John Lloyd | A Drink with the Idler

uh stay in bed save lives and our guest today is uh jordan lloyd who's a ridiculously talented person i mean um uh when you look at the look at the things that he's done in his life it's sort of unbelievable he started with something called the news quiz in his twenties on radio four um he went on to produce not nine o'clock news fitting image black adder um he he then had a sort of a a break when he became incredibly rich and successful commercials maker um and uh but this money didn't make him happy did it john no and we might be hit a little bit about that and and after a sort of period of crisis he emerged with this new idea qi which is about about 10 years ago and there's a a really brilliant cheerful uh didactic educational project um john's joining us from his house uh near oxford john we're going to come to you and say i just wanted very quickly to um come to mark vernon do you want to give a quick wave to everybody they can see where you are there he is and uh we're gonna have a quick chat with mark vernon who's our resident philosopher um now mark last week and the week before we spoke about the stoics uh they weren't stiff upper lip they would go with the flow the epicureans likewise were not addicted to luxury in fact they were fairly frugal what about the cynics um what do you think of the cynics and how would they have coped with uh this kind of plague or crisis because i think these plagues and crises did happen in ancient athens didn't they quite periodically remember the um the plague of athens at so-called that you know kill pericles wiped out i don't know a quarter of the population was absolutely devastating um i think that i mean quite a good little thing to remember the cynics is they weren't cynical um they were called the city it's because they lived like dogs um and sonar gaze is the greek for dog um but they kind of interesting i was thinking about them was that they invented the dire tribe um the idea that you have a kind of rant or um you know kind of um preach against something or have a go at something um diogenes the cynic the founder he was once um seen uh talking to a statue and people said why are you talking to the statue and he said well i get a better response from the statue than from anyone else but the point of the the diatribe was to actually kind of chastise yourself to shake yourself out of your own stupor so originally died tribes actually was something you kind of wrote against yourself and you know cynics would say you know why am i bothered about uh the clothing that i have because you know surely there's more important things to want in life um it's that kind of dynamic and i think that um you know they the good cynic would have been prepared for this because they would have already um said you know look life is fragile stuff happens um why did you orientate your life around the assumption that everything was going to continue without interruption um and and the diatribe becomes um in time it becomes the sermon and then it becomes the rant against other people but the original sense was really to kind of challenge yourself um and so you know that's one thing perhaps to take from them do you think diogenes would have taken this all seriously would he just i mean you know in picacho uh during the plague in 1348 and he said some people just went around florence just tweeting the whole thing like an enormous joke and they didn't really sort of take any notice of it um there were some people today who were who were like that how would dodgies have reacted with him self-isolated that would have thought he was being bossed around by the authoritarians anyway he lived in a barrel didn't he yeah well they they love to shock i mean you know the the the city's remembered not so much by their philosophy but by their stories endless stories i mean the most famous one is the encounter between diogenes and alexander the great when alexander who owned everything came up to darjeeling who owned nothing and said what can i give you and darjeni said step out of the sun because alexander was casting a shadow across his barrel um and they were nature optimus you know they really thought that if you if they were they're actually the more radical stoics whilst the stoics did say go with the flow the synod said no really go with the flow um and you will have what you need in life you'll discover they believe so they although they were super tough and there were never that many followers there was always a kind of prophetic um cynic figure in every generation it's kind of one remembered for the hundreds of years into the christian period um so they were kind of the prophets they were in a way they were the momento mori characters a bit like you do get in other cultures um who kind of seemed to live on the edge but somehow reminded you of a greater life thank you mark now john lloyd um i can see you there in your uh in your your home studio you've got actually terrific lighting did someone plan that for you or or is that random oh we can't actually hear you let me just i'll give it unmute you yeah there we go yeah i'm here yeah no i have a little man who comes in tom yeah it's a little zoom guy a little who likes me yes yes um so your little zoom guy comes in uh gets everything set up before yours before your zooms no not really i'm just looking out the window and that's daylight because that's all it is just you know about these things because you're you're a tv pro right natural life yeah yeah yeah yeah now what's your philosophy well tell me how your lockdown's going where are you and who's in your house with you uh i've got my wife um my uh son harry his girlfriend and my younger daughter so five of us it's really nice it's a bit a bit fractious from time to time you know people we've all lost our temper once anyway but we we're uh you know we're a philosophical family you know we we try to live some of these uh precepts and principles and it's been really hard i think the thing that i i don't try not to do pride but if i'm proud of anything it's that i'm still married to the same person i married 30 years ago and i like all my children i don't just love them i like them and they haven't um run away from you or anything like that well no they've been you know terrible terrible moments we've had like everybody does but it's like um you know all those things that you read about in books i really try to do you know like you've got to get up in the morning be grateful for what