The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Douglas Murray: From Poetry to Free Speech

Episode Date: May 27, 2023

I have to say that Douglas Murray reminds me in several ways of my late friend Christopher Hitchens. It is not merely that they are both English, eloquent and well-read. Douglas doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and pulls no punches when necessary. But he is otherwise charming, thoughtful, and willing to enter into respectful intelligent conversations on many topics. Both Douglas and Christopher have been journalists covering dangerous parts of the world, which has helped shape some of their views. Douglas is more conservative, Christopher was in some ways more liberal, but their deep reserve of knowledge combining literature and current events makes listening to either one of them compelling. I first got to know Douglas through his marvelous book, The Madness of Crowds, a take-off on Charles Murray’s 1841 classic Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which was “A distillation of some of the most humiliating, terrifying, and confusing things humans have done in collectivity”… treating things like alchemy, haunted houses, and the crusades. Douglas’ book discusses modern craziness, cutting with surgeon-like skill to the heart of issues related to gender, race, identity politics, and of course free speech. The Madness of Crowds was followed more recently by The War on The West, which took up where the former book left off, dealing with issues ranging from postmodern attacks on the western Canon, attacks on modern science, and more recent ‘Critical Race Theory’ related attacks on modern western society. I discussed all of these issues with Douglas, but was very pleased to be able to bookend the dialogue, front and back, with a discussion of poetry. He writes a weekly column for Free Press on the virtue and joy of committing great poems to memory, and while I have a limited appreciation and tolerance for poetry in general, there are a few poets, T.S. Eliot, and Rainer Maria Rilke in particular, who I greatly enjoy. It was a pleasure to listen to Douglas recite some favorite lines, and to discuss these sublime subjects with him before and after we dropped down into the muck that comprises the modern culture wars. I hope you enjoy this discussion as much as I did. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krauss. And this week's episode is with the charming and eloquent and delightful writer-journalist, Douglas Murray. I fell in love with Douglas's writing from his books, the first book I read, The Madness of Crowds, and then War on the West more recently. And the writing in there touched topics that are near and near to both of us. And then I got to know him personally and found him even more delightful than his writing. And then discovered a different facet of Douglas Murray. Recently, he writes a segment each week for free press on poetry,

on poetry that he is committed to memory and the importance of that and discusses some of the greatest poets around. And I loved listening to them and of course share his interest in at least a few of the poets. And I asked him actually to bookend this episode. We began this episode and ended it with poetry, which is why I call this episode from poetry to free speech. We began with the sublime poetry and then moved to the ridiculousness of the modern world, the attacks on free speech, free speech, rationality, classical liberalism, as you call it.

And Douglas and I come from different ends of the political spectrum, but we share a concern about the attacks on literally the Enlightenment. And we talked about all the things you probably shouldn't talk about when you go home for Thanksgiving, from gender to race to identity, feminism, postmodernism, and many other isms, and the events that are going on in the world that have us both concerned about not just free speech,

but democracy in general. So I hope you will be as enthralled listening to this, as I was talking to Douglas Murray. And you can watch it, add free, if you subscribe to our Critical Mass Substack site. And those subscription fees go to support the Origins Project Foundation, the nonprofit foundation that produces this podcast and other activities that are where we try and bring science and culture together.

Or you can watch it for free on YouTube or listen to it on any podcast listening site, of how you watch it or listen to it. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did, and I hope you're, you'll be as enthralled and captivated by Douglas Murray as I continue to be. With no further ado, Douglas, thank you so much for coming on. I've wanted to have you on for so long. And all that's happened since I first planned to get you on is I've been reading more and more of your stuff and enjoying it more and more. So we'll go longer and longer. Well, thank you.

It's a great. I'm so glad you can finally make this work. Yeah, me too. Me too. It's great. And actually, this reminds me of the, probably you don't remember the TV show Green Acres, which was a show about a guy from New York who moved to a small town. But it's like you're in New York and I'm in here in the middle of nowhere.

It's perfect. But I want to begin actually with your voice. And before we totally change gears. So I'm going to play this, which I hope will be audible in this video. So we'll try it. My prime of youth is but a frost of cares. It is but a dish of pain. My crop of corn is but a field of tears.

And all my good is but vain hope of gain. The day is fled. And yet I saw no sun. And now I live. And now my life is done. The spring is part. and yet it hath not sprung. The fruit is dead and yet the leaves be green. My youth is gone, and yet I am but young. I saw the world, and yet I was not seen. My thread is cut,

and yet it is not spun. And now I live, and now my life is done. I sought my death and found it in my womb. I looked for life and saw it was a shade. I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb. And now I die. And now I am that made. The glass is full. And now my glass is run. And now I live. And now my life is done. There we go. Well, that was beautiful. And there's two things. I'll say about that. First of all, it comes from a column you write for free press every week called Things Worth Remembering about poetry worth remembering. So first I was going to put you on the spot and have you recited for memory, but I thought better not because I had a recording of you saying it. And I'd also thought of reading it, but when I listen to your reading it, it reminds me of having talked to my friend Stephen Frye,

who I would rather hear read the phone book than hear me do any. anything. But it was just beautiful. And I assume that it is committed to memory. One of the things that this column is about is not just the beauty of poetry and what it and the impact it has on you, but, but the reason to memorize it, which is interesting because I have such, I have, I'm terrible at memorizing poetry. I, I, I, um, I, um, I know my friend Richard Dawkins loves to, loves to recite poetry when we're together. And it's, and it's lovely. It's, it's, it's not. It's, it's not. only enjoy to listen to, but it makes one seem so refined as well. You know, and I remember when I was a kid, you know, I had to recite, learn poetry. I remember performing Macbeth, in fact, when I was about 12, but boy, it is lovely to have that. And this comes from Tick-Born's Lament, which was, which was a, well, why don't you introduce a little bit? Yes, it was, I think the fifth week of Collins, this. This is a wonderful idea of Barry

wise. She came to me some time ago and she was setting up the free press and she said, I'd like you to do a column for me. And I said, well, I do sort of three or four columns every week. And I mean, I'm fortunate in that the world keeps on giving me a lot of material. But I said, I'm not quite sure I've got another one in me. And she said, no, no, no, I want you to do about something about something totally different. And it was actually her idea. She said, I've heard you over the dinner table, as it were, sometimes in your cups, you know, reciting things, you seem to pluck out of nowhere. And I know you've got a lot of poetry in your head, a lot of quotations, a lot of prose as well by heart. And maybe you would write each week about why there's something you have in your

head and why you have it there. And I thought that was just such a brilliant idea. I don't think I'd have come up with it myself. It really is lovely. It's a great editor's insight that. And I've been doing it. just loved it because, first of all, of course, is a great change of pace, which, as you know, I mean, sometimes, you know, the old line about a change being as good as a rest is absolutely true, particularly for writing. But yes, really, it's about something which I learned when I was, or at least learned is the wrong word. I intuited when I was quite young that it was worth having a lot of stuff up here, if you could, if you could lodge it there. And, and, you, you know, And as I actually said in the first column in this series, which is about Pastanac in Shakespeare.

I learned actually from the great polymath George Steiner, who died some years ago, a great Cambridge intellectual of the 20th century. And I once heard him lecture when I was a schoolboy, and it just made a huge impression on me. And he said, relating a story I related about Pashtanak and the writer's conference in Moscow in 1937, I remember Steiner saying, what do you have up here, the bastards can't take? Yeah, yeah. They can take most of us. Maybe they'll try to take all of us,

but they can't take everything. They can't take the language. They can't take the poetry. What we have in our heads, they can't actually take. And for some reason, I always found that very moving idea that we need things in our heads that travel around with us as we live.

And the funny thing is, of course, is the era we live in. I was writing about this recently, different column. The era we live in has this oddity, doesn't it? I mean, you mentioned, Lawrence, that when you were a boy, you were taught things by road. That's one very good way to put people off poetry, of course. Well, actually, I enjoy the experience, but I didn't maintain it. Some people do. I mean, some time ago, I was speaking at a conference of teachers, and I mentioned something about the importance of learning things by heart. And this teacher said, I was taught T.S.

Eliot by heart when I was a boy, and I've hated him ever since. And I said, well, you know, might be your fault, not T.S. Eliot's. But anyway, but the point, but I do understand it. Some people sort of get put off for life. And also they think, well, I don't want this. But my point is, find the things that you would want to furnish your memory with. Find the ones that you could do with. And you'll find that they crop up in your life at strange times often, but that you'll need this stuff. And we used to. We used to. call it a well-furnished brain. I'm not saying mine's by any means the best furnished, not by a very long way, but I have a sort of attic-like brain. And personally, it's been an

enormous solace and inspiration to me in my life. There'd be many times I relayed in the second column in this series about TSA. Yeah, I was going to say T.S. Eliot and Terry, Terry Waite. Yes, yes. I mean, that was another one. made an impression of me with Terry Waite, who was a hostage in Lebanon for many years, where he also had speaking when I was younger, saying that, you know, after being chained to a, you know, a radiator in a Beirut cell and dungeon for years, he wasn't entirely alone because he had what was in his head, and he had in his head, among other things, the four quartets of T.S. Eliot.

One of my favorite poems. Well, in fact, I think I wrote you after that to tell you. And we'll get to T.S. Eliot, but far later, because T.S. Eliot is one of my favorite poets. I don't have many favorite poets. I should say that I'm a Philistine in many ways, or at least provocative. But, but, and I once got in trouble when I was at a position at Harvard, something called the Society of Fellows,

and one of the senior fellows was one of the world's experts on poetry and Shakespeare. And I said to provoke her one day, I said, if poets have something to say, why don't they just write it down? and she never talked to me for three years after that. But my problem with poetry when I was, you know, it is true that English and for English classes turn people off reading and writing almost more than anything else in school. And, you know, I've always loved reading and writing. But it turned me off poetry for a long time because what I hated was the incessant interpretation, the incessant need to try and go into the writer's head and decide what they were talking about.

I like the sound of poetry and I like thinking about it myself and what and how it resonates with me. But I've never liked trying to get inside the head of an author in terms of trying to understand what they're more. And so that incessant need to analyze poetry instead of just enjoying it. I agree. No, at some point it's like it's it's it's it's like um being shown how a piano works. Yeah. Rather than just listening to someone play it, you know. Yeah. For me that's okay. That's so I don't mind. that so much it's like that's like Feynman once saying that knowing how a rainbow works is not doesn't make it less exciting it makes them more exciting and I

do I think that but but but but trying to constantly look for hidden meanings and what the intent of the author was uh is something I you know I you know it may have been beyond me well I mean I could do it but I never trusted it no it's a very common mistake in teaching the piano analogy then you know you give it really, it only works if you say, if you did that to someone who've never heard a piano being played. Yeah, exactly. And so a lot of teaching of literature, for instance, is, you know, I remember once I had a very bad teacher teaching King Lear, and, you know, it did the first line.

What can we learn from this line? And, you know, like this. And I remember thinking, I just want to know how the play goes, you know, because I'm fairly sure it's exactly. Exactly. That's probably why I fell in love with Shakespeare, who, of course, the poet, because I was in some class when I was age 11 and we performed and had to memorize Macbeth and I turned out to be Macbeth mostly because I was the only boy who was willing to wear tights.

But but and it was just life-changing experience in so many ways and it was just a joy because in performing it, you have to think about it obviously. But but the poet, the thing that I, the reason I started with this, which is your first all, it's a lovely poem and it's your most recent one, your most recent column, but it does share in spirit what you talked about from Steiner and from weight, which is the fact that the Gittankans did fry, our thoughts are free, that what's in our heads is always ours. And it brings to mind.

And so this was written before this young man who was waiting execution the next morning and was executed. And there's a long tradition of that. And it brought to mind to me, Two things that I, it's not all such great writing has been poetry. The two things that resonated with me that were very similar were, I guess, when I first learned about both theists' famous work, the consolation of philosophy, who was, wrote a whole book about the consolation of philosophy,

awaiting for a year to be executed in a horrific way. And that really had an impact on me that, that even in the worst of times, philosophy ideas are yours and you can get great consolation and as well as as in in writing the poetry or as in the case of Terry Waite, the beauty of listening to or remembering a T.S. Eliot and there's another one. I'm a much more American case because I we were we were working on a movie about Thomas Payne and the age of reason which is his famous book of course was written when he was imprisoned in France during the French Revolution, again, awaiting execution and almost executed, except for a small accident and the

death of rose pier. But both of those things, in my own time, not just poetry, but the realization that writing and thinking take you through even the worst of times have had a tremendous impact on me personally. I don't know if they have for you as a writer, a fellow writer. I think so. And I think but it's also worth pointing out that it signals something that's extraordinarily unique to us as human beings, this urge. I mean, what species would think of writing a three-stance of poem on the scaffold? Yeah, exactly. Something, there's something that tells you something extraordinarily deep

about what we are as human beings. that that impulse would even be there. Because among other things, I mean, you know, I'm a great fan of J.H. Hardy's mathematician's apology. Yeah. You know, Hardy says there that he says, immortality is perhaps a foolish word, but if it belongs to anyone,

it probably belongs to the mathematician. And he makes the rather beautiful observation that he says, the calculuses of Archimedes will survive, the plays of Euripides. not because they speak of the truth, but because they are true. And this, of course, is a great warning shot to poets from a mathematician. But nevertheless, whether or not Hardy is correct, it is that impulse, even till the end,

to say, I will leave something. I will communicate, I will try to communicate beyond this, that is a human instinct which is, thank God, is ineradicable from us. Yeah, I think, I think so. And it comes out in different people in different ways. You know, obviously, I think you and I's writers hope our writing in some ways will live us. But I'm happy to have a hat as a scientist and recognize and like to think that, you know, winds change. and we'll talk about that and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and it's just a very it's it's a very satisfying thing for me to think that the contributions made to science will be there

independent of writing or other things look the Barry's uh brilliance in having you do this and now for something complete different column was not like lost on me. And I wanted to, I wanted to begin with poetry. And I promise we're going to end with poetry eight or ten hours from now. But, or how are, but, but, but, but because we are going to dive into the, from the heights of the human intellect and the human experience, we're going to dive down to the lowest parts. And we're going to go from the sublime to the ridiculous and, and, which have you written a lot about. And so do why. As you say, there's lots of fodder for columns all the time because of it. And, and, and, you know, I, I first, I first got to know of you because of

your writing about commentary about things that were ridiculous. And I want to get there. And, I mean, and I want to focus eventually on two, on your two last beautiful books, both of which, you know, there are books I read and where I, and I used to do this with my friend, my late friend, Christopher Hitchens, where I'd read it. Almost every page, I go, yes, yes. And, and, and, and that's great because by the way, both in the case with him and in you, although I think even in more of a case with you, our politics are in many ways quite different. And it's wonderful that we can have that convergence. And also, I'm convinced we could have a, as we will, hopefully a little later in the podcast, have discussion of things we disagree with in a way which is fine, which

is good and should be, it should happen more often. Christopher was one of the people who could get along, even though he was viewed as a bulldog, could get along better than anyone I ever knew with people who had a completely different worldview from him. And I was very, that had a big impact on me trying to think about how I think of that. I remember that he, I mean, of course, he, as you well know, at the lunch in particular, the dinner table, he liked Dr. Johnson talked for victory. But, yeah, I was impressed by the fact that he would, he once, one of my other great mentors growing up with Roger Scruton, the conservative philosophy, having Christopher, who was, of course,

the left is mainly. And Roger was two of my sort of great encourages, always caused a slight sort of dichotomy sometimes early on in my thinking. But I remember once telling Christopher that I'd just come from staying with Roger Scruton at his then farm in Virginia. I remember, and the only time I'd ever seen Christopher say anything mean about Roger in print, it was very mean. And Christopher immediately said, oh, where is it? are they living? And I said, well, they're in Virginia. And he said, I must drop them a line, look them up. Yeah, exactly. I remember when he told, well, he was going to have a, before he died, he was planning yet another one of those dinners that would be filmed. And I was very happy and

honored that he wanted me to be in. And one of the people would have been Justice Scalia, about with whom I disagree tremendously. And so does he. But that would have been a very, and it would have been four people who had very different worldviews. And I wish, one of the many, I miss him for many reasons, but, but I would have loved to have had that event at that dinner. Well, look, I want to get to the madness of crowds and the war in the West, which are the two focus on issues I want to talk about before returning to poetry. But this is, in fact, this is probably a unique podcast among all the ones that I'm because I always begin with origins. In this case, I began with poetry because it was such a nice way of starting and listening to you. But I do want to begin with your origins because I'm fascinated in what gets people to where they are.

are before we talk about where you are now. And, you know, I've done a little bit of research. And your mother was an English teacher, your father, a civil servant, right? Is that correct? Now, who had a bigger impact? So you decide to study English. Was it the example of your mother? Or did you, was there a great encouragement when you're young to do reading and, and who among your parents had that kind of impact on you? Perhaps neither of them. Maybe it was just self-induced. They were both very encouraging, enormously encouraging. I actually, music was my first love. And it was through music, actually, that I got interested in literature, strangely, not the other way around.

