The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Stephen Fry

Episode Date: September 22, 2020

The incomparable Stephen Fry joins Lawrence to discuss topics ranging from Greek myths and language, to AI, technology, religion, politics, and mental health. See the commercial-free, full HD videos of all episodes at www.patreon.com/originspodcast immediately upon their release.  And please consider supporting the podcast by donating to the Origins Project Foundation www.originsprojectfoundation.org Twitter: @TheOriginsPod Instagram: @TheOriginsPod Facebook: @TheOriginsPod Website: https://theoriginspodcast.com Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

The Origins Podcast is now a part of the Origins Project Foundation. Please consider supporting the podcast and the foundation by going to www.orgensprojectfoundation.org. Hello, and welcome to the Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krause. I'm Lawrence Krauss sitting here at home because of the pandemic. The episode is, nevertheless, with the incomparable Stephen Fry. We recorded this episode before the pandemic, and that's interesting in itself. because several of the topics we talked about now take on a new significance, even though it was relatively recently, it was before the pandemic, before Black Lives Matter,

before George Floyd. And I think with that new historical perspective, some of the things we talked about will take on a different significance. But that's just a small tip of the cosmic iceberg that is the intellect and mind of Stephen Fry. It's hard to adequately describe him. He's a writer, an actor, a humorist, a humanist, an intellectual, a historian, a consummate storyteller, a former criminal, as it turns out, and also a polymath, I guess, is the best way to say it. He is enjoyable to talk to on almost any subject, and we covered so many subjects, ranging from philosophy in ancient Greek to empiricism and technology and knowledge itself,

computers, AI, physics envy, language and the excitement about language, which he clearly manifests so strongly, the nature of teaching, disruption, shame, that's just a small subset of the things we talked about. And what's great is I could listen to Stephen Frye talk about anything, not just the exciting ideas we talked about, I could listen to him, read the phone book for two hours, and I'd be mesmerized. And the whole world is luckier for the fact that we're able to hear him in different ways, as are several major authors.

For example, J.K. Rowling is extremely lucky that Stephen Frye read the entire Harry Potter series for audiobooks. And that's another reason to listen to them, even if you've read them. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, while he may be dead, is nevertheless very lucky that Stephen read the entire opus of Sherlock Holmes stories for audiobooks. And I know Stephen reads regularly for audiobooks because it's hard to imagine a voice you'd like to listen to more. I will cherish this episode as I cherish my friendship with Stephen, and I hope you will too. I think you'll find it one of the most exciting episodes we've done.

So with no further ado, here's Stephen Fry. Well, Stephen, thank you very much for taking time out to talk to me. It's a great pleasure to have you here. You're very sweet. We'll better decide until the end. Yeah, well, okay. At the moment it is, in any case. And, you know, it's an origins podcast, so I usually like to start with people's origins.

but I thought I'd reverse that a little bit because you've written three autobiography so people may know more about your origins than they may... Then they need to. Well, no, no, no, no. It's fascinating. They're all fascinating,

but they may not know the breadth of the man you are. And I want to talk about, we'll get to your origins in a sense, but I want to talk about how it led to growing into the man you are, which is, as I would say, in my definition of you, is one of the loveliest, wittiest, most likable people I know. But in addition to that, you are and have been many things. A comedian, an actor, a film, actors and films, and theater and radio, and a director, a quiz show host, a playwright,

a documentarian with a variety of documentaries from manic depression to gadgets, which I, which I want to get to. And a writer of many things, many columns for newspapers, four novels, three autobiographies, two Greek myth books, and a book on appreciating poetry, at least are the ones I know, and an amazing reader, not just a reader personally, but professionally, the reader of all the Harry Potter books, and the entire Sherlock Holmes works. Those are the ones I've read out loud. I have read more books than that to myself. I just thought I should point that out.

Good, yes, read out loud. And I should also say a writer of technology columns, which I also want to talk about. And finally, a university rector, whatever that is, that's probably the least impressive of all of the things. But what I will do throughout this is quote you because I love your words. And in fact, I want to read a quote from you about your writing, just so I make it clear why I love him. If a thing can be said in ten words,

I may be relied upon to take a hundred to say it. I ought to apologize for that. I ought to go back and ruthlessly prune and pear and extirpate excess growth, but I will not. I like words. Strike that. I love words. And while I am fond of the condensational,

and economical use of them in poetry and song lyrics and Twitter, in good journalism and advertising, I love the luxuriant profusion and mad scatter of them, too. After all, as you will already have noticed, I am the kind of person who writes things like, I shall append a superscribed obelisk thus. If my manner of writing is a self-indulgence that has your grinding in your teeth, then I'm sorry, but I'm too old a dog to be taught to bark new tunes. And as I say, I just love to listen to it. I love to listen to it more when you do it.

in your book, your first book, you begin with boarding school. You begin with a story about going on the train to boarding school. And so I want to ask, of course, and you describe boarding school, especially for Americans, I think, who don't realize what a tradition that is, perhaps, in the UK. But I'm wondering to what extent why you chose to begin there, and have that related importantly to the man that you are now. It's an interesting question. We owe J.K. Rowling an enormous debt because she has explained the nature of English boarding schools to the world,

who are now more familiar with the idea of a train that takes you to this usually old hall, castle, strange buildings, cloisters and other such things with houses. You know, everyone's familiar with Hufflepuff and Gryffindor nowadays. And that's exactly what I was having to explain to people, because only slightly under 7% of British people go to such institutions. though unfortunately they have an enormous reach and influence, as we can tell by looking at our political cabinet to the stage. And yes, I began it.

I was seven years old. I suppose my life didn't begin then, but it's a kind of tradition when, you know, surveying a life and looking at a sentimental education, as you might put it, that that's when you first are thrown on your own. You're let go of the apron strings of Mama and there you are in this strange new world. And I didn't want to overstate it as being a peculiar punishment or an oddity.

It may be odd to other people, but of course, you only have to think a little to realize that every other boy in that school was in the same position as me. And all the children I knew, which is a sad reflection on the lack of diversity of my circle of acquaintance when I was small, but it's, you know, lamentable but true, all the boys I knew and girls I knew. growing up in Norfolk in the countryside in England, were from certain kind of class, if you like, and they tended to go away to school too.

The boys more than the girls, that's a terrible thing, but it was considered that girls could, you know, all they had to learn was cooking and then typing and then marrying. It's an awful thing, but we've got over that a bit, I fear. No, no, I don't fear. I mean, I am proud and pleased to say. But, yes, that's, it's a tradition in literature and in confessional literature and autobiography is in it to start

whether our hero or anti-hero stoutly negotiating his first few days in the strange world of a boarding school and discovering himself. Discovering himself. I think that the sense that I get from that is it was a key, that's where you discover yourself. Absolutely right.

I think it's a kind of negative thing at first. You realize how inadequate you are. They're all the other boys around you. They're ambustuous and they're boisterous and they're strong and they seem to have all kinds of things in common. And you feel an outsider. Later on, you realize that's how everybody feels, of course. But you feel especially, if not cursed,

slightly sort of doom-laden than outcast. And I particularly felt this because I have no skill whatsoever when it comes to physicality. I can't really throw or catch a ball. Certainly couldn't then. I could come to run in a straight line, a collider of a tree or a lamp post. can't sing or dance, play a musical instrument to any proficient or, you know, listenable to, level.

And I can't draw paint. So I really felt like, well, what am I? I'm nothing. But I discovered that language was something I instinctively and always adored and venerated and was surprised to discover that others didn't. They took it for granted or they merely thought it was an exchange system. It was just a way of asking someone to pass the sugar or to shut it. up or, you know, the really, really sort of basic communication device, rather than something that was like paint or music, an art form, something that could be guile and seduce and

delight and fill the mind with images and pictures that weren't there before and enliven and kindle and delight. So that's what I buried myself in, both my own production of ridiculous little compositions, reading in the dormitory at night, telling stories in the dormitry at night making them up. Oh, Stephen, tell a story. Tell a ghost story. To others as well. Yes, that's what I mean in the dormitory.

They were lying there. There were communal dormitories. You didn't share them with one person. They were named after trees. I remember. There was elm and pine and beach and sycamore, I think. Do you remember what you were in? You changed it.

My first term, I was in Sycamore, I remember. And then by the sort of set that, last year, you're in a slightly small and more grown-up one. But, yeah, it... it became, as it were, the thing that held me together was my love of language and of stories and of other languages too. I fell in love with doing Latin and Greek. Well, I want to talk about Latin and Greek. I was impressed with a statement in the book that you read well at three and were writing by four.

And, of course, you never learned your math tables. I was going to give you a quiz, but I decided not to do it. It would be embarrassing. But so the love of language began well, even, I mean, very, very important. early. It really did. And was it internal or? And it's inexplicable. I mean, that's to say, there aren't any, what you might call Aristotelian, necessary and sufficient, you know, explanations for it, because I have a brother who's 18 months older and he's very bright, very wonderful, but he doesn't have the same passion or instinct for language, I think he'd be the first

to admit. And I have a sister, ditto, but they have many talents. And my father was, he died Saturday this year, but he was extraordinarily talented physicist and a musician, mathematician, and he could turn his hand to anything, engineer and so on. My mother's historian, she read history here in London, where we're speaking from at the moment, and she told me stories from the very beginning, and we had a very special bond to do with it. I think she picked up on me a delight in the stories and poems she'd read to me from a very early age, and I just responded to them. it seems to be something that was in my brain and in the way that music might have been for someone else, I guess.

And so, yeah, I was wondering if your mother was the one in some sense. I mean, it's hard to know chicken and egg, whether her reading to you was done because you responded so well or vice versa. Exactly, right. That's why it's so hard to explain to Gloss. But it saved me in the end in all kinds of ways because the rest of my life was very much a turmoil. Well, yeah, I mean, it saved you, well, it saved you in the long run.

If one was predicting your trajectory later on in boarding school, it might not have been where you are now. You were expelled at least twice, that I know. Am I right? Just twice. Yes, I mean, the other ones were just running away or saying, you know, go, you know, we don't think you should come back sort of good comments. Yes, I, along with the charm and usefulness of. of linguistic facility here and there, and certainly, perhaps most importantly,

for academic studies, a terrific memory, and just always had that. Yeah, that's obvious when, yeah. Yeah, it's incredibly good fortune, and I realize that I want, it's because I don't work at it, and I know some people do struggle to remember things,

and they are very annoyed at the fact that I don't seem to, and that's always been the case. So with exams, I could just regurgent. quite happily without really thinking and things just lodged. I say, and of course it's just a fancy analogy, but you meet a fat person, it's because they're greedy and the food stays inside them and you meet someone who has a good memory and the knowledge stays inside them. So I'm sort of fat epistemologically if that makes any sense. But in terms of emotions, I don't know how to describe it.

A passionate, sensual child, full of fear, wonder, love, doubt. And as I developed up into my 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, I suppose it became apparent to me that I had a, you know, the way I wanted to express my love was, was a forbidden one. In other words, I was aware that I was going up what we would now say gay or whatever. And that was very hard, although there's a tradition in the English private schools of all kinds of fiddling about, which I relished and took great pleasure in, sex is a playground, but love is forbidden. Yeah. Love is to boo. Love is scary. And I've always felt this about homophobia, certainly in the sort of political sphere. the religious fear that they don't, you know, they pretend to be disgusted by the physical act,

but that's obvious nonsense because, you know, if they single out anal sex, for example, well, we all know how many more heterosexual relationships there are than homosexual, and just statistically, most anal sex in the world that's going on, is between men and women, whether one likes it or not. So if that's really your objection, then you have to look at the pornographical sites that begin with, you know, Asian anal sluts or whatever and all the horrific things. So really what they're afraid of is love.

And rightly, because love is a violent and extraordinary force in life. Although it's not usually... Well, I mean, it's not necessarily negative, and that's what's so surprising. But it should frighten and it should, you know, because it is so strong, so powerful. And, you know, when you're a child,

you look at a movie and you think, oh, why are they stopping for the kissing? And what's with this? You think, everything is about love. It's so annoying. And then suddenly you get it and you realize that everything is about love.