you have and i i really do wake up and i think my god i've got another one i've got another whole day this is unbelievable i don't deserve this i mean i never thought i'd make 40 you know now you you haven't always been in such a cheerful mood john have you no and why were you in a not cheerful mood in previous incarnations i was i was known as mr grumpy for a long time in television uh or terry tension was another name oh terry tension's in the room um well i don't know i suppose you're a perfectionist was that why uh you sort of wanted to do these things well okay well here's the thing um there's a freudian concept called um infantile amnesia are you aware of this when you forget you've been a baby yeah as you get that you are baby-like my son harry said this to me years ago when he was i did teenager young teenager he said dad can you remember what i was like when i was two and i said of course like yesterday and he goes why can't i it's one of the central mysteries of being a human being is why can't you remember just before you were two or three and the reason is that um it's basically to protect psychiatrists livelihoods because that's where all the damage happens all of all the problems unless you actually brain damaged happens before your two and and it is the engine that drives you whatever it was all your resentments your fears my case obsessive perfectionism that you know fear of failure those all come from something somebody said to me when i was tiny and they that's what hard wires you that's the machinery that operates what the chinese would call the monkey mind the little man in your head that tells you what to do and what to think so so i spent until i was very lazy school boy uh i didn't want to be a producer i wanted to be a performer and a writer and i uh got offered a job by a man with a beard from the bbc and i was so poor i had to do something so i did that and within three months i was hooked completely obsessively hooked on the job i found i could something i could really do and i did that without a break for 15 years i worked every weekend i missed everybody's weddings i just was a completely driven and then i met sarah we got married had a couple of kids i won these two lifetime awards in the same year one from bath from one from the royal television society and one christmas eve i woke up and i just hit the i hit the buffers i couldn't see the point of anything in life i'd sort of had in in psychology it's called um the successful malcolm and it it's what often drives the male midlife crisis you know i'd done everything that i set out to do i won all the prizes i had money you know as you say i made ridiculous amounts of money directing cheese commercials in the 90s and you know i had a nice car and you know a cottage in the country and i was absolutely brefed for years the first three years were the worst i sat and i met just mainly crying and drinking a great deal of expensive malt whiskey and then i spent i thought okay so i'm going to dig myself out of this it's i can see that i am the problem in some way that i don't understand i don't understand why this has happened to me i have got no reason to be unhappy and i'm absolutely furious resentful um angry and uh very depressed and so i uh sort of dug myself out of the pit it took about 10 years the first seven were the worst and i did it by basically learning to think for myself once again and trying to find out about everything really and and qi is basically a it's a kind of um byproduct of that search what it was literally the search for the meaning of life i wanted to know what is the point of being alive what what is is it is there something other than he who dies of the most toys wins is there another you know i'd never read any plato you know i didn't i thought philosophy was boring and pointless and too difficult for me and never any science i couldn't possibly have told you how an atom was constructed or what was the difference in an atomic molecule or a planet in the sun and i bet quite a few people here don't know the difference between a planet in the star amazingly who except for the scientists among us can explain photosynthesis clearly very few people and and when it comes to philosophy you know and people go on about you know oh i'm an atheist or whatever well have you read the literature have you read the bhagavad gita have you studied the daoda jing you know have you have you read any of the quran for example have you actually read the bible on what evidence do you basis well there's no evidence for god and you think well it depends what you mean by god we come onto that later maybe but um it's like people are going through life with a bag over their head um that's something i discovered in some sufi sage you know that people are sleepwalking through life they're not really here they're not awake and the reason they're not awake is because the little monkey in your head the little chap who's i can hear yours all chattering at me you know i know your lips aren't moving but the monkey mind is talking 19 to thousands why is this guy shut up i thought he was meant to be funny oh let's tune out you know this is not as good as the last idol when when mark vernon did all the talking all those things that your your what they call your internal monologue is saying and that is actually not you that's your puppeteer that is that's your puppet fear puppeteer puppeteer yeah it's the little self it's the little self that controls you and and and controls all your feelings and makes you unable to operate it optimally and and the the thing you need to try to reach at least that's what i try to do is i've got a philosophy of my own called absenteeism okay so i said that again john my philosophy is called absenteeism it has only one commandment and it is get out of the way get out of the way and that means in everything you do whether you're a parent or a film director or an editor you remove yourself from the equation and things will go fine thanks it's we get in the way of ourselves that's what i think too serious for you tommy now did this um this sort of enlightenment that uh this was difficult for you to find i mean you said you took about 10 years and then qy came out of it um hey i didn't i never claimed to be enlightened or anything like that i mean i'm just struggling through like anyone else but the point is i have thought about everything as far as i'm able and in the time i have literally everything i could possibly find to think about i thought