Out to Lunch with Jamie Laing

Before I’ve an opportunity to ask Jamie Laing a query, he places one to me. Our opening small speak had by some means drifted to the lockdown of 2021, and the way extremely uninteresting and damp and deadening I discovered it. “Did you feel anxious?” Jamie says. “Were you depressed?”

Such questions are central to Jamie Laing’s new ebook, Boys Don’t Cry: an alphabetical work about psychological well being that hops between tales, victories and struggles in Jamie’s personal life. At its centre is a chapter known as ‘H is for Honesty’ — in all probability the defining mantra for your complete ebook.

Not that it got here naturally. “As a kid, I was not honest,” says Jamie now, sitting within the good-looking assembly room on the HQ of his empire, down a cobbled mews avenue in Marylebone. “I lied about everything. Not big lies, but a lot of white lies.” So he needed to follow being sincere for this ebook, and for his wider job. “But I’ve noticed,” he continues, “having done podcasts, that when you start with an anecdote about yourself, the other person will open up. So I thought: right, if I’m going to talk about the subject of mental health, I need to talk about myself first.”

And so he does, although he acknowledges (in a second of honesty-about-honesty) that there’s nonetheless a slight “fatigue” to being fairly so open fairly so usually.

The ebook is all the higher for this candour. Though sure chapters, he says, have been very laborious to write down — just like the ‘W’ chapter, which is all about weight and his previous struggles with bulimia and physique picture. He writes about making himself sick after a giant meal, and his spouse, Sophie, discovering him on the toilet ground. “I’d never, ever spoken about that, and I’m still shameful about that,” he says now. “But once you discuss something, it becomes much easier to accept.”

Jamie is sweet at discussing issues. He first got here to prominence as a breakout star on Made in Chelsea — basically one lengthy shiny chit-chat of a present, the place dialog and hearsay have been all (although honesty, maybe, was not). He pivoted this preliminary success into what’s now a thriving entrepreneurial empire — one which spans sweets (Candy Kittens) and leisure, through his a number of podcasts. The success of the latter appears to me all the way down to the unguardedness and pure curiosity with which Jamie approaches his topics and conversations — whether or not they’re with Sophie as they put together for the upcoming start of their first baby (Nearly Parents), or with an eclectic mixture of celebrities on Great Company. “It’s the only way I know how to connect,” he says. “I’m not a great thinker, right? I don’t think I’m smart enough to write stuff that people will read and want to study. But my strength, I think, is that I’m a good storyteller, and I’m good at connecting with people.”

“It’s taken me 10 years to get any sort of credibility in this field”

I cherished the episode of Great Company the place broadcaster Amol Rajan spoke concerning the dying of his father, earlier than turning the gaze gently onto Jamie, and asking about his personal relationship together with his dad. Jamie, clearly taken off guard by this, tries to reply, however falters.

“And then it hit me,” he writes within the chapter ‘D is for Dad’. “An uncontrollable wave of emotion that I hadn’t anticipated. I suddenly felt immense guilt. Guilt for never saying sorry, for never saying ‘I love you’ enough, for never telling him how great a dad he was. And tears, big, hot tears, started streaming down my face.”

“And then Amol said,” Jamie tells me, “‘I have this magical thing which I can give you — just time. You still have time to say all of that to him.’” Jamie known as his dad immediately after the episode. “‘I’m sorry if I’m an asshole,’ I said. As a kid, I picked a side during my parents’ divorce. And my dad made a lot of mistakes, but he’s an incredible person. We’re all guessing. We’re all doing this for the first time.”

I ask Jamie how he feels about his personal life and profession choices. Almost everybody he knew warned him towards occurring Made in Chelsea when he was ending college at Leeds: they informed he’d by no means get a correct job once more — not realising, maybe, that this was a part of the attraction. “Made in Chelsea was great,” he says. “I did stupid things, I behaved badly sometimes, but I also did some great things and had some fun times.” And, he provides with amusing, “I was unemployable anyway!” He noticed it as a shortcut to what he actually wished to do: one thing in leisure. “But when you take a shortcut somewhere, it’s a long road round eventually,” he says. “It’s taken me 10 years to get any sort of credibility in this field, and that’s from hard work and growth.”

I learn him a quote from the ebook. “For too long, I genuinely believed that if I became rich and famous, it would magically solve every insecurity and problem I had.” How does he really feel about fame at present, having been well-known for greater than 15 years? “Fame is useful in lots of ways. It opens doors. It can provide you with money and security. So there are lots of advantages to being famous — but there’s a real problem with desiring fame. If your drive is just to become famous, you’re going to be left in a pretty horrendous place,” he says. “It’s a drug. Once you become famous, you’re basically constantly moving towards becoming irrelevant, and that’s bad, in your head. So then you’re going to start doing things to try to stay relevant. And that’s a tricky place to be.”

On the one hand, Jamie acknowledges the alienating elements of social media: “We are so connected that we are disconnected,” he writes. “We are constantly connected to hundreds of people, scrolling through feeds and highlight reels, but it is driving us apart from each other.” Comparison is the thief of pleasure — and typically sanity, he says. “You lose sight of your worth because you’re constantly comparing yourself to an endless, curated stream of ‘success’.”

On the opposite, Jamie’s far-reaching and hard-earned success — and this lovely constructing is a compelling monument to all of it: a form of whirring, infectious, bustling playground of initiatives and concepts and output — has been turbo-charged by social media. The motive so many people heat to Jamie and really feel we all know him — and thus need, maybe, to tune into his podcast conversations, in that fashionable parasocial means — is as a result of he has at all times been so open and current on social media. Which should even be tiring, or exposing, ultimately.

“It’s been an immensely useful tool,” he says. But the extra you utilize it, the extra dangerous it will get. “It’s important to post what you want to post. You have to post your true self, what you truly think, because otherwise you’re living an inauthentic life, and you’ll slightly be caught out.”

The ersatz, uncanny ‘connection’ of social media exposes one other phenomenon of the second, maybe. “As guys, we have a bad problem with being lonely in our thirties,” Jamie says. “Our time is stretched between our relationship, our work, maybe — and so our social life is the one that normally gives up.” And so we spend much less time with our pals in individual, he says, and males historically solely know how one can join in individual: “Usually through nonsense talk, you know?” Which is okay within the extra carefree, collegiate days of your twenties.“But you’re spending less time with your friends as you get older, and you’ll find it harder to have nonsense talk with strangers, because they’re not your friends,” he says. “So we start to drift apart.

“Men should become much better at gossiping,” he concludes. “Women are very good at gossiping and just catching up.” He notes that his spouse has in all probability spoken to 6 of her pals on the telephone that morning, whereas he hasn’t spoken to any. “So if we can speckle, within the nonsense, a few moments of truth, like: ‘How are you feeling at the moment? How is life?’ That’s a good thing.”

In that spirit: how is he doing? As we communicate, he’s about to have a child (son Ziggy finally arrived on 4 December). Yet Jamie continues to be doing virtually every little thing else, together with press for this ebook. “I’m not balancing it all that well, if I’m honest,” he says. “But I’m trying. And I’m taking all of December off, when the baby arrives, which will be amazing. I’m so excited for this journey. I only get this chance once in my life to be with the baby. As much as I want to be working and doing things, I’m going to try my hardest not to be distracted. I’m going to make sure that I am present.”

For extra insights into the minds of inspiring personalities, uncover our dialog with Dom Hamdy.