Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Stephen Fry on Love, Trump and Learning Not to Care

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Stephen Fry on Love, Trump and Learning Not to Care · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:03
  G'day humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:07
  I'm trying to resurface some of the greatest gems in the Uncomfortable Conversations archive.
• 0:13
  This one is from only two years ago, but it's one of my heroes and it's one of the most enjoyable conversations I've had on the show.
• 0:21
  So if you heard it then, you will want to hear it again and if you've joined the show in the past two years...
• 0:27
  I didn't want you to miss it.
• 0:28
  Stephen Fry is one of the greatest comic minds in the UK and perhaps the world.
• 0:33
  I grew up idolising him from his sketch comedy show, a little bit of Fry and Laurie, to the British classic Blackadder.
• 0:41
  He's an Emmy winner.
• 0:42
  He's got six BAFTAs.
• 0:43
  He's got two Olivier Awards.
• 0:45
  He has a Tony nomination for his performance in The Twelfth Night, which was a Globe Theatre production on Broadway.
• 0:53
  He's been nominated for a Golden Globetrower.
• 0:54
  Globe.
• 0:55
  He's appeared in Gosford Park, the movie A Fish Called Wanda, V for Vendetta, The Hobbit.
• 1:00
  He is the narrator of all the Harry Potter and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy audiobooks.
• 1:06
  And he has a fabulous memoir called Moab is My Washpot, which will become relevant in the conversation that you're about to hear.
• 1:14
  It was a tremendously reassuring book for me to read as a teenager, sort of
• 1:19
  sketching out that sense of teenage listlessness and lostness and the sense that the whole world is a bunch of phony adults doing their stupid phony things, caring about their mortgages and their dumb jobs when the real visceral kind of meat of life is available only to someone who sees the world as it truly is.
• 1:39
  And that person is invariably a 15 year old.
• 1:42
  Stephen Fry was visiting Sydney in November of 2024 when he was kind enough to swing by the Uncomfortable Conversations studio.
• 1:50
  I hope you enjoy either for the first time or the second or the third, fourth, fifth or sixth.
• 1:55
  The one, the only Stephen Fry.
• 1:56
  Stephen Fry.
• 1:59
  The week that Donald Trump first won his first election in 2016, I was on stage in Philadelphia with Richard Dawkins moderating an event.
• 2:10
  And it was the first public thing that he or I had done since Trump won the first time.
• 2:15
  And we came out into this auditorium and sat down and you could feel the sort of tension in the air.
• 2:21
  And the first thing I said to him was, what the fuck just happened?
• 2:25
  And everyone sort of laughed.
• 2:28
  What the fuck just happened?
• 2:30
  Well, as I said to the audience, and the Australians will understand this, and the Americans listening won't, nor with anyone else, but it was an astonishing result, and I'd bet the other way.
• 2:42
  And in comes Knight's Choice, 90 to 1, quite extraordinary.
• 2:47
  I'm talking, of course, about the really important race that went on, which was the Melbourne Cup.
• 2:54
  But what goes on in America?
• 2:56
  I have this...
• 2:57
  desperate need to believe that I can opt out of knowing what's going on in the world.
• 3:04
  Knowledge is a powerful thing, and people talk about it as a great thing, but it's also an immensely destructive thing.
• 3:11
  There are a lot of phrases like, you know, what the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over.
• 3:15
  But I've traveled enough in the world to know that if you're in, I don't know, the deciduous forest of Madagascar,
• 3:22
  They don't know who the president of the United States is and they don't care.
• 3:25
  They get on with their life.
• 3:26
  It matters nothing to them.
• 3:29
  Does it actually matter to us?
• 3:31
  I mean, it's an interesting question.
• 3:33
  Well, presumably, I mean, whether or not those forests in Madagascar continue to exist or can't exist in a world of climate chaos depends a little bit on who the president of the United States is.
• 3:45
  Yeah.
• 3:46
  I mean, in a very long chain of cause and effect, very, very long.
• 3:50
  If you really believe that the world would last longer with Kamala Harris as president than with Trump, I think you're totally misguided.
• 3:59
  Have you always been this?
• 4:00
  No one is solving the problem.
• 4:01
  No.
• 4:01
  This fatalistic?
• 4:02
  No, not at least.
• 4:03
  No, it's because I'm trying not to care.
• 4:07
  Yeah.
• 4:07
  Because it's so destructive.
• 4:09
  It's like giving yourself cancer.
• 4:11
  to worry about this preposterous cretin at the White House.
• 4:16
  He's going to have an apoplexy before his thing's over, and it's not he who's the problem now.
• 4:21
  It's his legatees.
• 4:23
  It's the muskrat.
• 4:24
  It's Robert Kennedy.
• 4:25
  It's the vice president and all the people he's enabled in the Supreme Court and the entire structure of the United States Constitution and its, you know, articles and instruments of government.
• 4:40
  it's civil service and everything else all the agencies they'll be corrupted and contaminated and it's yeah it's depressing but I'm 67 and I want not to care it's that simple of course inside I had a sleepless night I thought fuck them all I was angry and upset then I thought that's what they want me to be there's nothing they like more than liberals wringing their hands they're
• 5:09
  to mock them.
• 5:10
  They said they were going to leave the country.
• 5:11
  Why are they still there?
• 5:12
  As if they expected everyone to leave within 24 hours.
• 5:17
  You know, it's a tricky one, Josh.
• 5:20
  Yes, it's miserable, but we have to find a way to live life and to be happy and fulfilled human beings and to do what we can that's good in our perception of what's good, not virtue signaling or anything like that, but just believing that
• 5:39
  the circle of one's kith, which is not a word we use very often, the neighbourhoods, the communities in which we live, as well as the kin, the family, are where we can survive.
• 5:51
  And that if we keep worrying about these...
• 5:54
  enormous, apparently enormous and important people and their actions, it would drive us crazy.
• 6:01
  And I'm fully aware that if I'd said that in 1933, I'd be in real trouble now because, you know, sometimes you have to take action, man the barricades, shout, scream, try and change what's going on.
• 6:18
  But at the moment, at least, I just want to ignore it all.
• 6:21
  I want to get on with life and live life here and now in the vertical moment, not in the great horizontal stream of history, because it's almost too much to think about.
• 6:33
  And you have to believe at some point, you have to have a faint sense that the wicked will be punished by...
• 6:47
  by the nature of the cosmos.
• 6:49
  And I'm always reminded of a great line in The Importance of Being Earnest, where Cicely is talking to her governess, Miss Prism.
• 6:58
  Miss Prism says, Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cicely.
• 7:02
  I myself wrote one in happier times.
• 7:05
  And Cicely says, did it end happily?
• 7:08
  And Miss Prism says, the good ended happily, the bad ended unhappily.
• 7:13
  That is what fiction means.
• 7:16
  This is a great line.
• 7:19
  And I fear it's true.
• 7:20
  It is only in fiction that the good end happily and the bad end unhappily.
• 7:24
  I mean, some kind of vast cosmic comeuppance for people who do bad sounds quite religious.
• 7:31
  which is something you're not.
• 7:33
  Well, no, I'm not a member of a church or a temple or any organised religion, but that doesn't mean that one doesn't have a sense of right and wrong.
• 7:43
  But do you think the cosmos does?
• 7:45
  No, no, no, but it's the language we use to describe the balance of good and evil and when things happen and what the consequences are.
• 7:55
  I mean, really, it's logical chains of action and reaction.
• 8:00
  that happened more or less within the space we live, though we know that that doesn't work at the quantum level.
• 8:07
  But you do think that immoral acts will lead to a chain that will end in the destruction of the... No, I hope, I hope, but that's why I quoted Oscar Wilde.
• 8:15
  We feel it probably doesn't happen at all.
• 8:17
  I mean, that's what's so shocking, isn't it, about modernism?
• 8:21
  I remember reading when I first read Evelyn Moore, I could not believe how shocking it was.
• 8:26
  Not because it was morally shocking because of loose ethical behavior or anything like that, but because there was no justice in the books.
• 8:37
  And I was so used to that Wildean idea that he mocks, that the good end happily and the bad end unhappily, which...
• 8:44
  They did in the kind of books I'd read as a boy, you know, whether it was Sherlock Holmes or school stories, you know, the bully gets punished and the hero wins the day.
• 8:54
  And suddenly to read novels like Decline and Fall and so on, where people just randomly, it seems, end up in prison for doing nothing wrong.
• 9:02
  And I suppose you'd call it the malice of time and chance.
• 9:06
  shocked me.
• 9:06
  And I think it should shock all of us.
• 9:08
  Because inside us, for some reason, we are given this sense.
• 9:12
  You can call it cosmic, or you can call it internal and personal.
• 9:17
  We're given, I mean, philosophers call it deontology, or the deontic sense, a sense of what is right and what is wrong.
• 9:23
  It's beyond religion.
• 9:25
  Religion, it's far...
• 9:27
  preceded certainly christian religion and it's their unanimous religions and anything else that there that things should balance and that uh um behavior that is cruel and rapacious uh which destroys society and hurts people and it destroys families um is wrong and should be punished and if
• 9:50
  punished by the cosmos, by nature, by some sort of accident or, you know, a bad person, you know, getting ill, which doesn't really happen.
