Welcome to hardtalk, im stephen sackur. Sometimes it takes an outsider, armed with a sharp eye and curiosity, to get us to see ourselves as we really are. And that would explain the enduring popularity of the american born writer bill bryson, whose wry take on britain and the british has generated two best selling books. Now, in recent years, his travels have taken him deep into the realms of science and human biology. From the mysteries of afternoon tea to the power of the human brain, what has bill bryson learned from his gentle search for understanding . Bill bryson, welcome to hardtalk. Im delighted to be here, stephen. Thank you for having me. Well, its a pleasure. It seems to me that youve lived a life driven by curiosity, by a determination to get explanations. Am i right . I get a lot of credit for that, and im not sure i entirely deserve it. I mean, i wont argue with you if you want to praise me for it, but i think were all driven by curiosity. What else gets us out of bed in the morning, you know . And all ive done, really, is just figured out a way to make a living out of it. Well, except its maybe the difference between an open mind and a closed mind. And your mind has been open to travels, to learning things about, you know, science, for example, which you clearly didnt begin with a great deal of expertise in. I guess i have always been fascinated by why people do things the way they do them. And maybe its because i grew up in the very middle of america, in a very homogenised sort of part of the world, and everybody for 1,000 miles in every direction was exactly like us. I mean, there was no variation in accent or skin colour or anything. This was deepest darkest iowa. This is in middle iowa, yes, and it was really, really quite homogenised. And i grew up fascinated by the way people did things in other countries. I really, really wanted to go off and see how they did things elsewhere, and i am still fascinated by that. I think its quite amazing when you go somewhere and you just think, you know, london has really jaunty red double decker buses. Why doesnt everybody do that . Why . And sidewalk cafes. I know a lot of the rest of the world has copied that, but back in the 70s when i started travelling, it was really unusual to see that in other countries. In a funny sort of way i want to look at your body of work backwards, if you like, and begin with the recent writing which has very much delved deep into the worlds of science, but particularly in the latest book. The human body a guide for 0ccupants, you call it. Because, in a way, we need to think and you want us to think about the way our body works. Well, what ive done with that book and what i do with all my books is i find something that im curious about and i want to know more about, ijust find some area of great ignorance in my life, and one of those is the human body. I have been struck for a long time by this great paradox that we spend our whole lives in this container. You know, theres nothing in your existence with which you are more intimately associated than your own body, for obvious reasons, and yet most of us barely know it. I mean, i have never seen the back of my own head, except reflected backwards in the mirror. I cant look in my own ears. I cant look down my own throat. If i walk around you, i will see more of you than you have ever seen of yourself, in ten seconds. And then, when you look at whats inside us, most of us have practically no idea of how were all put together. And i have this vague sense that theres all of these things inside me that have been keeping me going for 68 years now, and im grateful as hell for it, but i really would like to know how it works and how it all fits together. Interesting you say, you know, here i am, 68 years young. Is there something about ageing, perhaps a greater appreciation of mortality, that has drawn you to talk about the body . No doubt. It also in the early stages made the Research Really hard, because i kept reading all the things that could kill me. You study about the heart and you realise, whoa, ive been neglecting this organ for nearly seven decades now, and all the rest of it. And so, yes, it took me a little while to get perspective on it, and the one thing i decided in the end was it was very important to me that i not dwell on all the things that can go wrong. Because honestly, things can go wrong with your body, and ultimately something will go so wrong that it will kill you. That is just an inevitability we all have to live with. But, for the most part, your body is a success story. All of these systems within you are looking after you. As were here now, in london, were breathing in pathogens wherever we go. And they want to make us ill, but they dont, because our body catches them and deals with it, swallows them or coughs them out or whatever. And, most of the time, we are constantly subjected to things that really ought to hurt us. An amazing statistic i heard about is, from a professor in stanford in california, that three to five times a day we get cancer one of your cells will turn cancerous. You have so many cells that are replicating so much that things will go wrong, and out of the trillions of cells, 37 trillion cells you have, some of them will misfire, and you will actually get cancer. You mean all of us are prone to this. Every single one of us. 0ur immune system gets them. 0ur immune system captures them and identifies them and dismisses them. So if you really get cancer, in the conventional sense, you have been very, very unlucky, because most of the time, your whole life your body has been dealing with it. I just thought that was an amazing thought. The passion is coming across, and you do write about it with a sense of amazement and awe, which it seems to me you sort of feel that scientists dont always manage to get across, and therefore they dont get appreciated in the ways that they should. Well, the one advantage ive always felt i had when i do science is that i am not a scientist. I have no scientific background. I was terrible at science at school. And the one thing i can bring to it is a kind of enthusiasm bred from ignorance, that i have an infinite capacity to be astonished by what im learning. Whereas ive often found a lot of scientists, by no means all of them, but a lot of them, are veryjaded by their own subjects. Because, to them, the things that strike me as absolutely astounding arejust, you know, everyday business of their working lives. But you do go to pretty extraordinary