When I discovered the texts that various composers and others were setting, and whereas I love the texts, I would read the other work. So it was a strange way in, perhaps, but it was also one way of, things being memorable as if they're also accompanied by music. But yes, music was really my first love. And it was through that that I discovered all sorts of new worlds. And I was a scholarship boy, meaning that I sort of worked my way up through the schoolings of the UK to see the full gamut, you might say, horror of education.

Yeah, I want to get to your educational experience, which I've heard something you describe in rather interesting ways. So. But, but yes. And then really I had that thing which I'm pretty sure you and almost everyone watching has had at some point, which is at least one, if not, in my case, more just transformative teachers who showed you, you know, the way to think rather than what to think. Yeah. And it imbued me with the same intellectual curiosities that they had. And as I say, I mean, it's almost a sort of cliché to cite it, but it's a cliche because it's true. Yeah, it's true. Teachers.

A transformative teacher is absolutely irreplaceable. And I cannot think of my life and how I've achieved or whatever I have achieved without that simple thing of certain people saying very memorable. things at specific and important times. Yeah, it's, you know, I've had that experience, but it's interesting, as I've talked to people, I've discovered a lot of people, have some at least two or three people, I know really of quite great accomplishment in different years, said, nope, teachers had no impact on their lives. They got in the way and it shocked me. But, you know, it's nice to know that nothing's universal in that sense.

But yeah, great teachers. And it might, yeah, well, for me, interestingly enough, there were a few good science teachers, but mostly it was history in English for teachers that had that big impact for me, even though I... You can really, you can put somebody off for subject, very... Yeah, yeah. If you're a bad teacher. A lot easier to do bad than good in the world in general, I think. Absolutely.

But, yes, I mean, it's interesting to consider what the things are that we think of as being the signs of a good teacher. And I would say they're among other things showing, having the humility to show, the student that you don't know everything either. Oh, yeah. That when I saw that, I was knocked over. That's the most exciting thing. And I mean, I've written my new book, in England is the known unknowns. But it's, I say it the very first line, that thing I don't know is the most important thing you can do. And I certainly always say that teachers and parents should say that a lot because it's an invitation to discover to discover someone you think should know everything doesn't know. It means, hey, that we can learn this together and it's an endless and that it's an endless journey exactly which is

itself very important i mean the idea that that one of my favorite quotes is um the former man i've had enormous amount of respect for and i never never met he died before i was about but alan bloom uh yeah we is of course i was with one of his friends harvey mansfield the other day at harvard and um i said to harvey that um there's a quote of alan blooms which i adore he gave the commencement address at Cornell at some point in the 80s and he said to the students there he said he said he said he said um he said these are your charmed years they they sit between they sit between the years of ignorance and the intellectual wastelands that most of us go into an adulthood they do not waste these years but of course really the aspiration of any student should also be not to go into an

intellectual waste loud. Of course, it's a jive to make you not go to there. Yeah, and it should be the aspiration of every teacher to, as we said, to teach how to, how to learn and, you know, and make learning a lifelong activity, whether you're an academic or whatever you do. And it's interesting you had your teachers because because you did say you started out in a school, a comprehensive school, which you should describe for the American, the ignorant Americans among us or North Americans, which was a grammar school. And one assumes that a grammar school is better than a comprehensive school. Is that a correct assumption?

No, it's not. I went to perfectly good Church of England primary and secondary schools, the local one. I grew up in London. And I received an adequate education there. It was anything spectacular. It was fine. I then was transferred to a recently former grammar school, Grammar schools were the sort of jewel in the crown for families in Britain in the post-war period

who couldn't afford to send their children to a private school. Just called a public school in England, isn't it? Just to make it clear out. There's all sorts of, like liberal. All of this stuff just explodes across its borders. But yes, a fee-paying school. If you couldn't afford a fee-paying school, then grammar school was really your best hope. but the various governments abolished them

and then there are still some left but they were thought to be to elitist and all sorts of other things and so I went to a school that had recently been in grammar school that was thought to be a therefore to have some, you know, kudos. It was an absolute zoo

and I mean it was one of those times where you know, I mean, the teachers spend all of their time doing crowd control and you have no time to learn Is this your words? It was described when I read it as a war zone similar to that many of the children's parents had escaped from? That must be your words, I'd assume. I'd say that, golly. Yeah, it could be my words. Gosh. Yes, it was certainly rough. I mean, the year after I left,

a group of boys at school gang raped a female teacher in the classroom, you know. Oh, my God. Yeah, it was pretty rough. So my parents were as I should get out of their pretty sharp it. Yeah, and I did. And I managed to get a scholarship for a small fee-paying school in London. And from there to the most famous school in the country, from college. Yeah, which are. And then they're not, yeah, and then Oxford University. So yeah, so I have that slightly shape-shifter thing, as you'll understand, Lawrence. I mean, is it because people inevitably wish to pigeonhole anyone, and that's quite understandable. On one hand, I have a totally, um, the most establishment of education.

and yet I always am pleased that I also saw it from the bottom up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I like that. You know, again, my friend Stephen Frye's had, you know, had the experience of being in prison and then also Cambridge, so it's really... Yeah. That in his case, obviously, it's given a very interesting view on things.

I mean, there are certain things which once you've seen them, you can't unsee, and that's probably what it should be. Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. It is interesting to me. I'm going to ask you, you know, I actually lectured at Eaton once, much to my surprise. And of course, I was dressed much more poorly than the students who were all in tails. Although they more looked like they all needed to be washed. Yes, it's hard to dress smarter than an Eaton school boy.

But it's an all-boy school. And I have to ask this, did it the impression, and actually Richards talked about this too, because it it almost was a tradition. I mean, you're gay. And a gay experience seemed to, if you watch at all the movies, the British boy school movies, it seems like it's almost a British tradition

to have that experience. And I know it's an appropriate thing to ask, but I'm wondering if it, just an aside, if it was during that period that realized you were gay or or, and if it had any impact. No, I realized it was gay already. and I was hoping to go to Eaton and have a lot of being gay.

Okay. Okay. It wasn't the only reason I went, I just stressed. Okay. That's great. Found out like, there's been more of them. Books are true then surely. Yeah.

All the jokes are true. Then surely. Actually, during my time there, it was an incredibly homophobic place. I was lucky enough to find some other students who were gay and who were at least able to talk, but with each other. but um uh no it was enormously homophobic because of course that's that's one of the other ways it can happen yeah a lot of boys together is that of course they're exactly pick on age they're very sensitive about their sexuality they they're very they're very insecure and the way to be insecure

is to be homophobic yeah yeah and i mean when you're an adult and you're straight there's like no need to be homophobic if you're not gay because it's like who cares i'm living like unless you're incredibly insecure again i think it's you know unless you're very insecure yeah But as a boy, I mean, I, you know, yeah. And I remember a friend of mine saying to me then, I wish there were girls at this school. And I remember saying, but that would mean there were fewer boys. And that she said he's ever, they would have a civilizing influence. Yeah, I mean, I frankly, my daughter went to an all-girls school for a while,

which was very good when she was very young. But when she was an adolescent, anyway, she eventually moved. And I, and I, I'm now think you absolutely need. I think it's a very good as a socializing experience. It's single, there's arguments for a single sex education, but I think as a part of the whole school experience, one of the reasons why I'm not particularly happy with homeschooling is a part of this school experience is not just education and socialization.

It's learning how to live with others and experience others. That's, that's, that's something, that's an insight that's particularly important after recent years of the pandemic. I mean, yeah, I remember the first months of the pandemic. I find out of a friend of mine who's now retired philosophy professor at Oxford, and we were speaking on the phone. And I said, what do you think the long-time effect of this is going to be? And he said, Douglas, it's incalculable because he said the great secret, the great secret of education is that it's not the professors who educate the students. The students educate each other.

Oh, yeah. I've always said that. Yeah, absolutely. It's your peers. And that's the only reason I've encouraged kids generally, you know, to go to good universities. I mean, I've also said you can get a great education to any university. I mean, you have to join your own education. But one of the reasons to go to a place where people actually like to learn is that peer-to-peer education, and that makes a huge difference.

I found, by the way, I think I've said it's poor, I found intellectually speaking, Eaton was much more stimulating for me than Oxford. Interesting. It was part of the quality of teachers there. I mean, almost every teacher there could have been an. Oxford professor. Some of them had been. Yeah. But they also had that, I had some terrific tutors at Oxford as well and some terrific lecturers, but broadly speaking, that desire to sort of impart the fire to you was more prevalent at each. Well, I mean, high school teachers are

there to teach and either they're love-hating or it's just they've fallen into the job. And if there's two categories, and one said are awful teachers and one set are fantastic. But they are in teaching and you know university professors having been one for many years are teach but in if they're at a first-rate university they're interested in the researches and and and teaching can be fun and enjoyable but the dedication that that a high school teacher has is and if interesting experience i i also found in many ways high school a more interesting learning experience than as an undergraduate university now i i switched from many fields eventually did math mathematics and physics, which is, which was quite different than, than the general education

that I had, but the quality of the teaching, much better in high school. And I, and in areas I did, because it turns I did history for it in physics, the history level of history I did at high school was much more rigorous than at university. I found. Well, there's also that thing that one of the great curses of our age, which is the curse of hyper-specialization. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, that's right. And I, yeah, I remember trying to fight it. I did for a while. I started university as one of these degrees where you could do science and non-science the same time. Eventually, I realized I had to choose and I did mathematics and physics, but, because I liked history, I did that for a year and then took a year off school to actually work

on a history book, which, well, I worked on a history book during college. You wrote a book during college. But before we get to that, I want to get your Boise, Boise book, is it? How do you pronounce it? Is it Bozzy? Bozzy. Bozzy. Lord Alfred Douglas. I want to ask, you did a degree in English. Why did you choose English? Was it because of the teachers you had in school? Yes, I had thought of reading music and ended up changing to English.

I actually, slightly worse than you describe. I wrote my first book in my gap year between school and university. I finished it the week before I went to university, knowing pretty well that if I didn't finish it before going to university, I would be unfit. That's why I had to take a year off. off from university. And you have to complete a project like that

if you're famous. And so I turned up to university with a finished book, which didn't get me love from all of my contemporaries. Some of your professors might have been happy about it, though. Some of them were pretty annoyed.

They were particularly annoyed because it came out in my second year. It was a bestseller, and that ruined my university career. Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah, you would have been intolerable and insufferable probably. I mean, I'm totally insufferable to myself. I mean, you know, everything had been done to ruin me.

You know, I was flown to New York for lunch, you know, and that's something. Yeah, I know. I mean, I look back now and I think, I wish I just spent my time at Oxford doing what you're meant to do. But I spent my time wanting to get out. Well, that's it. Well, on the other hand, it's nice that you had a goal. But did you, well, I was going to. going to ask you why i'll get to why he wrote the book and by the way we're we're going to

eventually get to the subject here but this is fascinating um did you ever consider you wanted to start you started music but i'm just wondering did you know because you're obviously as i am political at least in the sense of being interested in what's going on in the political world even though we both have huge suspicions about politics governing human affairs um you think of political So science, did you, and the other word that has never entered into our conversation so much, and so far, and one of the reasons I do this podcast is because I tried merge science and culture, and I think they're both, you know, science is a part of our culture, and we need to understand that and appreciate it. But did you ever have any interest in science, or did you have any good science teachers?

Well, that's a very good, I've thought about that a lot in retrospect, because I read quite a lot of science books now. I have a lot of friends who are scientists, mathematicians and so on. But firstly, I don't think I had very good science teachers. I had a physics teacher who was noticeably bad, would basically say down on the class. Answer the questions on pages 10 to 15, don't disturb me, hand in your work. You know, that sort of thing. But nevertheless, that's a sort of excuse as well.

The truth is, actually, Lawrence, I made a fundamental, mistake in my teenage years, which I wish I hadn't have made now, which was that I thought that it wasn't either or. And I mean, it's not uncommon. I hope it's becoming less common. But that sort of CP Snow debate was still going on. And there was a, there was an expectation that if you're interested in the humanities, you were not interested in sciences and vice versa. It took some time for me to realize the error of that. I mean, I started to realize it when I was at the Junior Royal Academy of Music, and I realized that one of my favorite composers, Benjamin Britson, was also a great mathematician. Yes. Or very good mathematician. I remember thinking when I discovered that, oh, that, that,

that, that, that queers everything, you know, old fashions. You know, old fashion. I thought, that, that really mucks up my theory. And, and then I discovered that, you know, I mean, actually, you know, a lot of musicians. I mean, Bar, in instance, you know, works in a sort of mathematical way. Yeah, and a lot of mathematicians have certainly enjoyed music and scientists. Exactly. But for some reason, I was pickheaded, I was stupid, too opinionated, and thought, I'm a humanities person, and therefore the sciences are not for me.

Yeah. And people are told that too often, still, I think. In fact, there's a badge of honor. I don't know if it's so much as when I, I was growing up, certainly was, and I remember when I was writing my first science books, and I taught at Yale, which was, you know, humanities were king. And it was amazing to me what a badge of honor was for people to say, well, you know, I just can't get that science stuff, as if it's a, as if, well, that makes me cultured. Well, exactly. But, you know, I also learned that there's an

attitude towards that, which you can be encouraged to develop. And I was encouraged to, the development at Oxford, accidentally or deliberately, I don't know, by the various people, because inevitably in a college community, as you know, I mean, everyone sits at table at dinner and, you know, you sit beside a physicist and opposite of, you know, a musician and the other sides of, you know, and it's the same at high table with the dons, with the professors. And I realized that Oxford, this incredibly important thing, which was that nobody was doing anything dull. Yeah, yeah. That's nice. And I mean, I remember there was once a set of lectures for all of us who'd just come up as freshmen, you'd say, in America. And we were given a lecture by, four or five

lectures, each by somebody who was, you know, in a particular department. And they're all wildly different. There was a lecture about Anglo-Saxon poetry by the Anglo-Saxon professor. There was a lecture about the mating habits of the fruit fly by one of the biology of places. And I remember at the time, I still had that schoolboy thing in my head of fana fana what a ridiculous thing to spend your life studying. And he showed during the talk how fascinating this was. And then I suppose through that there's this line. Actually, your friend Stephen Fry likes to quote from Oscar Wilde. We described somewhere the Oxford Manor, which is to play gracefully with ideas.

And actually that is something that an institution can impart. And one of the most important things of playing gracefully with ideas is sitting with somebody who's got a specialism you don't have and finding stuff out. And you know, I'm not following you there. Row back a bit for me. It's the aha experience, which is orgasmic. I used to work in science museums when I was younger,

and we used to call the aha experience, and it is that. We suddenly see the world a new way. And it gives an intense, kind of pleasure, and it's universal. It really does give an intense pleasure, I think, to everyone, no matter how turned off their mind is. By the way, wouldn't you agree that one of the most stimulating things, and certainly this is something I've found as an adult, almost invariably, the things that sparked me off now to new ideas or new ways of seeing things, almost invariably come from disciplines I do not have. Oh, yeah. It's when I'm at a conference or a seminar with somebody

who tells me something in a discipline, I do not understand, which I get like one nugget of. I go, that's what I'm trying to put my finger on in my own language. Yeah, yeah, no. Those are the things that make you have those sort of mind orgasms. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think that's, yeah, absolutely.

