Beauty is the Point ｜ Joe Hage ｜ EP 352 (eynw7KqJx4g)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=eynw7KqJx4g

You should accept yourself just the way you are. What does that say about who I should become? Is that just now off the table because I’m already good enough in every way? So am I done or something? Get the hell up. Get your act together. Adopt some responsibility. Put your life together. Develop a vision. Unfold all those manifold possibilities that lurk within. Be a force for good in the world and that’ll be the adventure of your life. I gave up philosophy because I didn’t feel I could add anything to man’s intellectual history. So I remember being stuck in the library at Cambridge. It was raining, so I went down to the basement and read the abstracts of all the PhDs done in the past 100 years. You know, the abstracts, the first five pages. And I remember thinking, what I was doing wasn’t… I didn’t really have any ideas that merited spending three to five years of my life. So because I was so good at philosophy, and I thought I’d be good at some law too, I didn’t have enough money to become a lawyer. I’d seen a trial when I was 13 or 14 at the Old Bailey, which really impressed me with some barristers and cross-examination. That was a shocking thing for me to see because I’d seen a witness give evidence, and by the time he’d finished giving evidence, it’s called in chief, I totally believed the witness. And then the barrister questioned him. I remember seeing this, and I totally disbelieved him after the questioning. So that sort of ran parallel to this Cartesian doubt issue. Exactly. So you heard a story that was perfectly compelling, and then you saw someone tear it into bits. Exactly, and that was shocking for me because I totally believed the witness the first time. Hi, everyone. I’m here in London today. And I have the opportunity to speak to Joe Haig. And I met Joe with the film producer, the British film producer, Guy Ritchie. We’ve met, this is the fourth time we’ve met. And the last three times, we had a very interesting conversation. Joe has had a remarkable life in a variety of different directions and on a variety of different planes. And so for me, this is an opportunity to get to know him further. He’s had a remarkable career as a litigator and is also deeply involved in the world of modern fine art. And so we share a lot of interests. I worked with lawyers for a long time in Toronto when I was working as a clinician and a consultant. And I’ve been collecting art for a long time. And Joe’s quite the fascinating character. 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. And so that’s the plan for today. So Joe, I think we should probably start by doing a little bit of an investigation into your background. And so where were you born? I was born in Lebanon. And I came to England when I was four years old. I’m an only child. My mom and dad were immigrant workers. And they came to England. I often get asked this. 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. And when was that? We arrived on January the 9th, 1967. 67. It’s funny, immigrants often remember the day they arrived anyway. It’s like an important date, yeah, 67. Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s quite something to arrive in a new country with a young child and try to orient yourself and get going. What did your parents do in Lebanon? My mom didn’t do anything really. And my father was a carpenter and a French polisher, just polishing wood really. Often in churches, church pews needed polishing, French polishing. And how did they get the opportunity to come to Great Britain? It’s funny, like most things in life, it’s pure accident and chance. But the UK occupied England, I think, in the second half of the First World War. And so my auntie, my mom’s auntie, I call her my auntie, married an English soldier she’d fallen in love with. She came here, so we had the contact here. Most Lebanese would normally go to Australia, or as you probably know, to Canada, especially Montreal. But we came here just because of that chance encounter that my great aunt had with an English soldier in about 1944. So she was living here, and so she helped us come here. And so you came here when you were four. Do you remember anything of Lebanon as a child? Yeah, we’ve talked about this, I think, a little bit before. 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. But I have a vague memory of things. I remember wanting to get these old fantastic little biscuits and cakes and syrupy drinks, and they’d come round the streets shouting whether anyone wanted them. And if you wanted them, you’d lower a basket down with some money, and then they’d take the basket out of the power towers. Very keen on getting those little goodies as a kid. You know, that overlaying of memory, that’s an interesting phenomenon, because we tend to think of memory as something like a videotape recording, and it’s not that at all. Memory is very malleable, and every time you bring a memory to mind and discuss it and contemplate it, you actually change the shape of the memory, partly because you’re contextualising it differently as you think about it. So it alters and transforms while you play with it, and that’s sort of how the story of your life emerges from the memories of your life, and there’s a back and forth between that constantly. So, and what were things like for you in Great Britain? Where did you move specifically? Just to London, to South West London, Wimbledon, where I was brought up. You know, my auntie and uncle helped out, my great aunt and uncle helped out, and my mum and dad got jobs that were very hard, typical immigrant worker jobs, you know, helping in a kitchen, helping on a building site. But things were very good. I mean, looking back, we were very poor. By the time, we didn’t really feel poor. Yeah, well, if you have hope, you’re not poor. Exactly. You know, I lived in Montreal as a graduate student, and I lived in a poor neighbourhood, and I didn’t have much money because I was on a fellowship, and at that particular time, I was supporting Tammy, at least to some degree, but I knew I had a reasonably future that was likely to progress upward, and I started to really understand the difference between not having money and being poor at that point, because all my neighbours were poor. The neighbourhood I lived in was sort of, it wasn’t a slum by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a neighbourhood that had been multi-generationally poor, and it was poor enough so there were some people who’d fallen completely out of the system in the neighbourhood, and they were, by all measures, poor, fractured, fragmented, broken. And I thought, well, what’s the difference here exactly? I don’t have any money, and they don’t have any money, but I’m definitely not poor, and they’re definitely poor, and I realised that almost the entire difference was, well, I had nothing but opportunity in front of me, and if you have nothing but opportunity in front of you, assuming you’re not starving, you’re not poor, and partly because we live to a far greater degree than we realise on faith and hope, and if there’s a pathway open in front of you. So even with your parents, if they believed that you were likely to have a life that was going to improve quite dramatically as it progressed, then they have a reason for all their sacrifices and their work, and then with that reason, you’re not exactly poor, you just don’t have any money. That’s not the same thing. I agree. You have hope. I was in an ambulance a while ago with someone who was critically ill, and I remember the ambulance driver saying, do you think they’ll make it? And they said, yeah, sure, they will. I’m sure they will. You have to have hope. And they said this nice phrase, they said, hope is the last thing to die. That’s really the way it should be. If it dies before it should, then you die shortly thereafter because you have to have hope. Yeah, well, you see with clinical depression, it has two components, and one is that people suffer from both an overwhelming influx of pain and anxiety, so that’s on the negative emotion front, and you might think that that’s sufficient to produce depression, but it’s not. Real depression is also characterised by the eradication of positive emotion, and hope is really, if you had to specify a single word to represent the bulk of the positive emotion that people most truly want to experience, hope is likely the best word, because hope is experienced in relationship to a goal, to a valued goal, and so if you see yourself progressing towards a valued goal, or you see any pathway whatsoever open up towards a valued goal, then you have hope, and if you’re truly depressed, that hope vanishes and all you see in front of you are obstacles and pitfalls, and well, then if you add pain and anxiety to that, you’ve got a good recipe for despair, and that despair, that’s poverty, and this is an important thing to understand because this is, I think, one of the problems of both the right and the left wing ideas in relationship to money. The left thinks that poverty is caused by lack of money, and you can’t cure despair with money. You can add impulsive hedonism to despair with money, but you can’t cure it with money, and the right, well, I will leave that out of the conversation for now, and so what was your childhood like in Wimbledon? Yeah, it was very good, very happy. My mum and dad were probably more dependent on me than usual parents because they couldn’t speak English as quickly as I could or as well as I could. Right. So I had to help them read letters and help them do things, but it was a very, you know, they loved me so much, and that was the main thing they did for me, but it was a good upbringing. Obviously, everything was state-paid, the school, you know, because we didn’t have money to go to a fee-paying school, but I had a very happy upbringing, at least it appears to be the case now when I pull my memory out of it and put it back. I had lots of good friends. There’s one thing, as we were talking earlier about where you lived in Montreal, which I thought was quite interesting, is that because we were so relatively poor, we had a house with three bedrooms in it, but because we didn’t have so much money to pay for it, we rented out a lot of the rooms. This is like 50 years ago. And so you’d always have different, I think, people who live, I wouldn’t say in poverty, but people who don’t have much money, they often live closer together and on top of each other, and so we had lots of people coming in and out of the house. I remember there was an Iranian couple, an Irish builder, an old lady who lived in the house, and you saw quite a lot of life jammed up close. And that was quite good as a kid for me to see so many different people from different societies, really. I didn’t realise that at the time, but it was really great. Well, there must have been some advantage, too, to being dependent upon like that by your parents at such an early age, because that puts you… I mean, children really like to have genuine responsibility if you can lay out a pathway forward for them so that they are contributing in some way that isn’t merely illusory. It helps them pay for the burden of their care, and it’s not like they’re thinking that through, but they’re feeling it. Kids, because they’re human, would just as soon be in a reciprocal relationship if they can manage it. One of the advantages to being in the situation that you’re in is that you actually did have some real things to do. It mattered that you could speak English and read and intermediate for your parents, and certainly that places a quasi-adult burden on you. And you could imagine that that could get overwhelming if your parents were struggling and barely staying afloat, but you could also see that that could be an optimal situation for someone young. How about… How were you treated by the other kids in the neighbourhood? You’re an immigrant kid. The trope would be that that would go badly, and of course, obviously, often it doesn’t. I don’t think it probably goes badly more often than a kid’s life in general goes badly. Yeah. But how were you… Treated very well. I mean, where I was brought up in London, there were lots of immigrants, really, at different phases. There’s different phases of immigration. I always found England, or London anyway, the least racist place going, but there were lots of Irish kids, Indian kids, Caribbean kids, so it was pretty mixed up, and there wasn’t any racism. Everyone was kind of welcomed in the immigrant community, and the English people were also very welcoming. So I’ve never had any sort of… I’ve always felt welcomed here, for which I’m really appreciative, and so is my mother and father. Right, right. And you also… You’re… You appear quite positively predisposed to the memories you have of your childhood, and you said that your parents loved you. And how did that make itself manifest? What was your relationship with your father like? He… I had a bit of fear about him, because he was quite a strong and potentially violent man, but he never hit me. But it’s funny, when I was a child, my mother used to hit me, but not in a way that really hurt, it was just more in a way that people did 40 or 50 years ago, not in a bad way, but it made no difference to me. I’d just be running around the room, we’d be shouting to each other. We used to feel sorry for our mother when she got pushed to the point where she’d have to hit us. The three… I had two siblings, and we’d ramp up the excitement in the house, or the squabbling, or whatever it was, and mum was very patient, but now and then, we’d push her beyond her capacity for tolerance, and she’d lash out in some manner that didn’t really make any difference at all. Make any difference at all. We were way more likely to stop misbehaving because we felt guilty that we’d upset her, because of anything that was a consequence of the blow. I think the way that… My mum and dad were very simple, because they were essentially from a village in the mountains in Lebanon, and they had a very pure and simple approach to life. And I think the thing that they gave me, when you said, how did love manifest itself, it also manifested itself in a belief in me. And I remember, I was telling, I was talking to some friends recently, if I said I wanted to do anything, they would support me, anything at all, really. Yeah. And they would believe in me. Like, even if I were to say to my mum now, I’ve decided to try and win the 100m Olympic gold medal for sprinting, she wouldn’t say, don’t be so ridiculous. She’d say, of course, you can do it. And even though it’d be absurd, she really would believe in me. Even now, she’d believe in me doing it. And that gave me so much… Yeah, that’s very interesting, because one of the things I think that my parents gave me on both sides was exactly that. And that’s an interesting example of the positive manifestation of faith. And it wasn’t like they were deluded about my stature or potential ability. And it wasn’t a narcissistic grandiosity on their part about the specialness of their child. It was… I thought this through, I think, technically, when I was working as a clinician. And it was… I really think that what it was was the best in them serving the best in me and their fundamental willingness to have that happen. And I really noticed the difference between the relationship I had, particularly with my father, and the relationship. Who was a rough guy and who had very high standards and who was a strict person. He was no pushover and no sympathetic font of easy love. But he had this intrinsic faith in my ability. And I always had that with me, always. And my friends… I grew up in a working-class town, and my friends, by and large, didn’t have that, particularly from their father. And that was definitely something that was hard on them and lacking