Everything spins down. I mean, I remember reading the passage about your first love and the power of that. Yes, there's nothing like it is there. And you feel, I felt, aware, I think because I'd read so many books, I knew I'd grow slightly away from it. I'd become cynicized, I'd become a little bit,

you know, just blah, Blase exactly, but that that fierce adolescent fire of that first love would never quite, as the Pope Browning put it, can you ever hope to recapture that first fine, careless rapture? And I hated my future self for betraying. You know, I felt that adolescence is a republic and it's the only one that matters and that I would grow into something else and that I would... You know, I just, I seem to remember a letter you wrote to yourself. That's right.

Telling your future self how good you were then and you... I wanted to pin my feelings and say, this is the real feeling. This is it. The way I respond to nature, now, the way I respond to love, the rawness of my engagement with the world is correct. And that when that rawness gets sealed up by layers of sophistication and civilization and aging, I will be growing away from my real self. It was a furious tempest of emotion, but I see.

stand by it? Yes, and there's a passage here about adolescence that I particularly liked, so I want to read it. He said, perhaps all adolescence is a dialogue between Faust and Christ. We tremble on the brink of selling that part of ourselves that is real, unique, angry, defiant, and whole for the rewards of attainment, achievement, success, and the golden prizes of integration and acceptance. But we also, in our great creating, imagination, rehearse the sacrifice we will make, the pain and terror will take from other shoulders, our penetration of the lives and souls of our fellows, our submission and willingness to be rejected and despised for the sake of truth and love, and in the wilderness, our angry rebuttals of the hypocrisy, deception, and compromise of a world

which we see to be so false. There is nothing so self-righteous nor so right as an adolescent imagination. Oh, goodness, did I write that? Yes. Yeah, you did. As I read this, I keep thinking, I want you to read it instead of the teacher. But I found that incredibly powerful. I'm wondering, to what extent you try to keep that adolescent? I do. I mean, I'm fully aware that I'm an establishment figure, that I'm very lucky.

I'm in this country and in various other parts of the world is sort of celebrity enough at least to get everything I need, tables at restaurants and all the rest of it, and that I have no cause for despair or for feeling rejected by the world and therefore any any postures or you know arguments that I'm still angry or still you know would sound a bit tame but on the other hand I do believe that the mind should keep one in if not in the Republic of adolescence than in that of Bohemia whatever you want to call it in the

eternal student state of questioning doubting fearing not just others, but oneself, you know, doubting one's own certainties, constantly reinventing, rethinking, being unsure and not, you know, not settling in, not bourgeoisifying, if that's the right phrase, you know. And it sounds, and it's taken by the world now to be rather a snobbish thing that you're basically saying that the life of the mind, the life of the artist, the life of the intellectual, the academic is a superior one to those. who, in the words of worth, wordsworth are getting and spending and, you know, living and breathing and just about on the edge of survival because of the economy and because of everything else and they're angry and they feel let down and they think people like ours are in ivory towers and that we don't connect with the real world and that it's easy for us to have these grand opinions, but that we are a sneering coastal metropolitan elite whose time is over.

And maybe they're right. But I can only, I can't pretend to be anything other than. than I am or feel or, you know, go on the track that I sense to be the most productive for my own fulfillment and for the, for living a life that I think is ethical and truthful. Well, you can't ask for more than that. It sounds virtue signaling of the worst kind, which is, of course, anything you say can be interpreted as. But it's not, you know, I'm not a Christ-like in any sense of sacrificing myself in that way.

I wouldn't be talking to you were. The other thing I say if it's in the same book, and I think it is, is that I locate myself and most of us, as it were, most humans, I think, in that anti-hero state, which yearns on the one hand to be accepted to be part of the tribe and with equal fervor in contradistinction yearns to be apart from the tribe. that desire to be socialized and that desire to be a solipsistic individual standing alone. And I think that's a very strong impulse. Oh, yeah. I actually wrote that down. Oh, he did. No, no, because I thought it was very powerful.

But it's interesting that you talk about that wanting to be sort of that state of self-doubt questioning, which I know for a fact, which is why in spite of your, well, we'll get to, your apparent innate lack of ability as a mathematician and maybe as a physicist. it's the spirit of science. And that's one of the things I celebrate about science that I think is so important. And of course, in literature, it should be celebrated in all intellectual endeavors.

Is the questioning, the self-doubt, the recognition that not knowing in some ways is more exciting than knowing. Absolutely. And it's humility before the facts. And I suppose you'd say that's a definition of science and a definition of art is humility before experience, before the experience.

Absolutely. And they're the same thing. Yes. empiricism means that the, exactly. And I absolutely treasure above all the, and I don't want to sound nationalistic about this, but the British tradition of empirical thinking, both in philosophy and, of course, what it did to science.

The idea of testing, of trying out, of seeing, of vindicated, epidemiology and medicine and of experimentation in chemistry and physics, of characters like Faraday and Thompson, and Maxwell and those sort of people. I mean, just breathtaking, that they dared, you know, it goes back to, again, this sounds about having a go out the French, but, you know, Pascal having these theories of light, but not thinking of picking up a piece of cardboard and putting a hole in it, you know, which an Englishman would do,

because we're a bit vulgar and clumsy and just think, well, let's have a look then. So Newton was, in that sense, he had many faults, of course, but he was, yeah, an experimenter. Exactly, he was an experimenter. I mean, he's known for his theories, but he was an experimenter. In fact, we're sitting in a philosopher's office, and they always try to explain to me that I should like Aristotle more than I do. But one of the things that always amazes me is that he said that women have a different number of teeth than men. He did make some astonishing mistakes. Easy to just check.

Just check. Exactly. Yeah, I think the problem with Aristotle is that he's also associated with a way of thinking that fitted so immediately and instantly into the church. Sure, yeah. So, you know, I think it's known by historians and historians of philosophy as Aristotelian ecclesiasticism, which is a bit of a mouthful. But that's really what made the Dark Ages what they were. This categorisation, this absolute certainty of the way things were and the order of them being sort of fixed and unmoving.

And it took the dislodging of humanism and early humanism and the Renaissance and the age of reason to dislodge that. I'm biased because my first learning about Aristotle was through Galileo in a way, and so, of course, he was a foil in some sense. Exactly, yeah. But of course, in his poetics and ethics, there's a lot to admire. And people are beginning to re-examine him. I can't remember her name. She's written a very good book on him that came out last year. I should read it because I'm constantly learning that I might.

Well, it's nice to learn that your preconceptions are wrong in many ways. Now, you talked about your love of Latin Greek. You love the classic. It's obvious you've written. Two beautiful books about ancient Greek myths. So I took Latin in school, and I really wish in Canada that I always wanted to learn ancient Greek, but I never did. But your love of classics, did it begin? You had a teacher, Rory Stewart, who was a literature teacher who left a bit impression,

but you said he was really a well-known classicist. He was. That's how he started. Yeah, I was wondering if it started from there. It was before that, because that was what we call public school, which is 13 years, sort of age of 13 onwards, whereas it was at prep school, which is 7 to 13. That's the tradition of thing. That's where I started Latin, you know, you just did.

Virtually the first week, it was a MoMAsomat. You know, Maraism, and so on. And then I just, I thought it's like a code. I just love the idea of swapping words over, you know. And so the Latin teacher there, who's name was Mr. Knight, he said, would you be interested in learning Greek? Why don't you learn the alphabet? And I thought, that's even more like a code.

I could send messages. I teach friends and we just write English words in Greek characters. And then he gave me a primer and I started to learn Greek on my own. And then I did exams in it. And I just loved it. It was just fun. I know the letters because of the same with numbers. I bet you did calculus three years before everybody else.

You were differentiating when someone threw a ball like you. No, well, not necessarily. It was okay. But the opportunity, in fact, it's kind of, well, I'm sure you've been on this too. I don't, in British schools, do they still teach Latin? Because I don't think you can get it in American schools. They do, yes. I think you have to, you and your parents have to ask for it a bit more, I fear.

But there's a new generation of classicists, interesting, almost all women. Emily Wilson, is a brilliant new translation of the Iliad. And there's Natalie Hughes, Madeline Miller, the novelist, American novelist, who at the Song of Achilles and Circe, both prize winning. Brilliant books. So it is alive. I'm sure something will come to later, but I always get a little tired of people who think that technology sweeps everything away. Yes. As I tried to say about e-books, you know, Kindles and so on, you know, they are escalators or elevators that doesn't mean people are going to stop building stairs just because they've invented a lift. Absolutely.

Where lifts are useful, you use a lift or elevator. but otherwise you use stairs, you know. It just changes things, it makes them better. You know, there's an analogy I've recently written about AI and everyone's afraid of AI. But my point is that it will change everything, but it won't make it worse, it'll be different. And the example I can think of relates to writing,

which is, you know, Plato was and his ilk were worried desperately that writing would destroy storytelling. Absolutely right. But it changed the world, but it certainly didn't destroy storytelling. And writing's only 5,000 years. old, or least alphabetic writing. And, of course, in 1450,

everyone, the church thought that about Gutenberg. Yeah, exactly. They'll have to put, you know, they won't have to know things. It'll be written down in typed books. And, of course, it actually led to the opposite to a great explosion of knowledge. And that's why, yeah, that's, so I'm sort of excited

much by AI. I also think it's much further off. That one shouldn't be aware that, as we're reminded all the time, everything casts a shadow. Yeah. The brighter and shinier it is, the darker and more, clear the outlines of that shadow are. Well, as a physicist, in spite of the concerns, and there are some, many, especially economic ones, I think.

But I'm interested always in whether, what physics questions will interest AI. And one, I suppose, could imagine the same thing. What literature would it create? And it would be fascinating as a foil, once again, to see, understand our own literature by thinking about that. Exactly. So to go from the sublime to the ridiculous, I was very pleased to discuss. that the only O-level exam that you failed, and you failed abysmally, was physic.

Yes, I think there was a bit of parasite going on there. As I said, my father was a physicist, and he was one of those people, I'm sure you're much the same. If I would ask a question like, you know, why is the sky blue? He's naturally actually taken a piece of paper and do an X and a Y, and then a sort of curve on it and say X squared minus 1 equals Y or something. And I go, what on earth is that supposed to mean? What is it?

And I remember saying about asking, I said, look, Papa, father, I've been reading about Newton, I said. Bodies in space attract each other and it's something to do with the inverse of the square of their distance. I said, I know what each word means. I know what inverse means. I know what square means. I know what distant means. But what the hell?

Why is square? Why not a cube? What's he? How does it bra? And then he would draw things and show, don't forget a square is best described as looking at a square, you know. So I remember him going through a square. proof of Pythagoras with me and said the square on the... And he drew the square on the sides and said,

see, he's a square. He said, don't think of it as just the figure two on the top because I've got... You use all these... Sure. And he was very good at making geometry out of it. Yeah. So he would always, you know, draw and say, look, see? And I sometimes go, yes, and then other times, whoa, especially when the big F sign came out, the big function side.

Yeah. Well, I read that eventually, even when you got the math, the geometry is something, you never liked, which I was surprised about. Well, I mean, I just, as Clint Eastwood says to Hal Holbrook is, it's in Magnum Force, a man's got to know his limitations, breaks. And I knew my limitations. That it was just, I could probably make the journey, but it would be harder work for me, and it would be tough going, and I would never really be lit up by it.

I would just catch up and say, I see it now. I mean, I see the wide outlines of the beauty of. of science and I absolutely believe in it and I believe in the adventure and the quest. But the detail, the actual work of it, I just know I'm not made to do. Well, that one doesn't have to. It always amazes me that in our society we say, you know, you can enjoy music if you're not Bach. And you can enjoy literature if you're not Shakespeare. But somehow science, you don't see people to be able to enjoy unless you can do it. And you're an example, I think, and the people I really enjoy are examples of people who do enjoy all breaths of intellectual inquiry, including science. And I was going to ask,

so, you know, obviously you didn't have an aptitude. But I've discovered, and I'm wondering if it's the case you, that because of that lack of maybe interest and aptitude, coming back later in life, did that push you more to realize that you might have missed something and want to learn more? Very much so. Very much so. And actually, where we happen to be in Bloomsbury, in London, and just across the road, there's a street called Tottencourt Road. And in the late 70s and early 80s, it was filled as it was for the next couple of decades. And still, to some extent, it shops, sell electronics and gaits and gizmos. And I was in one of those in just come out of university.

