#1022 - Sheehan Quirke - How Did The Modern World Get So Ugly? | Modern Wisdom

What is beauty?

That's one hell of a question.

I think the word is overused and misunderstood.

The best way to think about beauty, the most helpful way, is to think of it as synonymous with the word love.

Once you do that, all the complications kind of fade away.

I think beauty is basically love manifest in the physical world.

But anyway, so that's how I think of beauty because I think Because you're a hopeless romantic.

Oh, I'm a hopeless romantic.

Well, I'm a hopeful romantic, let's say.

But I think the problem is once you start talking about beauty, what is beauty?

It's kind of like asking what is art, right?

It's a very, very interesting question, but you can end up talking.

We could spend the whole two hours of how long we're going to be here just talking about.

Well, maybe beauty is this, maybe beauty is that, but what are this?

Same with art.

I think it's very helpful to agree on a pretty simple definition and then move on to the more important stuff.

So, taking beauty, I think people obsess much over the idea of beauty like is the modern world beautiful?

Is architecture beautiful?

Is design beautiful?

Is this room beautiful?

I don't think it's helpful.

I think more helpful words are interesting, charming and meaningful.

They're the words i prefer to use.

Delineate those for me so well.

I think interesting is the opposite of boring, and i think you know a lot of what i write about online.

Um, and what generates an awful lot of interest is when you talk about the ugliness of the.

I think boringness is a much more important and powerful word.

Because again, ugly and beautiful, they feel very subjective.

But when you say boring, it's a lot easier to agree on what is boring.

And I think something being boring is a bigger problem.

I've often said to my friends, the one thing human beings cannot stand is being bored.

We can put it with a lot of stuff.

We can put it with suffering and misery.

And ugliness.

We can put it with that.

But being bored is the worst thing.

And I think actually...

Being bored has driven a lot of events and movements in human history.

I often think a lot of revolutionaries end up being revolutionaries just because they're bored.

And a revolution is exciting.

It's a chance to be part of something.

And anyway, yeah.

Okay.

So we've got interesting, which is the opposite of boring.

Presumably sort of engaging, captures attention, maybe memorable.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then charming.

I love the word charming.

It's probably my favorite word.

It's my word of the year.

You know charm when you see it.

And charm, I think, is a kind of playfulness.

It's not too serious.

And it also respects the person looking at something or viewing something.

When you make it charming, right, there's no obvious use to charm.

You know, there's not really a profit margin there.

Yeah, exactly.

But when it's charming, it's like, oh, wow, the person who made this thing has thought about me.

They wanted to give me, you know, something to look at, something to make me smile.

I think that's, charmingness is kind of like playfulness, I guess.

Whimsy in the experience.

Yeah, and it doesn't have to be like you know Wes Anderson level of whimsy, but it just has to show that there's something about this object that isn't just interesting in the straight sense of like having something to it other than what is basically necessary, but also yeah, makes you smile and kind of reminds you.

In a way, charm what it does.

It gets you out of your, Your thoughts.

You know walking around and you know miserable thinking about.

I've got to email this person.

I think it's all the time.

I hate emails.

I've got to email this person.

I've got to read Chris Williamson's text or whatever.

And then, you know, then I see something charming and I smile.

Which is also Chris Williamson's text.

Indeed.

And then you think the world isn't so bad.

And then finally meaningful, which I guess I mean.

This conversation is more about the physical world than anything else.

And meaningful basically could mean a few different things.

But a good example is when you walk around a town and you find that the way things have been designed reflects something about that town, its people and its history.

I think that's what meaning is.

And it kind of brings you out of this generic standardized convenient, hyper-optimized online modern world.

And it brings you back into the reality.

We're living in the one that we have been since the dawn of civilization.

So meaningful charming, interesting are much more useful words than than beauty.

And i think also they're much less inflammatory like, if you know, if i put out on on x or something about you know the modern world is so ugly.

Or or look at this um, you know, palace of asai, so beautiful.

People start, you know, getting angry about it, but you say it's interesting, it's charming.

Or you take a sort of a modern building and say well, this is boring.

People say yeah actually, you know what.

You have a point, it is boring.

It's funny how quickly you can um, take these, the charge out of these conversations by using better words.

I wonder whether some of this is because beauty and ugliness feels like a moral judgment.

Yes, it feels like a value.

So i i got a speech coach who you met at the leicester square sorry, london last year, backstage miles and um, when i started working with him, some of my friends said working with a speech coach is going to sort of neutralize your identity.

What?

What if you lose your speaking cadence?

What if you lose who you are?

And I found it really fascinating because I realized that there were preferable and less preferable, more optimal and less optimal ways to speak, in the same way there are to write and in the same ways that there are to sing or play the piano.

And nobody would say to you learning to play the piano well, why are you going to that piano teacher?

What about the lovely natural way that you play the piano?

And you say, well, yeah, but it sucks.

Or it could be refined.

Even if I'm great, it can be refined.

So what it taught me was that there are certain things that people attach closely to our sense of self, like the way that we speak, and there are other things that people don't attach so closely to our sense of self, like the way that we play the piano, and it feels to me like beauty.

Is this word that's imbued with moral weight, with judgment?

Oh it's, it's.

It's the sense of the building or the piece of art or the poem itself, as opposed to a simple comment on the way that it presents.

Yeah, exactly.

So imagine, like you know, before you'd seen this this, this um vocal coach, i said you know chris, the way you talk is ugly man.

That feels quite offensive.

But if i said to you you know the way you talk, you can work.

Yeah, it's boring.

Suddenly like oh wow, really like i need to work on that.

Yeah exactly, i should work on my ugliness doesn't feel quite the same level of what are you getting?

I want to see you bought.

I bought props.

I'm so excited.

I went to Snappy Snaps a couple of hours ago.

Oh, thank you.

It's about two hours in there because I'm not very good at emailing and I sent all the wrong files and there were Google workspace attachments.

If you spent more time on your emails, you'd be better at sending emails when you go to Snappy Snaps.

Well, we can get into that.

Okay.

The good news is so in terms of to illustrate, because what I find is that when you talk about these things, having visual illustrations helps so much.

You know, the old saying, a picture paints a thousand words.

It's so true.

And all I've found.

In order to make points effectively, all you have to do is contrast two things.

Put two images next to each other and it says everything.

So when we talk about things being beautiful versus ugly, interesting versus boring, i have some pictures of drain pipes now.

I love drain pipes and gutters and air conditioning units and, like i love all the stuff that the world is filled with.

It's amazing.

You sort of don't really pay attention to it, but it once you start noticing how much freaking stuff that is in the world.

Like you know, go outside on the street.

Anybody here you know listening or watching Um, when you finish watching which is hopefully not just yet um, go outside and just look at how many things that are on the street outside.

There's literally like the cars, the signs, the windows, the drains, everything.

And all of that has been designed, right?

This stuff didn't just appear.

Like everything in this room is all manmade.

Like someone had to decide how all this stuff looked.

And I guess my big gripe, and the thing that bothers a lot of people, is that all these things around us feel increasingly boring and and standardized and generic, regardless of beauty.

So i have some pictures of drain pipes and i will show them.

I mean, i can maybe, i don't know if you can.

Yeah, we can, we can put them, yeah.

So these are some 19th century drain pipes.

Wow, and like i'm not going to sit here and tell you these are beautiful, like i think that'd be crazy for me to say, oh chris isn't, isn't this beautiful, isn't it?

But what it is?

It's charming, it's interesting, it's fun and it's meaningful, and it's It's basically it shouldn't be a revolutionary idea, but it is that drainpipes can actually improve the appearance of a town or city or home.

You think of it as something that has to be functional and you want to get it out of the way, but you still have to see it and it's like well, it's kind of ruining this wall.

No, our drainpipes can make our towns and cities more beautiful.

They can make our lives better.

Make drainpipes beautiful again.

Exactly, yeah.

And so here's another one comparing some of the same to some modern things.

More modern drain pipes.

How would you categorize the difference between the two in terms of what they are, if you were trying to describe them to someone?

What do you mean?

So you have this list on the right and this list on the left.

What is the difference between those two?

Because they do the same thing.

Well, I don't think they do do the same thing.

Functionally, they do the same thing.

Yes, but this is the point.

So you know this famous line, form follows function, right?

Everyone knows that line.

And everyone sort of thinks what that means is that the function is what matters and appearance is, you know, doesn't matter.

That's kind of how people interpret it.

That we shouldn't care about appearances, we should just care about how it works.

But the guy who said that, Louis Sullivan, the great American architect who kind of solved the big skyscraper problem in the late 19th century,

So skyscrapers, they appeared in America, in Chicago, first in the late 19th century and like no one had ever seen a skyscraper before,

So no one knew how to make them look.

And the first skyscrapers.

If you look, you can go and see more.

Look at photos.

The first skyscrapers in America were basically just like stacks of smaller buildings.

You know sort of take what would normally be a three-story building and just replicate that for another 10 stories.

Command C, command V. Yeah, exactly.

And Sullivan realized that this is, this is nonsense.

It's not working.

And he identified the chief characteristic of skyscrapers as what he called loftiness.

You know their height.

And when he said form follows function, he was the guy who said it.

What he meant is that it's innermost purpose.

The appearance must um be be suited to that.

So what he did was he got rid of this weird multiplication thing and basically just made all the stories the same from the top to the bottom, without all these horizontal lines and kind of um.

In short, he figured out how to make them, make them look good.

I've done an architectural boat tour of chicago.

Oh wow this, i mean.

So many people do this tour.

It's musically at least mine was musically accompanied, the guy maybe, it was a harmonica, but i went on my own.

I was there on tour And I went on my own.

It's fucking freezing.

I wore shorts because I'm an idiot.

And I was enthralled.

It was brilliant.

It was so cool.

And you go and you see the fire.

This is where the fire was.

It goes down.

It does a U-turn.

You see everything of one side.

You see everything of the other.

I think it's got the tallest skyscraper in the world that was designed by a woman there.

It's got the tuning fork building with this sort of unbelievably thin base and the way that they had to structure that in order for it to go.

The most hilarious thing is you're pulling in.

At the very beginning, you go underneath the bridge from the harbor.

You pull through, and they're showing you all of the different buildings.

And he's going sort of from right to left all the way around, right at the end, right in the middle.

Huge, big thing, big letters.

Trump Tower, Chicago.

And this guy's going, it was the tallest building in the world.

It was built by a woman.

And this is using the granite that was imported from East Germany.

And moving over to the left, and he just completely leapfrogs the Trump thing.

I'm like, it's probably safe.

It's probably safe.

Some people are going to hooray you for doing it.

Some are going to be not so happy.

And they just made the executive decision that we'll, we'll forget that building.

Uh, I thought it was quite funny but, by the way, we may need to mention that name again later in this, in this conversation, because Trump is weirdly, and maybe unfortunately, important in this conversation.

You know he he he, in both his terms, has done these executive orders to say that all federal buildings need to be in traditional architectural styles.

Hmm.

Which is, I think, in some ways good and in some ways bad.

But actually, I will put a bookmark there and we'll come back to it.

Because on this point about form and function, Sullivan decorated his buildings, right?

Like his skyscrapers, have this beautiful sort of ornate terracotta panelling and all these floral wreaths and stuff.

His point was just that the decoration should be suited to what the building is.

The problem he felt in the 19th century.

