't have to be the way they are there isn't this plan.

20:21This isn't this logical progression of things unfolding. And that means that you have agency. If you believe in inevitability, then in some ways you're giving over your agency to the plan, to the party, to the, you know, the scheme that's unfolding. So when I wrote that, um, 12 years ago, whenever I was just wrong, you know, I was completely wrong, but it was hopeful. I would love all of my work to become irrelevant in terms of my writings. I would love the social issues and the problems that they've addressed to just have been solved. And for whatever I've written, eventually just be of kind of historical interest, of reflection of the time in which it was written.

21:11But when you talk about fast food nation, the central issues in the book are unquestionably worse now than when I wrote the book in 2001. And I mentioned this to you before we started the podcast. The book isn't really about food. It's very disappointing to some people who meet me, but I'm really not a foodie. And if you come over and ask me to cook for you, I can make a pretty good bowl of microwave oatmeal or a sandwich. But I'm not going to give you the best olive oil that I found through multiple tastings. Fast Food Nation is about the rise of unchecked corporate power in America as seen through the food system.

22:02And the food system was a very good place to look at it because of how central the food system is to the American economy. But by any measure you want, monopoly power has gotten worse since the book was published. And, you know, it's approaching levels that we haven't seen in the United States since the late 1890s. Certainly, wealth inequality right now in the United States is approaching the levels that we had in the 1890s. But, you know, I'm not so delusional as to think that I could write a book and it would, you know, lead to the breakup of massive multinational corporations. But I'm just part of the process of trying.

22:52time. Schlosser's theory of change is sort of writing a book about every 10 years or so, and that things will just collapse and fall apart and something else will be rejuvenating. You have to believe that to get up in the morning and sit down and pour through all these government documents. No, I'm not deluded in the power of one writer or one person, But I'm encouraged by being part of the process. And this sounds so pretentious again, but being part of a movement. I mean, on a personal level, the people whom I've met, the people who I've worked with on these different issues have helped give me hope and have helped create a sense of community.

23:42And it's a reminder that there are other people who care and are willing to spend the time to wage the fight, etc., etc. I think that the worst position of all to be in is to feel overwhelmed by the constant barrage of bad news, to be isolated and to do nothing about it. Because, again, you know, getting back to the kind of post-war existentialist point of view, just the process of trying to do something about it helps. You know, that's what you can control. You can't control these gigantic social, economic, political forces in the world. you can to a certain extent control what you do with your life and how you think about these things and even if it's just it sounds so corny but even if it's just once a week devoting a few hours to something other than just self-aggrandizement can make a difference I really believe that

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25:27Both in relation to the food system, but also corporate power, because I actually think, particularly with a European parallel, I do believe that fast food is more prevalent here than perhaps, even just on a sort of purely anecdotal, on my personal experience, when I visit European countries, the sort of the density, the saturation of both these chain restaurants, whether it's McDonald's, you could say McDonald's, but it could be, you take your pick, right? versus in France, in Italy, in Spain, whether or not they're there as dense there. And I just wonder, I'd invite that comparison from you, both in relation to the food system, but corporate power and the politics.

26:04I mean, I know this conversation is very broad ranging, but just on that point about the US-UK parallel, to what extent you believe it to be there, to what extent you believe them to be similar, or differences you identify perhaps. Well, let's start with immigration and then move on. Okay. One of the things that I love most about the United States, and maybe it's because so much of my formative years, so many of my formative years were spent in New York City, which has always been a gateway to immigration, is that you, more than anywhere else in the world, can be an American if you just believe in a certain set of values.

26:46and you know it's a hugely imperfect history and we can go through you know the Chinese exclusion exclusionary acts in the late 19th and early 20th century we can talk about the racist immigration legislation in the 1920s etc but more than any other country in the world the United States was welcoming to immigrants and embraced a wide variety of backgrounds and again you know New York City is the melting pot that I grew up in, where you had every kind of person from everywhere in the world, not necessarily loving one another, but sharing the same streets and finding a way to live, you know, relatively in peace with one another.

