Conversation, Interintellect, and Arcadia (with Anna Gat)

If technology is ruining the art of conversation, maybe it can save it, too. Anna Gat--poet, screenwriter, playwright, and founder of Interintellect--talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts on how she's reviving the French salon in the digital age. They discuss why authority, moderation, and clear formats make conversation freer, not more constrained. They also explore why one of the greatest of modern plays--Tom Stoppard's Arcadia--is so resonant not only as a live theatrical performance, but also when read aloud, both alone and in a group. They conclude the episode by connecting Arcadia's themes to Gat's mission at Interintellect: Namely, preserving the value of thinking together across generations, disciplines, and worldviews.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. Today is December 9, 2025, and before I introduce today's guest, I want to encourage

• 0:42Speaker 00

  you to vote on your favorite episodes of 2025. So go to econTalk.org. You'll find a link there to our survey and vote. Thank you, and thank you for listening. My guest today is Anna Gat. She is founder and CEO of Interintellect, which is described as an intellectually and politically open conversation platform where attendees, community members, and event hosts come together to think through the most important ideas of our times. She hosts the podcast The Hope Axis and writes at Substack at American Innocence. Anna, welcome to Econ Talk.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me. I'm so delighted to be here.

• 1:23Speaker 00

  Now, our topic for today is our culture, what you're trying to do with this fascinating platform, Interintellect. But along the way, we're going to pay homage to Tom Stoppard, who died last month, and his play Arcadia. Arcadia is my favorite modern play, maybe my favorite play, period. I have seen it three times, and I hope to see it again. But let's start, we'll get to that. Let's start with Interintellect, which I have been part of and enjoyed very much. Tell our listeners, what is it? Why'd you start it? What's it trying to do?

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Sure, I do remember your episode that Bronwyn Williams hosted, who is a South African economist. And you came on to talk about your book Wild Problems that came out in 2022, which I greatly enjoyed. And yeah, I do still recommend it to people. And if somebody seems especially troubled in my life, I can offer them for Christmas with a little, you know, wink, wink. Just read this.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  I started inter-insultant altogether in 2014, so 11 years ago. I was studying theatre for my third master's degree, because, you know, I make weird life choices in London. And, you know, I mean, I started doing academic level classics when I was 19 in 2002. And I had always been in these special programmes at high school as well. So, you know, I always lived amongst the great philosophers. And, you know, having grown up in a show business family where people wrote screenplays and plays, it was very interesting to get the kind of Greek or Enlightenment, German Enlightenment, French perspectives, and then later Romantic perspectives on how to write drama.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  And it was always weird to me that, you know, screenwriters, playwrights, since Aristotle, have understood how to write dialogue, like it's a science almost. If you walk into a Hollywood writers' room at a popular TV series, those people work in a delightfully formulaic way that actually allows that type of creativity to arise. Because like in classical music, the foundations are very formalized. You can teach it to a three-year-old, right, like, like Saul Fesch. And it never made sense to me why, other than maybe Gottman's, you know, science of couple therapy

• 3:49Speaker 01

  and other fringe experiments, we never really tried to help real human beings have conversations with each other the way we are so adamant of helping completely fictional people to have great conversations with each other. And I think this frustration of mine kind of came to its own zenith.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Around twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, when I felt that humanity at large is losing some kind of ability to communicate. And I know that every generation thinks this, every generation since biblical times ha- has thought that the world was falling apart and that this is the last generation and after us there will be no life because somehow that's more comforting to us than the idea of our own death. You know, that it's okay, you die, but everybody else does too. Great, great. So chill out. Um, and, and so I think gradually I went from writing plays and screenplays into trying to figure out the human stage. What, how would it work with people coming together? What, how could, can you interfere with the format in a way that doesn't interfere with the content?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  I mean, people still have to come and bring their own selves, their own ideas, because otherwise it's not a conversation kind of by definition. And, and so I went from this very strange kind of circular way into building spaces where people can face reality. And what does that mean? Um, and I think humans have a, I mean, this is the David Mamet idea from Three Uses of the Knife, which is one of the best books on dramatic writing that any layperson can read. Humans have a natural understanding of the stage. We have a natural understanding of the sacred and the profane. And so you can create, I mean, when you teach ex cathedra, when a surgeon is in the theater, you know, of operating,

• 5:39Speaker 01

  like, we understand that there are special spaces in the world where people can be at their best selves, where some, you know, some breakthrough can happen between people. Um, or religions rest on this understanding, God, holy of holies, um, the altar. And so I came to inter-intellect from that angle. But it surprised me how much technology can actually help with this and how many elements from theater can actually be applied to these encounters in real life between real people, trying to work on real problems.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  Before we get to how you do this online, could we talk for a minute about conversation?

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Let's converse about conversation.

