Stephen Fry - The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss

[Music] hello and welcome to the origins podcast with lawrence krauss i'm lawrence krauss sitting here at home because of the pandemic the episode is nevertheless with the incomparable stephen fry we recorded this episode before the pandemic and that's interesting in itself because several of the topics we talked about now take on a new significance 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 we talked about will take on a different significance but that's just a small the small tip of of the cosmic iceberg that is the intellect and mind of of of stephen fry it's hard to adequately describe him he's a he's a writer an actor a humorist a humanist an intellectual a historian a consummate storyteller a former criminal as it turns out and also a polymath i guess is the best way to say it he is enjoyable to talk to on almost any subject and we covered so many subjects ranging from philosophy in ancient greek to empiricism and technology and knowledge itself computers ai physics envy language and the excitement about language which he which he clearly manifests so strongly the nature of teaching disruption shame that's just a small subset of the of the things we talked about and what's great is i could listen to stephen fry talk about anything not just the exciting ideas we talked about i could listen to him read the phone book for two hours and i'd be mesmerized and the whole world is luckier for the fact that we're able to hear him in different ways as are several major authors for example jk rowling is extremely lucky that stephen fry read the entire harry potter series for audiobooks and that's another reason to listen to them even if you've read them sir arthur conan doyle while he may be dead is nevertheless very lucky that stephen read the entire opus of sherlock holmes stories for audiobooks and i know steven reads regularly for audiobooks because it's hard to imagine a voice you'd like to listen to more i will cherish this episode as i cherish my friendship with stephen and i hope you will too i think you'll find it one of the most exciting episodes we've done so with no further ado here's stephen fry [Music] well stephen thank you very much for taking time out to talk to me it's a it's a it's a it's a great pleasure to have you here you're very sweet we'll be you better decide until the end yeah well at the moment it is in any case and you know it's an origins podcast so i usually like to start with people's origins uh but but i thought i'd reverse that a little bit because you've written three autobiographies so people may know more about your your origins than than they may they need to well no no no no it's it's fascinating they're all fascinating but they may not know the the breadth of the man you are and i want i want to talk about we'll get to your origins in a sense but i want to talk about how it led to growing into the manuar which is as i would say my definition of you is the one of the loveliest wittiest most likable people i know so but in addition to that you are and have been many things a comedian an actor a film in actors in films and theater and radio and a director a quiz show host a playwright a documentarian with a variety of documentaries from from manic depression to gadgets which i which i want to get to and a writer of many things many columns for newspapers four novels three autobiographies two greek myth books and a book on appreciating poetry at least for the ones i know and an amazing reader not just a reader personally but professionally the reader of all the harry potter books and the entire sherlock holmes uh works and those are the ones i've read out loud i haven't read more books than that to myself i just thought i should point that out yes read out loud and i should also say a writer of technology columns which i also want to talk about and finally a university rector whatever whatever whatever that is that's probably the least impressive of all of all of the things but what i will do throughout this is is quote you because i love your words and and in fact i will i want to read a quote from you about your writing just so i can make it clear why i love him if a thing can be said in 10 words i may be relied upon to take 100 to say it i have to apologize for that i ought to go back and ruthlessly prune and pair and extirpate excess growth but i will not i like words strike that i love words and while i'm fond of the condensed and economical use of them in poetry and song lyrics and twitter in good journalism and advertising i love the luxuriant profusion and mad scatter of them too after all as you will already have noticed i'm the kind of person who writes things like i shall append a superscribed obelisk thus if my manner of writing is the self-indulgence that has your grinding in your teeth then i'm sorry but i'm too old a dog to be taught to bark new tunes and and as i say i just love to listen to it i love to listen to it more when you do it but but um in in your book one your first book you begin with boarding school you begin with a story about going on the train to boarding school and so i want to ask of course and you describe boarding school especially for for for americans i think who don't realize that that what a tradition that is perhaps in the uk but i'm wondering to what extent you cho why you chose to begin there and that related importantly to the man that you are now it's an interesting question we owe jk rowling an enormous debt uh because she has explained the nature of english sporting schools to the world who are now more familiar with the idea of a train that takes you to this usually uh old hall castle strange buildings cloisters and other such things with houses you know everyone's familiar with hufflepuff and gryffindor nowadays and uh that's exactly what i was having to explain to people because only slightly under seven percent of british people go to such institutions though unfortunately they have an enormous reach and influence as we can tell by looking at our political cabinet um and yes i began it i was seven years old i suppose my life didn't begin then but it's a kind of tradition when you know surveying a life and looking at a sentimental education as you might put it uh that that's when you first are thrown on your own your your let go of the apron strings of mama and there you are in this strange new world and i don't want to overstate it as being a peculiar punishment or an oddity it may be odd to other people but of course you only have to think a little to realize that uh every other boy in that school was in the same position as me and all the children i knew which is a sad reflection on the lack of diversity of my circle of acquaintance when i was small but it's you know lamentable but true all the boys i knew and girls i knew uh in growing up in norfolk in the countryside in england were from certain kind of class if you like and they tended to go away to school too the boys more than the girls that's a terrible thing but it was considered that girls could you know all they had to learn was cooking and then typing and then marrying yeah it's an awful thing but we've got over that a bit i fear i mean no no i mean um but yes that's that's it's a tradition in literature and in confessional literature and autobiographies need to start with the our hero or anti-hero uh stoutly uh negotiating his first few days in the strange world of a boarding school and uh discovering himself discovering himself i think that the sense that i get from that is it was it was a key that's where you discover yourself absolutely right um the i think it's a kind of negative thing at first you realize how inadequate you are um they're all the other boys around you they're robustuous and they're boisterous and they're strong and they seem to have all kinds of things in common and you feel an outsider later on you realize that's how everybody feels of course but you you feel especially if not cursed slightly sort of doom laden and outcast and i particularly felt this because i have no skill whatsoever when it comes to physicality i can't really throw or catch a ball certainly couldn't then um i could kindly run in a straight line and collide with a tree or a lamppost can't sing or dance uh play a musical instrument to any proficient or you know listenable to level and i can't draw paint so i really felt like what am i i'm nothing but i discovered that language was something i instinctively and always adored and venerated and was surprised to discover that others didn't they took it for granted or they merely thought it was a an exchange system it was just a way of asking someone to pass the sugar or or to shut up or you know the really really sort of basic communication device rather than something that was like paint or music an art form something that could beguile and seduce and delight and and fill fill the mind with images and pictures that weren't there before and uh enliven and kindle and delight so um that's what i buried myself in both my own production of ridiculous little compositions reading in the dormitory at night telling stories in the dormitory at night making them up so oh stephen tell a story tell us those stories you know to others as well yes there were communal dormitories you didn't share them with one person you know they were named after trees i remember there was elm and pine and beech and sycamore i think do you remember what you were in i i well you changed it you know my first term i was in sycamore i remember and then by the sort of last year and a slightly smaller more grown up one but uh yeah it uh it became as it were my th the thing that held me together was my love of language and the stories and of other languages too i fell in love with doing latin and greek well i want to talk about latin degree i was impressed uh with the statement in the book that you read well at three and then we're writing by four and of course you never learned your math tables i was going to give you a quiz but i decided not to do it it'd be embarrassing but uh so so the love of language began well even i mean very early it really did and was it internal or and it's inexplicable i mean that's to say uh there aren't any what you might call aristotelian necessary and sufficient you know uh explanations for it 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 um and i have a sister ditto but they have many talents and um my father was he died sadly this year but he was extraordinarily talented physicist and a musician uh mathematician and he could turn his hand to anything engineer and so on my mother's historian uh she read history uh here in london where we're speaking from at the moment and uh she told me stories from the very beginning and we had a very special bond to do with it i think she picked up on me a delight in the stories and poems should read to me from a very early age and i just responded to them it it seems to be something that was in my brain and in the way that music might have been for someone else i guess and so yeah i was wondering if you your mother was the one in some sense i mean it's hard to know chicken and egg whether her her reading to you was done because you responded so well or vice versa exactly right that that's why it's so hard to explain to gloss um but but it saved me uh in the end in in all kinds of ways yeah because the rest of my life was very much a turmoil well yeah i mean it saved you well well it saved you in the long run and you if one was predicting your trajectory later on in boarding school it might not have been where you are now you were expelled at least twice that i know um am i right just two yes at least twice yeah uh yes i mean the other ones were just running away or yeah we don't go you know we don't think you should come back sort of good comments yeah yes i i am along with the charm and usefulness of a linguistic facility here and there and certainly perhaps most importantly for uh academic uh studies uh terrific memory and we just always had that yeah well that's obvious when yeah yeah it's when everyone meets you incredibly good fortune and i realize that i want it's because you don't i don't work at it and and i know some people do struggle to remember things and they are very annoyed at the fact that i don't seem to and that's always been the case so with exams i could just regurgitate quite happily without really thinking and things just lodged um i say and i of course it's just a fancy uh analog analogy but it's you meet a fat person it's because they're greedy and the food stays inside them and and you meet someone who who who has a good memory and the knowledge stays inside them so i'm sort of fat epistemologically if that makes any sense um but but in terms of emotions i was i don't know how to describe it uh a passionate sensual child uh full of fear wonder love doubt um and and as i developed up into my 10 11 12 13 14 i suppose it became apparent to me that that i had a uh you know my the way i wanted to express my love was it was a forbidden one i know in other words i was aware that i was going up what we would now say gay or whatever but um and that was very hard although there's a tradition in the english private schools of all kinds of feeling about which i relished and took great pleasure in um sex is a is a a playground but love is forbidden love is taboo love is scary and i've always felt this about um homophobia certainly in the in the sort of political sphere and the religious fear that uh they don't you know they pretend to be disgusted by the physical act but that's obvious nonsense because if you know if they single out anal sex for example well we all know how many more uh heterosexual relationships are rather than homosexual and just statistically most anal sex in the world that's going on is between men and women whether one likes it or not so if that's your if that's really your objection then you have to you have to look at the uh the pornographical sites that begin with you know asian anal [ __ ] or whatever all these horrific things um so really what what they're afraid of is love and rightly because love is a it's a it's an extraordinary force in in in life although it's not usually well i mean it's not necessarily negative and that's what and that's what's so simple but it should frighten and yeah you know because it is so strong it's so powerful and you know when you're a child you look at a movie and you think oh why are they stopping for the kissing and what's with this you really you think everything it's about love it's so annoying and then suddenly you get it and you realize that everything is about love everything spins down i i was re i mean i remember reading the passages about the your first love and it to the the power of that yes there's nothing like it is there and you feel i felt aware i think because i'd read so many books i i i knew i'd grow slightly away from it i'd become synthesized i'd become a little bit uh you know just not blase exactly but that that fierce adolescent fire of that first love would never quite as the pope browning would can you ever hope to recapture that first fine careless rapture