And it was around the time that the great phrase microcomputing was being used. And there was the BBC Acorn computer, and there was the Sinclair ZX, little home hobby's computers and there was the Commodores and the Atari was around the corner too. And I saw a group of kids sitting around in this shop in the Tottenham Court Road, literally a cricket ball throw from where we are now, playing with this BBC Acorn computer. And I thought, as people did, scared, stiff, if I don't catch up now with this, I'll never. You know, you have to be computer literate was the phrase. So I saved up a bit.

I was just literally stopped being a student and bought one of these and you plugged it into a television of course and had a cassette tape recorder to carry your little programs and taught myself basic the language in order and wrote little programs, none of which were of any particularly use, little shell sort programs

and other such things. So the early sorts of thing you would do in order to find out what it was all about and I became very interested in Boolean mathematics in logic. Suddenly I understood logic from a different point of view. Because you used it. Yes.

I'd sort of read books on logic and symbolic logic got me a bit lost when it got very mathematical. But suddenly the and or if unless until the sort of hinges on which an action depend, the gates swinging open or closed or giving, you know, little options and sealing off this way, a little labyrinth of intellectual progress or of indeed quite banal. or simply to get, you know, a dot on the screen to move to where you wanted to. You had to break it down. And I thought this was stunningly beautiful and really interesting.

And it was only much later that I discovered about Claude Shannon and the nature of information science and what it was about. And I still marvel at its beauty and the breathtaking idea that you can connect these numbers. and logic, you know, logic words like if and when to the action of electricity. Well, I'm wondering, as you say that, because of your love of language, was it the, in some ways when you learn basic, was it that it was a very different type of language

that attracted to you think? Yes, maybe it was. And in fact, the word, the fact that the word language was used is they've used another word to describe, you know, a computer, they called it, cipherology, or something sort of strange thing. I might have been off put, but the fact that it was called a language made me think that.

And, of course, you then got a higher and lower level languages. Well, I was thinking even more than that. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it's sort of language opens up a world for you. And this language opened up a very different kind of world. It did, and yet it connects as well. Enarcho en logos is the other first sentence of the gospel of St. John. In the beginning was the word.

Yes. separated Logos from Lexus, two types of word Lexus, the unit of sense either written or spoken, as in lexicographer and dyslexia and so on, and logos as in ology, but as in logic. And now we know a little more about the brain and it's, you know, the way neurons and work and fire and so on, there are similar logic paths that have to be made in connections and alternate routes that have to be decided by something very similar to what was worked out in order to get a digital computer built first. And meaning is sort of what it's about.

Meaning and difference and the ability to read, to, you know, intelligence, to read into, into ledgeret. And it's all connected. It's all deeply connected. And the idea that one should be one field of study and the other and others. Well, that's lovely.

I mean, that explains a lot to me, because I have to admit, given the background, when I learned you run a technology column, and I thought, well, where, what's the connection that just made it for me in a real sense? And also, when I think about the need for you to at least get through math and physics,

what you just did illustrate something that I think is interesting, when you talked about your father talking to you, I found it very moving when you describe your father working so hard to help you get through your math, things. But what you said, what I thought was fascinating, he said, the very act of my father's teaching inspired in me a love of the act of teaching in and of itself. That's the point.

I don't suppose he had ever taught anyone anything before, but he taught me how to teach far more than he taught me how to do maths. It's true. Absolutely. And I think that, but it's interesting, you're a lovely teacher, but teaching is involved with learning as well. And I'm wondering if that's, if that's, which is really what's important about school that people don't realize, it's not just doing the math, it's the ability to be a lifelong learner. Yeah. And so I wanted to ask you about that love of teaching and whether it related to then your, I mean, much of your life has been a public figure, but an entertainer and a, but do you view that as

teaching? I do. And I realize it is. And I think I was aware, even in my 20s, that I was almost acting against the, you natural impulse, the natural current flow that my life had led to, that I should have stayed on at university and become a teacher, if not there, then at a school. I think it's better for the world that you did. Well, it's nice of you, but of course, there are two narrative modes and there are two

pedagogical modes, two teaching modes, and they are telling and showing essentially. And obviously, we privilege showing in our culture in all narrative modes. You know, the spectacular is the way everything is done. if you can show it rather than tell it than show it. But actually, one of the things I've discovered these Greek myth books and then doing them on stage as an act of telling rather than of showing is that this is sort of what I was built to do, was to tell stories.

And whether the stories are actually shaping ideas or whether they are merely narratives, I say merely, because narrative's obviously more than mere, but I'm not sure. It's, as you know, one of the most fashionable sciences and mostly in the hands of us or pseudoscience is evolutionary psychology, which is a very, it's a poison chalice to some extent. But, you know, it's quite easy to think of us, you know, as our ancestors in our, we've had toolmaking, we've harnessed fire, you know, for tens of thousands of years and then suddenly language, the great cognitive leap arrived. And finally we could sit around and we didn't all have to be hunters and gatherers. You know, someone would go, do you know what?

I'm going to brighten the cave up with some pictures. And they go, really? Yeah, well, you know, he's a better fighter than I am and she's a better forager. And, you know, so suddenly there were people who had different gifts to give. And whereas before they would have fallen by the wayside, people like I. And as you, I'm sure you know, the Jasper's, you know, the axial age idea, which is an amazing fact, but that Confucius and Buddha and the Old Testament prophets

and Aristotle and Plato and Socrates, could all have met each other. There was a sudden moment where, I think, it's a concatenation of benign circumstances, sea level settled, so you could have harbors and ports that were the same year after year that allowed trading to stabilize and develop and enrich the cross-currents of commerce and so on.

And the calories were getting cheaper and therefore people had more leisure. Exactly. And with leisure came in this ability to question. And it happened that the Greeks were at the absolute crossroads of this moment in our history and with alphabet and everything else and with the Phoenician trading. So they could stop and think and they could tell stories and they could fix the stories because the alphabet had arrived. Yes.

And the poets could improve them and embarrass them. and polish them. And a culture arrived, and a culture that could be transmitted forward through language. And all these things meant that people like me suddenly had a role. Whereas before, literally, who would have just been left in the mud going, oh, help, I can't catch up, I can't run fast enough, I can't kill that. That stag is charging me, that bull has trampled me.

But now we have, well, you stay at home, dear. You're not very good at fighting. And you tell stories, and you will. Or, unfortunately, you're. you, mostly it's warriors and priests. Yes, yeah. And these are things we fought against us. Yeah, and we, you know, I've run several meetings on early modern humans.

And it's interesting to think about the notion of language and how it plays out in terms of the necessity of a tribe of having some communication. Although I've spent a lot of time talking, Nome Chomsky, who has always said that he thought language, development of language was not to communicate. Yes, I know. It's to think. Yes. And it's a fascinating question. I never had hit it. And there's the E. Wilson sort of the idea that the ceiling of the social bonds and the creation of a whole kind of, not a hive mind, but what, a human social mind.

Yeah, sure, sure. Well, it's, I'm going to get to the present time, but I want to, there's a number of other descriptions that, that one of them that I think maybe gets us to the present time. But I, and remarkably it has to do with your nose. The Jewish nose, the cocaine, which is it? No, no, the bent nose. What you talk about. Phew. No, no, no, no, no. But I love what you said.

You said, we keep our insignificant blemishes so we can blame them for our larger defects. The problem of my bent nose comes to mind when I have regular arguments with a friend on political subjects. He is firmly of the opinion, the existence of the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the House of Lords is absurd, unjust and outdated. It would be hard to disagree with that. He believes, however, that in the name of liberty and social justice, they should be abolished. is where we part company. And actually, there's a long discussion that I'll probably skip, but, but, uh, he said, you say there will be grateful psychological damage done to us if we take the steps of constitutional

cosmetic alteration. The world would stare at us and whisper and giggle about us excitedly, as people always do. And then I think you say the trouble with doing a thing for cosmetic reasons is that one always ends up with a cosmetic result. And the cosmetic results, as we know from inspecting rich American women, are ludicrous, embarrassing and horrific. I love that. But I thought it would give me a chance.

I'm going to jump ahead a little bit to, the notion, I love this statement that the blemish, we keep our blemishes so we can blame them for our larger defects. And your example, the monarchy, really, I think there's something deep there in the sense that one of the problems that's happened, in my opinion, the United States, and there are many lately, is that we invest the power and the pomp in the same person. Yes.

And it's always impressed me that if you can separate them. I agree. But you may have watched the Crown, and you may remember the first season of the Crown. It began with Winston Churchill as the Queen's first prime minister when her father died. And he had to bow. He had to come in. This grand old man, one of the great figures of the 20th century, had to bow in front of this girl. But of course, he was bowing in front of the idea of what a sovereign is, the representative of the country.

Now, imagine if your president, Trump, every week had to go to a graceful, colonnaded, you know, colonial building on the top of the hill somewhere in Washington. And there was an Uncle Sam figure who was a representative of America, who was like an embodiment of the flag and the idea of the country. And that Trump had to bow to them and explain himself each week, what he'd done, why he'd done it, what the current problems were. Uncle Sam couldn't say do this because Uncle Sam wouldn't be elected.

Uncle Sam was just a figurehead, a symbol of the... personification of the country. I think that would be incredibly healthy. And that's what every British Prime Minister has to do. And indeed, the current humiliation of our Prime Minister at the moment is that he may would indeed have deceived the Queen in pruroging Parliament. You don't have to follow the technicalities of that. But I tell you where this is interesting, Lawrence, I think,

is because 10 years ago we were still excited about the idea in Silicon Valley and elsewhere of move fast and break things, the disrupting culture. We're going to disrupt this space. We're going to disrupt that space. We disrupt cars in cities and we become Uber. We disrupt the way people get a room and we become Airbnb. We disrupt, you know, we move fast and break things. That was the cliche.

And as some chickens are coming home to roost now, we're realizing that things have been broken that maybe it would have been wise to think about, you know, if it was a good idea to break them. It's a philosopher's idea called Chesterton's fence. You know, G.K. Chesterton wrote about this idea that someone who didn't really understand what a fence was, if they saw it, would probably break it. Then they wouldn't know about the animals breaking free. They wouldn't understand the wind coming through and the topsoil erosion and the huge concatenation of circumstances that can follow when you destroy something that you don't understand.

Interesting. And it sounds like an argument for conservatism, and it kind of is. At some level. Because actually, conservatives now aren't conservative. No longer. Conservatives used to believe in. institutions and and trust them unless there was a very good reason not to. Whereas now conservatives of the Bannankind and our British equivalents and the European equivalents,

break it all down, break it all down. It's just elites, it's just, you know, let's say, and as Thomas Moore says in a man for seasons, you know, when Richie Rich, the John Hurt character in the movie, if you remember, says about, well, tear it all down, tear the laws. What do you know, because he's saying the law prevents us from doing this. You say, well, the laws are wrong, tear them down. Ah, but laws are hedges, Richie. When you tear down each hedge and who will stand in the winds that come, you know.

And it's a neat, and Paul Schofield does it brilliantly in the film. But we're beginning to feel that now, I think, that what used to be called conservatism is now in the hands. It's fantastic irony of people like me, you know, people who say, well, actually, I'd rather think this institution is worth prising, or at least. You know, don't smash it up. The conservatives in both, I mean, the parallels that are happening in both our countries, the apparent conservators are at wing are the people who have no respect for the institutions that they seem to run.

And that's why I found that I found that statement about blemish is so interesting. Yeah. If you can, if you can sort of have them to worry about it. That's right. And then the other important things are, you. And again, it might as well be like an epidemiologist about it. Well, let's imagine that the purpose of government, the purpose of socialized living of any kind,

I don't mean socializing the sense of socialism, but just living together in countries even, is for, as the American Constitution put it, with the pursuit of happiness, is for us to be a more stable, contented people. Well, there are indices that you can look at. They're not always reliable, but if there are enough of them are pointing in the right direction, you could argue quite, oh, it seems the happiest countries are the Benelux countries, Belgium and Luxembourg and the Netherlands and Scandauwija. And they're all constitutional monarchies. How very interesting.

