The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 352. Art is Not Optional, It’s the Point ｜ Joe Hage

00:00:00.960 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

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00:00:57.420 Hi everyone. I'm here in London today, and I have the opportunity to speak to Joe Hegg.

00:01:15.100 And I met Joe with the film producer, the British film producer Guy Ritchie.

00:01:20.040 We've met, this is the fourth time we've met, and the last three times we had a very interesting conversation.

00:01:29.780 Joe has had a remarkable life on a variety of different, in a variety of different directions and on a variety of different planes.

00:01:37.340 And so, for me, this is an opportunity to get to know him further.

00:01:40.780 He's had a remarkable career as a litigator, and is also deeply involved in the world of modern fine art.

00:01:50.260 And so, we share a lot of interests.

00:01:52.720 I worked with lawyers for a long time in Toronto, when I was working as a clinician and a consultant.

00:01:58.060 And I've been collecting art for a long time, and Joe's quite the fascinating character.

00:02:02.840 And so, I thought I'd have this opportunity today to get to know him a little bit more, but also to introduce all of you to him.

00:02:09.700 And so, that's the plan for today.

00:02:12.420 So, Joe, I think we should probably start by doing a little bit of an investigation into your background.

00:02:19.320 And so, where were you born?

00:02:21.240 I was born in Lebanon.

00:02:23.880 And I came to England when I was four years old.

00:02:25.980 I'm an only child.

00:02:27.060 My mum and dad were immigrant workers.

00:02:29.320 And they came to England. 0.82

00:02:30.260 I often get asked this.

00:02:31.360 They came to England simply to make a living and seek their fortune, or just to get a life, because it was tough in Lebanon then.

00:02:38.360 And when was that?

00:02:42.620 We arrived on January the 9th, 1967.

00:02:45.540 67.

00:02:46.380 It's funny.

00:02:46.680 Immigrants often remember the day they arrived anyway. 0.89

00:02:49.380 It's like an important date.

00:02:50.420 Yeah, 67.

00:02:51.540 Yeah, yeah.

00:02:52.300 Well, it's quite something to arrive in a new country with a young child and try to orient yourself and get going.

00:02:58.780 What did your parents do in Lebanon?

00:03:00.080 My mum didn't do anything, really.

00:03:03.500 And my father was a carpenter and a French polisher, just polishing wood, really.

00:03:09.080 Often in churches, church pews needed polishing, French polishing.

00:03:14.060 And how did they get the opportunity to come to Great Britain?

00:03:17.800 Well, it's funny, like most things in life, it's pure accident and chance.

00:03:21.480 But the UK occupied England, I think, in the second half of the Second World War.

00:03:30.400 And so my auntie, my mum's auntie, I call her my auntie, married an English soldier she'd fallen in love with.

00:03:36.420 She came here, so we had a contact here.

00:03:38.800 Most Lebanese would normally go to Australia or, as you probably know, to Canada, especially Montreal.

00:03:44.120 But we came here just because of that chance encounter that my great-aunt had with an English soldier in about 1944.

00:03:51.760 So she was living here, so she helped us come here.

00:03:54.740 And so you came here when you were four.

00:03:57.240 Do you remember anything of Lebanon as a child?

00:04:00.580 Yeah, we've talked about this, I think, a little bit before.

00:04:02.980 I do remember some things, but I'm not sure how much I remember because it's been put in my mind by constant repetition by my mother and father.

00:04:13.440 But I have a vague memory of things.

00:04:15.520 I remember wanting to get these old fantastic little biscuits and cakes and syrupy drinks.

00:04:23.100 And they'd come around the streets shouting whether anyone wanted them.

00:04:26.000 And if you wanted them, you'd lower a basket down with some money.

00:04:29.420 And then they'd take the basket up at parent hours, very keen on getting those little goodies as a kid.

00:04:35.100 You know, that overlaying of memory, that's an interesting phenomenon because we tend to think of memory as something like a videotape recording.

00:04:43.620 And it's not that at all.

00:04:45.080 Memory is very malleable.

00:04:46.520 And every time you bring a memory to mind and discuss it and contemplate it, you actually change the shape of the memory,

00:04:54.440 partly because you're contextualizing it differently as you think about it.

00:04:58.500 And so it alters and transforms while you play with it.

00:05:02.320 And that's sort of how the story of your life emerges from the memories of your life.

00:05:07.360 And there's a back and forth between that constantly.

00:05:09.920 And so, and what were things like for you in Great Britain?

00:05:16.660 Where did you move specifically?

00:05:18.280 Just to London, to southwest London, Wimbledon where I was brought up.

00:05:22.140 You know, my auntie and uncle helped out.

00:05:25.860 My great aunt and uncle helped out.

00:05:27.740 And my mom and dad got jobs that worked very hard.

00:05:29.680 Typical immigrant worker jobs, you know, helping in a kitchen and helping on a building site. 1.00

00:05:34.440 But things were very good.

00:05:35.400 I mean, looking back, we were very poor.

00:05:38.300 By the time, we didn't really feel poor.

00:05:40.840 Yeah.

00:05:41.400 Well, if you have hope, you're not poor.

00:05:43.580 Exactly.

00:05:43.920 You know, I lived in Montreal as a graduate student and I lived in a poor neighborhood.

00:05:49.760 And I didn't have much money because I was on a fellowship.

00:05:52.900 And at that particular time, I was supporting Tammy, at least to some degree.

00:05:58.920 But I knew I had a reasonably, a future that was likely to progress upward.

00:06:05.980 And I started to really understand the difference between not having money and being poor at that point.

00:06:11.000 Because all my neighbors were poor.

00:06:13.480 The neighborhood I lived in was sort of, it wasn't a slum by any stretch of the imagination.

00:06:17.680 But it was a neighborhood that had been multi-generationally poor.

00:06:22.240 And it was poor enough so there were some people who'd fallen completely out of the system in the neighborhood.

00:06:29.000 And they were, by all measures, poor.

00:06:32.640 Fractured, fragmented, broken.

00:06:34.300 And I thought, well, what's the difference here exactly?

00:06:38.800 I don't have any money and they don't have any money.

00:06:41.160 But I'm definitely not poor.

00:06:42.840 And they're definitely poor.

00:06:44.340 And I realized that almost the entire difference was, well, I had nothing but opportunity in front of me.

00:06:52.980 And if you have nothing but opportunity in front of you, assuming you're not starving, you're not poor.

00:06:57.980 And partly because we live to a far greater degree than we realize on faith and hope.

00:07:05.180 And if there's a pathway open in front of you.

00:07:07.420 So even with your parents, you know, if they believe that you were likely to have a life that was going to improve quite dramatically as it progressed,

00:07:16.400 then they have a reason for all their sacrifices and their work.

00:07:20.480 And then with that reason, you're not exactly poor.

00:07:24.080 You just don't have any money.

00:07:25.260 That's not the same thing.

00:07:26.560 No, I agree.

00:07:27.740 You have hope.

00:07:29.400 I was in an ambulance a while ago with someone who was critically ill.

00:07:34.100 And I remember the ambulance driver, I was saying, do you think they'll make it?

00:07:38.240 And they say, yeah, sure, they will.

00:07:39.460 I'm sure they will.

00:07:40.160 You have to have hope.

00:07:41.160 And they said this nice phrase.

00:07:42.420 They said, hope is the last thing to die.

00:07:44.280 That's really the way it should be.

00:07:47.100 If it dies before it should, then you die shortly thereafter because you have to have hope.

00:07:51.760 Yeah, well, you see with clinical depression, it has two components.

00:07:55.620 And one is that people suffer from both an overwhelming influx of pain and anxiety.

00:08:03.100 So that's on the negative emotion front.

00:08:05.200 And you might think that that's sufficient to produce depression, but it's not.

00:08:09.300 Real depression is also characterized by the eradication of positive emotion.

00:08:14.580 And hope is, hope is really, if you had to specify a single word to represent the bulk

00:08:23.960 of the positive emotion that people most truly want to experience, hope is likely the best

00:08:28.940 word because hope is experienced in relationship to a goal, to a valued goal.

00:08:35.340 And so if you see yourself progressing towards a valued goal or you see any pathway whatsoever

00:08:40.660 open up towards a valued goal, then you have hope.

00:08:43.520 And if you're truly depressed, that hope vanishes and all you see in front of you are obstacles

00:08:49.480 and pitfalls.

00:08:50.600 And well, and then if you add pain and anxiety to that, you've got a good recipe for despair.

00:08:56.440 And that despair, that's poverty.

00:09:00.500 And this is an important thing to understand because this is, I think, one of the problems

00:09:05.920 of both the right and the left wing ideas in relationship to money.

00:09:11.040 The left thinks that poverty is caused by lack of money and you can't cure despair with money.

00:09:19.240 You can add impulsive hedonism to despair with money, but you can't cure it with money.

00:09:26.300 And the right, well, I will leave that out of the conversation for now.

00:09:32.040 And so what was your childhood like in Wimbledon?

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00:11:11.160 It was very good, very happy.

00:11:16.040 My mum and dad were probably more dependent on me than usual parents because they couldn't

00:11:21.480 speak English as quickly as I could or as well as I could.

00:11:23.980 Right.

00:11:25.040 So I had to help them read letters and help them do things.

00:11:28.980 But it was a very, you know, they loved me so much.

00:11:31.200 And that was the main thing they did for me.

00:11:33.440 But it was a good upbringing.

00:11:35.000 Obviously, everything was state paid.

00:11:36.920 The school, you know, because we didn't have money to go to a fee-paying school.

00:11:41.220 But I had a very happy upbringing, at least it appears to be the case now when I pull my

00:11:44.960 memory out about it and put it back.

00:11:46.460 I had lots of good friends.

00:11:48.160 There's one thing, as we were talking earlier about where you lived in Montreal, which I

00:11:52.720 thought was quite interesting, is that because we were so relatively poor, we had a house with

00:11:57.160 three bedrooms in it.

00:11:58.180 But because we didn't have so much money to pay for it, we rented out a lot of the rooms.

00:12:01.600 This is like 50 years ago.

00:12:03.220 And so you'd always have different, I think, people who live, I wouldn't say in poverty,

00:12:08.680 but people who don't have much money.

00:12:10.200 They often live closer together and on top of each other.

00:12:12.800 And so we had lots of people coming in and out of the house.

00:12:15.380 I remember there was an Iranian couple, an Irish builder, an old lady who lived in the

00:12:19.800 house.

00:12:20.280 And you saw quite a lot of life jammed up close.

00:12:22.920 And that was quite good as a kid for me to see so many different people from different

00:12:28.420 societies, really.

00:12:29.640 Right.

00:12:29.860 I didn't realize that at the time, but it was really, really good.

00:12:33.440 Well, there must have been some advantage, too, to being dependent upon like that by your

00:12:39.480 parents at such an early age, because that puts you that, I mean, children really like

00:12:44.860 to have genuine responsibility if you can lay out a pathway forward for them so that they

00:12:51.140 are contributing in some way that isn't merely illusory.

00:12:54.680 You know, it helps them pay for the burden of their care.

00:12:57.120 And it's not like they're thinking that through, but they're feeling it.

00:13:00.980 You know, kids, because they're human, would just as soon be in a reciprocal relationship

00:13:06.700 if they can manage it.

00:13:07.880 And one of the advantages to being in the situation that you're in is that you actually

00:13:11.640 did have some real things to do.

00:13:13.180 It mattered that you could speak English and read and intermediate for your parents.

00:13:17.740 And certainly that places a quasi-adult burden on you.

00:13:22.380 And you could imagine that that could get overwhelming if your parents were struggling

00:13:26.180 and barely staying afloat.

00:13:27.840 But you could also see that that could be an optimal situation for someone young.

00:13:32.320 How about, how were you treated by the other kids in the neighborhood?

00:13:35.600 You're an immigrant kid. 0.99

00:13:37.080 I mean, you know, the trope would be that that would go badly.

00:13:40.220 And of course, obviously, often it doesn't.

00:13:42.680 I don't think it probably goes badly more often than a kid's life in general goes badly.

00:13:48.580 Yeah.

00:13:48.720 So, but how were you treated?

00:13:50.420 I treated very well.

00:13:51.080 I mean, in, in, where I was brought up in London, there were lots of immigrants really

00:13:55.860 for different phases.

00:13:57.420 There's different phases of immigration.

00:13:59.520 I find, I've always found England or London anyway, the least sort of racist place going.

00:14:04.720 But there were lots of Irish kids, Indian kids, you know, Caribbean kids.

00:14:09.320 So it was pretty mixed up and there wasn't any, any racism.

00:14:12.680 So everyone was kind of welcomed in the immigrant community and some, and the, and the English

00:14:17.700 people also very welcoming.

00:14:18.960 So I've never had any sort of, I've always felt welcome here, of which I'm really appreciative.

00:14:23.660 And so is my, so my mother and father.

00:14:25.680 Right, right.

00:14:26.280 And, and you also, you're, you're, you're, you appear quite positively predisposed to the

00:14:35.100 memories you have of your childhood.

00:14:36.400 And you said that your parents loved you.

00:14:39.320 And how did that, how did that make itself manifest?

00:14:42.220 Like, what was your relationship with your father like?

00:14:44.960 He, I had a bit of fear about him because he was quite a strong and potentially violent

00:14:51.140 man, but he never hit me.

00:14:52.160 But it's funny, he, when I was a child, my mother used to hit me, but not in a, in a,

00:14:55.840 in a way that really hurt.

00:14:56.980 It was just more in a way that people did 40 or 50 years ago, not in a, in a bad way,

00:15:01.420 but it made no difference to me.

00:15:02.500 I'd just be running around the room and be shouting each other.

00:15:04.840 We used to feel sorry for our mother when she got pushed to the point where she'd have

00:15:08.240 to hit us.

00:15:09.260 The three, I had two siblings and, you know, we ramp up the excitement in the house or

00:15:14.800 the squabbling or whatever it was.

00:15:16.340 And mom was very patient, but now and then we'd push her beyond her capacity for tolerance

00:15:21.160 and she'd, you know, lash out in some manner that didn't really make any difference at all.

00:15:25.600 Make any difference.

00:15:26.160 We were way more likely to stop misbehaving because we felt guilty that we'd upset her

00:15:31.380 that because of anything that was a consequence of the, of the blow.

00:15:35.620 I think the way that my mom and dad were very simple because they were essentially from a

00:15:40.440 village in the mountains in Lebanon and they had a very pure and simple approach to life.

00:15:45.320 And the thing, I think the thing that they gave me, when you said, how did love manifest

00:15:50.280 itself, it also manifested itself in a belief in me.

00:15:54.440 And I remember I was telling, I was talking to some friends recently, if I said I wanted

00:15:57.980 to do anything, they would support me, anything at all, really.

00:16:01.120 Yeah.

00:16:01.460 And they would believe in me.

00:16:02.520 Like even if I were to say to my mom now, I've decided to try and win the 100 meters Olympic

00:16:08.580 gold medal for sprinting. 0.99

00:16:11.000 She wouldn't say, don't be so ridiculous. 0.99

00:16:12.620 She said, of course you can do it. 0.98

00:16:13.980 You know, and even though it'd be absurd, she really would believe in me.

00:16:17.340 And even now she'd believe in me doing it.

00:16:19.500 And that gave me so much.

00:16:20.680 Yeah, that's very interesting because, you know, one of the things I think that my parents

00:16:25.120 gave me on both sides was exactly that.

00:16:29.020 And that's an interesting example of the positive manifestation of faith.

00:16:34.120 And it wasn't like they were deluded about my stature or potential ability.

00:16:40.700 And it wasn't a narcissistic grandiosity on their part about the specialness of their child.

00:16:47.340 It was, I thought this through, I think, technically when I was working as a clinician.

00:16:54.860 And it was, I really think that what it was, was the best in them serving the best in me

00:17:00.160 and their fundamental willingness to have that happen.

00:17:03.480 And I really noticed the difference between the relationship I had, particularly with my

00:17:07.900 father and the relationship, who was a rough guy and who had very high standards and who

00:17:14.460 was a strict person.

00:17:15.420 He was no pushover and no, you know, sympathetic font of easy love.

00:17:22.360 But he had this intrinsic faith in my ability.

00:17:26.920 And I always had that with me, always.

00:17:29.920 And my friends, I grew up in a working class town and my friends by and large didn't have

00:17:36.300 that, particularly from their father.

00:17:37.920 And that was definitely something that was hard on them and lacking in their life because

00:17:42.780 they didn't have that.

00:17:44.020 It's like an internal sense of, well, if your parents have faith in you, it's a lot easier

00:17:50.900 for you to have faith in you as you move out to confront the world.

00:17:54.960 It's a gift of faith that's transmitted down the generations fundamentally.

00:18:01.640 And so your parents did provide you with that.

00:18:03.740 Did they do it in different ways?

00:18:05.380 Like, how would you separate their roles?

00:18:07.120 In very similar ways, they would be both supportive.

00:18:10.300 Whatever I wanted, they'd let me do.

00:18:11.940 And they'd say, not let me do, but support me and believe in me.

00:18:14.600 You know, if I'd say, I'm going to do this, they'd say, of course, take winning the 100

00:18:19.620 meters.

00:18:20.000 They'd say, somebody's got to do it.

00:18:21.240 Why not you?

00:18:21.860 You're as good as anyone else.

00:18:23.020 Right, right.

00:18:23.560 Why not you?

00:18:24.360 Yeah, why not you?

00:18:25.140 Which is kind of a good question.

00:18:26.680 So they just believed if you worked hard, you could do anything you wanted to.

00:18:29.720 Yeah, it's a good question in general for people to consider.

00:18:32.300 It's like, well, if this could be done in some conceivable world, it could be you.

00:18:38.400 And I mean, obviously, every person can't do everything, but there's a lot of things

00:18:42.880 to do.

00:18:43.320 So you can probably find some of the things that are your things to do.

00:18:46.940 And so, now, how about school?

00:18:51.080 How do you do in school?

00:18:52.080 I did, I was very gifted academically.

00:18:55.580 I wouldn't say very gifted, but fairly gifted.

00:18:58.200 And I went to Catholic school.

00:19:00.780 My mom and dad are Christians, and they were Maronite Christians.

00:19:03.920 But the closest they could get to that was Catholic school.

00:19:08.220 So I went to a Catholic school.

00:19:09.480 There was a state school that was sponsored by the state, so we didn't have to pay money.

00:19:13.600 And it was run by some Jesuits in Wimbledon.

00:19:16.660 And so it was quite a Catholic school.

00:19:17.960 We had to go to, we had to pray at the beginning in every lesson.

00:19:22.580 And we used to go to mass every, once a week in the morning.

00:19:27.660 I used to have to, I normally went more than once a week, actually.

00:19:30.820 I normally went every day.

00:19:31.840 It was a quick mass.

00:19:32.580 And it was just a good way to clean your, to clear your mind.

00:19:34.840 It wasn't that I was particularly religious as a child.

00:19:36.700 But you get into the ritual and the routine of it and the meditative nature of it, which

00:19:42.600 I found very useful.

00:19:43.360 I found that quite useful at university, too.

00:19:44.980 And how old were you when you started doing that?