in their life, because they didn’t have that… It’s like an internal sense of… Well, if your parents have faith in you, it’s a lot easier for you to have faith in you as you move out to confront the world. It’s a gift of faith that’s transmitted down the generations, fundamentally. And so your parents did provide you with that. Did they do it in different ways? Like, how would you separate their roles? In very similar ways. They would be both supportive. Whatever I wanted, they’d let me do. And they’d say… Not let me do, but support me and believe in me. You know, if I’d say, I’m going to do this, they’d say, of course. They’ll take winning the 100 meters, they’ll say, somebody’s got to do it. Why not you? You’re as good as anyone else. Right, right. Why not you? Yeah, why not you? Which is kind of a good question. So they just believed if you worked hard, you could do anything you wanted to. Yeah, it’s a good question in general for people to consider. It’s like, well, if this could be done in some conceivable world, it could be you. And, I mean, obviously, every person can’t do everything, but there’s a lot of things to do. So you can probably find some of the things that are your things to do. And so… So, now, how about school? How do you do in school? I did… I was very gifted academically. I won’t say very gifted, but fairly gifted. And I went to Catholic school. My mum and dad are Christians, and they were Maronite Christians, but the closest they could get to that was Catholic school. So I went to a Catholic school. There was a state school that was sponsored by the state, so we didn’t have to pay money, and it was run by some Jesuits in Wimbledon. And so it was quite a Catholic school. We had to go to… We had to pray at the beginning of every lesson, and we used to go to Mass every once a week in the morning. I used to have to… I normally went more than once a week, actually. I normally went every day. It was a quick Mass, and it was just a good way to clear your mind. It wasn’t that I was particularly religious as a child, but you get into the ritual and the routine of it, and the meditative nature of it, which I found very useful. I found that quite useful at university, too. And how old were you when you started doing that? Between 13 and 18, really. And you found that ritual useful very early? Yeah, well, probably 14 or 15, at least then. And how do you think it helped you orient yourself at that age on a day-to-day basis? What were you orienting yourself toward? I think if you coupled it with another thing that I really took away from school, through school, you cram your mind through loads of facts that you have to let go as soon as you get an exam and never have to remember again. So there’s loads of that going through. But the one sort of thing that stays in my mind now, after many years of thinking about school, was that… The Jesuits in my school had this thing that for every piece of work you did, every essay or problem you had to solve, you’d have to write at the top of it something called AMDG, which is Latin for Ad Mori and De Glorium, which means for the greater glory of God. Now, that sounds, in a way, a bit over the top, because you think, you know, just writing a little essay or solving a problem, why should this be for the greater glory of God? But that stayed in me, the idea that everything you did, whether you’re religious or not, if you believe in something more than simply yourself, you know, I have my religious moments too. It’s not like I’m a very devout person, but that stayed with me, the belief that everything you do has to be for something great. Well, it has to be for something. And so, if it’s for something, then you could infer that it should be for something good. And if it’s for something good, it might as well be for the best. And so, I mean, we talked a little bit earlier in today’s discussion about hope. And, you know, people often find themselves mired into kind of unproductive hopelessness. And that’s partly because they don’t direct what they’re doing, the trivial things they’re doing towards a higher purpose. And if you understand that each step you take, no matter how small it is, is a step taken towards somewhere that you really want to go and should go, then that does infuse each step with meaning. And that’s how the nervous system is set up, because hope is experienced in relationship to a goal. And your goals can be fragmented and fractionated and impulsive, but that just means you’re not very well organized. If you compile all those fragmented and fractionated goals into something like the uppermost goal, which in principle would unite you with other people, because unless you want an uppermost goal that divides you from other people, then everything you do should carry that imprimatur. You know, in the Sermon on the Mount, the fundamental injunction of the Sermon on the Mount is to orient your attitude in the most profound way towards that which is the highest, and to decide that you’re going to serve the highest, and then to concentrate on the moment. And it looks like that idea was embedded in that Jesuit practice. You said it’s over the top. It’s like, well, not when you compare the alternatives, because the alternatives are a kind of pointless fractionation, or what, you’re gaming down? Yeah, at least it makes you try your best, because you’re thinking, is this the best I can do for myself and for the world, or for a greater force? It does give you that motivation and realization that everything you do, you have to try your best. And when you were a teenager, so this is 13 to 15, say, that’s a time when people often start to become somewhat cynical. Most kids misbehave a little bit more, especially boys, around that time than they might before that or after that. I mean, were you a positively oriented person when you were a teenager, in the same way that you appear to have been as a child? Did that carry through, like, the teenage years? Yes, it did, yeah. I was positively oriented throughout that time. I think I lost it for a bit when I was 17, for a few months, and when I met my first girlfriend. But then that was, you know, I lost my, I didn’t study so hard for a few months, but then I got back into it. Right, so that was a romantic disappointment. Right, but that was the only sort of crisis of, let’s say, faith and optimism that you experienced when you were that age? I wouldn’t call it a crisis, more of a diversion. Yeah. Yeah, but that’s fine. Well, the religious training, per se, that you obtained at the hands of the Jesuits, I mean, you said that you found the meditative aspect of mass useful to orient yourself very rapidly and fell into that as a practice. So that gave you a chance to think, like, what were you doing when you were, what do you think you were doing when you were attending mass? And then also being willing to attend it. I wasn’t listening to much of what was going on in the mass. I was just thinking about what I was doing, why I was doing it, what I was going to do that day, going back to, it’s just clearing your mind, really. It wasn’t particularly, it wasn’t like I was listening to the sermon. Some of the times I didn’t, so I normally listened to the sermon, but it was just, it was almost like meditation. I think there was another time in my life when I also went to mass every day. It wasn’t even mass, it’s called Evensong. When I was at university, in about 515, there was a 20-minute, very spiritually uplifting choir, Evensong, and it was fantastic. And you’re in this amazing building. Right, there’s this beautiful chapel, university chapels. And I was at King’s College, Cambridge, and you go in there and you just feel, it’s not as if you’re thinking about it and you just uplift it and transcend it into something else. And you come out of that feeling cleansed and feeling like it. Right, right. Well, that clarity of mind, so imagine there’s multiple states that you can exist in conceptually, and one state would be the state where the goal that you’re pursuing is paramount and obvious. And what that means is the world divides itself quite clearly into a set of affordances that will move you forward, pathways and tools, and a set of obstacles. But it’s clear. And imagine instead that you’re plagued by a multitude of concerns. And what that means, it’s as if you’re trying to operate with 10 different maps simultaneously. And that is murky. And so when people use metaphors like clear their mind, what they are referring to is the fact that if you can get what you’re doing clear, then the world that lays itself out in front of you is clear practically. You can navigate in it, but it’s also clear emotionally because what’s relevant is obvious. And what’s irrelevant, which is even more important, is obvious. And what’s good is obvious and what’s not good is obvious. And that does mean that your mind is clear. And the alternative to that is a confused and hopeless anxiousness. It is. I think there’s another, some of my best ideas happen when I, it’s not so much you clear your mind, but if you stop doing what you’re doing, even if you’re doing nothing else, and if, or if you go away, sometimes like you might go away to have a break for a week or two and then you look back at your life in London, how busy you are, and you see things of it differently. When you, when you stop doing them and stand away from them, sometimes you have the best ideas about how you can carry on. In a world that is constantly changing and moving at such a fast rate, there’s no better time to become more deeply rooted in your faith. A great place to start is building a habit of prayer and meditation. Join me and thousands of others on Halo, the number one Christian prayer app in the US. Halo is helping me maintain a daily prayer routine and it can help you too. Download the app for free at halo.com slash Jordan. You can set prayer reminders and track your progress along the way. Not sure where to start? Check out Father Mike Schmitz’s Bible in a Year, available on the Halo app for brief daily Bible readings and reflections. Or pray alongside Mark Wahlberg, Jim Caviezel, and even some world-class athletes. With Halo, you can customize a personal prayer plan that works for you. Listen anywhere you are with downloadable offline sessions. Get an exclusive three-month free trial at halo.com slash Jordan. That’s halo.com slash Jordan. When you’re task-focused, your perception is very high resolution and everything gives zeroed out, right? Except this very specific thing that you’re narrowly focusing on. And that’s great because it’s efficient and you can concentrate on the task at hand. But it’s not so good if what you’re focusing on happens to not be exactly the right thing. And so if you can step back in this more contemplative mood, it enables you to evaluate and reshift what your priorities might be. And that’s very different than concentrating on the micro routines that are relevant to a given priority. And it seems it’s a bit of an oversimplification, but not too much to say that if you’re locked on target in relationship to a goal and then undertaking the micro routines necessary to make it happen, you’re dominated by your left hemisphere and it’s mostly linguistic and practical. And when you snap into that more contemplative phase, then you’re shifting your goals and maybe voluntarily. Daydreaming is like that. And that’s a right hemisphere state of existence. And to calibrate yourself properly, you have to continually shift between focus and contemplation of what should be focused on. And that’s a dance. That’s a good way of thinking about it. That’s the eternal communication between yin and yang. That’s wayfinding. That’s what happens in a good conversation because there’s that dynamic interplay. And to get that optimized, that’s optimized psychological function isn’t much different than optimizing those two processes so that they benefit each other. And again, in school at this age, so you’re in junior high now, 13 to 15, let’s say, what’s your social network like at that point? Pretty good. It was a boys school, so we played lots of rugby and I hang out with boys. Occasionally went to some sort of community club that was basically hanging out with boys, playing sport, which I really enjoyed. Oh, so and were you athletic? Yeah, very athletic. And what did you specialize at? Rugby, really. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So that’s another reason in all likelihood that you were reasonably popular. Right. So you were successful on the athletic front. I was very good at rugby. And why were you successful? I think it’s probably again going back to my mom and dad because I believed that I could run faster and further and harder, even if I couldn’t. I just had a lot of belief in myself. And so you had an intrinsic confidence. Exactly. Which enabled you to try and do things that you might not otherwise do if you had some self-doubt or frailty. Right. So you weren’t held back by any unnecessary intrinsic limitations. Yeah, well, you see this often with people that a lot of the times the walls that hold people in are unrecognized, implicit limitations on self-conceptualization. The notion that, well, I could do this just never occurs to the person. They’ve already got themselves boxed in. This is the sort of person I am. And anything beyond that, that’s often parameterized by their parents’ achievements, for example, especially if their parents aren’t very supportive. They presume that this is who they are and that’s all they could ever be and that’s that. And people will say to themselves, you see this a lot in negative self-talk that’s associated with depression. It’s like, oh, I could never say something in a group. Well, man, you formulate that idea at 12 and you never alter it your whole life. You never say anything in a group your whole life. And if you take someone like that in a psychotherapeutic situation and you point out to them, look, you just said you could never say something in a group. Someone socially anxious might be like that. It’s like, let’s take that apart a bit. Could you not say one word? What if the group was two people? You obviously talking to two people. Have you ever talked to three people? You can decompose it. You find that people hem themselves in with these tyrannical self-conceptions that limit them to an indeterminate degree. Everybody’s not going to be an artistic genius, but most people can learn to draw. And they can learn to draw a lot faster than they think. And they can learn to draw faster and become better than they think quite rapidly. But they won’t even try. And so this gift that you were given by your parents was something like the generalized rejection of that whole set of a priori negative conception. So your default operating presupposition was you could probably do it. Yeah, that’s a great thing to be able to give your kids that belief. Because I used to try this with my son. It’s like, you know, I’d ask him, you think you could do this? Do you think you could do this? And his default answer always was yes. And you can think about that as a kind of delusion, an optimistic delusion. But you have to be pretty damn cynical to reduce it to that. Yeah, exactly. And maybe it’s an optimistic delusion, but maybe your son’s right to have it because he can’t do it. Well, it’s better than the pessimistic delusion, which is no, no, of course I could. Because I’ve certainly met people like that whose default 100% was no. Any question that they even set to themselves is, oh, no, I probably couldn’t do that. Yeah, I agree with you. My parents were very poor because they were immigrants and they changed their whole life. Now, which I find incomprehensible how somebody would have the courage to do that at their age of 25 or 35. My father was nine or 10 years older. And they were also disinhibited as well. I learned a lot from them because they challenged everything because they came from another society. My father, this is a rather small story, but it shows how disinhibited they were. If my father lost my mother in a supermarket, he’d stand in the middle of the supermarket and shout out in his full voice, my mom’s name, Salma, say, Salma. And everyone would look around at him and he wouldn’t care. He just said, look, I don’t know what the problem is. I’ve lost my wife. I want to find her. In England, and most of the Westmoreland people are a bit more inhibited. They wouldn’t shout their head off. But that different approach to life where everything was, you know, can be challenged and they would do things like that as if they’re in the village. It was a kind of a double life. So you saw two parts of that. 