Why he said that is because people decorated everything the same.

He was saying, no, no, we need to decorate and design things according to their purpose.

Not that they shouldn't be decorated.

And in my view with those two different sets of drain pipes, she said, you know, they're both functioning, functionally the same, but I don't, I disagree.

I think any object we design, not in all cases.

You know, I don't need the inside of my laptop to look beautiful.

Right.

It's just got a fricking work, which is still does by the way, all these years later.

Um, but I think anything that's in the built environment and our homes and our offices and our streets, if it's not making that environment more humane, if it's not making the lives of people they're better, it is not fulfilling its, its entire function.

So those drain pipes on the right hand side, i don't know, don't seem like i'm picking on them.

You know they do their job, which is great.

But my point is very simple.

It's just like if we can also make drain pipes that do their job and like make the world a more interesting place to live in, shouldn't we be doing that?

And now why things have changed and how to achieve it, we may get into that, but i think that's the first point to establish.

And yeah, it sounds kind of shocking to people, but drainpipes can be not beautiful but charming.

You know, like all those weird creatures or whatever.

Like imagine, you know, you're walking down the street and you see those.

It does something, which doesn't occur when it's just a plain metal or plastic pipe.

Well, it's interesting when you say form follows function, but you ask what is the function?

Is the function to add charm to your day?

There's no reason that the job of a drainpipe needs to begin and end with water.

Exactly, yeah.

I saw a photo.

You uh, are the leader and traffic in the world of viral x posts about uh, beautiful things and interesting meaningful, charming and um.

I saw one i think it was the the inside of the latch on a door.

So when you look at the door and there was all this engraving, have you ever imagined that this is a common uh currency that you traffic in?

Um and yeah, another thing, you do kind of see it, You do.

I don't see it much, but doors are left open, especially if it's an internal kitchen door or something like that.

So why not make the edge of a door an opportunity to add charm?

You go, well, what's a door for?

Well, it's to create a boundary line, a territory line between the kitchen and the hallway.

But what if it could be a source of charm?

Yeah, I mean, the analogy here is life itself.

I'm not going to ask you what is the point of life right now, but universally people agree the most important things in life are love and friends, fun and adventure and achieving stuff all of that.

That is beyond the function of life.

If I said to you, Chris, what is the meaning of life?

And you said, well, it's to not die and reproduce.

Some people do believe that, to be fair, but most people don't think that about life.

Most people think a good life is one that has love in it and friendship.

More than raw functionality.

Yeah.

The way we view life, that view of life is reflected in drainpipes like those.

Wow, what a take.

Drainpipes are life.

Yeah, but it's funny you mention the virality of these things is so interesting to me.

Because this is kind of how I got started on X or Twitter as it was then.

Why don't you tell the story?

Regale us with how you became the cultural tutor.

So, how did I become the cultural tutor?

So, my name is Sheehan Quirk.

I was born in Scunthorpe, of all places, actually.

Anyway.

That's not really relevant.

Well, it is maybe relevant, but I won't go into that just yet.

So I went to university and then, when university finished, this weird thing happened, where all my friends had plans and they went into the master's degrees.

They went and got jobs in the city of London as lawyers and accountants and all that.

And I, and it kind of took me by surprise because I just, I just did not have a plan at all.

So I'd always wanted to be a writer.

I've always been writing and reading.

You know, since I was a child, my head has been I've just.

You know, my my bedroom as a child was filled with nothing but books.

And I always wanted to write and I've been writing since I was, you know, since I could first hold a pen basically,

And I'd always thought it would happen.

And then, after I left university without a plan, I sort of got into this state of complacency where I was expecting life to just hand it to me on a plate.

I sort of thought one day someone would knock on the door and say Shane, we've heard, you're a great writer.

Here's a book deal.

Obviously, that's not how the world works.

So I got a job as a security guard, sort of, more or less.

This was four years ago. doing the night shifts, you know, which I loved.

I loved the night shift, the 12 hour night shift.

At?

At my old university, actually.

So it was when COVID came.

COVID came, and then they ran out of night watchmen, or porters as they're called, because guys were off sick.

They didn't want to work and all the students had gone.

And I was still living there, just in like a small house with my girlfriend at the time.

And I needed a job.

So they rang me and said, Sheehan, we don't have any porters left.

Do you want to be one?

Normally there are sort of guys who are in the 50s, 60s, semi-retired, retired.

I said, sure, I need a job.

So I did that and I spent a year and a half unblocking toilets and fixing door handles and sitting through the whole night and doing rounds and making sure no one was trying to break in or seal anything.

And in those night shifts, I would write and stuff and watch films.

But in terms of the big picture, where I wanted to be in life, it wasn't happening.

I wasn't unhappy, but things weren't heading in any particular direction.

I left that job, and then...

I realized I didn't have any money.

I didn't have a job for three months.

I ran out of money.

I needed to pay the rent on this house I was living in.

I borrowed money from my friends and my family.

And I just needed a job as quick as I could.

So I just went on Indeed, applied to everything.

Pizza Hut rejected me.

But McDonald's said yes.

And so on the 2nd of January 2022, I went for my interview.

And then two days later, I was there.

And I wasn't a burger flipper.

I was a maintenance person.

So my job was to take in the stock.

You know, get in sort of six in the morning the truck would arrive, bring in all the fries and all the sausages which were packed in scunthop, because it happens.

And the chicken came from Cambodia, which surprised me.

You know, I'd get into the freezer, stock it all up and then I'd have to get out the jet washer and go and clean the car park.

You know, there's McFlurries everywhere and tomato ketchup.

The McDonald's tomato ketchup, when it solidifies, is like rock solid. solid you have to freaking get like boiling hot water to get that stuff off the walls so that's what i was doing and there was just no sign of this ending and i wasn't earning enough money to actually pay back all my friends and i guess it was a bit of a spiral and then i have a very good friend harry dry who you may know of course he's he's a genius and uh and also a fiercely loyal brilliant friend who who tells it how it is and and i was one day i was with him And I was giving him all these ideas.

Oh, Harry, yeah, I'm going to write this novel about this.

And I think I'm going to make a film.

And he's like all you're doing is telling me that you're going to do all these things, not doing anything.

And he said this great line.

He said, what you lack is deadlines, not ideas.

You lack deadlines, not ideas.

And it was maybe one of the most important things anybody said to me.

And I had this, what I call my Mulan moment.

Have you seen Mulan?

The Disney film, Mulan.

Not the most recent one.

The animated.

A long time ago.

Yeah.

You might need to...

Anyway, so there's this wonderful scene in the film where Mulan, her father gets called to war.

He's very old, very sick.

He doesn't have any sons.

And the eldest male member of the family has to go off to war.

Mulan, she loves her father, doesn't want him to go off and die fighting.

So she goes in his place, which obviously they don't want her to do.

But she has to pretend to be a man.

So there's this wonderful scene in the film where the synths kick in.

It's the middle of the night.

And she goes and gets out her father's armor, gets out his sword, and she cuts off her hair.

She cuts off her hair.

So she can ride off to war as a man.

And I kind of had that moment.

There was this one day when I thought, you know what?

I'm just going to quit my job at McDonald's and going to just give everything I've got to getting to where I think I should be.

And I took off my McDonald's beanie for the last time and my big yellow jacket.

And it felt like that moment in new land.

It was like a point of no return.

I did a few things.

I applied to film school.

They rejected me.

I applied to the army and went through the whole process.

They actually offered me a place at Sandhurst, which I said no to because by then something else had taken off, which was this Twitter account I made.

My plan had been to make some money.

How can you make some money?

Well, by tutoring.

Online tutoring is quite a good way to make money.

People sometimes pay like fricking 50 pounds an hour for a good online tutor.

And I thought, well, I'm going to tutor people, not in maths or law.

I did law at university.

I don't want to tutor law.

I thought I wanted to do cultural tutoring.

I thought some parents might want their kids to be more rounded.

So I thought maybe they'll pay me to tutor their kids in poetry and architecture and art, which I've always loved, you know.

And so I made this little website offering tutoring lessons.

And then how do you get eyes on the website?

I made a Twitter account hoping to drive traffic towards this website, so people would book in tutoring sessions and I could finally make some money.

What did I call the Twitter account?

Well, the cultural tutor, because that's what I thought I was.

And I put this little statue of Plato as a profile picture.

And within six weeks it became pretty clear that no one wanted me to tutor them, but they did like what I was writing about.

And after six weeks, I had 100,000 followers on Twitter as it was then.

And kind of from there to here, it's been a dream.

But what I did?

I said when I made the Twitter account I was going to post a thread every single day for a month and just see where it gets me.

Obviously, the first 10 threads, you don't get a single like.

So I would stay up all night going on Twitter searching for other people who'd posted about church windows, seeing who'd liked it, then message those people.

Say, hey, I saw you liked this post about church windows.

I've just written one too.

You might be interested.

And sort of, you know, after a week, you're getting two likes on a post.

It's really bootstrapping your way to viral.

Oh, man, yeah, yeah.

I was obsessed.

It was like I had this clear-mindedness, which is a very rare thing in life.

It's very rare to be able to have that level of focus and determination.

And what started out as a month ended up being two and a half years.

So for two and a half years, I posted every single day online.

What was the first day that you didn't post like?

It was when I was writing my book.

It was after I got the book deal.

And there was this one day when I thought, like, I have a choice today.

I can either make this particular chapter of the book better or I can post on X, And at that point I thought you know what?

It's very hard to let go of something like that.

Like, it's really hard to let go of a ritual because that was my life.

I was like, I would, you know, I said no to all my friends going out.

I said, no, I've got to write on Twitter.

Why the hell do you want to tweet instead of hanging out with your friends?

Like I remember sometimes I would go out and then I'd get home at 5am and stay up till 8am putting something on Twitter and eventually got to a point where I was where I needed to be.

I had my dream, which was to have a book deal.

And then that became the focus.

Um, and a key part of the story is Mr David Perel, who you know, of course.

Uh, he saw I was going viral online and he reached out to me and he just, in this fantastically American way.

Just said, let's get on FaceTime.

And so we went on FaceTime.

He said, look, Shane, I really like your work.

And I'm guessing you need to make some money from this.

But rather than you monetizing your audience and trying to, you know, maybe start a sub stack and then you turning your focus from the wider public to your audience.

I'm going to support you.

I'll be your patron.

I'm going to pay you a living wage, a good wage.

And all you have to do is write every single day.

And thanks to David and his patronage of me, I was able to write every single day and then get to where I am now, with nearly 2 million followers whatever, and a book deal and some other exciting projects on the way.

So that's how it happened.

And it kind of brings us back to where we started.

I mean, maybe I don't know if you want any sort of, if you have any comments on that or any reflections.

It was one hell of a journey.

But the post that went viral, the post that took me from I sort of ground my way after five and a half weeks to 15000 followers, which is pretty good.

But then I did a couple of posts and they got like, you know, less than a hundred likes.

And I was thinking maybe this is it.

I'm washed.

I don't know if you ever have.

I mean, you've been, you know you're an old hand now and anyone who works online will know the sort of the dread and anxiety that hangs on your back.

Right.

Because you live by those numbers.

And as soon as they dip, even by a half percent, you're like, this is it.

This isn't my time.

You know, my 15 minutes of fame is done.

And I was, I was really mad, really mad.

