Stephen Fry - The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss

Hello and welcome to the

origins

podcast

with

lawrence

krauss

. I'm

lawrence

krauss

sitting here at home due to the pandemic. However, the episode is with the incomparable Stephen Fry. We recorded this episode before the pandemic and that's interesting in itself because several of the topics we cover. what we talk about now takes on a new meaning even though it was relatively recently, it was before the pandemic, before black lives matter, before george floyd and I think with that new historical perspective, some of the things The ones we talk about will take on a different meaning, but that is just a small tip of the cosmic iceberg that is the intellect and mind of Stephen Fry.

It is difficult to describe him adequately. He is a writer, an actor, a comedian, a humanist, an intellectual, a historian, a storyteller. an accomplished former criminal as it turns out, he's also a scholar, I guess is the best way to put it. He is pleasant to talk to about almost any topic and we cover many topics ranging from philosophy in ancient Greek to empiricism and technology and knowledge itself, computers and physics, envy, language and enthusiasm for language that he clearly states so strongly the nature of the disruption of teaching shame that's just a small subset of the things we talk about and the good thing is that I was able to listen to Stephen Fry talk about anything, not just the interesting ideas what we have.

I talked about how I could listen to him read the phone book for two hours and he would be hypnotized and the whole world is luckier for the fact that we can listen to him in different ways, as can several important authors, for example, jk Rowling. I'm very lucky that Stephen Fry has read the entire Harry Potter audiobook series and that's another reason to listen to them, even if you've read them. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, although he may be dead, is very lucky that Stephen has read all of Sherlock Holmes' works. stories for audiobooks and I know Steven regularly reads audiobooks because it's hard to imagine a voice you'd like to hear more of.

I will cherish this episode as I cherish my friendship with Stephen and I hope you will too, I think you will find that. It's one of the most exciting episodes we've ever done, so without further ado, here's Stephen Fry. Well, Stephen, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. It is a great pleasure to have you here. very sweet you better decide until the end yeah well right now it is anyway and you know it's an

origins

podcast

so I usually like to start with people's origins um but I thought reverse that a bit. a little bit because you've written three autobiographies so people can know more about your origins than they need well, no, no, no, it's fascinating, they're all fascinating, but they may not know the breadth of the man that you are. and I want to talk about we'll get to your origins in a sense, but I want to talk about how it led you to grow into the draw, which is, as I would say, my definition of you is one of the most charming, most witty and most nice people, I know, but besides that you are and have been many things, a comedian, an actor, a film, film, theater and radio actors, and a director, a game show host, a playwright, a documentary filmmaker with a variety of documentaries from maniac. depression to devices I want to reach and a writer of many things many newspaper columns four novels three autobiographies two books of Greek myths and a book on how to appreciate poetry at least for those I know and an incredible reader, not just a reader Personally but professionally, the reader of all the Harry Potter books and all the works of Sherlock Holmes, uh, and those are the ones I have read aloud.

I haven't read any more books than that, I just thought I should point out that yes, read. out loud and I should also say a writer of technology columns which I also want to talk about and finally a president of a university, whatever that is, that's probably the least impressive of all the things, but what I'll do along This is what quoting you is about because I love your words and in fact I want to read a quote from you about your writing so I can make it clear why I love it, if something can be said in 10 words I can trust you to do it. take 100 to say it I have to apologize for that I should go back and prune mercilessly and even out and remove the excess growth but I won't I like words, I love words and although I like the condensed and economical use of them in poetry and song lyrics and Twitter in good journalism and advertising, after all, I also love their exuberant profusion and crazy scattering, as you may have already noticed, I am the kind of person who writes things as if adding an obelisk with an inscription like that.

If my writing is teeth-gnashing self-indulgence, then I'm sorry, but I'm too old a dog to be taught to bark new tunes, and like I say, I love listening to them. I love hearing it more when you do it, but in your book one, your first book, you start with boarding school, you start with a story about going by train to boarding school, so I want to ask, of course, and you describe boarding school especially for Americans. , I think who doesn't realize what a tradition it is maybe in the UK, but I wonder to what extent you choose why you chose to start there and that relates in an important way to the man you are.

Now that's an interesting question. We owe a huge debt to JK Rowling, uh, because she has explained the nature of English sports schools to the world, which now she is more familiar with the idea of ​​a train that takes you to this castle that is generally ancient. Strange buildings. cloisters and other similar things with houses, you know, everyone is familiar with Hufflepuff and Gryffindor nowadays and that's exactly what I had to explain to people because only a little less than seven percent of Britons go to this type of institutions, although unfortunately they have enormous reach and influence. as we can see by looking at our political cabinet um and yes, I started it when I was seven years old, I guess my life didn't start then, but it's a kind of tradition when you know how to examine a life and observe a sentimental education like I could say it, uh, that's where it is when you first throw yourself out there, you let go of mom's apron and there you are in this strange new world and I don't want to exaggerate it as a peculiar punishment or an oddity.

It may seem strange to other people, but of course you just have to think a little to realize that all the other kids at that school were in the same position as me and all the kids I knew, which is a sad reflection. of the lack of diversity. from my circle of acquaintances when I was little, but it's unfortunate but true, all the boys and girls I knew when I grew up in Norfolk, in the countryside of England, were of a certain type of class, if you will, and they tended to go too. boys go to school more than girls, that's a terrible thing, but it was considered that girls could know that all they had to learn was to cook, then type, and then get married, yes, it's a horrible thing, but I already do it.

We have overcome a little. I'm afraid I want to say no, no, I mean, um, but yes, that's, it's a tradition in literature and in confessional literature and autobiographies should begin with our hero or antihero, uh, firmly, uh, negotiating their first days in the strange world of a boarding school. school and, uh, discovering yourself, discovering yourself, I think the feeling I get from that is that it was a key, that's where you discover that you're absolutely right, I think it's a negative thing at first, you realize realize how inadequate you are, um. It's all the other guys around you, they're robust, boisterous, strong and seem to have all kinds of things in common and you feel like a stranger later you realize that's how they all feel, of course, but you feel, especially if you're not cursed, a bit doom-laden and outcast, and I particularly felt this because I don't have any skills when it comes to the physical aspect, I can't really throw or catch a ball, I certainly couldn't, so, um, I could run kindly. in a straight line and I hit a tree or a street lamp, I can't sing or dance, I play a musical instrument with any level of proficiency or you know, it's listenable up to the level and I can't draw paint, so I really felt like what am I? ? nothing more than I discovered that language was something that I instinctively and always adored and revered and I was surprised to discover that others did not take it for granted or simply thought it was a system of exchange, it was just a way of asking someone to pass. sugar or or shut up or you know, really really a kind of basic communication device rather than something that was like painting or music, an art form, something that could seduce, seduce, delight and fill the mind with images and images that They weren't It wasn't there before and, uh, it enlivens and ignites and delights, so that's what I buried myself in in my own production of ridiculous little compositions, reading in the bedroom at night, telling stories in the bedroom at night , making them up, so, Stephen, tell a story. we those stories that you also know others yes, there were communal dormitories you didn't share them with just one person you know they were named after trees I remember there were elms, pines, beeches and sycamores I think you remember what you were in Well, you changed it, you know, my first trimester I was at Sycamore, I remember and then last year and a little bit smaller and older one, but uh, yeah, it became, so to speak, my tenth, which kept me together.

It was my love for language and stories and for other languages ​​too. I fell in love with doing Latin and Greek. Well, I want to talk about the Latin degree. I was impressed by the statement in the book that you read well at the three of us and then we did. You were writing at four and of course you never learned your math facts. I was going to give you a test, but I decided not to. It would be embarrassing, but, then, the love for language started well, I even want to say, very early, really. did it and was it internal or is it inexplicable, I mean, I mean, there's nothing that you could call Aristotelian necessary and sufficient, you know, explanations because I have a brother who's 18 months older and he's very bright, very wonderful, but He doesn't have the same passion or instinct for language, I think he'd be the first to admit, and I have a sister, same thing, but they're very talented, and my father sadly died this year, but he was an extraordinarily talented physicist. and a musician, uh, mathematician, and could do anything, engineer, etc., my mother's historian, uh, she read history, uh, here in London, where we're speaking from right now, and uh, she she told me stories from the beginning and we had a very special bond to do with that I think she captured in me a delight for the stories and poems that were read to me from a very early age and I would simply respond to them, it seems to be something that was in me brain and in I guess the way music could have been for someone else, so yeah, I was wondering if you, your mother, were the one in some way.

I mean, it's hard to know if the chicken and the egg are done reading you because you responded so well. or vice versa, exactly true, that's why it's so hard to explain, um, but, in the end, it saved me in many ways, yeah, because the rest of my life was a big mess, well, yeah, I mean, you saved you. Well, well, it saved you in the long run and if one were predicting your trajectory later in boarding school, it might not have been where you are now. You were expelled at least twice. I know. I'm right, only two.

Yes. At least twice. Yeah, yeah, I mean the others were just running away or yeah, let's not go. You know, we don't think you should come back, good comments, yes, yes, I am along with the charm and usefulness of a language facility here. there and certainly perhaps the most important thing for academic studies uh excellent memory and we always had that, yes, that's obvious when yes, yes, it's when everyone knows you, incredibly good luck and I realize that I want it, it's because you No. I don't work on it and I know some people have a hard time remembering things and are very upset by the fact that I don't and that's always been the case, so with exams I could regurgitate quite happily without really thinking and stuff. . just lodged, I say, and of course, it's just a fancy analog analogy, but if you know a fat person, it's because they're greedy and the food stays inside them, and you know someone who has a good memory and knowledge. it stays within them so I'm a little fat epistemologically if that makes any sense um but in terms of emotions it was I don't know how to describe it uh a passionate and sensual child uh full of fear wonder love doubt um and and how I became my 10 11 12 13 14 I guess it became apparent to me that I had a uh, you know, the way I wanted to express my love was that it was something forbidden, I know, in other words, I was aware that I was coming up with what we would now say gay or whatever, but um and that was very difficult, although there is a tradition in English private schools of all kinds of feelings about which I enjoyed and enjoyed very much.