lengths to learn. You spend hours and hours obviously in libraries, and gleaning information. But also i was very struck by the passage you wrote about going to a dissection room, and i dont know if you had seen dead bodies before. No, no. This little passage is striking. You say the only raw flesh we normally see is the meat of animals were about to cook and eat. The flesh of a human arm, once the outer skin is removed, actually looks surprisingly like chicken or turkey, and its only when you see that it ends in a hand with fingers and fingernails that you realise it is human. And that is when you think you might be sick. Its true, and i went into this dissecting room id never been exposed to anything like this before. I was very, very lucky to be allowed to go in. This is at the university of nottingham, and i went in not sure how i would respond, whether i would be terribly queasy. And for the first 20 seconds, i was, for sure. I think most people are, partlyjust because youre nervous and youre not sure how youre going to react. But then, i couldnt believe how quickly that passed and how fascinating it was, and how privileged ifelt, and grateful. I mean, all of these people leave their bodies for medical science. I dont think i would have the character to do that, to just allow myself to be stripped naked and laid on a slab so that medical students could cut me open and learn the business of being doctors, or nurses or other things. And, you know, so i think the people that have donated their bodies are massively heroic. In yourjourney, if i can put it that way, because we know you as a travel writer, in yourjourney through the human body, and health, because youre addressing issues of human health, you do seem to draw some fairly dark conclusions about what we modern human beings are doing to our bodies. You know, you talk about the ways in which modern lifestyles are actually endangering health, and entirely voluntarily, because of the stuff we eat, because we overeat. You talk about obesity, you talk diabetes, you talk about sperm counts falling. It sort of ends up being a book which suggests, for all of our material well being as human beings, weve got some very grave problems. Well, i partly disagree with that, in the sense that i do believe the book is about is a celebration of the body and the good things it does, and how it looks after you. But its true that a lot of things go wrong, and what was really surprising to me is to what extent we are responsible for the things that go wrong in us. I cant remember the exact figure, but its something well over half of all the things that might kill us are things that are self inflicted through lifestyle, bad choices. But its not even just that, is it . Its not just that we overeat. We the wrong kinds of food. Its also, if i may say so, somewhat political, your main point, because you make a real point of saying actually health equates very closely to wealth and to riches, to money, ie those who have more money, on the whole, will be significantly healthier and will enjoy greater longevity. And that applies across the world. It seems to be universal, and its really interesting, because i dont think its been terribly well studied. Nobody knows to what extent its genetic you know, because youre wealthy, you come from privilege, you have lots and lots of good genes behind you, supporting it and to what extent its just that you havent been exposed to risk in the same way. Its something that really ought to be studied, because its something of a scandal in every advanced nation, not least britain, and even more in the United States, my own country. But its something that really we should all be conscious of, which is part of the reason i dwelled on it, to some extent. Because you do raise difficult issues. And theres one other thing i want to talk about in the book the body, that strikes me as very important, because i want to move on to other work. But you talk about the degree to which collectively were living longer as a species, longevity is extended, but that doesnt necessarily mean were living longer healthier. Many of us have dementia and other degenerative diseases which make our final years, which are extended, actually very difficult and very expensive. And ijust wonder, for you yourself, as you age, whether you consider for example the ethics of assisted dying, and whether there is a case, given our demographics, given oui resources, given the difficulty of living with degenerative disease, whether assisted dying is something youve come to agree with. If youre asking me personally. Iam. I do agree with it. Its not something i deal with in the book, but i think its going to be the whole matter of how we age and how we deal with it is going to be a real problem. Because medical science can keep your body going, it can keep your heart ticking away and all of your systems functioning really well. But what it cant do is give you quality of life that goes on forever. And the body deteriorates, thats just an inevitable part of ageing. And my dear old mother, who died a couple of years ago at the age of 102, she was a prime example of that. From about the age of 97 onwards she was essentially blind and demented and deaf, and she didnt know where she was or what was going on. She had no quality of life. Do you think she would have wanted the right to take her life . Well, this is the real difficult thing. Because if i had been responsible for her, i couldnt have said, yes, put her down, euthanise her. Shes my mother, i loved her. I couldnt do that. And there isnt any way that you could assign that role to society in some general sense. So how do we deal with that . How do we square this where, you know, were able to keep people alive, but with essentially zero quality of life . Essentially, i dont think we as a society have even begun to address it. Let me shift focus a little bit away from the body and to bill bryson, in his late 60s, living in the uk, of course, with still strong connections to the United States. You talk very interestingly these days about how you feel you dont belong in the 21st century. You say, i dont text, for instance, ijust cant do it. I cant. All of this stuff such as twitter, i dont understand it. I dont feel comfortably attached to this wider world. You are the arch communicator. Well, no, but i am just interested in the day to day stuff. I dont have any aptitude for all of the technology that we are surrounded with, and i dont see. But you can learn. We have just heard