So, I mean, you know, it's illogical. It's not, you wouldn't start from there if you were planning a country. Yeah. But somehow we've evolved into it. It's definitely. And it seems to work. It's a, you know, it's a bit like people try and reinvent theatre. There's an act of people say, you know, the Prisini March is sort of somehow

almost a fascistic, you know, we are talking. Let's put a thrust out into the audience and, yeah, it works for the odd thing, but ultimately everyone's just embarrassed and doesn't know where to look. There was a reason that the prozart was invented somehow. So let's go back. Well, I'm very simple. You know, it's been for me as, and well, you, because you span the continents as well, but I grew up in Canada and moved to the United States and the difference and with, you know,

Canada being part of what is essentially constitutional monarchy. And seeing that difference was really fascinating and drawn home to me the minute I arrived. and I continue to ache in some sense when I think about when I see what's happening. Okay, there's one more quote, a quote from you say, just as it is the love of money that is the root of all evil, so it is the belief in shamefulness that is the root of all misery. And I thought, I think that's very important now in the modern times. And I thought I'd ask you to talk about that.

Well, shame is the prime mover of the Judeo-Christian tradition, of course. So it is Pouda, it is shame in the Garden of Eden. The most important line was not that about, have you eaten the fruit of the tree, whereof I spake thou shouldst not eat? But it's why you cover your body up, God says, when he sees Adam and Eve, and they go, well, we were naked and we were ashamed. Who told you you were naked? Where did you get this idea that you were naked?

And whatever arguments one has with the Hebrew Bible and the religion that sprang from it, it's a very interesting myth because like all creation myths, it has to deal with the fact that we as a species recognize we were animals because we sleep, we breed, we poo, we eat like other animals, and yet we know we're different. So around the fire, we must have said, why are we different? And, you know, the Prometheus and the Pandora myth from the Greeks and the various other ones came, and the Hebrew one was.

well, we have this idea that we're ashamed of us. We think about ourselves. We look at ourselves and we go, ooh. And it's both a wonderful thing, self-consciousness. It can allow us to bootstrap into whole new areas of cognition and imagination. But it's also, it can hold us back. And one example is shame. I think it's very difficult to apologize for the things we should apologize for,

but we kind of know what they are. But they're not for having a penis or for having a rectum, you know, for having to poo every day. This is nothing to apologize for. It's common to all of us. Well, all of us with wide chromosomes in the case of the penis, obviously. And the hypocrisy, the greed, the casual violence, the closing off to the cries and screams of suffering.

around the world of animals as well as our fellow humans. These are things we have to think about. We have to kind of come to terms with our own, you know, how far can we, you can't spend the whole life. Begging for apology because someone is dying three and a half thousand miles away, because it's just not practicable. But you try and live an ethical life at least or a feel that you're trying. But to be bogged down in sex, I mean, and things like that,

it's just insane. I mean, the Martian beloved of ethicists and philosophers who looks down on the planet, he will say, well, I can see this species here. They do all kinds of terrible things. There's abuse, the trampling of the innocent, there's a cause of suffering and violence and lies and deceit and warfare and slaughter and all these things. So I would imagine the Martian would say that in language, these are the things you have to be very careful about. But they also do good things. They eat food and there's sustenance and obviously they have to get rid of it and they have an interesting way of doing

that, putting out their toxins and so on. And they have to copulate, they have to reproduce and the way they do so is rather interesting and beautiful. And it makes use of a remarkable pairing idea of sort of get variation into their systems.

It's wonderful. And then lo and behold, in their language, they can say, oh, the traffic was torture. But torture is one of the things they do that's absolutely unforgivable. There's never an excuse to torture. It was murder. Oh, it was so cruel, but cruelty and murder are the worst things they can do. But they say, well, fuck that. And everyone goes, oh, she said, fuck, but that's one of the good things they do. What's the matter with these people? Why, you know, so even, I mean, it's bizarre idea. Yeah. That, uh, we, um, we're ashamed

to things we have no reason to be ashamed. We're utterly hung up on them. We care about children being exposed to, but we don't care about children and being exposed to the things that really, are monstrous. A monstrous. Exactly. There's so many things we accept and kids can do, but they can't go to a movie where there's a nipple. No, it's extraordinary.

I mean, it's hilarious if it weren't possibly so destructive. No, I... You know, because there's a lot of rape, there's a lot of sexual confusion, there's a lot of unhappiness about it. Because the sex is incredibly important to us as human beings. You know, it's an impulsive. It's put as deep as anything.

Exactly. I mean, it wasn't Oscar Wilde. He's always misquoted as him, but somebody said, everything in the human world is about sex, except sex, which is about power. Which is quite a good, the neat. We're certainly thinking about it.

I'm not sure it's entirely true, but it's quite clever. You've hit on the part of shame, at least one aspect of shamefulness, that is the root of all misery. But I'm wondering whether there's another kind of shamefulness when I think about, well, you talked about yourself as anti-hero. And to some extent, In fact, I wondered whether you like me are that way, the older we get, the less secure we are in our own abilities and less confident.

But there was a trend. I find that fascinating because when I hear about your adolescence and insecurities, and then I read about them as an adult, and there's some great quotes that you have of yourself basically not liking aspects of yourself, the fact that you like to be liked by people, that you live in a place because you think it gives an image of you that you like to have, but you're not really. I'm joining all these clubs. And it reeks of sort of in some sense, the insecurities that we have. And as I say, that I find grow in me to some extent the more successful I am. But there's one time in your life, which I just found inexplicable in that sense.

And it's an amazing time that turned you from a lost soul to the road to success. And that's when after you stole, after you went to prison for it and you came back to school, You basically told someone, look, I'm going to study for the A-Levels. I'm going to go to Cambridge. And I'm going to pass all these and I'm going to get a scholarship. And I found it so surprising because it's seen what, but what isn't described in that book and I wanted to ask you about was what, what caused that sudden change from an insecurity to incredible confidence?

I think it's, again, I'm going to sound over-obsessed, but he was a remarkable man and he has died, so he's been much on my mind. But my father always said of me that I, You know, when I was passing exams and doing things when I was young, even though I was getting into trouble at school. And I remember one of the housemaster saying, but he is a very bright boy. My father said, well, yes, he has the gift of pastiche and reproduction,

but he's never thought in his life. And I'm a big outrage by this. My goodness. And at one point when he was in a friendly mood, I said, what did you mean by saying I'd never thought? He said, well, you haven't. You don't really understand what thought is, do you? And I said, what is it? He said, it's work.

Work is the currency of the universe, at least of our universe, as we understand it. It's the only thing that matters. And thought is that it changes, it moves things, it is a force. And you merely reproduce, you reflect. And I, you know, repudiated this inside my head and kind of felt a bit that I was under attack. But I realized it was true. I had a gift for parody and pastiche. I could imitate anything.

I had no style of my owner. it was while in prison when I was reading and I had nothing else to do and I was teaching this particular cellmate how to read and so on that I just got out of complete works of Shakespeare, which I'd always loved Shakespeare. And I thought, I didn't really know these plays properly. So I started to read them and make notes on them. And I started to say, no, that's, I'm just copying someone else's idea here.

That's what do I really think? and I suddenly discovered the joy of work. And it was work. I was thinking for the first time in my life. And by this time, it was late. I'd been a prodigy before in the sense that I'd done my O-level exams. I'd done them all when I was 14. Yes.

And usually that's done when you're 16. It's only two years. It's nothing really. But in child that it seems like a lot. But it was all just without thinking. You're Houdi Menin, I remember. He did the same. He was a child, I mean, much more than I.

But he was a child. Prodigy as a violinist, you know, Elgar wrote a concertative to play and so on. He stopped when he was about 17 and said, I have to learn how to play the violin now. I just picked it up and knew at a child level and sort of amazed people because of my skill, but I never really have broken it down and to try and understand. And I'm certainly not comparing myself to him anyway, but for the first time, I realized that there was a pleasure in not just the labor, which I did enjoy, the actual toil, the actual realising I've sat down and focused and concentrated for a long period of time,

but also in the transformative challenge of realizing, I don't understand this, I'm going to have to work through it, I'm going to have to pick it apart. I'm not just going to say, I know how to do this, but I'm going to, you know, and I think that was the difference. Oh, okay. Well, it's fascinating to me to hear that, and because it was so important.

And so obviously later on, but that makes sense to me. Okay, good. Well, then... And one of my favorite quotations that just say on the other is because the ethic of work, which is somebody people talk about a lot, is important to me, or at least so natural to me that I, you know, if I get two days off, I just go mad. I have to do something.

I know a feeling. There's a no coward quotation which I like, which is, work is more fun than fun. And I do rather... the cleave to that. Well, I think, yes. I mean, I always say how lucky I'm because I never separated work from, for me. And I think that's the luxury that I have. And I often say people don't think people do science to save the world. I mean, I just science because I enjoy it. And I think, and it's incredibly lucky. As Richard Simon put it, the pleasure of finding things out. Exactly. And it's just so fortunate to be able to do something. And so if I'm able to work,

I find it more relaxing than the other things I have to do in life. It's really. That's true. But at the same time, there's work and there's work. There's one more quote. Before, there's three or four things of specifics of things that you're talking about now that I want to get to. But there's another wonderful quote that you have. Well, there's millions. But it is the useless things that make life worth living. And that make life dangerous to. Wine, love, art, beauty. Without them, life is safe, but not worth bothering with. Yes, it's a kind of paradox, isn't it? the useless things are the only things that are useful, actually. Yeah.

And that explains why Oscar Wilde said all art is quite useless. It sounds like, well, he's the arch East Theat. How could he say that? But that's the point. Yeah, wine, love, you know, all these little extras, they are the only things really that seem to make life worth living. Everything else is existence. Well, you know, again, I often try and translate the connection between heart and science,

but I've often said that I'm really quite proud. I care, I'm very political as an individual, but I'm really quite proud that nothing I've ever done in my work has any practical significance whatsoever. And I find that because of that separation, because it's just for the beauty of finding things out. And people say, well, you never know if it down the road will have some practical value,

but I'm pretty certain that everything I've ever worked on will never have any practicality. You can't be that. I had a friend at Cambridge who, there's a great tradition of mathematics at Cambridge. Of course. To go back to Isaac Newton. And so instead of getting a first-class degree in mathematics,

they have this peculiar system where you're a wrangler or what's called an optimet. And the senior wrangler is the person with the biggest result. And my idea, I happen to know the guy who was senior wrangler. And I said, wow, congratulations. That's amazing. I mean, even Bertram Russell wasn't senior wrangler. And he said, oh, yes, it's a big of this. I suppose if you know things, you know them, if you can do them, you can do them.

And I said, what are you going to do for research? He said, I'm not going to bore you with it. It's just ridiculous. I said, well, he vaguely tell me. So what is to do with long numbers? I just have this interest in really long numbers. I said, well, and I, of course, said, whatever idiot says, well, can't you just add one? And he said, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anyway, I saw him about 10 years later, just in the street. I said, oh, hi, gosh, what are you doing? Are you still, are you mathematicians? He said, well, I am, but I'm sort of for hire. I said, what do you mean? He said, well, you know that subject I did, which was completely abstruse and of no use to anybody in long numbers. It turns out to be incredibly useful in cryptography. In cryptography, large numbers and multi-millionaire.

Exactly. From pure number theory to a penthouse. I'll hope for that latter part then. We'll see. Now, speaking of potentially useless things, but not, obviously, the fascination with Greek myths, it may seem like a weird segue, but which I find fascinating. I mean, for me, one of the things that I found so fascinating, not just with Greek myths and Roman myths, but also in Greek and Roman history, which I used to read a lot, is the fact that the more things change, the more they stay the same, the fact that these incredibly different societies, when you read the personal lives of people and what concerns them, how amazingly familiar it seems. And one of the things, I guess, one of the reasons I guess I like the Greek gods so much more than the Judeo-Christian one is that they're so much more understandable. And I mean, if you're going to invent a God, you might as well invent one that has the characteristics.