27:28And you could have a governor of California named Arnold Schwarzenegger with a thick Austrian accident. And you could have a president of the United States named Barack Obama, you know, with a mixed race background. And that's the America that I love. At the same time, you know, you have these waves of anti-immigrant sentiment. In the 19th century, it was anti-Irish and anti-Catholic. Later on, it's anti-Chinese. Then it's anti-Eastern European. Now it's anti-Mexican. There's always been a real strain of anti-Mexican. And then there's just been the profound racism towards black people that was there since 1619.

28:15So it's a highly imperfect society, but has as a central value, the embrace of immigrants, how imperfectly realized. And I think in Europe, there's much less of that. I think that if you look at the core nationalism of the different European states, they don't have the welcoming of immigrants as part of the nationalism. And I've had to try to broaden the nationalism and broaden the definition of what it is to be English so that it could include people who don't look traditionally English. And that's true in Germany. It's true in Austria, you know, Scandinavia. Anyway, getting back to fast food, I think what you're talking about is a business model that sort of favors cheapness, uniformity and conformity and has certain advantages over independent businesses.

29:28You know, Starbucks, for example, would come into a town, find an independent coffee house, and then open one or two Starbucks in the neighborhood. And, you know, when you have economies of scale, can wipe out independent businesses. And I do find in the United Kingdom now, looking at the high streets, it's a remarkable degree of uniformity, not just in fast food restaurants, but all kinds of chain stores that you might not find in other parts of Europe. And it's just, it's something that I, you know, I'm not drawn toward, which is this sort of everywhere, everything the same. Yeah, it's not the way that I'd like to lead my life.

30:20I think that's where the beauty is, right? Those are the things you appreciate. People that are different for whatever reason or in whatever way, different points of view. I'd appreciate this, and I'm sort of asking you to do a little bit of an explainer here. If you could talk a little bit about MacLibel, because I think there is some knowledge in the UK about it, not least because our prime minister is one of the lawyers who worked pro bono on that case, but I don't think they might, the average person might not necessarily know what it involved and specifically the kind of collusion, shall we say, the synergy between private corporate power and the power of the state and the way those two things came together.

31:04I just wonder if you could talk about that a little bit for me. Yeah, it's an extraordinary, extraordinary story. And there was a great documentary made on it by Franny Armstrong called McLibel. The McDonald's Corporation really took advantage of the libel laws in the United Kingdom, which are much more favorable to corporations or people who want to sue. And basically, if you're sued for libel in the United States, your behavior as a journalist, for example, you needed to be reckless in spreading something that was false. You needed to be willful, deliberately doing it. And, you know, there's much more tolerance for an honest mistake.

31:55in the united kingdom the burden of proof is on you as a journalist to show that what you wrote was 100 accurate whereas in the united states the burden of proof is on the person suing to show that you were being irresponsible and that you knew what you were writing or saying was false so the mcdonald's corporation in the united kingdom for years used the libel laws here in the United Kingdom to sue people who had disagreed with and threatened to sue them. And this corporation, the multi-billion dollar corporation, you know, had such an advantage in these lawsuits because they could win an enormous amount of money as a judgment.

32:40And just having to defend yourself would cost you an enormous amount of money. So there's a long list of people who they threatened to sue. And again and again, those people would back down and apologize and, and, you know, issue apologies, even if maybe what they were saying was accurate. And then they decided to sue these activists from London Greenpeace, which was an offshoot of Greenpeace, not even part of the main Greenpeace. And two of those activists refused to apologize, Helen Steele and Dave Morris. They just said, no, sue us and let's go to court. And what they'd been doing is they had been distributing a pamphlet and the pamphlet was what's wrong with McDonald's and it had a list of the environmental harms McDonald's was causing the labor harms you know what's wrong with the food etc etc and they were just handing out these pamphlets at McDonald's but you know the corporation was kind of drunk with its own power of shutting people up and you know, acting in a very authoritarian way until they came up against these two activists who wouldn't apologize.

