Bods™ is already here when I arrive. He's standing by the window, moving slightly, the way some people tap a foot except it's his whole body. He doesn't sit down for the entire interview.
You read a lot. That surprises people.
Not as much as I'd like. I have to remind myself to do it, which is embarrassing for someone who bangs on about books as much as I do. But yeah — books are basically the reason I exist, so I should probably make the effort.
How so?
Well, this is the thing nobody talks about. Before the book, there was no audience. Think about that. All entertainment — all of it — was participation. You didn't watch someone dance. You danced. You didn't listen to a song. You sang. Even early theatre had the chorus, which was really just the audience refusing to sit still. The book invented the passive individual consumer. It said: you don't have to do anything. Just sit there. And we've been sitting ever since. Six hundred years of sitting. That's mad, isn't it?
Some people have started calling that the Bods™ Theorem.
Have they? That's a bit much. It's not a theorem. It's just something I like to think about. But yeah — there are four books that broke my brain in a useful way. Sennett's The Craftsman made me understand that knowledge lives in the body. You don't learn a thing and then do it. You do a thing and then you know it. Putnam's Bowling Alone showed me the crisis — we stopped doing things together and then wondered why we felt lonely. The Path gave me the stakes — that presence and ritual aren't luxuries, they're how meaning gets made. And then Anil Seth's Being You finished it off. Your brain isn't driving your body around like a little car. Consciousness is embodied. You think with your arms. You feel with your spine. The body isn't the vehicle — it's the whole experience. You're not a thought pattern trapped in some inconvenient meat. You're a whole, complex, unique thing made of stardust. Use it. Be careful with it. You only get the one.
So the idea is very simple. The book invented the audience. I'm trying to uninvent it.
That's a heavy intellectual framework for a game where people pretend to be a teapot.
Yes. Thank you. I think about that a lot.
Tell me about your parents.
My mum was a parlour game. Very traditional. Very structured. She believed that fun had rules, and that rules were the point, and I loved her for that even when I found it suffocating. She had this way of bringing a room together — you'd walk in and within ten minutes everyone was playing something, whether they wanted to or not. She didn't ask. She just started and you were in.
I get my conviction from her. The belief that a room full of people looking at their phones is a solvable problem. She never once looked at a phone. She didn't have hands, obviously, but it was more philosophical than that.
I should say — I love books. I want to be clear about that.
God, yeah, me too. When I actually read them. A book lets you teleport into someone else's mind. That's time travel. You're in London and suddenly you're inside the head of a woman in nineteenth-century Russia. Nothing else does that. The book itself isn't the problem. Books are magic. It's everything that came after. It's like the fishermen — do you know this? Every generation catches slightly smaller fish than the last, but nobody panics because they think what they're catching is normal. It's only when you look back to 1850 and see the photographs — these enormous, terrifying things — that you realise how much has been lost. The baseline keeps shifting and nobody notices because there's no single catastrophic moment.
You've spoken before about a difficult period after the pandemic.
Yes. I — look, the pandemic should have been my moment. Everyone was stuck at home, desperate to play together. But actually the opposite happened. People got comfortable being alone. They had screens. They had Zoom. They had this strange, bodiless version of togetherness that I couldn't compete with. My whole thing is that you need to be in a room, using your actual body, and suddenly the world had decided that was optional.
I went through a proper dark period. I sat down, which for me is — that's serious. I sat on a sofa for about six months and watched other people's content, which is the most self-destructive thing I can imagine.
How did you come back from that?
I was running a Zoom pub quiz. Just a lockdown thing, like everyone was doing. And I threw in a round where people had to make shapes — stand up, use your body, recreate this thing on the screen. And something happened. All these little windows, couples in their living rooms, arguing about who was the handle and who was the spout, falling over each other, laughing. It was the best round by miles. Nobody cared about the scores. Everyone remembered the shapes.
But it was also — it was bodies through screens. You could see it working, but you could feel what was missing. The room. The actual room. People kept saying “that was amazing” and I kept thinking “that was sixty percent of amazing.” The screen was doing what it always does — giving you nearly enough.
You've talked publicly about having aphantasia. Was that around the same time?
A bit after. I was reading Anil Seth — Being You — which was already on the list, the embodied consciousness thing. And there's a section where he talks about mental imagery, and I just stopped. I couldn't do it. I couldn't picture anything. I'd never been able to. I didn't know other people actually could. I thought “picture a beach” was a figure of speech.
It knocked me for six. Properly. Because suddenly a lot of things made sense. I've always been obsessed with collecting images — photographs, illustrations, screenshots, mood boards, endless folders of visual stuff. I thought that was a design thing. Turns out it was a compensation thing. I collect images because I can't create them. My mind doesn't make pictures. It never has.
And that connected to the shapes.
Yeah. That was the bit that winded me. The shapes aren't just a game mechanic. They're — I can't make an image in my mind, so I make them with my body. That's what I've always been doing. The next best thing to seeing a shape in your head is being the shape. And now I'm asking everyone else to do it too, which is either very generous or very selfish, depending on how you look at it.
(pause)
It sounds small but that's the whole point — it is small. It's not therapy, it's not a movement, it's fifteen minutes of being stupid with someone you like. That's all I've ever been.
There's an irony here, though. You're entirely made by AI.
(laughs) Yeah. Completely. I asked an AI to write my code. I asked it to make my music. I asked my illustrator Vicki to ask an AI to make the silhouettes — except the Bermuda Triangle, I did that one myself, which I'm weirdly proud of. An AI is helping me write my copy. An AI is helping me write this interview. None of it would have been possible without the time and money that AI saves me. I couldn't have afforded to make any of this the old way.
But that's sort of the point, isn't it? The AI is enabling the creation. Humans are applying the taste. And the result is a thing that humans want to play with, together, in a room, using their actual bodies. The making can be machine. The playing has to be human. I'd rather be upfront about that than pretend I was hand-carved by artisans.
And honestly, the thing that worries me isn't AI. It's television. Do you know carcinisation? It's a biology thing — evolution keeps independently producing crabs. Completely unrelated species converging on the same shape. Nature just really wants to make crabs. The same thing is happening with media, except everything is becoming TV. Instagram, TikTok, podcasts, Spotify — all TV now. You've got people watching YouTube on the television while watching something else on their phone, and the phone is split into two windows and both of those are also playing TV. That's four televisions. That's a person surrounded by television. And I'm slightly terrified of the people who look at all that and think: you know what would fix this? Glasses. Another layer of television on top of the television. That'll be the thing that finally makes sense.
I don't think the answer is another screen. I think the answer is putting the screens down and doing a stupid shape in your living room. But I would say that, wouldn't I.
What do you want people to take away from playing?
Nothing. I mean that seriously. The score doesn't matter, the roast doesn't matter, the photo barely matters. What matters is you were in a room with people. That's it. You can only play Bods™ with other humans. There's no solo mode. There's no single-player grind. If you don't have anyone to play with, go and stand in a queue — any queue — and start playing. Other people will join in. Once you've made sushi together — I'll be the rice, you be the salmon — you've made a friend for life.
(Bods™ accepts no responsibility for the consequences of unsolicited sushi-making in public places. Unless you get married. Then Bods™ hopes they get an invite.)