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. And then they also brought with them a set of behaviors that didn’t match the precise limitations of the culture they were in. That’s right. 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. And I was also brought up as an English boy in a school. And that double life meant I didn’t really feel totally English or totally Lebanese. So I was kind of outside of both little societies in a way, especially because of my parents. Right. So that makes you a shapeshifter. What does that mean? Well, there are figures in mythology who exist on boundaries. So the spirit Mercury, for example. Mercury is the winged messenger of the gods, and he exists half in the human world and half in the divine world. But there’s a place there that’s a border between two categories. And the way Mercury makes himself manifest is by catching your interest. Some things catch your interest. Some things don’t. There’s a pattern to the things that catch your interest. And that pattern is associated with, well, you could say you become interested in the things that are likely to further your development. So you could think that implicit inside you is the realm of the potential better you. And then it captures your interest and it guides you in those directions. And that’s the spirit that exists on the boundary. And the spirit that exists on a boundary, there’s a word for that. The word is psychopom. And a psychopom isn’t one thing or another. It’s a shapeshifter, a trickster. And what that means is that one of the things you learned is that you could operate in two different territories. And so whatever you were, fundamentally, wasn’t limited to the things that were limited by either of those territories. Exactly. And that is, I think how you’ve described me is how I am. And I have this tension with some people I look after and manage in the business world. I love chaos. And I love, I enjoy that. And I enjoy when there’s a real crisis is when I’m at my best. And when we don’t know what’s going to happen next, I love chaos. I remember my partner, I was going to, I was getting a flight and I was on the way to the airport. He said, where are you going? And I said, I’m not sure. I’m either going to Singapore or New York. I’ve got tickets to both. He said, but you’re in the car on the way to the airport. So I know they both go at the same time. So when are you going to decide? So I decide when I get there. And most people don’t like that degree of indecision and chaos in life. But I had a rucksack and I could go to either, but that’s where I thrive. Well, that’s okay. So that’s interesting too, that you are able to, it seems to me that the fact that you’re able to do that is associated with this default presupposition that your parents helped instill and support in you, which is that while you can do it, you know, because one way of limiting anxiety, anxiety is to limit choice, zero choice, generally speaking, zero anxiety, because there’s no conflict. But another way of dealing with anxiety is to presume that if the situation shifts on you, you can manage it. That’s why people like to watch jugglers, for example, or acrobats, because, you know, they’re in a situation that’s dynamically unstable and yet they can continue their complex operations and everyone loves that. And it’s because it’s a reflection of that spirit that’s able to juggle. And so now how did it come about that you had tickets to Singapore and New York? I had meetings in both places, but I wasn’t sure what was going to be the most important. I made a final phone call. I had to just assess which was the best place to be at that particular time. Right. And so you were leaving it till? To the last minute. Which were you where you’d have the most information? Yeah, I’ll come back to that. I can deal with that now, actually. In a way about decision making, it’s not quite in the relevant place in my career. But often people spend a lot of time focusing on what’s the right decision to make. But they neglect a very important question. And this is in my life as a litigator, really. Or even in life generally, they neglect the important question of when is the right time to make the decision. And so they just think, should I do this or that? But they don’t think when do I have to decide because… Or when should I do it? 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Well, people also assume… I watched my colleagues, for example, in graduate school try to figure out which city they should live in if they had competing job offers from different universities. And they might be completely on different sides of the continent or in different countries. And so you might say, well, this is a really crucial decision. And the truth of the matter is, it’s actually not that crucial a decision because if you’re in a good university in a large city, you have way more opportunity than you’ll ever be able to make use of in both places. So the first thing you have to realize is, both of those decisions in principle could be good. And the right city isn’t even an appropriate category because it’s not like a city is one thing. A city is 50 billion things. And so the real question in a situation like that is, could I land in my feet and start to operate properly regardless of which of these places that I’m in? And the answer to that should be yes. And if it’s yes, then you think, oh, either choice is good. And then you can start thinking, well, now maybe I’ll go to city one and talk to the people there and see how I get along. And I’ll go to city two and start to find my way. But people often are under the misapprehension that they come to these important inflection points in their life, like which city? And that’s going to determine the entire course of their life. And it does in so far as geographical locale is one thing rather than another. But if it’s a choice between immensely productive options, then there’s no sacrifice in the choice. There’s just a choice between different banquets. That’s a good way of thinking about it. Exactly. But even if there is a sacrifice, you’d have to ask yourself, when do I have to make this decision? Is it now? Because people feel the pressure of making a decision. They say, well, I don’t have to decide until the 31st of March. Between now and then, I’ll just think about it. And then I’ll decide. That’s what I’m saying. But people often force themselves to make a decision before they have to. People who work with me or for me get frustrated because they say, are we doing this or that? And I say, when do I have to decide? And often, because I leave things up in the air, like the juggler, you’re talking to. It gets very frustrating. People like to have an audit. They’d like to know what they’re going to do. But I like to leave things. You don’t mind the uncertainty. Well, you know, I used to tell that many undergraduates who, for example, they didn’t know whether they wanted to go to medicine or to clinical psychology. And so I’d say, well, apply to both. Make 20 applications to both. And maybe you don’t even have a choice because you get accepted to psychology and not medicine. End of problem. Or the problem will become more acute when you actually realize that you didn’t get into medicine and that’s what you wanted. But that’ll snap into focus. But you can pursue it. But then let’s say, well, now you have three offers from a clinical program and three offers from a medical program. It’s like, okay, now you have six decisions to make and now you can go to each of these places and investigate them and you’re going to gather way more information. And then by the time you need to make the decision, which could be as late as possible, you’re going to be much more informed. And so that’s another problem with making a premature decision is that my advice to my students and my clients was always don’t close the door before it’s necessary to close the door because you’re not maximally informed at that point. And also, you don’t have to accept that temptation to prematurely foreclose, right, to deal with that anxiety. It’s not a good way of dealing with it. These are the options on the table. It is a temptation for people to make decisions before they need to because they want to have order, but they close doors. They don’t need to. And that’s hard psychology. I don’t know why it’s hard. Well, it’s a lack of it is it I do believe it’s associated with a lack of faith of the sort that we’ve been describing is that people aren’t they don’t have enough faith in their own ability to dance and to juggle. And so they want to specify the narrower pathway as soon as possible to get things, you know, unnecessary chaos isn’t helpful. And I don’t think you want to, you know, distribute mayhem and catastrophe wherever you go. But and if there is sometimes I might leave it to the last minute and it’s not the last minute. You pushed it too far and you should have made it. Yeah, well, that’s another that’s another mistake you can make. But the thing is there are mistakes everywhere. OK, so now you’re you’re in in this in the Jesuit schools. And are your academic interests starting to make themselves known? And what are they? There are two things. I was very interested in science. I missed one thing out that was important in my formative years, which I’ve just realized in talking to now is when I was about 13, I went to visit my family in Montreal and my uncle Joseph is a is a teacher, a professor of philosophy. And philosophy means lots of things to different people. Obviously, he did what’s called in England European philosophy because the English philosophy or Anglo American philosophy tends to be quite dry and logical and to do with, you know, Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, which I also like. So he did Sartre and other people. And at the age of 13, he spoke to me a lot and really influenced me and persuaded me to read Descartes Meditations and Discourse, which is a really important thing for me. As you you probably know, they’re about skepticism and what you can know for certain. And he challenges all the assumptions you have. And that really started. That was an important thing for me. Why? Because I was a bit shocked that you could challenge so many things. And I started challenging things in my school, in the subjects that I was taught, and it changed my my attitude to life, really questioned a lot, made me question a lot of things and not take anything for granted. And at the same time, so it helped you notice you were taking things for granted. Yeah. And then it helped you realize that wasn’t necessary and develop your skill at questioning. So why didn’t that just throw you into disarray? Because it sort of threw Descartes into disarray. Right. I mean, he became rather desperate before he came to his final doubt. Yeah. Looking back, maybe it did throw me into disarray. I spent many hours discussing these things with my closest friend at the time, a guy called Justin, including the debates one has when one’s young about the meaning of life. But particularly, we were obsessed with determinism and whether you had any free will at all. And so we just discussed these things. And at the same time, I developed a strong interest in science. So I did lots of mathematics and physics and chemistry. But like most young people, you begin to change after a while, you’re desperately trying to find meaning for life and question things. And that stayed with me a bit longer, because after how that influenced me, that’s when it happened at 13. But by the time I went to university, I decided to do philosophy at university. Where did you go to university? I went to York and at Cambridge. I did postgraduate work there. I was mainly doing a PhD at Cambridge and it was on the philosophy of science fun enough. So it all came together. And so York, you studied philosophy? Yep. And at Cambridge too. And at Cambridge after that? Yeah, exactly. And so what did the study of philosophy at York entail? I don’t know the class structure. No, you just have, I think you do nine different subjects. Like I said, it’s sort of Anglo-American philosophy. It tends to be logic and Wittgenstein and Bertram Russell and a lot of what they call epistemology, which is the study of knowledge. Right. How is it that you know something? Exactly. How is it you know something? Do you really know it? And how do you know you know it? And these were fascinating subjects for me. 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 from the structure of scientific revolutions, how you change your paradigms about what you know. And what I was doing my PhD on, although after about a year or so I decided not to leave. I didn’t want to carry on with it. I’ll come back to that later. It was on what you could tell about the, it sounds so extraordinary really to say it now, given my whole life in a very practical commercial world. By the time I was obsessed with knowing what you could tell about the physical world, simply from a priori reasoning, there’s really the debate between the rationalist philosophers and the empiricists. Yeah. And that was, I found that fascinating. So it’s interesting because you, your career did take a very practical turn, but you spent quite a lot of time when you were young. How old were you when you went off to York? 19. And did you, is that a more American model university or more British model? Did you have, did your university program consist mostly of attending lectures or were you doing a lot of reading on your own? A lot of reading on our own, a few lectures and then a tutorial every week where you have to write an essay every week on a subject and debate. So it was more a Cambridge Oxford model. And so, and you were disciplined enough to be pursuing these academic pursuits or interested enough in the topic to be pursuing these on your own. How much reading were you doing? More than anyone. I just was obsessed with reading and learning. I had a gap year before going to university and they sent a reading list out, which was basically I think the whole three years worth of reading this night. I thought you had to do it before you arrived. So they got missed off a couple of books. And I remember queuing up on the admissions day and feeling really guilty. And I said to a student in line, said, have you read it all? And they told me, I haven’t written anything yet. That’s what you meant to read in the next three years. I see. I see. So you got to jump on it. Yeah. Yeah. And so, and so how did that experience of all, what did that experience of all that reading do for you? And then how did that set you up for your eventually more practical pursuits? How did you make that leap from the philosophical and contemplative back into the practical? And like, how did that come about? How did you justify that to yourself or how did that emerge as the right pathway? Yeah, it’s a good question. I gave up philosophy because I didn’t feel I could add anything to man’s intellectual history. So I remember being stuck in the library at Cambridge. It was raining. So I went down to the basement and read the abstracts of all the PhDs done in the past hundred