and i thought very hard and i have looked for evidence and and i have worked out for myself a philosophy that locks together in a way which means i can forget about it really you're just trying to live it you know like john when when do you think you know because you you went from being a let's say a sort of workaholic um to being a philosopher and you sort of now combine the two how do you how do you sort of carve out the thinking time and when does the thinking time happen for you it must have been difficult to make that time driven as you naturally perhaps are um and uh you know you might feel that just wandering around the kitchen doing nothing is is a waste of time but were you sort of disciplined about your thinking time i mean do you sort of um do you go for walks or in my crisis i was just in despair you know i was a i was a wreck but i was a high functioning depressive and i used to go to work and shoot barkley card ads and i was quite good at that stuff um i went very angry and i got absorbed in the thing that's one of the things i found that when i was doing something i really loved i forgot my troubles you know one of the ways to stop being depressed is help somebody else stop thinking about yourself all the time so these things and gradually as as i the more i thought and and i it because i was well overpaid for this very uh testing job and so i had lots of time i was home a lot i read constantly yeah and as i read i suddenly realized that many things in the universe that we think are upside down from the way they actually are you can see two the two most obvious ways are that everyone will understand straight away which is the sun appears does it not to rise in the east and go overhead and go down in the west and we now know that's exactly the reverse of that it's going nowhere the sun from our perspective we are revolving towards it similarly you may know that when you look at anything the light that comes in and hits your retina hits the retina upside down and the brain turns it up the right way up and you can actually buy a pair of glasses that turn things upside down and the brain takes i think it's about three days to work out hang on i'm wearing a pair of glasses and it flips it round again and this idea of inversion is something i'm very keen on the moment many problems are solved by inverting it you know say no it's the other way around i remember in the middle of my crisis i went into the shower in the morning and was very hungover i'd been very drunk the night before very angry probably bust a few doors down and i turned on the shower and i could not turn the shower knob it i was driving me mad i went to get some monkey wrench from the from the kitchen and i wrenched it and it nearly came off and i suddenly realized oh no it goes anti-clockwise and there was no problem you know and that in that little way and i was just thinking earlier you know we think obedience is a good thing you know and that adam and eve got thrown out the garden of eden for their disobedience and this is a really cool thing people take this away and think about it because um obedience is what causes all the problems in life you want to be disobedient where you can obedience is what causes wars you know the reason the germans kept having world wars is not because they're a war-like people it's because they're obedient hitler was an elected chancellor and everyone said well it's the law you know and they went along with it it's because they're nice guys not not because what and the british who are disobedient people which what makes them such great football hooligans you know uh you know we we we beat them in that one but and and the thing is disobedience is about you think of all the people who really achieved something in life i mean obviously a lot of criminals but you know most creative people wouldn't sit still at school didn't get it were bored you know ran away to become a rock guitarist or a painter or a novelist and and this is you know human creativity is in and you will not be happy ever if you accept what you are told by other people you like you will only start getting there if you learn to think for yourself is that really true is that actually what i think is it when i'm just repeating what i read in the daily mail or what i learned at university and people are stuck in this groove repeating endlessly repeating patterns and thinking it's somebody else's fault it's nobody's fault but yours it's your life you fix it am i being too robust here tom i'm sorry it just makes me think um what about these people who uh let's call them conspiracy theorists you know we sort of think they're silly um but they're you know i sort of think well they're questioning the consensus um there's a consensus right now about um that we should be sort of you know following what the government says about coronavirus i mean some people my mum for example find that quite insulting uh and he would like to be disobedient but then other people would say no you're putting lives at risk well i don't think you should be disobedient for the sake of it but um the thing is it basically means assessing everything as as far as you best know i mean your mom probably doesn't know much about coronavirus so that's probably about the best advice she has so being disobedient like you know when when you say to a child don't run across the road you'll get run over and they say john lloyd says be disobedient and boof that's obviously ludicrous who's that philosopher mark there was a philosopher who believed taking it so easy that he used to cross the road without looking and his followers had to stop him doing that because he believed he would never be hit well there is the story about socrates walking along and falling into potholes and stuff like that i don't know if it's the same the same story it sounds a bit remember the guy's name john out of all the different things you've done which was the most fun which you enjoyed the most which you think has sort of caused the most um joy in the world i don't know they're all um the one of the things about absenteeism which i've always done at work i go to work with no agenda all i want to do is i want to at the end of the day or the week or three months to emerge with something really good and it one is annoying about working with me is that i've only got two buttons one is terrific and the other is not good enough i don't have a sort of that'll do thing so everything i do is extremely hard whether it's a i don't know a larger