And I was staying with my mum at the time.

And I decided to write about something, which had always bothered me.

I used to moan to my friends about it all the time, which was this thing we're talking about.

Ever since I was a kid, I'd always be like, why is stuff so boring?

I'd look at older things and think, well, they're pretty so interesting.

Why is modern stuff so boring?

So I wrote about that online.

I did bring a screenshot, actually, of this post to show the point.

This was the post.

It's called The Danger of Minimalist Design.

And the death of detail, a short thread.

Yeah.

So it got 440,000 likes.

Yeah.

That'll, that'll build a 15 K account.

Yeah.

And it got me a 90, 90,000 followers overnight.

And what's so funny about this is what's so funny about it.

And it's so interesting.

And look at the lead image.

It's just two bollards, right?

It's like a typical old bollard.

It's not even that interesting, but then it's a typical new bollard.

And what it turned out is that people all over the world had been feeling exactly the same way, that things are boring and generic these days, and that people are crying out for the world to be a more interesting, charming and meaningful place.

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Dude, what a great story.

You know, I'd heard this from David's side.

Mm-hmm.

But it's really wonderful to hear it from you.

It's really inspired me even hearing what David did with you.

I've had a bunch of conversations with the people who look after my accounts.

And in America, you can start a nonprofit and do these things.

It's a fucking nightmare.

Because what I would love to do is start a kind of scholarship thing where maybe once every 12 months, I find somebody, or maybe a small group of people who are in your position, and liberate them yeah, to be able to go and do the thing.

And it's so difficult.

It's so difficult to be able to do that because if they're an employee, then it means this, and if it's a non-profit, then you can't be the person that chooses, because the opportunity for nepotism is, you know, obviously through the roof.

It's basically a way for you to tax-free funnel money from your business to other people that you like.

Well, obviously I like them if I want to support them because I think they're good, but oh, you're not allowed to the light.

So you can be the director, but then you need to have a symposium or a board of people and they would choose and you can't have it.

I just want to give someone, I just want to enliven one or a few people that I think are making good work, to go and do it.

And it turns out to be really difficult.

So that's a work in progress.

You got it.

Cause honestly, like patronage is like a very old fashioned way to make things happen in the modern world.

Throughout the 20th century, you had establishments, you know you had the publishers and the media broadcasting organizations.

That's where you went to get stuff done.

Now we have the online creator economy, as it's called.

You become an influencer, you know, like us, i guess.

You know you get sponsorships, or or you know you have a sub stack.

The old-fashioned way is a guy who has some spare money finds people who are talented and gives them that money right, and then that's how so many of the world's most famous and beloved works of art appeared pretty much all of them.

Like You know, Michelangelo didn't paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel based on, you know, substack subscriptions.

He didn't have a sponsor.

Pope Julius II said, Michelangelo, you're the best artist in Italy right now.

I'm going to pay you 400,000 ducats, whatever it was, to paint the ceiling of my chapel.

And he did it.

Same as the Mona Lisa, right?

The Mona Lisa, which is pretty boring and overrated painting.

But anyway, it was commissioned by a guy.

Leonardo was back in...

Florence, after being in Milan for a while, and this guy he just got married and was moving into your house said Leonardo, I want you to paint a portrait of my wife.

So here's a lot of money, paint a portrait of my wife.

This is how great art throughout history and many books as well, and poems and stuff.

That's how they appeared.

Somebody with the funds directs it directly to the person who needs it, and then it gets created.

Patronage.

It's an old-fashioned system, but I think maybe it has a future in our modern world.

Tell me more about your opinion on the Mona Lisa.

Well, look, I think...

I mean, there's a few facts about it.

First of all, here's a question.

Who is the Mona Lisa?

What is she called?

It's not after Mona Lisa?

Well, no.

Her name is Lisa.

But I think there's something interesting about the fact that the most famous painting in the world, in some sense the woman with the most famous face in history no one knows what she's called.

Her name is Lisa Gerardini or Lisa del Gicondo when she got married.

Um, and also the crazy thing is she, she never actually saw the painting finished.

Leonardo was a famous procrastinator.

He would just fricking take forever to do anything.

And, uh, he actually left Italy with the painting.

He went off to, to, to live in France because the King of France, uh, asked him to come and work.

Yeah.

He hired him and he took the painting.

So Lisa Gerardini never saw the finished portrait. which is kind of crazy, I think.

She died before it was done?

No, no, sorry.

So Leonardo took the portrait with him to France before it was finished.

And then he finished it in France and then gave it to the king of France, Francis I, he was called.

Anyway.

Here's a painting of someone else's wife.

Well, you know, yeah, I guess, I guess.

But yeah, it's Leonardo.

So even then, the guy was a celebrity.

Even then, like his reputation now, it hasn't changed at all.

People then worshipped the guy.

But I just think it's a shame that the most famous painting in the world is a relatively boring portrait.

Why is it boring?

Well, if you look at other paintings and the things that might get people interested in art, like you imagine because, like i'm passionate about art, you know it's my lifeblood.

But the way our culture works, like if you want to get someone interested in art and they kind of start looking into it and they see the most famous product of the entire history of art is just is like a woman smiling um, it's.

I don't think it's going to excite them.

What do you wish was the replacement?

If you were to say, hey, the world is gifted, I can hot swap the Mona Lisa for something else.

This would be a good front end of the funnel for people into art.

Sure, I think there's a few contenders.

Some of which are already quite...

Well, no, look, it depends on the person.

Because I think when someone's, for example, like young, when they're a teenager, I think you need something a bit more brash and exciting.

If you look at the paintings of a guy like John Martin he was a 19th century English painter from County Durham actually

And he painted these kind of crazy, biblical, catastrophic landscapes.

You know, and there's lightning and there's thunder, and there's like cities blowing up and there's gigantic waves.

And it's epic.

You know, it's like sort of watching Lord of the Rings, but in a single painting.

Like that kind of thing is exciting.

Also another painting which is very, very famous The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch.

That one is pretty famous and I think paintings more like that are more likely to get people excited about art.

A little bit more interesting.

Yeah, they're basically more... I don't hate them only so much.

If you like it, then you like it.

But I think people should be free to call it boring if they want.

This is another problem.

The problem with art.

It's in this space where people feel very intimidated.

No, they feel ignorant.

Yes, i certainly do sure, and then instantly they feel like they're not allowed to say the mona lisa is boring because it feels unrefined, like i don't get the joke that everybody else gets, or i don't get the, the subtext, i'm not sufficiently sophisticated.

Exactly exactly, whereas my view is the only thing you need to get into art uh, you only need two things your eyes and your heart.

That's all you need, and you've got to fall in love with it.

And that's a lot of my work.

Is there's been that just trying to put art out there, Not in the context of art, but in the context of just something that's not that different to cinema?

A nice drainpipe.

Yeah, exactly.

Or a nice freaking drainpipe.

Yeah, man.

Exactly.

Anyway, so how did the Mona Lisa come up?

You were explaining, I think you were going through a bunch of, oh, it was Da Vinci, Michelangelo.

He's laid on the ceiling.

So this thing you're thinking of doing, man, good luck with that.

Good luck with that.

Because who knows what it might lead to.

What else have you got by way of example?

I'm excited for what comes next.

I've got some really good stuff there.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Some deep cuts from the world of architecture and art.

So the reason I brought these is, again, just to illustrate the points I'm making.

I could say, oh, just Google it, but it's much easier if I show it myself here.

Now a big part of my work online, a big part of the book but not only the book and a big part of this documentary, this short film, which is being released online tomorrow as we speak.

Um made it with David Perel.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

It's a 15 minute short film and we're treating it as a standalone piece and as a pilot for a future series we want to make about art and architecture with and learning from art and architecture, about life in the 21st century.

It's called the modern world actually, because I think we can learn a lot about life now and how to improve it by looking at art and architecture and things like that in the past.

And people are crying out for a sort of a high quality, uh art documentary series anyway.

Now, what i think is really important my life's work in a way is to establish, first of all, that there is a problem with the way the world looks today and the way we design it, and then, secondly this is the crucial part to establish a consensus around this issue.

A problem i ran into pretty early on, which i hadn't anticipated, is that as soon as i started writing about this you know this, this like just like people have very strong views about it.

Um, Most people are inclined to agree and the polls show very clearly.

Studies and polls show very clearly that people are dissatisfied with how things look and that they generally prefer traditional to modern architecture.

But I found that as soon as I started writing about it, people have all these connotations based on whether they think they're left-wing or right-wing.

There's this idea, for example.

No, it's a big issue because people think if you're To criticize modernism right, so like modern architecture to criticize, that must mean that you're somehow like a traditionalist conservative, even a fascist.

And also, if you want to revive traditional architecture, you must therefore be a conservative or a fascist.

Um and?

And then people also think if you defend bond architecture, the conservatives think you're like a radical socialist or a communist, and all of this is is it's complete nonsense.

It's just not true now.

So that's the second part.

I want to demolish these misguided political associations around the issue and establish a consensus, which is why I've brought some little graphics.

So the first thing I'll do is, this should be quite good fun.

I just want to show you these and ask you what you think they are.

It's sort of a trick question, and I'm hoping you get it wrong.

They look like towers, towers of castles in some ways.

Yeah, exactly.

That's how they look.

These are water towers.

These are 19th century water towers wow.

So all they do is you know, and for people who don't know what water tower is like in a town or city, in order to have water pressure, you need to lift all the water up high to the pipe, right?

So that's what these are.

Unbelievably, these somehow are just bits of like the most boring infrastructure you can imagine water management infrastructure.

And yeah, they look like they're just.

They're so much fun, right?

Imagine.

Northumbrian water created one of those, exactly exactly.

And What's most interesting perhaps, is that these have all been decommissioned now, right?

Because obviously you know we've got more advanced technologies and yet they still stand, because people love them.

They've been converted variously into houses.

Some of them are like gallery spaces or viewing platforms.

And again, just like the drain pipes.

It's crazy to think that in the past, people believed that even something as simple and ostensibly boring and functional as a water tower could make a town or city more interesting.

But this isn't about past versus present, which is what people assume.

All I'm interested in is improving the present by learning from the past.

It's difficult to learn from the future.

Indeed.

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Now, to establish how there is... I mean, look at this.

This is another screenshot of a tweet I did.

So this is like... I can't read.

What does it say?

Why are cities all around the world starting to look the same?

Yeah.

USA japan russia columbia germany ethiopia brazil taiwan poland australia spain, china.

These are high-rise skyscrapers.

Yeah, they just want like it all looks the same right, and and what's so.

I did this glass steel, vertical lines and it's got like 174 000 likes, you know.

So like people really care about this issue, like people feel very, very strong, like the easiest way to get traction online is just to post two images One of like a nice old thing, one of a crappy new thing, and everyone loves it because everyone feels it to be true.

It's like a global issue as well.

So you know, with those water towers, with those drain pipes, the reason I want to show them to you is just to kind of give an example of two things.

First of all, the fact that things have changed, that we don't design things how we used to.

And secondly, to show that it's possible to make boring things, to make infrastructure interesting meaningful, charming.

So that is the problem.

Now, at this point, people start getting very angry.

And if I can sort of address the two sides, one after the other, this is what I would say.

So I think it's very important to defend modern architecture.

It's not popular with the public, even though a certain sort of group of architects and planners love it.