00:19:47.280 Between 13 and 18, really.

00:19:49.820 And so, and you found that ritual useful?

00:19:53.060 Very useful.

00:19:53.560 Very early, right?

00:19:54.760 Yeah.

00:19:54.780 Well, probably 14 or 15, at least then.

00:19:56.780 And what did, how do you think it helped you orient yourself at that age on a day-to-day

00:20:02.480 basis?

00:20:03.000 What were you orienting yourself toward?

00:20:04.660 I think if you coupled it with another thing that I really took away from school, through

00:20:09.660 school, you cram your mind through loads of facts that you have to let go as soon as you

00:20:14.800 get an exam and never have to remember again.

00:20:16.380 So there's loads of that going to school.

00:20:17.480 But the one sort of thing that stays in my mind now, after many years of thinking about

00:20:21.460 school, was that the Jesuits in my school had this thing that for every piece of work

00:20:27.400 you did, every essay or problem you had to solve, you'd have to write at the top of it

00:20:32.340 something called AMDG, which is Latin for ad morium de glorium, which means for the greater

00:20:37.860 glory of God.

00:20:38.880 Now, that sounds, in a way, a bit over the top, because you think, you know, just writing

00:20:43.120 a little essay or solving a problem, why should this be for the greater glory of God?

00:20:46.880 But that stayed in me, the idea that everything you did, whether you're religious or not, if

00:20:52.060 you believe in something more than simply yourself, you know, I have my religious moments

00:20:57.500 too.

00:20:57.740 It's not like I'm a very devout person, but that stayed with me, the belief that everything

00:21:03.680 you do has to be for something greater than simply doing it.

00:21:06.060 Well, it has to be for something.

00:21:08.440 And so if it's for something, then you could infer that it should be for something good.

00:21:14.220 And if it's for something good, it might as well be for the best.

00:21:18.560 And so, I mean, we talked a little bit earlier in today's discussion about hope.

00:21:24.780 And, you know, people often find themselves mired into kind of unproductive hopelessness.

00:21:31.140 And that's partly because they don't direct what they're doing, the trivial things they're

00:21:37.240 doing, towards a higher purpose.

00:21:40.280 And if you understand that each step you take, no matter how small it is, is a step

00:21:46.740 taken towards somewhere that you really want to go and should go, then that does infuse

00:21:52.660 each step with meaning.

00:21:54.200 And that's how the nervous system is set up, because hope is experienced in relationship

00:21:58.320 to a goal.

00:21:59.640 And your goals can be fragmented and fractionated and impulsive.

00:22:03.700 But that just means you're not very well organized if you compile all those fragmented and fractionated

00:22:09.460 goals into something like the uppermost goal, which in principle would unite you with other

00:22:14.880 people, because unless you want an uppermost goal that divides you from other people, then

00:22:20.180 everything you do should carry that imprimatur.

00:22:24.080 You know, in the Sermon on the Mount, the fundamental injunction of the Sermon on the Mount is to orient

00:22:31.660 your attitude in the most profound way towards that which is the highest, right?

00:22:36.760 And to decide that you're going to serve the highest, and then to concentrate on the moment.

00:22:43.000 And it looks like that idea was embedded in that Jesuit practice, right?

00:22:47.740 You said it's over the top.

00:22:49.060 It's like, well, not when you compare the alternatives, right?

00:22:52.880 Because the alternatives are a kind of pointless fractionation, or what?

00:22:56.460 You're aiming down, right?

00:22:59.360 Yeah, at least it makes you try your best, because, you know, because you're thinking,

00:23:03.380 is this the best I can do for myself and for the world, or for a greater force?

00:23:10.180 It just does give you that motivation and realization that everything you do, you have to try your best.

00:23:14.900 And when you were a teenager, so this is 13 to 15, say, that's a time when people often

00:23:20.220 start to become somewhat cynical.

00:23:23.480 Most kids misbehave a little bit more, especially boys, around that time than they might before

00:23:28.420 that or after that.

00:23:29.540 I mean, were you a positively oriented person when you were a teenager, in the same way that

00:23:34.420 you appear to have been as a child?

00:23:36.120 Did that carry through, like, the teenage years?

00:23:39.480 Yes, it did, yeah.

00:23:40.340 I was positively oriented throughout that time.

00:23:43.160 I think I lost it for a bit when I was 17, for a few months, when I met my first girlfriend.

00:23:47.940 But then, that was, you know, I lost my, I didn't study so hard for a few months, but

00:23:53.280 then I got back into it.

00:23:54.180 Right, so that was a romantic disappointment.

00:23:56.580 Right, but that was the only sort of crisis of, let's say, faith and optimism that you

00:24:01.460 experienced when you were that age?

00:24:03.440 I wouldn't call it a crisis, more of a diversion.

00:24:06.080 Yeah.

00:24:07.000 Yeah, but that's right.

00:24:10.040 Well, the religious training, per se, that you obtained at the hands of the Jesuits, I mean,

00:24:15.560 you said that you found the meditative aspect of mass useful to orient yourself very rapidly

00:24:22.880 and fell into that as a practice.

00:24:25.380 So that gave you a chance to think, like, what were you doing when you were, what do you think

00:24:28.840 you were doing when you were attending mass?

00:24:31.620 And then also being willing to attend it.

00:24:36.000 I wasn't listening to much of what was going on in the mass.

00:24:39.500 I was just thinking about what I was doing, why I was doing it, what I was going to do

00:24:43.560 that day, going back to, it's just clearing your mind, really.

00:24:47.140 It wasn't particularly, it wasn't like I was listening to the, some of the times I didn't,

00:24:52.400 I normally listen to the sermon, but it's just, it was almost like meditation.

00:24:57.000 I think there was another time in my life when I also went to mass every day.

00:25:01.200 It wasn't even mass, it's called Evensong.

00:25:02.840 When I was at university and about 5.15, there was a 20 minute, very spiritually uplifting

00:25:08.980 choir, Evensong, and it was fantastic.

00:25:13.700 And you were in this amazing building.

00:25:15.260 Right, there was this beautiful chapel, university chapels.

00:25:18.780 And I was at King's College, Cambridge, and you go in there and you just feel, it's not

00:25:22.300 as if you're thinking about it and you're just uplifted and transcended into something

00:25:26.540 else.

00:25:27.460 And that, and you come out of that feeling cleansed and feeling like it.

00:25:31.120 Well, that clarity of mind.

00:25:33.060 So imagine there's multiple states that you can exist in conceptually.

00:25:38.180 And one state would be the state where the goal that you're pursuing is paramount and

00:25:46.060 obvious.

00:25:47.440 And what that means is the world divides itself quite clearly into a set of affordances that

00:25:53.620 will move you forward, pathways and tools, and a set of obstacles.

00:25:57.560 But it's clear.

00:25:58.320 And imagine instead that you're plagued by a multitude of concerns.

00:26:02.300 And what that means, it's as if you're trying to operate with 10 different maps simultaneously.

00:26:07.880 And that is murky.

00:26:09.480 And so when people use metaphors like clear their mind, what they are referring to is the

00:26:14.740 fact that if you can get what you're doing clear, then the world that lays itself out

00:26:20.220 in front of you is clear practically, you can navigate in it.

00:26:24.980 But it's also clear emotionally, because what's relevant is obvious.

00:26:29.040 And what's irrelevant, which is even more important, is obvious.

00:26:32.380 And what's good is obvious.

00:26:33.660 And what's not good is obvious.

00:26:35.260 And that does mean that your mind is clear.

00:26:37.520 And the alternative to that is a confused and hopeless anxiousness.

00:26:40.980 It is.

00:26:42.700 I think there's another.

00:26:45.040 Some of my best ideas happen when I, it's not so much you clear your mind, but if you

00:26:49.680 stop doing what you're doing, even if you're doing nothing else, or if you go away, sometimes

00:26:54.420 like you might go away to have a break for a week or two.

00:26:58.560 And then you look back at your life in London, how busy you are, and you see things a bit

00:27:02.660 differently when you stop doing them and stand away from them.

00:27:05.780 Sometimes you have the best ideas about how you can carry on.

00:27:10.300 When you're task-focused, your perception is very high-resolution, and everything gets

00:27:16.220 zeroed out, right, except this very specific thing that you're narrowly focusing on.

00:27:22.060 And that's great, because it's efficient, and you can concentrate on the task at hand.

00:27:26.480 But it's not so good if what you're focusing on happens to not be exactly the right thing.

00:27:32.300 And so if you can step back in this more contemplative mood, it enables you to evaluate and reshift

00:27:39.800 what your priorities might be.

00:27:41.720 And that's very different than concentrating on the micro-routines that are relevant to

00:27:47.820 a given priority.

00:27:49.380 And it seems it's a bit of an oversimplification, but not too much to say that if you're locked

00:27:57.440 on target in relationship to a goal and then undertaking the micro-routines necessary to

00:28:02.800 make it happen, you're dominated by your left hemisphere, and it's mostly linguistic and

00:28:07.420 practical.

00:28:08.580 And when you snap into that more contemplative phase, then you're shifting your goals, and

00:28:15.580 maybe voluntarily, daydreaming is like that.

00:28:19.680 And that's a right hemisphere state of existence.

00:28:23.320 And to calibrate yourself properly, you have to continually shift between focus and contemplation

00:28:30.600 of what should be focused on.

00:28:32.500 And that's a dance.

00:28:35.460 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:28:36.760 That's the eternal communication between yin and yang.

00:28:40.420 That's wayfinding.

00:28:42.420 That's what happens in a good conversation, because there's that dynamic interplay.

00:28:46.680 And that to get that optimized, that's optimized psychological function isn't much different

00:28:53.140 than optimizing those two processes so that they benefit each other.

00:28:57.480 So, and again, in school at this age, so you're in junior high now, 13 to 15, let's say,

00:29:04.720 what's your social network like at that point?

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00:30:16.400 Pretty good.

00:30:17.360 It was a boys' school, so we played lots of rugby and I hang out with boys.

00:30:21.180 Occasionally we went to some sort of community club, but it was basically hanging out with

00:30:26.240 boys playing sport, which I really enjoyed.

00:30:28.200 Oh, so, and were you athletic?

00:30:29.620 Yeah, very athletic.

00:30:30.280 And what did you specialize at?

00:30:32.060 Rugby, really.

00:30:33.060 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:30:34.120 So that's another reason, in all likelihood, that you were reasonably popular, right?

00:30:39.820 So you were successful on the athletic front.

00:30:41.340 I was very good at rugby.

00:30:42.420 And what were you, like, why were you successful?

00:30:46.460 I think it's probably, again, going back to my mom and dad, because I believed that I could

00:30:50.140 run faster and further and harder, even if I couldn't.

00:30:53.620 I just had a lot of belief in myself.

00:30:56.180 So you had an intrinsic confidence.

00:30:58.380 Exactly.

00:30:59.320 Which enabled you to try and do things that you might not otherwise do if you had some

00:31:03.540 self-doubt or frailty.

00:31:04.900 Right, so you weren't held back by any unnecessary intrinsic limitations.

00:31:10.900 Yeah, well, you see this often with people, that a lot of the times, the walls that hold

00:31:18.340 people in are unrecognized, implicit limitations on self-conceptualization.

00:31:24.980 The notion that, well, I could do this just never occurs to the person.

00:31:28.720 They've already got themselves boxed in.

00:31:30.680 This is the sort of person I am.

00:31:32.840 And anything beyond that, that's often parameterized by their parents' achievements, for example,

00:31:38.920 especially if their parents aren't very supportive.

00:31:41.280 They presume that this is who they are, and that's all they could ever be, and that's

00:31:46.100 that.

00:31:46.440 And people will say to themselves, you see this a lot in negative self-talk that's associated

00:31:51.180 with depression.

00:31:51.920 It's like, oh, I could never say something in a group.

00:31:56.040 Well, man, you formulate that idea at 12, and you never alter it your whole life.

00:32:02.300 You never say anything in a group your whole life.

00:32:04.680 And if you take someone like that in a psychotherapeutic situation, and you point out to them, look,

00:32:08.800 you just said you could never say something in a group.

00:32:12.280 Someone socially anxious might be like that.

00:32:14.280 It's like, let's take that apart a bit.

00:32:17.640 Could you not say one word?

00:32:19.700 What if the group was two people?

00:32:21.360 You obviously talk to two people.

00:32:23.500 Have you ever talked to three people?

00:32:25.080 You can decompose it.

00:32:26.280 You find that people hem themselves in with these tyrannical self-conceptions that limit

00:32:35.900 them to an indeterminate degree.

00:32:38.680 It's like, now, everybody's not going to be an artistic genius.

00:32:41.540 But most people can learn to draw.

00:32:43.560 And they can learn to draw a lot faster than they think.

00:32:46.200 And they can learn to draw faster and become better than they think quite rapidly.

00:32:50.440 But they won't even try.

00:32:52.440 And so this gift that you were given by your parents was something like the generalized rejection

00:33:01.800 of that whole set of a priori negative conception.

00:33:07.600 So your default operating presupposition was you could probably do it.

00:33:14.000 Yeah, that's a great thing to be able to give your kids that belief that...

00:33:18.580 Because I used to try this with my son.

00:33:20.820 It's like, you know, I'd ask him, do you think you could do this?

00:33:22.760 Do you think you could do this?

00:33:23.720 And his default answer always was yes.

00:33:26.840 You know, and you can think about that as a kind of delusion, an optimistic delusion.

00:33:30.360 But you have to be pretty damn cynical to reduce it to that.

00:33:35.920 Yeah, exactly.

00:33:36.720 And maybe it's an optimistic delusion, but maybe your son's right to have it because he can't do it.

00:33:41.900 Well, it's better than the pessimistic delusion, which is, no, no, of course I could.

00:33:45.940 Because I've certainly met people like that whose default 100% was no.

00:33:52.020 Any question that they even set to themselves was, oh, no, I probably couldn't do that.

00:33:57.000 Yeah, I agree with you.

00:33:58.780 And my parents were very poor.

00:34:01.060 And because they were immigrants and they changed their whole life now, which I find incomprehensible, 1.00

00:34:05.540 how somebody would have the courage to do that at their age of 25 or 35.

00:34:09.980 My father was 9 or 10 years older.

00:34:11.440 And they were also disinhibited as well.

00:34:14.140 And I learned a lot from them because they challenged everything because they came from another society. 1.00

00:34:18.100 My father, this is a rather small story, but it shows how disinhibited they were.

00:34:22.500 If my father lost my mother in a supermarket, he'd stand in the middle of a supermarket and shout out in his full voice,

00:34:30.020 my mom's name, Salma.

00:34:31.160 Say, Salma!

00:34:31.660 And everyone would look around at him and he wouldn't care.

00:34:35.220 He'd just say, look, I don't know what the problem is.

00:34:36.600 I've lost my wife.

00:34:37.500 I want to find her.

00:34:39.260 Whereas in England and most of the Western world, people are a bit more inhibited.

00:34:43.280 They wouldn't shout the head off at the market.

00:34:45.000 Right, right.

00:34:45.380 But that different approach to life where everything could be challenged and they would do things like that as if they were in the village.

00:34:54.840 It was a kind of a double life for me.

00:34:57.140 So you saw two parts of that.

00:34:59.160 You saw the fact that, well, your parents had broken all the shackles in their life that were implicit and explicit merely by moving to a completely new culture.

00:35:08.900 And then they also brought with them a set of behaviors that didn't match the precise limitations of the culture they were in.

00:35:17.160 That's right.

00:35:17.900 And that's very significant for me as well because, I'll come back to me, but I was brought up in a little Lebanese bubble with my mom and dad, and I speak Arabic to them.

00:35:29.840 And I was also brought up as an English boy in a school.

00:35:32.980 And that double life meant I didn't really feel totally English or totally Lebanese.

00:35:37.920 Right, right.

00:35:38.440 So I was kind of outside of both little societies in a way, especially because of my parents.

00:35:43.760 Right, so that makes you a shapeshifter. 0.77

00:35:46.140 What does that mean?

00:35:47.740 Well, there are figures in mythology who exist on boundaries.

00:35:52.100 So the spirit Mercury, for example.

00:35:54.920 Mercury is the winged messenger of the gods, and he exists half in the human world and half in the divine world.

00:36:00.460 But there's a place there that's a border between two categories.

00:36:03.340 And the way Mercury makes himself manifest is by catching your interest.

00:36:09.120 Some things catch your interest.

00:36:11.140 Some things don't.

00:36:12.520 There's a pattern to the things that catch your interest.

00:36:16.000 And that pattern is associated with, well, you could say you become interested in the things that are likely to further your development.

00:36:22.160 So you could think that implicit inside you is the realm of the potential better you.

00:36:30.120 And then it captures your interest.

00:36:32.140 And it guides you in those directions.

00:36:33.660 And that's the spirit that exists on the boundary.

00:36:36.280 And the spirit that exists on a boundary, there's a word for that.

00:36:39.620 The word is psychopomp.

00:36:40.860 And a psychopomp isn't one thing or another. 0.66

00:36:43.440 It's a shapeshifter, a trickster. 1.00

00:36:45.060 And what that means is that one of the things you learned is that you could operate in two different territories.

00:36:51.700 And so whatever you were fundamentally wasn't limited by either of those territories.

00:36:58.040 Exactly.

00:36:58.760 And that is, I think, how you've described me is how I am.

00:37:01.820 And I have this tension with some people I look after and manage in the business world.

00:37:07.880 But I love chaos and I love, I enjoy that.

00:37:15.460 And I enjoy when there's a real crisis, it's when I'm at my best.

00:37:18.960 And when we don't know what's going to happen next, you know, I love chaos.

00:37:21.840 I remember my partner, I was going to, I was getting a flight and I was on the way to the airport.

00:37:30.480 He said, where are you going?

00:37:31.820 And I said, I'm not sure.

00:37:33.340 I'm either going to Singapore or New York.

00:37:36.000 I've got tickets to both.

00:37:37.880 He said, but you're in the car on the way to the airport.

00:37:39.620 I said, I know, they both go at the same time.

00:37:41.660 So when are you going to decide?

00:37:43.160 I said, I'll decide when I get that.

00:37:45.180 And most people don't like that degree of indecision and chaos in life.

00:37:49.940 But I had a rucksack and I could go to either.

00:37:52.100 But that's where I thrive.

00:37:54.160 Well, that, okay, so that's interesting too, that you are able to,

00:37:58.040 it seems to me that the fact that you're able to do that

00:38:01.220 is associated with this default presupposition that your parents helped instill and support in you,

00:38:11.680 which is that, well, you can do it.

00:38:14.780 You know, because one way of limiting anxiety is to limit choice.

00:38:20.780 Zero choice, generally speaking, zero anxiety, because there's no conflict.

00:38:27.740 But another way of dealing with anxiety is to presume that if the situation shifts on you,

00:38:35.940 you can manage it.

00:38:37.260 That's why people like to watch jugglers, for example, or acrobats,

00:38:40.540 because, you know, they're in a situation that's dynamically unstable,

00:38:44.040 and yet they can continue their complex operations.

00:38:48.040 And everyone loves that.

00:38:49.220 And it's because it's a reflection of that spirit that's able to juggle.