Well, exactly. I mean, the Greeks looked at the world, and they saw the world, was majestic and beautiful. I mean, it's stunningly perfect and remarkable. But it was also deeply violent and cruel and unjust and capricious. And therefore, whoever made it must be those things, too, a mixture of. And it's that mixture. It's the idea of the complexity and the ambiguity of character that the Greeks seem to be the first, at least the first to be able, because of the alphabet and so.

the first to be able to transmit it to us to have this sense of the complexity of things. But the Greek creation myth, as you probably know, Prometheus made us. And he was a titan. And as you said, they're wonderful. And you can play with them and you can teach them what you like, but you mustn't give them fire.

That's the one thing you mustn't do. And Prometheus in the end couldn't help it. We were defenseless compared to other animals. We didn't have echolocation or claws or stings or, you know, things like other animals had. We were poor, naked, forked little creatures. So he went up to an imprisoned stole fire from heaven and gave it to us. Now, you can say that that was one way of the Greek saying literally, how do we have fire, the physical stuff, the rolling plasma that melts and and smelts and roasts and toasts. But it's also the divine fire, self-consciousness. And Zeus was right

in the sense to say, man mustn't have it, because if we had it, we would then eventually outgrow the gods. We wouldn't need them. We'd match them and we'd be free of them. As the Greeks were, as humans are. We've, you know, it was well before Nietzsche that we could say, you know, the gods are dead, that their fire is out. We've got it now. But what's so fascinating and how could the Greeks have known this, you wonder, is all those thousands of years ago, that we can be sure by the end of this century, there will be sapient, sentient creatures that we as Prometheuses have made. And some people like Zeus will say, we cannot give them a fire.

We're already talking about that. If we make these robotic mixtures of bio-augmentation and robotics and AI and all the rest of it, if we make them, we can't give them that spark. We can't give them self-consciousness and the ability to inspect themselves and to want to live in the way that self-consciousness gives you. Because if we do, they won't need us. Yes. And we will be overcome. And, of course, we're not the first to notice the Promethean myth being that important. by the end of the 18th century

when the Enlightenment had really taken hold, it was as if we were saying, ah, yes, the Greeks understood that the champion was Prometheus, that the gods are our enemies, the gods didn't want us to be completely fulfilled, self-thinking creatures, and Prometheus set us free by giving us the fire.

And within about three months of each other, Beethoven had written a Prometheus overture, and Shelley had written Prometheus unbound, because Prometheus gets punished, of course, and this is about his dialogue with Zeus. And more importantly, really, Shelley's wife, Mary Shelley, had written Frankenstein,

subtitled a modern Prometheus, about creating a life. So we've understood that the deep relevant, the chime, the resonance of Greek myth inside our own feelings. And of course, someone like Douglas Adams would say this has happened all many, many times before,

that the gods had been made by previous group of gods who had given them fire, and that was their mistake, and so on and so on and so on. And for all we know, that will continue, that we make a race of robots who get rid of us because we're unnecessary now. And they will then create another life form which will go, we don't need you and so on.

Maybe that's part of the wider refinement. I like to think the only difference is that they'll have a, that they'll be in that society, there'll be a debate between evolution and intelligent design, and they'll be right about intelligent design. Yes, exactly. It'll be the first time that intelligent design has become the fact. Exactly.

It's a wonderful thought, isn't it? Yeah. Well, speaking of not wonderful thoughts, I couldn't have asked you to, I'm glad you stressed Prometheus. I was going to go to Oranos, who I learned something remarkable about from you. But Prometheus leads me to a, I'm not sure, a wonderful segue, but nevertheless, a very current one. Boris Johnson just described Brexit in terms of Prometheus.

Did you know this? Did I miss that? What did he say? Oh, he said that, oh, it's a wonderful quote just two days ago that the whole process of getting Brexit is like eating the liver forever. And he was a... Oh, see, the punishment of Prometheus. Yes, and so I thought I'd ask you to...

The torment of Prometheus. Yes, Prometheus was punished by his use for the impertinence of stealing fire, and he was chained, shackled to the Caucasus Mountains, and every day an eagle came to tear open his side and eat his liver in front of him. But Titans being immortal, the liver would regrow and the torture would be renewed every day, and I guess that's what...

That also is interesting, isn't it, because they chose the liver. And did the Greeks know that the liver is the only one of the organs that actually does regenerate? Yeah, that's interesting. I have no idea. But, yeah, that's a cheek on the part of... I know it is.

I was hoping you could... put him down for it, but maybe not. Well, I mean, yeah, he's just doing what he always does. He's just giving a bit of classical knowledge, but it's not the context is all wrong, because is he Prometheus in this? Well, I was trying to...

That was my assumption, somehow he was relating himself to Prometheus. He was going to give the fire by removing from Europe, but I assume there was that incredible conceit, but he doesn't say that. It was really more the torture. It would go on forever. And, uh, well, he's,

Prometheus is liberated by Heracles, the, or Hercules, as the Romans called him. So he is freed. There are two, you know, it's interesting, there are two people who are tort, in one way or another, well, there may be more, the two that I know of that are tortured for eternity. Prometheus is one, but the other, of course, which always has related to me, maybe because of Camus, but of Sisyphus. Sisyphus, yeah. Yes, and Sisyphus, I do like to think Sisyphus was smiling.

Did, but it'd be nice. It'd be nice. Sisy was a great trickster. He was a magnificent. He cheated deaths several times. as you say, punished for pushing that stone up the hill. And it's the pushing, though. That's the point you said the work.

It's the work. It's the work. It's the work that's the joy. It's the searching. It's not the getting there, at least even for me and science. Again, Browning. We've quoted him once, but the man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for. Exactly.

You know what? I couldn't ask you, that's the next thing I was going to. Here you are. Here's that quote from you right here. Oh, really? So it is. There it is. Good heavens.

Yeah. From Frumipipia. but you... It's a favorite cry, didn't of course. But then you said, and I was about to talk about poetry. And that very quote, you say, Robert Browning's cry brings us back at last to poetry. And you were a marvelous book about learning about poetry

and how to understand and appreciate, which I have to say, I need to digest more. There are many things about myself as a heathen that I recognize. I like to blame some of it in my upbringing. but that I've never appreciated poetry as much as I should, or opera. But you write it early on in this book. For me, the private act of writing poetry is songwriting, confessional, diary-keeping,

speculation, problem-solving, storytelling, therapy, anger management, craftsmanship, relaxation, concentration, and spiritual adventure, all in one inexpensive package. I just love that. I love that. But what made me, when I read that, The interesting thing I was wondering was, is it, I know you say you write poetry, but is it, would you prefer more writing it or reading it? Oh, reading it, because there are so many poets much better than I am to enjoy.

And the writing of it, yeah, it is a pleasure, and I catch up with it. I go for weeks and weeks, months and months without writing any poetry, and then I'll suddenly just write some things, and it's very much a private pleasure. But the point of the book is called the odeless travel, and it's a... It's a wonderful. But it is the, it was also my delight in form. Yes. And it's a strange thing, but when it comes to painting and music, for example,

no one questions that you should be taught in music, you know, what a chord is. You know, what are we say in England, a minim or a crotchet, you say a half-node or a quarter-node-note, whatever. And, you know, a diminished seventh here or a... G7 there, you know, you learn, and it's part of the initiation into music. It shouldn't be too frightening. If it's all done by a terrible school teacher who makes you feel guilty about the rudiments of classical music, then it can be a bit off-putting, but it can be a friend with a guitar saying, hey, this is D major.

And look, if you go from D major to A, it's you get this sort of sound, and you can just flatten this note with it. And then he goes, wow. And then he says, they call that, you know, and you go, oh, I see. Why is it? Oh, right. And then no one questions it. But if you say to someone, this is a villainel and this is a sonnet, they go,

we're in the schoolroom here. And it's a strange thing. But because partly people think poetry is just, you put your feelings down on paper. And I'm not saying that I don't love blank verse, which is, you know, ordered verse, but more in particular free verse. Walt Whitman, a lot of T.S. Eliot and so on is free verse. And as much as it's not formal, it doesn't have. have the same line lengths. It doesn't express itself in according to a metrical scheme.

But you can't talk about it, whereas you can say to someone, this is an, this is Otava Rima, this is a form. It has these lines, it ends in a couplet, and the couplet has two more syllables than the other lines, and here's an example of it from Byron, for example, or this is Tertzerima, this is Dante, you know, this is a different form. This is rhyme royal, you know, This is a Sestina, which is a very complex form. And though I think they're thrilling. It's a bit like going back to the codes. It's, oh, this is a...

They don't restrict it, as Robert Frost said, who was a great American poet, but a formal poet, in that he wrote within forms rather than free verse. He said, I can't write without it. It would be, like, to me, like playing tennis without a net. You know? And words were throwing about it, too.

You know, the scanty plot of ground, which he called the sonnets thing, but you can grow better. If you say to someone, here's an open field, play a game, you think, I don't know what to do. But if you say here's a little courtyard with lines on it, you could instantly, you'd make up a game and you'd play according to rules. And it would have a structure and it would have drama and form and dialectic and meaning.

And I think we're all a bit afraid of that. We think form, as I say, we're... So it's the form. So that's what attracts you most about to the fact of it. Well, it's why I wrote the book, because you can't write a book about free verse. Yes, yes. I mean, it then becomes a book about appreciating Whitman or appreciating Elliot or just about... Yeah, it's funny because those...

I tried to think of the poets just to show I'm not a complete even that. I like it. You know, and Elliot is one. Dylan Thomas is another, by the way, because I just like the sound of it. Well, Dylan Thomas is an example of this, a really complex form called a Villanelle, and that's what one of his most famous poems, do not go gentle into this good night, is a Villanelle. And if you look at the way the lines repeat,

It's a very intricate and clever pattern, extraordinary pattern. But you shouldn't be aware of it any more than you have to know when listening to the moonlight. What a sonata is? It's up to the composer to follow the form. And the form, for some reason, lights things in your brain and makes an emotional journey all the richer than a lack of form seems to. Not always. And I'm not, you know, the book wasn't an attack on free verse.

It was merely that I think we don't. treasure enough, the beauty of form. Well, I want to learn, I want to go into it more. I wanted to sit with you sometime for two hours ago. Because I once had a fancy position at Harvard, and it was mostly involved fancy dinners, and something called the Society of Fellows. And early on, there were senior fellows.

I was a junior fellow, and with an interesting name. But, and there were a number of physicists. There were intellectuals and then there were physicists. Right. Because it was from all fields. And one of the senior fellows was one of the world's experts on poetry. And I was drinking and I wanted to have a little fun. And early on, I said to her, I said, my problem with poetry is if people have something to say,

why don't they just write it down? And she never, for three years, which is how long I was there, never spoke to me again. but she obviously thought you were terrible Philistine or something. Well, I was wondering, but I, you know, and that was sort of my joke about. It's an interesting point. It's a compression. It's an idea. It's, um, uh, talking of Harvard. I think he was Harvard. Jane, uh, the origin of consciousness and the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Yes, I think so. Yeah, yeah. And he talks about how Homer and, uh, and the post-Homeric literary tradition suddenly had the ability to create metaphor that, for the first time, two different frames of reference, two different fields,

two different magisterian human experience could be fused so that you could talk about a ship ploughing through the sea and not go, but plows are the earth? How can that happen? Why is a plow? Because suddenly it brings an image to your head that enhances and that this gets stronger and stronger

these fusing of different fields of reference. And poetry does that. extraordinarily and I mean here's an example in Greek myth of a poetic idea this is what poetry can do but it's also what myth can do poetically but it's just the Greek word for making incidentally but in the early Greek myths there were the Titans and most people have heard of them and that they were like like the gods six female and six male the original Titans and one of the original females was called mnemocene which is spelled M-N-E-M-O-S-Y-N-N-E-M-M-M-M-M-M-M-M-M-M-M-E which is the Greek word for

memory. You can remember mnemosone by thinking of the mnemonic. By thinking of the mnemonic. But Zeus, of course, Zeus had his way with Nemosone, as Zeus always did. And she bore him nine daughters.