and and i and i and i hated my future self for betraying you know i i felt that adolescence is a republic and it's it's the only one that matters and that i would grow into something else and that i would i you know i just i seen you remember a a letter you wrote to yourself telling him your future self how good you were then and you i wanted to to to pin my feelings and say this is the real feeling this is it the the way i respond to nature now the way i respond to love the the the rawness of my engagement with the world is correct and that when that rawness gets sealed up by layers of sophistication and civilization and aging i will be growing away from my real self it was a furious tempest of emotion but i i stand by it yes and uh there's a passage here about adolescence that i particularly liked so i want to read it perhaps all adolescence is a dialogue between faust and christ we tremble on the brink of selling that part of ourselves that is real unique angry defiant and whole for the rewards of attainment achievement success and the golden prizes of integration and acceptance but we also in our great creating imagination rehearse the sacrifice we'll make the pain and terror we'll take from other shoulders our penetration of the lives and souls of our fellows our submission and willingness to be rejected and despised for the sake of truth and love and in the wilderness are angry rebuttals of the hypocrisy deception and compromise of a world which we see to be so false there is nothing so self-righteous nor so right as an adolescent imagination oh goodness did i write that yes yeah you did you know as i read this i keep thinking i want you to read it but but i i found that incredibly powerful i'm wondering to what extent you try to keep that adolescent uh i do i mean i'm i'm fully aware that i'm an establishment figure that i'm very lucky i'm in this country and in various other parts of the world a sort of celebrity enough at least to get everything i need tables at uh restaurants and all the rest of it and and that i have no cause for despair or for feeling rejected by the by the world and therefore any any postures or or you know arguments that i'm still angry or still you know would sound a bit tame but on the other hand i do believe that that the mind should keep one if not in the republic of adolescence than in that of bohemia whatever you want to call it in the eternal student state of questioning doubting um fearing not just others but oneself you know doubting one's own certainties constantly reinventing rethinking being unsure and and not you know not settling and not bourgeoisifying yeah that's the right phrase you know um and it sounds and it's taken by the world now to be rather a snobbish thing that you're basically saying that the life of the mind the life of the artist the life of the intellectual the academic is a superior one to those who in the words where wordsworth are getting and spending and you know living and breathing and just about on the edge of of survival because of the economy and because of everything else and they're angry and they feel let down and they think people like us are in ivory towers and that we don't connect with the real world and that it's easy for us to have these grand opinions but that we are a sneering coastal metropolitan elite whose time is over and maybe they're right but i can only i can't pretend to be anything other than i am or feel or you know go on the track that i sense to be the most productive for my own fulfillment and for the for living a life that i think is ethical and truthful um you know well that's why you can't ask for more than that sounds virtuous the worst kind which of course anything you say can be interpreted as but it's not you know i'm not a christ-like in in it it's no no no housing myself in that way i wouldn't be talking but i feel like the other thing i say in in if if it's in the same book and i think it is is that i locate myself and and most of us as it were most humans i think in that anti-hero um state which yearns on the one hand to be accepted to be part of the tribe and and with equal fervor in conscious distinction yearns to be apart from the tribe that that desire to be socialized in that desire to be a solipsistic individual standing alone and and i think that's a very strong impulse oh yeah no pair of impulses i actually wrote that down no no no because i thought it was very powerful but that it's interesting that you talk about that wanting to be sort of the state of self-doubt questioning which i know for a fact which is why in spite of your well we'll get to your apparent innate lack of ability as a mathematician and and and maybe as a physicist um it's the spirit of science and and that's one of the things i celebrate about science that i think is so important and of course in literature it should be celebrated in all intellectual endeavors is the is the questioning the self-doubt that the recognition that you that that you that not knowing in some ways is more exciting than noah absolutely and it's humility before the fact yeah and i suppose you'd say that's a definition of science and the definition of artists humility before experience before the experience absolutely you know that and they're the same thing yeah and i absolutely treasure above all the and i don't want to say nationalistic about this but the the british tradition of empirical thinking and both in philosophy and of course what it did to science the idea of of of testing of trying out of seeing of vindicate epidemiology and medicine and and and of uh experimentation in chemistry and physics sort of characters like faraday and absolutely my hero those sort of i mean just breathtaking that they did you know it goes back to again it's this sounds about having a go at the french but you know pascal having these theories of light but not thinking of picking up a piece of cardboard and putting a hole in it yes you know which an englishman would do because we're a bit we're a bit vulgar and clumsy and just thinking well let's have a let's have a look then and so newton was in that sense he had many faults of course but yeah but he was a he was yeah an experiment exactly he wasn't experimented i mean he's known for his theories but he was an experimenter in fact i have we're sitting in a philosopher's office and they always try to explain to me that i should like aristotle more than i do um and and but one of the things that always amazes me is that he said that women have a different number of teeth than 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 was that fitted so immediately and in instantly into the church sure yeah so you know i think it's known by uh historians and and historians of philosophy as aristotelian ecclesiasticism which is a bit of a mouthful but that's really what made the dark ages what they were this categorization this absolute certainty of the way things were the order of them being sort of fixed and unmoving and it took the dislodging of of humanism and early humanism and and the the the renaissance and and the age of reason to to disagree with that now i'm biased because my first learning about aristotle was through galileo in a way and so of course he was a foil in some sense exactly yeah but of course in his poetics and uh and ethics there's a lot to admire he was a and people have been learning to re-examine him and there's a there's a i can't remember her name she's written a very good book on him it's came out i should read it because i i'm constantly learning that i might well it's nice to learn that your preconceptions are wrong in many ways now you talked about your love of latin greek you love the classic it's obvious you've written two beautiful books about about uh ancient greek myths so i i i took latin in school and and then i really wish in in canada that there i always wanted to learn ancient greek but i never did but your love of classics did it begin you had a teacher rory stewart who was a literature teacher who was very who had left a big impression but you said he was really a well-known classicist he was that was started yeah i was wondering if it was before that because that was um what we call public school which is 13 years sort of age of 13 onwards whereas it was at prep school which is seven to 13. that's the traditional thing and that's where i started latin you know you just did virtually your first week it was a mass amount of you know some artisan and so on and and then i i just i thought it's like a code i just love the idea of swapping words over you know yeah and so the latin teacher there his name was mr knight he said well would you be interested in learning greek why don't you learn the alphabet and i thought that's even more like a code yeah i could send messages i teach friends and yeah just write english words in greek characters and then and then i he gave me a primer and i started to learn greek on my own and then i did did exams in it and i just wow i just loved it it was just fun i know the letters yeah you were the same with numbers yeah you did calculus three years before everybody else was differentiating when someone threw a ball up here no i well not necessarily that was okay but uh uh but but the opportunity in fact it's kind of well i'm sure you've been on this too i i don't do british schools do they still teach latin because i don't think you can get in american schools they do yes um i think you have to you and your parents have to ask for it a bit more yeah i fear but there's a new generation of classicists interesting almost all women emily wilson's brilliant new translation of the iliad and there's natalie hughes madeleine miller the novelist american novelist at the song of achilles and cersei both prizes and brilliant books so it is alive it's uh i mean i'm sure something we'll come to later but i always get a little tired of people who think that technology sweeps everything away yes i think as i tried to say with about um you know ebooks you know uh kindles and so on you know they are escalators or elevators that doesn't mean that people are going to stop building stairs just because they've invented a lift absolutely where lifts are useful you use a lift or elevator um but otherwise you use stairs you know and it just changes things it makes better yeah you know there's an analogy i i've recently written about ai and and everyone's afraid yeah but but my point is that it will change everything but it won't make it worse it'll be different and the example i can think of relates to writing which is you know plato was and his ilk were opposed worried desperately that writing would destroy storytelling but it changed the world but it certainly didn't describe sorry writing's only five thousand years old yes alphabetic writing and um and of course in 1450 everyone the church thought that about gutenberg yeah you know that they'll have to put you know they won't have to know things it'll be written down in typed books and and uh of course it actually led to the opposite to a great uh exclusion of knowledge and that's why yeah that's so i'm sort of excited much by a i always just get to say that one shouldn't be aware yeah as we're reminded all the time everything casts a shadow the brighter and shinier it is the darker and more clear the outlines of that shadow are well as a physicist in spite of the concerns and there are some many especially economic ones i think but but uh i'm interested always in whether a what what physics questions will interest a.i and one i suppose could imagine the same thing what literature would it create and it would be it would be fascinating as a foil again once again to see understand our own literature by thinking about that exactly uh so to go from the sublime to the ridiculous i was very pleased to discover that the only o level exam that you failed and you failed abysmally was physics yes i think there was a bit of a bit of parasite going on there yeah i said my father was a physicist and he was one of those people i'm sure you're much the same if i would ask a question like you know why is this guy blue he's naturally actually take a piece of paper and do an x and a y and then a sort of curve on it and say x squared minus one equals y or something and i go what on earth is that supposed to mean what it were and i remember saying about asking i said look papa father i've been reading about newton i said bodies in space interact attract each other and it's something to do with the the the the inverse of the square of the distance i said i know what each word means i know what inverse means i know what square means and then what distance means but what the hell why is square why not a cube what what he how does it break and then he would draw things and show don't forget a square is best described as looking at a square you know so i remember him going through a proof of pythagoras with me and said the square on the butt and he drew the square on on the sides and said he's a square yeah he said don't think of it as just the figure two on the top because i've got you use all these sure and he was very good at the making geometry out of it yeah so he would always you know draw and say look see and and i sometimes go yes and then other times whoa especially when the big f sign came yeah well i read that eventually even when you got the math the geometry is something you never never liked which i was surprised about well i mean i i just as as clint eastwood says to hal holbrook is it's in magnum force a man's gotta know his limitations breaks and and and i knew my limitations that it was just i could probably make the journey but it would be harder work for me and it would be tough going and i would never really be lit up by it i would just catch up and say i see it now i mean i see the wide outlines of the beauty of science and i absolutely believe in it and i believe in the adventure and the quest but the detail the actual work of it i just know i'm not made that one doesn't have to it always amazes me that in our society we we say you know you you can enjoy music if you're not bach and you can enjoy literature if you're not shakespeare but somehow science you don't see people be able to enjoy unless you can do it and and and you're an example i think and and the people i really enjoy are examples of people who do enjoy all breaths of intellectual inquiry including science and i was going to ask so you know obviously you didn't have an aptitude but i've discovered and i'm wondering if the case for you that you that that because of that um lack of maybe interest and aptitude coming back later in life did that push you more to realize that you might have missed something and want to learn more very much so and actually where we happen to be in bloomsbury in london just across the road there's a street called tottenham court road and in the in the late 70s and early 80s it was filled as it was for the next couple of decades and still to some extent is with shops sell electronics and guests and gizmos i remember and i was in one of those in just come out of university and it was around the time that the great phrase microcomputing was being used and there was the bbc acorn