And I think that's one of the, frankly, one of the, there are two things about this. One of the reasons I like to write books is, because it forces me often to have the, discipline to enter into a territory I might not feel comfortable with and requires me to interact with people and learn things that I wouldn't otherwise. And that's a lot of fun. But it also, it's one of the reasons I, with what I'm doing now in this particular podcast is to jumping across from having scientists to journalists, to writers, just movie directors because that diversity

of human intellectual inquiry is so fascinating. And it is all one thing. thing, which I would con call culture. And it's and and turning off any part of it is is is a tragedy. But moreover, being turned on to new things is a is a joy. And I hope you know, I hope in some ways some some of these things apart that experience and I'm sure my, I'm my conversation with you will will do that to some people as well. I think, but it also relates to something where you are going to get to eventually,

which is which is John Stuart Mill's notion of free speech that the notion of learning that something you thought was true is wrong. is a great joy, but it's an opportunity, and it's the opportunity that free speech provides, but we'll get there. But it's interesting that your music experience. Did you decide you weren't enough good enough musician to continue in that experience,

or was it just because your interests were elsewhere? What I actually was, I was a composer primarily. Oh, okay. What I discovered in writing my first book was that whatever it was I was trying to communicate was better communicated in words for me. That's not the same with everyone, of course. I know lots of composers who obviously don't have that interest at all.

But that was at some point, I became aware that that was the language I wanted to communicate in. I was always, actually Christopher used to say that he was rather surprised when he discovered I was a musician. And I remember him saying, to be one. There's always one of the arts you can't do. Yeah. And music is the one he couldn't was music. Yeah, I love music, but I'm, I'm incapable. And my daughter was a very good musician.

And I thus got to be involved with a lot of the music community as a result. And I loved it. In fact, I actually got to perform at the Cleveland Orchestra, even in which we lived there. And speaking of music and science and thinking of the two cultures, here's a story, an interesting story because there's a physicist I used to know named John Glazer. He won the Nobel Prize for inventing something called the bubble chamber. And he was from Cleveland, which is where at that, when I escaped from New Haven, I became chair of a university in Cleveland. And he told me he was, he played with the, at that time, the Cleveland Philharmonic, which was an orchestra below the Cleveland Orchestra, which. is a famous orchestra. And he was a good violinist and he was trying to decide what to go into his college. And he and his father, and he was okay in science. He was okay in science. And his father

told him going to science. He said, because as a mediocre musician, you'll never get a job. As a mediocre scientist, you'll be fine. Yes. And there's a secondary part of that advice that I've heard people give, which is if the thing you love is something you've think you might end up hating if you go into it, don't go into it. Yeah, that's, I think. And it's ruin the love. And you tend to continue to only love the things you're good at, ultimately, I think.

And that's true. I mean, I still play the piano, my own personal enjoyment and do every day. But no, but on the thing I mentioned about the arts you can't do, the art I really envied was painting, which I can't do at all. But the painter, Francis Bacon, as opposed to the essays. made a great impact on me when I was a young man. And I was always deeply envious of his ability to communicate everything onto the canvas.

Now, that isn't something a musician can do, for instance. You cannot communicate anger. I mean, there were ways in which you can do it. So the Schatzegovychokovic 10 is a pretty good example of a composer communicating anger at almost certain stars. But the point is, is that generally speaking, there's all sorts of specific registers that music is simply not

able to do. That having been said, it can also do a register that nothing else can do. Exactly. Everything aspires to the form of music, you know, and whatever, it was it, it was Wittgenstein, at the end of his life, said about one of his great philosophical works, I wish I'd said it in verse. first. I've always said that I think no writer hasn't at some points thought I wish I could say that in music. But nevertheless, for some reason in my late teens, words started to take over and the interest in words and communicating with words became the thing I realized was actually what I was meant to be doing. Okay. I was going to, as a side, I was going to ask, I mean, there was a lot of controversy in Bob Dylan, one of the Nobel Prize in literature. I had no problem with it myself because his words had a big idea. impact on me growing up. And it's less so than, well, and the music did too.

And I'm wondering whether that, yeah, I mean, the Nobel Prize. The Nobel Prize in literature has been given to so many ropy candidates by now not least. I could not, I fell out of any simply with it when they gave it to Harold Pinter. Okay. Not least his poetry, which was beyond awful.

Yeah, no, we just want to, it's only, It's perhaps only, only, it's second only to the Peace Prize for being inappropriate, I think, among those prizes. And prizes are largely arbitrary anyway. I was going to ask you why you wrote the book that when you did. But I, you know, it's just been fascinating. But I do want to move on. But it is fascinating to me that you wrote the book when you did. And maybe you just wanted to have that experience.

But you quit in university, other than doing that and writing a play. and three of the other things, you emerged as what you called a neo-conservative. And did that arise, was that again inbred or was that, did that arise out of your university experience or what? No, it was several things. One was that I had entirely, with the exception of very closely following the war in the Balkans, I had almost no interest in politics as an undergraduate. I had no interest ever in party politics. I had known to be joining the Labor Club or the Conservative Club.

All of these things filled me with horror, mainly because of the people involved. Yeah, sure. And one of my embarrassments going back occasionally to speak at places like the Oxford and Cambridge Union is, and I'm always asked by the various, you know. Yeah, I've been there. So what did you do when you were here? Which posts did you have? And I didn't do anything here, really.

But you must be a man, but I came once or something. And the thing I can ever say is, because, of people like you. I just, I did, I never had much appetite for that incredibly voracious, hungry politico type. But I was interested in the ideas and I was unusual by my last year at a university of actually reading the paper every day. That was less unheard of. I remember the chaplain at my college said, usually, Douglas, when somebody's carrying a paper, it means it's the end of term. and news to be the signals that you want to find out what's happening in the rest of the world

before you go back into it. I was very interested in that. I suppose the Neocom thing was, which is a word that I now regard as being almost unusable. It means so many things and so many bad things to most people. It's just one of those words you sort of have to give up. But there was a general, to cut a long story short, there were two things really. One was the aftermath of 9-11, where I thought, like a lot of us, did at the time, rather bullishly, doubtless and filled with certainty, but nevertheless,

it felt that something had happened that needed serious addressing and that an outrage had been perpetrated at the heart of American democracy, which deserved more than the sort of platitudes of, you know, we've brought this on ourselves and the stuff that I, I thought at that point, you know, it was something that Jean Kirkpatrick said at the time of the Vietnam protests, She said, you know, nobody doubts that we can improve, but in order to improve, we have to continue and survive. And that was very much my view at that time. I didn't like the sort of many. That was the first sort of shedding of friends, I think, was the friends who was in the sort of, well, so what, America brought upon herself, you know, who are we to say and so on.

The second thing was my discovery of a group of very remarkable thinkers from America mainly, who I started reading and really was very sort of just sympathetic with, specifically Irving Crystal, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, other figures like this, who were... I'm sympathetic, too, but anyway. But people who, apart for anything else, have made a very interesting intellectual, journey. I mean, I think that right and left, we might get into this, mean less and less and maybe always have tricky things to define. I don't much like the dichotomy. It's sort of, like a lot of

these, it's useful to an extent and also tedious. Yeah. But these were people who made the intellectual journey from the left in the post-war era to the right during the Cold War era. And I found, for various reasons, I just found these people attitudeally behavioural. intellectually, very sympathetic. I liked their style. I liked their outlook on things. They were sort of liberal in a true sense. But not being so liberal that their minds fell out, you know.

And I saw a lot of people whose minds were falling out. And so I sort of inevitably migrated towards the people who I thought hadn't had that experience. In retrospect now, I mean, one of my best friends. friends said, because my book on neo-conservatism is my one book I won't allow to be republished. Most of it is an intellectual history of neo-concertism, but the last chapter is not. And I would have to write the last chapter completely from scratch or just reissue it to say, these are my mayor culpers. These are my, but I wrote that in 2004, I suppose. And it's a young man's book, which, funnily enough, my first book was not.

Isn't that interesting? Well, look, yeah, I was going to ask you to find neoconservative. Anytime you say one says neo, like there's new atheists, and I'm always suspicious. Let me put it that way of neo, because I think most ideas have been around for a long time, and most of the, they're not really new. And so I'm always suspicious of the word when it's attached to a word. But I don't want to even go into neoculars. There's so much more we can talk about, which we will get to.

And some of those views might be called neoconservative. You did work for The Spectator, which, or maybe you still did, which is a conservative newspaper. So the associate editor, which is a type of nobody understands. Okay, well, I don't want to go there then. We may get there. I'm not, yeah, no, my least interest,

the least interesting thing to talk about is editors in the world. So anyway. I started writing for a spectator when I was at Oxford. I started reviewing books for them. And then I started writing political pieces shortly after I was out of university. I think, I don't,

I may have actually written something for them once. Anyway, because, Because even though it's funny how I've now bridged the transition from a left to what mum, some people might call the right only because I'm interested in truth and reality. And we'll get there. But it is, I thought it was poetic, if you'll forgive the pun,

that you're interested in poetry appeared. And when you were as an editor of the spectator, you were involved in the poetry prize, weren't you? Which was won by Boris Johnson. Is that not right? Yes, you touch on a piece of history which I'm actually very proud of. That's right. Yeah, how long ago was that?

Six, seven, eight years ago. No, no, it was 2016. I remember it was a year of the referendum on Brexit. Boris Johnson was the Foreign Secretary. Yes. So to cut a long story short, it was a moment of brilliant inspiration, if I do say so, on my part. There was a German comedian who had made a joke about Edouin, president of Turkey.

Turkey. And Receptide Erdogan had been assaulted by this late-night German comic who had implied that among other things in a poem, a funny poem

on air, applied in other, among other things that Erdogan's relationship with the animal kingdom was not entirely platonic. Now, that's where I come from, as I'm sure where you come from,

that's standard in insult fair by Saturn. Edouan did not see the funny side, asked, when he got word of it in Ankara, called for the chance of the then-Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, to prosecute the comedian. There is a laissez-magiste law on the books in Germany about insulting foreign rulers. I was absolutely incensed by this. and the idea that in 2016, a European comedian could be censored by the state, let alone, as at the time seen possibly, even imprisoned, a Dutch comedian friend of mine put out a very funny video. We sort of said, why don't we do an I Am Spartacus thing? And my Dutch friend had a video saying that he'd given Erdogan a blowjob and he hadn't paid him for it. And he wasn't going to forgive him until he gave him the cash.

And I decided to do it through the medium of poetry. So I announced that I would give a thousand pound cash prize to the person who could write the most defamatory poem about Erdogan. And I suggested we do it in the limerick form, which is, of course, only five lines. And that adds up to £200 a line, which, by my calculation, was the highest paid poetry prize in the world. Oh, interesting, okay.

So, and I gave an example of what I thought should be the sort of, of style we were going for and wrote an incredibly lavatorial and bestial limerick and said this is the sort of thing we're after and entries poured in from all over the world including Turkey and it was it actually became a bit too much for me because there were so many thousands of entries coming in and anyhow the point was that then in the end a mutual friend whilst interviewing Boris said, have you seen what Douglas is doing with this poetry competition? Boris said yes, and they made up a limerick on the spot, which wasn't very good. But the friend called me immediately said, Boris Johnson's just done a limerick.

I think we should enter it and make it win. Oh, it was fixed. Oh, God. It was sort of fixed, and I thought, actually, that will cause maximum diplomatic damage to Erdogan. And indeed, that will give most coverage to the comedian, most importantly, which is that it would therefore become clear that you could not prosecute a comedian in Germany for doing something of the Foreign Secretary

in Britain had done. So it was what I did. It did cause a diplomatic incident. I still can't go to Turkey, sadly. But, you know, life is partly cutting off doors. Yeah, well, there's enough places. Going up bridges. Well, it was a noble cause.

I mean, it wasn't just... I do feel very strongly about that sort of thing. I feel very strongly about it. Satire is usually the best way to respond to, well, often the best way to respond to ridiculous strictures on speech. Well, people don't know what to do with it. I mean, there was a man in, there was actually a man in Ankara shortly after my accomplishment who was arrested by the police for asking the way to the zoo. By that point, the police in Turkey couldn't work out what was satire and what was simply

traffic direction. So there you go. Okay. Well, yeah, I, I'm very pleased that I just produced a piece where I was able to reproduce the seven swear words that George Carlin talked about could never be talked about on TV. I just for Quillette, and it came out and it's going to, I think it's going to come out of Canadian paper too. And I want to see how they, what they do with those words. It's very interesting. In any case, we'll see. But this lead, this kind of provoking. is, is, is, I know that's not the reason you write books, but part of the reason to get way to get people to think about things is provoke. And I have to say your book, the last two books have been provocative in a sense. And one of the things I, one of their things I really enjoyed about them, besides the fact that they're brilliant, is brilliantly written. And, and I agree with most of the stuff in the two, which doesn't hurt. I want to go to the madness of crowds, which, which,

which is, you know, I was surprised. I don't, I read it, I completely reread it again the last two days. And for which I was cursing you in the middle of the night at one point the other day, but not only because I really wanted to get through it. Again, you don't mention, I'm assuming the title comes, is related to Charles McKay's 1841 book. I didn't see any mention to that in the book, but he wrote, you know, it's a, I think I mentioned in instruction.

I think I mentioned it. Really, I didn't see it. So maybe I missed it, but I'm sure it must be there because I didn't see it in the introduction, but it was a great book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions in the Madness of Crowds, 1841. And I loved it. I think, I don't know if he said this or someone else said this. It was a distillation of some of the most humiliating, terrifying, and confusing things humans

have done in collectivity, which I think is a wonderful thing because, and what he made fun of was Al-Kamee and the Crusade. and haunted houses. And so you then decided to write a book where you'd make fun of things like gender, race, identity, and trends. And I thought, well, that's that all the things, those are all the things you're told sort of never to talk about at a Thanksgiving dinner or a dinner with friends, right? All the things are going to produce nothing but vitriol. And I thought, what a great, what a great, what a great subject to move, you know, that, that, that segue from the the badness of crowds from alchemy, et cetera,

to the things that really are viewed it with with craziness. And yes, the interesting thing is, Lawrence, is that the only people, I do hope I credit Charles Mackay, I think I do somewhere. But yes, his book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Manors of Crowds, is today I discover only really well known by people in hedge funds. and certain bits of financial markets. I've spoken at places where people have said,

you know, I give this out to all of my employees when they join. And actually, I had a wonderful economist friend who died a couple years ago from COVID, actually called Deepak Lowe. And I remember he once said to me years ago that he had gone to a library of a new university somewhere. He used to teach economics at UCLA and LSEA and, among others, but he would have been taken around a new library somewhere, I think in the Indian subcontinent, but anyhow, and he asked to see their economic history department,

and they didn't have one. They said, well, they regarded economic history, like medical history, as it were as something which we'd gone beyond. Oh, I see, interesting. So the important thing about giving the man's extraordinary popular delusions in the man's crowd to people who work in market, is this is the bit that could be forgotten knowledge

and will be the knowledge you need the most. Yes, yes, absolutely. And funny enough, all of the modern editions of Charles McKay's book only include the bits on bubble, on financial bubble, the Mississippi bubble, and so on. And that's a shame because the original

includes, as you mentioned, these social ones as well. Yeah, I'm an old version then, yeah. No, I mean, and I mean, there's much more in this. I mean, I have a book somewhere above me here, I think, called We Believe the Children, that a friend lent me recently, about the child satanic sex abuse scare in America in the 1980s, where we went to prison for, were given sentences of hundreds of years. I mean, some of the longest sentences than ever for moral panic, which ended up to be based on nothing.

And I'm very happy to have had a podcast with the psychologist, the woman, who showed this was nonsense. Yes. And so both of these things, the memory that there are financial stampedes and madnesses, but also social sort of contagion madnesses, is very important to know about. And we always look back on them with such sort of disdain. Who could possibly think that? But, you know, these things have happened in our own time as well.