commercial is just as hard as writing a press release or doing an episode of blackout or i give 110 to everything i do and it's very painful for me i find work extremely difficult but the the satisfaction of doing something and because i know it's not me what i all i'm doing is i'm kind of channeling uh i'm just waiting until it gets to the excellent bit and so i don't take credit i haven't taken credit for anything i've done for probably 30 years i think and i know it's not me you can't take credit for anything except turning up and working really hard and not giving up and getting back on the horse when you you get hurt so uh they've all been you know everything i do you know i often think there's life is perfectly balanced from the way the planets go around the the stars and all this and from a human life everything is perfectly balanced but you you have a choice as to what kind of sign curve you live in you know you can have one that goes like this this is a kind of you know lucky postman you know happily married not many you know nothing terribly testing about the job but nothing no great highs either um or you can have one like mine which is insane you know incredible lows amazing highs so they've all been all those programs and things i suppose the most fun one was the meaning of life if you know that book that i wrote with douglas adams oh the meaning of ladies and gentlemen um which is the uh things that there aren't words for given words which are english towns which john wrote with douglas adams yeah you have to sort of explain it it's they're all all the words are recycled place names so for example kettering in northamptonshire kettering is in fact the marks left on your bottom and thighs after sitting sunbathing on a wickerwork chair or epping is the fruitless movements of four fingers and eyebrows when failing to attract the attention of a waiter or barman that's epping i was epping the entire weekend tom and how has your epping been uh at home you know we're hearing that as you i'm sure you know you know during tudor lockdown the playwrights had to stay at home there were no plays the the theaters closed for six months um and then six months later this kind of explosion of new material because the creative people have been sitting around doing nothing and therefore coming up with you know new ideas last week we had dominic west and he said yes i've been reading all about karl marx i want to put on a play about karl marx have you had any clearly you're sort of um bursting with creative ideas all the time anyway have you had any sort of any fantasy thoughts that have occurred to you over the last few weeks things you'd like to do new ideas new projects i just want to thank ian probert i'm seeing the notes go by and aren't they classy these notes are brilliant it's worth doing reading with me ian probert says planets strictly speaking don't revolve around stars anybody knew that it's actually space time that's moving that is so cool oh yeah that means thank you yeah that would be on the next series of q i no problem and then someone else has written fair enough they're dues yeah that's all right yeah take that sorry what what yeah so look during this lockdown um tuesday lockdown you know shakespeare wrote plays if you had any sort of you sort of move forward forward creatively you had some good ideas good thoughts schemes fantasy for things you'd like to do um honestly tom i'm i'm so busy you know we're writing a book um i've just got a thousand things to do and as you know i don't this works um if uh can i write things on here yeah you can yeah hold it up to the screen does it read the right around yeah okay so what i'm doing is my most fun thing i've ever done in my life is managing my son's band okay they're called waiting for smith where's the camera is that reed yeah waiting for smith we could see that yeah i was going to come on this this is john's other job that he's doing which is um managing a pop group uh and the pop star is his own son cause i guess this someone said how long did the td lock down last have a look at our website ronald tuck was the expert not me um and waiting for smith uh harry's doing these lovely songs at the moment hasn't he yeah he's just brought a video called long life that's getting lots of love on youtube which he shot himself and edited himself he's an extraordinary thing now people sometimes say on things like this quite wrongly they say oh john you're a genius or a comedy genius i'm so not a genius not even i'm not even close i'm just really stubborn i just won't give up i am insane i am honestly mentally deranged in my refusal to give up no matter how horrible things get harry is a genius he sits down at the piano and these songs come out of his fingers and mouth like from nowhere and he can teach himself to do anything in 20 minutes you know he's the most extraordinary guy and i'm very privileged to be able to you know what i call manage you know sort of bumble around my uh my manager name is brown ego lovely boys very talented did i mention them right yeah i just must bring up the rider question again ron ego remember the name thank you very much oh well look john it's a wonderful wonderful life um can we can we don't go away because we're gonna go to q a in a second um with all the lovely people in the audience uh out there or in the room together with us but we just wanted to go over to sandy hi sandy are you muted are you unneeded hi um hello hi everyone this is sandy burnette and we've been working with sandy for years when we used to have a bookshop uh sandy came in and said um why don't you do some courses on classical music and uh and we did and we've been working together for for i suppose about 10 years now isn't it standing yeah it's great classical music guide for the idler and stuff um and this week we're doing an offer on your tuscan music course and what do you want to tell us about today how well the classical music going this week uh i think it's quite a good time for classical music because we've got time usually i haven't got any time but this has given me time to listen and think and reflect and get a bit bored uh so classical means it needs time and it needs a bit of mental breathing space but uh victoria i remember coming and filming this course in a day one hot august day arrived at the bookshop in the morning and i kind of talked about the history of classical music all day and then it was kind of dark by the end of it maybe not quite dark but so it's goodbye