computer and there was the sinclair zx little home hobbies computers and there was the the commodores and the atari was around the corner too and i saw a group of kids sitting around uh in in this shop in the tottenham court road literally a cricket ball throw from where we are now playing with this bbc acorn computer and i thought as people did scared stiff if i don't catch up now with this i'll never you know you have to be computer literate so i um i saved up a bit i was just just literally stopped being a student and bought one of these and you plugged it into a television of course yeah sure had a cassette tape recorder to carry ordinal programs and taught myself basic that the language and wrote little programs none of which were of any particular use little shell sort programs and other such things so the early sorts of sure thing you would do in order to find out what it was all about and i became very interested in uh boolean mathematics in in logic suddenly i understood logic from a from a different point of view perspective because you used it yes i i'd sort of read books on logic and yeah and then symbolic got me a bit lost yeah when it when it got very mathematical but suddenly the and or if unless until it sort of hinges on which uh an action depend the the gates switching open or closed or giving you know little options and sealing off this way a little labyrinth of of of intellectual progress or of indeed quite banal but simply to get you know a dot on the screen sure to move to where you wanted to you had to break it down and and i thought this was stunningly beautiful and really interesting and and it was only much later that i discovered uh about claude shannon and yeah and the the the nature of information science and and and what it was about and i still marvel at its beauty and breathtaking uh idea that you can connect these numbers and and logic you know logic words like if and when well to the the action of electricity well do you i'm wondering as you say that was it was because of your love of language was it was it the in some ways when you learn basic was it was it that 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 is they used another word to describe you know a computer uh they called it but the fact that it was called the language made me think that and of course you then 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 sort of language opens up a world for you and and and and and these and and this language opened up a very different kind of world it did and yet it connects as well um and narco in logos is the other first sentence of the of the gospels john in the beginning was the word yes and uh the greek rightly separated logos from lexus two types of word lexus the the unit of sense uh either written or spoken as in lexicography and dyslexia and so on and logos as in ology and but as in logic and and and now we we know a little more about the brain and it's you know the way neurons and uh work and fire and so on that there are similar logic paths that have to be made in connections and alternate routes that have to be decided by something very similar to to what was worked out in order to get a digital computer built first um and meaning is sort of what it's about meaning and difference and the ability to read to you know intelligence to read into in into legere and and it's it's all connected yeah it's all deeply connected and the idea that one should be one's field of study and the other another is lovely i mean that explains a lot to me because i have to admit given the background when i learned you wrote a technology column and i thought well where what's the connection just made it for me in a real sense and and also when i think about the need for you to at least get through 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 describe your father working so hard to help you get through your math things and but what you said what i thought was fascinating you said the very act of my father's teaching inspired in me a love of the act of teaching in and of itself that's the point i don't suppose he had ever taught anyone anything before but he taught me how to teach far more than he taught me how to do maths it's true absolutely yeah and and i think that but it's interesting you're a lovely teacher but teaching is involved with learning as well and i'm wondering if that's if that's which is really what's important about school that people don't realize it's not just doing the math it's the it's the ability to be a lifelong learner yeah and and so i wonder i wanted to ask you about that that love of teaching and and um and whether it it related to then your i mean much of your life has been a public figure but an entertainer and but do you view that as teaching i i do and i realize it it is and i i think i was aware even in my 20s that i i was almost acting against the natural impulse the natural current flow that my life had led to that i should have stayed on at university and become a teacher if not there then at a school i think it's better for the world that you did well it's a nice view but the of course there are two narrative modes and there are two pedagogical modes two teaching modes and they are telling and showing essentially and obviously we privileged showing uh in in our culture in all narrative modes you know the spectacular is the way everything is done you if you can if you can show it rather than tell it then show it but actually one of the things i've discovered these greek myth books and then doing them on stage as telling rather than of showing is that this is sort of what i was built to do was to was to tell stories and whether the stories are actually shaping ideas or whether they are merely narratives i say merely because now it is obviously more than mere but uh i'm not sure it's as you know one of the most fashionable sciences and mostly in the hands of of us all uh pseudosciences is evolutionary psychology which is a very uh it's a poison chalice to some extent um but you know it's quite easy to think of of us you know as a our ancestors in in our we've we've had tool making we've harnessed fire um for you know for tens of thousands of years and then suddenly language the great cognitive leap arrived and and uh finally we could sit around and we didn't all have to be uh hunters and gatherers you know someone would go do you know what i'm gonna brighten the cave up with some pictures yeah well you know he's a better fighter than i am and she's a better forager and you know so suddenly there were people who had different gifts to give and whereas before they would have fallen by the way people like i and as you i'm sure you know the yasper's um you know the axial age idea that that um which is an amazing fact but that confucius and buddha and the old and the old testament prophets and aristotle and plato and socrates would could all have met each other there was a sudden moment where i think it's a concatenation of of benign circumstances sea levels settled so you could have harbors and ports that were the same year after year that allowed trading to stabilize and develop and enrich the cross currents of commerce and so on and um and the calories were getting cheaper for and and therefore people had more leisure exactly and with leisure came this ability to question and to and it happened that the greeks were at the absolute crossroads of this moment in in in our history and with alphabet and everything else and with the phoenician trading and so so 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 could improve them and embellish them and polish them and and a culture arrived and a culture that could be transmitted forward through language and and all these things are meant that people like me suddenly had a role whereas before i literally would have just been left in the mud going oh help i can't catch up i can't run fast enough i can't kill that oh that that stag is charging me that bull has trampled me but now we have we well you stay at home dear you're not very good at fighting and um and you tell stories and and you will or unfortunately you mostly it's warriors and priests yes yeah and these are things we fought against yeah and we i've you know i've run several meetings on early modern humans and and and it's interesting to think about the notion of language and how it how it plays out in terms of the necessity of a tribe of having some communication although i've spent a lot of time talking noam chomsky who has always said that he thought language the development of language was not to communicate yes it's it's to think yes and it's a fascinating question i've never never heard him and there's the year wilson sort of the idea that the ceiling of the social bonds and the creation of a whole kind of not not a hive mind but but but but what a human so sure sure well it's i'm going to get to the present time but i want to there's a number of other descriptions of that that one of them that i think maybe gets us to the present time but i and remarkably it has to do with your nose [Laughter] and you and you knows the cocaine no no this is the bent nose oh but i love what you said you said we keep our insignificant blemishes so we can blame them for our larger defects the problem of my bent nose comes to mind when i have regular arguments with a friend on political subjects he is firmly of the opinion the existence of the monarchy the aristocracy in the house of lords is absurd unjust and outdated it would be hard to disagree with that he believes however that in the name of liberty and social justice they should be abolished this is where we part company uh and and actually there's a long discussion that i'll probably skip but but uh i it's he said you say there will be great psychological damage done to us if we take the steps of constitutional cosmetic alteration the world would stare at us and whisper and giggle about us excitedly as people always do and then i think you say the trouble with doing a thing for cosmetic reasons is that one always ends up with a cosmetic result and the cosmetic results as we know from inspecting rich american women are ludicrous embarrassing and horrific i love that but but the truth but i thought it would give me a chance i want to jump ahead a little bit to i'm ha the notion i love this statement that the blemish we keep our blemishes so we can blame them for our larger defects and and and and your example the monarchy really i think it's there's something deep there in the sense that one of the problems that's happened in my opinion the united states and there are many lately is that we invest the power and the pomp in the same in the same person yes and it's always impressed me that you if you can separate on that that's it i agree and you may have watched the crown and you may remember the first season of the crown it began with winston churchill as 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 this grand old man you know one of the great figures of the 20th century had to bow in front of this girl and but of course he was banging in front of the idea of what a sovereign is the representative of the country now imagine if you're president trump every week had to go to a graceful colonnaded you know colonial building on the top of the hill somewhere in washington and there was an uncle sam figure who was a representative of america who was like an embodiment of the flag and the idea of the country and that trump had to bow to them and explain himself each week what he'd done why he'd done it what the current problems were uncle sam couldn't say do this because uncle sam wouldn't be elected uncle sam was just a figurehead a a symbol of of the personification of the country um i think that'd be incredibly healthy and that's what every british prime minister has to do and indeed the current uh humiliation of our of our prime minister at the moment is that he may would indeed have deceived the queen yeah in in in proroguing parliament do you don't have well technicalities of that we'll get we may tell you what this is interesting lawrence i think is because 10 years ago we were still excited about the idea in silicon valley and elsewhere of move fast and break things the disrupting culture we're going to disrupt this space we're going to disrupt that space we disrupt cars in cities and we become uber we disrupt the way people get a room and we become airbnb uh we we we disrupt you know we move fast and break things that was that that was the cliche 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 a philosopher's idea called chesterton's fence you know jk chesterton wrote about this idea that someone who didn't understand what a fence was if they saw it would probably break it then they wouldn't know about the animals breaking free they wouldn't understand the wind coming through in the top soil erosion and the huge concatenation of circumstances that can follow when you destroy something that you don't understand uh interesting and it sounds like an argument for conservativism and it kind of is in at some level because actually conservatives now aren't conservative they're no longer conservatives used to believe in institutions and and trust them unless there was a very good reason not to whereas now conservatives are the bannon kind and our british equivalents and the european equivalents break it all down break it all down it's just elites it's just you know let's uh and as thomas more says in a man for all seasons you know uh when when richie rich that john hurt character in the movie if you remember says about what tear it all down tear the laws what do you know because he's saying the law prevents us from doing this he said well the laws are wrong tear them down ah but laws are hedges richie when you tear down each hedge and who will stand in the winds that come you know and it's an it's a nature and paul scofield does it brilliantly in the film but we're beginning to feel that now i think that the the the what used to be called conservativism is now in the hands fantastic irony of people like me you know people who say well actually i rather think this institution is worth prizing or at least yes you know don't smash conservatives in both or i mean the parallels that are happening in both our countries the the the apparent conservatives are right-wing are the people who have no respect for the institutions they seem to run and that's why i thought that i found that statement about blemishes so interesting that yeah if you can if you can if you can sort of have them to worry about and and and then then the other important things are are you and again it might as well be like an epidemiologist about it well let's imagine that the purpose of government the purpose of socialized living of any kind i don't mean socialize in the sense of socialism but just living together in countries even is for as the american constitution put it with the pursuit of happiness is for us to be a a more stable contented people well there are indices that you can look at they're not always reliable but if there are enough of them are pointing in the right direction you could argue quite oh it seems the happiest countries are the benelux countries