00:38:52.780 And so now, how did it come about that you had tickets to Singapore and New York simultaneously?

00:38:57.680 It's just, I had meetings in both places,

00:38:59.560 but I wasn't sure what was going to be the most important until I made a final phone call.

00:39:03.760 I had to just assess which was the best place to be at that particular time.

00:39:07.220 Right, and so you were leaving it till?

00:39:08.800 Till the last minute, I think.

00:39:09.760 Which were you, where you'd have the most information.

00:39:12.420 Yeah, I'll come back to that.

00:39:14.380 I can deal with that now, actually, in a way about decision-making.

00:39:18.960 It's not quite in the relevant place in my career.

00:39:22.600 But often people spend a lot of time focusing on what's the right decision to make,

00:39:27.880 but they neglect a very important question.

00:39:30.880 And this is in my life as a litigator, really, or even in life generally.

00:39:34.720 They neglect the important question of when is the right time to make the decision.

00:39:38.280 And so they just think, should I do this or that?

00:39:42.640 But they don't think, when do I have to decide because, or when should I do it?

00:39:47.500 And that's often neglected in a simplistic approach to decision-making, in my experience.

00:39:53.360 Well, people also assume, you know, I watched my colleagues, for example, in graduate school,

00:39:58.540 try to figure out which city they should live in if they had competing job offers from different universities.

00:40:03.240 You know, they might be completely on different sides of the continent or in different countries.

00:40:09.900 And so you might say, well, this is a really crucial decision.

00:40:12.900 And the truth of the matter is, it's actually not that crucial a decision.

00:40:17.160 Because if you're in a good university, in a large city,

00:40:24.100 you have way more opportunity than you'll ever be able to make use of in both places.

00:40:28.660 So the first thing you have to realize is, both of those decisions, in principle, could be good.

00:40:34.780 And the right city isn't even an appropriate category.

00:40:38.860 Because it's not like a city is one thing.

00:40:41.040 A city is 50 billion things.

00:40:43.600 And so the real question in a situation like that is,

00:40:48.220 could I land in my feet and start to operate properly,

00:40:51.820 regardless of which of these places that I'm in?

00:40:55.860 And the answer to that should be yes.

00:40:57.560 And if it's yes, then you think, oh, either choice is good.

00:41:01.000 And then you can start thinking, well, now I can, maybe I'll go to city one and talk to the people there

00:41:05.720 and see how I get along.

00:41:06.700 And I'll go to city two and, you know, start to find my way.

00:41:09.780 But people often are under the misapprehension that they come to these important inflection points in their life,

00:41:14.860 like which city, and that's going to determine the entire course of their life.

00:41:18.780 And it does, insofar as geographical locale is one thing rather than another.

00:41:23.520 But if it's a choice between immensely productive options,

00:41:29.040 then there's no sacrifice in the choice.

00:41:32.840 There's just a choice between different banquets.

00:41:35.940 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:41:36.740 Exactly.

00:41:37.220 But even if there is a sacrifice, you'd have to ask yourself, when do I have to make this decision?

00:41:42.560 Is it now?

00:41:43.180 Because people feel the pressure of being a scenario.

00:41:45.400 They say, well, I don't have to decide until the 31st of March.

00:41:48.940 Between now and then, I'll just think about it.

00:41:51.140 And then I'll decide.

00:41:52.040 That's one.

00:41:52.480 That's what I'm saying.

00:41:53.180 But people often force themselves to make a decision before they have to.

00:41:55.840 People who work with me or for me get frustrated because they say, are we doing this or that?

00:42:00.840 And I say, when do I have to decide?

00:42:03.340 And often, because I leave things up in the air, like the juggler you're talking about,

00:42:07.180 it gets very frustrating.

00:42:09.720 People like to have an audit.

00:42:11.220 They'd like to know what they're going to do, but they like to leave things.

00:42:13.660 You don't mind the uncertainty.

00:42:14.980 Well, you know, I used to tell many undergraduates who, for example,

00:42:20.120 they didn't know whether they wanted to go to medicine or to clinical psychology.

00:42:24.080 And so I'd say, well, apply to both.

00:42:29.000 Make 20 applications to both.

00:42:30.900 And maybe you don't even have a choice because you get accepted to psychology and not medicine.

00:42:35.940 End of problem.

00:42:37.340 Or the problem will become more acute when you actually realize that

00:42:40.900 you didn't get into medicine and that's what you wanted.

00:42:43.160 But that'll snap into focus.

00:42:44.980 But you can pursue it.

00:42:46.380 But then let's say, well, now you have three offers from a clinical program

00:42:49.360 and three offers from a medical program.

00:42:51.120 It's like, okay, now you have six decisions to make.

00:42:54.420 And now you can go to each of these places and investigate them.

00:42:57.300 And you're going to gather way more information.

00:42:59.660 And then by the time you need to make the decision, which could be as late as possible,

00:43:03.360 you're going to be much more informed.

00:43:05.600 And so that's another problem with making a premature decision is that

00:43:09.220 my advice to my students and my clients was always,

00:43:13.420 don't close the door before it's necessary to close the door.

00:43:18.120 Because you're not maximally informed at that point.

00:43:21.840 And also, you don't have to accept that temptation to prematurely foreclose, right,

00:43:28.980 to deal with that anxiety.

00:43:30.280 It's not a good way of dealing with it.

00:43:31.780 These are the options on the table.

00:43:33.220 It is a temptation for people to make decisions before they need to,

00:43:36.100 because they want to have order, but they close doors when they don't need to.

00:43:40.180 And that's hard psychologically.

00:43:41.340 I don't know why it's hard.

00:43:42.040 Well, I do believe it's associated with a lack of faith of the sort that we've been describing,

00:43:47.840 is that people aren't, they don't have enough faith in their own ability to dance and to juggle.

00:43:52.860 And so they want to specify the narrower pathway as soon as possible to get things,

00:43:59.480 you know, unnecessary chaos isn't helpful.

00:44:02.440 And I don't think you want to, you know, distribute mayhem and catastrophe wherever you go.

00:44:09.720 Yeah, and in fairness, sometimes I might leave it to the last minute,

00:44:12.780 and it's not the last minute, I admit.

00:44:14.360 You pushed it too far and you should have made it a bit better.

00:44:16.280 Yeah, well, that's another mistake you can make.

00:44:19.080 But the thing is, there are mistakes everywhere.

00:44:21.160 Okay, so now you're in the Jesuit schools.

00:44:26.000 And are your academic interests starting to make themselves known?

00:44:30.260 And what are they?

00:44:32.080 There are two things.

00:44:32.820 I was very interested in science.

00:44:33.860 I missed one thing out that was important in my formative years,

00:44:36.280 which I've just realized in talking to you now.

00:44:37.960 So when I was about 13, I went to visit my family in Montreal.

00:44:42.660 And my uncle, Joseph, is a teacher there, a professor of philosophy.

00:44:48.300 And philosophy means lots of things to different people, obviously.

00:44:52.500 He did what's called in England European philosophy,

00:44:55.860 because the English philosophy or Anglo-American philosophy

00:44:58.520 tends to be quite dry and logical and to do with, you know,

00:45:02.180 Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, which I also like.

00:45:04.660 So he did Sartre and other people.

00:45:06.580 And at the age of 13, he spoke to me a lot and really influenced me

00:45:10.060 and persuaded me to read Descartes' Meditations and Discourse,

00:45:15.280 which is a really important thing for me.

00:45:18.040 As you probably know, they're about skepticism and what you can know for certain.

00:45:23.260 And he challenges all the assumptions you have.

00:45:25.280 And that really started, that was an important thing for me.

00:45:28.240 Why?

00:45:29.720 Because I was a bit shocked that you could challenge so many things.

00:45:35.360 And I started challenging things in my school, in the subjects that I was taught.

00:45:40.840 And it changed my attitude to life, really.

00:45:44.420 It made me question a lot of things and not take anything for granted.

00:45:48.800 And at the same time...

00:45:49.400 So it helped you notice you were taking things for granted.

00:45:52.120 Yeah.

00:45:52.680 And then it helped you realize that wasn't necessary and develop your skill at questioning.

00:45:59.300 So why didn't that just throw you into disarray?

00:46:02.660 Because it sort of threw Descartes into disarray, right?

00:46:05.140 I mean, he became rather desperate before he came to his final doubt.

00:46:12.900 Yeah.

00:46:13.980 Looking back, maybe it did throw me into disarray.

00:46:16.440 I spent many hours discussing these things with my closest friend at the time, a guy called Justin,

00:46:24.400 including the debates one has when one's young about the meaning of life.

00:46:27.300 But particularly, we were obsessed with determinism and whether you had any free will at all.

00:46:32.300 And so we just discussed these things.

00:46:33.620 And at the same time, I developed a strong interest in science.

00:46:36.780 So I did, you know, lots of mathematics and physics and chemistry.

00:46:42.680 But like most young people, you begin to change after a while.

00:46:45.820 You're desperately trying to find meaning for life and question things.

00:46:50.260 And that stayed with me a bit longer because after...

00:46:52.520 How that influenced me, that's when it happened at 13.

00:46:55.320 But by the time I went to university, I decided to do philosophy at university, which is...

00:47:00.880 And where did you go to university?

00:47:02.320 I went to York and Cambridge.

00:47:03.760 I did postgraduate work there.

00:47:05.020 I was meant to be doing a PhD at Cambridge.

00:47:06.920 And it was on the philosophy of science, funnily enough.

00:47:08.700 So it all came together.

00:47:09.760 And so York, you studied philosophy?

00:47:12.580 Yep.

00:47:12.960 And at Cambridge too.

00:47:14.480 And at Cambridge after that.

00:47:15.740 Yeah, exactly.

00:47:16.640 And so what did the study of philosophy at York entail?

00:47:20.360 I don't know the class structure.

00:47:22.580 No, you just have...

00:47:23.880 I think you do nine different subjects.

00:47:25.240 Like I said, it's sort of Anglo-American philosophy.

00:47:27.220 It tends to be logic and Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell.

00:47:30.380 And a lot of what they call epistemology, which is, you know, the study of knowledge.

00:47:35.180 How is it that you know something?

00:47:38.160 Exactly.

00:47:38.540 How is it you know something?

00:47:39.460 And do you really know it?

00:47:40.320 And how do you know you know it?

00:47:41.280 And these were fascinating subjects for me.

00:47:44.760 And for me in particular, with my interest in science and discovery and progress, and as that famous book, which you'll be aware of, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, how you change your paradigms about what you know.

00:47:57.880 And what I was doing my PhD on, although after about a year or so, I decided not to leave.

00:48:05.440 And I didn't want to carry on with it.

00:48:09.300 I'll come back to that later.

00:48:10.940 It was on what you could tell about the...

00:48:12.880 It sounds so extraordinary, really, to say it now, given my whole life in a very practical, commercial world.

00:48:18.420 But at the time, I was obsessed with knowing what you could tell about the physical world simply from a priori reasoning.

00:48:25.060 It was really the debate between the rationalists, philosophers, and the empiricists.

00:48:28.820 The empiricists, yeah.

00:48:29.820 Okay, so it's interesting because your career did take a very practical turn, but you spent quite a lot of time when you were young.

00:48:38.160 How old were you when you went off to York?

00:48:40.480 19, yeah.

00:48:41.300 19.

00:48:41.760 And did you...

00:48:42.720 Is that a more American model, university, or a more British model?

00:48:46.340 Did your university program consist mostly of attending lectures, or were you doing a lot of reading on your own?

00:48:55.980 A lot of reading on your own, a few lectures, and then a tutorial every week.

00:48:59.560 Where you have to write an essay every week on a subject and debate it.

00:49:01.900 Okay, so it was more a Cambridge Oxford model.

00:49:03.300 Yeah, exactly.

00:49:04.180 And you were disciplined enough to be pursuing these academic pursuits, or interested enough in the topic to be pursuing these on your own.

00:49:13.120 How much reading were you doing?

00:49:14.800 More than anyone.

00:49:16.000 I just was obsessed with reading and learning.

00:49:18.240 I had a gap year before going to university, and they sent a reading list out, which is basically, I think, the whole three years' worth of reading lists.

00:49:25.480 And I thought you had to do it before you arrived, so...

00:49:28.560 Thank God.

00:49:29.560 I missed off a couple of books, and I remember queuing up on the admissions day and feeling really guilty.

00:49:34.020 And I said to a student in line, I said, have you read it at all?

00:49:37.500 And they told me, I haven't written anything yet.

00:49:38.900 That's what you're meant to read in the next three years.

00:49:41.160 I see, I see.

00:49:42.140 So you got to jump on it.

00:49:43.440 Yeah, yeah.

00:49:43.820 And so, how did that experience of all that reading do for you?

00:49:52.860 And then, how did that set you up for your eventually more practical pursuits?

00:49:58.800 How did you make that leap from the philosophical and contemplative back into the practical?

00:50:05.920 And how did that come about?

00:50:07.440 How did you justify that to yourself, or how did that emerge as the right pathway?

00:50:11.780 Yeah, it's a good question.

00:50:14.240 I gave up philosophy because I didn't feel I could add anything to man's intellectual history.

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00:51:40.640 It was raining, so I went down to the basement and read the abstracts

00:51:47.160 of all the PhDs done in the past hundred years.

00:51:50.000 You know, the abstracts, the first five pages.

00:51:52.460 And I remember thinking, what I was doing wasn't,

00:51:56.280 I didn't really have any ideas that merited spending three to five years of my life

00:52:01.120 to put in a book.

00:52:02.460 So you didn't have a burning philosophical revelation at hand that needed to be worked out.

00:52:07.860 You'd wandered through the territory that other people had explored, but you're, there wasn't,

00:52:13.380 yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:52:14.520 Because at some point you have to decide that you've got something truly original and creative

00:52:21.780 to add, or you're done.

00:52:24.440 Or you just, oh, you're not done, but you can carry on and you can do what I call a footnote exercise,

00:52:28.840 still get your PhD, but you haven't really taken things further for man's.

00:52:32.460 Right, right, right, right.

00:52:33.620 So I decided that.

00:52:35.240 So because I was so good at philosophy, and I had, I thought I'd be good at law too.

00:52:41.160 I didn't have enough money to become a lawyer.

00:52:44.720 So I decided to have a five-year plan.

00:52:46.740 And the background was my mother and father.

00:52:48.200 My mother and father believe in commerce, even though they weren't particularly good at it,

00:52:51.760 even though they didn't do much of it.

00:52:52.860 But in their blood, in their belief, they really think that the highest thing you can do is business.

00:52:58.320 And my father, my father didn't like, although always supported me,

00:53:04.220 thought philosophy was a kind of waste of time.

00:53:05.820 Right, right.

00:53:06.300 He'd just be buying and selling things and doing business.

00:53:09.140 But he still supported me in doing that.

00:53:11.720 And so I wanted to go and work.

00:53:14.620 I'd seen a trial when I was 13 or 14 at the Old Bailey,

00:53:17.860 which really impressed me with some barristers and cross-examination.

00:53:21.000 That was a shocking thing for me to see because I'd seen a witness give evidence.

00:53:24.920 And by the time he'd finished giving evidence, it's called in chief,

00:53:27.720 I totally believed the witness.

00:53:29.620 And then the barrister questioned him.

00:53:31.720 I remember seeing this and I totally disbelieved him after the questioning.

00:53:34.720 So that sort of ran parallel to this Cartesian doubt issue.

00:53:38.040 Exactly.

00:53:38.420 Right, so you heard a story that was perfectly compelling

00:53:40.580 and then you saw someone tear it into bits.

00:53:42.580 Exactly.

00:53:43.080 And that was shocking for me because I totally believed the witness the first time.

00:53:47.900 Yeah, well, it is shocking too when your feelings, let's say,

00:53:50.820 are in sync with someone who's telling a story that makes you sympathetically oriented to them.

00:53:57.300 And then some attack dog comes along and says,

00:54:00.460 here's all the lies and the contradictions and none of this is true.

00:54:04.640 And yeah, it is shocking.

00:54:06.180 It's very shocking.

00:54:06.740 It's very shocking.

00:54:07.360 And it's not just that you believe someone.

00:54:09.200 It's just that if you believe someone and you're on the jury,

00:54:11.640 somebody would have gone to prison who shouldn't have gone to prison.

00:54:14.660 Right, right.

00:54:14.980 But the stakes are high.

00:54:16.020 Yeah, the stakes are high.

00:54:16.980 Well, that's interesting too.

00:54:18.240 That means that the stakes are high for that naive sympathy as well.

00:54:23.180 Yeah, exactly.

00:54:23.600 That naive, non-critical sympathy.

00:54:26.040 Yeah, well, it's something.

00:54:27.160 So when I came to finish university, I thought, what can I do?

00:54:30.720 I didn't have enough money to do law, but I wanted to do law.

00:54:32.940 So I decided to have a five-year plan, which is a bit extraordinary, really, looking back.

00:54:38.000 And I decided to qualify as an accountant, which I did specialise in.

00:54:40.820 How old were you at this point?

00:54:42.220 I had finished university at around the age of 24.

00:54:45.640 24.

00:54:46.440 Okay.

00:54:47.280 So I did a five-year plan, which I qualified as an accountant, where I worked, made money,

00:54:52.240 did my exams, qualified with Price Waterhouse in the city.

00:54:54.860 It's the late 80s.

00:54:55.740 The financial sector was booming.

00:54:57.340 There was something called Big Bang.

00:54:58.760 So I learned a lot about business and banking.

00:55:02.440 Upon qualification, as planned, and everyone was shocked, I jacked it all in,

00:55:05.920 went back to law school for two years, and then a pupillage at the bar,

00:55:09.140 where I became a barrister specialising in commercial litigation.

00:55:12.500 And did you like being an accountant?

00:55:15.040 Because that's quite, in some ways, on the opposite end of the distribution from philosophy.

00:55:20.360 Yes.

00:55:20.820 It's so concentrated on, I wouldn't say minutiae, but certainly details.

00:55:26.180 I did enjoy it.

00:55:27.500 I was an auditor, so I was checking things up.

00:55:29.560 So there was a bit scientific.

00:55:30.780 You're trying to prove things.

00:55:31.640 So there's an investigative element.

00:55:33.640 But I think I liked it because I knew I was doing it for three years or three years, really.

00:55:37.660 Right.

00:55:38.000 So it was part of this plan that was actually very compelling to you.

00:55:40.940 And so what was the contents of your five-year plan?

00:55:43.620 The content was if I could become good at, I'd get some money from being an accountant.

00:55:47.240 I'd be good at business and commerce.

00:55:50.600 Many of these things are fallacious in a way.

00:55:52.540 I'll come back.

00:55:53.360 I'll unpack it for you in a second.

00:55:55.100 And then I'd be able to go to law school and become a good lawyer.

00:55:58.140 And I'd become an even better lawyer than most lawyers, because most lawyers don't understand numbers.

00:56:01.900 That's what I believe.

00:56:02.500 Right.

00:56:02.520 So you'd have the philosophical background, and you'd have the detail-oriented numeric background.

00:56:06.760 Well, there's at least a certain rigor in thinking that's associated with the arithmetic and the mathematical realm.

