Jamie Oliver: Why Dyslexic Thinking Is The Secret Ingredient You Need To Create Change

My pleasure.

Bestselling. Yeah. Pick it up. Come on. Bestselling non-fiction writer. My moment.

Yeah.

Thanks for the intro. I love that. I need a bit of massaging of my ego these days as I head to my 50th year on the planet Earth.

Thank you. Keep it going. This interview is going so well.

Dyslexic thinking coming both ways.

Well, I think at its kind of purest, dyslexic thinking is just an acceptance that you see things or can do things differently. And if it's reading that you struggle with, or writing, or spelling, or organizing your thoughts, it's just acceptance of that and then thinking, 'Right, cool. If it was a circuit board, how do you get around that? How do you wire around it?' So literally, all I've ever done is use my other skills: getting stuff done, doing stuff, turning up early, leaving late, building teams, engaging people, creating cultures, and having missions. The first time I ever made money, I invested it in people. I've just tried to grow a team that basically are a patchwork quilt of all my weaknesses. And if you look out in the office, there's quite a lot.

But I think it's a real acceptance of your weaknesses. Like, for instance, with the campaigning, having a relationship with campaigning was never a plan. That was just an outcome of being exposed to a lot of things. So I've never really just talked about stuff. I've always traveled there, gone there, been there, done it, smelt it, felt it, and kind of been on the front line. So whether we were talking about school dinners, or if it was the setting up of Fifteen, which got me closer to prisons and crime and gangs and sort of children that were on the wrong side of the law, I never just talked about it. I was in it. And I don't know if it's a dyslexic thing or not, but when I'm in it, it just changes me, probably genetically, just reprograms my brain, and I just submerge myself in it and I feel it. And then before you know it, you're campaigning because it's wrong.

So I think my compass of right and wrong, and getting done, that's been part of my journey of dyslexia. At the same time, I think I kept it quite quiet. I didn't really talk about it for many, many years, probably not until you guys started up, and I don't think many people did. And I think to this day everyone's quite ashamed. A lot of people are ashamed by ADHD, ADD, dyslexia, ASD, autism. I get it, but I think that's kind of cultural. And there's always that hatred of labels. Labels are important because we need labels to understand a specific thing, but also we might need to get a diagnosis that gives us access to funding, or help, or some kind of hope when you're failing within a certain system. But at the same time, labels can be like flags and they can be a problem. So I think we're in this amazing moment where people are learning and know so much more about neurodiversity and those challenges, and the facets of those people, and I think it's ultimately about everyone understanding each other a bit more.

Definitely.

It's such a—oh my god, it's such a ball and chain. Honestly, it's literally like taking the blue pill. Not that blue pill—what's the matter with you? The other blue pill in The Matrix. Once you get into the vibe of caring, because you can't care and then be a hypocrite, or care but then don't care. Once you get into something that's wrong, the worst bit for me is that I'm known for it, so people think I'm good at it and they expect it. Even this documentary that I'm making, I'm really proud to do it and I'm happy to do it. I hope we do a good enough job that's fit for purpose for the problem, because the problem is epic.

It's always been an honor to be held up as a dyslexic succeeder, I guess. And it is actually hilariously ironic that I think I'm the second most published author in the country, but if you'd have seen my school reports and if you'd have seen dyslexic Jamie at 10, 15, if you'd seen me in the attic of the school in special needs, it's like no way. But I'm happy to be held up and shown to the world as hope. In the story of polishing a turd, that's literally a pretty big transformation, do you know what I mean? But I so believe in hope, and I think for the bashed and the brokenhearted dyslexic and neurodiverse kids that have had their self-worth eroded and stamped with 'problem child' and not quite understood, maybe a tiny bit of training might have helped a totally different pathway for that kid, and it's really holding the country back.

Yeah. I mean, I'm 50 nearly, and I'm still getting to know myself. There's a few different Jamies, do you know what I mean? The default Jamie, happy-go-lucky, jovial, not very good jokes, pretty low bar to be fair, but I do quite a lot of them, so it's a numbers game. But there's definitely benefit to dyslexic thinking because it becomes more galactic and more three-dimensional. I think the concept of feeling and injecting feeling and thought and culture into things—we're often good at the hard things like that, like making people feel real culture instead of fake culture. But also, I'm starting, even through this process of the documentary, to identify where I've delegated walls of things that I'm not good at. The fact that I haven't really made any effort to try and take any of those walls down or have a few little holes through them, I think that's probably been the reason that a high proportion of my businesses have failed, because I've delegated too much trust in the wrong area at the wrong time and it's bitten me up the ass.

My average used to be 50%. It might be 65 at the moment. But I think it's like constant polishing, really.

Well, it's pretty brutal. You just dust down and start again, and try and see what your core principles and the thing that people most want from you are. We've always had our core of stuff that we're really good at, and our job in a really nice way is to stretch where and how food can go, and how making things better works. Our job ultimately is to educate and lift standards in food, and if we don't do that, we shouldn't be doing it. The food industry is such a beautiful industry in all of its different ilks.

Well, it's so interesting. There's so much daft stuff that goes on. Even something simple like, 'All right, Jamie, have school dinners got better?' Yes, they have. 'Well, have they really got better?' Well, definitely 'excellent' is a lot more common, definitely 'good' is a lot more common, and definitely everything's gone up a bit, but there's still 40% that's totally unacceptable. And that 40% is my guess. But the reason I can't give you any specifics is because the government don't measure on it. There's nothing. All this money goes to powering all these schools, 24,000 schools feeding all these kids, and we've got the standards that are not perfect, but pretty good, and we don't know about compliance.

Government is so weird because they look at compliance as in getting a bad mark back. Some people just have a disease of not wanting to have bad news. And I don't see it as bad news. If I see a school that's struggling, then I'm not thinking, 'Oh, you naughty, terrible people.' It's like, you need help. You need resource. What can you do to make it right? Because every school's different. Some are up mountains, some are on beaches, some are in cities, some are in villages, some are built to work and function because they're big, and big normally means they're efficient. And some are literally in Timbuktu and you've got a couple of home ovens and 50 kids that by law need to be fed, and of course they're going to struggle. There's not one kitchen that's the same. So you would say, 'Well, why isn't there compliance?' And it's because the government don't want to know the truth. How basic is that as a problem? That would never happen in a business.

Yeah. And if I look at what's happened in the last 20 years, it's nowhere near enough. What we know and what we're aware of and the actions is pretty unimpressive in 20 years. Even on a good day, it's unimpressive. So the only difference between that thinking is we've got this thing called AI and a very creaking system. Part of me thinks that it's getting so stressed and bad that that's a point of reflection and bounce back, do you know what I mean? The only way is up when you've gone quite low. We're not in a great place, so I'm thinking that AI digital revolution and the fact that we have to reframe education, there's absolutely no reason why every child can't have access to shine.

The potential for dyslexic and neurodiverse kids to really understand their flavor, because you'll know better than me—I didn't even know until this experience how different dyslexics are. Even I'm surprised.

Yeah. And what I think I love about my obsession for this possible dreamy moment of change, which is much deserved, is that it's not just about the dyslexic kids or the neurodiverse kids. It's about every kid. Do you know what I mean? Everything required to do this better just makes everything better.

If you've got a class that can learn better that's 25% dyslexic or neurodiverse, and new strategies of teaching and supporting allows the whole lot to come up, that's also the workplace. We've got a lot of work to do in the next 20 years. Is there anyone brave enough in government? It would be interestingly unique to not just plug the holes, but actually have the drains up and actually reimagine school.

Go for it.