• 10:02
  As we know, decent, wonderful kids get cancer and Trump's still alive.
• 10:06
  bizarre that we meandered into this fatalistic territory, uh, because I'm, this is a week where I've just lost three people who were very close to me randomly.
• 10:14
  One of whom was young, one of whom was old and one of whom was in between.
• 10:19
  And I was just talking to my brother on the phone coming in here and he was asking me how I'm feeling.
• 10:23
  And I said, it's a little bit like I'm, I'm numb, like I'm not grieving, but I do feel like I'm walking through a multiplayer video game and I'm
• 10:37
  random or predetermined or something, and it decided to throw a Trump victory and then one person dying and another person dying and another person dying at me.
• 10:46
  And it's sort of like, well, let's just see how the ants respond.
• 10:49
  And I just sort of feel a bit like an ant.
• 10:50
  Yes, I know just what you mean.
• 10:53
  And it is, I suppose...
• 10:56
  It's why I value not religion, but myth, because the myths I love best, the Greek myths that I've just spent the last, I don't know, six years of my life retelling in different forms, understand that if there are gods, if, you know, in other words, if there are agencies and forces in the cosmos, then they must be.
• 11:20
  sort of by definition because of the nature of the cosmos, they must be, yes, beautiful, magisterial, fantastically powerful, but also capricious and mean and cruel because that is what the world is.
• 11:35
  And, you know, children die of bone cancer.
• 11:37
  There's no getting away from it.
• 11:39
  There are special diseases that nature has...
• 11:42
  has invented that are so cruel.
• 11:45
  There is, you know, trachoma.
• 11:47
  African children have their eye, and it's growing inwards, scratching their eyes with agony, and they go blind.
• 11:53
  Is the New Testament and is Christianity a bit fatuous in that context?
• 11:57
  It's, I mean, you can describe it.
• 11:59
  There's all kinds of things.
• 12:00
  It's an interesting story, obviously, pretty much historical in its lineaments.
• 12:08
  But once St. Paul gets in, in the Acts of the Apostles, once he gets on the road to Damascus and turns from being a persecutor of this tiny little sect that is growing up after the death of Jesus and decides to...
• 12:25
  created a religion out of it, what we call a church, Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiasticus, then it does become, if not fatuous, it becomes about power and control.
• 12:36
  I mean, St. Paul writes letters to all the people who've heard about Jesus and think it's interesting telling them how to behave and telling them how to organize.
• 12:46
  It becomes political.
• 12:47
  It becomes literally about power.
• 12:50
  power and organization with a few spiritual things thrown in.
• 12:55
  And in terms of detaching yourself from the flotsam and jetsam of daily life and finding that kind of tranquility and happiness that you were talking about by focusing on kith and kin, have you gotten better at that with age?
• 13:07
  Is it easier at any particular stage of life?
• 13:10
  It is easy.
• 13:10
  It's easier not to...
• 13:12
  It's easier to be patient, I think.
• 13:15
  I mean, in a literal sense.
• 13:16
  When you're young, very young, like now, we're in November as you and I are talking.
• 13:22
  Yes.
• 13:23
  If I was a child then, if I was eight, nine, ten...
• 13:27
  and I saw Christmas was how many weeks away it is, six or seven weeks away.
• 13:32
  I'd go, oh, my God, it's never coming.
• 13:34
  I would be so, oh, oh.
• 13:38
  And if I'm made to wait in the car for an hour, it'd just go mad.
• 13:42
  None of that matters anymore, you know.
• 13:44
  Absolutely doesn't.
• 13:45
  Time passes and you know it does.
• 13:48
  And even bad things, boring things, dentist visits, whatever, you know, tests and all the things you get when you're older.
• 13:56
  That'll be gone.
• 13:59
  Don't worry, don't worry.
• 14:00
  So things do pass.
• 14:02
  And you were aware of cycles more because you've had a longer time to live and you know things go up and down.
• 14:09
  The Romans had a nice image which was Rotor Fortuna, the Wheel of Fortune, nothing to do with the American Quiz Show, that's now Ryan Seacrest, I think, has taken over.
• 14:20
  Oh, dear.
• 14:21
  Yes, from Pat Seajack.
• 14:23
  Never mind.
• 14:26
  But the Wheel of Fortune was essentially like a sort of big Ferris wheel, like a wheel that goes around, but it was blown by the wind and the wind was time and chance.
• 14:35
  And sometimes it blew harder and the wheel went faster and sometimes it was slow and the wheel was slow.
• 14:41
  And I remember when I was kind of in my prime and...
• 14:47
  Bill Clinton was president and Tony Blair was prime minister.
• 14:53
  And there was talk of the third way, the idea of extreme right wing or indeed the kind of strange left wing cultural imperialism that is filtered into universities was fascinating.
• 15:06
  Miles away, miles away.
• 15:07
  It was the bottom of the wheel, if you like.
• 15:09
  Both of them were.
• 15:10
  And it seemed like at the top of the wheel, this third way between the left liberal and right conservative was the natural path that the world was going to take.
• 15:22
  And the end of history.
• 15:24
  The end of history, indeed, as Fukuyama called it.
• 15:26
  And Fukuyama.
• 15:28
  And the, yeah, because the Berlin Wall was falling and Mandela was free and...
• 15:34
  You know, everything really did seem quite remarkable and interesting and fun.
• 15:37
  And even art and music and things were interesting and original.
• 15:42
  And, you know, there was Oasis and Blur and there was Damien Hirst and the young British artist.
• 15:48
  There was, you know, things going on.
• 15:49
  There was style and there was fun.
• 15:52
  And it seemed like that's how it would be.
• 15:54
  But the wind blew and the wind continued to blow.
• 15:56
  And now those things are right at the bottom.
• 15:58
  It couldn't be more contemptuously held by most of the world.
• 16:05
  And often when the wheel goes round, things become opposite.
• 16:08
  So words take on opposite meanings.
• 16:11
  So now the word elite does not refer to billionaires who are saving on tax and who are running the world.
• 16:19
  It refers to people like us sitting in a scruffy studio moaning about the fact that the world doesn't go the way we want it to.
• 16:28
  But apparently we're elite.
• 16:29
  Well, we do.
• 16:31
  But that's a bit cute, isn't it, to avoid the cultural definition of elitism in the sense that we and people like us hold the organs of cultural power or at least have up until now.
• 16:43
  Have, but we don't really.
• 16:45
  Well, people in Hollywood, people on television.
• 16:47
  But that's not power.
• 16:48
  There's no power in Hollywood.
• 16:50
  Absolutely none.
• 16:51
  Every film they make is a disaster.
• 16:53
  Streaming is going down.
• 16:54
  No, seriously.
• 16:55
  I mean, it's absolutely not.
• 16:57
  Hollywood is in a shit condition.
• 16:59
  All the studios are combining to try and make money and their margins have never been tighter.
• 17:06
  They don't control the conversation.
• 17:08
  No, but the culture that people consume by watching television and going to the movies, regardless of what the sort of economic fortunes of that industry are, combined with the kinds of things that get said in newspaper editorials, combined with the kinds of things one is supposed to believe in order to get invited to the right parties in Brooklyn and New York.
• 17:27
  London, like there is a, I understand the Trumpist definition of elitism, which is this fairly sensorial kind of university.
• 17:36
  You know, how many, Seth Rogen has how many listeners?
• 17:40
  Joe Rogen.
• 17:40
  Joe Rogen.
• 17:41
  Well, hundreds of millions.
• 17:43
  Hundreds of millions.
• 17:44
  How many people watch the television program?
• 17:47
  Two million.
• 17:47
  Yeah.
• 17:48
  I mean, it's just nonsense.
• 17:50
  That's what I mean by the opposite.
• 17:52
  It just isn't true.
• 17:54
  It's a perception.
• 17:55
  Well, what did you mean a moment ago when you talked about the cultural imperialism of a certain type of leftism in universities?
• 18:02
  In academia.
• 18:03
  Academia, yeah.
• 18:04
  What does that mean?
• 18:05
  Oh, God, do we have to go through?
• 18:07
  Well, that probably...
• 18:09
  intersects with the thing that you're denying.
• 18:11
  Intersection, that's another word I never want to hear again for the rest of my life.
• 18:15
  We can have a bingo card.
• 18:18
  Of course I know what is said, but nobody reads newspapers.
• 18:22
  Nobody watches television.
• 18:24
  It's all, this is how it used to be.
• 18:27
  The wheel has gone round.
• 18:29
  That's the point I'm making.
• 18:30
  Things are the opposite.
• 18:32
  Yes, I understand.
• 18:32
  But the grievance... And the rhetoric of the right is still as if this enemy of theirs, these liberals, these liberal elitists are still ruling the world.
• 18:43
  We're not.
• 18:44
  We're just whining in corners.
• 18:45
  Yes.
• 18:45
  like this, like you and I are.
• 18:48
  We don't have any.
• 18:48
  And I'm not saying I want any power.
• 18:51
  I'm not interested in it.
• 18:53
  If people want to listen to me, I appear on a podcast, but so do millions of others.
• 18:56
  And this Rogan, whose name I got wrong, is a perfect example.
• 19:00
  Far more people listen to him than will be listening to us.
