CHAPTER 96

Colin: You’d come in and he’d be like, ‘Listen, I want you to read this.’ Noam does too with these young guys. ‘I want you to read this,’ it was before email really, ‘And I’m going to come back and I’m interested to see what you think of this, because I’ll tell you what I think when you read it.’ And then you read it and you sit around and have these, like, Socratic … He loved ideas.

Author: You said when you first came to the Cellar it was an amazing place. You loved it straight away and then it started to be like the Left Bank in Paris, these chain-smoking Israelis talking about deep stuff.

Colin: Right, it’s always what I envisaged the Village would be, you know.

Author: Did you read the stuff that he asked you to read?

Colin: Of course. We were very close. He liked to talk. He liked to make you talk. He was like that. That’s why I say, like, Socratic … He’s like, ‘What do you think about that?’ And that’s how Noam is too. ‘Okay, I understand that, what is the answer?’ And he’s just like his father in that way, he wants to probe, but he’s not trying to catch you. He’s not trying to win. He’s trying to find that essential truth to things, and if you have it then he’s more than happy to hear it.