And those nine daughters, we call the muses. And they stand as patrons to the different arts. Cleo for history and Calliope for epic poetry and uterpe and topsykere and polyhimnia and melpomene and thalia and uranium and so on. And there are nine of them. And they are the arts.

that's fine. But then you suddenly think, oh, the collective unconscious of the Greeks in expressing this myth, is it saying the arts are the daughters of memory? And suddenly that's a poetic phrase. Out of myth, out of the collective unconscious, as Young called it. You know, this idea that myths, to some extent, explain. They have an ideological function to some extent. Sure.

And here, the arts are the daughters of memory. That's not easy to parse. And it's not necessarily a complete truth about the arts. But a lot of what the arts are is a re-imagining, a reimagining of experience and thought and emotion and so on. And it's an actual truth. Now, they've, you know, to reverse engineer it, they've said, okay, we've got these things called arts.

Where did they come from? We'll make these. I don't know how. We don't know the mystery. of it. But that's when Joseph Campbell, who's not someone I necessarily have a great deal of truck with, or certainly, you know, you know I mean, the mythographer. He did have a good phrase for this, which is public dreams. And poems, to that extent, public dreams. They can collide images and thoughts in ways that rational and, you know, ordinary writing and communication don't do. They

can express things logically and in complex ways and, you know, with all kinds of nested subcloses and, you know, riders and so on. But poetry forms a collision. This is a great story of Keats when he was young. He was called a cockney by those who disliked him because he was, in other words, he came from a rather poor background compared to Lord Byron than others, although Byron loved Keith. And he was studying to be an apothecary, a pharmacist, as we'd say now. But there was a person in Islington where he was growing up who taught him poetry on the side, because he could see he was a talented boy, who really was very young, then. He said, you know, he died incredibly young. And there was one moment where he was teaching him some Milton, and Keith suddenly almost burst into tears.

It was just a three-word phrase, what might be technically called the kenning, which was the seashouldering Leviathan. A Leviathan is just a fancy word for a whale. And he saw that phrase sea-shouldering, and he said, in that instant, I saw the streams of water coming off the whale. I heard the sound of it, breaking the water. And I realized, but whales don't have shoulders. And yet the work those words were doing, just those words, sea-shouldering Leviathan, the whole image was born in my head. and I knew what poetry was. And I think that's worth... Yes.

That epiphany that tells you a lot about how poetry works. You surprised me you talked about form as your first example of why of poetry. Because because of your language, the very joke I made at Harvard, I thought it had a deeper purpose, which is that I thought maybe you liked poetry because the cleverness is hidden within, in some sense. It's because you're not just writing it down, you have to be more creative in utilizing language to hide and coax out the reality.

Yeah, well, I mean, it's an art form. It's never what you think. It's the senses that make. It's what comes in, not what goes out. And so, you know, like if you can't draw, you look at an artist, you think, what is it with their hands? But it's not their hands, it's their eyes.

The hands can do it. If you can write your drawing. You know, you are reproducing symbols in a way that is recognizable to people. That's drawing. But you talk to any artist. It's how you look. There's a great story of Cézanne sitting at having a meal in the south of France with someone. And the friend said, do you think, Paul, that you look at tomato, like the tomato in your dish,

in a different way to the way that other people look at a tomato? And Cézanne looked at the tomato. And then he started laughing. He said, oh, it's funny. He said I can look at it just as a tomato on my plate, and then I can look at it as a painter. And I have two ways of looking. And now I'm looking at it.

And now I want to paint it because I'm looking at it. And I just thought, that's brilliant. And a musician, too, it's about listening. It's about hearing. It's where the story Mozart being able to reproduce Allegory's Misnerary when he was, you know, note for note, because he could hear. And with language, you see, you can go to a shop and buy, acrylic paints, oil paints,

you can buy turpentine and linseed and sable brushes and hogshae brushes and there's equipment and canvases and so on. And with music there's obviously violins and trumpets and guitars and so on and there's a language for it. But the only language of language is language

and it's the same language I'm using to you now. It's the same language people use to order up a pizza. It's the how, as Elliot put it, to purify the dialect of the tribe, to make a paint out of the words that are used commonly and routinely by everyone. That's what a poet does. And when it works, ordinary words,

because they can't use specialise words, if they just suddenly start. Invented their own life. Yeah, inventing them or using, you know, real sort of $30 words. As some philosophers do, I guess. Yeah. But when they can make new images burst in your mind or new truths,

available or you see something for the first time in the same way that you look at a turner and say now I see what the sun the sun and the sea together can do he's made me look at it in a new way and the poet can make you look at love or a sunset in the new way as well because they found ordinary words but they put them together and they've beautified they've rarefied the language they have as as early put it purified the language of the tribe out of this stony rubbish as he puts it You make something great. That's the unity of art and science. The purpose is to force us to see ourselves and are placed in the cosmos in a new way.

That's really what's, for me, that's in some ways that's what makes science worth it. Just like art and music and literature. It's not the tools. It's not the technology. It's not the computers. It's not the arts. The elementary building blocks of matter and the elementary building blocks of language can combine in ways such as every linguist knows and most people logically know

that this sentence I'm giving to you now has never been spoken before, ever. Lawrence, it hasn't. And yet it's simple words. And it's the same with the 88 notes of on a piano keyboard, you know, that you could sit there. And instantly, out of those just 88, you know the power of numbers,

you can make a sound within seconds that has never before penetrated the ear of humankind. And similarly, the universe can play tricks with most elemental building blocks to make complexities such as the human. brain on the one hand or a banana. And it's so remarkable. It's such an orgasmic experience for anyone to realize that these complex phenomena is understood.

You suddenly see it a new way and it, we're hardwired to get pleasure from that. Because we do the same thing. We make our universes of language out of the atoms of a discrete unit of language like a t or a w or the letter on the page. We can build a poem or a hamlet or a, or a, or a, um, the protocols of the elders of Zion. It's morally, there's no moral valency. It can be wicked.

It can be, you know, mind count, or it can be... But the same as the same for the tools of science. Precisely. And, you know, it's... And actually, Stephen Pinker gives a good example. He says, you know, people claim science, you know, physicists made the atomic bomb, but they don't hate architects, although they had to make the Auschwitz. Precisely.

Absolutely right. Indeed. And you don't hate... linguists or speakers because they're capable of doing the Nuremberg rally or... Well, I want to go, I want to now move from the peaks, from the peaks of human intellectual activity down to the depths. Le bas-profant. Yes, I want to start, we want to talk about science, humanism, and ultimately religion.

And which we have both have very similar views about. There's a wonderful line in the X-Files, which. is not my favorite show, but nevertheless, which is what Fox Maldaral says, we want to believe. Yes. We want to believe. We all want to believe things. We're hardwired to believe in things. And that is not itself necessarily bad.

I think there's a great indirect description of religion. You said, old people don't know. So old people, so you tend people become often become more religious as they get old. You said, old people don't know that in the world today, there's no one there. they don't know that the Bible is a customer service announcement and that purgatory is where St. Peter puts you on hold and sends you into a self-contained menu-driven loop of tone-button-operated eternity to the sound of Vivaldi's Spring.

That was actually... I mean, it's it funny to remember that you actually wrote these things? Well, you know, there is, of course, an impulse. Whenever we don't understand a force, in the earliest days, it would be the moon and the sun, and we would give it an agency, and the name we give such agencies is a god. So there was a moon god and the sun god,

and there was a god of pushing leaves out of branches of trees. Who, who, any force, any motion that we don't understand. And then, of course, force and motion and the understanding of force and motion is your business and is the business that Galileo and Newton were famous for, literally the moving of things. Sure. The prima mobile, the prime mover is the key to it.

It's the realising emotion. You hit it. You see it. physics student. No, really, because one of the things when I talk about introductory physics is the difference between Galileo and Aristotle, is Aristotle thought position was important.

Gallo realized it was motion. And that simple realization was the creation of modern physics. Yes. And what is the agency behind that movement? And of course, if you don't know and you're not prepared to do the hard thinking that science involves,

or you choose to disbelieve science for some weird reason, you give that agency to a deity. Yes. These days, I prefer to, well, I think it's... These days, a single deity, unfortunately, but it was more fun when it was... It was much more fun than more, and they're much nicer when there are a lot of them. Exactly.

I agree with you. But it's more than that, I think it's, well, maybe I'm more pejorative, that you... It's where you stop working. It's when you say, I don't want to think about this anymore, so I'll just... It's God. Yeah, I mean, I'm more hesitant than you, I think, or our mutual departed from... friend Christopher Hitchens, I cut more slack to the individually pious and devout individuals in the world.

I have no wish to offend them or to make them. I don't think he did either, actually. No, I don't think he did particularly. You know, and I always think of Flobed. You know, it's Tracant, the three stories of Flobet. There's one called La Curse Sampler, the Simple Heart. And it's this woman, Felicity, she's called, which I think is an ironic title of Happiness.

She's a hardworking maid, Bonn. And she sits in front of a, a stained glass window and looks at it. And Flobe's contempt for the Cardinals and the prefecture of Cardinals and the panoply and hierarchy of the church that keeps her on her knees is profound. But his love and sympathy for her on her knees being awed by the color and the excitement and the possibility of what religion offers is deep. And I understand that.

You know, I think I don't want to shake people and say, don't you stare at that stained glass men who don't sing those. hymns, how dare you, it's not my business. I mean, I have to speak as I find when it comes to the truth behind it, which is important. But the wonder, the sense of wonder is for celebrating. And I guess my always point of religion is that there are many positive things, as we both agree. But the question is, can you achieve those positive things without the negative ones? And Richard Feynman did wonderful, you remember talking about the flower when an argument with an artist saying, I find the flower more beautiful than you do.

You just, you know, you sort of find it beautiful. and then you go into all its stamens and its atoms. And Richard Feynman said, well, no, but don't you see? I get the beauty of the flower as the colours and the aesthetic shape, but I also get the beauty of the symmetry inside its cells. I get the symmetry of its genes. I get the beauty of its transport systems, and its, you know, its chemical reactions, it's factory, the whole thing.

I get more. More, exactly. In fact, see, I have Feynman written here. Oh, do you? So, no, it's amazing. We're on the same page. Absolutely. But interestingly enough, I also had Feynman in the sense of, you said something independently

that was almost exactly the same thing. I mean, finally, we talked about the flower, looking at a rainbow. You said a rainbow isn't less beautiful because I understand how it works. And you said rationalizing a sunset doesn't make it any less beautiful. You said it in the hippopotamus. Oh, that's right, yes. And which is a wonderful, I like the book and I like the movie. Yeah.

because it was a wonderful way of addressing this fact that we want to believe, and how can you gently show people that they're really misinterpreting the world, that there's actually a different explanation, which may be more illuminating, more useful in the long run, as it was in this case to learn about the nature of the two young men. Absolutely. And to learn the reality. That's the point.

It's not that it's not a beautiful way of seeing the world, but what ultimately leads you to useful actions versus irrational actions? And that's my problem. A greater depth of engagement in the world around you. And what we really have an objection to, of course, are the power-wielders of it, is the priestly caste that decides it has knowledge that is special, that has revealed knowledge that cannot be questioned,

that is a truth that doesn't need to be proved. and that will set you free and that without it you are in some way damned. And the people who are most likely to be controlled by that are the most vulnerable, are the poorest, are those with the least education, and who are denied any sense of education or an option of looking into the true depth and wonder of the world because it seems religion wants to count its souls. And we know what the dangers are. Yeah, there's those dangers, but those are the obvious ones, I guess.