• 19:02
  But the reason, Stephen, the reason why a lot of people are drawn to people like Joe Rogan and the reason why a lot of people voted for Donald Trump, I would suggest, is because those are counter-revolutionary movements against a hegemony.
• 19:14
  Yes, yes.
• 19:15
  I know what the rhetoric is.
• 19:15
  It's a lie, but it's a believed one.
• 19:18
  Yeah, the wheel has gone round.
• 19:20
  That's all I'm saying.
• 19:21
  And now, yeah, that's why they use the word elite, and it pricks the excitement of the voters.
• 19:29
  Yeah, those guys like Josh and Stephen sitting there using long words and referring to things, and fuck them, you know?
• 19:39
  It's all about great gods.
• 19:41
  Yeah, fuck us, why not?
• 19:42
  Okay, because we, you know, I'd rather...
• 19:47
  I'd rather not listen to Joe Rogan or watch martial arts.
• 19:54
  And, you know, I'm not interested in their world.
• 19:57
  And it's the world that's winning.
• 19:58
  It's the big world, their entertainment, their wrestling and, you know, all the things they like.
• 20:04
  and the music they listen to and the clothes they wear and the language they use is dominant in the world.
• 20:13
  It is winning.
• 20:13
  It has won.
• 20:15
  And mine may once have seemed smart and interesting, just as the aristocrats of the 19th century, but we don't...
• 20:23
  If someone went round now wearing ribboned wigs and saying la and talking out in Bridgerton language, we would...
• 20:31
  think they were pretentious or mad.
• 20:32
  You're giving me an idea about something I'd rather like to do.
• 20:35
  By all means, cosplay then it becomes, doesn't it?
• 20:38
  It becomes something else.
• 20:39
  Well, our thing is cosplay, isn't it?
• 20:41
  I mean, there's so much of this is cosplay.
• 20:42
  But it was real, that's the point.
• 20:43
  It was real.
• 20:44
  It was a real way of thinking.
• 20:45
  It was a real way of apprehending the world and describing it.
• 20:48
  It was a real way of offering an organizational and political structure for us to follow.
• 20:54
  That is gone.
• 20:55
  The wheel has turned.
• 20:56
  And now there is another one.
• 20:57
  And people find it very difficult to understand when the world changes, that it really, really does change.
• 21:04
  And I am not of the generation that belongs to this new world.
• 21:08
  And I am not politically, culturally, socially disposed towards the same set of beliefs and aspirations that those people are.
• 21:17
  I don't want to persuade them that I'm right and they're wrong.
• 21:21
  I just, it's become a different country.
• 21:24
  If you go to a, you know, like my university, I went to an ancient university, Cambridge, it was founded the best part of a thousand years ago.
• 21:34
  It's the same buildings that it has been for that 900 years.
• 21:38
  The same colleges.
• 21:39
  Some of them have been added to by different generations, a bit Georgian here and so on.
• 21:45
  But it's basically a medieval building.
• 21:47
  But if I went in there in 1790 or something, I would see the young Byron there at Trinity College being a student and all the dons, all the teachers would be single and they would be in holy orders.
• 22:04
  That's how it was then.
• 22:05
  That's how the place worked.
• 22:07
  Same building, completely different world.
• 22:11
  And we are in the same building, the earth.
• 22:13
  It's still got the Alps, still got Australia, still got the English Channel, but it's a different world.
• 22:20
  And it's a different world to the one I was born in and grew up in.
• 22:23
  And I can be, like most old people, hand-wringing and nostalgic and sentimental about it.
• 22:29
  I can be angry and gnarly about it.
• 22:31
  I can be grumpy, but I choose not to be, even though inside a lot of me is churning and thinking, fuck this new world.
• 22:39
  I hate it.
• 22:40
  I hate every part of it.
• 22:41
  I recognise the buildings, but it's not the same world.
• 22:46
  And this happens.
• 22:47
  As the wheel turns, it happens all the time.
• 22:50
  And different generations get caught up in it because they belong to it.
• 22:53
  And we now live in a time where people are very, very self-conscious about those generations, and I think that's why.
• 23:00
  when i was young yes the phrase baby boomer existed but it really merely was a reference to the fact that there was a peak in births after the second world war it was a demographic statement it wasn't a huge cultural one but now every bucking
• 23:15
  Ten years, there's a new generation that is apparently described with piercing accuracy as, oh, Gen Z think this.
• 23:24
  Do they?
• 23:24
  I mean, if you said that about black people or Jews, you'd be considered racist.
• 23:28
  Just on the basis of someone's birth, you interpret who they are, what they think, and even can say you hate them.
• 23:36
  I hate baby boomers.
• 23:37
  Do you?
• 23:38
  And do you hate black people?
• 23:40
  Is that a reasonable thing to say?
• 23:43
  No, it isn't.
• 23:44
  How dare people be so bloody bigoted about generations?
• 23:49
  But I think part of the reason is because the wheel is turning so fast and people are unstable about it and unsure about it and they want to be rooted.
• 24:00
  I mean, in my real theory, I suppose, again, it's a sort of examination of Greek myth, but it's the hearth.
• 24:09
  talked about kith and kin.
• 24:11
  The word hearth in almost all cultures is extremely important.
• 24:17
  Obviously, fire was important when we invented it, and when language arrived 60,000 years ago, very, very recently, we were, you know, the putative human family was gathered around the fire in the...
• 24:29
  putative cave with the dogs helping us guard from wild animals and other tribes and so on.
• 24:36
  And we started, because we had language and some element of safety, children would start asking questions and around the fire would tell stories about how the world was created and why there was thunder in the sky and what it meant, who was in charge of pushing out flowers from dead twings at the springtime and all those sort of things.
• 24:55
  And we've had the hearth.
• 24:56
  We've had the hearth ever since.
• 24:58
  And the word hearth is cognate, as linguists say, with the word heart in Anglo-Saxon.
• 25:02
  Heart and hearth are the same.
• 25:04
  The word cardia in Greek was used for hearth as well as oikos.
• 25:08
  And the Latin for hearth is very revealing.
• 25:11
  It's focus.
• 25:12
  The word focus means hearth at its origin.
• 25:14
  We now use it metaphorically to mean anything around which we concentrate our thoughts.
• 25:19
  We focus on this, but it comes from the hearth.
• 25:22
  It's deeply part of who we are to have a hearth.
• 25:25
  And right up to your childhood and my childhood, we still had a hearth.
• 25:30
  It wasn't necessarily a fireplace.
• 25:32
  But it was a television, funnily enough.
• 25:34
  It was a flickering light that told stories about which we all gathered, and everybody watched them at the same time, and the stories came out, and they weren't always good stories.
• 25:42
  Obviously, they were often Reg Grundy soap operas or whatever you might say.
• 25:47
  But nonetheless, there was a sense of commonality in the fireplace, the national fireplace, and now that's utterly disintegrated.
• 25:55
  Nobody watches the same things anymore.
• 25:57
  Mummy and Daddy are watching an Apple TV series in...
• 26:01
  The daughter's watching something in her bedroom and the son is, well, we won't even ask what the son is watching in his bedroom.
• 26:07
  And the food is different.
• 26:08
  Probably the most interesting.
• 26:09
  Yeah, the food is utterly different.
• 26:12
  He's getting a pizza, she's getting a burger, they're all getting delivered.
• 26:15
  So they're not eating together and they're not listening and they're not telling stories in the evening and they're not gathering around the fireplace.
• 26:21
  any kind, sharing stories.
• 26:24
  And that disintegration of the hearth is a disintegration of a lot of things.
• 26:28
  And I know that's almost a right-wing thing.
• 26:30
  People used to say, out of a Christian or some sort of strong social sense that, you know, young people with their music and they don't have any structure and family life is disintegrating because of divorces and gay people and so on.
• 26:45
  And
• 26:45
  So it almost sounds as if I'm using that kind of language.
• 26:49
  But I'm just speculating, really, on the fact that we don't have this anymore.
• 26:56
  We don't have this hearth.
• 26:58
  Social media tries to be a hearth.
• 27:01
  I suppose the strange image that Americans have that Musk keeps using about a town square.
• 27:09
  I don't know why he thinks it's a town square.
• 27:12
  In town squares, do you have...
• 27:14
  One person with a microphone the size of Africa, while other people have one the size of a small pebble because that's what he's got.
• 27:23
  Does that make free speech and a town square?
• 27:25
  Also, you don't promote or demote ideas on the basis purely of how much people engage with them and how much people click on them and comment on them.
• 27:35
  No, it doesn't strike me as a town square.
• 27:36
  How much it outrages people.
• 27:37
  That just seems a weird way to shuffle ideas up and down.
• 27:41
  When I think of a town square in those terms, one thinks of, you know, the Ceausescu's on the balcony or the king on the balcony or Brezhnev on the balcony and everyone looking up and that's what they're doing.
• 27:53
  But it's worse than that.
• 27:54
  There's something Hunger Games-y about it.
• 27:55
  There's something Coliseum about it.
• 27:57
  Yes, there is.
• 27:57
  As well as Ceaușescu on the balcony.
• 27:59
  The popularity aspect.
• 28:01
  It's like, you know, who can say the most, who can say the thing that either most reinforces what you already believe or most demonizes and caricatures things that you already hate?