33:51And it became the longest civil court case in British history because Morris and Steele, with help from Keir Starmer, who was a brave and crusading human rights attorney, turned the tables on McDonald's and basically put McDonald's on trial. And I I can't remember. But I mean, the trial lasted for years. But there was a whole other hidden side of it. Some of it came out in the trial and some of it's only been revealed since then. You know, McDonald's had hired private investigators to infiltrate London Greenpeace. And at some of the meetings of London Greenpeace, there were more McDonald's private investigators than there were actual London Greenpeace members.

34:41And the McDonald's private investigators were from different firms and were basically spying on one another. So that sort of reveals not only the eagerness to sue people who disagree with them, but infiltrating activist groups with private investigators also reveals sort of McDonald's view towards civil society and freedom of speech. But what's come out since then is that Scotland Yard was simultaneously infiltrating London Greenpeace. And the pamphlet that was being handed out by London Greenpeace was partially written by an undercover agent from Scotland Yard, which is kind of classic agent provocateur work.

35:34One of the issues that's being examined now in the ongoing public inquiry that's happening right now is how much did McDonald's know about Scotland Yard's infiltration of London Greenpeace? The likelihood is they knew a great deal. The head of security at McDonald's was a former Scotland Yard superintendent. He had a lot of friends who were still at Scotland Yard. And one of the most interesting points of all is the Scotland Yard undercover agent at London Greenpeace was handing out these pamphlets all the time. But McDonald's never sued him, which is a sign that McDonald's knew who was Scotland Yard and who was actually a real Greenpeace activist.

36:24The infiltration of a small organization campaigning for healthy food, labor rights, and animal rights, not only by a multinational corporation, but by Scotland Yard, is really disturbing for anyone who believes in free speech. and anyone who's concerned about the excessive power of multinational corporations in a so-called free society. The one other element that's just beyond belief disgusting is that these Scotland Yard undercover agents who are infiltrating many different organizations were also sleeping with members of those organizations while collecting information. At least 50 women who belonged to these organizations were unknowingly sleeping with undercover agents, in some cases having children with them.

37:32And we're not talking about a one-night stand. We're talking about long-term, sometimes multi-year relationships with undercover police officers, some of whom had families and children while they were, you know, sleeping with these activists. And they would just then disappear. And, you know, it's just, you know, one of these women who unknowingly had a child with one of these Scotland Yard agents referred to it as state rape, which it really was. So, you know, there is this public inquiry going on right now. And I think it really deserves more and more attention. The Guardian did a terrific job at exposing a lot of this.

38:22But when you have the collaboration of the state and big companies like this, it really is pretty revealing about, you know, who the state is representing and who it's not acting on behalf of. Yeah. Who are you governing for? Yeah, I just encourage listeners if they do want to learn more about what Eric's talking about there, Police Spies Out of Lives is the name of the campaign and they can find all of this information. I mean, it is utterly extraordinary. Eric, we're running out of time and sort of my final question to you, I mean, we've obviously been quite a wide ranging conversation. your work is wide ranging I know you said it's about power and it's about multinational corporations but nevertheless I mean you have worked on a range of projects not just writing right not just books I mean you're a co-executive producer on there will be blood I just I would slightly introspective question for you and you might not like talking about it but I'm just interested to hear what draws you to a project what is it that you look for when you're when and you're thinking about pursuing something creatively, what is it that gets your interest?