00:56:14.680 Okay, so you trained as an accountant, and you managed to make some money, and then you went off to law school.

00:56:19.140 What law school?

00:56:20.260 It was in London.

00:56:21.180 There was a conversion course in the city of London.

00:56:23.680 And then there's a bar school you go to, which is only for barristers for the second year.

00:56:27.340 So it's an ins-of-court school of law, and then you do your pupillage.

00:56:30.600 I'll go back to the fallacies there.

00:56:31.880 I think because I thought I was good at philosophy, I'd be good at arguing in the law.

00:56:35.580 I'm not sure that's true.

00:56:36.600 I am quite good at it, but I think you could be good at it without being good at philosophy.

00:56:40.120 The other fallacy is you're a better lawyer if you also know a lot about numbers.

00:56:44.060 I'm not sure that's true either.

00:56:45.120 I don't think you have to be an accountant to become a lawyer.

00:56:47.840 But it's, as you say...

00:56:49.320 But it did make you some money.

00:56:50.640 It made you some money, which is not a fallacy that was real.

00:56:53.380 Right, right, right, right.

00:56:54.680 And it's not an outrageous fallacy.

00:56:56.840 You know, it did help me in life, because I saw...

00:56:58.660 The thing I enjoyed most about accounting and all the things was you saw different businesses

00:57:01.700 every few weeks, and you're in different situations.

00:57:05.660 Right, so you got to walk through the businesses.

00:57:08.020 Yeah, exactly.

00:57:09.320 And so what kind of investigation were you doing as an accountant into these multiple businesses?

00:57:14.260 Well, as an occasion, I did investigations as if there was a takeover.

00:57:17.740 This is many years ago, as you know.

00:57:18.940 I'm quite old now.

00:57:20.100 And then, but in audit, you just have to prove.

00:57:22.220 It's like a quite scientific process.

00:57:23.540 You have to prove the numbers that they present, the real numbers.

00:57:27.500 And so you can't check every number.

00:57:29.180 So you have to try and work out.

00:57:30.720 You have to understand the system, how numbers became the numbers, how you test them, what's

00:57:34.960 the statistical sample you take that makes it likely to be the case.

00:57:38.860 Right, so it's applied epistemology.

00:57:41.040 Exactly, it is.

00:57:42.220 It's like, do we really know this?

00:57:43.360 Do these numbers...

00:57:44.680 This is one of the things that's frightening about the online world and big media companies

00:57:50.740 who can gerrymander the numbers.

00:57:53.220 There's nothing more cardinal as an intellectual sin than to falsify what a number represents.

00:58:00.640 Because numbers, there isn't any concept that we have that has a more, has a closer one-to-one

00:58:08.240 concordance with the structure of the world than numbers.

00:58:11.320 So if you're dealing with someone who is playing fast and loose with the numbers, that's a very

00:58:15.520 deep sort of intellectual, and I would say too, theological sin.

00:58:19.220 Okay, so you're seeing, you have privileged access to a number of different businesses,

00:58:23.940 and you're trying to find out where the reality is.

00:58:27.880 Do you think, sorry, going back to what you're saying, do you think numbers is the closest

00:58:31.440 thing we have to truth?

00:58:32.860 Well, I think it depends on the kind of truth, you know, but numbers are associated with reality

00:58:41.620 in the same way that music is associated with reality.

00:58:44.900 I mean, our agreement on what constitutes one thing or two things or ten things is, it's

00:58:51.060 pretty fundamental.

00:58:52.500 It's grammatical, I suppose.

00:58:54.180 Yeah.

00:58:54.560 And so.

00:58:55.280 Structural.

00:58:55.920 Yeah.

00:58:56.320 Yeah.

00:58:56.880 And it's not as if there aren't other forms of profundity and there are other forms of

00:59:00.420 higher.

00:59:01.020 Or truth.

00:59:01.740 Or truth.

00:59:02.420 But numbers are, numbers are pretty basic tools and, and, and the lies that emerge as

00:59:11.260 a consequence of the falsification of numbers can have devastating effects.

00:59:14.740 So, which is of course why you do your due diligence if you're a business person.

00:59:19.960 And so thing is too, if the numbers, if your numbers are in order and you have a business

00:59:25.340 and my numbers are in order and I have a business, you and I can do business together in a way

00:59:29.780 that's much less complicated if neither of those situations are the case.

00:59:34.880 Exactly.

00:59:35.480 And often when you have, I have lots of, in my business side of life, you have lots of

00:59:39.640 ideas and people often forget about the numbers.

00:59:42.060 Right.

00:59:42.260 So as soon as you, as Wittgenstein would say, bump into reality, although you didn't put

00:59:46.940 it in an economic sense by looking at the numbers, it's a different, it's a different

00:59:49.900 game.

00:59:50.200 Yeah, well, I tend to run all the different enterprises that I am engaged in on a for-profit

00:59:57.360 basis for that reason, because things can get spread out and sprawled and inefficient.

01:00:03.360 And one of the ways of making sure that doesn't happen is to put that numerical discipline

01:00:08.900 is this, well, if this thing can't thrive on its own, then there's something wrong with

01:00:14.320 it.

01:00:14.580 Now, the fact that something can't be made profitable isn't an unerring indication that

01:00:20.080 it shouldn't live, but it's one indication.

01:00:22.900 And you need indications that things shouldn't live.

01:00:25.380 I mean, one of the things that can happen to people is that they'll keep an enterprise

01:00:29.380 that isn't thriving, limping along, failing to kill it forever.

01:00:35.440 And then they just waste their whole life on something that, well, where the numbers don't

01:00:39.600 match up.

01:00:40.380 Or you'll see people in the artistic world, because I had lots of clients who are artistically

01:00:44.620 oriented, who are never able to make a practical case for the application of their artistic

01:00:51.800 endeavor.

01:00:52.260 And they'll say things like, well, you know, I'm not interested in the numbers, I don't

01:00:56.880 care about the market, I don't want to sell out.

01:01:00.000 It's like, you're not conceptualizing this properly.

01:01:03.620 It's another form of disciplinary strategy.

01:01:06.560 And it's actually a very creative endeavor.

01:01:08.560 If you're an artist, you can be entrepreneurially oriented.

01:01:11.620 Entrepreneurs and artists are very similar in temperaments.

01:01:14.080 Like, no, you don't understand is that the communication about your artistic production

01:01:20.220 and it's commodification.

01:01:22.480 That's part of the creative process.

01:01:23.920 If you look at it properly, it's like, or what do you want to produce works of art that

01:01:27.520 no one ever looks at and starve to death while doing it?

01:01:30.760 It's not a very productive way of thinking.

01:01:32.780 It's not a very productive way of conceptualizing your artistic role.

01:01:36.280 And it's not sustainable.

01:01:37.220 There's a saying by Steve Jobs, which is a real artist ship, by which he means you actually

01:01:43.200 sell things.

01:01:43.780 You have to move things.

01:01:44.500 Yeah.

01:01:45.260 And if you're not really shipping, then you're not really an artist.

01:01:49.660 You're just a...

01:01:50.760 Most of the time, you're a poser.

01:01:53.440 And those claims that, well, I didn't sell out.

01:01:55.480 It's like, well, that's because you don't know how to and no one ever offered you the

01:01:58.300 opportunity.

01:01:59.300 Yeah.

01:01:59.580 And people often maintain that stance as a form of moral self-glorification.

01:02:05.420 And the artists that I've worked with, people who did have some artistic talent, who had

01:02:09.100 that attitude, all it was was an impediment for them because there's no way they could

01:02:14.180 be successful.

01:02:14.840 The artists I've known that were successful, they were really good at fostering social relationships.

01:02:20.440 They were really good at communicating with clients.

01:02:22.840 They were very good at helping explain to the people to whom they might have been trying

01:02:28.560 to sell their artistic productions what this would do for their life.

01:02:33.820 Because one of the things people want when they buy a piece of art, especially from a living

01:02:37.380 artist, is they kind of want to be part of the art world, the art life.

01:02:41.560 Maybe they're nose-to-the-ground businessman types who have a bit of a romantic dream somewhere

01:02:48.360 in their psyche.

01:02:49.420 And if they buy a piece of art and they know the artist, well, then they open themselves

01:02:55.120 up to that whole romantic sphere.

01:02:57.380 And the artist can, I wouldn't say sell that exactly, but that's what he's bringing to

01:03:02.240 the table.

01:03:03.260 And to be contemptuous of the commercial aspect of that, it's a false morality.

01:03:09.260 Yeah, I agree with you.

01:03:10.440 But having said that, you say the artists you know who are successful are good at use

01:03:15.280 other skills of socializing and essentially promoting themselves and their art.

01:03:20.560 But was their art good?

01:03:22.240 And could you not be a good artist and not sell?

01:03:24.940 Well, it's hard.

01:03:25.980 You can, for sure.

01:03:28.000 Although I don't know if you can be a good artist and be contemptuous of all that.

01:03:33.380 Right?

01:03:33.680 But also, maybe you can, but how are you going to keep body and soul together while you're

01:03:38.440 doing it?

01:03:38.900 And also, if you don't start to engage to some degree on the commercial and communicative

01:03:44.280 end, you don't expand out your social network.

01:03:47.740 And I have a, my sense is that that also limits your growth as an artist.

01:03:52.120 So it's, it's better to, it's better to, well, certainly dispense with any moral pretensions

01:04:01.800 that sales and marketing is beneath you.

01:04:04.540 It's like, once you're great at it, it can be beneath you.

01:04:08.800 But when you don't know how to do it at all, it's not beneath you.

01:04:11.740 You just don't know how to do it.

01:04:13.340 And then the proclivity is to pronounce yourself as morally superior because, you know, you won't

01:04:18.380 do it.

01:04:18.740 It's like, it isn't that you won't, it's that you can't.

01:04:22.120 And that's, that's a kind of crippling hubris.

01:04:25.920 And I've seen lots of people who are artistically oriented brought down by that.

01:04:29.660 Yeah.

01:04:29.860 No, there's a, I, I totally agree with you.

01:04:32.680 There's one, I remember trying to, many years ago, trying to debate what the meaning of an

01:04:38.080 artist is, and ultimately I've come to the conclusion it's just somebody who tries to

01:04:41.260 make a living from selling art.

01:04:42.500 And if you're not making a living from selling art, it's hard to be an artist.

01:04:45.160 Right, right.

01:04:46.200 Well, how do you, how do you continue your art?

01:04:49.140 You're going to have, maybe you have a patron or an independent fortune, in which case, fine,

01:04:53.200 do whatever you want.

01:04:54.420 But you're, the proper attitude, if you're a creative person, is to integrate the necessity

01:05:02.280 for making the enterprise economically sustaining into the enterprise.

01:05:07.100 And to consider that as part of the complex problems that you're trying to address as

01:05:11.000 an artist, it's a way better attitude.

01:05:13.080 And then you can adopt the meta attitude that you described, which is, well, of course I

01:05:18.000 can do this.

01:05:19.200 Right.

01:05:19.380 And I mean, I've seen people make artistic careers in, out of absurd pursuits.

01:05:26.120 I have a friend, Jonathan Paggio, who's a Orthodox icon carver, and he's commercially successful

01:05:31.920 at it, right?

01:05:32.860 So that's impossible, but it can be done if, now it's hard to do, but it's not like there's

01:05:39.060 no pathway forward, but you certainly can't be casual, casually contemptuous of social

01:05:44.420 relationships and opportunities if you're going to make something like that happen.

01:05:48.400 So, yeah, the great artists that I've known, they've been able to dance in the commercial

01:05:53.240 sphere.

01:05:54.360 And so.

01:05:55.000 Yeah.

01:05:55.940 We'll talk more about that, maybe, about money and art and value and art and how people's

01:06:01.760 attitudes.

01:06:02.780 Yeah, well, I definitely want to get into that.

01:06:04.680 Whenever you're ready.

01:06:05.720 Let's talk about your legal career.

01:06:07.720 Okay, so you developed yourself on the accountant side and you familiarized yourself with business

01:06:14.340 and you got your law degree.

01:06:16.180 How did you do in law school and then what happened?

01:06:18.480 I did very well at law school and I got taken on in the top commercial chambers in London,

01:06:23.360 one of the best commercial chambers.

01:06:24.900 As a barrister in London, you're self-employed and you work in the chambers, which is an

01:06:30.800 address.

01:06:31.840 You share the goodwill of that address.

01:06:33.960 Separate barrister and solicitor for all the Americans and Canadians who are watching.

01:06:38.620 So, yeah, it's a good question.

01:06:39.700 Because you take a lot for granted because I know barristeres are people that wear a wig 1.00

01:06:43.280 and a gown and basically go to court and stand up on their feet.

01:06:46.880 And solicitors are people who prepare the cases for them.

01:06:51.940 They do other things too.

01:06:53.380 But the legal profession can be split into, essentially, you start at the beginning between

01:06:59.340 crime and civil.

01:07:00.820 Crime is the state against the individual.

01:07:02.860 And that's a totally different skill to civil work.

01:07:05.760 Let's go down the civil road, which is where I went down.

01:07:08.760 Within the civil road, you have two types of solicitors, two types of lawyers.

01:07:13.160 You have transactional lawyers who help you do a contract, buy and sell a home, buy and

01:07:18.080 sell a company.

01:07:18.880 Right.

01:07:19.220 Make sure everything's in order or not front.

01:07:22.000 And then you have the litigators who deal in things that have gone wrong because the thing

01:07:26.260 you bought didn't show up or wasn't authentic or wasn't owned by the person who sold it.

01:07:31.020 Normally in most of the time.

01:07:32.080 So the first category is there to stop the second category from being necessary.

01:07:37.080 Exactly.

01:07:37.980 And the second category should normally be a small percentage of the first category.

01:07:41.480 So maybe 10% of lawyers should be litigated because most things should go through normally.

01:07:47.600 In America, there's a much higher percentage of litigators.

01:07:50.460 It might even be close to 50-50.

01:07:52.280 I'm not sure.

01:07:52.820 Between transactional lawyers.

01:07:54.220 This is down the civil road and litigation lawyers. 0.88

01:07:56.760 In England, it may be 20 to 80.

01:07:58.860 And you ended up on the litigation.

01:08:02.340 I'm on the litigation.

01:08:03.420 Civil litigation.

01:08:05.240 And so everything I see in my professional life has gone wrong.

01:08:08.600 Every deal that comes to me is something that's come to me because there's a problem.

01:08:11.500 It's a good thing that you're comfortable in chaos because that's definitely the space

01:08:16.200 that's occupied by two people who don't agree definitely constitutes chaos or two entities

01:08:21.160 that don't agree.

01:08:21.820 Oh, it does.

01:08:21.940 Yeah.

01:08:22.300 Chaos.

01:08:22.960 Like war.

01:08:23.640 War is a war. 0.63

01:08:24.700 Right.

01:08:24.980 It's a war.

01:08:25.660 Yeah.

01:08:25.780 So within the litigation, you have solicitors who prepare cases.

01:08:29.380 Historically, it's changed a bit over the past 10 years in England.

01:08:31.840 But when I was practicing over 30 years ago and still do practice, solicitors would meet

01:08:36.900 the client, prepare, take the witness statement, get it all ready, and the barrister would stand

01:08:41.180 on his feet in court and present the case.

01:08:42.960 That was the difference.

01:08:44.160 So the barrister would be like the trial attorney, the advocate in court, and the solicitors

01:08:48.100 would be preparing the case for him.

01:08:49.620 So I was a trial attorney with a wig and a gun.

01:08:52.560 Sorry I haven't brought it here today to show you.

01:08:54.520 And I did that.

01:08:56.440 I've done that for 33 years.

01:08:57.740 I haven't been in court for many years now because I gave it up, the trial, the appearance

01:09:02.380 in court after about 10 years.

01:09:04.840 But I still practice law and litigation and have my own law firm.

01:09:09.180 I came back to, I started at the bar and I was very successful at the bar, partly because

01:09:14.080 I loved it.

01:09:14.640 I worked, I think for the first 10 years of my life, I worked 12 to 14 hours a day, seven

01:09:19.940 days a week.

01:09:20.480 Okay, so when you say worked, how much of those 12 to 14 hours a day were actual productive

01:09:27.120 labor?

01:09:31.640 Quite a lot, but it was a manual intellectual labor so that you just had to sit at your desk.

01:09:37.740 It's like a solitary, which I didn't like actually, because I'm quite, I like meeting

01:09:41.200 people.

01:09:42.020 You sit at your desk and you have to go through files of documents and find out what's relevant

01:09:46.360 and what isn't.

01:09:47.120 So you have to do it even, and it might be productive because you find something in the

01:09:51.720 10th hour, but you have to do the nine hours to get to the 10th hour.

01:09:54.840 Well, the reason I'm asking is because I used to ask my undergraduates quite regularly how

01:10:01.260 much time every day they wasted by their own definition of waste.

01:10:06.600 And generally it was something approximating eight hours.

01:10:10.040 And then I would walk them through that arithmetically because your time as an undergraduate, if you're

01:10:16.160 at a reasonable university, you're a reasonably qualified person, your time is probably worth

01:10:20.900 somewhere between $20 and $50 an hour.

01:10:23.600 Although your time when you're young is actually worth more than that because it compounds, but

01:10:27.680 that's not a bad estimate.

01:10:29.380 And so I would point out to them quite quickly that they were wasting something on the order

01:10:33.720 of $120,000 a year by wasting time every day and that that wasn't illusory.

01:10:39.780 That was a real waste and also tried to put forward to them the notion that if they were

01:10:46.160 going to be successful, if that's what they actually wanted, they would have to learn to

01:10:51.960 be able to work so that they were actually working something like 70 to 80 hours a week.

01:10:57.780 Now, that doesn't mean you have to work like that your whole life, but you certainly have

01:11:01.300 to learn to work like that and if you're going to be successful at a high-end law firm, you

01:11:05.900 are definitely going to be working 70 to 80 hours a week and most of that is actually

01:11:10.300 going to be work.

01:11:11.480 It isn't going to be sitting there in the library, you know, leafing through your phone

01:11:15.480 pretending that you're studying.

01:11:17.480 And so how early on did you learn to concentrate in a manner that would enable you to work for

01:11:22.740 those protracted periods of time?

01:11:24.700 From when I was 18 or 19, I was concentrating.

01:11:27.600 I could just sit for hours at my desk concentrating.

01:11:30.560 I'd have to go for a walk every hour or two, but from very early on, I think.

01:11:34.980 I say very early on, but 18 or 19.

01:11:37.480 Right, right.

01:11:38.000 So you pretty much had that all down by the time, certainly by the time you were in law

01:11:41.620 school.

01:11:42.820 Yeah.

01:11:43.400 I used to go, I used to enjoy my work so much I'd have to pull myself away at like

01:11:47.320 midnight or two in the morning only because I knew that if I didn't get some sleep, I

01:11:51.380 wouldn't be able to work so much the next day.

01:11:53.220 Yeah, yeah.

01:11:53.800 Well, that's actually the proper limitation is the people that I worked with on the legal front

01:11:58.460 when we were trying to figure out boundaries for their work.