Maybe and it's sort of in some sense I suppose it can comfort us when we do look at the present madness of crowds which you and are going to Look at and talk about that that at least this maybe one can sometimes think this two shall pass But even if it doesn't seem like it will and in fact speaking of poetry, I guess the reason to think about these things is a One of my favorite lines from Mark Twain about history. You probably know it said history doesn't repeat itself, but it sure rhymes a lot absolutely one of the truth things ever said yes yeah and and by the way I can't help but there's a book that I first learned about that book about the McKay book because a friend of mine I'm very well-known physicists actually referred me to a more modern version of it written by someone I love called Martin Gardner and I

don't know if you've ever read it called fads and fallacies in the name of science and if you haven't I'm gonna buy it and send it to you let me make a note to it myself it's a it's a it's a It is a modern version of that, which is really, and it does talk about things, including financial issues, but it's a wonderful book. You should look at it. I mean, I'd love to, but I mean, look at what's going on at the moment. I mean, you know. Yeah, oh, absolutely. Blasping and, you know. You could rewrite that book. But he used to write for Scientific American and give these wonderful mathematic puzzles.

and but he was a remarkable guy and um and uh anyway it's it's a and then so i like to sort of if you wish i like to think of the progression of there's a mcquet book and then his book and now your book which we're going to talk about and um and which is a madness that i we we both agree is going on in fact to be in the interest of a full disclosure you and i first met personally in portland when i there having dinner with our mutual friend peter bogosian um and talking about the very issues that we both share uh in our concerns about which which are the issues that have to my amusement i see myself called a conservative pundit at times which is hysterical since i'm far to the left of most people in many other ways but it is this craziness and at the very beginning of the book you say

And what I plan to do is I'm going to focus on a number of quotes you've gone through. And we're going to go through there and try and get to the, a little bit to the, to the war on the West, and then return to poetry if we have time. And we'll see how it goes. If it's too long, and if you're enjoying this, we can always stop and then carry it on another day because I'm enjoying it. It's up to you. But you say we're going through a great crowd derangement in public and in private,

both online and off. People are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational, feverish, herd-like, and simply unpleasant. The daily news cycle is filled with the consequences, yet, while we see the symptoms everywhere, we do not see the causes. And you say the simple fact that we have been living through a period of more than a quarter of a century in which all our grand narratives have collapsed. This is your rationale for why it's happened. One by one, the narratives we have had were refuted, become unpopular to defend or impossible to sustain. The explanation for our existence that used to be provided by religion went first, falling away from the 19th century onwards. Then over the last century, the secular hopes held out by all political ideologies began to fall in religion's wake.

In the latter part of the 20th century, we entered the postmodern era, an era which defined itself and was defined by suspicion towards all grand narratives. However, as all children learn nature abhorves a vacuum and into the postmodern vacuum, vacuum, new ideas bank and a creek with the intention of providing explanations and meanings of their own. And that one question I wanted to ask, which is one could infer from that, and I don't think you mean that. Some people have said that that part of this, what you and I both agree is a secular religion nowadays, comes from the fall of religion. itself. I don't think that's the case myself. And I wanted to ask if you if you think the fact that if you think religiosity would have saved us from that or not. Well, I think it is religiosity. I just think it's a new sort of cult version of it. It is it is a new cult version. I agree with you. We

both agree there. It's a little because I mean to refine the point about the religiosity of it, I think that I think it is more cult-like than religion actually. Because A cult is something that says, you know, and if your family don't agree, cut them off. Yeah, exactly. Well, some religions say that too. Some religions say that too, as well. And certainly have done in the past. But, I mean, in the present, I think it would be an unusual vicar who would tread into the pulpit and say...

It would be an huge vicar. It might not be an unusual Ayatollah, for example. Oh, a very commonplace Ayatollah, almost... Yeah. dime a dozen. And, you know, and that's just, but, but, and as I keep pointing out, the only difference is one of history. A vicar 500 years ago would have been exactly the same as I told it today in the sense

of England would have burned someone at the stake easily for, for the wrong views. That's certainly true. Everyone's been through their own past. I mean, but I do think that the, I mean, one of the things I tried to get to just, as you know, you cut through bracken in my experience, at the beginning of a book you sort of cut who bracken to get to the place you want to start from. Yeah. And I put that in about about that because I do think that the absence of religion leaves a hole and the whole is a god-shaped whole. And in particular, there is this desire to

be good and do good. And of course, as everyone knows, to to really do evil. You've got to think you're doing good. And the vehemence and the dogmatism in our day. I mean, you know, there's this very interesting, whenever you see videos online of a sort of, you know, the new religion sort of protesting, you know, one's always struck by their means of communication. It is, for instance, shouting something repeated. Yeah. That's a quasi-religious way, like drumming something into you until you give it. And not wanting, and repeating it so that you can't say anything, because the last thing people want to hear is something they don't want to hear. It's literally the opposite of communication. Yeah, exactly.

It's dictation and dogmatism repeated so much. I mean, I'm surprised they still employ the tax. because for many of us, like myself, nothing would make me less likely to join an argument that person shouting the same thing over and over again. So, yes, I do think that it's got lots of the hallmarks of religion. As I've pointed out before, it has also got the disadvantages of not having certain things that certain religions do. Like redemption. Like redemption.

Exactly. most important, you know, the Judeo-Christian religion has this particularly important issue of redemption, you know, and I quote Hannah Arend, who's not a thing I'm especially fond of, but she in an essay in the 50s wrote something which I cite in the madness of crowd about the, you know, this fact that, you know, it is the nature of our action in the universe that we, we as human beings do not know the consequences of our actions, of our words, And as you know, all writers fear this to some extent. You can't fear it too much or you'd never start typing in the morning.

But you don't know who's going to read your words and misinterpret them. You can be certain that they'll be misinterpreted. There'll be somebody who will. And then you've got to work out, well, are they malicious misinterpretations or misinterpretations because I've written badly? I mean, that's the concern is that you don't want to knowingly mislead. Exactly. And so that's and that's why you have, you know, that's why as a writer, obviously, we all have to hone our craft and be as precise in our language and our meaning as possible. But, but, but yes, I suppose that my concern in, in, in, in, in, in recent years has been that there has been this, this, this, uh, leaping in of bad faith arguments of deliberate, wanton misconduct.

interpretation, assertion of things that we don't know, and an unwillingness to be humble before things. And the obvious example I give, and sorry, and just to finish the point on our end, Aaron says, you know, because we don't know how our actions will reverberate in the universe, the only mechanism we've ever come up with to answer that is forgiveness. It's the mechanism of forgiveness. And that is something, as I mentioned, the manse of crowds that our own era spends almost zero time thinking about. In fact, the opposite. We specifically, as you point out at length,

the modern world, especially social media, makes certain that people's words that may be misinterpreted are never buried. Yes, it used to be the old thing in public relations. The wisdom used to be, apologize and move on. Yeah. Now, you apologize and you're killed.

I mean, Jeremy Clarkson, who writes, if I write for, wrote a, say, over the top, deliberately sort of meant to be funny column about Megyn Markle and Megan and Harry Sussex. That's what you call it. And, you know, he ended up being forced to apologize five times. And then the Sussex just didn't accept his apology and insulted him again. And you just sort of think, well, in that case, we're in some very strange world. Anyhow, my own view is that we should understand.

and be forgiving if we can be because we'll need forgiveness ourselves. And I say that on certain things, I mean, I finished the Manse of Crowds on the trans issue, which now lots of people are writing about. I'm happy to just to speak. But at the time, very few people weren't. My simple assertion was we're pretending to know things. We just don't know. Absolutely.

You know, I mean, that's the arc I'm eventually heading towards this, because that's one of the reasons why I think it's, why I resonate so much with it, and it's, I don't mean this to send self-serving, but it will, because, you know, I wrote a book that now my new book is coming out, it's called the known unknowns, and the whole point of it is to acknowledge that that's to me the greatest thing that science offers us is the fact to realize that, you know, we don't know. And to know what we don't know is incredibly important because it's an invitation to learn, but it's also a humility. It's a recognition that they're things.

things we don't understand. And we need that more than anything as a civilizing influence, as well as a learning influence. I can't wait to read that. Can I ask your view on something then? Because one of the things that strikes me about this thing of we don't know is, as you say, it requires a certain humility. But here's something else. It also strikes me that it requires a certain amount of something like confidence. Yeah, sure. I mean, I have a friend, for instance, who works with gang members or reformed gang members. She always says, you know, the main problem is

it's all about respect and respect, having to be respected. And you realize these are people with no self-respect. And that's why they're so intent or even stab somebody if they show them any disrespect perceived or otherwise. It seems to me that when it comes to admitting to things you don't know, you can't do it if you have that massive self-doubt. Oh, and you can't do it. Yeah, I mean, that's why I think one of the reasons why some teachers, frankly, are hesitant to say it because they teach from a syllabus because they're very worried about being presented

with things they don't know. And they have that insecurity. And it really takes great confidence to be willing to recognize that you don't know things. But that's one of the lessons, I think. When I view of one of the reasons to learn science, it's like learning any human intellectual activity is not just the content. The content may be fascinating. I happen to think it's among the most fascinating stuff the humans have ever come up with, obviously. But equally important, it's that it teaches you.

things a way to approach the world that is useful in other ways. And that and it and and and the the scientific method, the constant need for skepticism is one thing, but the constant willingness to be wrong, I think is a really one of the greatest gifts that science can give us and and you can probably only do it if you've, if you felt in the past you've done things which are right, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in fact, it's really important. When you, you say, I don't know, people misinterpret that. When we say, when we talk about things, and people often use it as a, as a hammer against science because they say, well, you don't know this.

And it's true, we don't know a lot of things. But people misinterpret not knowing something doesn't mean we don't know anything. And I often say it's not evidence for God. It's the evidence of lack of knowledge. Or it's not evidence for it. So acknowledging that you don't know something is not the saying you know nothing. And I think there's, and that's, and that's, another confusion that that I think well I mean imagine if on something like I mean the reason why I did gay first in the in the man's of crowns was to sort of try to ease the reader in to saying look I'm willing on the one identity cramp on that I can claim to have yeah um so you know trust me that I'm willing you know I'm doing the others on well um but I I do say sometimes

the friends if you want skip the gay chapter you know I mean you know you don't have to but like if you get bored reading about that. But I don't think it is boring. But anyway, the point is... No, no, no. I think it's interesting because it is... Well, anyway, we're going to talk to the... The point is it's a really interesting one.

The really... Because gay and trans that I write about in that book affect such a small percentage of the population. Well, trans... It used to be the trans with much smaller percentage than gay. And we're seeing that change for social... Yeah, if the current trajectories continue, everybody in America...

is going to identify as trans by the year 2050. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, but all it is queer, that's the one, because that's the only way which a straight white male can now be on the victim hierarchy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unless you do a 23-a-mead tests and really luck out, obviously.

Yeah, yeah. But, but no, the one that interests me in that was, I thought, firstly, the relations between the sex is between men and women, because I always say if I don't, even if I don't have any dog in this fight myself, I do want the species to continue. Yeah. That's awfully generous.

Anyway. And would like my benighted, beleaguered heterosexual friends to be able to have some happiness in this life. Anyway, and the other thing is that I also make sure which is in regards to race, because that's something it now affects absolutely everybody. I think these issues, I mean, all I tried to do in the manners of crowds really is to open them up and say these are the really

interesting things that we we should be thinking and talking about and we should be talking about but we're either afraid to talk about or we're afraid to listen about one you know some things can talk about a nauseam but not listen to and some as we'll talk about art you can't even ask questions about which for me is we'll get to that near the end and mostly with trans stuff now which is really the thing that offends me the most because as a scientist ever nothing Nothing is sacred and not everything should be questioned. And as an academic, that's the thing that depresses me most about the modern world, including the academic world, is that increasingly, institutionally,

people are accepting the notion that some things can't be questioned. And once you do that, the education goes out the window. By the way, that's why, and I think I mentioned this somewhere, the Man's the Crowds, but this is why when I was starting to notice the subjects for that book, I'm sort of thinking it over, one of the big signifiers to me was friends of mine who were scientists who were saying to me, I can't do this. Like, I can't agree to this.

I mean, people had no, sometimes had no interest in social policy, no interest, they just wanted to do their thing. Yeah, which is what they found that they were being told to lie. Yeah. And they were just like, I can't do this. The people in humanity have been lying for years. Yeah, people in the humanities have been lying for years. I figured it would never happen in science. And I wish there were more people who'd say, I can't do this, but what we're finding is that, I mean, most, I've said this before in podcast, and I, you know, I was a professor for 40 years.

And academics are largely cowards. And it's a very safe profession. It's sort of, you know, it's, you're safe. And the main thing you want to do is keep your head under the, under the radar and just go on and do your own thing. And that's most academics. do, okay, just don't bother me. I just want to do what I'm doing. And, and therefore, even though they don't believe a lot of the nonsense, they don't have the, unfortunately, I mean, and I would say it's intellectual courage, to be able to be willing to speak up against it,

which is fine if it's a minority, if it's just a little bit of nonsense. When I was, when I taught at Yale, we used to just laugh at the deconstructionist down the hill when I taught in the 80s there because it was just nonsense. And this will never affect us. so why worry about it? But eventually, just like, you know, they're going to come for the lawyers, and then they're going to come for, you know, and the solutions weren't as, the solutions weren't as strong as we thought they were. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Now, before we talked, we've talked around this, I should say, the things you talk about that are madness are largely this, right away, the social justice, identity group politics, intersectionalism, as they relate to the topics we talk. talked about, which are gay, women, race, and trends in that order, going, I think from the least incendiary to the most incendiary topics, which I think is a good way to do that. And right off, you do, and I have to say, I first learned this from Chris Frichens because, but, but, but then I, I, I, I, was John Stuart Mill, this notion about why free speech, which is being attacked in almost all the

contexts of those four areas, is being attacked. Well, I'm going to read you. I'm going to read what you write here. In On Liberty, first published in 1859, John Stuart Mill famously laid out four reasons for why free speech was a necessity in a free society. The first and second being that a contrary opinion may be true or true in part. And therefore, may require to be heard in order to correct your own erroneous views, which is what Christopher first sort of made clear to me when I went into discussion. The third and fourth being that even if the contrary opinion is an error, the airing of it may help to remind people of a truth and prevent its slippage into an ignorant dogma, which may in time, if unchallenged itself, become lost.

And you talk about the modern world and you say, things have moved so swiftly that it's also been seen to be the replacement of one dogma with another, a move. from a position of moral opprobrium to a position of expressing a probrium to anyone whose views fall even narrowly outside the remit of a newly adopted position. The problem with this is not just that we are at risk of being unable to hear positions that are wrong, but we may also be presenting ourselves from listening to arguments that may be partially true. And that's, I think, what's so characteristic of the four topics you talk about and why you and I share this, Well, obviously this emotional and intellectual abhorrence to it,

enough for you to write books about it and meet up sometimes with write articles about it. And your first example is gay. And talking about the shift from the remarkably wonderful shift that 10 years ago, you and I would both have celebrated on its own, which is the amazing speed with which from far from instead of being ostracized to being accepted universally being gay for me i have being heterosexual i have i did have that learning experience of having a child and uh and um uh and for me it was kind of obvious early on that it wasn't going to it was not going to be an issue because i saw things like gay marriage being disputed

by older men largely in Supreme Courts and Lawson. But when I saw my daughter, I saw that for kids her age, it was not an issue at all. I mean, it's just not, and you know, like Max Planck said about science, science proceeds one funeral at a time. I realized that, you know, eventually these older people are gonna be dead and these young kids

have a sociology where it's not an issue. And so it won't be surprising to me if there's this sudden shift because of a generational shift. I don't know if it surprised you any more than that. No, only that, I mean, it was shown that attitudes towards homosexuality changed in countries like America in exactly the same way that attitudes towards things like interracial marriage changed.

They changed depending on just the extent to which people knew somebody in this situation. Yeah, exactly. It's just a matter of the more people came out, the more as being gay, the more people realize that, well, you're not talking about them. You're talking about my friend or my son or my nephew or whatever. And that's the same way all of the social, genuine social progress really has occurred in our time.

I mean, why are there so few people in America today, for instance, who are against interracial marriage. It's because of very few people who are in such a silo that... Yeah. It's the people who are in silos who remain that way, right? You know, and if you talk about it later on, I think, I figure whether it's in this book or the War in the West, maybe it's the end of this book. Oh, yeah, you talked about the historian. What's his name? The American historian, ancient story. He said, one of the great things in American democracy is face-to-face. Oh, yeah. Talkfield. Yeah, the talkfield is one of his most interesting observations. Yeah. She says that's the whole way in which Americans seem to decide things. And in fact, an example, of course, it comes after the Topfield's time. But the one of the ones is always on my mind is the Lincoln Douglas debates.