belgium and luxembourg and and the netherlands and scanda and they're all constitutional monarchies how very interesting so i mean you know it's illogical it's not you wouldn't start from there if you were planning a country yeah but somehow we've evolved into it it's it's definitely and it seems to work it's it's a you know it's a bit like people trying to reinvent theaters there's an active people say oh you know the proscenium arch is sort of somehow almost a fascistic you know we're talking let's put a thrust out into the audience and yeah it works for the odd thing but ultimately everyone's just embarrassed and doesn't know where to look there was a reason that the cross arch was invented somehow so let's go back well i'm very similar you know it's it's been for me as and well you because you span the continents as well but you know i grew up in canada and moved to the united states and the and the and the difference and with you know canada being part of what is essentially constitutional monarchy and seeing that difference was really fascinating and drawn home to me the minute i arrived and i ever i continue to to ache in some sense when i think about when i see what's happening okay let me there's one more quote a quote from you you say just as it is the love of money that is the root of all evil so it is the belief in shamefulness that is the root of all misery and and i thought i thought i think that's very important now um in the modern times and i thought i'd ask you to talk about that well um shame is the um the prime mover of the judeo-christian tradition yes so it is pewdiepie it is shame in the garden of eden the most important line was not that about have you eaten the fruit of the tree wherever i spake i should not eat but it's um why you covered your bodies up god says when he sees adam and eve and they go well we were naked and we were ashamed who told you you weren't naked where did you get this idea that you were naked and whatever arguments one has with the hebrew bible and uh and the religion that sprang from it it's a it's a very interesting myth because like all creation myths it has to deal with the fact that we as a species recognize we were animals because we sleep we breed we poo we eat like other animals and yet we know we're different so around the fire we must have said why are we different and you know the prometheus of the pandora myth from the greeks and the various other ones um came and the hebrew one was well we have this idea that we we're ashamed of us we think about ourselves we look at ourselves and we go and it's both a it's both a wonderful thing um self-consciousness it uh it can allow us to bootstrap into a whole new areas of cognition and imagination but it's also it can hold us back and one example is is shame i think um it's very difficult to apologize for the things we should apologize for but we kind of know what they are yeah but they're not for having a penis or or or for having a rectum you know for having to poo every day this is nothing to apologize for it's common to all of us yeah well all of us with y chromosomes in the case of the penis obviously but um and and the the hypocrisy the greed the the the the casual violence the the closing off and to the cries and screams of suffering around the world of animals as well as our fellow humans these are things we have to think about we have to kind of come to terms with our own you know how how far can we you can't spend your whole life on it yeah but begging for apology because someone is dying three and a half thousand miles away because it's just not practical but you try and live an ethical life at least or or feel that you're trying but to be bogged down in sex i mean and and things like that it's just insane i mean the the the martian beloved of of ethicists and philosophers who looks down on the planet he will say well i can see the species here they do all kinds of terrible things there's a abuse uh uh the trampling of the innocent there's a cause of suffering and violence and the lies and deceit and warfare and slaughter and all these things uh so i would imagine the martian would say that in language these are the things you have to be you know very careful about but they also do good things they eat food and so there's sustenance and obviously they have to get rid of it and they have an interesting way of doing that putting out their toxins and so on um and they have to copulate they have to re reproduce and the way they do so is rather interesting and beautiful is and it makes use of a remarkable pairing idea of sort of to get variation into their systems it's wonderful and then lo and behold in their language they can say oh the traffic was torture but torch is one of the things they do that's absolutely unforgivable there's never an excuse to torture it was murder oh it was so cruel but cruelty and murder are the worst things they can do but they say well [ __ ] that and everyone goes she said [ __ ] but that's one of the good things they do what's the matter with these people why you know so even i mean bizarre idea yeah that that uh we um we're ashamed of things we have no reason to be ashamed we're utterly hung up and when we care about children being exposed to but we don't care about children being exposed to the things exactly they are monsters are monstrous yeah exactly we don't there's so many things we accept and what kids can do but they can't go to a movie where there's a nipple no it's extraordinary yeah i mean it's hilarious if it weren't possibly so destructive no i know because there's a lot of rape there's a lot of sexual confusion there's a lot of unhappiness about it because the sex is incredibly important to us as human beings you know it's important it's but yeah as deep as anything exactly i mean it wasn't oscar wilde he's always misquoted as him but somebody said everything in the human world is about sex except sex which is about power which is quite a quite a good it's a delete yeah it's certainly worth thinking about i'm not sure it's entirely true but it's quite it's quite clever you've hit on the part of shame what at least one aspect of shamefulness that is is is is the root of all misery but i'm wondering whether there's another kind of shamefulness when i think about well you talked about yourself as anti-hero yeah and and to some extent in fact i wondered whether you like me are that way the older we get the less secure we are in our own abilities and less confident but there was a trend i find that fascinating because when i when i hear about your adolescence and and insecurities and then i read about them as an adult and there's some great quotes of that you have of yourself as basically not liking aspects of yourself the fact that you like to be liked by people that you live in a place because you think it gives an image of you that you you'd like to have but you're not going to join all these clubs yeah and it it reeks of of sort of in some sense the insecurities that we we have and as i say that i i find grow in me to some extent the more successful i am but there's one time in your life which i just found um inexplicable in that sense and it's the amazing time that that turned you from a lost soul to the road to success and that's when after you stole after you we went to prison for it and you came back to school you basically told someone look i'm going to i'm going to study for the a levels i'm going to go to cambridge and i'm going to pass all these and i'm going to get a i'm going to go and i found it so surprising because it seemed what and but what isn't described in that book and i wanted to ask you about was what what caused that sudden change from insecurity to incredible confidence i think it's um again i'm going to sound over obsessed but he was a remarkable man and he has died so he's been much on my mind but my father always said of me that i you know when i was passing exams and and uh doing things when i was young even though i was getting into trouble at school and uh he i remember that one of the house masters saying but he's a very very bright boy my father said well yes he has the gift of pastition reproduction but he's never thought in his life and i'm a big outrage my goodness and i and i at one point when he was in a friendly mood i said what did you mean by saying i'd never thought he said well you haven't you don't really understand what thought is do 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's the only thing that matters and thought is is is that it changes it it moves things it is a force and you merely reproduce you reflect and i i uh you know repudiated this in inside my head and um kind of felt a bit that i was under attack but i realized it was true i had a gift for parody and pastiche i could imitate anything i had no style of my owner it was while in prison when he was reading and i had nothing else to do and i was teaching this particular cellmate how to read and so on um that i just got out of the complete works of shakespeare which i don't i'd always loved shakespeare i thought i didn't really know these plays properly so i started to read them and make notes on them and i started to say no that's that's i'm just i'm just copying someone else's idea here that's what do i really think and i suddenly discovered the joy of work and and it was work i was thinking for the first time in my life and by this time i was late i've been in prodigy before in the sense that i'd done my o-level exams i'd done them all when i was 14. yes and usually that's done when you're 16. yeah that's it's only two years it's nothing really certainly he did the same he was a child i mean much more than i mean he was a child prodigy as a violinist you know elgar wrote a concerto for him to play and so he stopped when he was about 17 and said i have to learn how to play the violin now i i just picked it up i knew at a child level and sort of amazed people because my skill but i never really have broken it down and to try and understand and i certainly not comparing myself to him anyway but for the first time i realized that there was a pleasure in not just uh the labor which i did enjoy the actual toil the actual realizing i've sat down and focused and concentrated for a long period of time but also in the transformative challenge of of realizing i don't understand this i'm gonna have to work through it i'm gonna have to pick it apart i'm not just gonna say i know how to do this but i'm gonna you know and i think that was the difference oh okay well then yeah it's fascinating it's fascinating to me to hear that and and and because it was so important and and uh and so obviously later on but that makes sense to me okay well then one of my favorite questions to say on there is is um because the ethic of work which is something people talk about a lot is important to me or at least so natural to me that i you know if i get two days off i i just go mad i have to do something and i know the feeling there's no coward quotation which i like which is work is more fun than fun [Laughter] and uh i do rather cleveland i agree well i think yes i mean i always say i like him because i never separated work from for me and and i think that's the luxury that i have and and and i often say people don't think people do science to save the world i mean i decide because i enjoy it and i think and and put it the pleasure of finding things exactly and it's just so fortunate to be able to do something and so if i'm able to work i find it more relaxing than than than the other things i have to do in life it's and uh but at the same time there's work and there's work there's one more quote before there's three or four things of specifics of things that you're talking about now that i want to get to but there's another wonderful quote that you have that well there's millions but it is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous to wine love art beauty without them life is safe but not worth bothering with and um yes it's a kind of paradise isn't it the the useless things are the only things that are useful actually yeah yeah and that's that explains why oscar wilde said all art is is quite useless he it sounds like he's the you know the arch east how could he say that and but that's the point um yeah wine love you know all these little extras um they are the only things really that seem to make life worth living everything else is existence well you know again i try and translate the connection between art and science but i've often said that i'm really quite proud i care i'm very political as an individual but i'm really quite proud that nothing i've ever done in my work has any practical significance whatsoever and i and and i find that because of that separation it because it's just for the beauty of finding things out and and you know and people say well you never know if it down the road it will have some practical way but i'm pretty certain that everything i've ever worked on will never happen you can't be that sorry i had a friend at cambridge who uh there's a great tradition in mathematics that came into character of course who uh isaac newton and so instead of getting a first class degree in in mathematics they have this peculiar system where you're a wrangler or what's called an optima and and the senior wrangler is the person with the with the most uh the biggest results and i my yeah i happen to know the guy who was senior wrangler and i i said wow congratulations is amazing i mean even bertram russell wasn't senior wrangler you know and uh he said oh yes it is i suppose if you know things you know them and you know if you can do them you can do them and i said what are you gonna do for research he said i'm not gonna bore you with it it's just ridiculous i said well vaguely tell me so what is to do with long numbers i just have this interest in really long numbers i said well and i crossed there whatever idiot says why can't you just add one and he said yeah anyway i saw him about ten years later just in the street i said oh hi russ what are you doing are you still uh are you still are you mathematician he said well i am but i'm sort of for hire i said what do you mean he said well you know that subject i did which was completely obstruction of no use to anybody long episode it turns out to be incredibly useful in cryptography cryptocurrency large numbers multi-billion to their primary exactly from pure number theory now speaking of potentially useless things um but not obviously the fascination with greek myths it may seem like a weird segue but but uh which i i i find fascinating too i mean for me um one of the things that i found found so fascinating not just with greek myths and roman reigns but also in greek and roman history which i used to read a lot is it is this the fact that the more things change the more they stay the same the fact that these incredibly different societies when you read the personal lives of people and what concerns them how amazingly familiar it seems and and one of the things i guess one of the reasons i guess i like the greek gods so much more than the judeo-christian one is is that they're so much more understandable and i mean if you're going to invent a