you tell us you learned all about the human body. You can learn how to use twitter, for goodnesss sake. And when i have to, when its a clear benefit to me. I love my laptop, i could not be without my laptop, so its not as if i am a complete luddite. And i watch my children i came here on an underground train today and i watched people doing this all the time. I thought, what are you doing . Just look at the world. Theres a whole world around you. But in a way, they are looking at the world. The internet, you know, for so long it has been seen as this amazing gift to humanity, because in our pocket we have a machine that can open up all of the knowledge of the world to us. And again, as a man who in the course of this interview has shown your passion for knowledge, is that not a massive access . It is so touching you believe that because, every time ive looked and seen what the person beside me is doing is theyre playing some game or theyre watching some mrs browns boys or something. Theyre doing something fairly trivial. I do not see people stretching their minds, using the technology to stretch their minds. In fact, i rather worry its quite the reverse. Ijudged a journalism writing competition a couple of years ago and they had to list their sources and virtually every source from every entry paper was from wikipedia. They had not gone any deeper into doing research than just taking whatever wikipedia told them. It is a danger of living in a world that is full of richness but we just take the very top easiest route. If i may say so, im inclined to link your feelings about twitter and social media and the Digital World to your feelings more generally about the value of conserving and preserving and protecting. cause you have written about that a lot, particularly in the context of britain and your love of so much that is traditional in britain and your worry about some of the developments that might threaten, for example britains glorious natural habitat. Would you say you are a man who looks with great fondness to the past . Yeah, i think so but not in the sense that i think, oh, i wish i could live in a 19th century or something. Because some people look at your books and think, oh, my god, he isjust peddling all these old cliches about cricket and warm beer and afternoon tea and quirky, eccentric english people. Well, you can say that but that is thats where comedy lies. I mean, you make fun or tease about the things that are representative of any society and, for me as an outsider, those are the things that i will focus on, like cricket and the kind of silliness of britain in the 21st century, that yourjudges still wear little mops on their heads and that kind of thing. Did you find britain more funny than most countries that you have visited . Yeah but endearingly so. I think, part of what i really admire about britain, and the reason yourjudges still wear little mops on their heads, is because there is this deeply embedded sense of tradition and continuity and i think that is really, really important, and i think its one of the things what makes britain very, very special is this sense of a long history that is being honoured in some way. Some of it is a bit silly and superficial but i think, fundamentally, it has some real importance. Like i say, in the introduction i say that it sometimes takes an outsider to see us as we really are, and youre interesting because you have lived an awful long time now in the uk. You came here as a backpacking student in the 1970s, you married an english woman, youve lived most of your life here. Am i right in thinking you are now a naturalised citizen . Yes. So you are a brit, basically, but youre still kind of an outsider. And you wrote your first book, notes from a small island, i think in the mid 90s, then you updated it 20 years later with another travel journey through the uk. How has britain changed . A lot, ithink, and not always for the better. In some ways. Some things youve held on to, against all odds, i think the greatest achievement of the british nation is the countryside. You have preserved this beautiful, beautiful landscape, almost everywhere. If you were just parachuted randomly into the united kingdom, you would probably land in somewhere that was quite fetching. So you like the parts of that are britain stuck in aspic . Not stuck in aspic at all, i mean, you can have modern lifestyle but live in a landscape that is treated with respect, and you keep the hedgerows or the dry stone walls, or whatever the features that make it special. I think those are things that are worth preserving and fighting for and paying for. You can call that aspic if you want, i just think, if you have something that is really beautiful, why. Sure, but when you see the ever changing london skyline, some of the dramatic architecture. I actually quite like that. In britain today, we are facing so many existential questions that have been raised more than years of argument about brexit, which in a sense is about who we are and where we want to go with our nations story and you, it seems to me, is sending a message that you guys should understand that your past was fantastic and, frankly, note from a small island, you are in your view, an island, your story is very different from those of your neighbours, you should protect and preserve what is different about yourselves. Am i right in reading it that way . I think its more, if you have something that is really lovely or nice or special, why get rid of it . Hold on to that and then build new things over here. Dont sweep away some lovely village in order to have a new housing estate. We really need new Housing Estates and new hospitals but park them with care. Dontjust build them on. There are so many people who think that greenfield sites as just an underdeveloped resource sitting there waiting to be built on. And i think that is unfortunate because theres an awful lot of brownfield sites that can be built on very much more effectively. So all im saying is keep the good stuff, and this is notjust a british thing, this is everywhere. But i come from a country where we mostly got rid of all the good stuff. I want to end on thoughts about the country you come from butjust to stick with britain a moment longer and this thought that we are at a very important moment in the sort of development of the national psyche. Do you feel britain, as you travel around today, is more or less ill at ease with itself than when you first arrived here . Thats an interesting question because