Sex is a playground,but love. is forbidden love is taboo love is scary and I've always felt this about homophobia, certainly in the kind of political sphere and the religious fear that, uh, they don't know, they pretend to be disgusted by the physical act, but that It's obvious nonsense because if you know if they highlight anal sex, for example, we all know how many more heterosexual relationships there are than homosexual ones, and statistically, most of the anal sex practiced in the world is between men and women, whether one likes it or not, so if that's your objection, then you have to look at the porn sites that start with you. be anal asian or whatever, all these horrible things, um, really what they're afraid of is love and, rightly so, because love is an extraordinary force in life, although it's usually not good, I mean, it's not necessarily negative and that is. what and that's what's so simple but it should be scary and yeah, you know, because it's so strong, it's so powerful and you know, when you're a kid you watch a movie and you think, oh, why do they stop to kiss and what? happens?

This you really believe that it's all about love, it's very annoying and suddenly you understand it and you realize that it's all about love, everything spins downwards. I was re, I mean, I remember reading the passages about your first love and power. Of that, yeah, there's nothing like it there and you feel like I felt conscious, I think because I had read so many books, I knew that I would get away from it a little bit, synthesize it, become a little bit, uh, you know. just not exactly indifference, but that fierce adolescent fire of that first love would never be as much as Pope Browning would.

Can you ever hope to recapture that first beautiful, sloppy ecstasy? And I and I and I hate my future self for betraying, you know, I felt. that adolescence is a republic and it's the only thing that matters and that I would grow up to be something else and that I would, you know, I just saw you, do you remember a letter you wrote to yourself telling your future self how great it was? you were then and you wanted to fix my feelings and say this is the real feeling, this is the way I respond to nature now, the way I respond to love, the rawness of my engagement with the world is right and that when that The rawness is sealed by layers of sophistication, civilization and aging.

I will be moving away from my real self. It was a raging storm of emotions, but I stand by it. Yeah, and there's a passage here about adolescence that I especially liked, so I want to. read it maybe all adolescence is a dialogue between faust and christ we tremble about to sell that part of ourselves that is real unique angry defiant and complete for the rewards of achievement achievement success and the golden prizes of integration and acceptance but also in our great creative imagination rehearses the sacrifice we will make the pain and terror we will remove from other shoulders our penetration into the lives and souls of our fellow human beings our submission and willingness to be rejected and despised for the sake of truth and love and in the desert They are furious refutations of the hypocrisy, deceit and compromise of a world we consider so false that there is nothing so self-righteous or correct as the teenage imagination, oh God, I wrote that, yes, yes, you knew it while I was reading.

I still think I want you to read it, but I found it incredibly powerful. I wonder to what extent you try to keep that teenager. Oh yeah, I mean, I'm fully aware that I'm an establishment figure. that I am very lucky to be in this country and in several other parts of the world, I am some kind of celebrity famous enough to get at least everything I need on tables in restaurants and everything else, and that I have no reason to despair or for feeling rejected by the world and therefore any stance or argument that I am still angry or that you still know, would sound a bit tame, but on the other hand, I think the mind must maintain one if not in the republic of the adolescence that in the bohemian one, whatever you want to call it, in the eternal student state of questioning, doubting, fearing not only others but oneself, you already know how to doubt one's own certainties, constantly reinventing oneself, rethinking, being insecure and you don't know it, not conforming and not becoming bourgeois. , yes, that's the right phrase, you know, and it sounds and now the world considers it rather snobbish, you're basically saying that the life of the mind, the life of the artist, the life of the intellectual. the academic is superior to those who get and spend and you know, live and breathe and are almost on the brink of survival because of the economy and everything else and are angry and feel disappointed and think that people like us are in ivory towers and we don't connect with the real world and it's easy for us to have these big opinions but we're a sneering coastal metropolitan elite whose time is up and maybe they You're right, but just I can, I can't pretend to be anything other than what I am or feel or you know, go down the path that I feel is the most productive for my own fulfillment and for living a life that I create.

It's ethical and truthful, you know it well, that's why you can't ask for more than that, it sounds virtuous, the worst kind, of course, anything you say can be interpreted, but it's not, you know, I'm not like Christ in that. no, no, no, no, I wouldn't place myself that way, I wouldn't be talking, but I feel that the other thing I say in itself, yes, it's in the same book, and I think so, is that I place myself and most of us as such. I think most of us humans were in that anti-hero state that longs, on the one hand, to be accepted as part of the tribe and, with equal fervor, in conscious distinction, longs to be apart of the tribe that that desire to be socialized into that I wish to be a solipsistic individual on my own and I think that is a very strong impulse, oh yes, there are a couple of impulses.

In fact, I wrote it no, no, because I thought it was very powerful, but it's interesting that you talk about that desire to be. a sort of state of doubt and questioning that I know for a fact, so despite your good, we'll get to your apparent innate lack of ability as a mathematician and perhaps as a physicist, um, it's the spirit of science. And that's one of the things that I celebrate about science and that I think is so important, and of course in literature it should be celebrated in all intellectual endeavors: the questioning, the doubt, the recognition that you don't know. in some ways it's more exciting than Noah absolutely and it's humility before the fact, yeah, and I guess you'd say it's a definition of science and the definition of an artist, humility before the experience, before the experience, you absolutely know that and they're the same.

Yes, and I value absolutely above all, and I don't want to say nationalistic about this, but the British tradition of empirical thinking and both in philosophy and, of course, what it did to science, the idea of ​​testing, testing, seeing. . of vindicating epidemiology and medicine and and experimentation in chemistry and physics, types of characters like faraday and absolutely my hero, those, I mean, just impressive, what they did, you know, it goes back to another time, this sounds like trying . French, but you know, Pascal has these theories of light but he doesn't think about taking a piece of cardboard and making a hole in it.

Yes, you know what an Englishman would do because we are a bit vulgar and clumsy. Thinking about it, let's take a look then, so Newton was in that sense, he had many flaws, of course, but yes, but it was an experiment, exactly, it was not experimented, I mean, he is known for the theories of him, but was. in fact I have an experimenter, we're sitting in a philosopher's office and they always try to explain to me that I would like Aristotle more than me um and one of the things that always surprises me is that he said that women have a different number of teeth than men. of men easy to just check just check exactly yeah, I think the problem with Aristotle is that he's also associated with a way of thinking that fit so immediately and instantly into the church, right, yeah, so you know, I think .

It's known to historians and historians of philosophy as Aristotelian ecclesiasticism, which is a little complicated, but that's really what made the Middle Ages what they were, this categorization, this absolute certainty of how things were, the order that they were somewhat fixed and immobile and it took the dislodging of humanism and early humanism and the Renaissance and the age of reason to disagree with that. Now I'm biased because my first learning about Aristotle was through Galileo in a way and of course. he was a contrast in a certain sense exactly yes, but of course in his poetics and uh and ethics there is a lot to admire he was and people have been learning to reexamine him and there is a I can't remember her name, she has written A book has come out very good about it.

I should read it because I'm constantly learning that it might be good to know that your preconceptions are wrong in many ways. Now you talked about your love for Latin Greek. You love the classic. You've obviously written two beautiful books on ancient Greek myths, so I took Latin in school and then I really wish in Canada I always wanted to learn ancient Greek, but I never did, but your love for the classics began. you had a teacher, rory stewart, who was a literature professor, who had left a big impression, but you said he was actually a well-known classicist, he was the one who started it, yeah, i was wondering if it was before that because that was, um , that.

We call it public school, which is 13 years old, 13 and up, while it was in high school, which is seven to 13. That's traditional and that's where I started with Latin. You know, you did it pretty much in your first week, it was a massive amount. Of you know some craftsman and so on and then I thought it was like a code. I love the idea of ​​exchanging words, you know, yeah, so the Latin teacher's name was Mr. Knight and he said, well, would you be interested in learning Greek, why don't you learn the alphabet? And I thought it's even more like a code.

Yes, I could send messages. I teach my friends. I taught myself Greek and then I took exams and I just loved it, it was just fun, I know my letters, yes you were the same with numbers, yes you did calculations three years before everyone else differentiated when someone rolled. a ball up here no, well, it wasn't necessarily good, but uh uh, but the opportunity is actually kind of good, I'm sure you've been there too. I don't go to British schools. Do they still teach Latin? I don't think you can get into American schools, yes, I think you have to ask a little more, and your parents, yes, I'm afraid, but there is a new generation of classicists that interest almost all women.

Emily Wilson's brilliant new translation. from the iliad and there's natalie hughes madeleine miller the novelist american novelist in the song of achilles and cersei both awards and brilliant books so he's alive he's uh I mean I'm sure it's something we'll get to later, but always I get a little tired of people who think that technology destroys everything, yeah, I think, like I tried to say, with um, you know, e-books, you know, uh, kindles, etc., you know they're escalators or elevators, that doesn't mean people are going to stop building. stairs just because they've invented an elevator absolutely where elevators are useful, you use a lift or elevator um, but otherwise you use stairs, you know, and it just changes things, makes them better, yeah, you know, there's an analogy.

I have recently written about ai. and everyone is afraid, yes, but what I mean is that it will change everything, but it will not make it worse, it will be different and the example that comes to mind is related to writing, and you know that Plato and his ilk were opposed , They were worried. desperately that writing would destroy the narrative but it changed the world but it certainly didn't describe sorry the writing is only five thousand years old yes the alphabetic writing and of course in 1450 everyone in the church thought that about gutenberg, yeah you know they will have so you know they won't have to know things they will be written in typed books and of course it actually led to the opposite a huge exclusion of knowledge and that's why yeah it's like that I'm a kind of I'm very excited forever I can only say that one should not be aware, yes, since we are reminded all the time that everything casts a shadow, the brighter and brighter it is, the darker and lighter the contours of that shadow, as well as a physicist. despite the concerns and there are many, especially economic ones I think, but I'm always interested in whether what physics questions would interest a.i and I suppose I could imagine the same thing, what literature I would create and It would be fascinating as a contrast once again to see understanding our own literature thinking about that exactly, uh, to go from the sublime to the ridiculous, I was very pleased to discover that the only placement exam that you failed and you failed. abysmally it was physical, yes, I think there was a bit of parasite there, yes, I said that my father was a physicist and that he was one of those people.