• 28:10
  There you go, exactly.
• 28:12
  This cyclical nature of sort of history and of life is something you've actually been quite perceptive about.
• 28:18
  Even when you were...
• 28:20
  I think one of the reasons that your autobiography, Moab Is My Washpot, spoke to me so much when I was a teenager.
• 28:26
  It's such a beautiful book, Stephen.
• 28:28
  It is so, so beautiful and so open and revealing.
• 28:32
  But it's also like you quote from yourself aged 15, writing to your future self.
• 28:40
  Do you remember this passage?
• 28:42
  I do.
• 28:42
  I mean, I can't quote it.
• 28:43
  I have it.
• 28:44
  Oh, gosh.
• 28:44
  Could you read it?
• 28:46
  Yes.
• 28:46
  Would you read it?
• 28:47
  I'll happily read it.
• 28:47
  Because it's so...
• 28:49
  Anyway, I want to talk about that and what it tells us about life.
• 28:53
  To myself, not to be read until I'm 25.
• 28:57
  I know what you will think when you read this.
• 29:00
  You will be embarrassed.
• 29:01
  You will scoff and sneer.
• 29:03
  Well, I tell you now that everything I feel now, everything I am now, is truer and better than anything I shall ever be.
• 29:13
  Ever.
• 29:14
  This is me now.
• 29:15
  All.
• 29:16
  the real me every day that i grow away from the me that is writing this now is a betrayal and a defeat i expect you'll screw this up into a ball with sophisticated disgust or at best with tolerant amusement
• 29:32
  But deep down you will know, you will know that you are smothering what you really, really were.
• 29:39
  This is the age when I truly am.
• 29:42
  From now on my life will be behind me.
• 29:45
  I tell you now, this is true, truer than anything else I will ever write, feel or know.
• 29:52
  What I am now is me.
• 29:54
  What I will be is a lie.
• 29:56
  Holy heck.
• 29:58
  I remember writing that.
• 29:59
  I remember the tears streaming down my face as I wrote it and I felt it.
• 30:02
  And what it was really about, Josh, of course, I suppose, it was I was in love and there was a transgressive love because it was a gay love, as we would now say,
• 30:14
  And I felt that it connected me with all the poets and writers in the world.
• 30:21
  It made me, forced me to go to the library to try and find some vindication that I wasn't alone.
• 30:26
  And I read novels set in schools full of lyrical adolescent moon-calf love of the kind I was feeling.
• 30:35
  which had been banned at the time, or I read biographies of Oscar Wilde and his circle, and the ripples went out into other circles and other groups, into the Paul Bowles and the Tangiers set.
• 30:47
  And so I became quite a sophisticated reader of what we would now call queer literature.
• 30:53
  But also it gave me a sense that...
• 30:58
  that there was compromise in the later lives that I was reading, that my purity and ferocity of what I felt and also my very adolescent...
• 31:12
  sense that I could connect with nature, that the drops of dew on a tree spoke to me more than to others, and not just... ..that grown-ups, because car keys and mortgages and having lawnmowers and...
• 31:29
  all the attributions and things of adulthood that the other boys so looked forward to, I saw as growing away from this intensity.
• 31:38
  And although it's a bit like a Chinese foot massage, it's absolute agony, but you love it.
• 31:48
  And I loved this agony.
• 31:50
  It was, you know, Catullus, Udi et Amo, I hate and I love.
• 31:55
  And it was so intense and I felt it so powerfully.
• 31:59
  I suppose unusually for a teenager, I had an element of the literary now to be able to put it down.
• 32:08
  And I was asked by Gay Times many years later to respond or to write a letter to my 15 year old self.
• 32:16
  And I said, oh, well, that's interesting because my 15-year-old self wrote a letter to me.
• 32:20
  And they said, what do you mean?
• 32:22
  And I pointed them to that.
• 32:23
  And they said, well, can you reply to it?
• 32:25
  So I did actually write back.
• 32:27
  What did the reply say?
• 32:28
  Well, it said, I might even...
• 32:33
  have it in a strange way, if we can just have a second, because it was published in The Guardian, and someone reminded me of it recently, and so I...
• 32:45
  I won't read the whole thing.
• 32:47
  Well, I can.
• 32:47
  You can always cut it, I suppose.
• 32:49
  Dearest absurd child.
• 32:52
  I hope you are well.
• 32:53
  I know you are not.
• 32:55
  As it happens, you wrote in 1973 a letter to your future self, and it's high time that your future self had the decency to write back.
• 33:03
  You declared in that letter, reproduced in your 1997 autobiography, Moab is my washpot...
• 33:08
  that everything I feel now as an adolescent is true.
• 33:12
  You went on to affirm that if ever you dared in later life to repudiate, deny or mock your 16-year-old self, it would be a lie, a traducing, treasonable lie, a crime against adolescence.
• 33:24
  This is who I am, you wrote.
• 33:26
  Each day that passes I grow away from my true self.
• 33:30
  Every inch I take towards adulthood is a betrayal.
• 33:33
  Oh, Lord love you, Stephen, how I admire your arrogance and rage and misery, how pure and righteous they are, and how passionately storm-drenched was your adolescence, how filled with true feeling, fury, despair, joy, anxiety, shame, pride, and above all, supremely above all, how overpowered it was by love.
• 33:55
  my eyes fill with tears just to think of you-of me tears splash on to my keyboard now i am perhaps happier now than i have ever been and yet i cannot but recognise that i would trade all that i am to be you the eternally unhappy nervous wild wondering and despairing sixteen-year-old stephen angry angst-ridden and awkward but alive
• 34:19
  because you knew how to feel and knowing how to feel is more important than how you feel deadness of soul is the only unpardonable crime and if there is one thing happiness can do it is mask deadness of soul
• 34:36
  "'I finally know now, as I easily knew then, that the most important thing is love.
• 34:41
  "'It doesn't matter in the slightest whether that love is for someone of your own sex or not.
• 34:46
  "'Gay issues are important, and I shall come to them in a moment, "'but they shrivel like a salted snail when compared to the towering question of love.'
• 34:56
  Gay people sometimes believe, to this very day would you credit it, young Stephen, that the preponderance of obstacles and terrors they encounter in their lives and relationships is intimately connected with the fact of their being gay.
• 35:10
  As it happens, at least 90% of their problems are to do with love, and love alone, the lack of it, the denial of it, the inequality of it, the missed reciprocity in it,
• 35:21
  the horrors and heartaches of it.
• 35:23
  Love cold, love hot, love fresh, love stale, love scorned, love missed, love denied, love betrayed.
• 35:29
  The great joke of sexuality is that these problems bedevil straight people just as much as gay.
• 35:35
  The 10% of extra suffering and complexity that uniquely confronts the gay person is certainly not incidental or trifling.
• 35:44
  But it must be understood that love comes first.
• 35:47
  This is tough for straight people to work out.
• 35:50
  Straight people are encouraged by culture and society to believe that their sexual impulses are the norm, and therefore when their affairs of the heart and loins go wrong, as they certainly will, when they are flummoxed, distraught and defeated by love, they are forced to believe that it must be their fault,
• 36:08
  "'We gay people at least have the advantage of being brought up "'to expect the world of love to be imponderably and unmanageably difficult, "'for we are perverted freaks and sick aberrations of nature.
• 36:19
  "'They, poor normal lambs, naturally find it harder to understand "'why, in Lysander's words, the course of true love never did run smooth.
• 36:29
  "'Sexual availability, so long an impossible dream in your age,'
• 36:33
  "'becomes the norm in the late 70s and early 80s, "'only to be shattered by a new disease "'whose horrors you cannot even imagine.
• 36:40
  "'You would little believe that I can say to you now "'across the gap of 35 years that we are the blessed ones.
• 36:47
  "'The people of Britain are happy, or not, "'because of toll-puddle martyrs, chartists, infantry regiments, "'any number of ancestors who made the world more comfortable for them, "'and we gay people are happy now, or not,
• 37:01
  in large part thanks to stonewall rioters harvey milk dennis lemon gay news ian mckellen et al and the battered bodies of bullied beaten and abused gay men and women who stood up to be counted and refused to apologise for the way they were it has given us something we never thought to have pride
• 37:21
  for a thousand years shame was our lot and now turning on a sixpence we have arrived at pride without even it seems an intervening period of well it's okay i suppose wouldn't have chosen it but there you go who'd have thought it i know what you're doing now young stephen it's early nineteen seventy three
• 37:38
  You're in the library, cross-referencing bibliographies so that you can find out more and more examples of queer people in history, art and literature against whom you can hope to validate yourself.
• 37:49
  Leonardo Tchaikovsky, Wilde, Barons Corvo and von Glurden, Robin Maugham, Worsley, an Englishman, Jean Genet, Cavafy, Montellon, Roger Periffeed, Mary Renaud, Michael Campbell, Michael Davies, Angus Stewart, Gore Vidal, John Ritchie, William Burroughs, so many great spirits really do confirm that hope.
• 38:08
  it emboldens you to know that such a number of brilliant if often doomed souls shared the same impulse and desires as you i know the index card waltz of autobiographies poems and novels you are dancing those same names are still so close to the surface of my mind nearly four decades later
• 38:25
  "'Novels, poetry, and the worlds of art and ideas "'are opening up in front of you almost incidentally.