Yeah. They went round the country doing that. And Lincoln was really precise about going over the transcripts of those debates and correcting any errors, not making it better, but any just reporting errors. Yeah. making sure that it was the most accurate possible version of the debates that were being read in state after state across the union. And that's how things used to be done in America. And that face-to-face falls over in this way. It's meeting people. It's actually getting the person rather than your imagination about the person or even what they say. It's the humanity that changes your views towards people ultimately.

And yeah, and it's always been for me, you know, I love being wrong. It's one of just as they told you. I like and I get to be that way a lot. But one of the great joys is finding that someone you thought you'd, I guess dislike is one way of thinking about it. You don't. I mean, I have to say one of the people who both know, Jordan Peterson is a person who I, I had many, I still have questions about a number of his views.

and some of the things he writes, I think are nonsense. But when we talked, when we first did our first podcast or even talked before that, and he was generally interested in learning. And then I thought, suddenly I had and vice versa. I wanted to learn. Then I totally changed my view. I thought, okay, here's someone I can have a discussion with who's actually interested in asking questions.

And it changed. Yeah. I adore Jordan. He's a wonderful man, a wonderful thing. A enormous force for good. but there have been figures even in my own life who I have had disagreements with often profound disagreements

but if you do it face-to-face you almost always learn something of course yeah like I've always been very keen with television to always be in the studio if you can if you can yeah always learn something from a host or from a fellow guest you always if you've got your eyes open for it

You always learn something. You think, he can't do that. He's not very good at that. Or, wow, my gosh, she picked that up fast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you listen, you want to listen. You can be in a commercial break and the interviewer says, so, you know, and they ask a very basic question.

And then you come back and they do it as if they've known it all their lives. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you can have a bit of you that thinks, hang on, do you do that with everything? Then the other bit is, that's really impressive that you could do that. Yeah. You see, you're lucky you do it. Unfortunately, because I do, I was going to, we've talked about this before, the fact that when I write, when you're right, you're misinterpreted.

And my feeling has always been good. It's okay when I write about, because being misinterpreted about the beginning of the universe is never going to hurt anybody. So I'm safe. But similarly, my experience with having been on TV is quite the opposite because they're terrified of science. And so I always have to walk them through it. It's because instead of appearing confident, they almost always,

their lack of confidence shows true. And it's a matter of, during the commercial breaks, it's a matter saying, it's okay. It'll be okay. We'll get through this. Don't worry. Well, that is, I mean, one of the things I've railed against a certain amount in the past few years has been that the expectation that anyone in the public,

I must perforce be an expert in everything. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a shame. No, but it's interesting. Well, this is totally a side. what the heck that it's fascinating to me where you have to say about this that's one of the problems as a as a writer of science that i have is people are willing i first noticed in the scientific book reviews a great book review of a science book

book is it boggled my mind that's make it a bestseller if you if you took as the example i used to give was say john kenneth galbraith an economist but if you read a book review in saying American magazine like the New Yorker, you could pick a British one. You'd never, you'd never read a book review of that saying it boggled my mind. Even if the person really didn't get what the person said, they'd be willing to go on for 10 pages about it. But the problem with science is you can make, you can appear foolish much more quickly, I think. And people realize that and it makes them often, especially TV people, afraid it's okay to not know the answer, you know, to misinterpret, you know, to be contradicted on politics.

But somehow there's a fear. Are you sure that doesn't just simply scientific illiteracy in the general? Oh, I think it is scientific literacy, but it's also a problem. It's the, I guess this is going to be sound patronizing, and it is. But it's because scientific literacy is easier to spot sometimes than literacy in other areas, because it's easier to see when you're wrong or when you speak spouting nonsense because because they're manifest empirical evidence now it would be great if that were true in areas like trans and everything else but but um in the in the hard sciences at least the kind of science i do it's it's

it's easier to spot when someone is just completely spouting nonsense and whereas you can spout nonsense in in in in in theology or or or politics in politics in fact people spot nonsense in politics and are i've noticed the high position what i've noticed that yeah anyway um let's let's let's get back to this book though i and i'm i'm really i hope you don't mind we're going all the place and i think people enjoy it because i'm enjoying it but um your point about the the chapter on on gay it seems to me because you really want to still poke people's sensibilities here is is this seesaw is the notion so it went from gay being being a an anathema to gay being accepted not to gay being accepted and then as all of these things you point out once once you've achieved in all of these

you know oppressed minorities once they achieve what think would then be time to say this is reality it crashes through and suddenly they become more oppressed and not that become the argument that it's not that being gay is is bad it's that being gay is better yes and you're right you you i'll quote you here you say because in some way the perception is developed and this and this relates to to a heterosexual person having a homosexual experience versus a homosexual person having a heterosexual experience and you say because in some way the perception is developed that to once be gay is to a fallen into your true state of nature, whereas to be forever afterwards straight is not.

This is different from a claim of bisexuality, is that a presumption that the seesaw of sexuality is not even evenly balanced, but in fact inclines towards gay, and that whereas a previous era might have tilted the seesaw towards straight, this one has decided to tilt it in the other direction, perhaps in order to write or wrong in the hope that the seesaw will one day arrive at an even point, but how are people to work out when the seesaw has arrived at the right position, is impossible to tell because like everything else, we're making all this up as we go along. And I think that's the key point is we don't know the answer to all of these things. And most of us, life is an experiment for each of us individually, and we find that we're experimenting and often wrong.

But societally, we're very confused about that. I do you think the whole concept. concept of how to get to equality is just really, oh, no, sorry, my thing for both briefly. I had an old friend of mine, one of my best friends, who was from Ireland, died some years ago now, and he was a great plain speaker, among other things. And he once said to me, you know what, Douglas, he said, you know the real definition of equality is when you don't get anything more than anyone else, you just have to put up with the same crap, the rest of us have to put up. And I always love that as a definition of actual equalities. You just have to put up with the same

crap everyone else said that's and and you know and it and it's or well yeah i put it more generally because when i was talking to a colleague a friend of mine who i had great respect for he started talking about a privilege he was because of the things he had and i and then i and you actually alluded to in the book part of this nonsense about privilege is yeah you have privilege here but there's other areas because you were well off you were you had less privilege you didn't you didn't get to experience the things and he had to finally realize yeah you know there's this no that so it's not that we that we are all equal in the sense we all have to put up the same crap what I tend to think of is it is a level of equality is yeah there's crap I don't have to put up with it you do

but this but there's crap that that that I have to put up with you don't we all live in this world full of crap it's just different crap and exactly and to some extent you know the I mean I always say the leftists tend to um so social justice activists campaigners and so on tend to think that life's meant to be about struggle and fighting and campaigning and forward and always forward. And I say, yes, there is an important place for that in the dialectic of politics and actual social justice and much more. But there's also a place for just finding your peace with the world. And one of the ways you can find your peace with the world is to realize, for instance, that there's always some optimal condition you dream of. I mean, you know, you mentioned privilege.

I used to think that people whose parents were very wealthy and well-connected, inevitably privileged a child. That is true sometimes. Of course it is. Sometimes. I know some children are very wealthy people. And sometimes absolutely a disaster. Yeah. The child is spoiled or is unused to being able to compete in the world.

they lack ambition or one of the most common ones is they live under the shadow of a parent who has achieved a great amount and in fact it cripples them yeah you know there are ways to console yourself you know about the things you don't have yeah i'd like to think it's just that we all suffer for the sins of our parents you know just as i say that we all have to find a way to make peace yeah we have to make peace with it but and it's a great equal equalizer. And it's speaking of equality. And you talk later about the fact that we, and we'll talk about equality, probably when it comes to women, I think is where you first bring it up, but it might be race. We don't even know what equality. You know, when you actually ask what is

equality, it's not very all defined, just like racism and everything else. And yet these things are talked about with certainty. And yet they're not. And wouldn't we all be better off if we just realize that, hey, let's ask what if we really understand what that means before we assert certainty about what it implies. Exactly. One of my conclusions about all of this is that, I would say, let's try to frame an argument that almost everyone could agree with, you know, instead of like straw manning, let's try to steal manate case.

One of the ways I've come to this is to say, look, I think there's almost unanimity in most developed societies now that people should not be held back from accomplishing anything or you can accomplish by dint because of a characteristic of which they have no say. So if there is a woman who is eminently qualified for a role, of course she shouldn't not be given the role just because she's a woman. Or because as a man or gay or trans or black or anything. Yeah, or anything. It's just ridiculous.

Now, I think you could get pretty much agreement on that across political sides. Very few people actually want to discriminate against people and hold people down. because of the characteristic. However, there is a major disagreement about how you go about this. And the campaigning left, the campaigning right has its own criticisms that can be made of it, including

a sort of conceitedness, including a sort of, well, you know, it'll take a lot, some time, but, you know, And there is a critique that says, well, how much time do you want this to take? You know, the gradualist approach, is it okay if it takes three generations more, for instance? There are criticisms you can make of a conservative attitude of this, a sort of gradualist approach. But broadly answer the question I just put out there.

But the other approach is we've got to force the change faster. And actually, I do think that that way is lying hell. There are obviously been lots of cases already. we've got the Harvard admissions case coming up probably the Supreme Court will adjudicate. That could find that almost every university in America has been breaking the law. I expect it will. And that's very serious.

Having taught at universities, I'd be amazed if it won't, but we'll see. Absolutely. It's a very interesting case. But in the case of women, I mean, I'm completely of the view. I mean, I would hate it if any woman was held back from doing something because that she was competent to do. Yeah. It would be ludicrous. But it's also ludicrous to say, for instance,

all high-status jobs must have exactly 50% representation from women. Oh, and by the way, the low-status jobs we won't worry about. Yeah, exactly. Or, you know, or, I mean, yeah, I was surprised in some ways maybe because it hadn't become a big issue yet, I think you bring it up in more in the war in the West, is something that affects me. me a lot is this nonsense of diversity, equity, inclusion, which is the central part of that that that ogre was born as I was finishing.

Yeah, as you're finishing the book, but that's become the mantra, which is, which is that everything, and it's absolutely a ridiculous notion, which we can apply in certain cases, but yeah, in other cases, no, no, and it's not just in low status jobs. Yeah, we don't want all roofers to be 50% women, but we all, or, or 50% black, but we also don't care if, if basketball players are we don't require them to be 50% white either and and and yeah yeah and so it's um this notion of um is is is is is ludicrous and and of course we both argue about it you don't talk about in merit is a huge thing which again isn't in this particular book but so much um but the notion you don't want to anyone be held back but it's ridiculous um to require uh people to require for any any any any

position that has a skill that that it's anything but the skill that's taken into account in determining the position yeah and you see that that's what i get into in the war on the west which is my biggest worry really about all of this the de i da so stuff is is the opportunity cost And that's, you see, let's just return to this idea of what happens if somebody with a competency is held back. Americans who identify as black make up something like 13% of the population. This is a significant chunk of the American population. You would not want that chunk of the population, that group in the population, to be disenfranchised, unable to achieve what they could achieve.

Equally, in a country where the majority of people are still white, you wouldn't want the white population to be disincentivized and disenfranchised and be told to keep back either. But it's the latter that is now occurring. It's a ladder that's now the norm. I think there is something, and we have to think very openly and very frankly about this, there is something deeply disturbing for the future of a society. if it says to its majority populations, hang back, hold back, shut up, keep quiet, go about life as

inoffensively as possible, and die without any carbon emissions. I just think it's such a tragedy. to see that as opposed to something which motivates and generates and says, look, whatever it is you're good at, whatever your competency, whoever you are, strive like hell, fight like hell, and discover like hell, and we're all going to be better on the other side. Yeah, that's right. I'll be dead on the other side.

The insidious aspect of this, of course, is that it all originated from good intentions, right? And that's the problem, which is those words, diversity, equity, inclusion, sounds like something you can't. How could you ever argue against any of those terms? And so it is clear that when the minority, and as often happens throughout history, and understanding history, as we point, as you point out, and I shouldn't feel is really important. And recognizing that it's history and not present is also weekly important. But, you know, minorities have suffered.

And then gays have suffered and women have suffered and women, even when they were in minority. And so and and trans and people with with ambiguous sexuality in different many ways. And and and and so it's easy to understand that the the desire to ensure that minority rights are upheld. But that that's not equivalent to taking rights away from the majority or anyone else, whether, you know, or from other minorities, whether it's Asian Americans in the case of, you know, American education or Jews or. Or anyone else. Yeah, I mean, but if, you know, if we take a step back in our area and say, like, imagine if, for instance, Silicon Valley Bank was dedicated really only to being a really good bank that optimized profits fits, you know, people deposited in it, was a safe loan, you know, and so on. imagine if it had focused on that. I'm not saying it would still be going,

but it would have a better chance. Imagine for that argument. I'm not sure I buy the other. They were really big on being the number one diversity bank and everything else. I suspect it was bad business practice as much as much as a, maybe they didn't have their eye on the ball. But, you know, it's hard to do. I know you have been one member of the board who understood finance.

That was a problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But my point is that if you go through all the various, various things. And I basically think when it, I've agreed my friend, Vivek Ramoswami, that effectively much of what, you know, what he calls woke capital is just sort of whitewashing. You know, I mean, like, if you're an energy, we all know, if you're an energy company and you're dealing fossil fuels for the last 20 years, all of your advertisements are, you know, about just wanting to make the planet greener, you know, endless pictures of trees and things,

you know, you never see a pumping oil well. Yeah, that's right. that's not popular anymore. But it's the same with all these corporations, all these banks and things. They worried after 2008, in my view, in particular, rightly they should have been worried that the crowd was going to come for them. And they spend the next 15 years pumping money into social justice programs and talking about how great they are about gays and covering their branches in rainbow flags

and all this crap. And, you know, it is a sort of whitewashing. And also I have a sort of contempt for these people because they were never there when they were actually civil rights to argue for. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's after a fact. It's easy. They came afterwards in order to... It's virtue signaling, which it's a way to protect yourself of virtue signaling, which a term I learned actually from...

I'm embarrassed to say from my friend Ian McEwen when he was talking to me about that experience I had. But... Virtue signaling as a word was invented at the spectator, by the way. Really? My colleague, Bartholome was one who came up for that very necessary. It's a brilliant term. And it is the popular defense. And it's what drives the cowardice of university presidents, of heads of scientific societies,

and government officials that you can get ahead of the game by going overboard to point out how sympathetic and how you are. And it was, it's, I view it as the intellectual air of the, I mean, this is not new either to me, you know, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the 50s, it was, you would protect yourself by pointing out in someone else as a communist, right? And, and, and, and virtue, part of virtue suddenly is, is, is saying how good you are, but unfortunately in the modern world, especially in the modern world governed by social media, the other half of virtue

signaling is pointing out not just how good you are, but how bad they are. Joel. And that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the, the, that's the, it's evil part of it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So come back to hardware versus software. That was the, the, the success.

And yet it's also been the bane in certain areas. Yeah. Because what, one, sometimes it's true and sometimes it may not be true. And if we don't know the answer, then requiring it to be hardware when it's true, hardware when it's when it's useful for you or software when it's useful for you for example and and i think you make it quite the the topic you talk about after gays women so it's advantageous for the gay community to show that being gay is hardware yes but it's advantageous for the for the for women to say many of if that either to say a there's no differences or b if there are it's software

rather than hardware. And in both cases, while there's evidence one way or another, we may not be certain of the exact answer either way. Yes. I mean, the reason I land on this hardware software thing is simply to say that I think that in the current era where people don't think we have a guiding ethos, we do. And this is about the most fundamental guiding ethos,

which is that you don't prejudice against somebody because of something over which they can have no. Exactly. And that's a very important ethos. It's like, why don't you, I don't know, why do we recognize now, for instance, as we didn't until, you know, a few decades ago, that, I mean, for instance, taking a piss out of somebody for some sort of some handicap. So, yeah, but basically we, we sort of came to that realization at some point in recent decades that if it's hardware, something you can't do anything about, you don't, you don't prejudice against people for that. One of the unforeseen consequences of that is, yes, is people wanting things to be hardware that might actually be software. I mean, there are several chapters I could have added to the madness of crowds, which I might do in a future book.