But there are the more subtle ones, and I think that in some sense, and again, I had this debate with Tromsky at one point, who said to me early on, I don't care what people think, it's what they do. The problem is there's an intimate relationship between what people think and what they do, and that's the problem of religion, it seems to me, is not that, I mean, I find, not that it's silly. It's that accepting that silly is causes people to do irrational and sometimes evil actions. So there's that part. But then going to Hitchens, there's a question. there's a quote which I thought was from Hitchens, but like many things, it wasn't, I suppose, where I heard him say, you know, we're created sick and commanded to be well. I've learned since then it was a 16th century quote

from a name Fouquet Gavelle, maybe you know the pronunciation. He said we are created sick but commanded to be sound. I learned that it came from that. But I first learned it from Christopher. This once more, we have to be ashamed of ourselves. The sense of shame.

Yes, the sense of shame. which is so ingrained in religion is in my mind one of the, well, especially in the Judeo-Christian religion, but Philco-Cristian, that is one of the more insidious and evil aspects. Yes, that we have to square the circle of that. We accept the preposterous nature, or at least we at least agree on that, that the original sin idea, the thought that we're supposed to believe that we're guilty,

we should be ashamed. But on the other hand, we also have spoken of, without using his name yet, Or the idea that there is a perfection out there that we have not attained, that we cannot attain. And that Browning quotation about that a man's reach that exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for, pushing forward of knowing that we are imperfect. By definition, perfection isn't that which cannot be achieved. But that there are paradigms of perfection. There is a thing called truth.

And there is a thing called a shining moral ethical life that we gesture towards. But we haven't got it. We are imperfect. But the imperfection is not a stain on us from birth. It's merely that we're given a sense of the ineffable and the inexpressible in ourselves, a pattern of something beyond, which is what Plato imagined, that there is this. And it's a not that Plato, I don't think, believed that there was this sort of parallel universe in which everything was perfect.

But that if you have it in your head, then... I like the idea that I should be better than I am. Yes. You know? It's because rejecting original sin is not the same as saying when we can just accept exactly who we are because we're perfect. We're born fine and I don't have to struggle to express myself

to fulfill myself more than, you know, we know that we fail. We know that we do fall short of some standard that may be acculturated but may also be programmed, may be hardwired. And like most of those questions, my terrible joke is, you know, we're used to the idea that the nature-nurture debate, you know, but we forget that there's also the question of human will, so I say it's nature, nurture and Nietzsche. But, you know, but I think awful, as that is, there is a truth in there that that, not that I would go along with Nietzsche and Superman and all the rest of it, but the will to power or anything. but that most philosophers don't believe there is such a thing as free will, but that doesn't mean there isn't will.

We can't will ourselves to have will, as Chopin has said. And we certainly don't, you know, we don't will ourselves to be, you know, the way we're born is not something we can will and how we're, where we're born or any of those questions. But whether or not we are forged more by name. more by nurture, we still have agency over our actions, which is not the same as free will, but is... No, well, yes, well, we can spend a long time.

You're quite a question. You know, even in a world without free will, we still have to take responsibility. Responsibility, exactly. I think that's the key point, because it appears to be a world. Yeah. It's funny because one of my favorite quotes, I was with, as you were, but I was with Christopher a little while before he died. And I was sitting in his kitchen, and I was reading the New York Times, and there was a wonderful article about how students at Yale,

they were working hard, there were religious groups, to try and stop students at Yale from losing their religion. And they said, faced with beer pong, Hitchens, and Nietzsche, it's impossible. And I said to Christopher. He would have loved that. Yeah, he did. I said, how much more can you have achieved their life to be sandwiched between beer pong and Nietzsche? There's nothing better.

Fabulous. Yeah, it was wonderful. But nevertheless, I would be remiss. One of, to me, I assume, we'll go down in one of most important quotes you've given is when people ask you what you'd come say face to face with God. And I have to read it because it's so important. Because, well, it relates to the Greek myth too. But you said, you'd say, oh, I should let you read it. But anyway, bone cancer of children, what about that? How dare you? How dare you? How dare you? How dare you? you create a world where there's such misery that's not our fault. It's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain? And... Yes. I mean, this was a surprise question I got from an interview I was giving in Ireland, actually. He just said, well, suppose you're wrong, Stephen, in the end. And, you know, you die, and then you wake up and there is God. What would you say to him? And so I thought, well, That's what I'd say. How dare you? What was there about bone cancer in children? What are you thinking of?

You know, I mean, even if you accept these free will ideas and that it's up to us and that God is, you know, wound the clock on humanity and is, for some bizarre reason, decided to watch his little creations jig about and judge them according to the way they behave, which is outrageous anyway. Even you accept that, that doesn't explain children dying in earthquakes, which is plate tectonics, which you can't even put down to the way. global warming. I mean, that's just the way he made the planet. But that's an old thing, the argument from evil, which used to be called, as you know, Theodicy is, I believe, the grand name for that form of theological argument, and it's a very difficult one to answer if you maintain that there is a single God who is benevolent. Yes. Because it just doesn't stand up, and it's...

It's that hypocrisy. You see, that's what... I mean, what's interested me is because comparing it to the Greek gods, the wonderful thing about the Greek gods was people expected the gods because they were vain and lustful and jealous and the Jewish God is exactly the same but we have to accuse him or her because

they're represented as being exactly the opposite of what they actually are and so we spend our time on their knees apologizing for our faults but ignoring his or hers yeah exactly it's preposterous it's a shame because I have to say

say, I love sacred music. I love talis and bird and Bach and Handel. I love sacred architecture. I love the English hymnal. I love the liturgy of the Anglican church. There's so much in the same way that I love Greek myths. It doesn't mean I believe in them. Yeah.

But I believe that ritual and ceremony are very important parts of being human. Absolutely. And I think they express in a visual, dramatic, metaphorical form, much of what it is to be alive. and like a kind of theater, a theater of ideas and emotions and instincts and impulses. And that's a very important thing for us to do. It's a unnatural way of expressing.

It's part of being human, and that's why religion I think is so ubiquitous. And again, when I talk about how can we achieve the goals, the things that religion provides without religion, my saying is that we should have Sunday morning quantum mechanics classes myself. And without the eschatology, without the idea that as the Greeks, one of the great things about the Greeks is that they knew anybody who said definitively what happens to a human being after their dead is either a fool or a liar

because there has never been one who's returned to tell the story and there is no place to visit. You know, and the original ideas that sort of vents and flumes that were showing a bit of lava might have been the gateway to hell we now know are just a gateway to a very hot. Very hot part of the world. Have you ever been? I was recently in Vanuatu, when I looked down into a volcano.

I've never been, it's unbelievable. Have you had that experience? I did. I helicoptered over Hawaii. I did a documentary which I went to all the states of the Union. And we ended in Hawaii watching new bits of America being born as the lava spewed into the sea and new rock was formed. It was a great way to end. Yes.

Well, before I end on religion, I had to ask you, you must be very proud. There aren't many of us. I want to know if it's still there, the defamation act. that you were accused of blasphemy. Yes. I mean, it's a wonderful. I actually, someone gave me a doctorate in blasphemy, a college, some college gave,

which I had on my wall. But you actually have been accused of it, which I assume is a badge of honor in someone. Well, actually, it was very Irish. And that sounds like it's almost a racist thing to say, to describe something as very Irish. But it was a, Ireland's been reinventing itself in terms of the power of the church.

over divorce and abortion and gay rights and all the rest of it, and they've had a series of plebiscites and referendums. And they still have this rather old blasphemy law. So when in Ireland, as I was, I spoke out against God and said what a monster he was, an absurd, stupid, evil, unnecessary cruel and so on. It was actually an Irish barrister who suggested that I might be guilty of blasphemy because he knew it would be a fantastic shit show to have me in a court. Yes. Because technically I had infringed the law and it would make the law look the ass that it is.

And it was his way of saying, come on Ireland, we've got to get rid of this. In the modern world, it's absurd. So he wasn't genuinely offended by what it said. But did it lead to getting rid of it? It actually did, or at least I don't know whether mine had, but he drew attention to it. And Ireland, as I say, had been busy in cleaning the orgy in stables of its, of its, of its Catholic stranglehold, yeah. And so that I think is one of the things that has been cleaned up.

As my friends, Steve Weinberg, would say you were doing God's work. Okay, well, there's two more, just two more things I want to talk about quickly. One is speaking, as we're traveling down the road from intellectual heights, there's political correctness, a group think mentality, which you've been, which you've attacked happily. and the notion that it's to some extent shame once again comes in here. I was talking to Ian McKeown recently about his, he received a prize and went to Israel and was castigated for that.

And I know, of course, you've spoken out against Israel's treatment of Palestinians. I have, but I'm Jewish and I see the right for Israel to exist as a state and I have family who live in Tel Aviv and if I want to visit them, I'll bloody well visit them. I might not be told not to. Exactly. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about this curse of the combination of political correctness and virtue signaling that you cannot say certain things now, which is the opposite of the enlightenment in some sense. Yeah. I mean, I'm temperamentally a liberal, but a hand-wringing liberal, a milk-toast liberal, an unsure, worried carpet, slippered, big cardiganed, you know, E.M. Forstery is sort of a liberal. I'm not a hardline lefty. I have a sympathy with a lot of social justice

imperatives and quests and so on. But I just want the left to be smarter than it is. I want it to be aware of how it's alienating, well-meaning good people are just outraged and upset and frightened by the redaction of human lives, who know of a person being cast into outer darkness, without trial, without due process, for, you know, all kinds of reasons, and for the language being used to carelessly. Yes.

Yeah, languages can be a ticking bomb. You can occasionally. Obviously, if you start talking about people as cockroaches and so on, we're all aware of how, you know, racist language can be a vicious precursor to racist behaviour. and to blood on the streets. But it is just language. But, you know, I think I agreed to be on stage with Jordan Peterson. Yes.

He's not someone I necessarily agree with in all. I was surprised, but I guess I understood. It was very open-minded. I'd draw the line at Ben Shapiro, I think. But Jordan Peterson, I thought, well, that's the point is to say, you know, there are things I disagree with this, ma'am, but I do agree with him on the fact that, and from my point of view, it's because I actually lament the failure of the left. I think the rise of Bannonism and the alt-rise and its equivalence across Europe

is more a catastrophic failure of the left than a particular triumph of the right. It's also bolsters the right, at least in the United States. It bolsters it enormously. If you read, who is protecting free speech right now, who's speaking out in favor of speech, it's the right. And it's not as it should be. It's not as it should be. We should be less sensitive.

And I don't want to use the word snowflake because it's so banded about. But, you know, less. And most importantly, we should think. about being of how it's more important to be effective than to be right, right in the sense of righteous and self-righteous and all those things. It just be effect, you know, if you want the world to be a better place, think about how to deliver that. And it's not by alienating people in the middle, people who are as lost and is frightened by their hard right and the alt-right and the hard left and the alt-left, if you want to call it that, that for heaven's sake,

It's just so dumb. It's dumb. It's dumb. It's lost in a world where if you start talking about heteronormative patriarchs, then I'm sorry, fuck off. You know, it's not English and it comes from a Judith Butler world of, you know, all respect to her and good work and all the rest of it. And this is not to say that we push back feminism as irrelevant. That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying is choose a better language to normalize it if you want to use a normal word rather than normativize it.

You know, it just, otherwise you are losing allies, you are losing political ground, you are not achieving what it is you want to achieve. All you are is being right. It's hugging yourself for being right. Well, good luck to you. But you're losing something even more. You're losing the fact that we need to question, that that's how society moves forward, that we need to question ourselves and be willing to openly question those things we accept as normal.