I'm sure you're very similar if I asked you a question like, Do you know why this guy is blue? Naturally, he takes a piece of paper and makes an x ​​and a y and then some kind of curve and says x squared minus one equals y or something.like this and I ask: what is that supposed to mean? what it was and I remember saying about asking I said look dad father I've been reading about newton I said that bodies in space interact they attract each other and it has something to do with the inverse square of the distance I said I know what each word means I know what the inverse means I know what the square means and then what distance it means, but what the hell, why is it a square, why not a cube, what, how does it break and then I would draw things and show them, don't forget that a square It's best described as looking at a square, you know, so I remember him going through a Pythagorean test with me and he said the square on the butt and he drew the square on the sides and he said it's a square yeah, he said don't just consider it. like figure two at the top because I have to use all of this for sure and he was very good at doing geometry from that, yeah, so he would always draw and say look, look, and sometimes I say yes and other times, especially when it came up the big f sign, yeah, well, I read that.

Eventually, even when you understood mathematics, geometry was something you never liked, which surprised me, well, I mean, just as Clint Eastwood tells Hal Holbrook, it's in great force, a man must know that his limitations are They break up and I knew it. my limitations were that I could probably make the trip, but it would be harder work for me and it would be difficult to go and I would never really become enlightened, I would just catch up and say, I see it now, I mean, I see the broad contours of beauty. of science and I absolutely believe in it and I believe in the adventure and the search, but the detail of the real work, I just know that I am not made so that one does not have to do it, is always surprising.

I say in our society we say you know you can enjoy music if you're not Bach and you can enjoy literature if you're not Shakespeare, but somehow you don't see that people can enjoy science unless you can. . and and and you are an example, I think and and the people that I really enjoy are examples of people who enjoy all aspects of intellectual inquiry, including science, and I was going to ask so you know that you obviously had no aptitude, but I have discovered and I wonder if in your case, because of that lack of interest and aptitude returning later in life, that made you more motivated to realize that you might have missed something and want to learn more. a lot and in fact, where we are in Bloomsbury in London, just across the street, there is a street called Tottenham Court Road and in the late 70s and early 80s it was packed as it was for the next two decades and still up.

To a certain extent, it is with stores that sell electronics and gadgets. I remember I was in one of those when I had just left university and it was at the time when the great phrase microcomputing was used and there was the BBC's acorn computer and there were the sinclair zx little home hobbies computers and there were the commodores and the Atari were also around the corner and I saw a group of kids sitting in this shop on Tottenham Court Road, literally a cricket ball's throw from where we are now. playing on this BBC Acorn computer and I thought, because people were so scared, if I don't catch up with this now I'll never know, you have to be computer literate, so I saved up a bit, they just literally stopped me.

When I was a student, I bought one of these and connected it to a TV, of course, yes, I sure had a cassette recorder to carry ordinal programs and I taught myself the basic language and wrote little programs, none of which had any particular utility. programs and other things like that, so the first kinds of sure things that you would do to figure out what it was about and I became very interested in Boolean mathematics in logic, I suddenly understood logic from a perspective from a different point of view. because you used it, yes, I read books about logic and yes, and then the symbolic lost me a little, yes, when it became very mathematical, but suddenly the and or if unless until it depends on what uh an action.

It depends on the doors opening or closing or giving you little options and thus sealing a small labyrinth of intellectual progress or in fact quite banal, but simply so that you know that a point on the screen will surely move where you want. I had to break it down and I thought this was incredibly beautiful and really interesting and it was only much later that I found out about Claude Shannon and yeah, and the nature of information science and and what it was about and I still marvel at its beauty and its awesome idea that you can connect these numbers and logic, you know, logical words like if and when, with the action of electricity.

Well, I wonder when you say that it was because of your love for the language that, in some ways, when you learn the basics, it was a very different type of language that attracted you, yes, maybe it was and, in fact, the word, the fact that the word language was used, it's They used another word to describe, you know, a computer, uh, they called it, but the fact that it was called language made me think that and, of course, then you got a higher and lower level, well, I was thinking even more than that, maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it's a kind of language that opens up a world for you and and and and these and and this language opened up a very different kind of world to the which opened and yet it also connects um and narco in logos is the other The first sentence of the gospels of John at the beginning was the word yes and uh, the Greek correctly separated logos from lexus, two types of words, lexus, the unit of meaning, whether written or spoken, as in lexicography and dyslexia, etc., and logos as in ology and but as in logic and and now we know a little more about the brain and you know the way neurons work and shoot, etc., that there are similar logical paths that must be taken in connections and alternatives. routes that have to be decided by something very similar to what was worked out to first build a digital computer um and the meaning is pretty much what it's about meaning and difference and the ability to read, you know, intelligence to read en en legere and everything is connected, yes, everything is deeply connected and the idea that one should be one's field of study and the other is lovely, I mean, that explains a lot to me because I have to admit, given the background when I met you.

I wrote a column about technology and I thought: what is the connection that marked me in a real sense? And also when I think about the need for you to at least get past math and physics, what you just did illustrates something that I think is interesting when you talked about your father talking to you, I found it very moving when you described your father working so hard. to help you get through your math stuff and what you said, what I thought was fascinating, you said the very act of my father's teaching. I was inspired by a love for the act of teaching itself, that's the point.

I guess he had never taught anyone anything before, but he taught me how to teach much more than he taught me how to do math. It's absolutely true, yes. And I think it's interesting, you're a lovely teacher, but teaching is also involved with learning and I wonder if that's what's really important in school, that people don't realize that it's not just about doing. math. it's the ability to be a lifelong learner, yeah, and I'm wondering, I wanted to ask you about that love of teaching and, um, and if it's related to your, I mean, much of your life you've been a public figure, but a artist and, but do you see it as a teaching?

I do it and I realize that it is and I think I was aware even when I was 20 that I was almost acting against the natural impulse, the natural flow of current that my life had led me to. You have stayed at the university and become a teacher, if not there, then in a school. I think it's better for the world that you did well. It's a nice sight, but of course there are two narrative modes and two pedagogical modes. Two teaching modes. they are telling and showing essentially and obviously we have the privilege of showing it in our culture in all the narrative modes, you know, the spectacular is the way everything is done, if you can, if you can, show it instead of telling it, then show it, but it's actually one of the things that I discovered in these books of Greek myths and then I put them on stage to tell more than to show is that that's what I was created to tell stories and whether the stories are really shaping ideas or whether They are mere narratives, I say this simply because it is obviously more than a simple but I am not sure that, as you know, it is one of the most fashionable sciences and mainly in the hands of all of us, pseudosciences is evolutionary psychology, which is a uh, it's a poisonous chalice to a certain extent, um, but you know, it's pretty easy to think of us, you know, as our ancestors, in our, we've had tools to make, we've harnessed fire, um, you know, for dozens of years. thousands of years and then suddenly language came the big cognitive leap and we were finally able to sit down and we didn't all have to be hunters and gatherers, you know someone would go, you know what?

I'm going to light up the cave. with some pictures, yeah, well, you know he's a better fighter than me and she's a better gatherer, and you know, suddenly there were people who had different gifts to give and, whereas before, they would have fallen for the way people like me and like you. I'm sure you know Yasper's idea of ​​the axial age, which is a surprising fact, but one that Confucius and Buddha and the Old Testament prophets and Aristotle and Plato and Socrates could have known. a sudden moment in which I believe it is a concatenation of benign circumstances: sea levels stabilized so that we could have ports that were the same year after year, which allowed trade to stabilize, develop and enrich the cross currents of trade , etc., and um and calories were getting cheaper and therefore people had more leisure exactly and with leisure came this ability to question and it just so happened that the Greeks were at the absolute crossroads of this moment in our history and with the alphabet and everything else and with the Phoenician trade and then they could stop and think and they could tell stories and they could fix the stories because the alphabet had arrived yes and the poets could improve them and embellish them and polish them and and a culture arrived and a culture that could be transmitted through language and all these things mean that people like me suddenly had a role, whereas before they would have literally left me in the mud saying oh help, I can't reach it, I can't run fast enough I can't kill that woe that deer is charging me that bull has trampled me but now we have we well you stay home dear you are not very good at fighting and um and you tell stories and and you will or unfortunately you are mainly warriors and priests, yes, yes, and these are things that we fight against, yes, and I, you know, I've led several meetings on early modern humans and it's interesting to think about the notion of language and how it plays out. in terms of the need for a tribe to have some communication, although I have spent a lot of time talking about Noam Chomsky, who has always said that he thought that language, the development of language, was not communicating, yes, it is thinking that it is, and It's a fascinating question, I've never heard it and there's Year Wilson's idea that the ceiling of social bonds and the creation of a whole kind of no not a hive mind but but but but what a human so safe, sure, well it is .

I'm going to get to the present moment, but I want there to be other descriptions of that one that I think maybe will take us to the present moment, but surprisingly it has to do with your nose and you and you know cocaine no, no, this is the crooked nose, oh but I love what you said, you said we keep our imperfections insignificant so we can blame them for our biggest flaws. The problem of my crooked nose comes to mind when I have regular discussions with a friend on political issues. He strongly believes that the existence of monarchy and aristocracy in the House of Lords is absurd, unfair and outdated, it would be difficult to disagree. with this, but you believe that in the name of freedom and social justice they should be abolished this is where we part ways uh and actually there is a long discussion that I will probably skip but uh, he said that you say that they will cause us great psychological damage if we take measures of constitutional cosmetic alteration of the world.