i've got one snippet i mean does anybody want to hear some music uh i've got one snippet of uh the man of the moment beethoven who was born 250 years ago uh this year yeah i've heard of him um and it's interesting john i've really enjoyed hearing thoughts about uh trying to find the menial thing and how to be rebellious and certainly beethoven did both of those things so accuse you know this might seem a bit kind of mainstream but this is the beginning of his hold on of his fifth symphony and um this is a very interesting piece i'll just give you 30 seconds of it it goes you probably know it and it's incredibly interesting from the from one point of view the musical point of view because that rhythm comes again and again and again it's very intense but to the romantic thinkers they weren't just listening to the notes they thought it would symbolize something else and i'll maybe say a little bit about that later but let me press go [Music] and so on oops um so i can stop um stop sharing that now so that bar comes around a lot and it's beethoven was fantastic at drama and excitement and also compression of musical ideas but there's another way of looking at that symphony is that it's actually symbolizing our own personal difficulties and that's what the romantics in 1808 when it's premiered immediately seized upon eta hoffman said it was that radiant beam shooting through the deep knight of the region and the end of this symphony is a blaze of glory and triumph so you listen to the whole of that symphony you're moving from darkness and trouble through into light so in the 19th century music was something to help just through out your difficulties maybe john it would have helped you maybe the fifth day has helped you out of defense yeah um so it's not just nice to listen to uh which was all the previous generation wanted for music this is music that can solve the problems of the world and unlock the mysteries of the world uh so uh music the eras music seems to kind of ebb and flow between a kind of classicism where order and beauty rules and the kind of turmoil where drama comes to the forefront so over the thousand years that i cover in the course which is all spoken by the way but there's a playlist that runs alongside isn't the victorious people can switch or pause the video and then and then listen to the the excerpts and then come back again um it's it's really placing within the context of the time and showing what the meaning of music is john um are you like john yeah um do you like classical music i i like pretty much all kinds of music but like harry does um i don't listen to enough music actually i should listen to more but um and certainly i'm very fond of beethoven definitely um what did you what classical stuff did you put because you were on desert island discs weren't you um uh very recently yes and i didn't want to be pretentious i wanted to do music that i could honestly say i tapped my foot to this and i wanted to be very upbeat and cheerful because i was at the time yeah she had the birdie song and things like that not the baddies or the chicken song um but i i used to listen to a lot i like scarletti a lot i like mozart piano concerto is a great deal i also like some quite weird stuff like uh messiah the tarangalila symphonies particularly but i wasn't going to say that on jet desert unders you'd be in sued's corner directly wouldn't you you you wouldn't be a fused corner here i mean you can be more sophisticated than your tastes you know if there's something weird you'd like to mention that's fine yeah but i like uh i say i like i like baroque music very much telemann and bach and uh all those guys i like playing song you know all those you know i really like and of course the thing is once you get in the habit of thinking like a qi person nothing's boring i mean the rule of qui is everything in the universe without exception is if is interesting if looked at closely enough for long enough or from the right angle and it's true it's never let me down no that's inspiring back you are you know i mean you can um you can take an interest in how you stack the dishwasher and you know nothing's boring uh and that's that's a lovely sort of insight to having that you can find anything interesting like john before we go on to questions yeah um i was remembering that i think we've done loads of events together over the years and um a couple of them you told uh a story and if you remember this about a friend of yours who was going for a job interview can you do you remember that um yeah yeah would you like to tell us that quickly oh yeah sure um so a guy goes for a job interview and um the interviewer looks at his cv for a while he goes yes oh yeah hmm [Music] so tell me what was you say is your worst fault and the guy goes um well i i know probably my worst fault is that i'm perhaps a little bit too honest i'm a little bit too honest honest yes yes and the guys i don't think we can really call honesty a fault can we and the guy says i don't give a what you think okay let's have a quick round of applause to be on mute everyone and say thanks to john and then we'll do something if sandy can share [Music] again okay so john um could you unmute yourself as well if that that would be for it because i got a few questions here we've got a question from marnie marnie shaw would you unmute yourself are you there marnie yes hello great hi manny um john at the idler festival when you were leaving the stage you made a remark about reality and i can't remember exactly if it was something about a string of digits or ones and zeros or something like that i just wanted you to say something about that and the way that consciousness fits into it okay so um it is my view um and i just want to share a bit of socrates from you it's a great uh great line i thought i think george steiner quotes this which is socrates said that there is a difference between right opinion and knowledge is something that i would particularly assert that i know so you you can call this my opinion if you like but this i am as certain of this as i am of anything which is there isn't really anything here except consciousness that is what is what the universe is made of and is it all it is everything else is an outcrop of consciousness okay so this is this one-man show i did about this so consciousness is eternal benevolent doesn't have any views it doesn't think it just is so anyone who's ever meditated will know this you might get a flash of it when you are conscious and