• 38:31
  "'You spend all your time in the library "'yearning to be told that you are not alone, "'and an unlooked-for side-effect of this "'just happens to be a real education "'achieved in a private school designed for Philistine bumpkins.'
• 38:45
  "'Being born queer has given you, by mistake, "'a fantastic advantage over the rugger-playing ordinaries "'who surround you.
• 38:52
  "'But those rugger-playing ordinaries have souls too, "'and you should know that.
• 38:57
  "'I know you cannot believe it now.
• 38:59
  "'They seem so secure, so assured, so blessedly normal.
• 39:03
  "'They gave Cuthbert Worsley the Kipling-derived title "'of his overwhelmingly important-to-you autobiography "'The Flanneled Fool.'
• 39:12
  "'These are the men that have lost their soul, "'the flannelled fool at the wicket and the muddied oaf at the goal.
• 39:18
  "'You look down at the fools almost as much as you fear them, "'the ordinary people whose path through life is guaranteed.
• 39:25
  "'They won't have to spend their days in public libraries, "'public lavatories and public courts, ashamed, spurned and reviled.'
• 39:33
  "'There is no internet, no gay news, no gay chatlines, "'no men-seeking men-personals, no out-and-proud celebs, "'just a world of shame and secrecy.
• 39:43
  "'Somehow, as you age, a miracle will be wrought.
• 39:46
  "'You will begin by descending deeper into the depths, "'expulsion, crime and prison, "'nothing really to do with being gay, "'but everything to do with love and your inability to cope with it.'
• 39:57
  yet you will as the regency rakes used to say make a recover and find yourself at university where it will be astonishingly easy to be open about your sexuality no great trick for the university's cambridge long a hotbed of righteous tolerance spiritual heavy petting and homo hysteria
• 40:16
  "'You will emerge from Cambridge and enter a world "'where being out is no big deal, "'although a puzzlingly small number of your coevals "'will find it as easy as you to emerge from the shadows.
• 40:26
  "'But before you damn anyone for failing to come out, "'look to their parents.
• 40:30
  "'The answer almost always lies there.
• 40:32
  "'Oh, how lucky in that department, as in so many you are, young Stephen.
• 40:36
  "'But don't kid yourself.
• 40:38
  "'For millions of teenagers around Britain and everywhere else, "'it's still 1973.'
• 40:43
  "'Taunts, beatings, and punishment await gay people the world over, "'in playgrounds and execution grounds, "'the distance between which is measured "'by nothing more than political constitutions and human will.
• 40:55
  "'Yes, you will grow to be a very, very, very, very lucky man "'who is able to express his nature out loud "'without fear of hatred or reprisal "'from any except the most deluded, demented, and sad.
• 41:07
  "'But that is a small battle won.
• 41:10
  "'A whole theatre of war remains.'
• 41:13
  The theatre of war is bigger than the simple issue of being gay, just as the question of love swamps the question of mere sexuality.
• 41:20
  For alongside sexual politics, the entire achievement of the Enlightenment, which led, inter alia, to gay liberation, is under threat like never before.
• 41:29
  The cruel, hypocritical and loveless hand of religion and absolutism has fallen on the world once more.
• 41:37
  "'So my message from the future is twofold.
• 41:39
  "'Fear not, young Stephen.
• 41:41
  "'Your life will unfold in richer, more accepted, and happier ways "'than you would ever dared hope.
• 41:46
  "'But be wary, for the most basic tenets of rationalism, openness, and freedom "'that nourish you now and seem so unassailable "'are about to be harried and besieged by malevolent, mad, and medieval minds.'
• 42:00
  "'You poor, dear, dear thing.
• 42:02
  "'Look at you, weltering in your misery.
• 42:04
  "'The extraordinary truth is that you want to stay there.
• 42:08
  "'Unlike so many of the young, "'you do not yearn for adulthood, pubs and car keys.
• 42:13
  "'You want to stay where you are, "'in the Republic of Pubescence, "'where feeling has primacy and pain is beautiful.
• 42:21
  "'And you know what?
• 42:22
  "'I think you are right.'
• 42:26
  Beautiful.
• 42:28
  Yeah.
• 42:28
  Beautiful.
• 42:28
  Isn't it to have a dog with oneself right?
• 42:31
  I mean, do you believe that the 16-year-old is right?
• 42:36
  I mean, I do.
• 42:37
  There is something about adolescence that for me as well was burning bright and so intense and the colours.
• 42:45
  Everything was turned up to 11.
• 42:46
  That's exactly right.
• 42:48
  Exactly right, Josh.
• 42:49
  And, you know, that's what I was saying when I was that age, and I suppose recognising it still to be true when I wrote that, which is now quite a long time ago, as you can pretty tell in a sense, although I was right perhaps to be pessimistic about the future.
• 43:04
  And so is the price then, when you talk about happiness and being happier now, is the price of happiness...
• 43:11
  contentment and the turning down of the volume of intensity.
• 43:15
  Yeah.
• 43:16
  Contentment is being in an armchair.
• 43:17
  Happier is skipping around.
• 43:19
  Yeah.
• 43:20
  I don't skip around.
• 43:21
  Skipping around like a child with an ice cream is happy.
• 43:24
  Contentment is in a chair thinking, oh, this will do.
• 43:27
  Yeah, something like that.
• 43:29
  Is that a bit sad that life goes that way?
• 43:32
  Yes, it is.
• 43:32
  It's sad and inevitable, I guess.
• 43:35
  I mean, on top of that, I have to layer at least the fact that I'm having bipolar disorder, will have phases in which the happiness is turned up not to 11, but to 111.
• 43:47
  Yes.
• 43:48
  You know, a sort of hypermanic phase of...
• 43:51
  I call it sometimes my Joan of Arc phase, you know, this kind of radiance that fills one and this sense of energy and things being possible.
• 44:01
  Is that reminiscent of what the 16-year-old Stephen was talking about?
• 44:05
  Yes, very interesting.
• 44:06
  I mean...
• 44:08
  Sometimes you think psychiatry and the language of psychology and mental health is just another linguistic discourse to describe what medievals use demons or humors.
• 44:23
  And, you know, that it's no truer to say that.
• 44:27
  But there is something about adolescence in which, yeah, mood swings are greater and...
• 44:34
  Yeah, I was also, I found it harder to concentrate.
• 44:39
  And you can call that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
• 44:44
  If you imagined a hypothetical spirit who waxed and waned from being a 16-year-old Stephen writing that letter to the Stephen of present day over the course of 24-hour periods, maybe we would diagnose that as bipolar.
• 44:58
  Yeah, and I think there is an element in which one can, I mean, I'm not anti-scientific in the least.
• 45:04
  A lot of my friends accuse me of being over-scientific or over-rational, although I don't think I'm a rationalist.
• 45:12
  But there's an element in which the medicalization of human moods and behaviors is no more convincing than,
• 45:21
  than the medieval theological demonising of the same thing.
• 45:26
  You know, they're both ways of kind of controlling and creating a narrative for something that is deeply, you know, inchoate and misty and brownian sometimes.
• 45:38
  Yeah, and look, it's clear from that letter that you wrote to your younger self that you would not, if you could, snap your fingers and erase having been that person.
• 45:46
  No.
• 45:48
  Would the converse be true that if you could snap your fingers and retain that sense of passion and, you know, life for the duration of your life, would you keep it?
• 46:04
  I think what I would, the thing that would pause me from that snap is that, and this is such a dull answer and my teenage self would be astonished,
• 46:16
  is the discipline and joy of work, that the control over my emotions that I gave myself or somehow learned through language and writing, and whether it was originally just writing comedy sketches with...
• 46:34
  my friend Hugh and becoming a professional entertainer.
• 46:39
  And then that word professional somehow, then becoming a writer and finding out how difficult it was to write but how that difficulty was a thrill and that the nature of creating a book required such professionalism.
• 46:54
  And even acting in the theatre and on film requires professionalism.
• 47:00
  You have to learn your life.
• 47:01
  You have to stand where you're told.
• 47:03
  You have to behave.
• 47:04
  beyond time and so on and so on.
• 47:07
  And all of that, those structures and frameworks that are not social ones, they're not a boss telling you what to do, which I would find difficult.
• 47:16
  They are you becoming your boss and telling yourself what to do.
• 47:19
  They are discipline.
• 47:21
  I mean, it's an old-fashioned word.
• 47:23
  And I get fulfillment out of that of a kind that I never imagined.
• 47:27
  I had this idea when I was young, like a lot of people, that art and poetry were about self-expression and about, you know, about really like that letter I wrote myself.
• 47:37
  They were about that sort of outpouring of emotion.
• 47:40
  But I discovered that...
• 47:43
  Almost the opposite is true.
• 47:45
  There's a great essay, it's an introduction to a book of criticism that T.S.
• 47:52
  Eliot wrote, in which he basically says the same thing.
• 47:55
  A lot of people seem to have the mistaken idea that the point of poetry is to express how you feel.
• 48:00
  It couldn't be further from the truth, he says.
• 48:03
  And this, you know, this is a lesson that very few people want to hear because we're mostly pretty adolescent still about the idea of poetry.
• 48:10
  And we think that's what poetry is.