He was staring at us and whispering and laughing at us enthusiastically, like people always do, and then I think you're saying that the problem with doing something for aesthetic reasons is that you always end up with a cosmetic result and the cosmetic results, as we know from inspecting to the rich. American women are ridiculous, embarrassing and horrible. I love it, but honestly, I thought I'd give it a try. I want to get ahead a little. I have the idea that I love this statement that we maintain imperfections. we can blame them for our biggest flaws and and and their example, the monarchy I really think there is something profound there in the sense that one of the problems that has happened in myThe opinion in the United States and there are many lately is that we invest the power and pomp in the same person, yes, and I have always been impressed that you split up, that's all, I agree and you may have seen The Crown and Remember the first season of The Crown that started with Winston. churchas the queen's first prime minister when she was uh uh when her father died and um, he had to bow and he had to come in with this great old man, you know, one of the great figures of the 20th century had to bow in front of this girl. and, of course, she was striking against the idea of ​​what a sovereign, the representative of the country, is.

Now imagine if you were President Trump, every week you had to go to some fancy colonnaded colonial building, you know, on top of a hill somewhere. In Washington there was an Uncle Sam figure who was a representative of the United States who was like an incarnation of the flag and the idea of ​​the country and Trump had to bow down to them and explain every week what he had done and why. He had done it, what were the current problems, Uncle Sam couldn't tell him to do this because Uncle Sam wouldn't be elected, Uncle Sam was just a figurehead, a symbol of the personification of the country.

I think that would be incredibly healthy and that's it. What every British Prime Minister has to do and, indeed, the current humiliation of our Prime Minister at the moment is that he, in fact, he could have deceived the Queen. Yes, by proroguing parliament. Don't you know the technicalities of that well? We'll get it, we can tell you what's interesting, Lawrence, I think it's because 10 years ago we were still excited about the idea in Silicon Valley and elsewhere of moving fast and breaking disruptive culture, we're going to disrupt this space. we're going to disrupt that space, we disrupt cars in cities and we go super, we disrupt the way people get a room and we become Airbnb, uh, we, we disrupt, you know, we move fast and we break things, that was that, that was the cliché and and and and as some chickens are coming home to roost now we're realizing that things have been broken that maybe it would have been wise to think about, you know, if it was a good idea to break them, um, it's an idea from a philosopher called Chesterton's fence, you know? jk chesterton wrote about this idea that someone who didn't understand what a fence was, if he saw one he would probably break it down, so he wouldn't know the animals are freed, he wouldn't understand the wind coming in eroding the top soil. and the enormous concatenation of circumstances that can follow when you destroy something that you don't understand uh interesting and it sounds like an argument for conservatism and in a way it is on a certain level because in reality conservatives now are not conservatives, they are not.

Conservatives no longer believed in institutions and trusted them unless there was a very good reason not to, whereas now conservatives are bannon types and our British and European equivalents break everything down they're just elites, ya you know come on, uh, and as thomas more says in a man for all seasons, you know, uh, when, when richie rich, that john hurt, the character in the movie, if you remember, says about what brings everything down, brings down everything the laws, what do you know? because he is saying that the law prevents. us to do this, he said well, the laws are wrong, tear them down, ah, but the laws are hedges, Richie, when you tear down every hedge and who can withstand the winds that come, you know, and it's a nature, and Paul Scofield does it brightly. the movie, but we're starting to feel like now I think what used to be called conservatism is now in the hands of a fantastic irony of people like me, you know, people who say well, I actually prefer to think that this institution is worth valuing or at least yes, you know, don't crush the conservatives in both or I mean the parallels that are happening in our two countries, the apparent conservatives are right-wing and they are people who do not respect the institutions that they seem to run and that is why I thought I found that statement about imperfections so interesting that yes, if you can, if you can, if you can, you have to worry about them and then the other important things are you and, again, I might as well be like an epidemiologist about it, well Let us imagine that the purpose of government, the purpose of a socialized life of any kind, I do not mean to socialize in the sense of socialism, but simply to live together in countries, even, as the American constitution puts it, with the pursuit of the happiness.

The important thing is that we are a more stable and happy people, well, there are indices that can be consulted, they are not always reliable, but if there are enough, they point in the right direction, one could argue a lot, oh, it seems that the happiest countries they are the Benelux countries, Belgium and Luxembourg and the Netherlands and Scanda and they are all constitutional monarchies, how interesting, so I mean it is illogical, not that you wouldn't start from there if you were planning a country, yes, but somehow way we have evolved. in this it's definitely and it seems to work is a you know, it's a bit like people are trying to reinvent theaters, there are active people who say, oh, you know, the proscenium arch is in some ways almost fascist, you know, we're talking, let's put a push towards the audience and yes, it works for something strange, but in the end everyone is embarrassed and doesn't know where to look, there was a reason the transverse arc was invented somehow, so let's go back, well, I'm very similar, you know?

It's been for me and it's been for you too because you also span all the continents, but you know I grew up in Canada and I moved to the United States and the difference and, you know, Canada is part of what is essentially a constitutional monarchy. and seeing that difference was really fascinating and it caught my attention the moment I arrived and it always still hurts me in some way when I think about what's going on, okay, let me, there's one more quote, a quote from you that you just say Like this as the love of money is the root of all evil, the belief in shame is the root of all misery and I thought that is very important now in modern times and I thought I would ask you to talk about that, well, shame is the main promoter of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Yeah, so it's pewdiepie, it's shame in the garden of Eden. The most important line was not Have you eaten the fruit of the? tree wherever i spoke i shouldn't eat but it's um why did you cover your bodies god says when he sees adam and eve and they go well we were naked and we were ashamed who told you that you weren't naked where did you get this idea? that you were naked and whatever argument one has with the Hebrew Bible and the religion that arose from it, is a very interesting myth because, like all creation myths, it has to do with the fact that we, as a species, recognize that we were animals. because we sleep, we breed, we poop, we eat like other animals and yet we know that we are different, so around the fire we should have said why we are different and you know the prometheus from the Pandora myth of the Greeks and the other um . came and the Hebrew said well we have this idea that we are ashamed of ourselves we think about ourselves we look at ourselves and we go and it is both a wonderful thing um self-awareness that uh can allow us to initiate ourselves into completely new areas of cognition and imagination, but it can also hold us back and an example is shame, I think it's very difficult to apologize for the things we should apologize for, but we know what they are, yes, but You're not for having a penis or for having a rectum, you know, for having to pooping every day, this is nothing to apologize for, it is common to all of us, yes, well, all of us with chromosomes and in the case of the penis, obviously, but um and the hypocrisy, the greed, the casual violence , the closure and the screams and cries of suffering throughout the world of animals, as well as our fellow human beings, these are things that we have to think about, we have to think about coming to terms with our own, you know how far we can get there, you can't spend your whole life on it, yes, but you apologize because someone is dying three and a half thousand miles away because it's just not practical, but you try to live an ethical life at least or you feel like you're trying to get bogged down in sex , I mean, and stuff like that, it's crazy, I mean the beloved Martian of ethicists and philosophers who look down on the planet, will say Well, I can see the species here, they do all kinds of terrible things, there's abuse, uh, uh, the trampling of the innocent, there is a cause of suffering and violence, and lies, deceit, war, slaughter and all these things.

So I imagine the Martians would say that in the language these are the things that you have to be very careful with, but they also do good things, they eat food and therefore there is sustenance and obviously they have to get rid of them. and they have an interesting way of doing it. bringing out their toxins and so on um and they have to copulate, they have to reproduce and the way they do it is quite interesting and beautiful and makes use of a remarkable mating idea to achieve variation in their systems, it's wonderful and then lo and behold in Their language they can say oh the traffic was torture but the torch is one of the things they do that is absolutely unforgivable there is never an excuse for torture it was murder oh it was so cruel but cruelty and murder are the worst things they can do, But they say that well and everyone goes, he said, but that's one of the good things they do, what's wrong with these people?

We have no reason to be ashamed, we are completely hung up and when we worry about children's exposure, but we don't care about children being exposed to things exactly, they are monsters, yes, exactly, no, there are so many things. We accept it and what children can do but they can't go to a movie where there is a nipple no, it's extraordinary yes, I mean, it's funny if it weren't so destructive no, I know because there is a lot of rape, there is a lot of sexual confusion, there's a lot of unhappiness about it because sex is incredibly important to us as human beings, you know it's important, but yeah, as deep as anything, I mean it wasn't Oscar Wilde, he's always misquoted as him, but someone said it all in it.

The human world is about sex, except sex, which is about power, which is pretty cool, it's an elimination, yes, it's certainly worth thinking about, I'm not sure it's entirely true, but it is Pretty smart, you got the shame part right. At least one aspect of shame is the root of all misery, but I wonder if there is another kind of shame when I think about it, well, you talked about yourself as an antihero, yes, and to some extent, in fact, I was wondering If you like me, you are like that the older we get, the less secure we are in our own abilities and the less confident, but there was a trend, I find it fascinating because when I hear about your adolescence and your insecurities, then I read about them as an adult and there are some quotes great things about yourself like basically you don't like aspects of yourself the fact that you like people to like you you live in a place because you think it gives an image of who you are I would like to have it, but you're not going to join to all these clubs, yes, and it reeks in a sense of the insecurities that we have and, as I say, I find that they grow on me to a certain extent the more successful I am, but there is a moment in your life that seemed inexplicable to me in that sense and it's the incredible moment when you became a lost soul on the road to success and that was when, after you stole, we went to prison for it. and you went back to school, you basically said to someone look, I'm going to study for a levels, I'm going to go to cambridge, I'm going to pass all of these and I'm going to get a I'm going to go and I found it very surprising because it seemed like what and but which is not described in that book and I wanted to ask you about what caused that sudden change from insecurity to incredible confidence, I think it's um Again I'm going to sound overly obsessed, but he was an extraordinary man and he died, so I've been on my mind a lot, but my father always said about me that he knew when I was passing exams and doing things when I was. young even though I was getting in trouble at school and uh, I remember one of the teachers at home said, but he's a very, very bright child, my father said, well, yes, he has the gift of reproduction pastiva, but he had never thought about it in his life and I.