god you might as well invent one that i mean you the greeks looked at the world and they saw the world was was majestic and beautiful i mean stunningly perfect and remarkable but it was also deeply violent and cruel and unjust and capricious and therefore whoever made it must be those things too a mixture of yeah and it's that mixture it's the idea of the the complexity and the ambiguity of character that the greeks who seem to be the first at least the first to be able because of the alphabet and so on the first to be able to transmit it to us to have this sense of the complexity of things but i'm the greek creation method you probably know prometheus made us um and he was a titan and as you said they're wonderful and uh but you and you can play with them and you can teach them what you like but you must give them fire that's the one thing you mustn't do and prometheus in the end couldn't help it we were defenseless compared to other animals we didn't have you know echolocation or claws or stings or you know things like other animals have we were poor naked forked little creatures so he went up to and then person stole fire from heaven and gave it to us now you can say that that was one way the greeks saying literally how do we have fire the the physical stuff the the rolling plasma that melts and smelts and and and roasts and toasts but it's also the divine fire self-consciousness the the the and zeus was right in the sense to say man mustn't have it because if we had it we would then eventually outgrow the gods we wouldn't need them we'd match them and we'd be free of them as the greeks were as humans are we we've you know it was well before nature that we could say you know the gods are dead that their fire is out we've got it now but what's so fascinating and how could the greeks have known this you wonder is all those thousands of years ago that we can be sure by the end of this century there will be sapient sentient creatures that we as prometheuses have made and some people like zeus will say we cannot give them fire we we're already talking about that yeah you know if we make these robotic uh by mixtures of bio-augmentation and robotics and ai and all the rest of it if we make them we can't give them that spark we can't give them self-consciousness and the ability to you know inspect themselves and to want to live in the way that you know self-consciousness gives you because if we do they won't need us yes and we will be overcome and of course we're not the first to notice the promethean myth being that important um by the end of the 18th century when you know the the enlightenment had really taken hold it it was as if we were saying ah yes the greeks understood that the champion was prometheus that the gods are our enemies the gods didn't want us to be completely fulfilled self-thinking creatures and prometheus set us free by giving us the fire and within about three months of each other beethoven had written a prometheus overture and shelley had written prometheus unbound because prometheus gets punished of course some questions about his dialogue with his use uh um and more importantly really shelly's wife mary shelley had written frankenstein subtitled a modern prometheus about creating a a life so we've understood that the the deep relevant the the chime the resonance of greek myth inside our own feelings and of course someone like douglas adams would say this has happened all many many times before that the gods had been made by previous gods who had given them fire and that was their mistake and so on and so on and so on and for all we know that that that will continue that we make a race of robots who get rid of us because we're unnecessary now and they will then create another life form which will go we don't need you and so on maybe that's part of the well why do refinement i like to think the only difference is that they'll have a that they'll be in that society there'll be a debate between evolution and intelligent design and they'll be right about intelligent design whereas exactly it'll be the first time that has become the fact exactly it's a wonderful thought isn't it yeah well speaking of uh not wonderful thoughts i couldn't have asked you to i'm glad you stressed prometheus i was going to go into orano so i learned something remarkable about from you but but prometheus leads me to a i'm not sure a wonderful segue but nevertheless a very current one boris johnson just described brexit in terms of prometheus did you know this i missed that what did he say oh he said that oh it's it's a wonderful quote just two days ago that that the that the whole process of of of of getting brexit is like eating the liver forever and it was a oh i see this yes and so i thought i'd ask a woman to produce it yes prometheus was punished by zeus before the impertinence of stealing fire and he was chained shackled to the caucasus mountains and every day an eagle came to tear open his side and eat his liver in front of him but titans being immortal the liver would regrow and the torture would would be renewed every day and i guess that's what so it's that also interesting isn't it because they chose the liver and it's did the greeks know that the liver is the only one of the organs that actually does regenerate yeah that's interesting yeah but um uh yeah that's a cheek on the part of him i was hoping you could put him down for it but maybe not oh well i mean yeah he's just uh doing what he always does he's just giving a bit of classical knowledge but it's not the context is all wrong because um is he prometheus in this is that i was trying to politically i was trying but that was my assumption that somehow he was relating himself to prometheus he was going to give you the fire by removing from us from from europe but i i assume there was that incredible conceit but yeah but he doesn't say that it was really more the torture it was just going on for it's going forever and uh well prometheus is liberated by heracles or hercules as the romans called him so he's freed they're two that you know it's interesting they're two there are two people who are taught in one way or another well there may be more the two that i know of that are torture for eternity for me this is one but the other of course which always is related to me maybe because of camus but but uh yeah yes and and says for so i do like to think sisters were smiling but it'd be nice it'd be nice it was a great trickster he was a magnificent he cheated death several times yes as you say punished for pushing that stone up the hill and it's the pushing though that's the point where she said the work yeah it's the work it's the work that's the joy it's not it's it's the searching it's not the getting there right at least even information we've created him once but the demands reach should exceed his grasp or what's to heaven for exactly you know what that i i couldn't ask you that's the next thing i was gonna i would i have here you are here's that quote from you right here there it is yeah from france but then you said and i was about to talk about poetry and that very quote you say robert browning's cry brings us back at last to poetry and and and you wrote a marvelous book about about learning about how about poetry and how to understand and appreciate which i i have to say uh i need to digest more um i've always there are many things about myself as a heathen that i that i recognize part i like to blame some of it in my upbringing but but that i've never appreciated poetry as much as i should or opera um and um but you you write it at the early on in this book for me the private act of writing poetry is song writing confessional diary keeping speculation problem solving storytelling therapy anger management craftsmanship relaxation concentration and spiritual adventure all in one inexpensive package i just love that i love that um so but what made me when i read that the interesting thing i was wondering was is it i know you you say you write poetry but is it would you prefer more writing it or reading it oh reading it because there are so many poets much better than i am to to to enjoy uh and the writing of it is a pleasure and i i catch up with i go for weeks and weeks months and months without writing anybody then i'll suddenly just write some things and that's very much a private pleasure but the the point of the book is called the old less travel yeah but it is the it was also my delight in form yes um and it's a strange thing but when it comes to painting and music for example no one questions that you should be taught um in music you know what a chord is what what you know what what a we say in england a minimum or a crotchet 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 that you you learn and it's part of the initiation into music um it shouldn't be too frightening if it's all done by a terrible school teacher who who makes you feel guilty about the rudiments of classical music then it can be a bit off-putting 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 sort of sound and you can just flatten this note with it and then you're going wow and then he says they call that you know and you go oh i i see why is that oh right and then and no one questions it but if you say to someone this is a villanelle and this is a sonnet they go oh girl we're in the school room here but yeah and it it it's a strange thing but because partly people think poetry is just you put your feelings down on paper and i'm not saying that that i don't love blank verse and a lot of tears eliot and so on it's free verse in as much as it's not formal it it doesn't have the same line lengths it doesn't express itself in according to a metrical scheme um and there's but you can't talk about it whereas you can say to someone this is a uh um this is our tavarima this is a form that has these lines it ends in a couplet and the cup that has two more syllables than the other lines and here's an example of it from byron for example or this is tetsurima this is dante you know this is a different form this is rhyme royal you know this is uh this is a sestina which is a very complex form and and though i think they're thrilling it's a bit like going back to the codes it's oh this is a they don't restrict it as robert frost said he was a great american but a formal person now in that he wrote within forms rather than three of us he said i can't write without it it'd be like to me like playing tennis without a net you know and and and words were very about it too you know that this scanty plot of ground which he called the sonnets thing but you can grow better you know if you say to 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 courtyard with lines on it you could instantly you'd make up a game and you'd play according to rules and it would have a structure and it would have drama and form and dialect dialectic and you know meaning and i think we're all a bit afraid of that we think form as i say so it's the okay it's a form so that's what attracts you most about truth to this well it's why i wrote the book because you can't write a book about free first yes yes i mean it then becomes a book about appreciating whitman or appreciating elliot or or just about it it's funny because those are i tried to think of the poets just to show i'm not a 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 of there's a really complex uh form called the villanelle and and and that's what uh one of his most famous poems do not go gentle into this night is a villanelle and if you look at the way the lines repeat it's a very intricate and clever pattern extraordinary pattern um but you shouldn't be aware of it any more than you have to know when listening to the moonlight what a sonata is it's it's uh it's up to the composer to follow the form and the form for some reason lights things in your brain and makes an emotional journey all the richer than a lack of form seems to not always and i'm not okay you know the book wasn't a an attack on free verse it was merely that i think we don't treasure enough the beauty of form well i wa that i want to learn i want to go into it more i wanted to sit with you sometime for two hours because i i i once had a fancy position at harvard and and um it was mostly involved fancy dinners and and and uh is something called the society of fellows and and um and um early on uh there were senior fellows i was a junior fellow and and uh with interesting name but um and and there were a number of physicists there were there were intellectuals and then there were physicists over there and and because it was from all fields and and it was one of the senior fellows was one of the world's experts on poetry and um i you know i was drinking and and and i wanted to have a little fun and uh early on i i said to her um i said the my problem with poetry is if people have something to say why don't they just write it down and and she never for three years which is how long i was there never never spoke to me again but she obviously thought you were a terrible philosopher well i was wondering but i you know and that's sort of my point it's a compression it's an idea it's um uh he's talking of harvard i think he was harvard jane uh the the the origin of consciousness and the breakdown of the bicameral mind yes 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 metaphor that for the first time two different frames of reference two different fields due to magisterium human experience could be fused so that you could um you could talk about um a ship plowing through the sea and and not go but plows are the earth yeah how can that happen what why is a plow because suddenly it brings a an image to your head that enhances and and that this gets stronger and stronger these fusing of different different fields of of reference and um poetry does that extraordinarily and i mean here's an example of 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 making instantly yes but um in the early greek myths there were the titans that most would have heard of them and that they were like like the gods six female and six male the original titans and one of the original females was called nemosine which is spelled m-n-e-m-o-s-y-n-e which is the greek word for memory uh you can remember nemosany by thinking of the i think of the mnemonic mnemonic because but um zeus of course had zeus had his way with nemo and and she bought him nine daughters and those nine daughters we call the muses and they stand as patrons to the different arts clio for history and callipe for epic poetry and uterpei and terpsicare and polyhymnia 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 then you suddenly think oh the collective unconscious of the greeks and expressing this myth is it saying the arts are the daughters of memory and suddenly that's a poetic phrase out of myth out of the the collective unconscious as young called it you know this idea that the myth to some extent explain they have an ideological function to to some extent sure and um and here the arts are the daughters of memory that's a it's not easy to pass yeah it's it's but it and it's not necessarily a complete truth about the arts but a lot of what the arts are is a reassembling