ANDREW O'HAGAN : Funnily enough, the one that wasn't part of an invitation-- I was invited by Julian Assange and his representatives to help him write his memoir.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : Yes.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : No, they didn't.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : Well, the men in black, as I call them, which was the two, the one from Vancouver, and the other man from Australia who were joining forces
ANDREW O'HAGAN : I think there's a lot of fear in that way.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : Yeah, it's sort of turns it up to the light that it's always been a sort of invented thing.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : --and the question of value isn't an actual, real, touchable thing in the way that I think we imagine it is when
ANDREW O'HAGAN : I was very struck by the position he was in when I first met him, that is to say a man wearing an electronic ankle
ANDREW O'HAGAN : And then it becomes not just about an organization doing good work, or struggling to introduce a new idea of honesty, truth,
ANDREW O'HAGAN : Well, I wanted them always to be two separate issues.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : I mean, I always felt, and I still feel that for any of us, if there's an accusation of that sort, you have to go and clear your name.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : Absolutely.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : Yeah.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : I think it's an interesting question, that.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : No, it makes you sort of ghostly.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : Yes.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : Yeah, having to go through them.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : You pay your money, you got your credits, you'll find anybody's address.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : Well, it's interesting.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : Yeah.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : Quite a while ago, just after it was exposed, actually, as having been a common practice in the Met.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : I've always felt it.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : --with love and identity is not about a public manifestation always.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : I can, yeah.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : Thank you.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : Thank you.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : That's an interesting core question about that story for me.
That sort of-- ANDREW O'HAGAN : I mean, technology has become the ghostifying thing for me in that the ghostifying thing-- Defying?
ANDREW O'HAGAN : It's unstable.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : They just need to check today's value of one Bitcoin, and they know that you were enriching them.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : The question of what you're worth is actually behind all this.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : In the era of fake news, and the era of a purported leader of the free world
ANDREW O'HAGAN : Fascinating, though.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : So the books were-- these stories, in a sense, are continuing material for me, and old topics revived, and coming all the way around
ANDREW O'HAGAN : It's an incredible statistic, if you think about it.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : I think I'll go and be Susan for five minutes.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : At the end, yeah.
I, mean-- Yeah, because it's material ANDREW O'HAGAN : --a child's eyes would widen if you handed them a bunch of 50 pound notes.
ANDREW O'HAGAN : And if you take that away, and you just imagine that if anybody's not telling you something private, it's because they're doing something wrong,
But increasingly, of course-- Well, though, the kids would-- ANDREW O'HAGAN : --generation-- --be more likely to-- ANDREW O'HAGAN : --they are much more likely.