The general public do not like modern architecture.

Look at any study, any poll.

Look where people go.

Look at where tourists take photos, right?

When tourists come to London, where do they want to go and take photos?

In front of the pretty old buildings.

Where do people want to go on holiday?

They go to Paris.

They go to Rome.

They go to Venice.

They go to Kyoto.

They want to see beautiful old buildings, right?

What the public want is very clear.

That being said, I think it's very important to defend modern architecture.

There's this idea, I think, maybe among conservatives and conservatives what you might call more right-wing or traditionalist people, which are all such unhelpful terms.

Anyway, that modern architecture, these big sort of boring concrete tower blocks skyscrapers, that they replaced these Baroque palaces and these charming cottages.

But the truth is that this is the kind of thing they replaced.

This photo was taken in the Netherlands in the 1930s.

Okay, this is a mud hut.

It's a family of three, two adults living And an infant.

I'm not doing this for the visually impaired.

I'm doing it because some people are just listening.

Black and white photo of what looks like farmland in the middle of a field, essentially.

I think there's a wheel.

Is that a wheel?

Yeah.

On the top of the house.

Yeah.

So it's very low.

It's basically the height of maybe even slightly lower than the height of people.

It's an A-frame sort of.

It seems to be a bigger bit at the back.

But I mean, it's halfway between a mound of dirt and a tent made out of wood.

Yeah.

By the chimney.

Would you want to live there?

No.

Probably not.

Now, most people in our history were living in conditions not totally dissimilar to this.

Like throughout most of history, until the last century, people were living in conditions of absolute squalor and material misery.

And all these modern buildings which are very easy to criticize aesthetically.

They look pretty nice when you compare them to that sort of thing.

Modern architecture using concrete and steel and glass and plastic, building quickly and cheaply and efficiently basically gave the world a roof over its head.

It lifted humanity out of material squalor and into a world where they could have.

You know they weren't living in places like that, where you're warm and you're dry and there's no danger of imminent collapse.

So it's really important.

I think that more conservative or traditionalist people recognise the modern architecture of has actually been a blessing for humankind insofar as quality of life is concerned.

I also think a lot of modernist buildings are very beautiful, but that's kind of a separate point.

I think they can be lovely.

And I think, like, I like the Shard, you know, and I like the Gherkin.

These buildings are so much fun, and I wouldn't want to see a world where we didn't build those.

Definitely not boring, though.

No, exactly.

They're not boring.

Exactly.

And they're charming.

And they're charming, yeah.

Meaningful.

What i love about these buildings is like london has this fantastic um practice of giving buildings nicknames, right.

So the gherkin, the shard, the freaking walkie talkie, the cheese grater that, i think, is meaning emerging.

Basically, when we give them those names um, you know, the gherkin feels like part of london.

You can't imagine london without the gherkin now, even though 20 years ago a lot of people didn't like it.

So that's my sort of piece aimed at the traditionalists who are, i think, too overly critical of modern architecture.

But now the problem is that maybe the slightly bigger problem is that as soon as you start talking about this issue, a lot of more progressive people, generally conservative, progressive, maybe socialist, left-leaning liberal people think that to call for traditionalism is some kind of like retrogressive, conservative, fascistic worldview, which I think is clearly not the case.

Like asking for the world to be more beautiful.

Especially the streets are where ordinary people live and work.

The rich can freaking afford whatever paintings they want.

They can afford lovely houses.

The people suffering most right now are ordinary people all over the world, whose streets and homes and offices are literally making them depressed.

Studies have shown, I mean, you don't even need studies to prove it, but I suppose it's helpful.

We are more stressed, more anxious, less productive, less happy when we're in boring environments.

Like, why do prisons look the way they look?

Like, why does solitary confinement have nothing in it and harsh lighting?

But there's this crazy situation where we literally design buildings these days in the same way that we design prisons.

I mean, it's kind of sad to think about, but there's this game that some people play, which is is it a prison or is it a school?

And if you look at prisons and schools built in the UK over the last 50 or 60 years and I show you a photo of each you can't tell which is which.

They look pretty similar.

Anyway...

And more to the point about why I think liberal people should embrace, and progressive people should embrace, some traditional architecture.

A bunch of reasons.

One, it's more sustainable.

Look at those water towers, right?

You build something that's beautiful that people like, you don't have to demolish it.

It lasts decades or hundreds of years, which is way more sustainable than building things like we do now, which can be demolished in 20, 30 years because they're crappy and no one likes them.

It's also more environmentally friendly.

Traditional architecture is way more interested in using local materials.

It's also more suited to local climate.

Like, why do all old houses or buildings in Northern Europe have very steep roofs, steep gables?

Because it snows, right?

And you don't want snow to build up on the roof.

Now we have flat roofs so we spend like a crap ton.

You know having to.

You know we have to clear it or we have to heat it so it melts.

It's a mess.

Anyway, so it's more environmentally sustainable.

And also, the final thing, I realise we're going on a bit, but this is so important.

Like When you have beautiful stuff, like those beautiful hinges, you talk about the beautiful latches in the doors.

William Morris, the great great.

William Morris, 19th century poet and designer and a campaigner, also a massive communist and Marxist as well.

The reason he loved beautiful medieval, old-fashioned design is because he felt it made people's lives more interesting when they have to use stuff, but it also made people's lives better when they had to make stuff.

Like right now we're forcing people all around the world on other sides of the world to be fair in other countries, paying them like crappy wages to make crappy boring stuff.

As soon as your job involves making something interesting and beautiful and you've got some creative say in it.

Like imagine, if you know bricklayers in this country, you know, we just make them.

We ask them to make plain brick walls.

It's like the Middle Ages, bricklayers, what they did, they would make patterns in the walls.

You know, you can do wonderful things with bricks.

They sound boring, but bricks can be so charming, so much fun.

And now, you know, we don't do that.

But in a world where we embrace beautiful design, everyone benefits.

The people who have to make stuff and the people who have to use stuff.

Anyway, that is, I think, most of what is needed to be said.

That I want to establish a consensus that the world can be so much more interesting that we will all benefit from it, and that it's not a political issue.

Anyway, I didn't get through all my slides.

I want to see more of your examples.

Go do the presentation.

Here's one.

So here are some.

Here are some, do you know what they are?

Water fountains.

Yeah.

So there's a variety, sort of a green, the classic green's okay.

It's a little, a little sterile and minimalist, but it's not bad.

And then there's one that's sort of a real aqua blue and looks a little bit like a, like a cartoon.

Yeah.

So these are some water fountains that have been installed around London in the past sort of 10 to 20 years, and around the UK.

Okay. actually and like they're fine like they do their job um but uh on the whole i wouldn't say that they necessarily make the place where they are prettier or more interesting and i here are some victorian water fountains which uh they look like mini chapels they do yeah they do they do um they're beautiful and they're really four-sided yeah i mean that that almost looks like a a fountain that you would go to yes where ducks would swim and yeah exactly and uh there's a few points on this but i'll keep it relatively brief and the main one to me is that when you see something like this when this much care and thought has been put into designing water fountains which are one of the most important kinds of public um architecture you can have right like water is a sacred thing it is it is it is the source of life um when you treat the public and treat water in this way um I think everyone is much happier.

And now the other slides, I can probably kind of speed through them.

There's no speeding through anything.

We can indulge as much as you want.

We can, we can, but there's just so much exciting stuff to talk about here.

So this one is kind of fun.

So you remember, I showed you the screenshot of how all modern architecture looks.

The same, all these skyscrapers.

Well, it turns out in the past, things weren't actually necessarily so different.

Like here's, here's one of.

Wow.

Island, Mexico, Greece, India, Russia, Cuba, USA, Philippines, Argentina.

And these are all quite sort of Baroque style pillars with the classics, a frame, Greece, Greek.

What is that?

Yeah.

And they all look the same, basically all over the world.

And it's the same here.

Difference being I think people don't mind when they think it's pretty no, they don't mind exactly.

But i think it's important to recognize that we shouldn't romanticize the past, even though i'm prone to doing that.

I think i've got better in recent years of being much more realistic about what things were like.

But it's interesting, first of all yeah, that people don't mind homogenous architecture when it's pretty, but also that things in the past were also.

You know, it's not like there was necessarily more variety, and these ones are kind of more to the point again.

It's just like freaking loads of buildings that look wow, look at that sort of gothic style cathedrals.

Uh UK Norway Slovakia Germany, Czechia.

Oh, Czechia.

I guess that's the Czech Republic.

Czechia.

Uh, Italy.

That one in Italy is insane.

Uh, uh, Hungary, Portugal, and Belgium.

All again, they're all very, very similar, right?

Cause they're all, they're all part of the same.

And that was kind of.

And then sorry, there is one more of these, which is a now Byzantine style architecture.

Okay.

So this is with domes.

Yeah.

Uh, a little bit lighter, uh, a lot of white, some yellows in there as well.

And again, they all look very similar.

So I kind of like making that point, just because again, perhaps some people who are more traditionally aligned tend to forget that there were phases in the past when buildings looked the same all around the world.

But then the equal point that you made straight away is that people don't mind architecture.

They don't mind when it's homogenous if it's pretty.

Then the final thing, it came out a bit blurry, unfortunately.

But anyway, what do you think this building is?

What do you think that is?

I think it's a church.

Sure.

That's what anyone would think.

Okay.

Can you tell me it's showers or something?

So this is a still from a documentary, actually.

It's been my dream for years to visit this place and to film there.

Where is it?

So this is called Crossnest Pumping Station.

This is a sewage facility.

Ha, ha, ha.

When London's new sewers were built in the 19th century, they needed a pumping station a few miles like about 20 miles east, closer to the mouth of the Thames.

And the Victorians thought this was how you should design a sewage facility.

And it's just absolutely gorgeous.

And this, in a way, sums up the change.

And I think we've lost the belief, the conviction that even sewers can be beautiful, can be charming interesting, meaningful.

People work in sewers.

And what's the excuse other than convenience and cost?

Yeah, well, so this is where it gets really interesting.

The cost point is frequently raised that we can't afford to build like that or design like that anymore.

But this kind of isn't true.

Now, there are two things to say about it.

First of all, one point it is a bit more expensive but like, anything is too expensive if you don't want it.

And then the question is, is the extra investment worth making?

Well, if it's going to cost 1 more, which is usually what it's like to decorate like, decoration is so much cheaper than every other part of a building, right?

Just got to stick some pretty stuff on the front of it.

Now that's all cast iron.

It's mass manufactured.

This isn't made by some artists slaving away for years.

You literally melt the iron, stick it in a mold, pull it out, paint it a bit, looks beautiful.

Like, is an extra percent worth an increase in human happiness and joy?

Worth increasing, you know, the lifespan of the building will be expanded by, you know, decades.

I dare say that that's a wise investment.

And also, in purely speaking, purely commercially, think of what it does for tourism.

Like cities, especially like in europe.

Um, you know, in europe people don't make stuff anymore, don't manufacture stuff.

Where does all the money come from?

Comes from tourism, like you put up beautiful buildings and people from around the world will come flocking spending all the hard-earned money just to spend one night in this one freaking pretty street in your city.

So, like it's, one of the best investments you can make is in decoration.

Um, that's the one people usually raises cost.

It's kind of the biggest one, and it really is that simple.

I think there's also other things we could get into that probably aren't worth addressing right now.

