The Interviews

There are more than 400 quotes in ‘Chasing The Scream’ that were spoken directly to the author. To be as transparent as possible, they are posted on this website – so as you read the book, you can listen the voices of the people in it, as they tell their stories for themselves.

You can follow along, chapter by chapter, from start to finish.

For anybody who is a major figure in the book and still alive, they were shown all the material about them, and they went through and corrected any mistakes and added details. (A full list of the people who fall into this category is in the book.) These fact-checking conversations were also recorded and are the source of some of the audio you can hear here.

Browse interviews by chapter

 Note

None of these quotes have been in any way digitally altered, spliced, or changed. (In one telephone interview, with President Jose Mujica, the voice of the President was recorded on one device from the phone line, and the voice of the simultaneous English translation was recorded on another device. These two files have been combined here to make it possible to listen coherently: this is the only digital editing of any of the audio files.)

The process for transcribing these quotes was: the quotes were initially written down by Johann Hari, and then independently checked twice – first by fact-checker Joe Daniels, and then in a second stage, as they were cut into audio clips, by either Elizabeth Davidson or Joshua Wood.

We have tried to eliminate any errors in the transcription. If you spot any when you listen to the audio, please email us at chasingthescream@gmail.com and we’ll post them in the corrections section on this site, fix them in any future editions, and give you a shout-out for spotting them.

Copyright © Johann Hari 2014. All rights reserved.