years. You know, the abstracts, the first five pages. And I remember thinking what I was doing wasn’t, I didn’t really have any ideas that merited spending three to five years of my life to put in a book. So you didn’t have a burning philosophical revelation at hand that needed to be worked out. You wandered through the territory that other people had explored, but you’re, there wasn’t, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because at some point you have to decide that you’ve got something truly original and creative to add or you’re done. Or you’re just, oh, you’re not done, but you can carry on and you can do what I call a footnote exercise. Still get your PhD, but you haven’t really taken things further for man’s. Right, right, right. Yeah. So I decided that. So because I was so good at philosophy and I had, I thought I’d be good at law too. I didn’t have enough money to become a lawyer. So I decided to have a five-year plan. And the background was my mother and father. My mother and father believe in commerce, even though they weren’t particularly good at it, even though they didn’t do much of it, but in their, in their blood, in their, in their belief, they really think that the highest thing you can do is business. And my father, my father didn’t like, although always supported me thought philosophy was a kind of waste of time. You just be buying and selling things and doing business. And, but he still supported me in doing that. And so I, I wanted to go and work and I’d seen a trial when I was 13 or 14 at the old Bailey, which really impressed me with some barristers and cross-examination. That was a shocking thing for me to see because I’d seen a witness give evidence. And by the time he’d finished giving evidence, it’s called in chief, I totally believed the witness. And then the barrister questioned him. I remember seeing this and I totally disbelieved him after the questioning. So that sort of ran parallel to this Cartesian doubt issue. Exactly. Right. So you heard a story that was perfectly compelling and then you saw someone tear it into bits. Exactly. And that was shocking for me because I totally believed the witness the first time. Yeah, well it is shocking too when your feelings, let’s say are in sync with someone who’s telling a story that makes you sympathetically oriented to them. And then some attack dog comes along and says, here’s all the lies and the contradictions and none of this is true. And yeah, it is a shocking. It’s very shocking. It’s not just that you believe someone. It’s just that if you believe someone and you’re on the jury, somebody would have gone to prison who shouldn’t have gone to prison. Right, right. The stakes are high. Yeah, the stakes are high. Well, and that’s interesting too. Then that means that the stakes are high for that naive sympathy as well. Yeah, exactly. That naive, non-critical sympathy. Yeah, well it’s something. So when I came to finish university, I thought, what can I do? I didn’t have enough money to do law, but I wanted to do law. So I decided to have a five-year plan, which is a bit extraordinary really looking back. And I decided to qualify as an accountant, which I did specialize. How old were you at this point? I had finished university at around the age of 24. 24, okay. So I did a five-year plan, which I qualify as an accountant where I worked, made money, did my exams, qualified with Price Waterhouse in the city. It’s the late 80s. The financial sector was booming. There was something called Big Bang. So I learned a lot about business and banking. Upon qualification, as planned, and everyone was shocked, I jacked it all in, went back to law school for two years, and then the pupillage at the bar where I became a barrister specializing in commercial litigation. And did you like being an accountant? Because that’s quite, in some ways, on the opposite end of the distribution from philosophy. Yes. It’s so concentrated on, I wouldn’t say minutiae, but certainly details. I did enjoy it. I was an auditor, so I was checking things up. So there was a bit scientific, you’re trying to prove things. So there’s an investigative element. But I think I liked it because I knew I was doing it for three years or four years, you know, three years really. Right. So it was part of this plan that was actually very compelling to you. And so what was the contents of your five-year plan? The content was if I could become good at, I’d get some money from being an accountant. I’d be good at business and commerce. Many of these things are fallacious in a way. I’ll come back, I’ll unpack it for you in a second. And then I’d be able to go to law school and become a good lawyer. And I’d become an even better lawyer than most lawyers because most lawyers don’t understand numbers. That’s what I believe. So you’d have the philosophical background and you’d have the detail-oriented numeric background. Well, there’s certain, at least, a certain rigor in thinking that’s associated with the arithmetic and the mathematical realm. Okay, so you drained as an accountant and you managed to make some money and then you went off to law school. What law school? It was in London. There was a conversion course in the city of London. And then there’s a bar school you go to, which is only for barristers for the second year. So it’s an Inns of Court School of Law. And then you do your pupillage. I’ll get back to the fallacies, though. I think because I thought I was good at philosophy, I’d be good at arguing in the law. I’m not sure that’s true. I am quite good at it, but I think you could be good at it without being good at philosophy. The other fallacy is you’re a better lawyer if you also know a lot about numbers. I’m not sure that’s true either. I don’t think you have to be an accountant to become a lawyer. But as you say- But it did make you some money. It made me some money, which is not a fallacy that was real. Right, right, right, right. And it’s not an outrageous fallacy. It did help me in life because I saw the thing I enjoyed most about accounting and all the things was you saw different businesses every few weeks and you’re in different situations. Right, so you got to walk through the businesses. Yeah, exactly. And so what kind of investigation were you doing as an accountant into these multiple businesses? Well, as an occasion I did investigation as if there was a takeover. This is many years ago, so you know I’m quite old now. But in audit you just have to prove, it’s like a quite scientific process, you have to prove the numbers that they present, the real numbers. And so you can’t check every number, so you have to try and work out, you have to understand the system, how numbers became the numbers, how you test them, how many, what’s the statistical sample you take that makes it likely to be the case. Right, so it’s applied epistemology. Exactly. It’s like, do we really know this? Do these numbers rep- This is one of the things that’s frightening about the online world and big media companies who can gerrymander the numbers. There’s nothing more cardinal as an intellectual sin than to falsify what a number represents. Because numbers, there isn’t any concept that we have that has a more, has a closer one-to-one concordance with the structure of the world than numbers. So if you’re dealing with someone who is playing fast and loose with the numbers, that’s a very deep sort of intellectual, and I would say too, theological sin. Okay, so you’re seeing it, you have privileged access to a number of different businesses, and you’re trying to find out where the reality is. Exactly. Do you think, sorry, going back to what you’re saying, do you think numbers is the closest thing we have to truth? Well, I think it depends on the kind of truth, but numbers are associated with reality in the same way that music is associated with reality. I mean, our agreement on what constitutes one thing or two things or ten things, it’s pretty fundamental, it’s grammatical, I suppose. Yeah, it’s a structural thing. Yeah, and it’s not as if there aren’t other forms of profundity and there are other forms of higher or truth. But numbers are pretty basic tools, and the lies that emerge as a consequence of the falsification of numbers can have devastating effects, which is of course why you do your due diligence if you’re a business person. The thing is too, if your numbers are in order and you have a business and my numbers are in order and I have a business, you and I can do business together in a way that’s much less complicated if neither of those situations are the case. Exactly, and often when you have, I have lots of, in my business side of life, you have lots of ideas and people often forget about the numbers. So as soon as you, as Wittgenstein would say, bump into reality, although you didn’t put it in an economic sense by looking at the numbers, it’s a different game. Well, I tend to run all the different enterprises that I am engaged in on a for-profit basis for that reason, because things can get spread out and sprawled and inefficient. And one of the ways of making sure that doesn’t happen is to put that numerical discipline in. Well, if this thing can’t thrive on its own, then there’s something wrong with it. Now, the fact that something can’t be made profitable isn’t an unerring indication that it shouldn’t live, but it’s one indication, and you need indications that things shouldn’t live. I mean, one of the things that can happen to people is that they’ll keep an enterprise that isn’t thriving limping along, failing to kill it forever, and then they just waste their whole life on something that, well, where the numbers don’t match up. Or you’ll see people in the artistic world, because I had lots of clients who are artistically oriented, who are never able to make a practical case for the application of their artistic endeavour. And they’ll say things like, well, you know, I’m not interested in the numbers, I don’t care about the market, I don’t want to sell out. It’s like you’re not conceptualising this properly. It’s another form of disciplinary strategy. And it’s actually a very creative endeavour. If you’re an artist, you can be entrepreneurially oriented. Entrepreneurs and artists are very similar in temperaments. What you don’t understand is that the communication about your artistic production and its commodification, that’s part of the creative process if you look at it properly. Or what do you want to produce works of art that no one ever looks at and starve to death while doing it? It’s not a very productive way of thinking. It’s not a very productive way of conceptualising your artistic role. And it’s not sustainable. There’s a saying by Steve Jobs, which is a real artist’s ship, by which he means you actually sell things, you have to move things, you have to get things out. And if you’re not really shipping, then you’re not really an artist. You’re just some… Most of the time you’re a poser. And those claims that, well, I didn’t sell out. It’s like, well, that’s because you don’t know how to and no one ever offered you the opportunity. Yeah. And then people often maintain that stance as a form of moral self-glorification. And the artists that I’ve worked with, people who did have some artistic talent who had that attitude, all it was was an impediment for them because there was no way they could be successful. The artists I’ve known that were successful, they were really good at fostering social relationships. They were really good at communicating with clients. They were very good at helping explain to the people to whom they might have been trying to sell their artistic productions what this would do for their life. Because one of the things people want when they buy a piece of art, especially from a living artist, is they kind of want to be part of the art world, the art life. Like maybe they’re nose to the ground businessman types who have a bit of a romantic dream somewhere in their psyche. And if they buy a piece of art and they know the artist, well then they open themselves up to that whole romantic sphere. And artists can, I wouldn’t say, sell that exactly, but that’s what he’s bringing to the table. And to be contemptuous of the commercial aspect of that, it’s a false morality. Yeah, I agree with you. But having said that, you say the artists you know who are successful, good at other skills of socializing and essentially promoting themselves and their art. But was their art good? And could you not be a good artist and not so? Well, you can for sure. Although I don’t know if you can be a good artist and be contemptuous of all that. But also, maybe you can, but how are you going to keep body and soul together while you’re doing it? And also if you don’t start to engage to some degree on the commercial and communicative end, you don’t expand out your social network. And I have, my sense is that that also limits your growth as an artist. So it’s better to, well certainly dispense with any moral pretensions that sales and marketing is beneath you. It’s like, once you’re great at it, it can be beneath you. But when you don’t know how to do it at all, it’s not beneath you. You just don’t know how to do it. And then the proclivity is to pronounce yourself as morally superior because you won’t do it. It’s like, it’s not that you won’t, it’s that you can’t. And that’s a kind of crippling hubris. And I’ve seen lots of people who are artistically oriented brought down by that. Yeah, I totally agree with you. There’s one, I remember trying to, many years ago, trying to debate what the meaning of an artist is. And ultimately I’ve come to the conclusion that somebody tries to make a living from selling art. And if you’re not making a living from selling art, it’s hard to be an artist. Right, right. Well, how do you continue your art? Maybe you have a patron or an independent fortune, in which case, fine, do whatever you want. But the proper attitude, if you’re a creative person, is to integrate the necessity for making the enterprise economically sustaining into the enterprise. And to consider that as part of the complex problems that you’re trying to address as an artist. It’s a way better attitude. And then you can adopt the meta attitude that you described, which is, well, of course I can do this. Right. And I mean, I’ve seen people make artistic careers in, out of absurd pursuits. I have a friend, Jonathan Pagio, who’s an orthodox icon carver, and he’s commercially successful at it. Right. So that’s impossible, but it can be done. Now it’s hard to do, but it’s not like there’s no pathway forward. But you certainly can’t be casually contemptuous of social relationships and opportunities if you’re going to make something like that happen. So yeah, the great artists that I’ve known, they’ve been able to dance in the commercial sphere. And so… Yeah. We’ll talk more about that, maybe, about money and art and value and art and how people’s attitudes… Yeah. Well, I definitely want to get into that. Whenever you’re ready. Let’s talk about your legal career. Okay. So you developed yourself on the accountant side and you familiarized yourself with business and you got your law degree. How did you do in law school and then what happened? I did very well at law school and I got taken on in the top commercial chambers in London, one of the best commercial chambers. And I just, as a barrister in London, you’re self-employed and you work in the chambers, which is an address. You share the goodwill of that address. Separate barrister and solicitor for all the Americans and Canadians who are watching. So yeah, it’s a good question because you take a lot for granted because I know barristers are people that wear a wig and a gown and basically go to court and stand up on their feet and solicitors are people who prepare the cases for them. They do other things too, but the legal profession can be split into essentially, you