There are obvious ones like addiction issues. A lot of addicts would like the addiction to be hardware because it to some extent absolves them of personal responsibility. On the other hand, it's tricky because, you know, we do know that, for instance, certain hereditary things like alcohol, you know, like alcohol, a propensity to our towards alcoholism in the family is definitely a thing. So that's tricky. Another one is mental health, which I did think of biting off in the manners of crowds and those was a book in itself. But mental health, which is also about the only way that a straight white male can get onto the victim hierarchy thing is to say, I'm certified bipolar or something. Oh, my God, that's good. Not only bipolar, but certified.

That's fantastic. It's the best. Where can I get a certificate like this? Yeah, exactly. You've put up in your wall. I'm on the wall framed. My parents on either side, my holding a home with a gown. And all that stuff, you know, is also, it's like there's a desire for, I mean, I think

that all, you know, mental illness is something that we've become increasingly understanding and knowledge all about and that's all for the good. But it wouldn't be for the good if, for instance, anyone who ever had any mental health problems was forever able to turn it into a hardware issue and therefore sort of make themselves a victim throughout their lives. Yeah, which is what, yeah, I mean, every, yeah, well, which is in some sense, again, I'm jumping all around, but in some sense what is becoming the norm, right? Everyone is, everyone now has mental health issues if they hear certain words. Suddenly, it used to be okay if you were an adult, if you weren't a child,

to be able to hear things you didn't want to hear or ignore them or argue against them. But now it's a mental health issue and that everyone seems to be allowed to suffer from. And it's ridiculous. You know, but again, it's hard, Lawrence, isn't it? I mean, I wouldn't like to be a diagnostician in some of these circumstances. For instance, PTSD, which I have a great interest in, a lot of friends who are. spent a lot of time of wars and things. Yeah.

And PTSD is a very, very, you know, important realization that it exists. Now people claiming to have it, it seems laughable. I mean, you know, like you weren't in the trenches of World War I. Yeah, yeah. You were Brandeis. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Whatever. You had a professor ignore you.

Yeah. And, but it's possible that, if you're brought up in a very fragile environment in which you think that every one of your moves is constantly documented by your peers on social media and all this sort of thing and that every action in the world is impossible to understand where it will go and you don't know you know you've got even less idea of your future and even more idea than we ever had before of what the present looks at you know maybe some of these kids do have a sort of form of PTSD But it's yeah it's it's you're right and in fact it's not knowing I think as you say if if we've decided what the answer it's not just knowing what the answers are but of deciding what the answers can't be as you say if we have decided what the answers cannot be or what answers we could not cope with yeah then seems to be little point beyond a fondness for truth in asking good questions and that's the again we come back to the area which sort of motivates me to talk about this as this intersection of science and

art and culture is that is that if and that's always been my problem with religion is that it assumes the answers before it asks the questions at least organized religions and and and that whenever you do that then then there's no room for discussion or learning and and when you when that comes into the secular realm as well where you know what the answers cannot be because they would not be acceptable to you or what answers we cannot cope with which, you know, I'm purposely going to jump ahead to things that I know are later on. This notion that is now becoming in the context, you talk about it mostly in the context of trans, but also when it comes up in the context of race, we see now this becoming part of the accepted hierarchy of science,

saying there are certain questions you cannot ask because there are certain answers we could not cope with. and and two examples that come up with which aren't in your book more recently than your book but but are that i've written about are examples of of a paper written for the national academy of sciences by two psychologists from from the michigan state university which is about police shootings and race okay and they eventually with asked for the paper to be withdrawn after have been appeared. First of all, they were casting at the university and the vice president for research at Michigan State who'd supported their research was removed. He's a physicist. He was removed because of complaints that were made by physicists that he was supporting this stuff.

But we're still, they asked for being removed from that because they said they were worried about being misused and, you know, that the answers they would come up with couldn't be coped with. So therefore, they should never appear. Similarly, the, the journal, natural nature behavior, and I have big problems with most of nature journals lately, but, but nature was used to be a very, and it still is in many ways, a reputable science journal, and so is science, all the science has become much more politicized than nature. I think the journal science, but nature behavior specifically said, we will not publish articles that may be construed to be harmful to certain groups, independent of whether the results are right or not.

I don't know if you're aware of that, but that is just how that's once, how can that be? It's especially disturbing because it shows, first of all, there's absolutely no chance of getting to the truth. Yeah, exactly. Zero. I mean, it just clearly means that truth is not your guide. It's something else. It's like, what would you call it? Social containment strategy. The second thing is, I just glanced down to my phone,

because I made a note to this to myself the other day. This is sort of my view. It may well be your view as well, I suspect it is. And it's completely counter to all of the ideas of the day. But let me just quote this to you. I think we ought to read only the kinds of books. that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with the blow on the head, what are we reading it for?

We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. Who wrote that? That was Franz Kafka in a letter. in 1904. Oh, that's brilliant.

Isn't that brilliant? A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. Yeah, wow, that's, wow, that is, yeah, that's fantastic. I mean, that is exactly the opposite of the world you're describing. Exactly. And it's the world, I mean, it's, what's sad is it started in a world of undergraduates who somehow felt that they should not be exposed to think. that they did not want to hear and you can understand that because they're

children okay I mean they're for the most part they're learning how to be adults you hope they're learning how to be adults unfortunately in modern universities they're not but what's sad is when that that permeates the actual establishment that should be involved in exactly the opposite I used to say the purpose of science and now I say the purpose of education but they're both same the perfect purpose of education is to make us uncomfortable purpose of science is to make us uncomfortable because because if we're not uncomfortable, we're just, we're not learning. We're not pushing our boundaries.

And the whole point of being comfortable and not is an anathema to learning. This is the, Lawrence, this is a failure of the adults to communicate this. And the educational community is when it's, you know, that's what scares me. And I think we should be scared of. It's okay when largely ignorant undergraduates think they should be coddled or they shouldn't or they should be safe. And by the way, you know, when I did speak at the Oxford Union online, you know, I've debated on two debates there, one live and one on line. I was, I actually was a debate on the question, we are all religious. And I actually took the positive side. A bunch of my atheist colleagues were on the other side because I do think,

one of my arguments was if we weren't all naturally religious, we wouldn't need science. But also the fact that we see the people who aren't religious, in the canonical sense, it become religious. We need religion, secular religion, and we're seeing it. But one of my, one of this undergraduates has put on, you know, how they do to the Oxford Union, they put some undergraduates on your side, was talking about the safetyism, the fact, as, and pointing out something very interesting, which I hadn't thought of before, which is true, which is this notion that's this, of giving students safe spaces,

has produced a group of students who feel far less safe. because there's never an issue before. But now by being presented with the possibility of a safe space, you're always wondering if you're unsafe. And that's a really serious problem. I'm afraid it's the same thing with mental health to a great extent. If everyone is told that they suffer from it all the time, and you will increasingly actually question whether your anxiety is a normal,

reasonable anxiety or actually a medicalized. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, and it's sad when these mental health issues become sort of part of the norm and similarly when these things that no one should question about the question of whether you should question and whether you should be able to question and whether whether scientific truth should not be disseminated because it might appear to someone to be harmful is. It's so awful because, I mean, life is so harmful, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what makes it wonderful.

So harmful. Every step is a step toward the grave. I just was reading a quote, and I can't, and I told you, I'm awful remembering quotes, but by actually Helen Keller, which was saying something like you couldn't experience joy if life wasn't, you know, was always joyous. Of course, it's the same thing, you know, with death. I mean, yeah, reasonable assessment of death

your head. Don't don't let it preoccupy yourself, but keep a reasonable recognition of it in your in your head and you'll live better. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And well, look, I'm going to jump at, there's so many, as I say, part of the presumably maturity is being able to pick things in spite of the fact there's everything I want to talk to about. We'll jump at to women since I want to hit all the points and then brief my hope is to spend, you know, hit all the points quickly now, go a little bit of the War of West and then I do want to return to the sublime. I want to return the poetry at the end. It's interesting that you point out when you talk about women,

you talk about, I assume a mutual friend, certainly a friend of mine, I'm a friend here, Steve Pinker, who I have great respect for. And in his book, The Blank Slate, he said things that nowadays would not be, it's amazing he hasn't been, I guess people still try and cancel him.

But we can't work. Back in his earth. Yeah, yeah. It's amazing. He just points out that it's just obvious. He said he seems confident when he's noted that gender has become a hot button issue, but he's confident that the scientific view would win out. And he talks about, you know, this difference is sex.

And you point out, you know, and as you say, as Pinker said, things are not looking good for the theory that boys and girls are born identical except for the genitalia with all other differences coming from the way society treats them. And I think the next sentence is except that less than two decades later they are. And I think you call it one of the biggest self-delusions. The societal self-delusion over biological reality is just one in a whole series of such delusions that our societies have decided to engage in. Worse is that we've begun trying to reorder our societies, not in line with facts we know from science, but based on political falsehoods pushed by activists in the social sciences,

which comes up in the case of race as well. he'll talk about the nonsense of critical race theory. Basically, I think what we're struggling with in sexual differences, differences in sexes, and any differences between racial groups is we don't know what we would do with the data. We just, we're so worried that, it goes about something you mentioned earlier, somebody bad will come along and misuse the data. Well, somebody bad will always come along.

Yeah. And you know, this reminds me of something at this topic. It's topic because I just wrote about it. And it surprised me and shocked me. And you talk about how Silicon Valley is, you know, how Google and others have this selection effects of determining what you're allowed to hear and such. We all know that.

But it's gone into chat BPT, which is, I wrote a piece on this. When it came to gender, I give a dialogue with chat DPT, where chat GPD basically says, I won't report to you these studies because they may be harmful or offensive. And that's got to be programmed in there, right? I mean, By the way, one of the things that started to obsess me in recent years, Lawrence, is a way in which in field after field there is a form of stasis. You know this very well from the academy. People think that there's a sort of stasis only in their field, and then they discover it seems to be existing in others. The most likely cause for it, in my view, is that we have already cut off certain fields of inquiry.

Yeah. And I mean, let's quickly do the exercise on one of the great, perhaps the greatest flowering of thought that ever existed, which is in ancient Athens. We could, this miracle of thought, which has never been equal in the history of any of the field, we could ask why it happened. And some of the answers would be ones which would not be positive if we said we wish to replicate it. For instance, there's no doubt that the great philosophers partly had more time to philosophize because they had slaves. Yeah, yeah. Women definitely had a secondary position in the society. And so many of the material discomforts that many of us have to find our own answers to in our lives in the 21st century were being dealt with by the

women and the philosophers and the mathematician there are questions about how society was set up in ancient Athens that that you could say because of the these conditions among others existed and we wouldn't want to replicate that today. Yeah. So you might come to a conclusion, but you could just look and say, look, this is just what it was and learn everything. you can from it. My worry in our day is that we have decided we have decided to cut off a set of things

and as a result are causing ourselves in field after field to be in some kind of form of stasis and the most dangerous one is that one of people couldn't cope with this idea because if Newton had

thought like that you know, if everybody else had thought like that Exactly. There's a great example that I learned from a colleague. This is from the Royal Society. It's a, it's a fascinating example to show what would have happened. And it's Van Loyenhoek, I think is how you say, his name. The person who developed the microscope was reporting to the Royal Society. And he first discovered sperm. Right. And he wrote to that Royal Society more or less said, you know, here are my results, but if they're too offensive. you know, don't publish them. And of course, they publish them. But, you know, he asked the question, can people cope with this?

And it's a wonderful example in the history of science that somehow in the whatever it was, the 16th century, probably, 17th century probably, they were more, the editors of the oil society were much more advanced than the editors of the Royal Society of Chemistry are now who have also said, we can't have any offensive words or ideas

published in our journals. I mean, because, I mean, among much else, you're well-known as an atheist. But, I mean, this must trouble you, I'm sure, as it does me, which is that what if, what if the, I mean, there might be a possibility in our own age that one of the things that is cutting off some of these avenues of inquiry is, in part, a form of atheistic certainty, which fears that if we admit to gaps, the religious are going to. the rush in and give us God again. Yeah.

I mean, I'm sure that exists in a certain segment of the population, but I think, um, I think, especially since the real definition of atheism is, you know, is not that you're certain there's no God. It's just that you're not convinced there is.

And by any argument that's ever been made. And then, and so, so, uh, again, the confident atheists are the ones who will say, I don't know, but here's a, you know, but there's no evidence and you present me evidence. I mean, I've had this discussion with the evolutionary biologists where you definitely get to a bit

where the atheist evolutionary biologist is very wary about the bits that are difficult. In case, in case the religious sneak in and say, ha ha, that gap is God. You know, I just mention it. Well, that's where I did that little meme that I've now seen written on cops, which I say lack of understanding is not evidence for God. It's just evidence of lack of understanding. So the good evolutionary biology should say, yeah, we don't understand it. But that always amazes me, especially as a scientist, is that claim you don't understand this,

which, and by, as a consequence, implied is you will never understand this. Love, you don't understand love. You'll never understand love. Well, it's true we don't understand. There's a lot we don't understand, but that doesn't mean we'll never understand it. So it's true that there are various aspects of evolution that are puzzles. And to pretend there are no puzzles because you're worried about saying there are puzzles. And you think that'll open up the regard is a dangerous alley.

You're absolutely right. Instead of saying, yeah, but if history is any guide, the things we don't understand, we can eventually understand. And I need, and I've had this discussion with my friend Martin Ries, whether he thinks there may be some limits to human understanding. there may be, but what is wonderful is that I haven't seen any yet. And that's remarkable that we haven't come up against any brick walls. We may come up against momentary brick walls.

And my one disagreement with you about stasis being caused by closing off questions, which I absolutely agree occurs. I think in science, if I were to look at that analogy, the stasis often occurs because we haven't yet come up with the right questions. It's not that they're closed off. It's no one has yet asked the right question. So in a sense, it's being closed off because everyone's, you know, following along on a trajectory.

But it's not as if we'd say you can't ask those questions. No one's been smart enough to come up and say, hey, this is the good question. And that's what usually causes progress in science. Is someone coming up with the right question? Yes. I saw your master something last summer, and he said something funny at one point. He said, he said basically, unless it breaks the laws of physics,

everything's possible. In fact, actually, someone just asked if they could quote me in a book where I more or less said something even stronger. Unless it's shown to be impossible, it's guaranteed to happen. And I think that's even stronger. So someone's writing a book and they asked if they, I don't know why they asked if they could use it because, of course, they could use it. But that's what's amazing about living in a complex, large, an old universe is that, as no matter how implausible it is, if it's not impossible, it's happened. And that's amazing.

And of course, it's even more amazing if there's a multiverse, but we can get into that some other time. But it is one of the things that I find, never ending source of surprise and awe for me as a scientist when I look at the universe, is it, yeah, I mean, it's just, I mean, we look at planets. I mean, it's just amazing to see the configurations that we once thought couldn't happen. because they were just so remote, but they happen all the time. And, you know, and it's just a pact of a big universe.

I mean, stars explode once every 200 years in our galaxy, but, you know, there's one exploding every second somewhere in the universe and it's responsible for you and me being here. And, and even stranger, give you another one that'll, I mean, it's not what I planned to talk about in this thing, but it's something that I gave a lecture on that amazed me when I first learned it. You know, I don't wear any gold, but I, but if you, you may have some gold on it. you. But we just learned. Yeah, okay, but they, they, but it's amazing is it was a big mystery in physics, how you got

beyond iron in stars. And one of the places we thought might be is this most, most implausible things with these two massive things called neutron stars, which are stars that have collapsed to the size of London and are so dense that a teaspoonful is a hundred billion tons. And, And two of them could collide and it was proposed perhaps that in that in that very exotic situation, you could argue that the big thing called neutron capture and you'd produce gold. And when when these, the new LIGO detector detected the collision of two neutron stars, which happens very rarely in the universe, but all the time because rare is happening all the time. other telescopes immediately were able to look at that thing and look at the two neutron stars

and look at the radiative decay and saw the creation of two Earth's mass worth of gold in that system so those people are wearing gold and this has to be silver but those people wearing gold every atom and that thing came from one of the most implausible events that you could imagine which the collision sometime isn't that amazing I mean isn't that mind-blowing Anyway, it's not what I was planning to talk about. But that's the kind of thing that is amazing. And we should be open-minded to not knowing it until we do. And wait, of course, till there's evidence.