01:12:01.260 And I saw this among the scientists that I worked with too, who were great scientists

01:12:04.680 is like, well, how much can you work?

01:12:07.300 Well, can you work 18 hours a day?

01:12:09.020 Well, yes, but not sustainably.

01:12:11.760 And I found that, for example, if I'm writing, I can't write for more than three hours a day

01:12:16.020 if I'm actually writing.

01:12:17.420 I can do other things.

01:12:18.440 But if I start to work more than three hours a day on writing per se, then I start to tire

01:12:24.620 myself out and it's counterproductive.

01:12:26.340 So one of the things you want to do when you're young is find out how hard you can work so that

01:12:32.760 that's actually sustainable.

01:12:34.760 And so you have to push yourself past your limit before you figure that out.

01:12:38.000 But it's a good thing to discover.

01:12:39.520 Yeah, it really is.

01:12:40.380 And to become a good lawyer, in my case anyway, I think it was quite good to do different things.

01:12:46.180 So you learn a lot.

01:12:47.300 It's not just you do X hours at your desk.

01:12:49.680 It's quite important to socialize with other lawyers and debate things with other lawyers.

01:12:53.200 You have your tea breaks and your lunch breaks.

01:12:55.900 And so you're in a little community, especially at the bar in England, because it all happens

01:12:59.580 in a very small area called the Temple.

01:13:02.040 There's a few inns and they sit in their rooms there and they go to have lunch in the same

01:13:06.520 place and they go to walk around the same gardens.

01:13:08.740 It's all in a little compound, in a sense.

01:13:12.280 So you're also making a community at the same time.

01:13:14.860 Yeah, it's a community.

01:13:15.180 Was that a conscious decision to make that community?

01:13:19.580 Did you know enough that you needed to do that?

01:13:21.460 Or were you driven mostly by the fact that you like to socialize and that just emerged

01:13:25.720 naturally?

01:13:26.700 Yeah, it's partly the structure of the English legal system.

01:13:30.240 Barristers, even to qualify, are obligated to have a certain number of dinners together

01:13:34.800 as part of the role of vacation.

01:13:37.160 You become a member of an inn and then you have to have dinners now to qualify, which I

01:13:42.140 found extraordinary in the beginning.

01:13:43.260 But now I think it's quite a good idea.

01:13:44.420 So you're forced to socialize.

01:13:45.960 It's like a little monastic group of monastic warriors, in a sense, who are hired for clients 0.51

01:13:53.720 to do well in court against each other.

01:13:55.340 Well, you have to have a network to be successful.

01:13:57.800 And that's especially true if you're also the kind of lawyer who ends up bringing in business

01:14:02.980 rather than merely doing the background legal research and work.

01:14:08.020 I mean, in North America, I don't know how much it's the same.

01:14:11.020 In England, the lawyers are on the commercial side are pretty well divided into the rainmaker

01:14:17.820 types who are really good at going out and bringing in new business and who also might

01:14:22.860 be good at research.

01:14:24.400 And then the people who are good at research but can't do the entrepreneurial work.

01:14:29.500 And they're nowhere near as valuable to their firms.

01:14:33.580 Yeah.

01:14:34.460 I mean, as a barrister, you didn't bring any business in.

01:14:37.780 You brought some business in, but solicitors brought you the business historically.

01:14:40.680 Now it's all changing.

01:14:42.380 But in law firms, which I also have run for about 10 years as well, you're right.

01:14:47.240 There's the so-called rainmakers.

01:14:49.160 And very few lawyers are good rainmakers.

01:14:51.000 They may be brilliant lawyers.

01:14:53.360 And often, the more brilliant you are as a lawyer, the less likely you are to be a great

01:14:56.340 rainmaker because you just want to sit and analyze the arguments all day.

01:15:00.100 But to have a good law firm, you need different skills.

01:15:03.220 And maybe to be a good lawyer, you need to have all of those skills.

01:15:06.320 But it's hard to have all of them.

01:15:07.440 It's hard to be...

01:15:08.520 Well, each of those skills is rare.

01:15:10.400 And so the combination of the skills is vanishingly rare.

01:15:13.860 Very rare.

01:15:14.480 I mean, to be good at arguing, to be good at reading, to be able to sit down and work hard

01:15:18.200 all day, to be a good advocate in court, to be a good cross-examiner because there's

01:15:22.320 different kinds of advocates.

01:15:23.820 There are advocates who are very good on appeal, but not so good with witnesses.

01:15:28.400 Well, and then to be a good litigator and have that attack dog mentality and ability, and

01:15:33.120 then also to be able to work harmoniously with your clients, that's a very difficult...

01:15:37.800 Very hard.

01:15:38.200 Those are two different worlds, for sure.

01:15:40.040 Because your client often is in a very difficult, traumatic time of their lives, and you're going

01:15:46.400 to have to work with them.

01:15:47.220 And then, in order to socialize and network with clients who aren't yet your clients,

01:15:51.640 on the hope that you might get some work in, it requires a lot for one person to be all

01:15:55.880 that, you know.

01:15:56.520 And even in the big law firms, you know, where there's only solicitors or trial attorneys,

01:16:01.940 I think only one in every 10 partners will be a real rainmaker.

01:16:05.380 Right, right, right.

01:16:06.480 That's what my question is.

01:16:06.840 Yeah, well, one of the things that's very useful on that front for young people to know

01:16:11.340 if they're trying to develop their professional career is when you see someone who's good

01:16:15.760 at something, first of all, you should notice it, especially if they're good at something

01:16:19.360 you're not.

01:16:20.380 And try not to be jealous of it and put it down, you know, because there's a moral temptation

01:16:24.700 there.

01:16:25.160 But people can develop a wide range of skills if they're willing to learn from the people

01:16:29.780 who already have those skills.

01:16:31.660 You know, I've seen introverts, for example, become extremely sophisticated socially.

01:16:35.580 Like they have to kind of learn it incremental step by incremental step where the extroverts

01:16:40.780 just have it at hand.

01:16:42.360 But you can, even those rainmaking skills, you can develop those if you're fortunate enough

01:16:47.320 to have a mentor and you have enough of a clue to learn from them the micro elements of what

01:16:54.680 they're doing.

01:16:55.540 Can I say two things as I listen to you talk about that?

01:16:58.380 There are two things that I think about my practice as a lawyer, especially as an advocate.

01:17:02.220 One is you learn most by actually doing it.

01:17:05.820 You can study about it as much as possible, but when you actually go into battle, you learn

01:17:09.760 a lot more than when you're reading about it.

01:17:11.680 That's one.

01:17:12.720 You bump yourself up against the right obstacles.

01:17:15.400 Yeah.

01:17:16.580 Which is an interesting thing that you have to do it to learn rather than study it.

01:17:21.420 The other interesting thing that's often puzzled me, which I'll ask you because I'm sure

01:17:24.440 you'll have an opinion on it, is why it is we can learn so much from people.

01:17:28.180 In our lives, even in your own life, when you look back, you'll have had some relatively

01:17:32.200 small conversations with people that have shaped the way you think about things.

01:17:36.360 And you can learn so much from a mentor or a person who's very, I've learned a lot from

01:17:41.420 some very senior barristers or not even senior barristers who've taught me, it's not just

01:17:46.560 a little trick, but their attitude.

01:17:48.340 What a conversation with someone can teach you more than reading many books.

01:17:52.440 Why is it so much?

01:17:53.780 Well, we're really imitative.

01:17:55.160 You know, and so it's one of the things that sets human beings off against other animals

01:18:01.660 most particularly.

01:18:03.480 And so you can literally embody the spirit of someone else's personality.

01:18:09.900 Well, that's to some degree, you do that in every conversation because you and I, to have

01:18:13.820 this conversation, we have to find a middle ground where we're basically both, we both are

01:18:19.480 occupied by the same spirit, you know, and the more different you are than me when that

01:18:25.520 conversation occurs, the farther I have to stretch myself to become an analog of you just

01:18:30.760 to communicate.

01:18:31.760 And that definitely broadens you.

01:18:34.260 And so, and we're very good at grasping the whole and inferring it from parts.

01:18:41.580 I noticed this was my son, for example, when he was about two and a half or three and we

01:18:47.360 first sent him off to daycare and there were, my son was quite well behaved because that

01:18:54.380 was a requirement in our household and he would come, but he was also extremely extroverted

01:18:59.860 and social and quite disagreeable.

01:19:01.940 So he had a will and we'd send him off to daycare and he'd come back and he would have learned

01:19:07.580 the most conniving tricks and just pick them up just like that.

01:19:11.420 And the reason was he was hanging around some, you know, bratty kid who had a whole bag full

01:19:16.440 of tricks as part of their personality, he'd just absorb that whole thing and he'd come

01:19:20.640 back and, you know, try it out.

01:19:23.040 And it's, it's, that's part of our fascination, let's say for stories, you know, when you go

01:19:28.540 to a movie and you're engrossed in the character, you're essentially, what happens is you adopt

01:19:35.340 the aims of the character and then your entire nervous system swings to make the things that

01:19:41.460 appear as obstacles to him appear as obstacles to you and the things that appear as facilitators

01:19:47.360 to him appear to facilitators to you.

01:19:49.720 And you really, you embody that whole mode of being and play it out as a dramatic fantasy

01:19:55.060 and then it shows you that that's a whole new way of looking at the world.

01:19:59.340 That's why we love stories so much and drama and a mentoring experience is like that is

01:20:05.000 because that you, you can, you essentially imitate the person that you're with.

01:20:09.220 It's so interesting and that's why you can't just, you know, somebody can tell you it orally

01:20:13.620 as a person, as a mentor, or you can read in the book, but the mentor, you will take

01:20:17.160 it in more.

01:20:17.520 Yeah, well, the mentorship has that, it's, it's the dramatic imitative element that comes

01:20:22.940 along with it.

01:20:23.580 You know, you might think that being a lawyer, for example, and Thomas Kuhn talked a lot

01:20:27.420 about this relationship to science.

01:20:28.980 It's like, well, what is science?

01:20:31.280 Well, it's a set of facts.

01:20:32.320 It's like, yeah, the facts change, so that's dubious to begin with, but it's also a practice.

01:20:39.860 Well, what's the practice?

01:20:41.120 Well, it's a list of skills.

01:20:42.360 It's like, there's no such thing as a list of skills.

01:20:45.180 You know, you, that's partly why we haven't so far been able to come up with expert diagnostic

01:20:50.060 systems, for example.

01:20:51.540 They are getting better now, but for a long time, they were useless.

01:20:55.880 Because whatever an illness is, isn't a list of symptoms discriminable from other, some

01:21:02.460 other list of symptoms.

01:21:03.660 There's an active diagnosis and an art, and a lot of that's not explicit.

01:21:08.140 It's a kind of drama, and the only way you can develop that skill is to imitate it.

01:21:12.600 So if you're a scientist, you have an apprenticeship, and it's in the apprenticeship that you learn

01:21:17.540 to imitate the spirit of science, and we have no idea how to reduce that to a set of rule-bound

01:21:23.020 practices.

01:21:24.120 We have no idea.

01:21:24.780 And Kuhn made a lot of that in the structure of scientific revolutions.

01:21:28.780 No, and you're very fortunate if you have mentors in your life, because you can copy

01:21:32.600 them.

01:21:33.660 And it's not just that the mentor imparts information to you by just advice.

01:21:37.820 I mean, my, at the bar, you had to have a year of being a pupil, an apprentice, and you

01:21:42.320 had a pupil master, and you'd sit in the room.

01:21:44.820 I was fortunate to have a fantastically clever pupil master.

01:21:48.860 And I started, and I thought, now he's going to teach me a lot, and he's my master.

01:21:53.580 It's this old-fashioned language.

01:21:55.420 I remember sitting there and saying, Mark, I'd ask him a question.

01:21:59.800 And he'd say, always, he'd say, you tell me?

01:22:03.580 Right.

01:22:04.040 And then I'd go, and I'd think about research, and I'd come back, and I'd say, I found the

01:22:07.500 answer to my question.

01:22:09.180 And he'd say, what is it?

01:22:10.280 And I'd tell him it.

01:22:10.980 And he'd say, no, try again.

01:22:12.580 And so he never actually told me anything, but he just kept me on my toes the whole time.

01:22:17.640 Right.

01:22:17.960 Yeah.

01:22:18.220 Well, and you never know to what degree hanging around him brought the right questions to

01:22:23.620 mind, right?

01:22:24.700 Because we don't really know how that mentorship relationship, we don't know how it transforms

01:22:30.940 you cognitively.

01:22:32.520 And it might, a lot of the most important thing in any discussion is what the pertinent

01:22:37.400 questions are, rather than what the relevant answers are.

01:22:40.560 Totally.

01:22:41.300 In the law, especially, I've often thought being a good lawyer is asking the right questions.

01:22:45.440 Once you ask the right questions, there's a saying in the law, often people say to judges,

01:22:49.080 one only has to ask the question to know the answer.

01:22:51.120 Once you've asked the question, things become a lot.

01:22:53.220 Yes.

01:22:53.460 The answers can be obvious.

01:22:54.900 There's another thing that happens, this is a slight detour, in asking questions in an

01:22:59.420 adversarial situation.

01:23:00.620 So you might send somebody in to interview someone or to do something, and you say, don't

01:23:05.380 give anything away.

01:23:06.160 And they always, or very often, naively say, we won't give anything away because we're

01:23:10.960 only going to ask questions.

01:23:11.620 Yeah, right.

01:23:12.400 Yeah, yeah.

01:23:13.400 Yeah.

01:23:14.000 The questions are loaded with information.

01:23:15.780 Yes, definitely.

01:23:16.940 Definitely.

01:23:17.680 Definitely.

01:23:18.560 So now you became very successful as a litigator.

01:23:22.880 And so what led to your success?

01:23:25.000 And do you have some stories at hand about, well, adventures that you undertook well engaged

01:23:34.040 in the litigation practice?

01:23:36.740 Yeah, obviously, a lot of the stories I have are confidential, but I can talk in generic

01:23:43.440 terms.

01:23:44.320 I did it after a while, give up the bar and go and work as a manager for people that had

01:23:52.500 lots of litigation problems.

01:23:53.740 So that gave me the opportunity to manage lots of lawyers.

01:23:57.620 Rather than being a lawyer, I became a sort of a crisis manager.

01:24:02.400 And I've acted for all sorts of normally very wealthy people or companies with huge commercial

01:24:07.300 problems.

01:24:07.940 But it's often on the edge of commerce and other problems, because if a wealthy person

01:24:12.940 really does have a problem, and it's normally a huge problem for them if they involve me,

01:24:18.080 if they need to come to me, it's normally a real crisis.

01:24:21.000 Then you're dealing with, like I said earlier, a client who can lose everything, really.

01:24:29.080 Often they're concerned about their reputation, then they're concerned about their money,

01:24:32.540 their lifestyle.

01:24:33.900 So I did one particular case for probably the wealthiest guy in the world where I had to

01:24:39.140 manage a lot of litigation.

01:24:40.380 I think I instructed something like 73 law firms in 13 different countries and caught and settled

01:24:47.260 over 500 different cases.

01:24:48.900 And that was all about a lifestyle that had gone...

01:24:50.400 Over what span of time?

01:24:51.540 Seven years, yeah.

01:24:52.800 How many cases?

01:24:54.260 Over 500 different cases.

01:24:57.020 That's a lot of chaos.

01:24:58.160 Yeah, it's a lot of chaos.

01:25:00.020 And you become good at...

01:25:02.280 That made me good as a lawyer, because I became a client, because I had lots of lawyers I had

01:25:08.520 to deal with and try and get the most out of them, because I was representing the client.

01:25:13.200 And I lived in the Far East in that particular case for seven years.

01:25:18.240 And there's a kind of quite a good attitude as well in the Far East, because I was always

01:25:21.640 being challenged by...

01:25:22.560 I remember there was one particular Chinese guy who I had to work with a lot, who would

01:25:25.220 always...

01:25:25.840 And, you know, I like being challenged, and I like challenging myself.

01:25:28.560 And he challenged me even more.

01:25:29.820 He said, why not?

01:25:30.580 Why can't we do this?

01:25:31.300 Why can't we do that?

01:25:32.380 And so I learned a lot in those cases.

01:25:34.880 But sometimes in those cases, you had to...

01:25:37.560 There were cases from, you know, car companies, plane companies, banks, from, you know, blackmail

01:25:43.940 cases.

01:25:44.540 Blackmail cases have become, you know, quite common.

01:25:47.280 Well, they're always around now.

01:25:48.400 But there's Me Too type cases that are recently.

01:25:50.600 Sometimes there's obviously merit in them.

01:25:53.160 Sometimes there isn't, you know, ever...

01:25:55.080 Well, it's put a lot of power in the hands of accusers.

01:25:58.300 Exactly.

01:25:59.000 And, you know, I've seen cases where the accusers were absolutely, you know, made up, you know.

01:26:04.140 Yeah.

01:26:04.520 And not, you know.

01:26:05.760 But it's crazy.

01:26:07.360 One thing as a barrister, ethically, you're not allowed to not take a client on because

01:26:14.200 you don't, you know, because you have to...

01:26:16.940 There's something called the cab rank rule.

01:26:18.240 So you just take clients on irrespective of your belief in their...

01:26:21.300 Right.

01:26:21.620 Because they're entitled to a defense.

01:26:23.660 Yeah.

01:26:23.780 Which is very important.

01:26:24.740 They're entitled to a defense.

01:26:26.020 I think that's really, really important.

01:26:27.420 I've always taken clients on and never, you know, even if...

01:26:30.840 Well, sometimes people think they're guilty and they're not.

01:26:33.660 That's tricky.

01:26:34.800 You know, I saw that in psychotherapy all the time is people would convict themselves

01:26:38.480 at a second's notice.

01:26:40.020 And I would look into it and I'd think, actually, you know, this wasn't nearly as much your fault

01:26:45.440 as your, you know, because you think, well, you should take responsibility for your actions

01:26:49.300 and fair enough.

01:26:50.160 But there are errors in that direction too, is you should take responsibility for your

01:26:54.280 actions.

01:26:54.800 But the presumption of innocence also applies to you, even if you are inclined to be guilty.

01:27:02.180 And so that principle that you should take on every client as a lawyer, it's a good

01:27:06.340 principle.

01:27:06.920 It's a very good principle.

01:27:07.460 You never know what the story is till you get to the bottom of it.

01:27:10.640 I remember early on at one of these dinners that I was compelled to go to, you know, when

01:27:15.660 I started out at Lincoln's Inn, where I'm a member, there was one of the leading criminal

01:27:20.200 barristers who did all the top murder cases and rape cases.

01:27:24.940 And we're all having dinner with him.

01:27:26.360 And one of the students said to him, how do you feel defending someone you know to be

01:27:31.860 guilty or you believe to be guilty?

01:27:33.880 And he said quickly, he's a brilliant barrister.

01:27:36.200 He's now dead.

01:27:36.780 He said, I feel relieved.

01:27:39.220 What do you mean?

01:27:39.880 He said, because there's nothing worse than representing someone you believe to be innocent

01:27:43.640 because you can only screw it up.