But to the point I want to make is that it is a choice.

We act like it isn't a choice.

And the problem with that, however, is that we live in a consumerist society.

And again, this is why I think traditionalists and liberals, conservatives and progressives should be united.

The problem, the biggest problem with modern design isn't any, isn't people who want to return to the past.

It's not socialism, it's not communism.

The biggest problem is consumerism.

Like we live in a society where we have a culture of obsolescence, nothing's built to last because you can make more money obviously, if you don't build things to last.

But the cheapest, most convenient, quickest route is the one that we always take with everything we do.

Like everyone stands to benefit from that kind of meaningful, beautiful design, apart from uh, if you're a property developer or a planner, whatever it is, and you want to spend as little money as possible and get back as much as possible in a short time span.

You make it boring.

You make it ugly.

You don't care about how it looks.

That's the consumerism, I think, is the biggest problem.

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Where do you think on the planet has got a good balance of beauty, of charm meaning, interestingness?

I imagine some unsophisticated idiot like me is immediately going to say Rome, because it's so obvious and in my face.

I went to Vienna for the first time. what do you make of it?

I, I again, I that kind of very um, i've just read my first philosophy bookcom unnecessarily baroque architecture thing for me is very it's easy to enjoy.

I find it right.

I find the detail uh, very pleasant um, the fact that every street that you turn down is really wonderful.

I thought that was lovely.

I really really enjoyed venice.

I thought venice was fantastic and um small, quaint streets and higgledy-piggledy buildings almost leaning up against each other and they're being supported by bits of wood and the wood's supported by iron and the iron brackets are on the side of the house and no two streets look the same and all of the pavements are cracked and that felt quaint to me, which was charming.

I think that would be very, very charming.

Where else has got it right that I like?

I'm a fan of Harrogate nice, i think, harrigan in the uk, edinburgh yeah phenomenal, just yeah, just when your spirits lift, when you go down, you're excited every corner.

But these are maybe not for americans, but these are maybe more obvious examples.

No, but they're good examples.

Man, like you really, you made such a like a good point, like when you said about vienna, like it's easy to enjoy.

You know, i've got like i'm deep into this stuff and i i don't like baroque architecture, I'm much more of a gothicist.

I'm much more of a gothic.

And I could sit here and talk for 12 hours about why that is.

But it kind of doesn't matter what I think.

I just like it.

I like it because I like it.

It makes you smile.

And you get out your phone and you start taking photos.

And that is what matters here.

So Edinburgh, Rome, Vienna, other cities in the world as well.

All over the world.

Where else?

Give us some maybe less obvious beautiful locations that people could...

That you wouldn't think of.

Yeah.

So, I love Sofia in Bulgaria.

Okay.

That's got a wonderful mix.

It's got a mix of architecture, which is why I like it.

Because for a long time, it was under the Ottoman Empire.

And the same is true all around Bulgaria.

You've got a lot of Ottoman-era, kind of Turkish-influenced buildings.

But then you've also got after it was independent.

You've got all these 19th-century neo-Byzantine, all big domed cathedrals.

And then you've got Art Nouveau, all spiraling and flowery and pastel colours.

Yeah.

And then the communists came and started building their massive brutalist monuments.

And I adore brutalism.

And so you go to any city in the Balkans, really, and they've got this amazing mix.

Over 500 years you've got several different chapters of world and cultural and architectural history crammed in on the same street.

And I think variety is key.

Again, I'll say it once more.

I wouldn't want to see a world where we just get rid of modernism in design.

Some modern buildings are just wonderful.

We mentioned the Gherkin earlier, and I think the world benefits from variety.

Look, it's a law of nature.

One of the big points I make is like, okay, but why do human beings like variety?

Why do we need variety?

Why is decoration charming to us?

Like, why is a door handle with a little spiral on it nicer than a door handle that's just a bar?

Because it reflects nature.

You go outside and look at a tree.

John Constable the painter has this great line that no tree, two leaves in the history of the universe have ever been identical.

And it's true.

Look at a tree.

Every single leaf is different.

Every single tree is different.

Nature is constantly changing and it's varied and it's detailed.

Um, and those principles of natural beauty, I think, which is the uh, which is the environment that we were not, not raised in, that we evolved in and that we've been in since the dawn of the human species, is the one we feel most at home in.

And, Go ahead.

I totally get it.

The straight lines don't necessarily appear in nature, so trying to replicate some more complexity and some more uniqueness in design is a good idea.

You mentioned brutalism there.

I can see how brutalism might not be boring.

I would absolutely say it is not charming, though.

True, true.

Make the pro case that For brutalist architecture.

Yeah.

Oh, God.

You might need to do a tiny briefer on what brutalist architecture is as well.

Sure.

So brutalism is a word that conjures a lot of images in people's heads.

Like it emerged after the Second World War in the late 50s well, early 50s and then kind of really took off in the 60s in the West.

And then it took off in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc a little bit later in the 70s and 80s.

Now, when people say brutalism, they usually mean any building that is concrete and square.

That's not what brutalism is.

That's the most basic form of modernism, I suppose.

Brutalism, properly told, is about these big, bold shapes.

Do you know the National Theatre or the South Bank Centre?

Just on the other side of Waterloo Bridge.

That's a great example of brutalism.

I probably should have added to my presentation.

But what you've got is these great big cubes and pyramids and weird angles and big open spaces.

And it's all concrete.

It's all unpainted, raw material concrete, which is very honest.

It's truthful.

That's the idea anyway.

The reason i love brutalism is because it's bold and it's exciting and it presents a vision for the world.

It's like brutalism.

You look at all this all like fancy, pretty detailed, delicate stuff.

Brutalism is the opposite of that.

It is massive.

It is pure geometry on a huge scale, like the pyramids of ancient giza or stonehenge are kind of brutalist, like imagine those things, but made of concrete.

Suddenly they're brutalism.

And that's what brutalism has, this like ancient, monumental monumentality to it and i think that's way more.

I agree it's not charming, but not every, not everything needs to be charming.

Some things should be imposing or impressive.

I think brutalism is impressive, but you, what you said was so true, you said it.

You don't think of it as boring right, because it's not boring.

It's maybe ugly, but maybe ugliness is a good thing sometimes.

But what did i say?

The one thing we cannot bear is boredom.

Ugly is fine, boring is not fine and brutalism is.

I grant that some people find it ugly.

And I wouldn't want a world of brutalism, but I think it's something inspired and, to me, very optimistic.

It emerged after the Second World War.

The whole world has been devastated by the greatest cataclysm in the history of civilization.

And from the ashes emerges this new style of architecture.

If you pick a brutalist building and look at a photo of it from when it was first built in the 50s or 60s, it looks so futuristic.

And I can imagine people like imagine you're surrounded by all these, like you know, delicate Victorian buildings.

Or all the plaster is peeling, the iron is rusty.

And then you see this like concrete spaceship.

It's like, this is going to be a better, fairer, more prosperous world.

Only in comparison with a much more delicate, refined glass, steel, chrome building.

Yeah.

Does this begin to actually look kind of raw and primal and threatening?

Yeah, threatening is a good word, it can be pretty threatening.

And the problem now which yeah, is that the world has been filled with so much boring design plain squares and cubes that brutalism has lost its charm because it worked by virtue of its contrast with that older environment.

Now we have these brutalist buildings surrounded by just freaking glass boxes.

Doesn't look that interesting.

You mentioned earlier on you're a hopeful romantic.

I think I put myself in the same category, actually.

How do you come to think about romance in the modern world?

We've spoken about beauty, something that I think people are wistful for, struggling to find, perhaps interestingness.

Where is it this sort of increasing sterilization, as they feel, of the environments that they have to spend time in, whether inside or outside?

How do you come to conceive of romance in the modern world?

So you mentioned sterilization, a really, really good word.

I think romance.

Romance is the least convenient thing.

You say the word romance twice and things start falling out of the wall.

That's the way it works.

That's how it should be.

We live, as I said, I think we're okay.

If someone agrees.

We live in a world of convenience and of hyper-commercialized optimization.

And in this world, and amongst it, romance screams out as the opposite.

I said it to a friend of mine.

I think I said it to David, actually.

I said, we were talking about dating and how he's getting on.

And I said, look, man, it's not love if it's convenient.

Love is anything apart from convenient.

When you're in love And when you're taken by these passions.

Right you?

You stop doing things you should be doing.

You think, well, I've got to work today, but I just, I just want to be with this person.

You stay up all night.

No, you arrive at work, you're tired, you're sleepless.

That is not, um, convenient.

And it's not beneficial to a world where your focus would be on on, on on on kind of optimizing according to those material conditions.

And yet it's worth it, you know?

And I think that's how I think of romance and why we're struggling to find it, because it runs contrary to all the instincts that are being um taught to us by what, like?

I don't think you can schedule romance, you know, and i think online dating culture it, it is transformed, the way maybe we think about love, into something that that that fits into a broader scheme of a scheduled and organized life, And I think it narrows the scope of possibility for passion to sweep you away.

And that is why I... Yeah, that's how I think of romance.

Does that answer the question or not?

To a degree, it does.

I think the inconvenience makes an awful lot of sense.

To go from your slightly more artistic, whimsical approach to my remote area of expertise of evolutionary psychology and mating dynamics.

Humans have two attachment systems.

We have the passionate and the companionate.

And the passionate is uh, highly irrational.

It's the honeymoon phase, it's obsession, a lot of anxiety.

Uh, it's very painful.

Anyways, it's very beautiful.

It's the rush, it's the spark.

Uh, you're unable to focus on anything.

It wouldn't make for a particularly good society.

It certainly wouldn't really even make for a particularly good family life.

There's a lot of articles online you can go and find.

This couple kept their honeymoon phase going for 20 years, and here's how you can do it too.

And there's a bit of me that thinks oh, that sounds nice in some ways, because there's the rush and there's the novelty and there's the uncertainty and oh, isn't it exciting?

I would not want to be the child of parents who are 10 years I'm 10 years old, or 5 years old and they're still in the honeymoon phase.

I don't think your executive functioning.

That's why you stay up late.

Right, you should go to bed.

You should go to bed.

It's a good idea to go to bed um, something i imagine you tell yourself all the time, knowing your sleeping pattern um so, and then you move into companionate love companionate, love is friendship.

It's categorized much less by sort of this obsession, but a deeper kind of connection.

It's closer to friendship uh, but with the, the romantic interest in there too.

And um, I don't know how much of a place there is in the modern world for romance, certainly not, given some of the challenges of roles that men and women have to try and contend with now that women can be their own provider and that men don't need to be the provider at all, especially if the woman is

Neither need to be procreator, which would have been very novel. ancestrally.

If you have two people that are together in a relationship and there's no child that's come out of it, it's pretty likely that we're probably going to part ways.

I don't know whether the fertility issue is me or whether it's you, but if we both split up, then there's a 50 chance that this might work with somebody else.

Maybe it is you.

Or maybe it's me and it'll be another whiff.

But I wonder, given these sort of changing modalities, in order for you to be romanced, in order for you to apply, And this is a Joe Foley idea

I fucking become obsessed with this idea.

It's so good.

Spoken about it twice today already.

Joe makes this great point that the modern world is defined in many ways, categorized by ironic speech.

Yes.

Yes, man.

Hell yeah.

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Earnestness, beautiful word.