• 48:12
  It's a way of, you know, letting your feelings out.
• 48:15
  Actually, it's a way of utterly controlling them through language and finding only the exact word.
• 48:21
  to describe what necessarily isn't a feeling, it's a perception.
• 48:24
  And it could be the song of a thrush.
• 48:28
  It could be, you know, the way a river moves.
• 48:32
  And if you find the right word, just as an artist, a painter, finds the right flash of white to...
• 48:38
  convey water then the emotion pours out but it's exact and it's formal and it's not done in a kind of blast of and even van gogh if you read his diaries and letters to his brother theo he's totally technical it's you know yes he's a deeply disturbed you know he's got great mental illness and so on and he's passionately full of love for color and movement and
• 49:02
  and nature and he wants to represent it.
• 49:04
  He wants absolutely to represent it, but it's about how he does it.
• 49:08
  It's about the detail of the brush.
• 49:11
  It's that that makes art, not emotion.
• 49:15
  It's the controlling of emotion.
• 49:16
  That's fascinating because in terms of discipline and precision,
• 49:20
  You were a precocious child.
• 49:22
  Yes.
• 49:23
  And your father's criticism of you was that you were a bit too cute and knowledgeable and fancy, and you were great at putting together a disciplined pastiche of what other brilliant people had said.
• 49:37
  Absolutely.
• 49:37
  But you were fundamentally unoriginal, and all you were good at was putting on a show of intelligentsia.
• 49:45
  Exactly.
• 49:46
  Is that a criticism that stuck or that hurt?
• 49:51
  And I'm not wishing to suddenly become all lectury about it, but it's so interesting because that is what he said, that I was a pastiche, that it was just a kind of laying on of things that I perceived from outside in the world and that I could recreate cleverly and make it look like it was a work of art.
• 50:08
  Isn't that exactly what we moan about in AI now?
• 50:12
  Because AI does the same.
• 50:13
  It just scrapes all the data and puts it together so neatly and so cleverly, but it's not original.
• 50:20
  The reason I called my first novel The Liar was it was about this image I had because I noticed that this is actually how it all works.
• 50:27
  And funnily enough, Eliot said the same thing.
• 50:30
  I don't know why I'm quoting him all the time.
• 50:32
  But, you know, great artist Steele was the way he put it.
• 50:36
  And the image I have for it is teenagers very often and younger, you practice your signature.
• 50:45
  Because it's your logo.
• 50:47
  It's your little image that you give the world, your name, the way you write it, your signature.
• 50:52
  And it used to be a very common thing because it was on checkbooks, which don't really exist anymore, the back of credit cards, which everyone forgets to sign these days because, you know, you use a chip and pin.
• 51:02
  But the signature was a very important thing.
• 51:04
  You signed a letter with it and it was your signature.
• 51:08
  And when you were young, you would practice it and you would make it up.
• 51:11
  It would be fake because you would say one day, my name has a Y in it, I'll do a straight down line for my Y with no curl on it.
• 51:20
  And then I think, no, that's not right.
• 51:22
  I'll do a little curl until it goes up against itself.
• 51:25
  And I would try different signatures.
• 51:27
  Right.
• 51:27
  And then one day it's fixed and it is your signature.
• 51:31
  And the same with a walk.
• 51:32
  I used to look at other boys as we sort of walked into school from our houses and think, oh, he carries his book in front of him like that.
• 51:38
  That looks quite cool, these books.
• 51:40
  kind of like that and other people, oh, he's got them under his arm.
• 51:43
  And I would sort of try different walks.
• 51:46
  And similarly with writing.
• 51:49
  And it takes a long time, but I loved various writers.
• 51:53
  I have my, what you now call the World Wide Web, my WWW.
• 51:58
  Oscar Wilde, P.G.
• 51:59
  Woodhouse and Evelyn Waugh.
• 52:00
  I loved their novels and writings and
• 52:04
  And everything I wrote was a ridiculous pastiche of those styles, you know, a bit of Woodhouse, a bit of Wild, a bit of War, with possibly a bit of Arthur Conan Doyle shoved in as well.
• 52:16
  And it was obvious.
• 52:18
  And I knew it.
• 52:19
  And my father saw it in everything, of course, pastiche, as he called me.
• 52:24
  But then I remember there was a magazine at university where you used to write reviews and articles and silly things, and it was always under pseudonyms, so no one knew who was writing what, so you could be rude about people and so on.
• 52:37
  And one day I was walking along and someone said, oh, that article you wrote about so-and-so, and I'd go,
• 52:43
  Why do you think that was me?
• 52:45
  He said, oh, for heaven's sake, it was your style completely.
• 52:48
  And I said, I've got a style.
• 52:49
  He said, of course you have.
• 52:51
  He said, I mean, you might as well have been, you know, you physically on the newspaper speaking out.
• 52:56
  It was obviously you.
• 52:58
  And I went back and looked at the article.
• 53:00
  It wasn't Woodhouse-y.
• 53:01
  It wasn't Wildy.
• 53:02
  I mean, it was English.
• 53:04
  It was an English style that had kind of, you know,
• 53:09
  was not of the streets, certainly.
• 53:12
  It was a literary style, if one wants to put it that way.
• 53:15
  And I thought, maybe I've suddenly got this thing, a voice, my own individual voice.
• 53:21
  And it is layers and layers of other people's voices and other people's influences from all over because everybody's would-be.
• 53:28
  But then that's what...
• 53:30
  also what artificial intelligence is.
• 53:32
  It's the Bayesian priors, we call it.
• 53:35
  And so maybe originality does eventually come out of these accretions of pastiche.
• 53:41
  Do you think it will from AI?
• 53:43
  Yes, yes.
• 53:45
  I think it's inevitable.
• 53:47
  I mean, already there's a... Sotheby's just sold a painting for 1.4 million, was it, that was done by an AI?
• 53:53
  Yes.
• 53:54
  I mean, that could be a fad, though.
• 53:55
  Oh, absolutely.
• 53:57
  That doesn't speak to the question of whether AI will be genuinely creative.
• 54:01
  And you mentioned in that article, in that letter that you just read, that you wrote to your younger self, one phrase leapt out at me, which was, blessedly normal.
• 54:10
  So when you're talking about copying the other boys' walks, Mm-hmm.
• 54:15
  Do you ever, I mean, I know you envied people who seemed to be blessedly normal.
• 54:21
  You know, people who just seemed to, you know, be able to dance without ever having had to be taught or knew how to walk and hold themselves.
• 54:30
  Yeah.
• 54:31
  If you could swap out your life for a blessedly normal life, would you?
• 54:36
  I think I actually say in Moab, the book you were so kind about, I think it has a section that's called Joining In or something like that.
• 54:47
  And I quote, is it Edward Said?
• 54:50
  It's someone who defines the...
• 54:54
  The bourgeois antihero in literature, which is kind of basically the hero of most novels since the Second World War, as being divided in the self between two opposite impulses,
• 55:10
  To be a part of the tribe, to join in, to be blessedly normal, to be accepted.
• 55:18
  But an equally powerful impulse to stand alone and be different and to be outside.
• 55:24
  And that is, they are so opposite, it tears one apart because you can't satisfy yourself.
• 55:29
  And I think I am like that.
• 55:31
  I think a lot of people are like that.
• 55:33
  You know, is it the master builder or the...
• 55:36
  a public enemy, I think it is, the Ibsen play that ends with he stands strongest who stands most alone, which is a powerful and terrible way to end a play and to say to an audience, you know, because it's a communal act theatre and it's a brilliant moment because you kind of think it's a tragic thing to say, but it's also defiant.
• 55:57
  And it is a lot of the things one admires in art are shaking fists at the gods.
• 56:03
  He stands strongest who stands most alone.
• 56:05
  Can that be true?
• 56:07
  Surely not.
• 56:07
  But he's writing the Ibsen plays about a poisonous society, a society that turns on an honest person with, you know, and...
• 56:18
  And yet we also believe that we only can be strong when we are together, you know, which is a kind of Obama-esque kind of thing you say in politics.
• 56:28
  Yeah.
• 56:28
  And no one challenges it.
• 56:30
  Of course we do.
• 56:30
  We are together.
• 56:31
  You know, we're stronger.
• 56:32
  But how can they both be true?
• 56:34
  And yet within one, they are both true.
• 56:36
  Well, it reminds me a little bit of the conflict between the desire for newness and adventure on the one hand and the desire for safety and certainty and familiarity on the other, which is obviously something that you've also struggled with.
• 56:49
  You know, you want to be doing something new and incredible and at the same time you want to be…
• 56:54
  comfortable and around the familiar.
• 56:56
  How does Walt Whitman put it so brilliantly?
• 56:59
  Do I contradict myself?
• 57:01
  Very well, I contradict myself.
• 57:03
  I contain multitudes.
• 57:05
  Yes.
• 57:06
  And that, I remember reading that and thinking, oh, that's the most beautiful thing I've ever read.
• 57:11
  Yeah.
• 57:12
  Do I contradict myself?
• 57:13
  Very well, then, I contradict myself.
• 57:16
  And, you know, that's because that's what it is to me.
• 57:20
  We are completely mixed in our impulses.
• 57:24
  I mean, it's true in ways, you know, that ancient, the Romans always talked about Rus versus Urbs, you know, the country versus the town.