a reimagining of of experience and thought and emotion and so on and and and it's an actual truth now they've they've you know to reverse engineer it they've said okay we've got these things called arts where did they come from we'll make these i don't know how yeah we don't know the mystery of it but it's that's when joseph campbell who's not someone they necessarily have a great deal of truck with or certainly you know you know i mean the mythographer yeah um he he did have a good phrase for this which is public dreams and the poems are to that extent public dreams they they can collide images and thoughts in ways that that rational and you know ordinary writing and communication don't do they can express things logically and in complex ways and you know with all kinds of nested subclauses and you know riders and so on but poetry forms a collision this is a great story of keats when he was young he was um he was called the cockney by those who disa you know who disliked him because he was in other words he came from a rather poor background compared to lord byron than others although byron loved keys um and he was studying to be an apoc apothecary a pharmacist as we'd say now and but there was a person in islington where he was growing up who who taught him poetry on the side because he could see he was a talented boy he really was very young and he's you know he died incredibly young and there was one moment where um he was teaching him some milton and keith suddenly almost burst into tears it was just a three-word phrase what might be technical the kenning in which was the sea shouldering leviathan leviathan is just a fancy word for a whale um and he saw that phrase sea shouldering and he said in that instant i saw the streams of water coming off the whale i heard the sound of it breaking the water and i realized but whales don't have shoulders and yet the work those words were doing just those words see shouldering leviathan the whole image was born in my head and i knew what poetry was and and i think that's worth that epiphany that tells you a lot about how poetry works you surprised me you talk about form as your first example of why of a folks because i because of your love of language the the very joke i made at harvard i thought it had a deeper purpose which is that i thought maybe you liked poetry because the cleverness is hidden within in some sense it require because you're not just writing it down you have to be more creative in utilizing language to hide and coax out the reality but yeah well i mean it's an art form it's an art form and the pub it's always it's never what you think um it's the senses that make not it's what comes in not what goes out uh and so you know like if you can't draw you look at an artist you think what is it with their hands yeah but it's not their hands it's their eyes the hands can do it if you can write you're drawing yeah you know you are reproducing symbols in in a way that is recognizable to people that's drawing but it's if you talk to any artist it's how you look there's a great story cezanne sitting having a meal somewhere in the south of france with someone and the friend said do you think paul that you look at tomato like the tomato in your dish in a different way to the way that other people look at the tomato and cezanne looked at the tomato and then he started laughing he said oh it's funny he said i can i can look at it just as a tomato on my plate and then i can look at it as a painter and i really i 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 just thought that's brilliant and and a musician too it's about it's about listening it's about hearing it so you know that's why the story of mozart being able to reproduce allegri's misery when he was you know noted because he could hear um and and uh and and with language you see you can go to a shop and buy acrylic paints oil paints you can buy turpentine and linseed and disable and brushes and hogs hair brushes and there's equipment yeah and canvases and so on and with music there's obviously violins and trumpets and guitars and so on and there's a language for it but the only language of language is language and it's the same language i'm using to you now it's the same language people use to order up a pizza it's this it's the the the how as elliot put it to purify the dialect of the tribe to to to make a paint out of the words that are used commonly and routinely by everyone the the that that's what a poet does and when it works ordinary words because they should they can't you specialize if they just suddenly yeah yeah inventing them or using you know real sort of 30 words and then just because yeah and but when they can make new images burst in your mind or new truths available or you see something for the first time in the in the same way that you look at the turner and say now i see what this the sun the sun and the sea together can do he's made me look at it in a new way and the poet can make you look at love or a sunset in the new way as well because they found ordinary words but they put them together and they've beautified they've rarified the language they have as eddie put it purified the language of the tribe out of this stony rubbish as he puts it you make something great that's the unity of art and sciences the purpose is to force us to see ourselves and our place in the cosmos in a new way that's really what for me that's in some ways the that's what makes science worth it just like art and music and literature it's not it's not the tools it's not the technology it's not the computers it's not the the elementary building blocks of matter and the elementary building blocks of language can can combine in ways such as every linguist knows and most people logically know that this sentence i'm giving to you now has never been spoken before ever uh lawrence it hasn't yet yes and yet it's simple words and it's the same with the 88 notes of on the piano keyboard you know that that you could sit there and instantly out of those just 88 you know the power of numbers uh you can make a sound within seconds that has never before penetrated the air of humankind and similarly the universe can play tricks with most elemental building blocks to make complexities such as the human brain on the one hand or a banana and it's so remarkable it's such an uh orgasmic experience for anyone to realize that these complex phenomenas understood you suddenly see it in a new way and it that's right we're hardwired to get pleasure from because we do the same thing we make our universes of language out of the atoms of of of of a discrete unit of language like a or a or the letter on the page we can build a poem or a hamlet or or or um the protocols of the elders of zion it it's it's morally there's no moral valency yeah it can be wicked it can be it can be you know or it can be the same as the same for the tools of science and you know it's uh and actually stephen pinker gives a good example he says you know people people claim science physicists made the atomic bomb but they don't they don't hate architects although they had to make the uh auschwitz precisely yeah absolutely right yeah indeed and you don't uh hate uh linguists or or speakers because they're capable of doing the uh nuremberg rally or uh well for i wanna go i wanna now move from the peaks from the peaks of human intellectual activity down to the depths yes i want to start we want to talk about science humanism and ultimately religion and which which we have both have very similar views about um there's a there's a wonderful line in in uh the x-files which is not my favorite tv show but nevertheless which is which is what fox mulder says we want to believe yes we want to believe we all want to believe things we're hardwired to believe in things and that um that is not itself necessarily bad i think you there's a great indirect description of religion you said old people don't know you so all people sort of ten people become often become more religious as they get older he said old people don't know that in the world today there's no one there they don't know that the bible is a customer service announcement and that purgatory is where saint peter puts you on hold and sends you into a self-contained menu-driven loop of tone-button-operated eternity to the sound of vivaldi's spring that was actually hydrophobic is it funny to remember that you actually wrote these things well you know there is of course an impulse whenever we don't understand uh a force in the earliest days it would be the moon and the sun and we would give it an agency and the name we give such agencies is the god yes so there was a moon god in the sun god and there was a god of pushing leaves out of branches of trees who who any force any motion that we don't understand and then of course force and motion and the understanding of force of motion is your business and is the business that galileo and and and newton were famous for literally the moving of things sure the prima mobile that the prime mover is the key to it it's realizing the emotion you hit it you seem to be a great physics student because most no really because one of the things when i talk about introductory physics is the difference between galileo and aristotle is aristotle's opposition was important yeah galileo realized it was motion and that's the simple realization 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 you're not prepared to do the hard thinking that science involves or or you choose to disbelieve science for some weird reason you give that agency to to to a deity yes i prefer well i think these days a single day unfortunately but it was more fun when it was it was much more fun or more and they're much nicer when there's a lot of them exactly i agree with you but it's more than that i think it's well maybe i'm more pejorative that you you it's where you stop working it's when you say i don't want to think about this anymore so i'll just it's god yeah i mean i i i i'm more hesitant than you i think or our mutual departed friend christopher hitchens i cut more slack to the individually pious and devout individuals in the world i have no wish to offend them or to try to make he did either no i don't think he did particularly you know and i i always think of floatbed you know this is treconde the three stories of flow but there's one called the cursed sampler the simple heart and it's this this woman felicity she's called which i think is an ironic title happiness she's a she's a hard-working maid um and she sits in front of a a stained glass window and looks at it and flow bear phobias contempt for the cardinals and the prefecture of cardinals and the and the panoply and hierarchy of the church that keeps her on her knees is profound but his love and sympathy for her on her knees being awed by the color and the excitement and the possibility of what religion offers is is deep and and i understand that you know i i think i don't want to shake people and say don't you stare at that stained glass don't sing those hymns how dare you it's not my business i have to speak as i find when it comes to the truth behind it which is important but the wonder the sense of wonder is celebrating and i guess the i guess my point about religion is that there are many positive things yes we both agree but the question is can you achieve those positive things without without the negative and richard feynman did wonderful remember talking about the flower when they're having an argument with an artist saying i find the flower more beautiful than you do you just you know you sort of find it beautiful then you go into all its stamens and it's atoms and these and richard feynman said well don't you see like you i get the beauty of the flowers as as the colors and the aesthetic shape but i also get the beauty of the symmetry inside its cells i get the symmetry of its jeans i get i get the the beauty of its transport systems and it's it's it's you know it's chemical reactions it's factory the whole thing i get more more exactly in fact you see i have feynman written here it's so annoying it's amazing we're on the same place absolutely well but interestingly enough i also had finement in in the sense of usage something independently that was almost exactly the same thing i mean finally talk about the flower rainbow right he said a rainbow isn't less beautiful because i understand how it works right and you said rationalizing a sunset doesn't make it any less beautiful you said it in the hip hop hippopotamus oh that's right yes and and which is a wonderful one i liked i liked the book and i liked the movie yeah um uh because it was a wonderful way of addressing this fact that we want to believe yeah and how can you gently show people that they're really misinterpreting the world that there's actually a different explanation which may be more illuminating more useful in the long run as it was in this case to learn about the nature of the of the two two young men absolutely and to learn the reality that's the point it's not that it's not a beautiful way of seeing the world but what ultimately leads you to useful actions versus yeah irrational actions and that's my problem at greater depth of engagement in in the world around you and what we really have an objection to of course are the other the power wielders of it is is the the priestly caste that decides it has knowledge that is special that has revealed knowledge that is cannot be questioned that is that is a truth that doesn't need to be proven and um that will set you free and that without it you are in some way damned and and the people who are most likely to be controlled by that are the most vulnerable are the poorest others with the least education and who are denied any sense of it of education or an option of looking into the true depth and wonder of the world because it seems religion wants to count its souls and and and there we know what the dangers yeah oh that there's those dangers but there are so and those are the obvious ones i guess but there are other more subtle ones and i think that that in some sense and again i have this debate with with chomsky at one point he said to me early on i don't care what people think it's what they do the problem is there's an intimate relationship between what people think and what they do and that's that's the problem of religion it seems to me is not that i mean i find not that it's silly and it it's that accepting that suddenly is causes people to do irrational and sometimes evil actions so there's that part but then going to hitchens there's a quote which i thought was from hitchens but like many things it wasn't i suppose but um where where i heard him say you know we're we're we're created sick and commanded to be well i've learned since then it was a 16th century quote from another from the name phuket gavil maybe you know the pronunciation he said you were created but commanded to be sound i learned that it came from that so but i first learned it from from from christopher this once more we have to be ashamed of ourselves this sense of shame yeah which is so ingrained in religion is in my mind one of the well especially in the in the in in judeo-christian religion