The courage to take your emotions seriously. right?

Sincerity.

You're planting a position in the ground that you truly believe in.

Okay.

This is me.

Here I am.

This is what I want.

This is what I believe in.

As opposed to, this is what I don't agree with, or I don't believe in, or I don't want.

Anybody can define themselves.

There are far more things in the world that we don't want than we do want.

And it doesn't define who we are to say what we don't want.

But it also means that you don't risk the fear of rejection.

You can't be rejected for not liking something.

You can in some ways, but it doesn't feel existential.

You can be rejected for saying, I like this thing.

Or that feels like a comment on yourself.

We were saying earlier on your ability to speak versus your ability to play the piano.

That feels like a real, that's close to the core of who you are as a person.

Oh, I really showed you a bit of myself.

I showed you a bit of myself.

I opened up, cracked my heart open, and there it is.

Here's a thing that I like.

Sometimes that's a person.

And sometimes it's how you feel about a person.

And for that to be rejected, it's painful.

So I think a culture of ironic speech, of sardonic distanced, second and third order aloofness is a prophylactic against being hurt but results in romance which, by definition, is sincere and earnest.

Courage to take your emotions seriously uh, it doesn't leave much room for that.

Yeah, every word that was very eloquently, beautifully put.

And yeah, i think, in response to all of that, two things.

First of all yeah, i agree with what you're saying when the word romance, i think, can mean a couple of things, and i certainly don't believe that pure romance is enough for a sustainable relationship and and and long-lasting oh, you're so utilitarian compatibility.

That being said, i think the romantic life is when you can, like we, there's two sides.

The romance is like the sweeping passion you stay up all night, you leave your job, you run down the street with no shoes on, whatever the hell it is.

I don't know, but i think romance can also be a way of life and a way of understanding the world, and what that way is is exactly what you said this ability to express those sincere, earnest feelings and The possibility of doing that is less available to us than ever.

We all have, every human has this deep well of passion and love and light inside them.

And I think the modern world in many ways is wonderful.

And even modern dating culture does a lot of things right.

But that particular part of us, we can't get it out there.

And I wanted to read you a few lines from it's the obvious place to go to, but from Romeo and Juliet.

It sounds like the obvious play to choose and I don't want to get into what the play necessarily means and how it's misunderstood.

But it is in many parts a wonderful evocation of how to express oneself so far as love is concerned.

So here's a little scene.

Romeo and Juliet are speaking from the balcony scene.

Romeo says, Oh, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?

Juliet, what satisfaction canst thou have tonight?

Romeo, the exchange of thy love's faithful vow for mine.

Juliet, I gave thee mine before thou didst request it, and yet I would it were to give again.

Romeo, wouldst thou withdraw it?

For what purpose, love?

And then Juliet says, But to be frank, and give it thee again.

And yet I wish but for the thing I have.

My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep.

The more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite.

Now, that's a kind of expression which doesn't really dovetail with this age of irony.

If she'd said all of that and then put lol at the end, it would have hit slightly less well.

Indeed.

I think we would be wrong to assume that all expressions of love are equal.

And the language is obviously very old-fashioned.

I'm not saying we should all stop talking like that again.

But those lines are as powerful and sincere, and they're also not generic, right?

It's not just, oh, roses are red, violets are blue kind of thing.

That is like a really profound thought.

She's providing it and explaining her like at this point in the play.

She's like way ahead of Romeo in terms of emotional maturity.

Like he's freaking playing catch up there.

He does catch up by the end of the play, but at this point he's just a guy who's he thinks she's very good looking and he'd like to kiss her.

Let's say um, I think he's still in that stage.

But Julia Julia, that stage of the play is already well beyond that into the realms of actual enduring life, affirming spirit, expanding love, which is what I think when I sort of romance.

I think that's what's so important, because it allows us to access that side of it.

Like romance and love are good for your freaking soul.

You know they they, they make the world brighter and and being able to talk, not in those words precisely, but to express oneself.

The sentiment that I've loved you since before you knew it.

And I love you so much that I'd withdraw it, just so I could have the pleasure of giving it to you again.

And it's boundless and reciprocal and circular.

And regardless of how you say it, it's sort of cosmic and it's bigger than you.

And it's real.

And for that, for you to say something like that to somebody, for you to give them that much of yourself, which is actually giving you more than them, right?

You're giving more than yourself, which is what love feels like.

Love feels greater.

For instance, one of the wildest things that I've done when flying into London, I had a big day scheduled.

I had all of this stuff planned.

And I decided I was going to torpedo these plans.

Land in London.

By the time I've landed in London at Heathrow, I've got an Uber book to go to Gatwick.

I go an hour Uber to Gatwick.

Completely annihilate all of the plans I had for the day.

Trip to the dentist hairdresser, two dinners that had been organized meetings, all the rest of the stuff.

Go to Gatwick, fly to Edinburgh to meet a girl, meet the girl, and yeah, and then i spend 20 hours in edinburgh to then fly back to gatwick, to then go and do this and destroyed the start of the week.

Awful, horrible idea.

Romance edinburgh is a great city as well to be walking around hand in hand, very much.

So yeah that, exactly.

Yeah, that's a beautiful story and it's um actually yeah, i was so into that story i've completely lost romeo and juliet earnestness.

Yeah um, i was gonna say something absolutely life-changing but i can't recall this.

But i think there is.

This touches on a broader point and the poetry stuff might seem like like, like it's kind of a trick or a gimmick, and you know i, but it really isn't, and like, i'm not saying that.

Like, six am in the morning, you wake up and um, you know i, i wake up and i make my girlfriend breakfast every morning before work.

You know she starts work at seven.

I'll wake up at six break, but if you can believe it, i do sometimes get up.

You've been texting me at 8 am awake, as opposed to going to bed.

Yeah, for the first time in a long time i am now.

You were nocturnal for a while.

I was yeah, i was, i was fully nocturnal the whole.

Your diet was largely red wine and cigarettes, not red wine actually.

I i didn't drink.

I can't work drunk.

I, i don't think you can work drunk.

That's alex, isn't it?

I do not, but it was.

It was one meal a day, far too many cigarettes.

Um, I think I asked you one day what your plan for the evening was.

And you said, I'm just going to smoke and walk around.

Yeah.

That's, that's romance romance.

It's, it's actually a bloody good way to live.

Not the smoking.

It's bad for you.

It's good fun, but it's bad for you.

And then you shouldn't do it.

But the walking around part, doing nothing in particular is so much good for you.

Um, but I will probably get back to that.

Although, on this point um, I'm not saying we should be giving these kinds of speeches to our loved ones.

You know, six in the morning just woken up, faces of it shiny and soft or whatever it is.

Um, but there is a place for it.

And I think to speak practically like, how like.

Why this age of irony?

Why do we struggle so much with romance?

You know this particular side of of of of love, modern love, I think, and this is a broader issue.

It comes down to education.

And when I say that, I don't mean what you're learning in school.

I mean the kinds of media and content you're consuming.

Like what you watch and what you read and listen to shapes you even more than what you eat shapes your body right.

Yeah.

Like, you know, this is the kind of thing you talk about all the time.

Yeah, it just is a really lovely – hold the point – don't worry, i'm not, i'm not gonna lose myself in your good.

Just this is a lovely little uh.

Someone put this in the comments forever ago um, which was uh, your body is made up of everything that you put into your mouth and your mind is made up of everything you put into your eyes and ears.

Prioritize appropriately and uh, i think how lovely and you want to.

You want a mental diet that is spirulina for the soul, not fast food for the amygdala.

I'm not sure what three of those words meant, but I think I probably agree.

You've had spirulina at some point.

I'm sure they put it in cigarettes.

I think that the new menthol cigarettes that you've been smoking has probably got spirulina.

I don't have menthol.

I don't smoke anymore anyway, so that's solved.

That's because your girlfriend's listening.

That's what you've said.

Yeah.

Anyway, the point I was going to make was, yes, that's also a beautiful way to put it.

Prioritize appropriate.

I love that.

And in the same way that I think our souls and our minds and our hearts are better when the things we consume with our eyes are charming and interesting versus boring.

It occurred to me a little while ago.

It sounds obvious, but I think you know I sort of if I have a talent for anything, it's realizing that obvious things are true.

And one thing I realized, I was speaking at an event about the manosphere.

I was telling you about it, this weird event about the manosphere.

Where nobody was on the side of the manosphere.

Yeah, I said, put your hands up if you're in the manosphere.

No one put your hands.

We even know anyone who's in the manosphere no one.

So just, there was a bit of an we're not even two degrees of separation from a manosphere, exactly yeah, but it was a good event.

Well meaning, i just it was just a really weird thing about it.

But anyway, at that event and one thing i realized as suddenly as i was talking like one thing that we've done really well in the past decade you know, you've been a big part of this as well is like i think a lot of parts of our lives are better now because we're focusing so much more on the kind of habits we have and and and and and.

The things we eat, or the, or the way we even, the way we schedule and journal stuff, the mass.

The past 10, 15 year boom in self-optimization has been like a blessing for human wellbeing.

I think primarily in a material sense, and maybe what we're lacking is the equivalent boom in an what I would call an artistic or cultural or emotional or spiritual.

I was trying to work out what the word was.

Yeah.

I need to.

I need to find a word that I will then use forever more, but it's something along those lines.

Yeah.

And I realized I was like, what is, look at, look at all these people.

I was imagining everyone's there.

They're eating well and they've got all the habits.

They're living great lives in a lot of ways, but what is the best piece of art they've ever been exposed to?

What is the best show they've watched?

What is the best film they've watched?

What is the best book they've read?

What is the best poem they've read?

And like these days, notwithstanding the, the freaking, infinite spew of instagram reels, many of which are very funny, of course, but anyway, notwithstanding that spew, which is obviously negative effects for how we think and feel, and like i don't we, we don't need to come to that, but because, you know, we always focus on the bad stuff, like people are spending too much time on instagram and reels youtube, real brain rot but we never look at the other side, which is okay, what is the best stuff we're putting into our brains and minds.

And in the past 10, 15 years, i was looking at these, these people all about my age.

I'm thinking maybe the the, the greatest piece of art they've ever, ever witnessed and be be, you know, seen is game of Thrones or white Lotus.

Okay.

Yeah.

And like there, I've not watched them.

I know they're very popular and they're they're, they're.

They're obviously well-made and like they're clearly extremely good.

Otherwise it wouldn't be that popular, but I suspect, across the scope of human history, that they they're not.

I think there are other forms of art, by which I mean poetry films books paintings music, which access and exhibit an even higher profounder deeper, broader and ultimately more meaningful side of humanity.

And the great value of art is that it lets you into those secrets.

It lets you see the world in a new way.

Like what is the point of looking at a painting or reading a poem or reading a book?

Okay, maybe you want to be entertained, but more than being entertained, it changes you.

It either reveals things about the world that you didn't know, or reveals things about yourself that you didn't know.

And like the difference between a whole life spent watching nothing but sitcoms and one where you watch sitcoms half the time but the other half of the time you deal with slightly more challenging, more complicated, more difficult but profounder forms of art.

I think that second case, that person is going to be happier.

It's going to be more at peace.

And this is why I think poetry is so important.

The bit I read from Romeo and Juliet.

I think the world stands to benefit from.