start at the beginning between crime and civil crime is the state against the individual and that’s a totally different skill to civil work. Let’s go down the civil road, which is where I went down within the civil road. You have two types of solicitors, two types of lawyers. You have transactional lawyers who help you do a contract, buy and sell a home, buy and sell a company, right? Make sure all the everything’s in order on the front. Then you have the litigators who deal in things that have gone wrong because the thing you bought didn’t show up or wasn’t authentic or wasn’t owned by the person who sold it. Normally in most cases. So the first category is there to stop the second category from being necessary. Exactly. And the second category should normally be a small percentage of the first category. So maybe 10% of lawyers should be litigated because most things should go through normally. In America, there’s a much higher percentage of litigators. It might even be close to 50 50. I’m not sure between transactional lawyers. This is down the civil road and litigation lawyers in England. It may be 20 to 80. We’ll be right back. First, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan’s new series, Exodus. So the Hebrews created history as we know it. You don’t get away with anything. And so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the tyrant and violate your conscience without cost. You will pay the piper. It’s going to call you out of that slavery into freedom, even if that pulls you into the desert. And we’re going to see that there’s something else going on here that is far more cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine. The highest ethical spirit to which we’re beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of freedom against tyranny. And yes, exactly. I want villains to get punished. But do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price? That’s such a Christian question. And you ended up on the litigation. I’m on the litigation, civil litigation. And I’m the so everything I see in my professional life has gone wrong. Every deal that comes to me is something that’s come to me because there’s a problem. It’s a good thing that you’re comfortable in chaos, because that’s definitely the space that’s occupied by two people who don’t agree definitely constitutes chaos or two entities. Yeah, like war. War is a war. Right. It’s a war. Yeah. So within the litigation, you have solicitors who repair cases. Historically, it’s changed a bit over the past 10 years in England. But when I was when I was practicing over 30 years ago and still do practice, solicitors would meet the client, prepare, take the witness statement, get it all ready. And the barrister would stand on his feet in court and present the case. That was the difference. So the barrister would be like the trial attorney, the advocate in court, and the solicitor would be preparing the case for him. So I was a trial attorney with a wig and a gun. Sorry, I haven’t brought it here today to show you. And I did that. I’ve done that for 33 years. I haven’t been in court for many years now because I gave it up the trial the appearance in court after about 10 years. But I still practice law as an litigation and have my own law firm. Came back. So I started at the bar and I was very successful at the bar, partly because I loved it. I worked, I think, for the first 10 years of my life. I worked 12 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week. Okay. So when you say worked, how much of those 12 to 14 hours a day were actual productive labor? Quite a lot, but it was a manual intellectual labor. So you just had to sit at your desk. It’s like a solitude, which I didn’t like actually, because I’m quite sick. I like meeting people. You sit at your desk and you have to go through files and documents to try and find out what’s relevant and what isn’t. So you have to do it. It might be productive because you find something in the 10th hour that you have to do the 9 hours to get to the 10th hour. Well, the reason I’m asking is because I used to ask my undergraduates quite regularly how much time every day they wasted by their own definition of waste. And generally it was something approximating eight hours. And then I would walk them through that arithmetically because your time as an undergraduate, if you’re at a reasonable university, you’re a reasonably qualified person, your time is probably worth somewhere between $20and$50 an hour. Although your time when you’re young is actually worth more than that because it compounds, but that’s not a bad estimate. And so I would point out to them quite quickly that they were wasting something on the order of $120,000 a year by wasting time every day. And that that wasn’t illusory. That was a real waste. And also tried to put forward to them the notion that if they were going to be successful, if that’s what they actually wanted, they would have to learn to be able to work so that they were actually working something like 70 to 80 hours a week. Now that doesn’t mean you have to work like that your whole life, but you certainly have to learn to work like that. And if you’re going to be successful at a high-end law firm, you are definitely going to be working 70 to 80 hours a week. And most of that is actually going to be work. It isn’t going to be sitting there in the library, you know, leafing through your phone, pretending that you’re studying. And so how early on did you learn to concentrate in a manner that would enable you to work for those protracted periods of time? From when I was 18 or 19, I was concentrating. I can just sit for hours at my desk concentrating. I’d have to go for a walk every hour or two, but from very early on, I think, I say very early on, but 18 or 19. Right, right. So you pretty much had that all down by the time, certainly by the time you were in law school. Yeah, I used to enjoy my work so much, I’d have to pull myself away at like midnight or two in the morning, only because I knew that if I didn’t get some sleep, I wouldn’t be able to work so much the next day. Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s actually the proper limitation is the people that I worked with on the legal front when we were trying to figure out boundaries for their work. And I saw this among the scientists that I worked with too, who were great scientists, is like, well, how much can you work? Or can you work 18 hours a day? Well, yes, but not sustainably. And I found that, for example, if I’m writing, I can’t write for more than three hours a day if I’m actually writing. I can do other things. But if I start to work more than three hours a day on writing per se, then I start to tire myself out and it’s counterproductive. So one of the things you want to do when you’re young is find out how hard you can work so that that’s actually sustainable. And so you have to push yourself past your limit before you figure that out. But it’s a good thing to discover. Yeah, it really is. And to become a good lawyer, in my case anyway, I think it was quite good to do different things. So you learn a lot. It’s not just you do x hours of your desk. It’s quite important to socialize with other lawyers and debate things with other lawyers. You have your tea breaks and your lunch breaks. And so you’re in a little community, especially at the bar in England, because it all happens in a very small area called the temple. There’s a few inns and they sit in their rooms there and they go to have lunch in the same place. They go to walk around the same gardens. It’s all in a little compound in a sense. So you’re also making a community at the same time. Yeah, a community. Was that a conscious decision to make that community? Did you know enough that you needed to do that or were you driven mostly by the fact that you like to socialize and that just emerged naturally? Yeah, it’s partly the structure of the English legal system. Barristers, even to qualify, are obligated to have a certain number of dinners together as part of the qualification. You have to become a member of an inn and then you have to have dinners that have to qualify, which I found extraordinary in the beginning, but now I think it’s quite a good idea. So you’re forced to socialize. It’s like a little monastic group of monastic warriors in a sense who are hired for clients to do well in court against each other. Well, you have to have a network to be successful. And that’s especially true if you’re also the kind of lawyer who ends up bringing in business rather than merely doing the background legal research and work. I mean, in North America, I don’t know how much it’s the same in England. The lawyers on the commercial side are pretty well divided into the rainmaker types who are really good at going out and bringing in new business and who also might be good at research. And then the people who are good at research but can’t do the entrepreneurial work. And they’re nowhere near as valuable to their firms. Yeah, I mean, as a barrister, you didn’t bring any business in. You brought some business in, but Solicitors brought you the business historically. Now it’s all changing. But in law firms, which I also have run for about 10 years as well, you’re right. There’s the so-called rainmakers and very few lawyers are good rainmakers. They may be brilliant lawyers. And often the more brilliant you are as a lawyer, the less likely you are to be a great rainmaker because you just want to sit and analyze the arguments all day. But to have a good law firm, you need different skills. And maybe to be a good lawyer, you need to have all of those skills. But it’s hard to have all of them. It’s hard to be… Well, each of those skills is rare. And so the combination of the skills is vanishingly rare. Very rare. I mean, to be good at arguing, to be good at reading, to be able to sit down and work hard all day, to be a good advocate in court, to be a good cross examiner because there’s different kinds of advocates. There are advocates who are very good on appeal, but not so good with witnesses. And then to be a good litigator and have that attack dog mentality and ability. And then also to be able to work harmoniously with your clients. That’s a very difficult… Very hard. Those are two different worlds for sure. Because your client often is in a very difficult, traumatic time of their lives and you’re going to have to work with them. And then in order to socialize and network with clients who aren’t yet your clients on the hope that you might get some work in. It requires a lot for one person to be all that. And even in the big law firms where there’s only solicitors or trial attorneys, I think only one in every 10 partners will be a real rainmaker. Right. Yeah, well one of the things that’s very useful on that front for young people to know if they’re trying to develop their professional career is when you see someone who’s good at something, first of all, you should notice it. Especially if they’re good at something you’re not. And try not to be jealous of it and put it down, you know, because there’s a moral temptation there. But people can develop a wide range of skills if they’re willing to learn from the people who already have those skills. You know, I’ve seen introverts, for example, become extremely sophisticated socially. Like they have to kind of learn it incremental step by incremental step where the extroverts just have it at hand. But you can, even those rainmaking skills, you can develop those if you’re fortunate enough to have a mentor and you have enough of a clue to learn from them the micro elements of what they’re doing. Can I say two things? As I listen to you talk about that, there are two things that I think about my practice as a lawyer, especially as an advocate. One is you learn most by actually doing it. You can study about it as much as possible, but when you actually go into battle, you learn a lot more than when you’re reading about it. That’s one of them. You bump yourself up against the right obstacles. Yeah, which is an interesting thing that you have to do it to learn rather than study it. The other interesting thing that’s often puzzled me, which I’ll ask you because I’m sure you’ll have an opinion on it, is why it is we can learn so much from people in our lives. When you, even in your own life, when you look back, you’ll have had some relatively small conversations with people that have shaped the way you think about things. And you can learn so much from a mentor or a person who’s very, I’ve learned a lot from some very senior embarrassers or not even senior embarrassers who’ve taught me, it’s not just a little trick, but their attitude. What a conversation that someone can teach you more than reading many books. Why is it it’s so much? Well, we’re really imitative. You know, and so it’s one of the things that sets human beings off against other animals, most particularly. And so you can literally embody the spirit of someone else’s personality. Well, that’s to some degree, you do that in every conversation, because you and I, to have this conversation, we have to find a middle ground where we’re basically both, we both are occupied by the same spirit. You know, and the more different you are than me, when that conversation occurs, the farther I have to stretch myself to become an analog of you just to communicate. And that definitely broadens you. And so, and we’re very good at grasping the whole and inferring it from parts. I noticed this was my son, for example, when he was about two and a half or three, and we first sent him off to daycare. And there were, my son was quite well behaved, because that was a requirement in our household. And he would come, but he was also extremely extroverted and social and quite disagreeable. So we had a will, and we’d send him off to daycare and he’d come back and he would have learned the most conniving tricks and just picked them up just like that. And the reason was he was hanging around some bratty kid who had a whole bag full of tricks as part of their personality. He just absorbed that whole thing. And he’d come back and try it out. And that’s part of our fascination, let’s say, for stories, when you go to a movie and you’re engrossed in the character, you’re essentially, what happens is you adopt the aims of the character. And then your entire nervous system swings to make the things that appear as obstacles to him appear as obstacles to you, and the things that appear as facilitators to him appear to facilitators to you. And you really, you embody that whole mode of being and play it out as a dramatic fantasy. And then it shows you that that’s a whole new way of looking at the world. That’s why we love stories so much and drama. And a mentoring experience is like that is because you essentially imitate the person that you’re with. So interesting. And that’s why you can’t just, you know, somebody can tell you it orally as a person, as a mentor, or you can read in the book, but the mentor, you will take it in. Yeah, well, the mentorship has that, it’s the dramatic imitative element that comes along with it. You know, you might think that being a lawyer, for example, and Thomas Kuhn talked a lot about this relationship to science is like, well, what is science? Well, it’s a set of facts. It’s like, yeah, the facts change. So that’s dubious to begin with. But it’s also a practice. Well, what’s the practice? What’s a list of skills? It’s like, there’s no such thing as a list of skills. No, that’s partly why we haven’t so far been able to come up with expert diagnostic systems, for example. They are getting better now, but for a long time they were useless. Whatever an illness is, isn’t a list of symptoms discriminable from some other list of symptoms. There’s an act of diagnosis and an art. And a lot of that’s not explicit. It’s a kind of drama. And the only way you can develop that skill is to