but that that is one of the more insidious and and evil aspects of it yes so we have to square the circle of that that we we accept the preposterous nature or at least we we we at least agree on that the original sin idea the the the thought that we're supposed to believe that we are guilty we should be ashamed but on the other hand we also have spoken of without using his name yet clato the idea that there is a perfection out there that we have not attained that we cannot attain and that browning quotation about the demands we should exceed his grasp of what's a heaven for pushing forward of knowing that we are imperfect by definition perfection isn't that which cannot be achieved but that there are paradigms of perfection there's a there is a thing called truth and there is a thing called a shining moral ethical life that we gesture towards but we haven't got it we are imperfect but the imperfection is not uh a stain on us from birth it's merely that we're given a a a sense of the ineffable and yeah and the inexpressible in ourselves a pattern of something beyond which is the what plato imagined that there is this yes um and it's a notional thing he's not the plato believed that there was this sort of parallel universe in which everything was perfect but that if you have it in your head then i like the idea that i should be better than i am yes you know it's because rejecting original sin is not the same as saying when we can just accept exactly who we are because we're perfect we're born fine and i don't have to struggle to express myself to fulfill myself more than you know we know that we fail we know that we do fall short of some standard that may be acculturated but may also be programmed maybe hardwired and like most of those questions i might my terrible joke is you know we're used to the idea that the the nature nurture debate sure but we forget that there's also the question of human will so i say it's nature nurture and nature but you know but i think awfulness that is there is a truth in there that that not that i would go along with nature superman and all the rest of it but the the will to power or anything but but that most philosophers don't believe there is such a thing as free will but that doesn't mean there isn't will um we can't will ourselves to have will as chopin has said yeah and we certainly don't you know we don't will ourselves to be uh um you know the way we're born is not something we can will and then where we're born or any of those questions but whether or not 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 yeah no way well yeah it's as well it's a model your clients you know even in a world without without free will we still have to take responsibility for responsibility exactly i think that's the key point because we it it appears to be a world where it's funny because one of my favorite quotes i was with well as you were but i was with christopher a little while before he died and i was re and i was sitting in his kitchen and and i was reading the new york times and there was a wonderful article about how students at yale they were working hard there were religious groups to try and stop students at yale from from losing their religion and they said faced with um faced with beer pong hitchens and nietzsche it's impossible and yeah he did i said how much more can you have achieved your life to be sandwiched between beer pong and nietzsche it was it's there's nothing better [Laughter] yeah it was wonderful and but but nevertheless i i would be remiss i i i one of to me i i assume will go down in one of the most important quotes you've given is when people ask you what you come say face to face with god and i have to read it because it's so important because well it relates to the greek myths too but you you said you'd say oh i should let you read it but anyway bone cancer at children what about that how dare you how dare you create a world where there's such misery that's not our fault it's utterly utterly evil why should i respect a capricious mean-minded stupid god who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain and um yes i mean this was a surprise question i got from an interview i was giving in in ireland actually he just said well suppose you're wrong stephen in the end and you know you die and then you wake up and there's god what would you say to him and so i thought well you know i mean even if you accept these for your free will ideas and that it's up to us and that god is you know wound the clock on humanity and his for some bizarre reason decided to to watch his little creations jig about and judge them according to the way they behave which is outrageous anyway even you accept that that doesn't explain people children dying in earthquakes which is plate tectonics which you can't even put down to global warming i mean that's just the way he made the planet yes and and uh but that's an old thing the argument from evil issues as you know theodicy is i believe the grand name for that form of the theological argument and it's a very difficult one to answer if you maintain that there is a single god who is benevolent yes um because it just doesn't stand up and it's it's it's that hypocrisy you see that's what i i mean what's interests me is because comparing it to the greek gods the the wonderful thing about the greek gods was people expected the gods because they were vain and lustful and and jealous and the christian god is exactly the same but we have to accuse him because or her because he they're represented as being exactly the opposite of what they actually are and so we've spent that time on our knees apologizing for our faults but ignoring his or hers yeah exactly it's it's a shame because you know i have to say i love sacred music i loved talis and bird and bach and handel i love i love arc sacred architecture i love the the english hymnal i love the the liturgy of the anglican church there's so much i've been in the same way that i love greek myths it doesn't mean i believe in them yeah but i believe that that ritual and ceremony are very important parts of being human absolutely and i think they express in in a visual dramatic metaphorical form much of what it is to be alive and like a kind of theater theater of ideas and emotions and instincts and impulses and that's a very important thing for us to do it's it's a natural way of expressing humans and that's why religion i think is so ubiquitous yeah and again when i talk about how can we achieve the goal the the the things that religion provides without religion my saying is that we should have sunday morning quantum mechanics classes myself and without the eschatology without the idea that as the greeks one of the great things about the greeks is that they knew anybody who said definitively what happens to a human being after they're dead is either a fool or a liar because there has never been one who's come back to tell the story and there is no place to visit yeah you know and the original idea is that sort of vents and flumes that were showing a bit of lava might have been the gateway to hell we now know just a gateway to a very hot very hot part of the world have you ever been i've was recently in in in vanuatu when i looked down into a volcano it's an it's never been it's unbelievable have you had that exercise i did i helicoptered over uh hawaii i did a documentary which i went to all the states yesterday reunion and we ended in hawaii watching new bits of america being born as the lava spewed into the sea a new rock was formed it was a great way to end yes well before i end on religion i had to ask you i'm you must be very proud there aren't many of us i i want to know if it's still there the defamation act that you were accused of blaspheming yes i mean it's a wonderful i i actually someone gave me a doctorate in blast for me a college some in college gave me that one and which i was having on my wall but you actually have been accused of it is it's which you might assume is a badge of honor in some way well actually it was very irish uh and that sounds like it's almost a racist thing to say to describe something is very irish but uh it was a um ireland's been reinventing itself in terms of the power of the church over divorce and abortion and gay rights and all the rest of it and they've had a series of plebiscites and referendums and uh and they still have this rather old blasphemy law so when in ireland as i was i i spoke out against god and just said what a monster he wasn't absurd stupid evil unnecessary cruel and so on um it was actually an irish barrister who suggested that i might be guilty of blasphemy because he knew it would be a fantastic [ __ ] show to have me in a court yes because technically i had infringed the law and it would make the law look the ass that it is and it was his way of saying come on ireland we've got to get rid of this in the modern world it's absurd so it wasn't he he wasn't genuinely offended did it lead to getting rid of it it actually did or at least whether i don't know where the mind of but he drew attention to it and islands to say he's been busy in cleaning the orgy and stables of its of its uh uh and so that i think is one of the things that was being made up friends steve weinberg would say you were doing god's work [Laughter] okay well there's two more there's two more things i want to talk about quickly one is speaking as we're traveling down the road from intellectual heights there's political correctness and group think mentality which you've been which you've uh which you've attacked happily um and the notion that um it's to some extent shame once again comes in here uh um i was talking ian mckeown recently about his he received a prize and went to israel and so and and was investigated and and i know of course you've spoken out against israel's treatment of palestinians but you know but i'm jewish and i see the i see the right for israel to exist as a state and i have family live in tel aviv and if i want to visit him i'll bloody well visit him i might not be told not exactly okay so let's talk a little bit about this curse of the combination of of political correctness and virtue signaling that you cannot say certain things now uh which which is the opposite of the of of of the enlightenment in some sense yeah i mean i'm temperamentally a liberal but a hand-wringing liberal a milk a milk toast liberal an unsure um worried carpet slipper big cardigan you know em forstery sort of a liberal um i'm not a hardline lefty um i have a sympathy with a lot of social justice uh imperatives and and quests and so on but but i just want the left to be smarter than it is i i wanted to be aware of how it's alienating you know well-meaning good people are just outraged and upset and frightened by the the redaction of human lives you know a person being cast into outer darkness without trial without due process uh for you know all kinds of reasons and for the language being used to carelessly yes uh yeah languages can be a a ticking bomb you can occasionally obviously if you start talking about people as cockroaches and so on we're all aware of how you know racist language can can can be a vicious precursor to racist behavior into blood on the streets but but it is just language you know i 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 it was very open-minded i draw the line that ben shapiro yeah but but but jordan peterson i thought well that's the point is you know there are things i disagree with this man on but i do agree with him on the fact that and from from my point of view it's because i actually lament the failure of the left i think yes the rise of bannonism and the the alt-right and its equivalence across europe is more a catastrophic failure of the left than a particular triumph of the right it's also bolsters right at least in the united states if you read who is protecting free speech right now who's speaking out in favor of speaking it's the right and that's it's not as it should be it's not as it should be we should be less sensitive and i don't want to use the word snowflake because it's banded about but you know less and most importantly we should think about being of how it's more important to be effective than to be right right in the sense of righteous and self-righteous and all those things it just just be effect you know if you want the world to be a better place think about how how to deliver that yeah and it's not by alienating people in the middle people who are as lost and as frightened by their hard right and the alt-right and the hard left and the old left if you want to call it that that that for heaven's sake that it's just so dumb it's dumb to be lost in a world where if you start heteronormative patriarchy then i'm sorry [ __ ] off you know it's not english and it's it's it comes from a judith butler world of you know i mean all respect and good work and all the rest of it and this is not to say that we push back feminism as irrelevant that's not what i'm saying at all i'm saying is choose a better language to normalize it if you want to use a normal word rather than normativise it and you know it just otherwise you are losing allies you are losing political ground you are not achieving what it is you want to achieve all you are is being right it's hugging yourself yeah exactly right well good luck to you but you're you're losing something even more you're losing the fact that we need to question that that's how society moves forward what that we need to question ourselves yeah and be all willing to openly question those things we accept as absolutely normal yeah and i i do believe in in in inspecting the nature of gender and the fluidity of it i do believe in you know that the the the transgender and intersex people have been given an incredibly hard time mutilated in the case of intersex people without their will and there's a lot of important social uh um work and understanding to be done and and uh in the same way that's happened in my lifetime my own you know my gay life has meant that i've suddenly ended up as it were being able to be married to the man i love you and it's an incredible breakthrough and there are many more breakthroughs to be made but actually in this country when ian mckellen and stonewall which is the the the sort of activist group working in politics he worked quietly behind the scenes persuading politicians he didn't stand in the barricades getting angry and red-faced and alienating ordinary people he he he saw conservative politicians and he was a conservative politician in the former david cameron who pushed through in the in the face of veterinary opposition from his own hard right uh he pushed through the the equal marriage act and that's the way you get things done it may not be just it may not be quick enough but it's how things get done yeah you know it's a bit like engineering it's the the third fourth fifth kind of version that is the one that you can release to the public that's actually going to work but there are a lot of a lot of betas and a lot of you know false starts and that's true in social uh progress as well well and we have to yeah and if the left sort of doesn't realize well it doesn't realize that i i