01:27:45.220 But if you believe they're guilty and you still do your best, it's not so bad.

01:27:49.580 If you, you know, if something happens, they go, it's, if you believe, if you believe they're

01:27:53.800 innocent and you screw it up, it's a disaster.

01:27:55.660 Right, right.

01:27:56.440 Whereas you still do your best both ways, but it puts a lot of pressure on you.

01:27:59.640 You're believing somebody is innocent.

01:28:00.920 Yeah, well, it's an open question, too, in any complex situation.

01:28:04.240 It's like, well, guilty of what exactly?

01:28:07.280 Because the devil's always in the details.

01:28:09.020 There's a famous ad, if I can interject for a second, which I saw once.

01:28:14.300 I don't know if it's famous, but it's famous in my mind.

01:28:16.080 Put it that way.

01:28:16.940 It's a guy who's trying to get some clients for defense work and criminal defense work.

01:28:22.340 And the ad is, it's a big poster and says, just because you did it doesn't mean you're

01:28:26.140 guilty.

01:28:26.380 It doesn't mean you're guilty of it, you know?

01:28:34.440 Yeah.

01:28:35.060 Yeah.

01:28:35.340 Well, it's also necessary for people who are, who find themselves in hot water legally and

01:28:41.060 ethically to sort things out for themselves so that they know where they took the wrong

01:28:47.820 steps.

01:28:48.300 I mean, the goal of analyzing a piece of misbehavior, let's say, if the goal is atonement, what that

01:28:56.480 means is you have to know exactly where you stepped wrong right from the beginning of the

01:29:02.920 process.

01:29:04.080 And that means you also have to know where you're guilty, but about things that were actually

01:29:09.140 peripheral to the event, or maybe you shouldn't have been guilty about them at all.

01:29:13.620 It's like, no, this is the cardinal mistake.

01:29:15.980 This is the mistake.

01:29:16.980 This is the pathway.

01:29:17.700 This is what you're guilty of, not these things.

01:29:20.600 This is what anyone would have done in your situation, because lots of times people will

01:29:25.480 do something that looks terrible on casual glance and may even be terrible, but you listen

01:29:32.040 to the full account and you think, oh, if I was in that situation, I would have done something

01:29:36.460 far worse, right?

01:29:37.860 And then that makes the whole notion of guilt much more complex.

01:29:40.900 You know, I mean, there's a woman who's in jail at the moment in the US who killed a man who had

01:29:50.180 repeatedly exploited her violently, sexually, and then posted the videos online and profited

01:29:57.920 from them. 0.98

01:29:59.120 It's like, well, she definitely killed him.

01:30:00.520 She shot him, I believe, in court.

01:30:02.100 But, you know, was she guilty?

01:30:04.760 Well, there's a complicated, probably of something.

01:30:09.020 She got herself in that situation.

01:30:11.040 And for however she managed that and then couldn't disentangle herself from it.

01:30:15.800 And that's not good.

01:30:16.860 So, obviously, you would presume some culpability on her part in that entire sequence, but trying 0.98

01:30:23.740 to entangle that, that's quite the bloody rat's nest. 0.98

01:30:26.320 That is. 0.65

01:30:26.780 But fortunately, I don't ever get involved in, I try, I don't like judging people.

01:30:31.460 I don't think it's, in my job, I don't think it's right.

01:30:33.680 I just have to represent them and do the best I can for them, obviously without misleading

01:30:37.380 the call.

01:30:38.520 Right.

01:30:39.700 But I don't like judging people, partly for all the reasons you're kind of alluding to.

01:30:43.400 It's kind of complicated, knowing who's guilty of what.

01:30:46.980 And there's an old saying, I think it's a Russian proverb that says, don't judge people

01:30:50.880 because it's too flattering to the devil.

01:30:52.580 I don't know exactly what it means, but I think it means that you're giving too much

01:30:55.540 credit to the devil.

01:30:56.560 Right, right, right.

01:30:57.500 Well, the devil is the adversary.

01:30:59.080 That's the fundamental.

01:31:00.000 That's what Satan means.

01:31:01.060 The word is adversary.

01:31:02.800 And so, yeah, well, one of the things you learn if you're a clinician and you have any

01:31:06.960 sense is also, it's also why you don't offer people advice.

01:31:10.680 It's like, I don't know what the hell you should do.

01:31:13.400 Like, maybe you and I could figure it out together with some really careful thought,

01:31:17.160 but I can't.

01:31:18.720 Most people are in situations that are sufficiently complex so that casual advice is just not

01:31:23.920 helpful at all.

01:31:24.600 And there's a real arrogance in that.

01:31:25.900 It's the same arrogance of judgment.

01:31:27.840 It's like...

01:31:28.240 Yeah, well, judgment's often bolstering yourself up, really.

01:31:30.880 Yes, definitely.

01:31:31.360 Judging people for some comparative advantage.

01:31:33.420 Definitely.

01:31:33.520 I hate the idea of judging.

01:31:36.340 I, myself, not that I'd ever be a contender, would never want to be a judge.

01:31:39.900 You know, I just hate the idea of judging people.

01:31:41.980 Some of my colleagues at the bar went on, some of my closest friends are judges, and they're

01:31:47.160 happy and they're doing great jobs as judges, but I just couldn't do that job.

01:31:50.080 Yeah, yeah.

01:31:51.280 It'd be interesting to talk to a judge with a lot of experience to find out how they

01:31:55.280 navigate the moral pitfalls of being in that position and how they reconcile themselves

01:32:00.240 to it, given this sort of complexity that we're describing.

01:32:02.980 I expect they say, and rightly so, their role is to judge.

01:32:06.480 Society needs people like them to judge, and they do their best to judge honestly and faithfully

01:32:10.520 within the law.

01:32:11.420 Yeah.

01:32:11.480 And so it's an important role.

01:32:13.220 It is, it is.

01:32:14.180 But it does set up these moral conundrums that we've been describing.

01:32:17.420 Now, as your career as a litigator developed, as your career as a litigator developed, you

01:32:22.820 also developed an interest in the world of art, and particularly modern art.

01:32:27.880 Yeah.

01:32:28.320 And so how did that develop in parallel?

01:32:32.020 It developed really because of, I've always loved art, and I've always felt it's important.

01:32:39.240 And then I started buying art for like 25 bucks or 50 bucks.

01:32:43.500 I mean, in fact, you know, years ago, when I was even 18 or 19, so I believed in art.

01:32:48.000 What were you buying?

01:32:49.260 Oh, just things in the local reference library done by old ladies of flowers and stuff.

01:32:52.920 I just...

01:32:53.280 But original art?

01:32:54.240 Yeah, original art.

01:32:55.020 Yeah.

01:32:56.160 And then as I became more successful and made money, I liked to, you know, buy some art.

01:33:01.880 And I got friendly with artists.

01:33:02.860 I was obsessed with the creative process and also the economics of creativity, which really

01:33:10.520 fascinates me.

01:33:12.880 In the art world, you can get two extremes of people.

01:33:15.680 You can get people who just think that money is disgusting, should have nothing to do with

01:33:19.620 art, and it's purely about sort of critical theory and aesthetics and history and stuff.

01:33:25.340 On the other hand, you get people who really don't care about anything to do with the art.

01:33:30.240 They just know how much they can sell it for and how much they can buy it for, yeah.

01:33:34.340 But I personally have just always been fascinated in that relationship between how you can turn

01:33:39.860 an idea into money and the economics of, I call it the economics of creativity, which

01:33:43.840 I find really fascinating.

01:33:46.020 So by chance, I was lucky enough to get friendly with some artists.

01:33:48.460 And artists have a difficult job, as you know, because they are, I believe, bearing their soul

01:33:54.820 to the world, to be judged, you know.

01:33:56.600 Right.

01:33:57.000 So it's a very hard job and hard for lots of reasons, because you have to do your paintings

01:34:02.560 normally, you have a show, people come and they like them or they don't, you sell them

01:34:06.040 and all the self-doubt and it's a lonely job, so you don't have many people to hang

01:34:10.780 out with normally, so it's a difficult job.

01:34:13.060 And so they're not normally very good at commerce, not normally.

01:34:16.200 And if they are, they might not be great artists if they're just good at selling their paintings.

01:34:21.360 They may or may not be good, but you have to appreciate the importance of that system.

01:34:24.620 But I was, so I got friendly with some artists and they'd ask me, I'm also, because of my

01:34:28.620 philosophical and scientific background, I was always trying to, and my commercial background,

01:34:33.320 trying to work out what the right thing is and the relationship between money and art.

01:34:36.940 And that's something that I've been involved in now for 25 years and I've been obsessed with

01:34:41.560 it really, trying to understand it.

01:34:44.080 And so I just got into it because by accident, I got friendly with an artist and he asked

01:34:48.280 me some, he asked me to help him out on various things.

01:34:51.140 And that's grown to me, managing more and more artists.

01:34:55.200 By managing, it's really advising, giving them commercial advice.

01:34:58.900 And that's not necessarily how to make the most amount of money.

01:35:02.400 It's what's to do that's best for your art and your legacy.

01:35:06.120 Right, well that's the development of a career.

01:35:07.820 Exactly, and there are all sorts of, art is such a fantastically interesting subject because

01:35:15.040 it means so many things, as we will hopefully discuss now.

01:35:18.540 It can mean so many different things to so many different people and it's very spiritually

01:35:22.120 important to some people, to other people it's just commerce.

01:35:24.960 Some art can be beauty, some art may not be beauty, it may be subjective, objective, all

01:35:28.720 these different things.

01:35:29.840 And then there's the market, which is, you know, so fascinating.

01:35:32.600 And one's attitude to art, and these are the things that, I remember the first, one

01:35:37.920 of the first valuable paintings I bought, I was so happy and I loved it so much.

01:35:41.740 And then a week or two later, I realized that the people who sold it to me had ripped me

01:35:44.520 off and it wasn't worth what I thought it was worth.

01:35:46.800 And then when I looked at that painting, it just represented me being had.

01:35:50.280 And I no longer love the painting anymore, I just looked at it.

01:35:54.080 So the relation between money and art is important.

01:35:56.460 Well, that's the relationship between context and perception too, because now you saw that

01:36:01.220 the same object, you know, through a completely different lens.

01:36:06.240 What an artistic production is as an object is extremely complex.

01:36:12.240 That's what Duchamp was playing with when he put the urinal in the gallery, is that, well,

01:36:17.660 if it's in a gallery, is it a piece of art?

01:36:19.900 It turned out with Duchamp's urinal that the answer to that, at least eventually, was most

01:36:24.100 definitively yes.

01:36:25.780 But people are cynical about that move on his part.

01:36:29.820 But it was actually brilliant because I've often thought this, for example, in the case

01:36:35.900 of museums, imagine there's a museum there that has Hank Williams or Elvis Presley's guitar.

01:36:41.560 Well, let's say it's a mass manufactured guitar.

01:36:44.640 It's like, well, now you have a display case and Elvis's guitar is in there.

01:36:49.140 But perceptually, in some real manner, it's not distinguishable from any other guitar of that

01:36:57.680 period.

01:36:58.840 So then you might say, well, what's the reality of the fact that this was Elvis's guitar?

01:37:04.200 Like, where is that reality?

01:37:05.680 Because it's not in the perceptual landscape.

01:37:08.060 It's in the shrine that's been built around it.

01:37:12.620 It's in people's memory.

01:37:14.100 And that's what Duchamp was playing with too.

01:37:16.140 It's like, well, what's a piece of art?

01:37:17.920 Well, often you find them in museums.

01:37:20.080 Well, if we raise something ordinary to the status of something in a museum, to what degree

01:37:26.740 does that now become a piece of art?

01:37:28.600 And that is definitely an open question and a very complex question.

01:37:31.660 And it's a sophisticated question.

01:37:33.320 You ran right into that with your painting.

01:37:35.140 It's like when you were viewing it through the lens of having made a successful social

01:37:39.580 and economic transfer, the painting was one thing.

01:37:42.420 And when that fell apart, the painting was something else.

01:37:44.760 And that in itself is quite interesting.

01:37:46.560 Well, the object is always an interplay of whatever it is and whatever you are as the reader of it.

01:37:54.680 And that can modify.

01:37:55.700 Exactly.

01:37:57.900 And there's art.

01:37:59.460 And there's another thing that happens in the art world, which is there is obviously one school of thought that says the commodification of art and art and money corrupts art.

01:38:11.640 But in a sense, it also saves art because people can appreciate.

01:38:15.760 I mean, they say if your painting that you have in your home is worth money, you look after it.

01:38:20.820 You make sure it's handled and framed properly and it makes sure it survives.

01:38:25.460 And people, so, you know, art to have an economic value is important for its survival, I believe, sometimes.

01:38:31.400 So those are the side of questions with the artist.

01:38:36.480 So what attracted you initially to these original pieces of art that you were buying?

01:38:42.340 And why did you think you had enough courage to rely on your own taste?

01:38:46.660 Because one of the things I've observed about people's relationship to art is people are terrified of art, especially of purchasing it.

01:38:53.760 Because just as the artist bears their soul in the creative production, the consumer bears their soul in the form of their taste now manifested as that purchase.

01:39:07.100 And people are very terrified to do that.

01:39:09.320 So why did you have enough confidence to be attracted to the pieces you were and then to purchase them?

01:39:17.320 I don't know the answer to that.

01:39:18.700 Maybe it goes back to the subject we're talking about, the confidence I had in myself, given to me from my mother and father, going to, you know, I just, when I try to...

01:39:26.100 Intrinsic confidence in my own judgment.

01:39:28.660 I do believe that the I, as it's called in the art world, or the aesthetic sense or I, is a kind of muscle that you can develop.

01:39:35.040 Yeah.

01:39:35.560 And if you look at enough things, enough times, and you don't just look at great things, you look at things that are rubbish and bad, and you question, which, as you know, I love doing, what's good and why it's good and what's bad and why it's bad.

01:39:47.080 I've done eBay treasure hunts for like 20 years, and I think I may have looked at more bad paintings than anyone else, because I looked at at least 1,000 to 2,000 paintings a night for like 10 years.

01:40:01.600 And I developed quite an eye for catastrophically bad art, which is really useful, right?

01:40:08.620 Because once you know the junk landscape, and there's millions of bad paintings on eBay, like literally just endless supply of them, a good painting will just go, it'll just snap out.

01:40:20.640 You think, whoa, okay, well, I don't know, that isn't what the rest of this is.

01:40:24.880 And you do develop that, you develop your eye, as you said, by continual exposure, which is why taking art history courses and so forth is so useful.

01:40:33.940 It is.

01:40:34.900 But obviously, fashions change, everything changes.

01:40:37.120 But I do believe, you and I seem to agree, that that eye, the aesthetic sense, can be trained like a muscle.

01:40:42.160 Well, then you can apply it to the whole world, which is unbelievably useful, to decorating your house, and to placing your furniture, and to arranging chairs at a dinner, and yeah, yeah, you, well, you know, to a large degree, what each of us as moderns even regards as beautiful.

01:41:02.140 You think, well, that's obviously beautiful.

01:41:03.560 It's like, no, no, no, some artists figured out that was beautiful, and taught you how to see that, or taught the people you learn to see from, that that was beautiful.

01:41:12.640 Like, most people now regard impressionist landscapes as sort of self-evidently beautiful, but no one thought that when they were first produced.

01:41:19.800 And the whole notion that even there is such a thing as beauty and landscape, that was by no means self-evident before artists figured it out.

01:41:28.120 Exactly.

01:41:28.920 And it's the same with many other genres of art.

01:41:32.080 But I think, yeah, and I agree, but going back to your question, how do you have the confidence to buy art?

01:41:41.720 Generally.

01:41:42.520 Yeah.

01:41:42.860 You build up your aesthetic sense, but of course, there's this other self, there's this other delusional thing that people have, which is everyone thinks they've got a good idea, a good eye.

01:41:52.240 So, not everyone, but most people do.

01:41:54.820 So, the classic thing a dealer, an art gallery will do, when you go in and there's 10 paintings and you choose one, they'll always say to you, oh, you've got a good eye.

01:42:03.420 And of course, you want to believe you've got a good eye.

01:42:04.980 So, you have to be careful not to believe that you have a good eye and to doubt yourself as well.

01:42:09.920 The other thing to do, which I think is important in art is, if you're really trying to buy great art, which is hard to express properly, but it's originality.

01:42:21.640 If it's simply copying other art, it may still be beautiful and it may still be valuable, but it's unlikely to be as valuable as the Impressionists in 1863 or whenever it was.

01:42:30.660 Because they were doing revolutionary, which was hard to accept then, but with time that becomes amazing.

01:42:37.520 It's also difficult to separate out original from merely shocking, because if it is original, it will be shocking, because it will force you to perceive something.

01:42:50.540 And I think Cubist art, the Cubist art from the 1920s, actually still has that power, a particularly good Cubist piece, you'll think.

01:42:58.960 That really, there is really something radically different about that, and good Cubist pieces are pretty damn rare.

01:43:06.440 But much of what passes for modern originality is always merely shocking.

01:43:13.280 Now, all that disappears in the flux of time very rapidly, and only what was truly original remains.

01:43:19.560 But it's not an easy thing to distinguish between the merely shocking and the original early.

01:43:25.800 You seem to have managed that to some degree.

01:43:28.440 I mean, you do, I think there's some reason to think that you do have a good eye for originality.

01:43:34.620 And so how do you distinguish between the original and, say, the merely shocking?

01:43:39.920 I think it's, again, training your eye to look at lots and lots of things.

01:43:44.340 And if you come across something that you've never seen before, that automatically makes you think about it.

01:43:48.860 Right.

01:43:49.080 And then it has to kind of touch you.

01:43:52.280 So already you're thinking it's original, then it has to touch you in a way.

01:43:55.260 I generally, you can tell if an artist generally is just trying to be shocking to grab attention,

01:44:02.400 or if he's just trying to create beauty or something important.

01:44:04.720 I say you can tell, I don't know how you can tell, but I can tell.

01:44:07.980 Yeah, well, you did lay out how you tell, though.

01:44:12.760 I mean, if you want to learn how to judge Impressionist landscapes, let's say,

01:44:18.700 you could start by looking at 10,000 of them.

01:44:22.440 And what you're doing is you're building up an implicit vocabulary,

01:44:25.280 because you're tuning a set of perceptual networks.

01:44:29.600 So imagine you have a set of 1,000 Impressionist paintings.

01:44:33.540 There's something about them that makes them Impressionist paintings, let's say,

01:44:37.600 rather than Renaissance realist paintings.

01:44:41.480 Now, what that is, is whatever's at the core of Impressionism,

01:44:44.960 say, versus any other genre of art.

01:44:47.880 But that's not definable.

01:44:49.340 The only way you're going to figure that out is by exposing yourself to a multitude of exemplars

01:44:54.560 and extracting the gist perceptually.

01:44:57.800 That's like tuning an AI network.

01:45:00.240 You can't express what it is, but you can learn to see it.

01:45:04.300 And then you can learn to see.

01:45:05.680 So imagine there's 1,000 Impressionist paintings.

01:45:08.920 Some of them are more canonical.