When I say education, this is what I mean, like a more enriching cultural, a more culturally enriched environment where people do the hard work of like reading difficult books, reading these great poems, looking at these great paintings, listening to this great music.

It's not just for fun and it's not just to show off.

Like this whole thing about being cultured can so quickly become like, oh well, you know I'm I'm, i'm the cultural tutor like, oh you, you know you're a beethoven's third symphony well you're, you know the troglodyte.

Look at how refined.

Yeah, that is not what it's about, and some people think it is that they couldn't be more wrong.

Like, those people are idiots.

What it's about is what it does to you, in the same way that eating a freaking big mac or a spirulina ball which one is better for you?

Same thing, and i think we need more poetry for that reason.

And there is another poem i wanted to read Bring it on.

I'm ready.

This is Sheeran Quirk's Poetry Hour.

So this I That is a dog-eared copy of It's called Verse and Prose in Peace and War by William Noel Hodgson.

Now, William Noel Hodgson, he was a soldier in the First World War.

He actually went to school in County Durham.

Anyway, and he wrote poetry while he was in the trenches and he sent it back to England.

And there's one particular poem which was published on the 29th of June 1916, which I wanted to read.

I think you'll like it.

Let me just take a... Prepare yourself.

This is William Noel Hodgson writing on the 29th of June, 1916.

It's called Before Action.

So this is him in the trenches.

Before He wrote this, you know, he just probably went off to fight.

By all the glories of the day and the cool evening's benison, by that last sunset touch that lay upon the hills when day was done, by beauty lavishly outpoured and blessings carelessly received by all the days that I have lived.

Make me a soldier, Lord.

By all, of all man's hopes and fears and all the wonders, poets sing the laughter of unclouded years and every sad and lovely thing by the romantic ages stored with high endeavour that was his, by all his mad catastrophes.

Make me a man, O Lord.

And I that on my familiar hill saw with uncomprehending eyes a hundred of thy sunsets spill their fresh and sanguine sacrifice.

Ere the sun swings his noonday sword must say goodbye to all of this.

By all delights that I shall miss, help me to die, O Lord.

Two days later, William Noel Hodgson died in the Battle of the Somme.

So it's a very powerful thing to read, regardless of the fact that he obviously wrote this poem and had those thoughts in his mind before he went off to die in war.

It is nonetheless.

I think you know you struggle to find a more impactful poem, one that expresses a more shocking worldview, in a way.

I mean you imagine a soldier in the First World War in the trenches, in those miserable conditions, far worse than anything we could possibly imagine.

Far from home in this war, unlike anything seen before with mustard gas and tanks and in the mud and the gangrene and the rats and it's just awful.

But he has the wherewithal, the composure, the sort of spiritual depth to look within himself, at his darkest of moments and write a poem which, you know, make me a man, O Lord.

Make me a soldier, O Lord.

Help me to die.

Oh, Lord.

It's just, you know, almost beyond words.

Now, why do I read it?

Well, because I think someone is better off.

I think people these days in the modern world will gain immensely their health, their emotional texture, their spiritual well-being.

It can only benefit from being exposed for the better word to, to that sort of thing versus.

You know I'm not punching down when I say versus game of Thrones or white Lotus, but my point is there's more than that.

And I think in art we can find it.

And that's just one example of one poem written by one guy.

And I wonder if these days, if people found the time and effort to dedicate 5 less time to those other forms of media and more to this thing i would do, is all so much good.

So i think the problem that i've always had and i told you this before we started the problem i've always had with poetry is i, i find it somewhat inaccessible.

I i don't know whether i'm supposed to, how i'm supposed to like it, what i'm supposed to take from it.

The holes that the um, unspoken words that are the vacuum that allow you to suck yourself in.

Uh um you're, you're spoon-fed game of thrones.

You know, two or three times something is repeated to remind you of exactly who this person is.

And you know the bad guy is disfigured and the hero has broad shoulders.

And you know um, there is a, there's a difficulty setting on on poetry, and i mentioned to you that i'd read some tim burton uh, the melancholy death of oyster boy, which is really great and fun.

But it's fun not because of its depth.

It's fun because of its wit, and wit has a kind of depth to it, but it's immediately apparent what's going on.

Another one about poor little mummy boy, and it's a pharaoh's curse that causes this woman to give birth to a bundle of gauze and then a dog comes over one day and sort of pulls him apart.

And then there's some Mexican kids at a birthday party and they mistake him for a pinata and they'd beat him to death.

It's very Tim Burton.

It doesn't have the spiritual or emotional or explanatory depth of a guy that is waiting at the Battle of the Sun.

But yeah, I think I get it.

I get that there is more to be gleaned and it gives you the opportunity to reflect on yourself and what this means to life and oh isn't that interesting wordplay or to think about you know what a boy bobbing in the middle of the ocean going nowhere but being on a journey or something like that right like it allows you to suck yourself into the story the difference between reading a book and watching a movie of the same even of the same book right um but the inaccessibility that at least i find i'm not Maybe I'm a little bit ashamed.

I feel like I should be more sophisticated, should be more refined, capable.

The insecure overachiever inside of me wants to win at being able to understand poetry.

But the advantage that you have of something like Game of Thrones or White Lotus or whatever, is that the barrier to entry is essentially the floor.

Very few people will struggle to understand what it's about.

There are certain movies.

Severance, for example, might be a good example of something that's a little bit more.

Or if you've ever seen, fuck, not Looper.

There's this time travel movie.

Oh, yeah.

It's called.

Where they have the box.

Yeah, I've not seen it, but I know exactly what it is.

Like a famous indie 2004.

Fuck.

Primer.

A little bit more difficult to follow.

Yeah.

Tenet.

From Christopher Nolan.

Oh, I love it.

Tenet's so underrated.

But why did people not like it?

Unnecessarily complex.

Yeah, yeah.

Memento.

Also unnecessarily complex.

Okay, yeah, sure.

Somewhat.

Just, again, the barrier to entry to get into this is a little bit higher.

So, yeah, you're right.

For the right people.

Yeah.

Okay, okay.

Something deeper is better, but the breadth is not there.

So I'm excited now.

I can see.

Yeah, get in.

Well, okay.

So three things to say to all that like really well, but maybe i end up being four.

First of all, like tim burton his poem, that's a great place to start.

You gotta like that's fantastic, like begin there and see where it takes you.

Second thing is yes, it can again poetry, like art, is dogged by the problem of connotations.

That is this refined sophisticated, like teacups and wigs like, oh well i, you know i, i can name every one shakespeare's place like that's crap, that's stupid and irrelevant and just pointless.

The only reason this has any value is not because it makes you more sophisticated or refined in that sense.

It's because in this stuff is contained the wisdom and the profoundest thoughts that humankind and a long civilizational history has come up with.

That's why these books survive.

And obviously it does generate this kind of cultural gap and people use it as a shibboleth, which my work is fighting against that.

So I want to throw that all out the window and present this stuff and want people to look at it on its own terms.

Now, it is more difficult, right?

Uh, some of it isn't necessarily difficult.

A lot of poetry is crap and pointless and you shouldn't read it.

Um, but a lot of things in life are difficult and the barrier to, there is a barrier to entry.

Look like I don't go to to to the gym, and maybe I should like I, in fact, I almost certainly believe I should but I've not done that.

And it's quite scary.

Like there's walking like this, like my walk in the gym, and start putting it.

I don't.

I assume alex could wear your suit jacket.

Yes, i assume i should get changed, but i like i don't even know how to.

I would love to turn you into a bro.

I would absolutely love the opportunity to bro up she and quote well look well, let's do a swap.

You can start reading poetry and you can put on a yeah yeah, and i'll get you to do chest and back with me.

Sure, but this, but this is about this.

We're joking.

This is what i want.

I want a synthesis.

I don't want to take us back to the middle ages.

What i want is for modern world, modern people as they are, to have this extra life and, you know, infuse the system.

Um, but yeah, the gym, like, I don't know how to set up gym equipment.

Like.

To me, that barrier is the same barrier as when I sit down and I read poetry.

It doesn't immediately make sense to me.

Well, well, sure.

But like the only way to do anything, there are two ways to get into stuff.

You either just fricking do it and learn on your own, or you have someone to help you.

And I would like to think something I can do in my book.

There's a whole chapter of the book, which is a, is, is, trying to convince people to write a poem you know it begins with the line i think you should write a poem and here's why um i'd like to think my work can be to try and help people engage with this stuff without all those stupid connotations for what it is and for what it's worth and show that it has real value like we need this stuff more than ever in the 21st century and then also just get into it like you've got to be fearless you've got to be brave like people it can be a bit elitist a bit frightening like you read Shakespeare and then you think oh well like this is what I think it's about but like all these critics are saying it's not about that maybe what I think it's about is wrong yeah well here's the truth what you think it's about is absolutely correct like this is my view the same with art like look at that painting you tell me what you think of it what it means to you and then maybe your view will change maybe I'll try and change your mind but that view is completely legitimate it's no less legitimate than the view of of whoever I uh do you know Andrew Doyle do you know who he is name rings a bell titania mcgrath on twitter uh he is the creator or he was the writer behind no i think i think i know for a long time he's been on gb news he's on the show a couple of weeks ago he's living in arizona now and um he i didn't realize his masters or maybe his maybe his phd maybe he's got a i might have a doctorate in this um was in shakespeare wow and uh he was telling me these stories about him i didn't know much about shakespeare law and um he was giving me all of this really interesting stuff i didn't know that he said that uh shakespeare basically made no commentary on his own plays there isn't much by way of this is what this means so as you said well this is what i think this means but this is what the experts say it means because well i mean that's fine but nobody knows what shakespeare thought it meant maybe there are some small i think there was I think there were a lot of acknowledgements, uh, that he had in some of the, the, the scripts, but there was no, there wasn't much in the margins.

Uh, he wasn't writing about his own experience.

He was a commoner because plays at the time were the, uh, entertainment of common folk.

Um, so I'm like, and he's just, I'm fucking chewing.

It was really cool.

Exactly.

Right.

When you present in that way, it's something like, Oh wow, this is like nothing's like.

It's like like whatever game of thrones, i say is the same thing as elizabeth, as macbeth, you know, it's just the same thing.

And yeah, tearing away that veil is is, is is so important.

Um, i was about to say something.

How did you that last spiel you gave about andrew door?

Where what, where did that begin?

You had said it doesn't matter what you think this thing is about, it doesn't matter what the experts that was it.

Yeah, david lynch, who's just just so funny.

Um, you know i he has this great.

He famously doesn't like talking about his films.

Yes, because people are like, so David, what does this thing mean?

He's like, well, look, I made the thing.

Watch it, you tell me what you think.

It doesn't matter what I think.

It's made.

It exists now in the world.

And all that matters is what you make of it.

Isn't that interesting?

Sorry for interrupting again.

Isn't it interesting that the creator of the thing is allowed to tell you what the thing means?

That would be like the parents of a child being able to define what the meaning of their life is, as opposed to the child itself.

You go.

I've created this thing and it's now in the interaction of that thing in the world that it Maybe that's a shite analogy, I don't know.