39:28So I started out as a playwright, and I was really unsuccessful. I've had two plays produced in London. One of them got amazing reviews. One of them got probably the worst reviews of 400 years in theater in London, and I am determined to have another play produced because I just can't end on that note. I was a novelist and I was a profoundly unsuccessful novelist and then I had the beginnings a real beginnings of a career as a screenwriter before I started doing non-fiction journalism so I've done all kinds of writing and it's really led me to believe that no one form is better than any other they're just different ways of getting at a subject or getting at a story you know there used to be a kind of hierarchy where like the poets are at the top and below the poets of the novelists and below the novelists of the playwrights and somewhere far below were the journalists and non-fiction writers and having done lots of types of writing it's all hard and to do something good is an achievement whatever genre it's in and it's just different ways of trying to get at the truth of something so I have been extremely fortunate that I've had plays produced and I've been involved in documentaries and I've directed an experimental film and just tried to get at things in different ways.

40:55And they're all valid and they're all just ways of exploring a subject. In the case of There Will Be Blood, after Fast Food Nation came out and when I was talking about it, I was constantly being asked questions about Upton Sinclair. And I'd read The Jungle, but I didn't really know that much about him. And I started reading a lot of Upton Sinclair. And he was amazing. I mean, he wrote books on every aspect of the American society that he was part of. He wrote a book criticizing organized religion, a book criticizing the universities, I mean, on and on and on. And one of the books that he wrote was a novel about the oil industry.

41:36And it really, really resonated with me. and so I did something that I've never done before and I've never done since which I contacted the estate of Upton Sinclair and I asked if the film rights were available and I bought the film rights and I bought them for a ridiculously low sum of money I mean a tiny so I mean it was a lot for me because I don't have a film company but it was minuscule for anybody who's in the film world And I just thought this would be an incredible film. And I started thinking about how to make this as a film. And then I was contacted by Paul Thomas Anderson, who literally was the only other human being I had ever heard from who had read that book, Oil by Upton Sinclair.

42:25He had, I think, been in a bookstore in London, and he'd been looking through old books, and he saw the cover, and he sat down and read it. And so the two of us were kind of obsessed with this book. It took us a little while to align in a number of different ways that I won't get into. But eventually I just realized that, oh, my God, you know, to have one of the great directors with probably the greatest living actor of my generation making this film. And I think it wound up being an extraordinary film. Extraordinarily serendipitous that sort of came together in that way. Yeah. Yeah. And I think I think it would have been made into a film.

43:15because there's a really elemental, powerful story in that book that speaks to all these bigger themes about America. I mean, with some, you know, again, you know, I worked for an independent film company and I read hundreds if not thousands of screenplays as part of my job. And I think you could take the same story and give it to three different really talented writers or three different talented directors and get three different really good films. And so I think oil had within it, you know, if it hadn't been Paul Thomas Anderson, a different director could have made a great film based on it.

44:00But his is extraordinarily good. And I feel like, I feel that There Will Be Blood is one of the great films of the 21st century. I'm not taking credit for it I'm giving it to him but I think another director could have made a really totally different interesting film based on that same source material but he made I think a classic film this I promise this is my last question I hear you keep a soundtrack for each of your books is that right no I kind of I listen to music while I write what are you listening to at the moment? I'm writing about prisons and I'm listening to a lot of hip hop. I try to, the reason I listen to music when I write, and when I wrote this nuclear weapons book, I was listening to a lot of minimalist techno, which seemed to fit this sort of crazy technological world of nuclear weapons.

44:59I find that playing music really loud while I write shuts up the critic and just allows the part of the brain that's willing to put something on the page when i'm when i'm writing in silence i'm often you know questioning each word that i put down anyway it's really interesting stephen king talks about that when he's in his book on writing it's like writing with the door open and writing with the door shut and even that sort of minor difference is like one psychological state is when you're open to the rest of the world criticism feedback, editing, and the other is when you're like, no, I need to put 2 ,000 words on the page today.

45:37And I'm just going at it. He closes the door. That's his way. Yeah. It's interesting to hear that point of comparison. Look, Eric, it has been such a pleasure talking to you. I'm so grateful for your time. I'm so grateful for the conversation. Thank you. Fast Food Nation, 25 years anniversary, a Penguin classic. Eric Schlosser, thank you so much. Thank you.

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