I'm a big scandal, my God, and I and I, at a time when he was in a good mood, I said to him: what did you mean by saying? I never thought he said, well, don't you, you don't really understand what thinking is. You and I said what is it? He said it's work. Work is the currency of the universe, at least of our universe as we understand it, it is the only thing that matters and the thought is that it changes, it moves things, it is a force. and you just play it back and you reflect and I, uh, you know, I repudiated this inside my head and I felt a little bit like I was under attack, but I realized it was true.

He had a gift for parody and pastiche. He could imitate anything he didn't have. My owner's style was while he was in prison when he was reading and I had nothing else to do and heI need to digest more um there's always been a lot of things about me as a pagan that I recognize in part and I like to blame some of that on my upbringing, but I've never appreciated poetry as much as I should or opera um and um, but you write it down beginning of this book for me, the private act of writing poetry is writing songs, keeping a confessional journal, speculation. problem solving, storytelling therapy, anger management, crafts, relaxation, focus and spiritual adventure, all in one affordable package.

I love, I love that, so, but what it made me when I read that, how interesting it made me The question I was asking was, I know you say you write poetry, but would you rather write it or read it? Oh, to read it because there are There are so many poets much better than me to enjoy uh and writing it is a pleasure and I catch up with them. I go weeks and weeks, months and months without writing to anyone, and suddenly I write some things and that's very It's a very private pleasure, but the point of the book is called "older, less traveling", yes, but it was also my delight with the form, yes, um, and it's a strange thing, but when it comes to painting and music, for example, no one questions it. you should learn um in music you know what a chord is what you know what we say in England a low or a crotch you say a half note or a quarter note or whatever um and you know a diminished seventh here or a g seventh there or you know you learn and it's part of the introduction to music um, it shouldn't be too scary if everything is done by a terrible school teacher who makes you feel guilty about the rudiments of classical music, then it can be a bit unpleasant, but it can be a friend with a guitar saying, "Hey, this is D major" and look, if you go from D major to A you get this kind of sound and you can just flatten this note with it and then you're like wow and then it says they're calling, you know and you're like, oh, I see why it's true, and then no one questions it, but if you tell someone this is a villanelle and this is a sonnet, they say, oh girl, we.

I'm in the classroom here, but yeah, and it's kind of strange, but because partly people think that poetry is just putting your feelings on paper and I'm not saying that, I don't love blank verse and a lot of tears. . eliot and so on is free verse to the extent that it is not formal it does not have the same line length it is not expressed according to a metrical scheme um and there is but you can't talk about it while you can tell someone this is a uh um this is our tavarima this is a form that has these lines ends in a couplet and the cup that has two more syllables than the other lines and here is an example from byron for example or this is tetsurima this is dante you know that this it's a different form this is rhyme royal you know this is uh this is a sestina which is a very complex form and although I think they're exciting it's a bit like going back to the codes it's oh This is something that they don't restrict it as Robert Frost He said he was a great American, but now a formal person, since he wrote inside forms instead of three of us.

He said I can't write without them, it would be like for me. like playing tennis without a net, you know, and the words referred to that too, you know this meager plot of land that he called the sonnets, but you can grow better, you know, if you tell someone, here's an open field, uh play a game you think I don't know what to do but if you say here's a little yard with lines you could instantly make up a game and you would play according to the rules and I would have a structure and I have drama and form and dialect dialectic and you know the meaning and I think we're all a little afraid of that we think about the shape like I say so it's okay it's a shape so that's what attracts you most to the truth well that's why I I wrote the book because you can't write a book about free first, yeah, I mean, then it becomes a book about appreciating Whitman or appreciating Elliot or just about that, it's funny because those are the ones I tried to think of. the poets just to show me.

I'm not complete even then, you know, and Ellie is one, Dylan, Thomas is another, by the way, because I just like the sound of it. Well, Thomas is an example that there's a really complex form called villanelle and and that's what a is. of his most famous poems don't enter gently into this night it's a villanelle and if you look at the way the lines repeat it's a very intricate and clever pattern, an extraordinary pattern, um, but you shouldn't be aware of it any more than necessary . To know, when listening to the moonlight, what a sonata is, it is up to the composer to follow the form and the form, for some reason, illuminates things in your brain and makes an emotional journey much richer than the lack so it seems not always. and I'm not okay, you know the book wasn't an attack on free verse, it was just that I don't think we treasure the beauty of the form enough, well, I want to learn, I want to go deeper into it.

I wanted to sit with you sometime for two hours because I once had a fancy position at Harvard and and um it was mostly about fancy dinners and and and uh it's something called the companion society and and um and um from the beginning uh there were senior Fellows, I was a fellow junior and, uh, with an interesting name, but um, and there were several physicists, there were intellectuals and then there were physicists there and because he was from all fields and he was one of the oldest. Fellows was one of the world's experts on poetry and, you know, I was drinking and I wanted to have a little fun and, from the beginning, I told him, I told him that my problem with poetry is whether people have something to say.

Why don't they write it down and she never for three years, which is how long I was there, she never spoke to me again, but she obviously thought you were a terrible philosopher? Well, she was wondering, but you know, and that's kind of it. my point is a compression is an idea is um uh he's talking about harvard I think it was harvard jane uh the origin of consciousness and the collapse of the bicameral mind yeah, I think so, yeah, yeah, and he talks about how Homer and uh and The post-Homeric literary tradition suddenly had the ability to create a metaphor that, for the first time, two different frames of reference, two different fields due to the teaching of human experience, could merge so that one could speak of a ship sailing the sea. and not go, but the plows are the land, yeah, how can that happen?

Why is it a plow? Because it suddenly brings an image into your head that enhances and this becomes stronger and stronger, this fusion of different fields of reference and um. poetry does that extraordinarily and I mean, here's an example from a Greek myth of a poetic idea. this is what poetry can do, but it's also what myth can do poetically, but it's just the Greek word for do instantly, yes, but in the early Greek myths there were the titans that most would have heard of and who were like the gods six women and six men the original titans and one of the original women was called nemosine which is spelled m-n-e-m-o-s-y-n-e which is the Greek word for memory uh, can you remember nemosany when you think of the, I think of the mnemonic mnemonic because, but um, Zeus, of course, Zeus had his way with Nemo and she bought him nine daughters and we call those nine daughters muses and they are patrons of different arts. clio of history. and callipe for epic poetry and uterpei and terpsicare and polymnia and mel pominae and thalia and urania and so on and there are nine of them and they are the arts, that's fine, but suddenly you think, oh, the collective unconscious of the Greeks and the expression of this myth.

Are you saying that the arts are children of memory and suddenly that is a poetic phrase taken from myth, taken from the collective unconscious as the young people called it? You know this idea that myth, to some extent, explains that it has an ideological function, to a certain extent for sure. and um, and here the arts are children of memory, that's not easy to get past, yes, it is, but it's not necessarily a complete truth about the arts, but a lot of what the arts are is a reimagining of experience and thought and emotion and so on and and and it's a real truth now they know how to reverse engineer they said okay, we have these things called arts, where do they come from, we will make them I don't know how, yeah, we don't know the mystery of this, but it was so when Joseph Campbell, who is not someone that they necessarily have much dealings with or certainly you know, you know, I mean the mythographer, yeah, um, he did have a good phrase for this, that they are public dreams and poems are to that extent dreams. public.

They can collide images and thoughts in ways that ordinary, rational writing and communication do not. They can express things in a logical and complex way. you know, with all sorts of nested subclauses and you know the horsemen etc., but poetry forms a collision. This is a great story of Keats when he was young. In other words, he came from a rather poor background compared to Lord Byron than others, although Byron loved keys and was studying to be an apoc apothecary, a pharmacist as we would say now, but there was a person in Islington where he was. growing up, who taught him poetry because he could see that he was a talented boy, he really was very young and he knows that he died incredibly young and there was a moment when I was teaching him some Milton and Keith suddenly almost exploded. through tears, it was just a three-word phrase, which could be technical, the kenning he was in the sea carrying leviathan leviathan is just a fancy word for a whale um and he saw that phrase sea carrying leviathan on his shoulders and said in That moment I saw the streams of water coming out of the whale I heard the sound of it breaking the water and I realized, but whales do not have shoulders and yet the work that those words were doing just those words see carrying on my shoulder Leviathan, the whole image was born in my head and I knew what poetry was and I think it is worth that epiphany that tells you a lot about how poetry works, you surprised me, you talk about the way as your first example of the why of some people, because Because of your love of language, the joke I made at Harvard I thought had a deeper purpose, which is that I thought maybe you liked poetry because intelligence is hidden in some sense, it's necessary because you're not just writing it. , you have to be more creative in using language to hide it and convince reality, but yeah, well, I mean it's an art form, it's an art form and the pub is always, it's never what you think, they are the senses do it, it's not what goes in, not what comes out, uh, and then you know, if you can't draw you look at an artist you think what's going on with his hands, yes, but it's not his hands, it's his eyes, the hands can do it if you can write you are drawing yes you know you are reproducing symbols in some way that is recognizable to the people who are drawing, but if you talk to any artist, it is how you see yourself.

There is a great story. Cezanne was sitting eating somewhere in the south of France with someone and the friend said: Do you think Paul looks at the tomato like? the tomato on your plate in a different way than the way other people look at the tomato and Cezanne looked at the tomato and then he started laughing he said oh that's funny he said I can I can see it as a tomato on my plate and then I can look at it as a painter and I really have two ways of looking and now I'm looking at it and now I want to paint it because I'm looking at it and I thought it's brilliant and and a musician is also about listening it's about listening to it so you know, that's why the story of Mozart was able to play Allegri's misery when he was, you know, he stood out because he could hear um and and uh and and with the language, you see, you can go. to a store and buy acrylic paints, oil paints, you can buy turpentine and linseed and disable and brushes and pig hair brushes and there are equipment, yes, canvases, etc., and with music, obviously, there are violins, trumpets, guitars, etc., and there is a language for but the only language of the language is the language and it is the same language that I am using with you now it is the same language that people use to order a pizza is this is the how as Elliot said it to purify the dialect of the tribe a to make a painting from the words that everyone uses commonly and routinely, that is what a poet does and when it works, common words because they should, they cannot specialize if suddenly, yes, they invent them or using, you know, 30 real words and then just because and but when they can make new images burst into your mind or new truths available or see something for the first time the same way you watch Turner and Say Now, I See What that the sun, the sun and the sea together can do.