imitate it. So if you’re a scientist, you have an apprenticeship, and it’s in the apprenticeship that you learn to imitate the spirit of science. And we have no idea how to reduce that to a set of rule-bound practices. We have no idea. Kuhn made a lot of that in the structure of scientific revolutions. No, and you’re very fortunate if you have mentors in your life because you can copy them. And it’s not just that the mentor imparts information to you by just advice. I mean, at the bar you had to have a year of being a pupil, an apprentice, and you had a pupil master. And you’d sit in the room and say, I was fortunate to have a fantastic, clever pupil master. And I started and I thought, no, he’s going to teach me a lot. And he’s my master. It’s this old-fashioned language. I remember sitting there and saying, Mark, I’d ask him a question. And he’d say, always, he’d say, you tell me. And then I’d go and I’d think about research and I’d come back and say, I found the answer to my question. And he’d say, what is it? And I’d tell him it. And he said, no, try again. And so he never actually told me anything, but he just kept me on my toes the whole time. Right. Yeah. Well, and you never know to what degree hanging around him brought the right questions to mind. Right? Because we don’t really know how that mentorship relationship, we don’t know how it transforms you cognitively. And a lot of the most important thing in any discussion is what the pertinent questions are rather than what the relevant answers are. Totally. In the law, especially, I’ve often thought being a good lawyer is asking the right questions. Once you ask the right questions, there’s a saying in the law often people say to judges, one only has to ask the question to know the answer. Once you’ve asked the question, things become a lot of answers. Yes, definitely. Another thing that happens, this is a slight detour, in asking questions in an adversarial situation. So you might send somebody in to interview someone or to do something and you say, don’t give anything away. And they always, or very often naively say, we won’t give anything away because we’re only going to ask questions. Yeah, right. Yeah. The questions are loaded with information. Yes, definitely. Definitely. Definitely. So now you became very successful as a litigator. And so what led to your success? And do you have some stories at hand about adventures that you undertook, well engaged in the litigation practice? Yeah, obviously a lot of the stories I have are confidential, but I can talk in generic terms. I did them after a while, give up the bar and go and work as a manager for people that had lots of litigation problems. So that gave me the opportunity to manage lots of lawyers. Rather than being a lawyer, I became a sort of a crisis manager. And I’ve acted for all sorts of normally very wealthy people or companies with huge commercial problems. But it’s often on the edge of commerce and other problems because if a wealthy person really does have a problem, and it’s normally a huge problem for them if they involve me, if they need to come to me, it’s normally a real crisis, then you’re dealing with, like I said earlier, a client who can lose everything, everything really. Often they’re concerned about their reputation, then they’re concerned about their money, their lifestyle. So I did one particular case for probably the wealthiest guy in the world where I had to manage a lot of litigation. I think I instructed something like 73 law firms in 13 different countries and caught and settled over 500 different cases. And that was all about a lifestyle. Over what span of time? Seven years, yeah. How many cases? Over 500 different cases. That’s a lot of chaos. Yeah, it’s a lot of chaos. And you become good at, that made me good as a lawyer because I became a client because I had lots of clients, lots of lawyers I had to deal with and try and get the most out of them because I was representing the client. And I lived in the Far East in that particular case for seven years. And there’s a kind of quite a good attitude as well in the Far East because I was always being challenged by, I remember there was one particular Chinese guy who I had to work with a lot who would always, and I like being challenged and I like challenging myself and he challenged me even more. He said, why not? Why can’t we do this? Why can’t we do that? And so I learned a lot in those cases. But sometimes in those cases, you had to, there were cases from car companies, plane companies, banks, from blackmail cases. Blackmail cases have become quite common. Well, they’re always around now, but there’s Me Too type cases that are recently, sometimes they’re obviously merit in them, sometimes there isn’t. Well, it’s put a lot of power in the hands of accusers. Exactly. And I’ve seen cases where the accusers were absolutely made up and not, but it’s crazy. One thing as a barrister, ethically, you’re not allowed to not take a client on because you don’t, you know, because you have to, there’s something called the cab rank rule. So you just take clients on irrespective of your belief in their. Right, because they’re entitled to a defense. Yeah, which is very important. They’re entitled to a defense. I think that’s really important. I’ve always taken clients on, and never, you know, even if. Well, sometimes people think they’re guilty and they’re not. That’s tricky. You know, I saw that in psychotherapy all the time, is people would convict themselves at a second’s notice and I would look into it and I’d think, actually, you know, this wasn’t nearly as much your fault as your, you know, because you think, well, you should take responsibility for your actions and fair enough, but there are errors in that direction too, is you should take responsibility for your actions, but the presumption of innocence also applies to you, even if you are inclined to be guilty. And so that principle that you should take on every client as a lawyer, it’s a good principle. It’s a very good principle. You never know what the story is till you get to the bottom of it. I remember. I remember early on at one of these dinners that I was compelled to go to, you know, when I started out at Lincoln’s Inn, where I’m a member, there’s one of the leading criminal barristers who did all the top murder cases and rape cases. And we’re all having dinner with him. And one of the students said to him, how do you feel defending someone you know to be guilty, or you believe to be guilty? And he said quickly, he’s a brilliant barrister, he’s now dead. He said, I feel relieved. What do you mean? He said, because there’s nothing worse than representing someone you believe to be innocent, because you can only screw it up. But if you believe they’re guilty, and you still do your best, it’s not so bad. If you know something happens, they go, it’s, if you believe, if you believe they’re innocent and you screw it up, it’s a disaster. Whereas you still do your best both ways, but it puts a lot of pressure on you, you believing somebody is innocent. Yeah, well, there’s an open question too, in any complex situation. It’s like, well, guilty of what exactly? Because the devil’s always in the details. And so famous ad, if I can interject for a second, which I saw once, I don’t know if it’s famous, but it’s famous in my mind, put it that way. It’s a guy who’s trying to get some clients for defense work and criminal defense work. And the ad is, it’s a big poster and says, just because you did it doesn’t mean you’re guilty. Bring me. It doesn’t because there’s a lot of things we’ve been thinking you’ve done it, or even doing it and actually being proved guilty of it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s also necessary for people who are, who find themselves in hot water legally and ethically to sort things out for themselves so that they know where they took the wrong steps. I mean, the goal of analyzing a piece of misbehavior, let’s say if the goal is atonement, what that means is you have to know exactly where you stepped wrong right from the beginning of the process. And that means you also have to know where you’re guilty, but about things that were actually peripheral to the event, or maybe you shouldn’t have been guilty about them at all. It’s like, no, this is the cardinal mistake. This is the mistake. This is the pathway. This is what you’re guilty of, not these things. This is what anyone would have done in your situation, because lots of times people will do something that looks terrible on casual glance and may even be terrible, but you listen to the full account and you think, oh, if I was in that situation, I would have done something far worse. Right. And then that makes the whole notion of guilt much more complex. You know, I mean, there’s a woman who’s in jail at the moment in the U.S. who killed a man who had repeatedly exploited her violently, sexually, and then posted the videos online and profited from them. It’s like, well, she definitely killed him. She shot him, I believe, in court, but now was she guilty? Well, there’s a complicated, probably of something. She got herself in that situation and for however she managed that and then couldn’t disentangle herself from it, and that’s not good. So obviously you would presume some culpability on her part in that entire sequence, but trying to entangle that, that’s quite the bloody rat’s nest out. Fortunately, I don’t ever get involved in, I don’t like judging people. I don’t think it’s in my job. I don’t think it’s right. I just have to represent them and do the best I can for them. Obviously without misleading the court, but I don’t like judging people. Part of all the reasons you’re kind of alluding to it, it’s kind of complicated knowing who’s guilty of what. There’s an old saying, I think it’s a Russian proverb that says, don’t judge people because it’s too flattering to the devil. I don’t know exactly what it means, but I think it means that you’re giving too much credit to the devil. Right, right, right. Well, the devil is the adversary. That’s the fundamental. That’s what Satan means. The word is adversary. And so, yeah, well, one of the things you learn if you’re a clinician and you have any sense is also why you don’t offer people advice. It’s like, I don’t know what the hell you should do. Like maybe you and I could figure it out together with some really careful thought, but I can’t. Most people are in situations that are sufficiently complex so that casual advice is just not helpful at all. And there’s a real arrogance in that. It’s the same arrogance of judgment. Yeah, well, judgment’s often bolstering yourself up, really judging people for some comparative advantage. I hate the idea of judging. I myself, not that I’d ever be a contender, would never want to be a judge. I just hate the idea of judging people. Some of my colleagues at the bar went on, some of my closest friends are judges, and they’re happy and they’re doing great jobs as judges, but I just couldn’t do that job. Yeah, yeah, it’d be interesting to talk to a judge with a lot of experience to find out how they navigate the moral pitfalls of being in that position and how they reconcile themselves to it, given this sort of complexity that we’re describing. I expect their say, and rightly so, their role is to judge. Society needs people like them to judge, and they do their best to judge honestly and faithfully within the law. And so it’s an important role. It is, it is, but it does set up these moral conundrums that we’ve been describing. Now, as your career as a litigator developed, you also developed an interest in the world of art, and particularly modern art. Yeah. And so how did that develop in parallel? It developed really because I’ve always loved art and I’ve always felt it’s important, and then I started buying art for like 25 bucks or 50 bucks years ago when I was even 18 or 19. So I believed in art. What were you buying? Oh, just things in the local reference library done by old ladies of flowers and stuff. Like by original art? Yeah, original art. Yeah. And then as I became more successful and make money, I liked to, you know, buy some art and I got friendly with artists. I was obsessed with the creative process and also the economics of creativity, which really fascinates me. In the art world, you can get two extremes of people. You can get people who just think that money is disgusting and should have nothing to do with art. It’s purely about sort of critical theory and aesthetics and history and stuff. And the other hand, you get people who really don’t care about anything to do with the art. They just know how much it’s, how much they can sell it for and how much they can buy it for. Yeah. But I personally have just always been fascinated in that relationship between how you can turn an idea into money and the economics of, I call it the economics of creativity, which I find really fascinating. So by chance, I was lucky enough to get friendly with some artists. And artists have a difficult job, as you know, because they are, I believe, bearing their soul to the world to be judged. It’s a very hard job and hard philosophy. It’s because you have to do your paintings. Normally you have a show, people come and they like them or they don’t. You sell them or they and all the self-doubt and it’s a lonely job. So you don’t have many people to hang out with normally. So it’s a difficult job. And so they’re not normally very good at commerce, not normally. And if they are, they might not be great artists. If they’re just good at selling their paintings, they may or may not be good, but you have to appreciate the importance of that system. But I was, so I got friendly with some artists and they’d say, they’d ask me, I’m also because of my philosophical and scientific background, I was always trying to, and my commercial background, trying to work out what the right thing is and the relationship between money and art. And that’s something that I’ve been involved in now for 25 years. And I’ve been obsessed with it really, trying to understand it. And so I just got into it because by accident, I got friendly with an artist and he asked me some, he asked me to help him out on various things. And that’s grown to me managing more and more artists by managing, it’s really advising, giving them commercial advice. And that’s not necessarily how to make the most amount of money. It’s, it’s what’s to do that’s best for your art and your legacy. Because there is that development of a career. Exactly. And there are all sorts of artists, such a fantastically interesting subject, because it means so many things, as we will hopefully discuss now, it can mean so many different things to so many different people. And it’s very spiritually important to some people, to other people, it’s just commerce. Some art can be beauty, some art may not be beauty, maybe subjective, objective, all these different things. And then there’s the market, which is, you know, so fascinating and one’s attitude to art. And these are the things that I remember the first, one of the first valuable paintings I bought, I was so happy and I loved it so much. And then a week or two later, I realized that the people who sold it to me had ripped me off and it wasn’t worth what I thought it was worth. And then when I looked at that painting, it just represented me being had. And I no longer love the painting anymore. I just looked at it. So the relation between money and art is important. Well, that’s the relationship between context and perception too, because now you saw that the same object, you know, through a completely different lens. What an artistic production is as an object is extremely complex. That’s what Duchamp was playing with when he put the urinal in the gallery, is that, well, if it’s in a gallery, is it a piece of art? It turned out with Duchamp’s urinal that the answer to that, at least eventually, was most definitively yes. But people are cynical about that move on his part, but it was actually brilliant because I’ve often thought this, for example, in the case of museums, imagine there’s a museum there that has Hank Williams or Elvis Presley’s guitar. Well, let’s say it’s a mass manufactured guitar. It’s like, well, now you have his display case and Elvis’s guitar is in there, but perceptually, in some real manner, it’s not distinguishable from any other guitar of that period. So then you might say, well, what’s the reality of the fact that this was Elvis’s guitar? Like, where is that reality? Because it’s not in the perceptual landscape. It’s in the shrine that’s been built around it. It’s in people’s memory. And that’s what Duchamp was playing with too. It’s like, well, what’s a piece of art? Well, often you find them in museums. And well, if we raise something ordinary to the status of something in a museum, to what degree does that now become a piece of art? And that is definitely an open question and a very complex question. And it’s a sophisticated question. You ran right into that with your painting. It’s like when you were viewing it through the lens of having made a successful social and economic transfer, the painting was one thing. And when that fell apart, the painting was something else. And that in itself is quite interesting. The object is always an interplay of whatever it is and whatever you are as the reader of it. And that can modify. Exactly. And there’s art. 