01:45:10.800 Those would be the masterpieces.

01:45:12.300 Some of them are more central to the spirit of the Impressionist endeavor.

01:45:16.160 You can learn to identify those.

01:45:17.920 But not without going through, not without doing it,

01:45:21.360 not without going through the effort of looking at endless exemplars of paintings.

01:45:25.320 And I suppose if you're really approaching it systematically, which I do,

01:45:28.480 you'd also look at the market and what the market says about value as well.

01:45:31.540 Because that is some...

01:45:32.740 It's a pointer.

01:45:33.600 It's a pointer.

01:45:34.380 It's an indication, but not on its own.

01:45:37.300 There's something that, you know, often the debate, as you know, in art is,

01:45:41.040 is beauty objective or subjective?

01:45:45.020 Forget about beauty.

01:45:45.880 Let's call it beauty.

01:45:46.900 There's a debate about whether art has to be beautiful or not,

01:45:49.540 which we probably will both accept it doesn't have to be beautiful.

01:45:51.880 It has to be meaningful and touch you, doesn't it?

01:45:53.600 Maybe you disagree with that, but let's come back to that.

01:45:55.940 On beauty, is it objective or subjective?

01:45:57.640 Well, goya is often not beautiful. 1.00

01:45:59.220 Exactly.

01:45:59.760 It's horrifying often.

01:46:01.080 Yeah, but you'd have to accept it's great art, I think, yeah.

01:46:03.660 Yes, yes, right.

01:46:05.340 So is it objective?

01:46:06.180 So the view I formed, and I may be wrong about it,

01:46:09.240 but this is my currently firmly held view,

01:46:11.840 is that there's a kind of collective subjectivity or even objectivity in art.

01:46:15.640 So if you asked 100 people, if I took you into a room with 10 paintings

01:46:20.260 done by the same artist, all one meter square,

01:46:23.780 I think there'd be a real consensus about which was the best one.

01:46:26.340 Well, we did this.

01:46:27.220 We actually did this formally.

01:46:29.700 I did this with Harvard.

01:46:30.900 A student of mine, Shelley Carson,

01:46:33.000 we were trying to develop objective measures of artistic production.

01:46:38.320 So one of the things we did was have well-established artists rate collages

01:46:45.840 we had ordinary people make with the same kit.

01:46:49.180 So your goal in our experiment was to make a collage out of this kit of pieces.

01:46:54.300 And then we had artists rate them for quality.

01:46:57.260 And then you can find out if there's anything objective

01:46:59.780 by seeing if there's a similarity in the rank orderings across the artists.

01:47:04.720 And the similarity was quite stunning.

01:47:06.280 So there's an index called alpha reliability,

01:47:11.400 which is, say, the average correlation across a set of rankings.

01:47:15.020 And it was extremely high.

01:47:16.380 The artists could very reliably distinguish the high-quality collages

01:47:21.960 from the low-quality collages.

01:47:24.520 And now, is that objective?

01:47:27.000 Well, it transcends the subjective.

01:47:31.440 I mean, it's not exactly objective

01:47:33.500 because it's so clearly dependent on the existence of a perceiver.

01:47:38.320 But you do have cross-perceiver similarity.

01:47:41.520 And that's a form of objective reality.

01:47:44.200 That's what I think, too.

01:47:45.060 It's more than subjective.

01:47:46.820 It's a sort of collective belief.

01:47:48.560 And what's right, of course,

01:47:49.260 there'll be one or two in a hundred or ten

01:47:51.100 that will disagree with you.

01:47:52.200 But generally, there's a consensus amongst you.

01:47:54.380 And a rank order.

01:47:55.160 Well, otherwise, we couldn't even have a category of art.

01:47:58.240 Because, well, you could just throw a frame around anything

01:48:01.260 and it would instantly be art.

01:48:02.720 It's like, no.

01:48:04.160 The mere fact that we have a category of art

01:48:07.680 means that we distinguish some images reliably from others.

01:48:12.400 Now, why?

01:48:13.660 We don't know exactly.

01:48:15.640 Beautiful might be one.

01:48:16.680 But I think part of what art does

01:48:21.320 is produce revolutionary transformations

01:48:25.140 in your perception towards something like the good.

01:48:29.560 And there's all sorts of different ways that can occur.

01:48:31.860 I mean, Goya is a good example

01:48:33.240 because his representations are so often horrific.

01:48:37.160 And Hieronymus Bosch is another example of exactly that.

01:48:40.380 I mean, there's beauty in the craftsmanship

01:48:42.440 and also perhaps in the palette.

01:48:44.120 But the details are horrifying beyond belief.

01:48:47.500 But those artists are compelling you to look past that

01:48:50.880 which they're compelling you to look past

01:48:55.480 even the comfortable emotional limitations

01:48:58.560 of your current perceptions.

01:49:00.760 And so the great artists are geniuses of perception, fundamentally.

01:49:06.500 They teach you new ways to see.

01:49:08.660 I think, well, seeing, you just look at the world.

01:49:10.340 It's like, yeah, no, seeing is a lot more complicated

01:49:13.120 than just looking at the world.

01:49:14.560 Yeah, that's what I think.

01:49:15.280 They help you relate to the world.

01:49:16.520 They help you get through life often

01:49:18.660 and see the world in a different way.

01:49:20.260 They help you discriminate 1.00

01:49:21.300 between that which is of quality

01:49:23.200 and that which is not of quality.

01:49:25.420 And they help you see things you otherwise wouldn't see.

01:49:28.720 I once, going back to a subject you touched on earlier,

01:49:32.560 which is in choosing art and hanging it on your wall,

01:49:36.820 you're exposing yourself in a way.

01:49:38.140 I remember a famous, a very well-known art dealer

01:49:41.400 telling me that you can tell a lot about someone

01:49:43.820 from their art collection.

01:49:45.220 I remember thinking, yeah, that makes sense.

01:49:47.240 But, and I've got a few ideas of what you can tell,

01:49:49.780 but I think it's true,

01:49:52.060 but I can't quite work out what it means.

01:49:54.520 Do you know what I mean?

01:49:55.160 That's like, and one thing you can tell

01:49:57.100 from an art collection is from the style.

01:50:00.020 You can probably tell that they're just buying

01:50:01.720 what they're told to buy.

01:50:02.860 Yes.

01:50:03.500 You can also tell if they're trying to match their furniture.

01:50:06.160 Exactly, so they're more interior decorators, you know.

01:50:10.300 But I don't know what else you can tell,

01:50:11.740 but I do believe that you can tell a lot,

01:50:13.780 but I couldn't narrate everything you can tell and why.

01:50:16.380 Does that make sense?

01:50:17.300 Well, I think it's probably as difficult to figure out

01:50:19.860 what an art collection reveals about the collector

01:50:22.900 as it is to figure out what the art itself represents.

01:50:27.240 Yeah, I think it's, it's, and it's partly, I suppose,

01:50:32.240 because people have all sorts of different motives

01:50:34.180 for why they collect art.

01:50:35.780 I mean, I collect art because I collected Soviet realist art.

01:50:41.140 To some, I collected a lot of it,

01:50:43.440 partly because I was extremely interested

01:50:45.320 in the pieces as historical artifacts.

01:50:47.840 And then I was interested in the war between propaganda

01:50:50.340 and the artistic tendency that each canvas represented,

01:50:53.600 because a lot of the Soviet realist artists

01:50:56.560 were very technically proficient and skilled as artists,

01:51:00.460 but then they were forced to serve as propagandists.

01:51:03.500 And so you have this terrible tension,

01:51:05.880 and they often painted in essentially an Impressionist style.

01:51:09.420 It wasn't exactly realist.

01:51:10.820 It was much more an Impressionist style.

01:51:13.080 This terrible tension in the canvas

01:51:14.740 between what's really incredibly high-level artistic ability

01:51:19.160 and this narrow propagandistic window.

01:51:22.040 So those canvases are a real battle

01:51:24.000 between two opposing spirits.

01:51:26.340 And so there are very intense things to have around you.

01:51:28.940 You know, like a beautiful portrayal of Lennon sitting by a window

01:51:34.100 while a child plays the violin.

01:51:36.020 That's a complicated object, 1.00

01:51:37.540 because Lennon was a complete bloody monster. 0.86

01:51:40.380 And yet you have the amalgam of this beautiful Impressionist light 0.98

01:51:43.620 and this extremely well-designed canvas.

01:51:46.320 And so my house was full of those paintings,

01:51:49.060 which was very, there's a lot of tension in that.

01:51:51.940 Even socially, because of course people would come into the house

01:51:55.520 and wonder what the hell I was doing,

01:51:57.780 having these like eight-foot portraits of Lennon up on the wall.

01:52:01.460 And there's all sorts of reasons.

01:52:04.380 I personally love what you collect,

01:52:07.100 and I love those communist propaganda posters.

01:52:11.100 I love the shapes and the people and the colours.

01:52:14.540 Well, they were also a very effective,

01:52:16.540 often very effective means of propagandisation.

01:52:19.020 And so that was a place where art,

01:52:21.480 whatever the impulse of art is,

01:52:22.880 was harnessed for political purposes.

01:52:24.580 One of the things I also loved about those canvases is that

01:52:27.720 as we move away from the Soviet Union,

01:52:31.380 the art wins.

01:52:32.960 They become less and less pieces of propaganda at all,

01:52:35.800 because, well, you don't, you know,

01:52:37.840 at some point, 300 years in the future,

01:52:40.040 people won't even know who Lennon was.

01:52:42.160 But the painting, insofar as it's an artistic success,

01:52:46.040 the painting will still exist.

01:52:47.640 All that'll be left is the art.

01:52:49.500 All of the propaganda will have vanished.

01:52:52.020 Maybe, I mean, maybe,

01:52:53.380 I mean, sometimes as time goes by,

01:52:56.240 things don't become more valuable,

01:52:57.640 there may still be the art there.

01:52:58.960 But there's a common belief,

01:53:00.520 which changes through time,

01:53:01.760 but a common belief that for art now

01:53:04.640 to be really great art,

01:53:06.060 the artist must be unfettered

01:53:08.100 and just apply his mind to whatever he wants to.

01:53:10.180 And as soon as you try and control it

01:53:11.560 by getting him to do a commission

01:53:13.520 or getting him to do a portrait,

01:53:16.240 or getting, I say him or her,

01:53:17.500 or getting them to do propaganda,

01:53:21.400 it corrupts the art of the artist and the value of it.

01:53:23.800 Does that make sense?

01:53:24.600 Well, I think my experience with artists,

01:53:26.940 I've worked with one artist for a very long time,

01:53:29.300 very intently.

01:53:31.120 A commission for me is more like a collaboration.

01:53:34.160 It's like, well, I don't want to get in his way

01:53:36.600 because he's the artist.

01:53:38.080 I'm not, so I work with this native carver,

01:53:40.520 for example, from the West Coast,

01:53:41.900 and I really like his work.

01:53:43.060 And normally when I commission something,

01:53:45.840 we go look at where it might be placed

01:53:48.160 and I talk about what he's engaged in.

01:53:50.860 And he asked me what sort of things I'm interested in

01:53:53.380 and what I'm sort of envisioning there.

01:53:55.080 And we come up with a story that he will represent.

01:53:58.500 And so there's no warping of his artistic,

01:54:03.140 there's no warping of the artistic enterprise there

01:54:06.520 because I don't tell him what to do.

01:54:08.480 We come up with an interesting project

01:54:10.160 and then pursue it.

01:54:11.620 And his, some of that is ideational discussion.

01:54:15.080 But I'm certainly,

01:54:16.560 and I think this is the right way

01:54:17.860 to handle business negotiations in general.

01:54:20.120 It's like, if I want to do business with you,

01:54:22.220 I don't want to just tell you what to do,

01:54:24.760 then you're definitely the wrong guy for the job

01:54:26.620 if I'm just telling you what to do.

01:54:28.660 I would rather that we have a discussion

01:54:31.240 that progresses to the point

01:54:33.160 to we're both very thrilled

01:54:35.580 with what we're going to do together.

01:54:37.120 And then if you happen to be an artist,

01:54:38.920 we found this even, Tammy and I,

01:54:40.600 when we've done a lot of renovation projects,

01:54:43.240 a lot of them fairly artistically oriented

01:54:45.720 with all the craftsmen,

01:54:47.800 if we would sit down with them

01:54:49.280 and tell them what we were envisioning

01:54:50.820 and what the goal was

01:54:52.640 and then ask them for their input

01:54:54.440 and about what, how they thought

01:54:56.520 that what they were doing might contribute to that,

01:54:58.900 they'd get on board.

01:54:59.900 And then all their creative energy would be released

01:55:04.380 and there was no subordination

01:55:06.380 of the artistic process to the commission at all.

01:55:09.680 Quite the contrary.

01:55:11.540 Could you imagine a situation

01:55:12.840 where there would be a subordination

01:55:14.420 and therefore a corruption in the art?

01:55:15.980 Oh yes, I think so.

01:55:17.160 I mean, I think if you're ordering the artist around,

01:55:19.780 for example,

01:55:20.700 well, you're certainly not going to get the best out of them

01:55:22.500 because you can easily interfere

01:55:25.160 with the manifestation of that creative spirit

01:55:31.760 and you do that by subjecting it

01:55:34.260 to constraints that are tyrannical.

01:55:36.520 You don't do that by subjecting it to constraints.

01:55:40.260 In fact, you actually often facilitate creativity

01:55:43.800 by imposing the right set of constraints,

01:55:46.440 but if they're tyrannical constraints,

01:55:48.240 well, that doesn't help at all.

01:55:49.820 I agree with you.

01:55:50.380 And I've seen that in some of the artists I've helped in the past

01:55:52.720 that some constraints can be useful

01:55:54.620 and they regard that as an artistic challenge.

01:55:56.700 Yes, definitely.

01:55:57.440 Whereas other ones can be,

01:55:58.660 listen, I'm not painting a particular thing

01:56:01.180 because you want me to

01:56:01.920 because that's just too much is tyrannical.

01:56:03.840 Yeah.

01:56:04.060 But I don't know how far you go

01:56:06.400 before it becomes tyrannical.

01:56:07.820 Well, I think you're trying to,

01:56:09.800 what you're trying to do

01:56:11.000 if you're working with an artist

01:56:12.240 and you have any sense

01:56:13.380 is you're trying to feel out your movement forward

01:56:17.400 so that they're inspired and enthusiastic about the project

01:56:21.560 because that inspiration and enthusiasm

01:56:24.620 is part and parcel of the spirit

01:56:27.240 that is allied with their creativity.

01:56:29.680 You know, so if I'm talking to Charles,

01:56:31.180 this artist that I was describing,

01:56:33.360 you know, he's designing a totem pole for me,

01:56:36.720 a 40-foot totem pole for outside my cottage up

01:56:39.600 in Northern Toronto.

01:56:41.180 And he asked me, you know,

01:56:43.000 what I've envisioned.

01:56:44.860 And I've had an idea for a totem pole in my mind

01:56:47.380 for a long time.

01:56:48.580 And it involves a representation of chaos at the bottom

01:56:53.180 in the form of fighting serpents.

01:56:55.040 And I know in their tradition,

01:56:57.040 they have this sea suit or figure that's a serpent.

01:56:59.480 And so I talked to him about

01:57:01.060 the emergence of order from chaos

01:57:03.220 and the dragon as a representation of chaos.

01:57:05.480 And we walked through the whole totem pole,

01:57:07.240 but it's a dance

01:57:08.520 because I'm really interested in,

01:57:10.500 for example, if I discuss an idea with Charles,

01:57:13.320 an image will pop into his mind

01:57:14.640 because he's very, obviously, image-oriented.

01:57:17.800 You know, if he looks at a block of wood,

01:57:18.960 he can see the sculpture in it,

01:57:21.240 which is apparently a talent Michelangelo had

01:57:24.400 in relationship to marble.

01:57:26.160 But it's a dynamic play

01:57:29.420 with his muse most fundamentally.

01:57:32.120 And you can't subject that to arbitrary constraints

01:57:34.740 because you'll just destroy it.

01:57:36.520 It has to be a form of play.

01:57:38.660 And a commission should be,

01:57:40.880 if you want to tell the artist what to paint,

01:57:44.000 then you should just do the painting yourself.

01:57:46.220 It has to be a dance, right?

01:57:48.340 And you could invite an artist.

01:57:50.800 And like I had a friend who was a portrait artist,

01:57:53.980 and he would take commissions for portraits,

01:57:57.060 but he wanted to paint the portrait.

01:57:59.860 And so there has to be a,

01:58:01.680 you can't say it has to be exactly like this.

01:58:03.820 And this is where the figures have to be portrayed.

01:58:06.220 You're not the artist.

01:58:08.400 If you want that artist to paint your portrait,

01:58:11.440 you have to invite him in

01:58:12.800 and to figure out how you can do that together.

01:58:15.180 So he's thrilled to do it.

01:58:16.680 So his creative spirit is unleashed.

01:58:19.240 And that isn't no constraint. 0.99

01:58:21.460 It's just not the stupid, tyrannical constraints 0.99

01:58:25.560 that put you in a morally superior position 1.00

01:58:27.960 in relationship to the artist.

01:58:29.240 Yeah, there comes a point when the commissioner

01:58:30.940 is the artist, if he's telling exactly what to do.

01:58:33.540 Some of the greatest art that's been done,

01:58:35.100 often there's different art.

01:58:36.800 There's art that's like a painting you hang on the wall,

01:58:39.200 and there's art that's part of a structure.

01:58:41.140 It's not, or it's going in a particular place.

01:58:43.740 And so when Michelangelo do the Sistine Chapel,

01:58:47.500 in a way he's already being told how big his piece is

01:58:50.240 and where it's going, roughly the subject matter.

01:58:53.260 So there are constraints even on that,

01:58:54.620 and that's a great work of art.

01:58:55.600 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:58:57.560 But I mean, we are always putting constraints

01:58:59.680 on each other when we're negotiating.

01:59:01.840 But I think the optimal constraints

01:59:04.840 are more like the rules for the game

01:59:06.500 rather than prohibitions against what can and can't be done.

01:59:10.560 It's like, let's play this particular game.

01:59:13.240 We'll open up this horizon of possibility.

01:59:15.480 And then it's a dance and a balancing act

01:59:17.780 to undertake the commission properly.

01:59:21.080 I mean, I've had a very productive,

01:59:22.500 what I told Charles when we first started working together,

01:59:24.780 because I really liked his art.

01:59:25.860 I said, look, you make the best piece you can

01:59:29.420 and send it to me every three months

01:59:31.420 and tell me what you think it's worth.

01:59:33.360 And I'll see how that works and it worked great.

01:59:36.260 You know, he'd send me a great piece

01:59:37.520 every three or four months.

01:59:38.420 And I'd think, wow, this is a great piece.

01:59:40.160 And that was that.

01:59:41.560 And then when I built the third floor on my house,

01:59:44.060 which is full of Native art,

01:59:47.160 I had him come out to Toronto

01:59:48.360 and I sort of told him what we were thinking about

01:59:50.280 with regards to the place.

01:59:51.360 And we started to brainstorm about how that might look.