• 57:33
  And that is partly an expression of that.
• 57:37
  There was a generation of Roman poets and thinkers and writers and indeed rulers like Augustus who...
• 57:44
  who fancied themselves in the countryside as a gardener, alone with nature, away from the rustle, the bustle of the city and far from the madding crowds in global strife, as Gray puts it.
• 57:58
  But also, like Catullus, they yearned for the pavement and the mob and the smell of people.
• 58:05
  And I'm like that.
• 58:06
  I love being alone in the countryside.
• 58:08
  I think it's a fantastic feeling and I...
• 58:10
  You know, I fantasized about just being in my house in the country and, you know, every year making chutney and jam with the seasons and, you know, having eggs from the chickens and not knowing who's president or prime minister.
• 58:26
  You know, this is how we began our conversation.
• 58:28
  And then another part of me is never happier than when I'm, you know, in Piccadilly or Fifth Avenue or...
• 58:34
  wherever it is, you know, just thinking, this is, I am part of the great urban stream.
• 58:38
  Do you know the Australian poem Clancy of the Overflow?
• 58:40
  No, I like the title.
• 58:41
  It's beautiful.
• 58:43
  It's by one of our greatest poets who I'm blanking on, who wrote The Man from Snowy River, Banjo Patterson.
• 58:50
  Banjo Patterson.
• 58:52
  Yes, I think it is.
• 58:53
  I won't waste three minutes of your time reciting it for you now, but it's beautiful.
• 58:58
  It's about exactly this.
• 58:59
  It's about this in the 1800s in Australia and someone who's sitting in his dingy little office writing a letter to someone who he met on a muster station in the Outback.
• 59:10
  And the letter comes back to him from a colleague who says, oh, Clancy, the name of the guy, has gone off and he's out on the range somewhere.
• 59:19
  And the letter is just this guy's...
• 59:22
  Sort of thinking through what it must be like to be out there in the wide open spaces of the Australian outback, sitting on horseback, seeing the vast sunlit plains extended, as he puts it, and the whisper of the breezes and the river on its bars.
• 59:38
  He sort of brings his focus back to where he is in this gritty 19th century, you know, Sydney, with the fetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city through the open window floating spreads its foulness overall, he says.
• 59:52
  And, you know, it just ends up with saying, I somehow rather fancy that I'd like to change with Clancy.
• 59:58
  Yeah.
• 59:59
  Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go, while he faced the round eternal of the cash book and the journal.
• 1:00:07
  But I doubt he'd suit the office, Clancy, of the overflow.
• 1:00:10
  That's brilliant.
• 1:00:12
  I love it.
• 1:00:13
  I love it.
• 1:00:13
  And that reminded me of the office thing, the great opening of the Wordsworth poem, the world is too much with us, getting and spending.
• 1:00:23
  Yes.
• 1:00:24
  And we feel that.
• 1:00:25
  But, you know, the marvellous thing about the brain, Josh, isn't it?
• 1:00:28
  It is astonishing.
• 1:00:28
  You can be like Clancy.
• 1:00:29
  They're on the range.
• 1:00:31
  And you stand and all around you is nature and not a single human being or a thing made by a human.
• 1:00:38
  and a little freshet of wind will turn a leaf in the distance and your eye will catch it straight away.
• 1:00:44
  You will see the tiniest movements.
• 1:00:46
  Your brain is tuned to them because it might be someone who thinks you're lunch, or it might be a potential lunch for you.
• 1:00:53
  And obviously evolution has trained us to have this sensitivity in our perceptions when we're out there.
• 1:00:59
  But you can then get on a train and two hours later, you're in the middle of the city with 600 people on the pavement either side of you playing music.
• 1:01:09
  You can be on the phone hopping out of the way of a taxi, music coming out of the barbershop as you pass by.
• 1:01:16
  All this noise, all this.
• 1:01:18
  And your brain can cope with that.
• 1:01:20
  Yes.
• 1:01:20
  So the same brain that finds the technology
• 1:01:22
  The tiniest little nuance in a leaf is able to filter out all this incredible noise and have a conversation.
• 1:01:30
  I thought you were also going to say something different, which is that you could be on horseback in the outback and your brain could be full of all the junk of the city and you could be completely non-present to the…
• 1:01:41
  That's certainly true.
• 1:01:42
  The tranquility that you're inhabiting and your brain could be racing.
• 1:01:45
  And similarly, you could be walking through Fifth Avenue in New York City.
• 1:01:48
  This is one of the things that I used to love doing when I lived in New York is walk down the street in a kind of contemplative, rather sort of Buddhist, where you're surrounded by the mayhem, but you're not of it.
• 1:02:02
  You're not in it and you can kind of coast through it in a tranquil way as the madness surrounds you.
• 1:02:07
  I want to let you go, but can I ask you, can we do a quick one-word Rorschach?
• 1:02:12
  I'll do my best.
• 1:02:13
  Or just throw a word at you.
• 1:02:15
  Give me a word.
• 1:02:16
  Haggis.
• 1:02:20
  Paul.
• 1:02:22
  Hugh Laurie.
• 1:02:23
  Friend.
• 1:02:24
  Winston Churchill.
• 1:02:27
  Bulldog.
• 1:02:28
  Twitter.
• 1:02:30
  Cesspool.
• 1:02:31
  English prep schools.
• 1:02:34
  Oh, joy, pain.
• 1:02:37
  Two answers.
• 1:02:38
  Brexit.
• 1:02:40
  Catastrophe.
• 1:02:42
  Circumcision.
• 1:02:43
  Cruel.
• 1:02:44
  Margaret Thatcher.
• 1:02:49
  Berdicea.
• 1:02:52
  Libraries.
• 1:02:54
  Smell.
• 1:02:56
  Pornography.
• 1:02:57
  Smell.
• 1:02:59
  Australia.
• 1:03:02
  Son.
• 1:03:03
  Los Angeles.
• 1:03:06
  Noise.
• 1:03:07
  New York.
• 1:03:09
  Clamor.
• 1:03:11
  George Orwell.
• 1:03:14
  Puritanism.
• 1:03:16
  Elon Musk.
• 1:03:18
  Foulness.
• 1:03:20
  Companies that make their staff write he, him, or they, them gender pronouns in their email signatures.
• 1:03:25
  Bless.
• 1:03:27
  TikTok.
• 1:03:30
  Incomprehension.
• 1:03:31
  Capitalism.
• 1:03:36
  Fuck it.
• 1:03:38
  The ethos of move fast and break things.
• 1:03:42
  Disaster.
• 1:03:45
  What's the most unusual place you've ever been?
• 1:03:47
  That's a good question.
• 1:03:52
  The most unusual place I have ever been.
• 1:03:59
  I mean, one can say Bhutan, probably, in terms of a country.
• 1:04:05
  It's unlike almost any other I've ever visited, both geographically and socially.
• 1:04:15
  What else?
• 1:04:17
  Well, I grew up in Norfolk, which is the most unusual county in England in some ways.
• 1:04:22
  It's eccentric and peculiar.
• 1:04:24
  We do different, they say.
• 1:04:26
  Also, in this rapid fire series of questions, I was also going to ask you, what's the most underrated part of England or Britain?
• 1:04:32
  Oh, we definitely say East Anglia.
• 1:04:34
  Yes.
• 1:04:35
  It's, yeah, Norfolk.
• 1:04:36
  It's fantastic.
• 1:04:38
  Should we colonise Mars?
• 1:04:40
  I don't, you know, I don't care.
• 1:04:43
  I mean, I know it's important and an extraordinary step for mankind, but because of the kind of people who talk about it and because obviously Musk is just so full of bullshit about what year we're going to do it and how we're going to do it, and it's a lot of things that we can do will unfortunately be done by such dreadful people that they sort of make it...
• 1:05:08
  you know, I mean, in a sense, you could say this is the story of humanity.
• 1:05:11
  It was wonderful to explore.
• 1:05:13
  I just read a wonderful book by the American historian Hampton Sides.
• 1:05:19
  It's called The Wide, Wide Sea.
• 1:05:20
  And it's about the last voyage of Captain Cook.
• 1:05:23
  And I wasn't sure what I was expecting.
• 1:05:25
  Firstly, it's
• 1:05:26
  beautifully written so it's a thrill to read um and i didn't know much about captain cook um you know i suppose i could have imagined that typical you know white supremacist style british person claiming things in the name of the king and
• 1:05:46
  being part of the ruination that his empire, he turned out not to be like that at all.
• 1:05:50
  He was very uncomfortable at changing the lives of the places that he discovered as a European, you know.
• 1:05:59
  And in his last voyage, he was supposed to be, on behalf of the crown, going all the way around the world and up
• 1:06:07
  to find the Northwest Passage, the idea being that you could get from the Pacific to the Atlantic across the top of the world, which we now know you can't do.
• 1:06:17
  It's just, it's all ice.
• 1:06:20
  Give it time with climate change.
• 1:06:21
  The only way was to go all the way down to the bottom of South America.
• 1:06:26
  That was a huge voyage until we cut.
• 1:06:28
  I say we.
• 1:06:29
  LAUGHTER
• 1:06:30
  The two of us, Stephen and Josh, cut the Panama Canal.