totally awake but you're not thinking and then it all comes back the monkey mind comes back straight away and you go oh no so and the question is how does the universe arise from consciousness which is not made of anything and is nowhere as empirically said i think he said the universe those greeks they got all right they're so clever um the axial age it's called i think mark was saying the other day online so how does consciousness which is both a point and everything it's like it doesn't have any dimension because it's not a thing okay it is a no thing in fact consciousness it is the no thing how do we get from that to this to trees and raspberries and hamsters and aeroplanes and all that and it's very simple and we we can relate to this metaphor easily now because what happens is the naught splits into two halves plus one and minus one and from that everything else results because once you've got numbers you want all you have is nots and wands and you can make anything you know you can now download a 3d printed elephant from sarawak to the isle of man no problem that's how we watch movies all the movie is is knots and wands in long strings and it's also true that any the physicists will tell you this the universe is what they call a zero energy sum it is actually it's just the universe is literally a very very long way of expressing zero mathematically that is what it is and so how does that have a bearing on this weird idea how's ever bearing on things well for a start when you die you go back into this consciousness but consciousness not not die you know that there's a thing called the law of conservation of matter in physics which states that matter cannot be either created or destroyed it can only change shape state and if that's true of matter the same is even more true of consciousness you know you you don't die when you go to sleep but you you're not conscious of it so all you all you lose when you die is your physical self and your your personality and in my case i should be grateful for that we've got so many more questions john um do carry on about that um we've got a quick one from serena soames who says have you practiced a long time to get your tie to look like that uh well i didn't knit it myself serena um no i just you know i like everybody saying it just tying it john it is perfect it's just i just literally put it on because obviously i've been hanging around unshaven in my pants for the last three weeks like everybody else okay we've got another question from uh paul i think paul you've already unmuted yourself go ahead paul okay can we go over to phil phil dante you've got a question about reading which also uh bethany asked as well so okay hi john hey i was just wondering you mentioned the seven difficult years um i don't if you can recall but was there anything that you read in the seven difficult years that particularly helped or that stood out for you in terms of helping you get through it that would that would be such a long list bill you can probably see some of the books i've got behind me prompted the question to be honest this comes from as i say 12 years working in commercials where i was insanely well paid and the one thing i was able to do was buy as many books as i could possibly carry it's a long it's a long question and that there are so many things i could recommend you should probably get are you in midlife crisis yourself you've gone mute i kind of worked in advertising flat out for 15 years 80 hours a week yeah different context but and then quit and it was the best thing i ever did in my life and i i can point to the person that helped me in terms of what i read because it was eric fromm oh yeah great yeah and when i read the art of the art of being and then the fear of freedom it just made me realize exactly what you were articulating earlier that um i was just being obedient and it was time to to not be so i i wasn't and life's been so much better ever since that's wonderful so i owe eric a big one it is it's taking responsibility isn't it for your whole life and what we all do is somebody else's fault you know your wife is insane your children are difficult your boss is a is a fascist you know that well do do something about it you know move leave good for you mate i mean the thing is you know this question goes round and round as to whether we have free will or not and that strikes me as an act of free will and i'm i you have my respect phil for that it's like when my wife gave up smoking we had to live with that for about three years but that i have uh utmost respect for someone who can do that that's free will that's being a human being and not a puppet yeah a lot of people thought i'd lost my mind of course the people who continue to be obedient so it was a challenging thing to do but it changed everything so what do you do now well i i i then consulted for a bit and sort of you know in order to just pay the mortgage but i the thing i immediately did i went to berkeley school of music in boston and then auditioned for trinity school of music in in london this is as a relatively older student you know i was in my late 30s when this all happened phil phil i'm going to actually have to pause you because we've got 10 more minutes right because but phil look up your mute what's the name of your band um phil biscay biscay so look up biscay as well when you look up um waiting for smith at the end um so yeah phil is one of our retreaters and um tuscany and um it's great stuff and he's a brilliant companion as well lovely to see you um sorry to hire you though because we've got a few questions we've got 10 more minutes um josephine adams you had another retreater hi josephine hi there thanks for that john that was um that was a really great uh honest um speech i was curious about whether a breakthrough the kind that you describe requires a breakdown or whether it's possible for younger people who don't necessarily have the kind of life experience uh can can essentially develop that level of self-awareness well i certainly my youngest who's 24 is training to be a psychotherapist and doing an m.a in that which is a marvelous thing that somebody's so young should feel then she does um she works as a volunteer for shout which is a um a suicide or you know a self-harming yeah so do i yeah okay so and of course most of the people on her course are like 15 years older than her but she's sort of imbibed i think because we talk a lot of philosophy at home because because it's what helps us get through so