01:59:56.880 And that was extremely productive too.

01:59:58.820 There was more constraints on him

01:59:59.980 because, well, the ceiling was a certain height,

02:00:02.000 et cetera, et cetera.

02:00:02.720 But there can't be no enabling principles.

02:00:07.080 There can't be no constraints.

02:00:08.440 That's not going to work.

02:00:09.660 Let me ask you another question connected to this,

02:00:12.240 but probably different.

02:00:13.060 What role do you think art has in a person's well-being

02:00:17.840 or why is it important to look at art,

02:00:21.040 to think about art, to maybe buy art?

02:00:24.520 Forget about artists.

02:00:25.680 It's a burning bush.

02:00:27.660 What do you mean?

02:00:28.120 Well, in the Exodus story,

02:00:31.200 Moses is just wandering around,

02:00:33.180 long-minding his business, let's say,

02:00:34.740 and something glimmers on the side of his vision.

02:00:37.740 And it's this burning bush.

02:00:39.520 It's something that attracts his attention, right?

02:00:41.920 So he goes to investigate it,

02:00:43.620 and then he inquires into it.

02:00:44.880 He looks more and more deeply into it.

02:00:46.620 He asks it.

02:00:48.580 He asks the phenomena

02:00:50.720 that he can't look away from, its name.

02:00:53.920 And it reveals itself as the ground of being.

02:00:56.900 And I would say, well, a painting,

02:00:58.900 a piece of art is an invitation

02:01:00.480 into an inquiry into the ground of being.

02:01:04.360 And so a great painting

02:01:06.320 will break your frame of reference.

02:01:08.140 So that's what Van Gogh's flower paintings do,

02:01:11.680 the iris, let's say.

02:01:12.820 It's a very, very famous painting.

02:01:15.600 There's no limit to how much

02:01:18.920 you can apprehend a flower.

02:01:21.640 It's a revelation of being.

02:01:23.900 Now, most of the time,

02:01:24.960 what happens is that we don't see the flower.

02:01:28.720 We see our memory of the flowers we've seen.

02:01:32.580 And an artist will go twist it

02:01:35.600 and then represent the flower to you

02:01:38.100 and remind you that there's way more to the world

02:01:41.300 than you're casually perceiving.

02:01:43.740 So that's a window through your presuppositions

02:01:46.400 into the ground of being.

02:01:48.760 And that's an invitation

02:01:50.580 into the realm of the gods.

02:01:52.280 And I don't mean superficially,

02:01:54.060 and I don't mean metaphorically.

02:01:55.680 I mean literally.

02:01:57.080 And now we know something about this

02:01:58.460 on the perceptual front now.

02:01:59.940 So psychedelics, for example,

02:02:01.600 chemically,

02:02:02.480 they strip your perception of memory.

02:02:05.660 And that means the whole world floods in

02:02:07.680 and that's overwhelming.

02:02:09.000 Well, a piece of art is a,

02:02:10.940 it's a micro,

02:02:12.480 it's a micro dose of a psychedelic.

02:02:15.120 That's a perfectly fine way of thinking about it.

02:02:17.660 And what it does is it,

02:02:18.920 it strips your,

02:02:20.420 it strips your perception of memory.

02:02:23.460 And you look at the painting

02:02:24.380 and you know how you develop a relationship

02:02:26.420 with a great painting across time.

02:02:28.020 You know, it's that,

02:02:29.120 it's like we know, for example,

02:02:31.300 that people use the parts of their brain

02:02:33.080 that they perceive people with

02:02:35.720 and living objects

02:02:36.480 to perceive musical instruments.

02:02:38.500 They're not dead things.

02:02:40.000 And paintings are like that too.

02:02:41.660 A painting, if it's deep and good,

02:02:43.540 like a piece of music,

02:02:44.860 it's something you establish a relationship with.

02:02:46.980 And it always reminds you

02:02:48.680 that there's more to what is

02:02:51.680 than what you merely perceive.

02:02:54.220 And to be surrounded by great art

02:02:55.940 is to be reminded of that all the time.

02:02:57.480 And, you know, that can be too much.

02:02:58.760 When people used to walk into my house,

02:03:00.440 which had like 500 paintings in it,

02:03:02.320 they were just absolutely everywhere.

02:03:05.180 It was like my mother,

02:03:06.240 who's less open on the artistic front.

02:03:10.460 She'd always asked me,

02:03:11.580 kind of disturbed her.

02:03:12.500 She said, well,

02:03:12.880 why do you want to live in a museum?

02:03:14.740 And my answer would be,

02:03:15.800 well, why wouldn't you want to live in a museum?

02:03:17.740 I want these windows to

02:03:19.480 the underlying reality of things

02:03:22.080 open everywhere

02:03:23.040 so that can shine through.

02:03:24.760 But it is a lot, you know,

02:03:26.160 it's a lot to ask of people.

02:03:28.740 I think we had 40 colors in our house

02:03:30.700 at that point at the same time.

02:03:32.720 So it was quite the...

02:03:33.900 40 colors.

02:03:35.240 Well, one of the artists that I had

02:03:37.260 bought a number of paintings from

02:03:39.860 helped us.

02:03:40.920 He was also an interior designer

02:03:42.300 and he came in

02:03:43.540 and we used 30,

02:03:45.680 I think it was 38 colors in the house.

02:03:47.540 It was a very small house too.

02:03:48.700 And they were very harmoniously arrayed,

02:03:51.800 but it was quite the...

02:03:54.300 And they were subtle, smoky colors.

02:03:56.100 You know, it wasn't a fluorescent landscape.

02:04:01.120 It was as subtle as 38 different colors could be,

02:04:04.680 but he was a master of harmony of color.

02:04:07.400 You know, in every room,

02:04:08.860 every doorway

02:04:09.520 was a different juxtaposition of a palace.

02:04:12.900 What's different between an artist

02:04:13.940 and a good interior designer then?

02:04:16.340 Well, I think anything you do

02:04:19.160 can be raised to the status of art.

02:04:21.940 The better you are at it

02:04:23.400 and if you're a great interior designer,

02:04:25.180 well, you're definitely

02:04:26.020 encroaching on the territory of fine art.

02:04:29.760 That's funny.

02:04:30.200 One of the artists I manage

02:04:32.440 says that himself.

02:04:33.720 He says,

02:04:34.160 anything done really well.

02:04:35.560 Yeah, well, that's what art means.

02:04:37.080 Art means...

02:04:38.340 Art means spectacular skill.

02:04:42.840 And so,

02:04:43.700 oh, you can see that among craftsmen.

02:04:45.920 I mean, this is partly why

02:04:46.900 I like working with

02:04:47.900 high-level craftsmen

02:04:49.100 renovating houses

02:04:50.280 is that

02:04:50.860 if you don't think

02:04:52.220 those people are artists,

02:04:53.100 you're not paying attention.

02:04:54.420 And as soon as you start treating them

02:04:55.940 like they're artists

02:04:57.600 and recognizing that,

02:04:58.640 man, you get

02:04:59.100 their best work out of them.

02:05:00.940 I mean,

02:05:01.140 the third floor we built,

02:05:02.540 Toronto,

02:05:03.200 all the craftsmen

02:05:04.080 just went way

02:05:05.060 above and beyond

02:05:07.180 the call of duty

02:05:08.460 because they were so excited

02:05:09.660 about participating in the project.

02:05:11.060 And that just means

02:05:11.880 every single corner

02:05:13.780 is beautiful.

02:05:15.380 It's so fun.

02:05:16.780 So I think you're saying,

02:05:18.040 and I agree with it,

02:05:18.820 that it's important

02:05:19.820 to connect to something

02:05:20.800 that you would say

02:05:23.660 transcendent.

02:05:24.480 If you don't look at art

02:05:26.360 and appreciate art,

02:05:27.520 you're not connecting

02:05:28.240 to forces outside of you.

02:05:30.020 Right, and you need to

02:05:30.940 because you need to get

02:05:31.620 narrowed otherwise

02:05:32.340 and bitter and shallow

02:05:34.160 and warped and tiny

02:05:37.080 and none of that's good.

02:05:38.720 The artists will blow

02:05:39.600 the unnecessary barriers

02:05:42.420 off your perceptions

02:05:43.460 and you might think,

02:05:44.300 well, that's not necessary.

02:05:45.380 It's like,

02:05:45.880 it's necessary

02:05:46.780 if you don't want

02:05:47.400 to get narrowed

02:05:47.960 to the point

02:05:48.380 where there is

02:05:48.840 nothing of you left.

02:05:50.840 You know, so.

02:05:51.720 I find art helps me

02:05:53.160 get through life.

02:05:54.880 It helps me just live, really.

02:05:56.840 It's such an important thing for me.

02:05:58.580 It's not optional.

02:05:59.940 And people who think

02:06:01.020 it's optional are blind

02:06:02.160 in a very fundamental way

02:06:04.260 if to think about it

02:06:05.240 as some,

02:06:06.680 it's actually the point.

02:06:08.640 It's not only not optional,

02:06:10.240 it's the point.

02:06:11.300 An artist,

02:06:12.160 and art is the point

02:06:13.440 because it points

02:06:14.140 to something higher.

02:06:15.240 That's what art does.

02:06:16.660 And there's ways

02:06:17.300 of technically discussing

02:06:18.500 what constitutes higher too

02:06:19.960 because modern people,

02:06:21.500 especially the post-modernist types,

02:06:23.120 well, there's no difference

02:06:24.120 between high and low.

02:06:25.160 It's like,

02:06:25.820 if you were low enough,

02:06:27.340 you wouldn't think that.

02:06:28.360 Believe me.

02:06:29.460 So you'd know pretty damn quick

02:06:31.220 that high is better

02:06:32.220 than wherever the hell

02:06:33.140 you've ended up.

02:06:34.040 And art is definitely

02:06:35.100 a pointer to what's highest.

02:06:37.220 Yeah, I agree.

02:06:37.980 But also,

02:06:38.520 it helps you question yourself,

02:06:39.740 helps you know,

02:06:40.980 understand the world

02:06:41.840 around you in a way,

02:06:43.100 even if it's not

02:06:44.000 to a high level,

02:06:45.120 to any level.

02:06:45.680 It just helps you

02:06:46.380 communicate with people

02:06:48.680 and think about things

02:06:49.640 in a way.

02:06:50.080 So it's very,

02:06:50.920 to me,

02:06:51.180 it's very important.

02:06:51.660 I think one thing

02:06:52.080 that often annoys me

02:06:53.400 about governments

02:06:56.200 or people who approach things

02:06:58.500 in a very commercial way

02:06:59.500 is they neglect

02:07:00.060 the commercial value

02:07:01.040 of art

02:07:01.420 and its economic value

02:07:03.260 because it's also...

02:07:04.760 It's so,

02:07:05.420 and it's so uneconomic.

02:07:07.000 It's one of the things

02:07:07.620 I just,

02:07:08.560 it just,

02:07:09.720 that hurts me

02:07:10.500 about conservatives.

02:07:11.380 It's like,

02:07:13.120 who dispense,

02:07:14.320 let's say,

02:07:14.660 with beauty.

02:07:15.260 It's like,

02:07:15.900 there isn't anything

02:07:17.160 more economically valuable

02:07:18.700 than beauty.

02:07:19.400 Think about Europe

02:07:20.180 and the beauty

02:07:21.320 of its most beautiful productions.

02:07:23.480 It's infinitely valuable.

02:07:25.480 And not only that,

02:07:26.380 it's going to become

02:07:27.080 more so

02:07:27.700 as we progress

02:07:28.680 into the future.

02:07:29.980 These great cities

02:07:31.080 like Bruges,

02:07:31.920 for example,

02:07:32.440 which is so beautiful,

02:07:33.400 it just breaks your heart

02:07:34.460 when you go there.

02:07:35.600 It's like,

02:07:35.980 there's no,

02:07:36.920 it's inexhaustible

02:07:38.240 economic value.

02:07:39.820 And so the notion

02:07:40.800 that it's,

02:07:41.840 that it's,

02:07:42.620 you know,

02:07:43.520 an unnecessary

02:07:44.280 and inefficient excess

02:07:47.000 to ensure

02:07:47.700 that things are beautiful,

02:07:48.920 it's so blind

02:07:50.040 and also so

02:07:51.260 counterproductive economically

02:07:52.620 that it's a kind

02:07:53.340 of miracle

02:07:53.840 that people

02:07:54.320 can even,

02:07:54.820 can even think that.

02:07:56.080 Yeah,

02:07:56.260 many governments

02:07:56.840 are more concerned with,

02:07:57.880 which are obviously

02:07:58.340 important things

02:07:59.100 to create

02:07:59.680 car plants

02:08:01.100 or electric battery plants

02:08:02.420 or sort of engineers.

02:08:03.480 You can even do that

02:08:04.260 beautifully,

02:08:05.080 you know.

02:08:05.420 Well,

02:08:05.640 I have a friend,

02:08:06.760 Penoyer,

02:08:07.340 in New York

02:08:10.080 who's a kind

02:08:11.120 of a classic architect

02:08:12.200 and he's built

02:08:13.280 lots of beautiful buildings

02:08:14.440 in downtown New York

02:08:16.100 and he's made

02:08:17.840 a very clear case

02:08:19.200 economically

02:08:19.660 that you can build

02:08:20.680 a beautiful

02:08:21.340 classic building

02:08:22.400 for the same price

02:08:24.000 per square foot

02:08:25.020 as a concrete

02:08:26.340 housing project.

02:08:27.980 So the idea

02:08:28.620 that beauty

02:08:29.060 is excessively expensive,

02:08:30.580 that's also,

02:08:31.680 that's also,

02:08:32.500 it's just,

02:08:33.040 exactly.

02:08:33.980 And that's why,

02:08:34.840 that's the area

02:08:35.500 I love thinking about,

02:08:36.640 the economics of it

02:08:37.520 because great creativity

02:08:39.580 is economically

02:08:40.780 very significant

02:08:41.680 for individuals

02:08:43.180 and for people

02:08:44.040 and for a country.

02:08:45.200 For whole cultures,

02:08:46.180 yes.

02:08:46.280 For whole cultures.

02:08:47.040 Well,

02:08:47.320 Europe's a great example 0.98

02:08:48.400 of that.

02:08:48.840 I mean,

02:08:49.000 the whole tourist

02:08:49.980 industry of Europe

02:08:50.940 is a consequence

02:08:53.140 of beauty.

02:08:54.200 Exactly.

02:08:54.620 And it's

02:08:55.240 unbelievably valuable.

02:08:57.480 We should stop.

02:08:58.820 We're out of time.

02:08:59.940 Oh, sorry.

02:09:00.520 That's too bad

02:09:01.120 because I'd like

02:09:02.580 to continue talking

02:09:03.520 but we will.

02:09:04.860 We'll continue talking

02:09:05.860 because we just got

02:09:06.860 going on the artistic.

02:09:07.920 It's warming up.

02:09:08.740 I would really like

02:09:09.660 to, you know,

02:09:10.740 delve at some point.

02:09:11.620 We should do this

02:09:12.560 into the particulars

02:09:13.540 of some of the

02:09:14.120 artistic endeavors

02:09:14.940 that you've been engaged in.

02:09:16.140 Yeah, no,

02:09:16.160 I can do that.

02:09:16.580 That'd be great.

02:09:16.920 So, for everyone

02:09:18.300 watching and listening,

02:09:19.540 thank you very much

02:09:20.300 for your time and attention.

02:09:20.800 Thank you so much.

02:09:21.860 Sorry I took a bit of time

02:09:22.740 to warm up.

02:09:23.780 Oh,

02:09:24.540 it was nothing

02:09:26.860 and it's always the case.

02:09:28.360 Just one thing,

02:09:29.680 on the economic thing,

02:09:30.840 if we include art,

02:09:31.700 there's one thing

02:09:32.040 I've been using recently

02:09:32.820 in government conversations

02:09:33.800 I've had,

02:09:35.420 not with the government

02:09:36.260 but talking about governments,

02:09:37.280 which is somebody,

02:09:38.500 a single parent mother,

02:09:39.920 scribbles out a book

02:09:40.800 in the cafe

02:09:41.360 in Edinburgh

02:09:42.960 and then that book

02:09:43.840 becomes Harry Potter.

02:09:44.740 What's that worth economically?

02:09:45.920 Exactly.

02:09:46.440 That's a great example.

02:09:47.480 It's worth

02:09:47.940 a hundred billion dollars maybe.

02:09:50.860 It's a book

02:09:51.420 that's worth billions.

02:09:52.300 It's a film

02:09:52.740 that's worth billions.

02:09:53.460 It's merchandising, right?

02:09:54.600 It's great PR

02:09:55.420 for the whole of the UK.

02:09:56.720 It creates tourism.

02:09:57.500 It's a theme park.

02:09:58.840 It's a theatrical performance

02:10:01.120 every night.

02:10:01.800 Yeah.

02:10:02.140 And it's not,

02:10:03.200 you know,

02:10:03.800 but it's not...

02:10:04.240 And it's not going

02:10:04.960 to go away tomorrow.

02:10:06.100 No.

02:10:06.520 It's like,

02:10:06.920 what's Shakespeare worth?

02:10:07.940 What's Shakespeare worth?

02:10:09.700 Right, exactly.

02:10:10.560 It's beyond money.

02:10:11.200 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:10:12.200 Well, the fact

02:10:13.460 that something is beautiful,

02:10:15.380 so that's another way

02:10:16.220 of thinking about it,

02:10:16.820 the fact that something

02:10:18.160 is truly beautiful

02:10:19.620 is actually an index

02:10:21.440 of its value.

02:10:22.620 And a fair chunk

02:10:23.480 of that value

02:10:24.120 can be economic

02:10:25.380 because value

02:10:26.660 is multidimensional.

02:10:27.880 And no,

02:10:28.400 the notion,

02:10:28.920 this is a real problem

02:10:29.800 with the conservative

02:10:30.660 mode of thinking

02:10:31.440 is the notion

02:10:32.560 that beauty

02:10:33.100 is some unnecessary

02:10:34.380 appendage

02:10:35.600 to the,

02:10:36.160 you know,

02:10:36.800 necessary bare bones,

02:10:38.300 concrete,

02:10:38.760 efficient reality.

02:10:39.700 That's so blind.

02:10:41.260 Ugly is,

02:10:42.100 there's nothing

02:10:42.820 more expensive 1.00

02:10:43.560 than stupidly ugly. 0.99

02:10:45.180 It demoralizes people 1.00

02:10:46.420 terribly.

02:10:47.660 So...

02:10:47.960 Sorry, we're back from...

02:10:48.840 Thanks so much.

02:10:49.720 Yeah, yeah.

02:10:50.300 See you soon.

02:10:50.920 You bet.

02:10:51.560 You bet.

02:10:52.200 You bet.

02:10:53.440 Hello, everyone.

02:10:54.760 I would encourage you

02:10:55.520 to continue listening

02:10:56.680 to my conversation

02:10:57.720 with my guest

02:10:58.580 on DailyWirePlus.com.

02:11:01.360 I wonder if you'd like a

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - April 27, 2023

352. Art is Not Optional, It’s the Point ｜ Joe Hage

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