But it's interesting that people look... I think this is one of the reasons that we do that is because we abhor uncertainty so much that we would rather collapse all of the different potential... reasons for something's existence down into one even if the one feels constricting instead of enabling yeah i can't work out is it is it a love story is it a tragedy is it a comedy is it a comment is it is it a comment on class is it because is judy what does he mean by i just want to know because sitting in the uncertainty is uncomfortable and we would rather snap that down yeah hell yeah i i couldn't could agree more and i i think the artist's perspective is just a part of the picture but yeah it's like if i said chris yo i got you this lovely gift today like i got i got this nice table that you can put in your in your in your front room you say well she and us a mug it's not a table i say well i think it's a table like well yeah similar thing basically like whatever you think it is that's what matters you think it's a cup users cup you think it's a freaking hat user hat i don't care that's a beauty of of art that that it just it it lifts you up and engages you and there is one final thing i want to say about poetry about why i think it's also so important in the modern world along with everything else i said about the wisdom that it teaches us and and what it allows us to access in ourselves it's also run like a lot of the problems that we find these days with the internet and social media addiction poetry one reason it's so difficult is because it's the exact opposite like rather than seeing 30 or 40 reels in a minute you have to kind of sit on your own in silence for maybe a couple of minutes while you read it and then think about what it think about it assuming you're alone and like all this world disappears and all our instincts to reach for something to scroll to flick to look for an explanation to ask about it to comment like you're just left alone with this with this poem and that sort of little bit of contemplative reflective experience again is like just a little little bit of texture that can help to to lift the ailing human spirit of the modern world i think um it's good training basically well yeah it's the same way it's the same way as going to the gym and lifting a weight while there's no weight on it wow okay right the progressive overload is injecting some of your effort into what it is that you do putting some of yourself into this thing asking yourself what does this mean it's an opportunity to reflect um You know, I certainly, I wrote my first poetry this year and I really enjoyed it.

It was a real challenge to, to allow myself to be more whimsical.

This is certainly something else that doing this, the show, the live show that I'm doing um has allowed me to do, because when you're on stage, people kind of forgive a bit more whimsy.

You know if you're in a normal?

I guess if you, if you're telling stories as well.

I learned this from friends that are great storytellers.

Mr Borland uh, he has this huge YouTube channel.

And even when he's just telling a normal story, Keegan Allen, another friend of mine, they just, about a drive somewhere and there's so much unnecessary detail in there about you know where the sun was at how hot it was or what he was wearing or the the coffee that he'd had earlier that day and you realize that all of the unnecessary detail fleshes the story out in the ways that you care about most that's the point of in in in the end that is almost the point of the story it's like in life all the most all the most valuable things about life are the least necessary in a way but no but i remember with your show last year you came you came out on stage and i was like okay here we go chris he's gonna freaking nail me to the canvas and sort me out i mean sort of telling jokes yeah yeah yeah just doing what doing what you want i love that um romance anything else to say on modern romance um i i think most of what i what i care deeply about has been has been maybe not quite as clearly as i'd have liked but i think I think in terms of my main gripes, it's, uh, just give me one, maybe more than one second.

Of course.

Like five seconds.

Um yeah, without getting too.

I have a bunch more slightly narrower thoughts, but I don't think there's a need to get into them.

Well, one is just about the willingness to die.

You know, I think, I think it's a part of romance, the willingness to die.

I think um Harold Bloom has this great line where he says the the erotic is where sex and death overlap, which is kind of an interesting thought.

And the reason I bring up that slightly weird quote is because the willingness to die is an interesting phenomenon.

And I think love, in its highest and purest form, romance, love, that's what they are.

It's got to be a complete...

You've got to cast off your stake in worldly matters in order to give yourself to someone completely right.

You've got to give everything up.

It's a kind of death.

Yeah, that's how people talk about religious duration.

But the weird thing is, I think I wonder in the modern world like okay, here's a question for you man.

Is there anything that you, what would you be willing to die for?

Oh, that's interesting.

Like, would you die for me?

Would you die for your country?

Would you die for your parents?

Yeah, wrapped up in that is love, right?

It's wrapped up in that is romance.

And it also touches on this again broader thing.

I think a weird interesting thing about the modern world is I wonder what people are willing to die for

And it's kind of a morbid thing to ask yourself.

The thing is, if you want to know who you are, if you want to get to grips with your life, you've got to ask what would I be willing to lay down my life for?

And I'm not saying people in the past had this sorted.

They didn't.

But it's certainly the case that at one time or another certain groups of people did, and in many ways the people we admire most in our films.

And that's like why people find medieval knights so interesting, or samurai.

Many reasons.

One of them is the fact that what they do is life or or death, and the same with many of the great romans.

You know what's one things are so impressive and weird and fascinating about them, and and so compelling is the fact that they are willing to stake their life on on a belief, on a conviction, on a kind of kind of love.

And you know um, it's uh.

Albert camus, you know, famously said that the meaning of life is uh, whatever is stopping you from killing yourself.

You know, this is a very, very witty line and, through my personal version is, you know, the meaning of life is?

Is whatever you're willing to die for.

The meaning of your life is whatever you'd be willing to give up that life for.

And if there's one question people should maybe ask, you know, i don't know whether this is the time, but often interviews end with what's your one piece of advice.

I usually have a few ones that I give, but the one that's on my mind right now is one piece of advice ask yourself, what would you be willing to die for?

And a lot of other stuff will fall into place.

Which is your favorite of the 49 lessons?

Not the best, not the most obscure.

The last one.

Can you grab your... Sure.

Grab your... It's actually not the last one.

I said that to be a... Well, maybe it is the last one.

So this is...

My book.

You want a photo?

Take him with a lovely Alexander Griffin in the back.

Yeah, he wants more credit.

I think he's got a lot of credit, but he just wants more.

Very selfish in that way.

I wonder if he's here.

Is he here?

Is he?

Good.

Yeah, tell him he's selfish.

Thank you.

Maybe it is the last one, you know.

So do you want me to talk about it?

Do you want me to read it?

No, just give me a little explainer of it.

Hi, Alex.

You're selfish.

In terms of what's most relevant or useful here.

I'm not saying it's just because it's at the end to convince people to read the whole book, but the second to last chapter is called The Last Library on Earth.

And in it, I kind of pose the question, this theoretical situation, which is like, imagine in the far future, there's been global catastrophe, Earth is being evacuated, and there's a spaceship, and you're this librarian, and you're like, okay, we need to leave earth.

There's only room for 10 books.

Like which 10 books would you bring?

The only books that survive from all of human history.

Um, my personal answer is that they shouldn't bring any books.

Um, but anyway the the, the.

The reason I bring up this this this, this point, is because this touches on themes we've been mentioning.

Um, there's something like 150 million books in the world.

It's like 150 million, not not total like physical books, but 150 million different books you could read.

Like, even if you read um like a thousand books a year, you wouldn't read more than like 0007, which is kind of scary.

It brings you face to face with your mortality.

As soon as you realize that you literally you can read anything, but you can't read everything, which means you've got to pick.

And a lot of my work is just about trying to encourage people to pick much more judiciously and imaginatively the very few things they'll be able to consume in their life.

Um, you know, i don't think people should read my book.

To be honest, i think there are thousands of books they should read instead of this one.

The problem is uh, there are thousands of other crappy books being published every single year.

Right, and if people reading my book come away with one lesson, it's that i don't need to read anything published in the last 50 years.

Like, everything i need to know about life has probably already been written, and written better.

And there's a way to make someone regret their purchase at the end of the book exactly, and but like, What is the best filter for quality in all of It's time, right?

Time.

If something is not good, it will not last.

Lindy effect.

Indeed.

So like an Amazon bestseller list, all it tells you is what's popular in any given week.

Even book awards, they tell you what's been popular in any given year.

But the past 10000 years of human history that tells you what people across all ages, in all corners of the earth, all backgrounds, all creeds, all religions, all situations, what all of those people or at least a lot of them thought was most useful, most interesting, most meaningful, like.

We have a list of these books.

You can go and read them like you can.

You can find, like and i'm saying not to only do that, like i'm not saying you shouldn't read you know dame jilly cooper, who died today uh, god rest her soul there that you know jilly cooper, she's.

You know she wrote these.

You know um, she wrote all these books, these sort of racy, uh novels about horse riding, and and and football and stuff uh, real legend, dame jilly cooper, you should read about her anyway.

I like i'm not saying you shouldn't read her books ever, but kind of the earn, the burning message of this book is like it's all waiting for you, like all this stuff which will just completely transform the way you think about yourself and the world, and like is you know, for me the whole experience of learning about culture quote unquote um, which i really got into about five years ago, i just i kind of managed to cast off all these preconceived notions of what i should or shouldn't think and just got into art and architecture and poetry and it was like the world went from being in black and white to in full color.

I think.

Yeah, that did summarize.

That is what these days, uh, that's what not all we're lacking.

And a lot of the stuff we're doing is good, but it is one of the things that that people are missing is joy.

Like the words romance and adventure and death.

These are such nobility, nobleness.

In our age of irony, it's very hard to say these words.

But that doesn't mean that these things aren't real.

And if you got every single book printed in 2025 and asked how many times the words adventure and romance and nobility came up, it would be like no one talks about these things.

And my job, if anything, is to inject that back into people's lives.

And this is the place to begin.

But it's not the place to end.

This is not the place to end.

This is not where you get everything.

This is intended as a primer this is where you begin it's like hey i've just discovered this whole new like solar system and i i want to tell you about it please please come and look at this it'll be better i promise than uh some of the things you're doing currently sheen quirk ladies and gentlemen dude i i think you're great i really love the work that you're doing where should people go they want to keep up to date with everything that's happening and check out sure well whatever you got on x at the cultural tutor i also do have an instagram page now do you really yeah you on instagram is a it's fascinating it's going to be like seeing i don't know your dad do an mma fight or something it's been pretty fun uploading stories you know take a picture of something and say oh look at this and x instagram i have a newsletter which is called the areopagus you can subscribe on substack uh find me at the cultural shooter on substack and along with the book there's also this fantastic documentary which i hope people where will that be uploaded to it'll be on youtube and on x whose channel the cultural tutor youtube channel yeah david's we're gonna we're gonna release it on a brand new channel which is exciting i'm not sure if this is a venture into being a youtuber but it's more it's the home of the channel and i'm sure we can join us i'm sure we can what do they say we can link it in the description join us sheen dude thank you so much it's been a long time coming i can't wait for the next one mr williamson If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the Modern Wisdom reading list.

It is 100 books that you should read before you die.

The most interesting, life-changing and impactful books I've ever read, with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them.

And you can get it right now for free by going to chriswillx.com slash books.

That's chriswillx.com slash books.

[Redefining Beauty: Finding Meaning, Charm, and Romance in the Modern World]-[#1022 - Sheehan Quirke - How Did The Modern World Get So Ugly?]

📋 Summary

Beyond Beauty: A New Vocabulary for the Modern World

The Power of Better Definitions

The Philosophy of Form and Function

The Necessity of Patronage and Earnestness

Reclaiming the Human Spirit Through Art

🎯Key Sentences

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📖 Transcript

[Redefining Beauty: Finding Meaning, Charm, and Romance in the Modern World]-[#1022 - Sheehan Quirke - How Did The Modern World Get So Ugly?]

📋 Summary

Beyond Beauty: A New Vocabulary for the Modern World

The Power of Better Definitions

The Philosophy of Form and Function

The Necessity of Patronage and Earnestness

Reclaiming the Human Spirit Through Art

Deep Learning with ListenLeap

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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