He made me look at it in a new way and the poet can make you look at love or a sunset in a new way too because they found common words, but. They put them together and beautified them, they rarefied the language they have, as Eddie said, they purified the language of the tribe from this stony garbage, as he says, you do something great, that is the unity of art and science, the purpose is forcing ourselves to see ourselves and our place in the cosmos in a new way that's really what to me that's in some ways what makes science worthwhile just like art and music and literature isn't It is not the tools, it is not the technology, it is not the computers, it is not the elementary components of matter and the elementary components of language can be combined in wayswhich every linguist knows and most people know logically that this phrase that I am giving you now has never been uttered before. uh lawrence, you haven't done it yet, yes and yet they are simple words and it's the same with the 88 notes on the piano keyboard that you know you could sit there and instantly, from those just 88, you will know the power of the numbers.

It can make a sound in seconds that has never penetrated the air of humanity before, and similarly, the universe can play tricks with most elementary building blocks to create complexities like the human brain, on the one hand, or a banana, and it's so extraordinary that it's such an orgasmic experience for anyone to realize that these complex phenomena, understood, you suddenly see it in a new way and it's true, we are programmed to do it. we enjoy because we do the same thing we make our universes of language from the atoms of a discrete unit of language like a or a or the letter on the page we can build a poem or a village or or or um the protocols of the elders of Zion is morally there is no valence moral yes, it can be evil, it can be, you know or it can be the same as for the tools of science and you know it's uh and actually Stephen Pinker gives a good example, he says you know, people say that scientific physicists They made the atomic bomb, but it's not like that, they don't hate architects, although they had to make Auschwitz precisely, yes, absolutely true, yes, in fact, and you don't hate. uh, linguists or speakers because they are capable of doing the nuremberg rally or uh, well, I want to go, now I want to go from the heights of human intellectual activity to the depths, yes, I want to start, we want to talk. about science, humanism, and ultimately religion, and we both have very similar views on um, there's a wonderful line on The that Fox Mulder says we want. believe yes, we want to believe, we all want to believe things, we are programmed to believe in things and that, um, that's not necessarily bad, I think there's a great indirect description of religion, you said that older people don't know you. all people, about ten people often become more religious as they get older, he said that older people don't know that in today's world there is no one there, they don't know that the bible is a customer service advertisement and that purgatory is where saint peter puts you on hold and sends you into a self-contained loop controlled by an eternity menu operated by a tone button to the sound of vivaldi's spring that was actually hydrophobic is it funny to remember that you actually wrote this stuff ?

Of course, it's an impulse whenever we don't understand a force in the early days, it would be the moon and the sun and we would give it an agency and the name we give to those agencies is god, yes, so there was a moon god. in the god of the sun and there was a god who pushed the leaves on the branches of the trees and who forced any movement that we did not understand and then of course force and movement and understanding the force of movement is a matter yours and it is your business. that Galileo and Newton were famous for literally the movement of things, sure, the prime mover, that the prime mover is the key, is to realize the emotion that you give it, you seem to be a great student of physics because most No, actually, because one of the things when I talk about introduction to physics is the difference between Galileo and Aristotle.

Aristotle's opposition was important. Yes, Galileo realized that it was movement and that is the simple understanding that it was the creation of modern physics yes and and what is the agency behind that movement and and of course If you don't know and are not prepared to seriously think about what science entails or you choose not to believe in science for some strange reason, you give it that agency to a deity. Yes, I prefer well, I think these days there is only one. day unfortunately but it was more fun when it was it was much more fun or more and they are much nicer when there are many exactly I agree with you but it's more than that I think it's okay maybe I'm more pejorative than you, it's where you stop working is when you say I don't want to think about this anymore, so it's just God, yeah, I mean, I'm more hesitant than you, I think, or our deceased mutual friend Christopher Hitchens cut me off. more lenient towards the individually pious and devout people of the world.

I have no desire to offend them or try to get him to do so. No, I don't think he particularly did it, you know, and I always think about the floater. You know, this is treconde. three flow stories but there's one called the sample damn the simple heart and it's this woman happiness called what I think is an ironic title happiness she's a hardworking maid um and she sits in front of a stained glass window and looks at it and flowing. She has phobias. Her contempt for the cardinals and the prefecture of cardinals and the panoply and hierarchy of the church that keeps her on her knees is deep, but her love and sympathy for her on her knees are astonished by the color and.

The excitement and possibility of what religion offers is profound and I understand that you know that. I guess I don't want to shake people up and say, "Don't stare at that stained glass window, don't sing those hymns, how dare you?" It's none of my business, I have to speak as I find it when it comes to the truth behind it, which is important, but the awe, the sense of wonder is to celebrate and I guess my point about religion is that there are many positive things, yes, both. Okay, but the question is: can you achieve those positive things without the negative ones?

And Richard Feynman did it wonderfully. Remember talking about the flower when they argue with an artist who says that the flower seems more beautiful to me than you. You just know. In a way I find it beautiful, and then you get into all of its stamens and its atoms and these and Richard Feynman said well, don't you see that you get the beauty of the flowers, as well as the colors and the aesthetic form, but I also understand the beauty. from the symmetry inside your cells I get the symmetry of your jeans I understand the beauty of your transportation systems and it is, you know, it's chemical reactions, it's a factory, I understand everything more, more accurately, in fact, you see, I have to Feynman.

Written here is so annoying that it's surprising that we are in the same place absolutely fine, but interestingly I also had an improvement in the sense of using something independent that was almost exactly the same, I mean, I finally talk about the rainbow flower, true, said a The rainbow is no less beautiful because I understand how it works well and you said that streamlining a sunset doesn't make it less beautiful. You said it in hip hop hippo. Oh, that's right, yes, and which is wonderful. I liked. I liked. the book and I liked the movie, yeah, um, uh, because it was a wonderful way to address this fact that we want to believe, yeah, and how you can gently show people that they're really misunderstanding the world and that there's actually an explanation. different that can be more enlightening, more useful in the long term, as it was in this case, learning about the nature of the two young people absolutely and knowing the reality.

That's the point, not that it's not a beautiful way to see the world, but what. ultimately it leads you to useful actions versus, yes, irrational actions and that's my problem with greater participation in the world around you and what we really have an objection to, of course, is others who exercise power, It is the priestly caste that decides that it has knowledge that is special that it has revealed knowledge that cannot be questioned, that it is a truth that does not need to be proven and that it will set you free and that without it you are somehow condemned and and The People who are most likely to be controlled by the most vulnerable are the poorest, the least educated, and who are denied any sense of education or the option to look at the true depth and wonder of the world because it looks like religion. wants to count their souls and and there we know what the dangers are, yes, oh, there are those dangers, but there are, and those are the obvious ones, I guess, but there are more subtle ones and I think that in a certain sense and again.

I had this debate with Chomsky at one point, he told me from the beginning that I don't care what people think, it's what they do, the problem is that there is an intimate relationship between what people think and what they do, and That's the problem with religion. It seems to me that it's not that I mean that I don't find it to be nonsense and it's that accepting that suddenly makes people do irrational and sometimes evil actions, so there is that part, but then, going to Hitchens, there is a quote that I thought it was Hitchens, but Like many things, it wasn't, I guess, but where I heard him say, you know, we are, we are, we were created sick and we were commanded to be well.

I have since learned that it was a 16th century quote from another of the name phuket gavil maybe you know the pronunciation he said you were created but commanded to be healthy i learned that it came from that but first i learned it from christopher this once again we have to be ashamed of ourselves this feeling of shame Yes, what is so ingrained in religion is, in my opinion, one of the good things, especially in the Judeo-Christian religion, but that is one of the most insidious and evil aspects. Yes, so we have to square the circle that we accept the absurd nature or at least we at least agree that the idea of ​​original sin the thought that we are supposed to believe that we are guilty we should be ashamed but on the other hand also We talk about him without using his name yet, I talk about the idea that there is a perfection out there that we have not achieved and cannot achieve and that quote from Browning about the demands that we must exceed his understanding of what a heaven is for us. move on or know who we are. imperfect by definition, perfection is not that which cannot be achieved, but there are paradigms of perfection, there is a thing called truth and there is something called a brilliant moral ethical life that we gesture towards, but do not have.

We are imperfect, but imperfection is not a stain on us from birth, it is simply that we are given a sense of the ineffable and yes, and the inexpressible in ourselves, a pattern of something beyond what Plato imagined exists. this, yeah, um. and it's a theoretical thing, he's not the one that Plato believed that there was some kind of parallel universe in which everything was perfect but if you have it in your head then I like the idea that I should be better than I am, yeah , you know, it's because rejecting original sin is not the same as saying when we can accept exactly who we are because we are perfect, we are born good and I don't have to fight to express myself to fulfill myself more than we know, we know we fail, we know we fall short some standard that can be acculturated but can also be programmed, maybe hardwired and like most of those questions, my terrible joke is that you know we're used to the idea that the nature versus nurture debate is safe. but we forget that there is also the question of human will, so I say it's nature, nurture and nature, but you know, I think it's horrible, there's a truth there, not that I would agree with nature , Superman and all the rest. it's the will to power or whatever, but most philosophers don't believe that free will exists, but that doesn't mean there's no will, um, we can't want to have will like Chopin has. he said yes and we certainly don't know we don't want to be uh um you know the way we are born is not something we can desire and then where we are born or any of those questions but yes or no We are forged more by nature more by nurture we still have agency over our actions which is not the same as free will but it is yes, no way, well yes, it is too, it is a model for your clients, you know it even in a world without free will. we still have to take responsibility for responsibility exactly, I think that's the key point because it seems to be a world where it's fun because one of my favorite dates I was with him just like you, but I was with Christopher a little bit before he died and I was laughing and I was sitting in their kitchen and I was reading the New York Times and there was a wonderful article about how the Yale students were working hard, there were religious groups to try to keep the Yale students from losing. their religion and they said, versus um, versus beer pong hitchens and nietzsche, it's impossible and yeah, it did, I said how much more can you have gotten your life sandwiched between beer pong and nietzsche, it was, it doesn't get any better, yeah , It was wonderful.