always when i find myself agreeing with donald trump i got worried and and you know when i read donald trump say well we were not going to give a federal funds to universities unless they allow free speech and that just seems reasonable to me actually and then i say oh my goodness if i if that sounds reasonable there's some fundamental problem with and as an academic it's really unfortunate to see how people are reigning in what they're called the scientists that he will also appreciate that um that newspapers and politicians will choose uh events and rhetoric from particular campuses to to suggest a far more systemic problem than actually exist actually if you go to the average university there is a lot of free speech and there's a lot of give and take well you know better now that what they've got no life on the campuses but there's also truth behind it that needs to be addressed well they're one of your favorite i want you to remember i always screwed up as a quote about giving offense which i want to get to but let me preface that by saying one of the to me one of the most ironic examples of what may have been happening academia it was a university where a speaker was coming in to speak on free speech and the women's group created safe zones so that so that uh uh there so that people wouldn't be uh wouldn't be traumatized by 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 you beautifully and i don't know if you remember exactly what but i remember hearing you first say that being offended doesn't give you any special rights and you know i think i think you said something like maybe i'm pretty sure you said something like oh i offended you big [ __ ] deal that's right it is i mean there's there's a tradition in language i love sir humphrey wasp in a rather not obscure but but one not one of the better known plays of ben johnson bartholomew affair when he he goes around his expression if he's annoyed with someone is a turd in your teeth sir and i want to say a turd in your teeth to these people just as when i was a boy my mother would occasionally take me to the assembly rooms in norwich which was like stepping back into a jane austen world and i used to picture myself standing on the table pulling down my trousers and pointing my bottom at these incredibly refined ladies with their tea because they just looked as if they needed you know to be slightly shocked out of their kind of everything is so nice and proper and and that's now the position that i feel in the case of some of these sensitive trigger-sensitive people uh in universities who say i don't want to see the macbeth because it's got a murder of children in it or there's a rape in this play i want to say turd in your teeth um you know well i you know it's like um you know parents who who over protect their children from from from from from viruses and and bacteria you know they're going to get oversensitive and you know they should be sucking gravel when they're two they should be playing exactly and that's the part of the problem if there's a book over in the united states called coddling of the american people yes johnson hates jonathan very good and i think the point that he makes which is so interesting is that is that in some sense the feeling of people that they have to be protected universities from anything that's going to hurt them comes from this overly protective parenting that's happened that didn't when you tried to run around but very interesting time when suddenly it all changed in terms of the a natural age at which children be allowed out to play on with their bicycles with their peers exactly and now don't cross the street don't do this don't that because you might get hurt you might scrape yourself you might the world is a dangerous place and you have to be protected from the dangers instead of the fact the world is a dangerous place but but learning to live with them is part of what it means the joy of growing up and being human it's really part of it i exactly and i was sent away at seven to a prep school where i was back bullied interfered with believe me but it did mean that i was i mean i'm a sensitive person i don't like being you know attacked or anything but but i i i was not i was not frightened by uh the emotional violence of the world yeah i was horrified but because it's a bad thing but i it i didn't i didn't get triggered into some sort of you know fetal position of whimpering um and i don't know i don't want to sound cruel and an an un feeling because it is a problem that young people if they are afraid of encountering things or they or if by the time they go to university it's the first time they've left home and you know they can't cope with it then that's a pity well it is but i think part of what university is supposed to be about besides the i mean the academics that part of it is is making that transition from the safety to home to the to the because ultimately it's supposed to prepare you for the real world in many ways in principle to prepare for the real world in becoming a lifelong learner we've seen we've all seen the toddler that falls over and then looks to the adult to see what the adult's expression is and if the adult just is not interested they might actually not cry but if the adult goes like that then they'll go away then they know they'll and we've all seen that we want to balance sensitivity with the desire i mean a little bit of tough love and combination for those of us who've been parents it's a it's a it's a huge challenge to know when to not be sensitive and when to treat uh my wife is much better than tub love and i'm my myself anyway yeah it's really now going back to i want to end it away because you went back to the to the your childhood experience but i went in with a personal thing which i was debating whether to talk to you but you've brought talked about it publicly is is your own issues of suicide and and and and um and i i want to talk about in a positive way if i can not not set suicide in a positive way but the notion of the challenge the personal challenges we have because what i said about you at the beginning of this is true in terms of uh just you're a lovely man but and and as someone that i just you just melt when i'm with you but but another person i'm like that way is is is someone i've had a dialogue with johnny depp who's a friend of mine and we had a dialogue on creativity and madness because he he talks about the demons in his head a lot and they but at the same time they've helped him become the person he is and so i wanted to ask you about whether that whether you feel in any way that that that the two double-sided points is there w h you know didn't take away my demons or my angels will fly away yeah and it's very hard for us to know to have to presume to know how much we depend on these these these struggles within ourselves for for any kind of uh you know achievement or self-definition and we that without them we would be blended out into something i mean it's certainly true that when you face mental health problems and and recognize them for the first time a lot of us have them as we now know and we don't certainly in the past maybe i hope that's changed we're unlikely to recognize them you know teenage is a difficult time anyway everyone knows it is you could be stormy and difficult and uh hard to manage and then there's university and there's your early early adulthood and you're introduced to alcohol and drugs and things and those have an effect on you that very often you haven't noticed why you responded well to them if if your moods are likely to drag you down or or to push you up into sort of mad frenzies then you you do reach out to to chemicals that that will control it in some way not necessarily consciously you just think oh god kind of a drink yeah we feel better kind of thing and then maybe you'll be lucky enough to think uh someone will tell you you're drinking too much or you really want to take all this cocaine are you sure and uh and you'll think okay i'll stop and then and then what's left behind is the problem that they were masking in the first place and and then you go through the business of realizing that you have a a condition you have a you have a mood disorder in my case a bipolar disorder and um and that your chemistry or whatever it is is is uh out of whack a bit or can can cycle in in ways that uh can be profoundly difficult to cope with and the depression can lead to to lead to suicidal ideation as they like to call it in the trade are you thinking about killing yourself uh which is obviously dangerous but and it has led in the past two people self-medicating with our common drugs in order to suppress it but also the mania the hyper mania as it's called of of of the upstate which used to be the manic as in manic professors um that's harder for your friends and family to deal with because you become totally you know you don't sleep you're full of ridiculous plans you know all of that you know um and you've got to find a way to manage it ideally without drugs and alcohol because you know that they only exacerbate it which they do it just is certainly in my case they do um they just make it worse that the alcohol becomes more and more depressing um and you get crosser and angrier when drunk and so so that's just a bad thing not nice to be around and it's just yuck and and so i went through you know the adventure of finding out different cocktails of pharmaceutic official pharmaceutical drugs rather than street drugs and recreational drugs and and then i have since i've been lucky enough to control it really with with not drinking much just a bit of social drinking here and there but i've never been that in love with drink to to become an alcoholic fortunately i gave up coke happily with a mattering particularly and indeed smoking and but i've taken up walking i walk eight miles every every morning and and that seems to have an effect on my mood oh yeah you know i'm i'm not gonna be so the endorphins that they they really do yeah yeah and i know you know i'm not going to claim that it's going to work for everyone because we're all different and well examples of how different we are as we all know people that we can sit round the table and drink the same number of glasses of wine and one person will become a monster and other person will be all sentimental another person will fall asleep and someone else won't turn a hair and that's that's the relatively simple uh chemical ingredient you know the esters and aldehydes of alcohol whereas whereas the complex uh drugs that uh that are given by by pharmaceutical companies they can obviously have different effects on different people so it's not for me to say lithium will work for you or or this you know ssri will work for you but when the complex drugs that are going through us and our own function we are we are a much more complex pharmacist yeah the endocrines and yeah yeah yeah and they affect people differently and in that sense i want i wanted to end this with because we actually you said it two different ways and i found it during this conversation now real may not realize we talk about shame and we talked about the fact that we we we know what we can become and and and so the reaction one can have to it there are two quotes there's one that not from you but it was since i was speaking to you in recently in his book about machines like me which is about it yes we know what we are we know we're deficient because we know what we should be yes and so again it's somewhat the shame aspect but in some sense that for me and and i imagine in to some extent in multiplication for you in the depressive stages is that's the source of my of 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 and enough and depression but at the same time if you think of it a different way if you're in it and maybe if the chemicals in your brain are working differently you have that quote of yours that we actually said ah but a man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's heaven for and so it seems to me the dichotomy between those are both different aspects of exactly the same thing you can either be depression depressed about the fact you are not what you can be or you can use it as a motivation to try and be a little more like what you can be exactly i i i remember once 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 yeah but and i remember saying to it as it was just there yeah yeah i've seen them i've been in the amazons and i said i don't know much about your life tree frog but i can be fairly certain that last night you didn't go to bed thinking i was a terrible freak free truck yesterday i i was awful i was mean to those tree frogs and i i promised that one something that i didn't deliver and oh i'm just so ashamed of myself you just as a tree frog you spend 24 hours of every day and and and and 60 minutes of every hour being a tree frog you're not becoming a tree frog you always are one that is your privilege your glory as an animal but i am different i don't know why i'm different and i don't know that i can actually prove it but i abs i intuit and i sense it strongly enough to call it knowledge that i do go to bed thinking i was a bad stephen yesterday about human yesterday i failed on this and why did i say that oh god what was i thinking of and shouldn't i have bothered to write that and i didn't write that thank you letter and i didn't you know there can be small little social things or there can be vast ethical quandaries and that's what that's what genesis tried to explain it's what the prometheus is trying to explain where do we get this thing that but it it's our curse but it's also our blessing and and i think that's what we square as being being humans being the species we are and how it got there whether you follow the evolutionary psychology path of the where we bonded and it's all to do with our uh evolution and whether it was a a strange piece of firing in that in a mutation that just developed not for you know not for for the benevolent reason evolution but it doesn't matter we can just think of it and and praise that if you like it praise that and the fact that that it's our it's our curse and our blessing at the same time it's what makes being human being human and trying to understand that through art yeah or through science yeah it's the same the same exploration the same search yeah and i just have to say that you know it's of all the people i know your grasp is about as far as anyone 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 so very much it's been wonderful thank you guys that was fun [Music] the origins podcast is produced by lawrence krauss 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 bonus content visit us at patreon.com origins podcast

Channel: The Origins Podcast

Views: 301,035

Rating: 4.8709474 out of 5

Keywords: The Origins Podcast, Lawrence Krauss, The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss, The Origins Project, Science, Podcast, Culture, Physicist, Video Podcast, Physics, Stephen Fry, Effective, Relgion, Gay, Far Right, Alt Right, Political Correctness

Id: O0SNKCRV5Wg

Length: 125min 29sec (7529 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 05 2020