Because that was a theory about neutron capture in these things. And I just seemed plausible to me because, yeah, it was in one place. But then the evidence comes out and you're willing to accept it. And so let's go back to self-delusion of women, which is maybe a lot less interesting than gold and neutron stars. but but um i i do want to ask you one or two questions there and and then and then we'll jump to race and trans and then and then i think we'll go to poetry we'll have to we'll have to we'll have to forget the the war in the west which isn't and well well actually we won't completely because i

wanted to talk about one or two issues where you and i disagree about him because i think it's important yeah um but one of the things that interests me about talking about feminism in the context of self-solution and do you know janice fiamengo do you know she is yeah yeah and and and And it's interesting me, because you talk about the first, second and third waves of feminism, and we all agree by the fourth wave of feminism, it's just become equivalent to male hating. But she's argued that it's true, that was historically true from all the waves. And it's a fascinating thing. I wonder if you've thought about that issue.

I say that the rhetoric is the most important thing to judge it by. Yeah, okay. And as I think I say there, if the suffragettes had said, do we demand the vote, all men are scum, I'm not sure the franchise would have been gained. Yeah, yeah, okay. It's a very unappealing way that the fourth-boy feminists have found to talk about men. Yeah, all men are trash, as you point out, which is interpreted. Oh, well, they don't really mean that, but by the sympathetic. people, but that's what they...

Again, I mean, it's such a disingenuous way of arguing. You know, if a man said all women, all women are whores, and then women said, I'm sorry, I go, I don't mean all women are whores. I'm just saying all women are whores. Yeah, yeah. No, we're judging you by your words. Yeah. So the people who say, when I say all men are trash, I'm not saying they're trash, it means

something else. Yeah, yeah. I haven't got time for people trying to work out their own thoughts and what kind of. comes out of their own mouths. But yes, that is, I don't, I don't agree that that sort of misandry was always there. I think it always had the potential to lurk, for sure. And it did lurk in some hearts, but not as part of the movement. Well, and one of things, and I, you know, for lack of time,

and I'm not going to start reading all of your quotes, which I like to read. I'll just go through some of the ideas, is that, I mean, one of the issues that you raised in your women's section is this notion of same but better the requirement to be the same instead of accepting that there are differences as if saying that there are differences their biological differences

is heresy and and we're so confused about this I mean actually in the wake of the collapse of SVV and others I was reminded again of something I mentioned the man's of crowds which is what Christine Lagarde said

at the IMF after the Lehman Brothers, which she said repeatedly for the next decade. If Lehman Brothers have been Lehman's sisters, maybe this wouldn't have happened. And I think this is a very important question to ask, which is, in which case you're saying that women are different, that women would behave differently. Now, what are the differences that you mean? And these may be real, or they may be imagined. But the real ones would be women are less big on risk.

Now, there is plenty of data to support that. And what's more that men are more risk tolerant in things like the market. So, okay, let's agree that women are less risk-taking than men. Does that mean that you should comprise a board of 50% men and 50% women in the hope that the 50% men will be rampaging ahead to try to do dangerous things? and the 50% women will be holding them back and saying, whoa, there, Sonny. Don't invest it all on that. Maybe, but no one's actually saying that. But also, if you say that, then you open yourself, like it's always the case,

you open yourself to getting bit in the butt, by literally and metaphorically. Because then you say, well, if you really believe that women are less risk-taking, maybe maybe then women are not as good in certain fields because they require and then and of course then you'll find that that's a heretical thing to say right if you if you really make a claim you've got it's either true or it isn't and you've got to accept the implications of it everywhere it's not that you're not allowed to it's once again you're not allowed to say yeah this is true here but we won't even consider that other case because we couldn't cope with that answer right no no it's it's a very, it's a strange fallacy we've fallen into in our time. Yeah, the equal but better is the way

I say it. Yeah, yeah. And it's also, you point out, and this is a touchy area, but I want to at least touch on it. You know, you talked about, you know, how the world has changed and you talk about Hollywood and Letterman and Colbert and stuff, but, and actually a great quote from Jordan Peterson. I have to talk about workplace relations, which we'll get, which I want to discuss briefly. But you point out as something, which is how much has changed, which is, which that famous scene from Indiana Jones where the young student, you know, who would not fall in love with Indiana Jones as a professor and has love you on there. And you point out, well, that was kind of a meme, you know, to believe that that, that,

you know, a young woman would want to, you know, not only be attracted to a professor, but would be in a position to want to seduce that. That was kind of a. And yet now that would be an anathema to argue because it's a question of power. Yes. And it would and and and of all sexual relations through the prism of power is disastrous. Yeah, as you point out, that's what that's how you view power. But but I want to ask you a question in that sense that that having, having,

arguing that or arguing that it's only a question, of power is demeaning, isn't it demeaning to women to say that they don't have the capability of having social power when in fact, as far as I can tell, all evidence is that women actually do have more social intelligence than men, more awareness of what's going on in the, around them, in their social interactions. And to say that there's somehow helpless vessels that can be manipulated by men is demeaning to women. Oh, I mean, and it's just visibly untrue for all the women in our lives that we know. I mean, it's visibly and true, but it's become the, it's become the mantra now that, and for,

and the example I wanted to give, which relates to these complexity of workplace relations, which is such a tragedy is, is, um, famous geneticist, David Sabatini, who was, who was removed from, you know, potentially Nobel Prize winning work. and his lab because he had a relationship with another woman in another lab who turned out to be not as senior as he was. And but then what's amazing to me is, you know, you talk about the fact that 10 to 20% of people find their partners in the workplace in the workplace. So for and what amazed me is that a lot higher, but that's still, yeah. But this is what shocked me is the Whitehead Institute, which removed him inappropriately, I think. think most people have looked at the story would argue.

And by interestingly, the head of the Whitehead Institute, as is the head of the Howard Hughes Foundation, which also removed them. Both are women who by the way married their former students, okay, or postdocs, interestingly. Interestingly, but the Whitehead Institute, which I think must have 1500 people, institute a policy that you were not allowed to have social relationships with anyone else who works at the Institute. I mean, isn't that complete lunacy?

What's her name? The woman who wrote the book, Tiger Mom. Oh, yeah, yeah, from Yale, who happened to know, I forget her name now. It was at Yale? She was teaching some classes. She talked to out in the law school at Yale. She's still teaching law school, Yale. She got into some mad assault on her character

because she was inviting students for tea at her house. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This was thought to be inappropriate. This is how you socialize students. But now you'd never do that. And I mean, I've got, you know, and yeah, and I, it's, it's absolutely ridiculous that you could have a, invite a male student for tea, but if you invite a female student for tea, you'd never do. No, no colleague, it would be. Mad.

Academic suicide to do that now. Yeah. But it's, it's, it's a very interesting thing also, because it demonstrates that there's, we don't have the understanding we had more than 2,000 years ago, about the nature of the dynamics in students. Yeah, but the fact that adult, but the fact, probably which you're right, 2,000 years ago, which the Greek poets and writers knew about, which is that human adult relations are complicated.

And, and, and, and, which is why they're so interesting. Yeah, exactly, which is why they're so interesting. And, and, and so to argue both oppression because of, of lack of power, seeming power, when in fact, as the Indiana Jones example gives, there's many different kinds of power. And to argue that a young woman, as you say in your book somewhere,

that to be young and attractive and doesn't imply any power, is just to be ignorant reality. Crazy unaware of reality. Yeah, we're both going to get in trouble for that. I certainly will. But anyway, let's go to race and then I want to zip through.

Because I certainly want to, I want to at least point out the claim that it's not, it's obvious now. You begin your discussion of race with the famous, the beautiful speech of Martin Luther King. And the famous claim that, you know, we hoped his children would be judged by the quality of their character and not the color of their skin. I'm paraphrasing, and you probably remember it exactly because you do those things. But the, let's see, yeah, I mean, here, yeah, one day they will live in a nation where they'll be not judged by the color of the skin, but by the content of their character. And we've moved to a situation where it's exactly the opposite. And as you point out, beautifully somewhere, the actual definition of racism is exactly equivalent. to what's being proposed in an effort to fight racism. Yes, it's, again, we were so close.

We were so close. Yeah. To a sort of reasonable approach to this. And it, like these other issues, it went skewing off into the distance, off the tracks, just as it should have drawn into the station. It's very sad. I mean, I know we don't have time to talk about the war. on the West, but the war on the West, I sort of go into some of this in greater depth.

It's very sad to me the way in which America in particular has re-racialized its society and the aim about racialism. And you just see it everywhere. I've just done a short tour of campuses in the US. And I was struck by a number of things. One was the timidity of a lot of students. There's the sheer, again, it goes to that thing that maybe they're right, you know, to be timid in this era. But the timidity of them, the being told to be holding back. Most of them, you know these studies that have shown that a majority of them are afraid to speak their mind. Yeah. I mean, we're, and and actually this is probably a place to say it. You say that in the context of race, that basically the safest places in the world are the places where the worst crimes are where it's claimed the worst crimes are happening.

And there's no place safer than a modern liberal arts college. It's the version of Moynihan's law, you know, about human rights and human rights abuses and claims of human rights abuses. Unfortunately, claims of racism happen in the place is least likely to be committing racism. I do joke that if you were to try to set up the Fourth Reich, then a college in Oregon would seem a most unlikely place to try to start it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But that's become the norm is that students are afraid in what should be the safest place in the world to speak your level. mind. Oh, and to try things out. To try. I mean, that's what universities and further.

Four years of being completely safe to try out anything, intellectually, sexually, emotionally, everything else. And it's a tragedy that they become the exact opposite. Yeah, and that's how you learn. I have a very shorthand version. I remember when I was a student, David Irving, the Holocaust and I was due to come to speak of the Oxford Union. I remember raring with my friends in the bar at my college about I was of the opinion that he shouldn't be allowed to speak

because if there was even one Jewish student who was offended, that means that, you know, and that was my view at the time, I thought. I'm crowded out with friends, and I have a different view now, which is that he should be allowed to speak and be countered by historians who know better who expose him. Yeah, I mean...

Which has happened since. So, you know, but yes, it's tragic. I thought that the timidity of the students in American colleges I've come across is very worrying. But another thing is just the prevalence of race as the discussion underneath every discussion. It's very disturbing. It's not what I think most of us in the true sense, who are liberal-minded, hoped we would be stuck on. And again, I think there's just a profound opportunity cost. Oh, tremendous.

It's tremendous. It's so, it's what I'm older than you, a fair amount, I suspect. but it's you know I'm a child of the 60s and and it when I look back and I think when I so I was a teenager in the 60s and I never imagined the world 50 years later you know I thought these things were a thing of the past it would have ever thought that not just the the the show of neo-puritanism but the the focus on things that we thought at that time were completely irrelevant. Well, imagine I mean, you know, imagine if we've been speaking

in 1999, Lawrence, on E millennium, and we've been talking about this new thing, the internet and computers and we can get access to, in 20 years I have access to almost any book, almost any formula. You'll be able to go online and have classes from Yale for free on, we would think,

my God, what is not possible in the 21st century? Fast forward, 2023, nobody's willing to say what a woman is, and America's disagree being about the date of its founding. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, but we've become stupid. Yeah, absolutely. And and and the other aspect is that while the internet is a fountain of all knowledge in some ways, it's also the fountain of misinformation and the problem. And that's why I've argued actually we have to change the teaching of the way we educate. It used to be facts were relevant,

but that's irrelevant in teaching now. What we need to teach kids, kids is how to sift the misinformation from the information. That's the skill of the 21st century. And another thing, which I wrote about recently in a column, which is the era of access to information is incredible. It's something our forebears dreamed of, but you also have to have wisdom. And wisdom comes from thinking about facts.

Thinking about facts and being exposed to things that make you uncomfortable because you can't gain the wisdom if you're in this in this echo chamber of comfort your whole life. Wisdom comes from from being challenged in many different ways and often tragically challenged, I think. And I know, yeah, and that's, I've experienced that my life in many ways. I will say when you talked about, it seems to me when you talked about one Jewish student being offended. In an article I just wrote that just appeared, which is titled, and I don't know if I sent it to you,

I meant to because it's amazing for someone, I was a writer like me or you, there are articles entitled Words Don't Matter. And I'd like to send it to you because I know, I love seeing your eyes go like that. Because, of course, words matter to us. But my point is that words don't matter because if you could ignore them.

I mean, words only matter if they have an impact. And of course, words don't matter as a mantra right now that's used for censoring. For words matter because they can offend. And the point is, if they offend, it's your choice. It's not the word. The words aren't the are not, they're both weapons and attackers. I'll say to you the piece. But the interesting thing was my attitude towards this, partly I think, comes from the fact that I came

from a Jewish family, where the response to what might have been offense or sub or minor subjugation or whatever the word you might want to think was always the the response was always to do it better i saw you know jews not being allowed in place x what would they do they build a better place why and and and and that was a totally different response than saying oh my god i'm you know i can't do anything and you know and of course there's a you know there's a lot of reasons and some of them were material ones for that but but you choose that attitude and i think my response to the fact that the response to being offended is to feel sorry for the is to is to speak out and argue but also to often if someone says some ridiculous name and nowadays where there's more anti-semitism

even though i'm an atheist people still nowadays start talking about my fact that i'm a jew sometimes never used to happen but my response is partly to therefore say they're not worth listening to and also feel sorry for them because they're ignorant but not to feel like i'm somehow victimized by by that and and so So you choose when it's verbal, I mean, it may be, there's many factors and some of them are psychological, but it's a, but it's you, it's you that's your psychological choice. If you're hit with a rock, you don't have a choice. Yeah. But if you're hit with a word, you in some sense have a choice.

That's why in the war in the West I use Nietzsche very carefully, as I always say, if you need to use in need to use them carefully. The genealogy of morals has this terrific insight that I borrow, which is his insight on the person of resentment. And I say that the only answer to resentment is gratitude. And it's the passage in the war in the West I'm proudest of is chapter on gratitude. But I lead up to it by talking about Nietzsche's view of the person of resentment. And the person of resentment needs to have somebody stand over their life. And Nietzsche isn't quite sure who it would be,

but describes it as a secular priest, who stands over the life of the person seeped in resentment and says, there is a person responsible for your failings. There is a person who has ruined your life. The person is yourself. Now, of course, you know, nobody wants to be told that.

It's about the most unpleasant thing you could ever be told, and nobody would want to be the person to tell somebody that. Yeah. But to give the positive spin, on that. You know, there's that beautiful interview that Morgan Freeman gave a few years ago in which he said, I don't know why his interviews are so terrific because he has such as a wonderful wisdom as well as the voice. And I think there's an interview he gave some years ago where the interviewer who was also black said, you know, well, you know, it's all very

well for you to say that sort of thing, but, you know, some people can't get out of the place they're in and all this. And Morgan Freeman just says, he says, that bus leaves every day. And it's such a beautiful thing to say. And at the very least, even if it wasn't true, it's a much better thing to hope is true than that there are no buses. Yeah, absolutely. But it is. And, you know, and of course some people are limited in how many, you know,

if they're on the wrong route and the buses on the other street. But so as I, you know, I point out, you know, when the example I gave the Jews, well, they could afford to, you know, the people I knew could afford to build a better place. And some people don't have those material things. But they nevertheless could, you know, the other example was, you know, of real, it's true that women weren't allowed in universities, but there was a quote on Jews in in science in the United States. And Richard Feynman nearly didn't get into Princeton and only got in.

I wrote a book about Feyman, only got in because when the chairman of the physics department of Princeton wrote the chairman at MIT said, how Jewish is he? And the Premier of America said, oh, he's not very Jewish. It's okay, let him in. But what happened in that field, which had a quota against Jews? What happened? Well, Feynman got in. It was better than the others and eventually led to, you know, Sheldon Glassdown and Team Weinberg.

What happened is the Jews started becoming dominant because they, you know, they could be. And so intellectually, they chose to say, will or, you know, whatever. And so there's lots of potential buses. And but we have to recognize that we have to make sure that, I mean, part of what you said early on, is we have to make sure as a society that the people, that those bus stops exist, that people aren't held back by virtue of something they have no control over. Absolutely. And at the very least to recognize that, you know, and I think, again, Mormon Freeman said this.