And yet, it would be negligent. I guess one of the most important quotes you've given is when people ask you what you come to say face to face with God and I have to read it because it's very important because well, it also relates to Greek myths, but you said you would say oh , I should let you read it, but anyway, bone cancer in children, what's up with that? How dare you? How dare you create a world where there is so much misery? It's not our fault, it's completely evil, why should I respect a stupid, capricious, petty god who creates a world so full of injustice and pain?

And um, yeah, I mean, this was a surprise question I got in an interview where I was giving in.Ireland actually just said, "Well, I guess you're wrong in the end, Stephen, and you know you die and then you wake up and my God, what would you say to him?", so I thought, well, you know, I mean, even if you accept this on your own. ideas of free will and that it's up to us and That god is, you know, winding the clock of humanity and, for some strange reason, he decided to watch his little creations move and judge them according to the way they behave, which It's scandalous anyway, even you accept that it doesn't explain the children's death. in earthquakes, which is plate tectonics, which can't even be attributed to global warming, I mean, that's how he created the planet, yeah, and, uh, but that's kind of old, the evil problems argument , as you know, theodicy is, I think, the big name for that form of theological argument and it's very difficult to answer if you maintain that there is only one god who is benevolent, yeah, um, because it just doesn't hold up and it's that hypocrisy, See, that's what I mean.

What interests me is because comparing it to the Greek gods, the wonderful thing about the Greek gods was that people waited for the gods because they were vain, lustful and jealous, and the Christian god is exactly the same, but we have to accuse him because or she . because he represents them as exactly the opposite of what they really are and that's why we spend that time on our knees apologizing for our faults but ignoring his, yes, exactly, it's a shame because you know I have to say that I love sacred music I love them talis and bird and bach and handel I love I love the sacred architecture of the arch I love the English hymnal I love the liturgy of the Anglican church there are so many things I've been into the same way I love the Greek myths Doesn't mean I believe in them, yeah , but I think that ritual and ceremony are very important parts of being human at all and I think they express in a visual dramatic metaphorical way a lot of what it is to be alive and to be a species. of the theater theater of ideas and emotions and instincts and impulses and that is a very important thing that we must do, it is a natural way of expressing humans and that is why I think religion is so omnipresent, yes, over and over again when I talk about how we can achieve the goal of the things that religion provides without religion.

What I'm saying is that we should have quantum mechanics classes on Sunday mornings and without the eschatology, without the idea that, as Greeks, one of the best things about the Greeks is that they knew someone who said definitively. what happens to a human being after his death is either a fool or a liar because there has never been one that has come back to tell the story and there is no place to visit, yeah, you know, and the original idea is that type of vents. and channels that showed some lava could have been the gateway to hell.

We now know that it is just a gateway to a very hot part of the world. Have you ever been? I was recently in Vanuatu when I looked down. a volcano, it is and never has been, it's incredible, have you done that exercise I did? I flew over Hawaii in a helicopter. I made a documentary that went to all the states yesterday at the meeting and we ended up in Hawaii watching new pieces of America being born as lava spewed out. in the sea a new rock formed it was a great way to end yes, well, before I finish with religion, I had to ask you, you must be very proud, there are not many of us, I want to know if it is still there. the defamation act that you were accused of blaspheming, yeah, I mean, it's wonderful.

In fact, someone gave me a cool doctorate for me at a university, some at the university gave me that one and I had it on my wall, but you've actually been accused of it's what you might assume is a badge of honor in some way. well it was actually very irish uh and that sounds like it's almost racist to say it to describe something it's very irish but uh it was a um Ireland has been reinventing itself in terms of the church's power over divorce and abortion and children's rights. homosexuals and everything else and they've had a series of plebiscites and referendums and they still have this pretty old blasphemy law, so when I was in Ireland like I was He spoke against God and just said he was a monster.

He was not absurd, stupid, evil, unnecessary, cruel, etc. It was actually an Irish lawyer who suggested I might be guilty of blasphemy because he knew I would be a fantastic sight to have around. in court yes, because technically he had broken the law and that would make the law look as bad as it is and it was his way of saying, come on Ireland, we have to get rid of this in the modern world, it's absurd, so? Wasn't he really offended? Did this lead to getting rid of it? Actually he did or at least I don't know where his mind was, but he called attention to it and said that he had been busy cleaning the orgy and stables of es de es uh uh and that I think is one of the things that were being done.

Making it up folks, Steve Weinberg would say you were doing God's work, well there's two more, there's two more things I want to talk about quickly. is speaking as we travel down the road from intellectual heights, there is political correctness and a groupthink mentality that you have been, that you have happily attacked, and the notion that, to some extent, it is shame, once again it comes Here uh um, I was talking to Ian McKeown recently about him, he received an award and he went to Israel and was investigated and I know, of course, that you've spoken out against Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, but you know, I'm Jewish. and I see the right for Israel to exist as a state and I have family that lives in Tel Aviv and if I want to visit it, I will visit it.

You might not tell me it's not exactly right, so let's talk a little. a little bit about this curse of the combination of political correctness and virtue that says you can't say certain things now, which is the opposite of enlightenment in a sense, yeah, I mean, I'm temperamentally liberal, but hand-squeezing liberal a milk a toast of milk liberal an insecure um worried carpet slipper big cardigan you know them forstery a kind of liberal um I'm not a hardline lefty um I sympathize with a lot of social justice uh imperatives and missions and so on but I just want the left be smarter than you are.

I wanted to be aware of how alienating it is. You know, good, well-intentioned people are simply outraged, upset and scared by the redaction of human lives. to the outer darkness without trial and without due process, uh, you know, for all kinds of reasons and for language that is used carelessly, yes, yes, languages ​​can be a time bomb, from time to time you can do it Obviously, if you start talking about people as cockroaches, etc. We're all aware of how you know racist language can be a cruel precursor to racist behavior that turns to blood in the streets, but it's just language, you know, I think I agreed to be on stage with Jordan Peterson, that's a debate um, he's not someone.

I necessarily agree with the norm. I was surprised, but I guess I understood that he was very open-minded. I drew the line that Ben Shapiro, yeah, but, but, Jordan Peterson, I thought, well, that's the point, you know, there are things I don't agree with about this man. but I agree with him on the fact that, and from my point of view, it is because I actually regret the failure of the left. I think so, the rise of Banonism and the extreme right and their equivalence throughout Europe is rather a catastrophic situation. The failure of the left that a particular triumph of the right also reinforces the right, at least in the United States, if you read who is protecting free speech right now, who is speaking in favor of speaking, it is the right and That's not how it should be. not as it should be, we should be less sensitive and I don't want to use the word snowflake because it is circulating, but you know less and most importantly we should think about how it is more important to be effective than to be right. in the sense of being fair and moralistic and all those things, it's just an effect, you know, if you want the world to be a better place, think about how to achieve it, yeah, and it's not by alienating the people in the middle, to people who are so lost and so scared by their far right and the far right and the far left and the old left if you want to call it that for God's sake it's so silly it's so silly to be lost in a world where if you start the heteronormative patriarchy so I'm sorry, you know it's not English and it comes from a Judith Butler world, you know, I mean all respect and good work and everything else, and this doesn't mean we go backwards. feminism is irrelevant, that's not what I'm saying at all.

What I'm saying is choose a better language to normalize if you want to use a normal word instead of normativizing it and you know it; Otherwise, you are losing allies, you are losing politicians. ground, you are not achieving what you want to achieve, all you have is to be right, is to hug yourself, yes, exactly, well, good luck to you, but you are missing something even more, you are missing the fact that we need to do it . Question that this is how society advances. That we need to question ourselves, yes, and be all willing to openly question those things that we accept as absolutely normal.

Yes, and I believe in inspecting the nature of gender and its fluidity. You know that transgender and intersex people have been given an incredibly difficult time being mutilated in the case of intersex people without their will and there is a lot of important social work and understanding to be done and in the same way. that has happened in my life, you know, my gay life has meant that suddenly I ended up like I could be married to the man that I love you and it's an incredible advance and there are many more advances to be made, but In fact, in this country , when ian mckellen and Stonewall, which is the kind of activist group that works in politics, worked quietly behind the scenes, persuading politicians not to sit on the barricades, getting angry, blushing and alienating the common people, heh, heh. saw conservative politicians and he was a conservative politician in the former David Cameron who prevailed against veterinary opposition on his own right, uh, he pushed for the equal marriage law and that's the way things are done, it may not be It may not be fast enough, but that's how things are done, yeah, you know, it's a bit like engineering, it's the third, fourth, fifth version that's the one that you can release to the public and it's actually going to work. , but there are many, many betas and many of you know false starts and that is true in social networks, uh, also in progress and we have to do it, yes, and if the left doesn't realize it well, they don't realize I realize that I always found myself agreeing with Donald Trump, I was worried and, you know, when I read Donald Trump, I said, well, we weren't going to give federal funds to universities unless they allow freedom of speech, and That seems reasonable to me actually, and then I'm like, oh.

Gosh, if that sounds reasonable, there is some fundamental problem and as an academic it is really unfortunate to see how people are dominating what they call scientists, and he will also appreciate that newspapers and politicians cherry-pick the events and rhetoric of particular campuses to suggest a much more systemic problem than what actually exists. Actually, if you go to an average university, there's a lot of free speech and there's a lot of give and take, well, now you know better than what they don't have. campus life, but there is also a truth behind it that needs to be addressed, they are one of your favorites.

I want you to remember that I was always wrong about a quote about offending that I'm trying to get at, but let me start with that. To me, one of the most ironic examples of what might have been happening in academia was a university where a speaker came to talk about free speech and the women's group created safe zones so that, so that, uh, uh, so that People wouldn't be uh wouldn't be traumatized by hearing it and that to me is the most ironic thing, but because the point is that people seem to think that being offended gives you special rights and you're beautiful and I'm not.