Yeah. I do believe in inspecting the nature of gender and the fluidity of it. I do believe in, you know, that the transgender and intersex people have been given an incredibly hard time, and mutilated in the case of intersex people without their will. And there's a lot of important social work and understanding to be done and in the same way it's happened in my lifetime that my own, you know, my own gay life has meant that I've suddenly ended up as it were being able to be. married to the man I love. And it's an incredible breakthrough. And there's many more breakthroughs to be made. But actually, in this country, when Ian McKellen and Stonewall, which is the sort of activist group working in politics, he worked quietly behind the scenes persuading politicians. He didn't stand in the barricades, getting angry and red-faced and alienating ordinary people. He saw conservative politicians. And it was a conservative politician in the former David Cameron who pushed through in the face of of vituperative opposition from his own hard

right, he pushed through the Equal Marriage Act. And that's the way you get things done. It may not be just, it may not be quick enough, but it's how things get done. You know, it's a bit like engineering. It's the third, fourth, fifth kind of version

is the one that you can release to the public that's actually going to work, but there are a lot of a lot of betas and a lot of, you know, false starts, and that's true in social progress as well. Well, and we have to, yeah, and if the left sort of doesn't realize, well, it doesn't realize that I always, when I find myself agreeing with Donald Trump, I got worried. And, you know, when I read Donald Trump, say, well, we were not going to give federal funds to universities unless they allow free speech. And that seems reasonable to me, actually. And then I say, oh, my goodness, if I, if that sounds reasonable, there's some fundamental problem with, and as an academic, it's really unfortunate to see how people are raining in what they're talking about. The scientists and he will also appreciate that newspapers and politicians will choose events and rhetoric from particular campuses to suggest a far more systemic problem than actually exists. Actually, exactly.

If you go to the average university, there is a lot of free speech and there's a lot of given take. Well, you know better than I do what the life on the campus is, but there's also truth behind it that needs to be interesting. Well, one of your favorite, I want you to remind, I always screwed up as a quote about giving offence. which I want to get to. But let me preface that by saying, to me, one of the most ironic examples of what may have been happening in academia, it was a university where a speaker was coming in

to speak on free speech. And the women's group created safe zones so that people wouldn't be traumatized by hearing it. And that to me is the most ironic thing. But because the point is that people seem to think that being offended gives these special rights, and you beautifully, and I don't know if you remember exactly what it's up, but I remember hearing you first say that being offended doesn't give you any special rights.

And, you know, I think you said something like, maybe, I'm pretty sure you said something like, oh, I offended you, big fucking deal. Well, that's right. It is. I mean, there's a tradition in language. I love Sir Humphrey Wasp in a rather, well, not obscure, but not one of the better known plays of Ben Johnson, Bartholomew Fair, when he goes around his expression if he's annoyed with someone, is a turd in your teeth, sir.

And I want to say a turd in your teeth to these people. Just as when I was a boy, my mother would occasionally take me to the assembly rooms in Norwich, which was like stepping back into a Jane Austen world. And I used to picture myself standing on a table, pulling down my trousers and pointing my bottom at these incredibly refined ladies with their tea, because they just looked as if they needed, you know,

to be slightly shocked out of their kind of, ooh, everything is so nice and proper. And that's now the position that I've, feel in the case of some of these sensitive, trigger sensitive people in universities who say, I don't want to see the Macbeth because it's got a murder of children in it or there's a rape in this play. I want to say, a turd in your teeth. You know, well, you know, it's like, you know, parents who overprotect their children from viruses and bacteria. You know, they're going to get oversensitive and, you know, they should be sucking gravel when they're

They should be playing in mud. Exactly. And that's the part of the problem. There's a book in the United States called Coddling in the American Monument. Jonathan Hayth. Very good book. I was going to say, and I think the point that he makes,

which is so interesting, is that in some sense, the feeling of people that they have to be protected at universities from anything that's going to hurt them comes from this overly protective parenting that's happened that didn't. When you and our kids, we like to run around. A bit very interesting time when suddenly it all changed in terms of the natural age. at which children be allowed out to play on with their bicycles, with their peers.

Exactly. And now don't cross the street. Don't do this, don't do that, because you might get hurt. You might scrape yourself. You might. The world is a dangerous place. And you have to be protected from the dangers. Instead of the fact, the world is a dangerous place.

But learning to live with them is part of what it means the joy of growing up and being human. It's really part of it. Exactly. I was sent away at seven to a preschool where I was beaten up, bullied, interfered with bastard, bastard, humiliated. And, you know, so by, I'm not recommending it as some of you do to children, believe me. But it did mean that I was, I mean, I'm a sensitive person. I don't like being attacked or anything.

But I was not frightened by the emotional violence of the world. I was horrified by it because it's a bad thing. But I didn't get triggered into some sort of, you know, fetal position of, of, you know, fetal position of, whimpering and I don't know, I don't want to sound cruel and unfeeling because it is a problem that the young people, if they are afraid of encountering things, or if by the time they go to university, it's the first time they've left home and, you know, they can't cope with it, then that's a pity. Well, it is, but I think part of what university is supposed to be about besides the, I mean, the academics is part of it is, is making that transition from the safety of the home to the, to the, because ultimately it's supposed to prepare you for the real world in many ways, in principle,

to prepare you for the real world in becoming a lifelong learner. We've all seen the toddler that falls over and then looks to the adult to see what the adult's expression is. And if the adult just is not interested, they might actually not cry, but if the adult goes like that, then they'll go, whee, and then they know they'll get a nice couple and talk. And we've all seen that. We want to balance sensitivity with the desire, I mean, a little bit of tough love and combined for those of us who've been parents, it's a, It's a huge challenge to know when to not be sensitive and when to treat.

My wife is much better than tough love and I'm my... That's off the way. Yeah, it's really... Now, going back to... I want to end in a way because you went back to your childhood experience, but I want to end with a personal thing, which I was debating whether to talk to you, but you've talked about it publicly is your own issues of suicide. And I want to talk about it a positive way if I can.

Not that suicide in a positive way, but the notion of the personal challenges we have because what I said about you at the beginning of this is true in terms of just you're a lovely man. And as someone that I just melt when I'm with you. But another person I'm like that way is someone I've had a dialogue with Johnny Depp, who's a friend of mine.

And we had a dialogue on creativity and madness because he talks about the demons in his head a lot. But at the same time, they've helped him become the person he is. And so I wanted to ask you about whether that, whether you feel in any way that that the two double-sided coin is there. W.H. Orden put it, you know,

didn't take away my demons or my angels will fly away too. And it's very hard for us to know, to have, to presume to know how much we depend on these, these struggles within ourselves for, for any kind of, you know, achievement or self-definition. And we,

that without them, we would be blanded out into something. I mean, it's certainly true that when you face mental health problems and recognize them for the first time, a lot of us have them, as we now know. And we don't, certainly in the past, maybe I hope that's changed, we're unlikely to recognize them. You know, teenagers are a difficult time anyway. Everyone knows it is. You could be stormy and difficult and hard to manage. And then there's university and there's your early adulthood and you introduced to alcohol and

drugs and things, and those have an effect on you that very often you haven't noticed why you've responded well to them. If your moods are likely to drag you down or to push you up into sort of mad frenzies, then you do reach out to chemicals that will control it in some way, not necessarily consciously. You just think, oh, I can't have a drink, let me feel better kind of And then maybe you'll be lucky enough to think, someone will tell you you're drinking too much, or you really want to take all this cocaine? Are you sure? And you'll think, okay, I'll stop.

And then what's left behind is the problem that they were masking in the first place. And then you go through the business of realizing that you have a condition. You have a mood disorder, in my case, a bipolar disorder. and that your chemistry, whatever it is, is out of whack a bit or can cycle in ways that can be profoundly difficult to cope with. And the depression can lead to suicidal ideation, as they like to call it, in the trade, i.e. thinking about killing yourself, which is obviously dangerous. And it has led in the past two people self-medicating with alcohol and drugs in order to suppress it.

But also the mania, the hypermania, as it's called, of the upstate, what used to be the manic, as in manic, depressive. That's harder for your friends and family to deal with because you become totally, you know, you don't sleep, you're full of ridiculous plans, you know, all of that, you know. And you've got to find a way to manage it, ideally, without drugs and alcohol because you know that they only exacerbate it, which they do. Certainly in my case, they do. They just make it worse.

The alcohol becomes more and more depressing, and you get crosser and angrier when drunk. So that's just a bad thing, and not nice to be around, and it's just yuck. And so I went through, you know, the adventure of finding out different cocktails of official pharmaceutical drugs rather than street drugs and recreational drugs.

And then I have since, been lucky enough to control it really with not drinking much, just a bit of social drinking here and there, but I've never been that in love with drink to become an alcoholic, fortunately. I gave up Coke happily with that matter in particular, and indeed smoking. But I've taken up walking. I walk eight miles every morning.

And that seems to have an effect on my mood. Oh, yeah. I'm not going to be so... The endorphins that they really do. Yeah. Yeah, and now you know, I'm not going to claim that it's going to work for everyone because we're all different. And, I mean, example of how all different we are, as we all know people that we can sit around the table and drink the same number of glasses of wine and one person will become a monster and another person will be all sentimental, another person will fall asleep and someone else won't turn a hair. And that's the relatively simple chemical ingredient, you know, the esters and aldehydes of alcohol.

Whereas the complex drugs that are given by pharmaceutical companies, they can obviously have different effects from different people. So it's not for me to say lithium will work for you or this, you know, SSRI will work for you. And the complex drugs that are going through us. And our own pharmacopoeia. Which we are, we are much more complex pharmaceutical. Yeah, the endocrines and the... Yeah, yeah.

And they affect people differently. And in that sense, I wanted to end this. this with because we actually you said it two different ways and I found it during this conversation now I may not realize we talked about shame and we talked about the fact that we we we know what we can become and and so the reaction one can have to it there are two quotes there's one that not from you but it was since I was speaking in mckeon recently in his book about machines like me which is about yes he said we know what we are we know we're deficient because we know what we should be yes and so again it's somewhat the shame

aspect, but in some sense that for me, and I imagine to some extent in multiplication for you in the depressive stages, that's the source of my insecurity, is the fact that I know I'm not what I could be. And it's a cause of shame and often depression. But at the same time, if you think of it a different way, and maybe if the chemicals in your brain are working differently, you have that quote of yours that we actually said, ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's heaven for. And so it seems to me the dichotomy between those are both different aspects of exactly the same thing. You can either be depressed about the fact you are not what you can be or you can use it as a motivation to try and be a little more like what you can be. Exactly.

I remember once filming in the Amazon and there was a tree frog and I looked at this tree frog and of course it's anthropomorphic but they seem to have a smile. Yes, yeah. But and I remember saying to it as it was just there. Yeah, I've seen them. I've been in the Amazon. And I said, I don't know much about your life, tree frog, but I can be fairly certain that last night you didn't go to bed thinking I was a terrible free frog yesterday. I was awful. I was mean to those tree frogs and I promised that one something that I didn't deliver and oh, I'm just so ashamed of myself. You just, as a tree frog, you spend 24 hours of

every day and 60 minutes of every hour being a tree frog. You're not becoming a tree frog. You always are one. That is your privilege, your glory as an animal. But I am different. I don't know why I'm different and I don't know that I can actually prove it, but I intuit and I sense it strongly enough to call it knowledge that I do go to bed thinking I was a bad Stephen yesterday, a bad human yesterday. I failed on this and why did I say that? Oh, God, what was I thinking of? And shouldn't I bothered to write that and I didn't write that thank you letter and I didn't you know there can be small little social things or they can be vast ethical quandaries and that's what that's what genesis tried to explain is what the prometheus myth trying to explain is where do we get this thing that but it

it's our curse but it's also our blessing and and I think that's what we square as being being humans being the species we are and how it got there whether you follow the evolutionally psychology path of the where we bonded and it's all to do with our evolution, or whether it was a strange piece of firing in a mutation that just developed, not for, you know, not for the benevolent reasons of evolution, but it doesn't matter. We can just think of it. And praise that, if you're like.

It praise that and the fact that it's our curse and our blessing at the same time. It's what makes being human being human and trying to understand that through art or through science the same exploration, the same search. And I just have to say that, you know, of all the people I know, your grasp is about as far as anyone's I know. But I want you to keep thinking of the positive, Stephen, that your reason to exceed it and not the negative

because we all need you. Thank you so very much. It's been wonderful. Thank you. Gosh, that was fun. The Origins podcast is produced by Lawrence Krause, Nancy Dahl, John and Don Edwards, Gus and Luke Holwarda, and Rob Zeps. Audio by Thomas Amison, web design by Redmond Media Lab, animation by Tomahawk Visual Effects, and music by Ricolus.

To see the full video of this podcast, as well as other bonus content, visit us at patreon.com slash origins podcast.