But, you know, it's not the case in every country in the world by any means. You know, if you're born in one of the lower casts in India, my God, there are no buses for you in this. Yeah. In America, it's not perfect by any means. In the West, it's not perfect, but there's nowhere else where it's better at the moment. Well, that's your war. That gives us a brief one-minute segment of the War in the West. While I'm not as, while I have more segment about American imperialism than you are, perhaps,

the statement that the West is criticized is often not put in proportion to the countries that aren't criticized for being worse. And I think that's a really important statement to me. The Arctic is on the international stage, you know. Yeah, yeah. Again, you've got to Moynihan's law that countries that have leased human rights abuses will claim the citizenry will claim the most human rights abuses. Yeah, and you point out in that book how that's used against lately in diplomacy against the United States by places like China, saying, well, look what's happening with George Floyd and all that. We have no human rights complaints in China.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's one area we agree about, although I do think that. American Empire is not as been as forgiving. But let's, I don't want to talk about empire. I want to talk for two minutes about things we disagree with and then I want to for poetry. So two things that clearly were wrong in my opinion were the invasion of Iraq, which I used to debate with my friend, Christopher Hitchin and and Brexit.

Give me one minute on each, telling me why I'm stupid. You're probably not wrong in Iraq. I've been asked to write a lot about it on the 20th anniversary and I have actually existed because I started writing something, it was so long, I just, anyhow, maybe another day. Yeah. It is so difficult. It was such a disaster in the end. You know, many people lost a lot of people, and it was hell for the many of the people in the country as well as for the troops. I don't think much was achieved. Some things were achieved. I'm not sorry to have seen the Hussein's go.

No, no one's sorry about that, but let me frame this even clear. It's obvious that it was a failure in a certain way. I don't want to interrupt it, I just want to get to the heart of this. That what bothers me more than it was a failure, because you never know unless you try, if there's a reason to try. What bothers me is at the time is that the rationale was a lie, that everyone knew that there weren't weapons, that there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction. And that was, and to, and to, and to, everybody, the risk of lives of so many people for a lie is

something. Look, everyone apart from the British, American, German and other intelligence agencies. No, the atomic energy agency was making. I was a physicist. It was quite clear. Everything I read. Yeah. Everything I read suggested was no evidence.

The official, I mean, there was an inquiry into the, I mean, for instance, the Chilcock Commission in the UK and I mean, as I say, the German intelligence. agency believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, they were obviously against the war as well. Yeah. But, I mean, as the Chilkine inquiry in Britain found, I mean, there's no, it would have been insane for Tony Blair to have knowingly lied about WMD, knowing that it would be discovered after the war.

There were none. I knew some of the main actors in the war, including slightly the person who your latest book titles lifted from. Yes. By the way, that's why they wouldn't let my, America, my book is not called the known unknowns, because they felt that if I used a quote from Unfeld, it would be, it would be polarizing.

In England, they didn't mind, so it's being, is that in England. It was a great observation of his. Yeah, it was one of, look, the fact that I was not a fan of his doesn't mean he couldn't say anything intelligent. He certainly did. But, I mean, the, in the end, I think that there was terrible hubris. I think that there was,

Many of us had the feeling that Afghanistan wasn't enough revenge for 9-11 and that America had the right to take out another enemy. Saddam Hussein was the most intransigent, religious enemy of the US. And we also were, I mean, I spent time there after the initial invasion. And one of the reasons I'm way away still. from having as settled opinion as I should have is because I saw things then that I mean I can't be completely contrite. I was in northern Iraq when the Kurds celebrated their Nauru's New Year's celebrations one of the first times after the death of Saddam Hussein. And seeing these people all flood out of their houses and dancing in the hills was like something

from Narnia. It was one of the most moving sites I've ever seen. in my life of people actually free for the first time. And I can never forget that, nor can I forget the torture chambers of Saddam Hussein that I saw and knowing the stories of people who are in them. And I suppose my own, for what it's worth feeling in retrospect, has simply been, and I certainly by Syria onwards, had this view that you have to be a lot more careful

than we've been with ever-altering state. status quo because war is Pandora's box and you can't put anything back in and everything, everything can happen. And I've seen enough. Yeah. And generally, war leads to suffering in, I mean, almost in. diplomacy almost always worked better than war, it seems to me. Yes, except that sometimes the status quo is actually as lethal as as, as, as, you just don't know.

And I agree. But as I say, I have very, I'm very conflicted still on it. I think it was all disastrously handled in a tragedy. And yet I can't give up everything that might. Yeah, I understand. I understand that conflict, the conflicted point of view there. Brexit is less conflicted. Interesting.

I still believe it was the right thing to do. I never campaigned or anything like that because I'm not a campaigner. I wrote a long time beforehand why I thought the Britain was better off outside of the EU. I still think that to be the case, but we've had seven years almost of complete ballsing of it up by consecutive British government. And I think the electorate will throw out the Conservative Party at the next election in part because they made such a balls up of post-Brexit period. There were arguments for both sides. There was an argument for the status quo that it was going to muck things up if we left. It was just too much hard work.

I didn't believe that. I thought that sovereignty was more important. I still believe that. I still believe that in the end, as the socialist MP, Tony Ben once said, the set of questions you need to ask anywhere you go in the world to any leader, you know, who put you here, who can get you out, and so on. And by the way, Tony Ben, rather, never said that question about Saddam Hussein or most other leaders in sports.

But anyway, put that aside for a second. The questions were good. And the question of who put you here and who can get rid of you wasn't very clear in my mind. It wasn't satisfactory clear with the European Union and Britain. I thought that it was effectively anti-sovereignty that we couldn't chuck out people who were making laws that overrode our laws. And that this was something that just needed to be righted. And personally, as I say, I think that was still correct. But there is no doubt that all of the things that we could have done,

many of the things we could have done in recent, has been horribly wasted, partly largely through the bad governance of consecutive administrations for prime ministers now. And they haven't taken advantage of the advantages of being out of the common market and the fact that we didn't get any trade deal with the US, which we were trying to get under the Trump regime, Trump government and didn't get in time. And now the Democrats won't give it. to the UK anyway, is a blow. I mean, the hope was, and I think it was a justifiable hope. It's happened with Australia and others, but was that, you know, we would leave the EU, remain on good terms with the EU, but also expand out to our older and closer Anglosphere allies.

I don't think that was mad, but there's one apology I am willing to give on Brexit, which is that I am deeply sorry for the way in which many EU, citizens viewed the vote. I wish that, and I actually said to the government in the days after Brexit, you have to tell EU citizens in the UK, they are not a bargaining chip. They all have the right to stay. We want them. And to my great upset, the government listened and then didn't do what I asked. And I regret that because I think it caused unnecessary bad blood. And led to genuine and passionate misunderstandings of what the British people were actually saying with that vote. Okay, good. I mean, look, I'm interested in your view. I have differing views in some areas, and I'll just put it in two cents in each case in response to what he said.

When it comes to Iraq, I sympathize with everything he said. And I, you know, I used to have this discussion with Christopher, so it's already softened me a little bit. but but um but i but i but i am friends with someone who whose politics i know you disagree with with him no mchomsky um and and and and but i think he makes a number of interesting points and of which i several of which i think are valid but one is if you're allowed to remove if you're if you're just you're allowed to remove governments you don't like then it has to go both ways and why then you can't object whether governments want to remove you and And it's, you know, what gives the United States to write to unilaterally decide what governments, what, what kind of, that's a question. Anyway, it's not an obvious answer.

Well, there is an obvious answer. There is an obvious answer, which is that Noam Tompsey can never avoid being a relativist on absolutely everything. And personally speaking, I think that the government in Washington or London, or indeed even paris is more reliable in this regard than say the government in piongyang yeah okay mr thomsky well i well that i would yeah that i would agree with but i think the point is you have to i guess it comes back to what i said before i think one if one's going to risk millions of lives of people as happened in iraq for you have to have a better reason than just not liking saddam was saying in my opinion and and in particular i view it as as also

So intelligent people cherry-picked the information they wanted to be. It was the example of what's happened, what we've talked about in the book that you talk about. If you know the answer before you ask the question, you're going to get the answer you want. By the way, I mean, there's also this is huge. There was so much, I mean, partly the information we were fed by some Iraqi exile groups and stuff. I mean, there was definitely a misunderstanding of the situation that would be. Then it's when it comes to breakfast, my own my rationale as an outsider are two twofold. One that I viewed I like you know, I like going to London, but I also viewed it as being a

as far as I can tell, the economy was largely based on the fact that economically it was a it was the entryway to Europe for and and I didn't think it was going to bode well economically for London to not be that. So if I so from partisan perspective, if I were there, I would have thought economically it's not necessarily going to be good news. But also as a scientist, if I looked, it seemed to me that England got more from its more coming in from scientific support by being part of the EU, then it gave out. And therefore I thought it would hurt the scientific community. So those were my two sort of personal perspectives of why it seemed me like Brexit wasn't a good idea. On the second, I don't know if the data's in yet. On the first, there has been some drain, but nowhere near as much as people thought.

Yeah, apparently. The city of London is still much superior to Frankfurt, wherever I was meant to flee. Okay. Now, look, that was great. Now let's, again, end with the sublime and after having left the ridiculous. There's two things I want to talk about, two poets briefly. You talked about Elliot, who happens he won my favorite poets? and there aren't a lot of poets I like, but T.S. Eliot is one, and I've,

there's few that I quoted my books, and I've quoted him in two. But you're, I don't know if you want to, I should put you on the spot to recite the beginning of the four quartet that you like. Can you do that? If it's not, I've been written down, but it's a beautiful. The opening of four quartets is time present and time past, that both perhaps contained, in time future and time future contained in time past if all time is eternally present all time is unredeemable what might have been is an abstraction remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation what might have been and what has been points to one end which is all always present footfalls echo in the memory down the passage which we did not take through the

door we never opened into the rose garden and then he goes on my work I'd echo thus in your mind disturbing the dust is on a bowl of rose leaves, but to what purpose I do not know. I've always been amazed by that last bit. Yeah, that last bit. You didn't include it in your piece, but it's, no, I mean, that portrait is really, I actually would have quoted in the section on time. I have quotes. And one of the only reasons I did in my new book is it was logistic. The last time I quoted, Elliot, I had to spend forever negotiating.

with the estate of J.S. Eliot for rights. And so I didn't put that in because I just want to take the time to. You might know the answer to that. There's a word I've been searching for, which I came across years ago and have not since been able to discover, which is a word that actually describes what Elliot was so obsessed by about this thing of the nature of time, of all time being eternally present.

Yeah, it's a wave function of the universe, I think, is what I mean, the point is in quantum mechanics, If you think about it, the wave function universe is in space and time, and it's, and it's, it's a way, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, is, is, is present. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and it's, you can think of this, of time as an illusion, because you happen to separate things into these time slices, but in fact, you know, in a picture of quantum mechanics, the whole history of the universe is, part of a single wave function in time is, it's like saying, you know, it's like space, which it is, and it's just present, just like all of space is present, all of time is present, in one picture of the way from. It's, it's something which obsessed Elliot, and there's always deeply moved me. I mean, even at very early, I was in Boston the other day, and I suddenly remembered, and I said

to my host that there's a weird early poem of Eliot's called the Boston Evening Transcript. Boston Even transcripts are very dull-sounding newspaper that used to come out obviously every evening in Boston. And Elliot's very short poem about it is a beautiful piece of sort of bathos, apart from anything else. At the very end, he says something like, he says, and one would turn and nod, as one would nod to La Rock Foucault, if the street were time,

and he at the end of the street. And I said, cousin Harriet, here is the Boston evening transcript. script. It's a wonderful boring evening paper, but the idea that one might be in a street in Boston and turn and there is La Roch Foucault in the street. It's something he clearly had in his

mind all his life. Well, it's a fascinating concept. I talk about it in the first section of my new book is about time, which there are many known unknowns about. And I point out that some people, many people, including physicists think some physicists, think time is an illusion in that sense. I think it's not an effect.

I also point out, I don't think it's a very useful idea. It doesn't, saying time is an illusion doesn't mean a lot to someone who's missed the 550 train to a job interview. It's, it's, it's it, it's it may in some abstract sense mean that, but operationally, time is is, is a vital importance in the universe. And so in and and and and so anyway, it, it, you, I hope you I sent you the PDF. I hope you read that chapter, but there's a lot we don't know about time, but but the reason I brought that up besides I love that and I planned to actually I've used certainly in places where I don't have to publish it. I have this in lectures because I love that part of four quartet, but the part of four quintet that I have quoted, which you don't use is one that moved me much more than the time bit, which is interesting because as a as a as a writer and a literary an English for you pick the quote part on time which is a in some sense, vaguely scientific. I picked the part on words, and I loved his lines. Words strain, crack and sometimes break under the burden,

under the tension, slip, slide, and perish, decay with imposition, will not stay in place, will not stay still. And as a writer every day, I think of that poem, because it's the struggle that I have every day. It's a magnificent passage that as well. I think it's also Burton Norton, isn't it? Yeah, it's also burnt north. I mean, it's so true.

And I mean, I realize whenever I lecture these days, increasingly how true it is, that there are just words you use that have transmogrified in meaning in our own lifetimes, you know, and, and then, you know, you always get somebody who says, you know, I was sorry you didn't spend more time explaining what you meant by X. And, you know, there is no time. Yeah, there is no time for that. But by the way, I began my piece on words don't matter with those words, the quote from him. And another quote in the Burton Norton, which also appears, one line.

Words after speech reach into the silence, which is fascinating because for some people they do, but they only reach into the silence if you let them, I would argue. Yes, well, Elliot believed that poetry was a way to communicate with the dead. dead. W.H. Jordan once said that in an interview, which Seamus Heaney turned into a poem eventually in memory of Brodsky. Orden was at once asked about what poetry was for, and he gave, first of all, Dr. Johnson's answer and then said, I think off the cuff, he said, it's also our principal way to

break bread with the dead. and Elliot believes that. He says at the end of four quartets that what the dead couldn't tell us whilst living, they can tell us being dead. Oh, okay. So I'm learning. That's why I wanted to bring it up.

But I happen to love Elliot without being anywhere near as knowledgeable about him as you are. But the last one I want to end with. I think it's the one before this. But one week ago is Rainer Maria Rilke. who you talk about and you and actually I learned these little bits from you know somehow eternity almost seems possible what a beautiful thing but but one what disappointed me is and it's relevant I think the reason I want to end with it is as I think it's relevant to discussion we have and I'm nowhere near have an encyclopedic knowledge rookie but the lot the the the bit that has all that stays with me is this is the four lines Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final. And I think for me, that captures the whole point of, that's what it's all about with learning and not being offended and bouncing back. And I actually just sent that to my stepdaughter upon her graduating from college because I think it's a beautiful, unbelievably beautiful sentiment. And he was an extraordinary person, Rilke. And as I said in that piece,

I mean, it could frame the great questions and some answers better than almost anyone. Yeah. And such a touching, such a touching figure, trying to ask these great questions at a time when the world had fallen around his ears,

you know. Yeah, and you quote that. That great question, does the outer space into which we dissolve taste of us all? That's one of the ones he quoted. Yes, there's the outer space into which we dissolve taste of us at all. I once said that to a mathematician friend who turned it round on his mouth and just said, that's very good.

Now, I want, I mean, I do enjoy, I'm learning from you and the poetry, because as I say, I'm a Philistine and I keep trying to learn a little more poetry. But I do want to, in the interest of full disclosure, first of all, it's lovely. say that I sound more in my knowledge of Rilke more scholarly than I am. Less people think I'm more scholarly. I learned those lines. Do you know where I learned the lines from Rilke? On the end of the movie, Jojo Rabbit.

That appears at the end of that movie. Well, there's no shame in that. Whenever a mass communication medium like cinema encounters a very small communication medium like poetry as today, only good can come from it, is my view. I think you're right. And only good can come to go back near the end of your book, to that face-to-face, as you point out from DeKopeville,

that made democracy so good. The face-to-face that we've had here has been just delightful for me, and I just appreciate it so much. I hope you enjoyed it too. And I know if people don't enjoy it, then there's something wrong. It's been a great pleasure, Lawrence. I'm so pleased with you. Thank you.

I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation, a non-profit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st century and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world. To learn more, please visit Originsproject Foundation.org.