I know if you remember exactly what, but I remember hearing you say for the first time that being offended doesn't give you any special rights and you know, I think you said something like maybe I'm pretty sure you said something like oh, I offended you a lot. deal, it's true, I mean, there is a tradition in the language. I love Sir Humphrey Wasp in a fairly non-dark way, but not one of Ben Johnson's most well-known plays Bartholomew's affair when he revolves around what he'll look like if he's upset with someone. It's shit in your teeth, sir, and I want to say shit in your teeth to these people, just as when I was a kid my mother would occasionally take me to the assembly halls in Norwich, which was like stepping back into the world of Jane Austen and I used to imagine myself standing at the table pulling down my pants and pointing my butt at these incredibly refined ladies with their tea because they looked like they needed you to know to be a little surprised by their kind of everything being so nice and appropriate.

And that's now the position I feel in the case of some of these sensitive, sensitive people in universities who say I don't want to see Macbeth because he has a child murder or there's arape on this. play I mean shit in your teeth um you know it well, you know it's like um, you know parents who protect their children too much from viruses and bacteria, you know they will become hypersensitive and you know they should be sucking gravel when they are two years old they should be playing exactly and that's part of the problem if there is a book in the United States called Coddling of the American people yes, Johnson hates Jonathan very well and I think the point he makes is very interesting. is that, in a sense, people's feeling that universities have to be protected from anything that could hurt them comes from this overly protective upbringing that happened and didn't happen when you tried to run around, but it was a very interesting moment when suddenly everything changed in terms of a natural age when children are allowed to go out and play on their bikes with their peers exactly and now don't cross the street, don't do this, don't do that because You could get hurt, you could get scratched.

You yourself may find that the world is a dangerous place and you should be protected from dangers rather than the fact that the world is a dangerous place, but learning to live with them is part of what the joy of growing up and being human means. . Really part of that, exactly, and I was sent at seven to a prep school where I was bullied again, he interfered, believe me, but that meant I was. I mean, I'm a sensitive person. I don't like being attacked. or anything else, but no, I wasn't, I wasn't scared by the emotional violence of the world, yes, I was horrified, but because it's a bad thing, but I didn't, I didn't trigger myself into some kind of fetal position, you know. to whine um and I don't know I don't want to sound cruel and without feeling because it is a problem that young people are afraid of encountering things or them or if by the time they go to university it is the The first time they leave home and you know that they can't stand it, so it's a shame, well it is, but I think part of what college is supposed to be about, apart from academics, is to do that. transition from safety to home to because ultimately it's supposed to prepare you for the real world in many ways in principle prepare for the real world by becoming a lifelong learner we've all seen we've seen the little boy who falls and then look at the adult to see what the adult's expression is and if the adult is just not interested he may not actually cry but if the adult does that then he will leave then he will know he will and we have already You see that we want to balance sensitivity with desire.

I mean a little tough love and matching for those of us who have been parents. It is a big challenge to know when not to be sensitive and when to try. my wife is so much better than love in the bathtub and I'm myself anyway yeah it's really now coming back to I want to end this because you went back to your childhood experience but I came in with something personal that was I'm debating whether to speak with you, but you've talked about it publicly, it's your own suicide issues and and and and um and I want to talk about it in a positive way if I can't not establish suicide in a positive way, but the notion of the challenge, the personal challenges that we have because what I said about you at the beginning of this is true in terms of "you're a lovely man, but and as someone I just melt when I'm with you." but another person that i'm like that with is someone that i had a dialogue with johnny depp, who is a friend of mine, and we had a dialogue about creativity and madness because he talks a lot about the demons in his head and they, but at the same time have helped him become the person he is, so I wanted to ask you if you feel in any way that the two double-sided points are there and you know that they didn't take away, my demons or my angels will fly, yes, and it's very difficult for We know, we have to presume to know how much we depend on these, these struggles within ourselves for any kind of achievement or self-definition, and we who without them would be mixed up in something, I mean, it's certainly true that when you face mental health problems and you recognize them for the first time, many of us have them as we now know and maybe we didn't have them in the past.

I hope that has changed, we are unlikely to recognize them, you know that adolescence is a difficult time, anyway, everyone knows that you can be stormy and difficult and, uh, difficult to deal with, and then there is college and there is your early adulthood and you are introduced to Alcohol, drugs and things like that have an effect on you that very often you haven't realized why you responded well to them. If your mood is likely to bring you down or push you into some kind of crazy frenzy, then get close to chemicals that will control it in some way, not necessarily consciously, you just think, oh God, some kind of drink, yeah , we feel better, and then maybe you'll be lucky enough to think that someone will tell you.

Are you drinking too much or do you really want to take all this cocaine, are you sure? And you'll think okay, I'll stop and then what's left is the problem that they were masking in the first place and then. you go through the business of realizing that you have a condition, you have a mood disorder, in my case, bipolar disorder and um and that your chemistry or whatever is a little bit out of whack or can go into cycles. ways that can be deeply difficult to cope with and depression can lead to suicidal ideations, as they like to call them in the trade, are you thinking about suicide?

Which is obviously dangerous, but he's carried it the last two. people self-medicate with our common drugs to suppress it, but also mania, hypermania as it's called upstate, which used to be manic as in manic teachers, um, that's harder for your friends and family to handle because you totally become you know you don't sleep you're full of ridiculous plans you know all that you know um and you have to find a way to deal with it ideally without drugs or alcohol because you know they just exacerbate it what they do is certainly in my case they do um they just make it worse things because alcohol becomes more and more depressing um and you get angrier and angrier when you're drunk and that's just a bad thing, it's not pleasant to be around and it's just disgusting, so I went through the adventure of discovering different drug cocktails official pharmacists instead of illegal drugs and recreational drugs, and then I've done it since I was lucky enough to really control it without drinking a lot. just a bit of social drinking here and there but I've never been so in love with drink as to become an alcoholic, luckily I happily gave up coke with one thing in particular and actually smoking but I started walking, I walk eight miles. every morning and that seems to have an effect on my mood oh yeah you know I'm not going to be like that the endorphins really do that yeah yeah and I know you know I'm not going to claim that. is going to work for everyone because we are all different and good examples of how different we are, since we all know people, we can sit around the table and drink the same number of glasses of wine and one person will become a monster and the other .

One person will be all sentimental, another person will fall asleep and another person will not move a hair and that is the relatively simple chemical ingredient, you know the esters and aldehydes of alcohol, while the complex medications that are administered by pharmaceuticals. Obviously, companies can have different effects on different people, so it's not my place to say that lithium will work for you or this, you know that the SSRI will work for you, but when the complex medications that we use and our own function We are, we are. a much more complex pharmaceutical, yes, the endocrine ones and yes, yes, yes, and they affect people differently and in that sense I want to end this because you actually said it in two different ways and I discovered it during this conversation, now It's real, maybe I don't realize it. we talk about shame and we talk about the fact that we know what we can become and the reaction that one can have there are two quotes there is one that is not yours but it was since he was talking to you recently in his book about machines like me, which is about that, yes, we know what we are, we know that we are deficient because we know what we should be, yes, and again, it's a little embarrassing, but in a sense that for me and for me.

Imagine to some extent in multiplication for you in the depressive stages, that's the source of my insecurity is the fact that I know I'm not what I could be and um and it's a cause of shame and enough and depression. but at the same time, if you think about it another way, if you're into this and maybe if the chemicals in your brain work differently, you have that quote of yours that we actually said, ah, but a man's reach must exceed his scope or What is the sky for? So it seems to me that the dichotomy between the two are different aspects of exactly the same thing.

You can be depressed by the fact that you are not what you can be or you can use it as motivation to try to be. a little more how you can be exactly. I remember one time filming in the Amazon and there was a tree frog and I looked at this tree frog and of course it's anthropomorphic, but they seem to have a smile, yes, yes, but I remember telling him. since I was there yes, yes I have seen them, I was in the Amazons and I said I don't know much about your life, tree frog, but I can be pretty sure that you didn't go to bed last night thinking I was a terrible monster-free truck yesterday I was horrible I was mean to those tree frogs and I promised that something something that I didn't keep and oh, I'm so ashamed of myself You, like a tree frog, spend 24 hours of every day and and and and 60 minutes of every hour being a tree frog doesn't bother you. you are turning into a tree frog you are always one that is your privilege your glory as an animal but I am different I don't know why I am different and I don't know if I can really prove it, but I have abs, I intuit it and feel it strongly enough to call it knowledge .

I go to bed thinking that yesterday I was a bad Stephen about humans, yesterday I failed at this and why. I said that, oh God, what was I thinking and I shouldn't have bothered writing that and I didn't write that thank you letter and I didn't know that there can be little social things or there can be big things ethical dilemmas and that's what genesis was about. explain is what Prometheus is trying to explain where we get this from but it's our curse but it's also our blessing and I think that's what we fit in as human beings being the species that we are and how it got there, if you follow the path of psychology evolutionary where we came together and everything has to do with our evolution and whether it was a strange shot in a mutation that just developed, not for you. not for the benevolent reason of evolution, but it doesn't matter, we can just think about it and praise that, if you like it, praise that and the fact that it is ours, it is our curse and our blessing at the same time, is what makes that the human being is human and trying to understand that through art, yes, or through science, yes, it is the same, the same exploration, the same search, yes, and I just have to say that you know it is Everyone I know, your understanding is as far away as anyone's.

I know, but I want you to keep thinking of the positive, Stephen, that your reach should exceed it and not the negative, because we all need you. Thank you very much, it was wonderful, thank you all, it was fun. The Origins podcast is produced by Lawrence Krauss and Nancy. dahl john and don edwards gus and luke hulwarda and rob zepps audio by thomas amusement web design by redmond media lab animation by tomahawk visual effects and music by ricolis to see the full video of this podcast, as well as other additional content, visit us on patreon. com origins podcast