philosophy for me became not too difficult but literally a way of saving my life of of turning around what all the things that i thought i knew uh that were actually wrong you um i i would love to do this and i could you know the problem is you only really hear about people wanting to do it when they are in crisis and as you know an awful lot of young people particularly men you have this awful thing the quarter life crisis of people get hit with a 27 or something they can't see the point yeah of course their parents are often ashamed or the the the kid themselves doesn't want their parents to tell anyone so they go into their bedroom and get very depressed and then they go out to the pub and nobody even knows and those people are extremely at risk i'm doing a project at the moment with them with a bunch of guys from the army who suffered from ptsd and because they have the same problem they won't talk about it because it's not it's not manly enough you know and so they suffer in silence and then they're gone it's terrible absolutely terrible and of course it's what we should be doing at school all this thing that i'm wanging on about from five if i started a school and one day there might be a qi school i would start right at the top i wouldn't sort of lie to them um and pretend that you know father christmas is you know was it wasn't there or whatever you go right in the beginning you say you start with stoic philosophy i would go for because it's like clear and easy to follow and obvious in many ways once you've heard it and i'd teach them physics you know we'd have ian probit as a head of physics um talking about um space time in a way that people could possibly understand and um and of course everybody should and we talk about this all the time especially when there's a crisis why don't they tell you this at school why don't they teach you how to read a contract we don't need to know about quadratic equations unless we're going to be a mathematician but we do need to know is why my feelings get so easily hurt all the time or you know how do you keep a marriage together or uh you know a hundred thousand things like that and yes all the thing is is there really a universe here or not these things should certainly be aired you know because the big bang is poop honestly the big bang is you know serious astronomers as astrophysicists they're just hanging on to this because it's the best we've got but there are so many holes in it now that nobody really believes it and they don't tell us it's on wikipedia as if it's the gospel truth it isn't anymore and and people ought to because this is the weird thing that every child before they go to school go to school unless their family is really dysfunctional is essentially cheerful happy and curious and unless they're being abused or something and then they go to school and they're told to sit down and shut up and do what they're told they're not allowed to play they're not allowed to ask questions very much really not so much at primary school but certainly by the time you get to 13 is definitely all about discipline and silence and not about curiosity and exploration and fun crazy indeed um mark price you had a quick question are you there mark it's actually it's denise says the question ah denise hi hi hi there how are you um john i think you've answered perhaps some of the question that i had but maybe you could elaborate a little bit more i'm interested to know how your family and your friends supported you through what has obviously been a particularly difficult period for you clearly you've got a very supportive family environment around you but what were the very practical things that those people that matter to you were able to do to help you through that i particularly my daughters were persistently kind to me i've i have a lovely relationship with both my daughters which is we have absolutely no side we all love each other very much and we're all baffled i have no idea why they like me i know where i like the way i like them and i don't i think i've had with my elders i've had literally one crossword in her whole life and we both hated it so much we swore privately we only found this out 10 years later that we would never ever have another argument because it was so painful for us but no mainly it wasn't there wasn't anything and i didn't go and see anybody i'm you know from a naval background my dad was a captain in the navy and it was you know walk it off john get a grip dear your mother will deal with i'm going to the shed you know yes good to see you your name is are you katie no you're the other one aren't you yes well goodbye uh lovely off to my warship again lovely guy was my dad but not not really a much emotional connection and and i just had to work it out for myself and it was very very slow and painful and you know i i wish i'd known i wish i'd had the courage to go and see somebody who could have helped me shorten the journey but actually one of the things i do believe in life i think one of the principles is literally nothing is wasted if you can only see it that way because i am so grateful for what happened to me obviously i'm grateful for being alive and i got through it i didn't get sick or didn't kill myself but it's from that it's made me the person i am that i am not ashamed to be and i am not obviously not enlightened or anything else but i'm engaged you know i'm i'm i venture to say i'm happy i'm certainly content you have a clear conscience i i you know i think that's all you can ask for really and do you think have your family members also grown and become more self-aware as as having gone through this process with you yes and it's particularly remarked upon by people who know us that we sarah and i are different people we we have you know i mean it's been i hope she's not listening in but i mean the first 15 years was hell on wheels it was we were famous for the shouting lloyds we were late for everything we ruined everybody's weddings you know it was awful and the children had to you know be in the slipstream of that but we have we are the right people in the another thing i believe is you don't get married to the person you want you get married to the person you need if you're lucky you get the person whose chemistry locks into yours in such a way that the terrible personalities and the issues we have to get around and the problems to solve do largely get solved and that's that's an incredible you know it's a fantastic gift to have but nothing good happens