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 money corrupts art. But in a sense, it also saves art because people can appreciate, I mean, they say if your painting that you have in your home is worth money, you look after it. You don’t, you make sure it’s handled and framed properly and it makes sure it survives. And people, so, you know, art to have an economic value is important for its survival, I believe, sometimes. So those are the side of questions with the artist. So what attracted you initially to these original pieces of art that you were buying? And why did you think you had enough courage to rely on your own taste? Because one of the things I’ve observed about people’s relationship to art is people are terrified of art, especially of purchasing it, 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. And people are very terrified to do that. So why did you have enough confidence to be attracted to the pieces you were and then to purchase them? I don’t know the answer to that. 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 said intrinsic confidence in my own judgment, I do believe that the eye, as it’s called in the art world, or the aesthetic sense, or eye is a kind of muscle that you can develop. 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, why it’s bad. 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 1000 to 2000 paintings a night for like 10 years. And I developed quite an eye for catastrophically bad art, which is really useful, right? 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 and think, whoa, okay, well, I don’t know, that isn’t what the rest of this is. 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. It is. But obviously, fashions change, everything changes. But I do believe you and I seem to agree that that eye, the aesthetic sense, can be trained like a muscle. 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, well, to a large degree, what each of us as moderns even regards as beautiful, think, well, that’s obviously beautiful. 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. Like most people now regard impressionist landscapes as sort of self-evidently beautiful, but no one thought that when they were first produced. 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. Exactly. And it’s the same with many other genres of art. But I think, yeah, and I agree. But going back to your question of how do you have the confidence to buy art? Generally, 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. So not everyone, but most people do. 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. And of course, you want to believe you’ve got a good eye. So you have to be careful not to believe that you have a good eye and to doubt yourself as well. 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. 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 whatever it was. Yeah, they were doing some revolutionary. Revolutionary, which was hard to accept then. But with time, that becomes amazing. It’s also difficult to separate out original from merely shocking, because if it is original, it will be shocking because it’ll force you to perceive something. And I think cubist art, the cubist art from the 1920s actually still has that power. A particularly good cubist piece, you’ll think that really, there is really something radically different about that. And good cubist pieces are pretty damn rare. But much of what passes for modern originality is always merely shocking. Now all that disappears in the flux of time very rapidly, and only what was truly original remains. But it’s not an easy thing to distinguish between the merely shocking and the original early. You seem to have managed that to some degree. I think there’s some reason to think that you do have a good eye for originality. And so how do you distinguish between the original and say the merely shocking? I think it’s again training your eye to look at lots and lots of things. And if you come across something that you’ve never seen before, that automatically makes you think about it. And then it has to kind of touch you. So already you’re thinking it’s original, then it has to touch you in a way. I generally, you can tell if an artist generally is just trying to be shocking, because to grab attention or he’s just trying to create beauty or something important. I say you can tell, I don’t know how you can tell, but I can tell. Yeah, well you did lay out how you tell though. I mean if you want to learn how to judge impressionist landscapes, let’s say, you could start by looking at 10,000 of them. And what you’re doing is you’re building up an implicit vocabulary because you’re tuning a set of perceptual networks. So imagine you have a set of a thousand impressionist paintings. There’s something about them that makes them impressionist paintings, let’s say, rather than Renaissance realist paintings. Now what that is, is whatever’s at the core of impressionism, say versus any other genre of art. But that’s not definable. The only way you’re going to figure that out is by exposing yourself to a multitude of exemplars and extracting the gist perceptually. That’s like tuning an AI network. You can’t express what it is, but you can learn to see it. And then you can learn to see. So imagine there’s a thousand impressionist paintings. Some of them are more canonical. Those would be the masterpieces. Some of them are more central to the spirit of the impressionist endeavor. You can learn to identify those, but not without going through, not without doing it, not without going through the effort of looking at endless exemplars of paintings. And I suppose if you’re really approaching it systematically, which I do, you’d also look at the market and what the market says about value as well, because that is some- It’s a pointer. It’s a pointer. It’s an indication, but not on its own. There’s something that, you know, often the debate, as you know, in art is, is beauty objective or subjective? Forget about beauty. Let’s call it beauty. There’s a debate about whether art has to be beautiful or not, which we probably will both accept. It doesn’t have to be beautiful. It has to be meaningful in touch. It doesn’t make you disagree with that, but let’s come back to that. On beauty, is it objective or subjective? Well, Goya is often not beautiful. Exactly. It’s horrifying often. Yeah, but you’d have to accept it’s great art, I think. Yeah. Yes, yes, right. So is it objective? And so the view I formed, and I may be wrong about it, but this is my currently firmly held view, is that there’s a kind of collective subjectivity or even objectivity in art. So if you asked 100 people, if I took you into a room with 10 paintings done by the same artist, all one meter square, I think there’d be a real consensus about which was the best one. We did this, we actually did this formally. I did this with Harvard, a student of mine, Shelley Carson. We were trying to develop objective measures of artistic production. So one of the things we did was have well-established artists rate collages we had ordinary people make with the same kit. So your goal in our experiment was to make a collage out of this kit of pieces. And then we had artists rate them for quality. And then you can find out if there’s anything objective by seeing if there’s a similarity in the rank orderings across the artists. And the similarity was quite stunning. So there’s an index called alpha reliability, which is the average correlation across a set of rankings. And it was extremely high. The artists could very reliably distinguish the high quality collages from the low quality collages. And now is that objective? Well, it transcends the subjective. I mean, it’s not exactly objective because it’s so clearly dependent on the existence of a perceiver. But you do have cross-perceiver similarity. And that’s a form of objective reality. That’s what I think too. It’s more than subjective. It’s a sort of collective belief. And of course there’ll be one or two in a hundred or ten that will disagree with you. But generally there’s a consensus. And a rank order. Well, otherwise we couldn’t even have a category of art. Because, well, you could just throw a frame around anything and it would instantly be art. It’s like, no, the mere fact that we have a category of art means that we distinguish some images reliably from others. Now, why? We don’t know exactly. Beautiful might be one. But I think part of what art does is produce revolutionary transformations in your perception towards something like the good. And there’s all sorts of different ways that can occur. I mean, Goy is a good example because his representations are so often horrific. And Hieronymus Bosch is another example of exactly that. I mean, there’s beauty in the craftsmanship and also perhaps in the palette. But the details are horrifying beyond belief. But those artists are compelling you to look past that which, they’re compelling you to look past even the comfortable emotional limitations of your current perceptions. And so the great artists are, they’re geniuses of perception fundamentally. They teach you new ways to see. I think while seeing you just look at the world. It’s like, yeah, no, seeing is a lot more complicated than just looking at the world. Yeah, that’s what I think. They help you relate to the world. They help you get through life often and see the world in a different way. They help you discriminate between that which is of quality and that which is not of quality. And they help you see things you otherwise wouldn’t see. I once, going back to a subject you touched on earlier, which is in choosing art and hanging it on your wall, you’re exposing yourself in a way. I remember a famous, a very well-known art dealer telling me that you can tell a lot about someone from their art collection. I remember thinking, yeah, that makes sense. But I’ve got a few ideas of what you can tell. But I think it’s true, but I can’t quite work out what it means. Do you know what I mean? That’s like a, and one thing you can tell from an art collection is from the style, you can probably tell that they’re just buying what they’re told to buy. Yes. You can also tell if they’re trying to match their furniture. Exactly. So they’re more interior decorators, you know. But I don’t know what else you can tell. But I do believe that you can tell a lot, but I couldn’t narrate everything you can tell and why. Does that make sense? Well, I think it’s probably as difficult to figure out what an art collection reveals about the collector as it is to figure out what the art itself represents. Yeah, I think it’s, and that’s partly, I suppose, because people have all sorts of different motives for why they collect art. I mean, I collect art because I collected Soviet realist art. I collected a lot of it, partly because I was extremely interested in the pieces as historical artifacts. And then I was interested in the war between propaganda and the artistic tendency that each canvas represented, because a lot of the Soviet realist artists were very technically proficient and skilled as artists. But then they were forced to serve as propagandists. And so you have this terrible tension, and they often painted in essentially an impressionist style. It wasn’t exactly realist. It was much more an impressionist style. This terrible tension in the canvas between what’s really incredibly high level artistic ability and this narrow propagandistic window. So those canvases are a real battle between two opposing spirits. And so they’re very intense things to have around you. Like a beautiful portrayal of Lenin sitting by a window while a child plays the violin. That’s a complicated object because Lenin was a complete bloody monster. And yet you have the amalgam of this beautiful impressionist light and this extremely well designed canvas. And so my house was full of those paintings, which was very, there’s a lot of tension in that. Even socially, because of course people would come into the house and wonder what the hell I was doing having these like eight foot portraits of Lenin up on the wall. There’s all sorts of- I personally love what you collect. And I love those communist propaganda posters. I love the shapes and the people and the colors. Well, they were also very effective, often very effective means of propagandization. And so that was a place where art, whatever the impulse of art is, was harnessed for political purposes. One of the things I also loved about those canvases is that as we move away from the Soviet Union, the art wins. They become less and less pieces of propaganda at all. Because while you don’t at some point, 300 years in the future, people won’t even know who Lenin was. But the painting, insofar as it’s an artistic success, the painting will still exist. All that’ll be left is the art. All of the propaganda will have vanished. Maybe, I mean, maybe, I mean, sometimes as time goes by, things don’t become more valuable, there may still be the art there. But there’s a common belief, which changes through time, but a common belief that for art now to be really great art, the artist must be unfettered and just apply his mind to whatever he wants to. And as soon as you try and control it by getting him to do a commission, or getting him to do a portrait, or get, I say, him or her, or getting them to do propaganda, it corrupts the art of the artist and the value of it. Does that make sense? Well, I think my experience with artists, I’ve been, I’ve worked with one artist for a very long time, very intently. A commission for me is more like a collaboration. It’s like, well, I don’t want to get in his way because he’s the artist. I’m not, so I work with this native carver, for example, from the West Coast, and I really like his work. And normally when I commission something, we go look at where it might be placed, and I talk about what he’s engaged in, and he asks me what sort of things I’m interested in and what I’m sort of envisioning there. And we come up with a story that he will represent. And so there’s no warping of his artistic, there’s no warping of the artistic enterprise there because I don’t tell him what to do. We come up with an interesting project and then pursue it. And his, some of that is ideational discussion. But I’m certainly, and I think this is the right way to handle business negotiations in general. It’s like, if I want to do business with