• 1:06:33
  That's right.
• 1:06:34
  But anyway, it's fascinating because he goes down all the way down to South Africa and then across the Pacific to New Zealand and then back to Australia where he'd first been, of course, to Botany Bay, not very far from where we were.
• 1:06:47
  are talking now.
• 1:06:49
  And he's in Tasmania, and then he goes up to Tahiti to return.
• 1:06:55
  Oh, my, this extraordinary Tahitian who he brought back to England on his second voyage and became the sensation of Britain, this remarkable Tahitian, whose complete desire was to...
• 1:07:11
  get his revenge against the people of Bora Bora who attacked his island.
• 1:07:14
  There was a lot of war going on in the society islands, whatever you prefer to call them now, that area of Polynesia.
• 1:07:22
  And then he went a bit north and discovered something completely new to the west, which was Hawaii, and had an amazing time in Hawaii.
• 1:07:29
  He was astonished by how wonderful and beautiful it was, and they were, and everything was gorgeous.
• 1:07:33
  Then he went up to the north and sailed around.
• 1:07:36
  But anyway,
• 1:07:39
  One I thought was what a good and interesting man he was.
• 1:07:43
  He was killed the second visit to Hawaii on the way, sir.
• 1:07:47
  Didn't they eat him?
• 1:07:50
  They may have done in a ritualistic way because they thought he was a god and that the god had betrayed them, this god Lomo.
• 1:07:56
  I'm not judging them for it.
• 1:07:57
  No, no, absolutely not.
• 1:07:59
  And it was...
• 1:08:01
  But what was interesting was that he felt very bad about the interference anyway and about the trading and all the rest of it.
• 1:08:08
  He was fascinated by the way they lived and very respectful of it.
• 1:08:11
  and had no sense that these countries should be run by Britain or anything else they should be governors sent out, he was a decent person.
• 1:08:19
  And I dare say they were very decent scientists.
• 1:08:21
  In a sense, he was like a scientist because his real skill was astonishing navigation.
• 1:08:26
  He was a remarkable seaman.
• 1:08:28
  I mean, absolutely incredible.
• 1:08:30
  The greatest of his age, and people were astounded.
• 1:08:32
  His crew were astounded by his skill and his instincts and so on.
• 1:08:36
  That's what he was.
• 1:08:37
  And there are scientists who have that knowledge about Mars.
• 1:08:41
  But the people who will go to Mars will be like the people who will exploit what Cook discovered and go, all right, well, we'll go there then.
• 1:08:48
  We'll go with the Royal Naval ship and we will run it and we will call it part of Britain.
• 1:08:53
  Who would lead the mission to Mars that would get the maximum buy-in from Stephen Fry?
• 1:08:57
  It would have to be a scientist and a scientist only, not someone who wanted to colonise it.
• 1:09:02
  Admittedly, there don't seem to be any Martians to be exploited, but the fact is we would just ruin another place.
• 1:09:11
  You know, it's like that hymn by Greenland's Icy Mountain, and there's a line in it, where every prospect pleases and only man is vile.
• 1:09:21
  And, you know, we are just such an infection.
• 1:09:26
  It's a terrible thing to say.
• 1:09:28
  We have some upsides.
• 1:09:29
  And we are part of nature.
• 1:09:30
  We are part of nature.
• 1:09:31
  You know, there are other animals that are infestations too.
• 1:09:34
  And, you know, other creatures can't write Moab is my washpot.
• 1:09:37
  Well, that's a very sweet thing to say, George.
• 1:09:39
  You know what I mean?
• 1:09:39
  It's like we are an infestation who has great redeeming features.
• 1:09:43
  I completely agree.
• 1:09:44
  We are gods and creatures.
• 1:09:46
  Yes.
• 1:09:46
  You know, aren't we?
• 1:09:47
  All of that.
• 1:09:48
  So very quickly, final things.
• 1:09:50
  What was the best thing about hosting QI?
• 1:09:53
  Oh, I mean the guest, Alan, really, Alan Davis.
• 1:09:57
  He's charming.
• 1:09:58
  Well, he allowed himself to be presented as a fool.
• 1:10:01
  He is anything but, and he's delightful.
• 1:10:04
  What's the least bad sport?
• 1:10:06
  The least bad sport?
• 1:10:08
  Well, cricket.
• 1:10:08
  Cricket is a great, great, great sport, a great artistic achievement.
• 1:10:12
  It's the greatest thing man has ever done.
• 1:10:15
  What's the best thing Oscar Wilde wrote?
• 1:10:17
  The importance of being honest.
• 1:10:20
  And de profundis a close second, his letter to Bosie from prison.
• 1:10:24
  Right.
• 1:10:25
  You get a time machine and you can go into the past, to any period and any place.
• 1:10:29
  Where do you go?
• 1:10:30
  You're not going to be killed.
• 1:10:32
  No.
• 1:10:32
  I'd go to the Café Royal in 1889, 1890, in the hope of meeting eventually...
• 1:10:42
  All the people who lived in that part of Victorian London would be Oscar Wilde, but also Sherlock Holmes would be just around the corner, or at least Conan Doyle.
• 1:10:50
  They met, actually, Conan Doyle and Wilde, and Conan Doyle was really impressed by Oscar Wilde.
• 1:10:55
  Wrote about him, even after the trial and the disgrace of Wilde.
• 1:10:59
  He wrote in his autobiography in the 20s, Conan Doyle, just how impressive a man he was.
• 1:11:05
  They were invited.
• 1:11:06
  It's a rather marvellous story.
• 1:11:07
  You could almost make a short film or something.
• 1:11:09
  There's a man called Stoddart who was the managing editor of an American literary magazine called Lippincott's Magazine, which published short stories and indeed full stories, novels.
• 1:11:21
  And rather like an American film producer, he went to England to get some talent.
• 1:11:26
  And he invited to dinner at the Langham Hotel, the original Langham.
• 1:11:30
  There are now Langhams all over the world.
• 1:11:33
  He invited Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling and Conan Doyle.
• 1:11:38
  Rudyard Kipling wrote The Light That Failed, his fantastic autobiographical novel about his...
• 1:11:43
  blindness about his, you know, or at least loss of good sight.
• 1:11:46
  He was very, very short-sighted.
• 1:11:49
  Kipling, it's a marvellous book.
• 1:11:51
  Conan Doyle was persuaded by Stoddart.
• 1:11:55
  This, The Study in Scarlet you wrote with that chap, what's he called?
• 1:11:59
  Sherlock something, Sherlock Holmes.
• 1:12:01
  Yes, I think there's another book in that.
• 1:12:04
  And so he wrote the second Sherlock Holmes book, The Sign of Four.
• 1:12:08
  And he said to Oscar Wilde, you've never written a novel, have you?
• 1:12:12
  You've written plays and everyone says, I wish you well.
• 1:12:14
  Why don't you write a novel?
• 1:12:15
  Have you got an idea for one?
• 1:12:16
  And Wilde said, well, I was thinking about someone whose portrait aged when they didn't.
• 1:12:23
  That sounds good to me.
• 1:12:24
  Write that.
• 1:12:25
  So a picture of Dorian Gray was written.
• 1:12:27
  So that one dinner at the Langham Hotel.
• 1:12:30
  So I'd like to be around there, you know, sort of bumping into those people.
• 1:12:34
  And thinking of that, you're such a polymath and you've done so many different things from Blackadder to QI to your books to your Greek mythology and everything.
• 1:12:43
  Do you ever wish you'd had a clearer focus?
• 1:12:48
  Yes.
• 1:12:48
  In a way, I do.
• 1:12:51
  I mean, I admire artists.
• 1:12:55
  And I'm not an artist.
• 1:12:57
  I have arguments with artists about this.
• 1:12:58
  They say, oh, yes, you're an artist.
• 1:12:59
  I say, no, no, no, no, no.
• 1:13:02
  One reason I know I'm not an artist is every artist I know, in the end, doesn't care what people think about them.
• 1:13:09
  They just go, oh, fuck that, I don't care.
• 1:13:12
  So Damien Hirst, someone like that, people can be incredibly rude about his work.
• 1:13:16
  Or other painter friends of mine, they can get, you know, criticism or their...
• 1:13:23
  market price goes down and they go, I care.
• 1:13:28
  That's my problem.
• 1:13:30
  I'm sensitive to the audience.
• 1:13:33
  I am in that sense.
• 1:13:34
  I suppose the word I would use is I'm an entertainer.
• 1:13:37
  I want people to be entertained by what I write, by what I say, and when I perform on a stage.
• 1:13:42
  And therefore, as an entertainer, I am the servant of the audience.
• 1:13:47
  An artist is a servant of no one.
• 1:13:50
  except their art.
• 1:13:51
  And I can't be like that.
• 1:13:53
  And part of me thinks it would be an adventure to be an artist, to be absolutely dedicated to something and care about that more than about what people thought of it.
• 1:14:03
  But then I care what people think about me too much socially as well as creatively.
• 1:14:09
  But that's okay.
• 1:14:10
  I mean, I suppose one of the themes of our conversation has been that I've come to the conclusion that it's okay.
• 1:14:18
  It is okay and you are very entertaining.
• 1:14:20
  Stephen, thank you.
• 1:14:22
  Thanks, John.