without difficulty if it's not difficult it's not going to be any good so when things happen to you that are bad you should view them as a gift because they are a sign probably like phil he's in the wrong job and he had the courage and the insight to get up and leave and he's a happier man for it super thank you thank you for that thank you john that's great we've had another question from bethany i'm not going to bring her in because we've only got a minute it might follow on a bit from what phil said where where can we um what books which where would she look to read to get some of the wisdom that you have um would you can you write us a list that would hate wisdom but um it's not it's it's much simpler than that it's sort of fairly obvious i think but if you um if you remind me um i'll i'll make a list of books like the ones i gave to to my younger daughter first be amazing and we'll send it to this list that'd be amazing john thanks so much thank you very very much john um tom do you want to say something you're going to ask another question do we have time for two minutes from mark where's tom gone he's gone off and drunk his beer okay so victoria i have got sadly i've got to go waiting for smith on radio oxford right now dude fantastic okay we'll get into radio listen everyone it is really really good it's very fun so i'm going to unmute everybody and um if i can and let's have a big big clap for john thank you so much great stuff so night night everybody i'm going to we'll say good night to john will say goodbye mark are you still here did pam get a chance to send it no tom spanish i think he's got to drink his beer tom you're going to say last few words can we get a couple of them everybody here we go john um tom you you ran off to go and get another beer no my beard's run out it's empty that's disastrous yeah i know i just wondered i know we go over time but we didn't it's mark mark are you still there yeah i'm still here yeah you're welcome i just wondered if we could have a couple more words from you and i know you because we've missed out a bit um let me just conclude with john before we go sir mark um but john's fantastic and if any of you sort of missed what he's done um he was the man he made blackadder and uh qy and not like news um and he's a brilliant person it was lovely to to hear his um his wisdom and philosophy so mark and so thanks tim for coming and thank you all for coming but let's just wind up with mark what what did what reflections do you have on what john said you know from your philosophical perspective well um john he really it's really true when he says that he knows a lot it's not just because he does qi but i when i first met him for you guys actually um i i'm very interested in a philosopher called owen barfield that victoria actually just mentioned uh very briefly at the beginning who was uh deeply influential on people like c.s lewis and j.r tolkien he was a romantic and i thought you know this is something i can tell john lloyd about but of course he read him already he knew about him already um so he really has done the search he really has the request and what about his can we just close with a few words about um uh death and socrates you know because i mean what one thing that john brought up which is lovely thought is that this idea that um you know consciousness doesn't disappear after you die isn't that more or less what socrates said in fido well yeah so the normal way of putting it now is that you're either a materialist which means you you think the matter is the basic stuff or you're an idealist which means you think that consciousness is the basic stuff um and uh you know you if you're materialist you think that consciousness is a byproduct of matter you know somehow the atoms in the brain come together in complex enough ways to sort of generate consciousness or you think it's the other way around um you know a bit like we can sort of build things with our imagination um so too the whole universe is like a kind of cosmic outpouring of the consciousness the imagination of the cosmos um so it sounds like he's gone more towards the idealism side of things um but you know much like he was saying that the big bang is now passe amongst physicists and so too quite what the relationship between physics and consciousness is um is still hugely debated very very moot um so uh yeah um but it sounded to me like he was veering towards the idealism side of things which i agree with myself which it was standard you know that was the standard um until the modern world until the modern period well um mark thanks so much for coming along again um and sandy would you like to give us any concluding comments um anything we should go and listen to now uh and it's a lloydian piece of music perhaps uh did you did anybody uh see stephen fry that started the lobster saying you know you've got all this time just take time enjoying doing things you didn't have time to do before i think just listen to the music that you love already and just let it um let yourself explore it in a new way because often i mean speaking personally i'm in too much of a rush all the time so uh music demands concentration and you've got to open up your mind so uh so that's what i would say okay thanks sandy open up your mind everybody get real get pissed no i'm sorry the content of your own mind and go and meditate and all that sort of thing and obviously improve yourselves with uh austin with other people um i think we're going to conclude that i've got read some just closing the piece of really really good news because i'm not playing ukulele tonight yay i left it uh i left it behind so that's uh i do like to talk to you all with it um and thank you for being tortured but this week you will not be tortured so um everybody well i'll i'll meet you for some chaos and then um unmute you have a nice big clap and say goodbye now but i will leave you all open so you can keep chatting to your friends um if you'd like to stay but uh big uh large hooray and goodbye to all of you thanks so much for coming so lovely to see your faces so great to see you all well victorian [Laughter] bye how do you manage it trying harder than me i'll try next week very quiet very cool next week that's it see you next week see you next week bye bye bye [Music] [Music] bye bye bye sarah

Channel: Idler

Views: 1,355

Keywords: Comedy, Television, QI, Blackadder

Id: -K4gKopCcfA

Length: 60min 8sec (3608 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 17 2020