you, I don’t want to just tell you what to do, then you’re definitely the wrong guy for the job if I’m just telling you what to do. I would rather that we have a discussion that progresses to the point to, we’re both very thrilled with what we’re going to do together. And then if you happen to be an artist, we found this even, Tammy and I, when we’ve done a lot of renovation projects, a lot of them fairly artistically oriented with all the craftsmen, if we would sit down with them and tell them what we were envisioning and what the goal was, and then ask them for their input and about what, how they thought that what they were doing might contribute to that, they’d get on board and then all their creative energy would be released. And there was no subordination of the artistic process to the commission at all. Quite the contrary. Could you imagine a situation where there would be a subordination and therefore a corruption in the art system? Oh yes, I think so. I mean, I think if you’re ordering the artist around, for example, well you’re certainly not going to get the best out of them. Because you can easily interfere with the manifestation of that creative spirit, and you do that by subjecting it to constraints that are tyrannical. You don’t do that by subjecting it to constraints. In fact, you actually often facilitate creativity by imposing the right set of constraints, but if they’re tyrannical constraints, well that doesn’t help at all. I agree with you, and I’ve seen that in some of the artists I’ve helped in the past, that some constraints can be useful and they regard that as an artistic challenge. Yes, definitely. Whereas other ones can be, listen, I’m not painting a particular thing because you want me to, because that’s just too much, it’s tyrannical. Yeah. But I don’t know how far you go before it becomes tyrannical. Well, I think you’re trying to, what you’re trying to do if you’re working with an artist and you have any sense, is you’re trying to feel out your movement forward so that they’re inspired and enthusiastic about the project, because that inspiration and enthusiasm is part and parcel of the spirit that is allied with their creativity. So if I’m talking to Charles, this artist that I was describing, he’s designing a totem pole for me, a 40-foot totem pole for outside my cottage up in northern Toronto, and he asked me what I’ve envisioned, and I’ve had an idea for a totem pole in my mind for a long time, and it involves a representation of chaos at the bottom in the form of fighting serpents. And I know in their tradition, they have this sea suit figure that’s a serpent. And so I talked to him about the emergence of order from chaos and the dragon as a representation of chaos. And we walked through the whole totem pole, but it’s a dance because I’m really interested in, for example, if I discuss an idea with Charles, an image will pop into his mind because he’s very obviously image-oriented. If he looks at a block of wood, he can see the sculpture in it, which is apparently a talent Michelangelo had in relationship to marble. But it’s a dynamic play with his muse most fundamentally. And you can’t subject that to arbitrary constraints because you’ll just destroy it. It has to be a form of play, and a commission should be if you want to tell the artist what to paint, then you should just do the painting yourself. It has to be a dance, right? And you could invite an artist, and like I had a friend who was a portrait artist, and he would take commissions for portraits, but he wanted to paint the portrait. And so there has to be a, you can’t say it has to be exactly like this, and this is where the figures have to be portrayed. You’re not the artist. If you want that artist to paint your portrait, you have to invite him in and to figure out how you can do that together. So he’s thrilled to do it, so his creative spirit is unleashed. And that isn’t no constraint, it’s just not the stupid tyrannical constraints that put you in a morally superior position in relationship to the artist. Yeah, there comes a point when the commissioner is the artist if he’s telling exactly what to do. Some of the greatest art that’s been done often, there’s different art. There’s art that’s like a painting you hang on the wall, and there’s art that’s part of a structure. Or it’s going in a particular place. And so when Michelangelo did the Sistine Chapel, in a way he’s already been told how big his piece is and where it’s going, roughly the subject matter. So there are constraints even on that, and that’s a great work of art. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, we are always putting constraints on each other when we’re negotiating. But I think the optimal constraints are more like the rules for the game rather than prohibitions against what can and can’t be done. It’s like, let’s play this particular game, we’ll open up this horizon of possibility. And then it’s a dance and a balancing act to to undertake the commission properly. I mean, I’ve had a very productive, what I told Charles when we first started working together, because I really liked his art, I said, look, you make the best piece you can and send it to me every three months and tell me what you think it’s worth. And all see how that works and work great. You know, he’d send me a great piece every three or four months and I’d think, wow, this is a great piece. And that was that. And then when I built the third floor on my house, which is full of native art, I had him come out to Toronto when I sort of told him what we were thinking about with regards to the place. And we started to brainstorm about how that might look. And that was extremely productive, too. There was more constraints on him because, well, the ceiling was a certain height, et cetera, et cetera. But there can’t be no enabling principles. There can’t be no constraints. That’s not that’s not good. Let me ask you another question connected to this, but probably different. What role do you think art has in a person’s well-being or why is it important to look at art, to think about art? Maybe buy art? Forget about artists. It’s a burning bush. Well, in the Exodus story, Moses is just wandering around, long minding his business, let’s say, and something glimmers on the side of his vision. And it’s this burning bush. It’s something that tracks his attention. So he goes to investigate it, then he inquires into it. He looks more and more deeply into it. He asks the phenomena that he can’t look away from, its name, and it reveals itself as the ground of being. And I would say, well, a piece of art is an invitation into an inquiry into the ground of being. And so a great painting will break your frame of reference. So that’s what Van Gogh’s flower paintings do, the Iris, let’s say, it’s a very, very famous painting. There’s no limit to how much you can apprehend a flower. It’s a revelation of being. Now, most of the time what happens is that we don’t see the flower. We see our memory of the flowers we’ve seen. And an artist will go twist it and then represent the flower to you and remind you that there’s way more to the world than you’re casually perceiving. So that’s a window through your presuppositions into the ground of being. And that’s an invitation into the realm of the gods. And I don’t mean superficially, and I don’t mean metaphorically, I mean literally. And now we know something about this on the perceptual front now. So psychedelics, for example, chemically, they strip your perception of memory. And that means the whole world floods in and that’s overwhelming. Well, a piece of art is a micro dose of a psychedelic. That’s a perfectly fine way of thinking about it. And what it does is it strips your perception of memory. And you look at the painting and you know how you develop a relationship with a great painting across time. We know, for example, that people use the parts of their brain that they perceive people with and living objects to perceive musical instruments. They’re not dead things. And paintings are like that too. A painting, if it’s deep and good, like a piece of music, it’s something you establish a relationship with. And it always reminds you that there’s more to what is than what you merely perceive. And to be surrounded by great artists, to be reminded of that all the time. And that can be too much. When people used to walk into my house, which had like 500 paintings in it, they were just absolutely everywhere. It was like my mother, who’s less open on the artistic front, she’d always ask me, kind of disturbed her. She said, well, why do you want to live in a museum? And my answer would be, well, why wouldn’t you want to live in a museum? I want these windows to the underlying reality of things open everywhere so that can shine through. But it is a lot. It’s a lot to ask of people. I think we had 40 colours in our house at that point at the same time. So it was quite the… 40 colours? Well, one of the artists that I had bought a number of paintings from helped us. He was also an interior designer and he came in and we used 30, I think it was 38 colours in the house. It was a very small house too. And they were very harmoniously arrayed, but it was quite the… And they were subtle, smoky colours. It wasn’t fluorescent, a fluorescent landscape. It was as subtle as 38 different colours could be. But he was a master of harmony of colour. And every room, every doorway was a different juxtaposition of a palace. Well, also if you mean an artist and a good interior designer then. Well, I think anything you do can be raised to the status of art. The better you are at it. And if you’re a great interior designer, well, you’re definitely encroaching on the territory of fine art. That’s funny. One of the artists I manage says that himself. He says anything done really well. Yeah. Well, that’s what art means. Art means spectacular skill. And so, you can see that among craftsmen. I mean, this is partly why I like working with high level craftsmen renovating houses. If you don’t think those people are artists, you’re not paying attention. And as soon as you start treating them like they’re artists and recognizing that man, you get their best work out of them. I mean, the third floor we built in Toronto, all the craftsmen just went way above and beyond the call of duty because they were so excited about participating in the project. And that just means every single corner is beautiful. It’s so fun. So I think you’re saying, and I agree with it, that it’s important to connect to something, something you would say transcendent. If you don’t look at art and appreciate art, you’re not connecting to forces outside of you. Right. And you need to because you get narrowed otherwise and bitter and shallow and warped and tiny. And none of that’s good. The artists will blow the unnecessary barriers off your perceptions. And you might think, well, that’s not necessary. It’s necessary if you don’t want to get narrowed to the point where there is nothing of you left. I find art helps me get through life. It helps me just live. It’s such an important thing for me. It’s not optional. And people who think it’s optional are blind in a very fundamental way. To think about it as some, it’s actually the point. It’s not only not optional, it’s the point. And art is the point because it points to something higher. That’s what art does. And there’s ways of technically discussing what constitutes higher too because modern people, especially the post-modernist types, well, there’s no difference between high and low. It’s like, if you were low enough, you wouldn’t think that, believe me. So you know pretty damn quick that high is better than wherever the hell you’ve ended up. And art is definitely a pointer to what’s highest. Yeah, I agree with you. But also it helps you question yourself, helps you understand the world around you in a way, even if it’s not to a higher level, to any level. It just helps you communicate with people and think about things in a way. So to me, it’s very important. I think one thing that often annoys me about governments or people who approach things in a very commercial way is they neglect the commercial value of art and its economic value. It’s so uneconomical. It’s one of the things that hurts me about conservatives who dispense, let’s say, with beauty. It’s like, there isn’t anything more economically valuable than beauty. Think about Europe and the beauty of its most beautiful productions. It’s infinitely valuable. And not only that, it’s going to become more so as we progress into the future. These great cities like Bruges, for example, which is so beautiful, it just breaks your heart when you go there. It’s like there’s no, it’s inexhaustible economic value. And so the notion that it’s, you know, an unnecessary and inefficient excess to ensure that things are beautiful. It’s so blind and also so counterproductive economically that it’s a kind of miracle that people can even think that way. Yeah, many governments are more concerned with, which are obviously important things to create car plants or electric battery plants or sort of engineers. You can even do that beautifully, you know. Well, I have a friend, Pennoyer, in New York, who’s kind of a classic architect, and he’s built lots of beautiful buildings in downtown New York. And he’s made a very clear case economically that you can build a beautiful, classic building for the same price per square foot as a concrete housing project. So the idea that beauty is excessively expensive, that’s also, it’s just wrong. Exactly. Yeah, and that’s why, that’s the area I love thinking about, the economics of it, because great creativity is economically very significant for individuals and for people and for a country. For whole cultures, yes. Well, Europe’s a great example of that. I mean, the whole tourist industry of Europe is a consequence of beauty. And it’s unbelievably valuable. We should stop. We’re out of time. Oh, sorry. That’s too bad, because I’d like to continue talking, but we will. We’ll continue talking because we just got going on the artistic road. I would really like to delve at some point, we should do this into the particulars of some of the artistic endeavours that you’ve been engaging in. So for everyone watching and listening, thank you very much for your time. Thank you so much. Sorry I took a bit of time to warm up. Oh, that’s all. It was nothing and it’s always the case. Just one thing, on the economic thing, if we include art, there’s one thing I’ve been using recently in government conversations I’ve had, not with the government, but talking about governments, which is somebody, a single parent mother scribbles out a book in the cafe in Edinburgh and then that book becomes Harry Potter. What’s that worth economically? Exactly. That’s a great example. It’s worth a hundred billion dollars maybe. It’s a book that’s worth billions. It’s a film that’s worth billions. It’s merchandising, right? It’s great PR for the whole of the UK, creates tourism. It’s a theme park. It’s a theatrical performance every night. And it’s not going to go away tomorrow. No. It’s like, what’s Shakespeare worth? What’s Shakespeare worth? It’s beyond money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the fact that something is beautiful, so that’s another way of thinking about it, the fact that something is truly beautiful is actually an index of its value. And a fair chunk of that value can be economic because value is multi-dimensional. And no, the notion, this is a real problem with the conservative mode of thinking, is the notion that beauty is some unnecessary appendage to the necessary bare bones, concrete efficient reality. That’s so blind. Ugly is there’s nothing more expensive than stupidly ugly. It demoralizes people terribly. So sorry, we’re back from. Thanks very much. See you soon. You bet. You bet. Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.