• 6:24Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Let's go meta.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, let's go meta. So, I mean, I think about this a lot, what you just said, that we don't teach people, we don't teach our children how to have a conversation. And I want to say a strong version of that and get your reaction. We don't teach people how to listen. What we teach people how to do is to not talk when the other person is talking. And we're not that good at that. Many of us struggle with that. We interrupt, we interject. It's a very human thing. But the idea that when you're talking, instead of thinking about what I'm going to say next,

• 7:09Speaker 00

  which is way many people behave, instead, I'm going to try to absorb what you're saying by listening, by giving you my full attention, my full presence. And what are your thoughts on that? Especially, forget about the web for a minute and our, this really remarkable technology that allows me to talk to you in New York City while I'm sitting here in Jerusalem. But if we were sitting at dinner, in a dinner party or at a salon, a physical space, what would you encourage people to think about in that setting that might be helpful to have a better conversation with the people there?

• 7:50Speaker 01

  I think I never thought about this fact that people are not taught to listen, although definitely, you know, coming from Eastern European Jewish culture, I come from the land of interruptions. You know, everybody talking at the same time. And your life is a little bit like a Robert Altman movie where everybody just like says their own thing. And maybe at the end, but kind of something at the end comes out of it. I really think that one strange thing that people misunderstand about conversation is that the one-on-one conversation would be a kind of natural unit of exchange. Right? We say dialogue. So this kind of there's monologue and then there's dialogue when there are two people.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  And in in actual conversation science and psycholinguistics, there have been a lot of interesting findings about how, you know, when somebody for instance is being shared a difficult piece of news, like if your doctor is giving you a difficult diagnosis that will, you know, take a long time to to deal with. It's actually really bad to have this facing each other across the desk setup because your monkey brain feels that it's a some kind of opposition. So the physicality of the exchange is like like you and I, we are talking on Zoom. And even on Zoom, we kind of like look aside when we're thinking. So we're trying to break up this, you know, Ampler's locked setup. And not because we would be in any way opposed to each other in opinion,

• 9:18Speaker 01

  but because we are also the animals in this situation. And for an animal face to face is a kind of fighting position. And so humans naturally friends, you know, when you're in a cafe, when you're having dinner with your wife, we create these diagonals, right? And even in camera work, when, you know, the famous scene in Heat is being filmed and Robert De Niro was having this very tense conversation with Al Pacino. There's a lot of beautiful analysis on how the camera work changes from the diagonal friendly exchange, sometimes to the head on, which to the viewer signals that there is an opposition. And I think one of the best ways to break this up is through having the host.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  And the host can just, the host can be any figure of temporary authority that people accept. Conversations in this sense are not really democratic, the same way as even however democratic a situation is, unless you're an anarchist or some kind of crazy, you know, communist denomination, you will probably have an appointed person to run the event. You know, in a family dinner, this can be the mother, this can be the father, the grandmother. In a friend group, it can be the person who booked the restaurant or in whose house we're having dinner. Having people be able to trust somebody.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  And outsource the listening to this person as a host. My greatest task on intranet, I just hosted my 1,000th salon on my own platform. So I've done quite a few, is I'm listening because people don't want to or cannot. It's not always a matter of will. And so I say, oh, so Ross, you said that. And Jenny, you said that. And Fabrice, you said that. And Kao Shik, you said that. So does that mean that Ross, you actually disagree with Fabrice? But you two are actually saying the same thing. And there I can take it to a third place. So in a sense, you know, this is the dialectic, right?

• 11:24Speaker 01

  You get two views and you kind of like try to find a way to combine them and move forward. So it doesn't become a kind of static set out. I think it's very difficult for two people to do, which any couples, any couple or any pair of siblings will attest, you know, when you're the two of you, you get back to the same things because there's no third to take you out. And that's why it's great to drag the kids into it.

• 11:52Speaker 00

  Well, you know, I think two comments. One, we have mentioned on the program, I can't remember which episode, but sometimes with, when you're with a friend or someone you're closer to, a spouse, you actually don't face each other and you don't face diagonally, but you share a vision. Could be of a vista, a sunset, a movie, children playing in the park and dogs doing something. And although normally we praise looking into the eyes of the people we care about, sometimes, as you suggested, I think it's a powerful insight.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  It's our thinking, and I'm doing this now unconsciously, I'm looking up at the ceiling. I'm trying to pull my thoughts together and if I'm looking at you, I can't do it actually. Part of it's, I'm too vulnerable because when I'm thinking, I'm going inside and I don't.

• 12:51Speaker 00

  Irrationally, I don't want you to look at, I don't want to look at you because I don't want you to be looking at me. Doesn't work, actually. If I'm looking at this, you can stare at me all you want, and it has no impact whatsoever, the fact that I'm not looking at you. But as human beings, this is a very natural reaction. So that's the first thing I wanted to say. The second thing I want to say is that I think in many conversations, in many conversations, the roles we're supposed to play are clear. A friend calls you and says they need to talk to you. They have a problem, something they need to work through. Of course, you're going to give them my book, Well, Problems, and everything's going to

• 13:33Speaker 00

  be fine. But that often is not the right path. And instead, you're there to listen, and you know that. You're not there to talk about what you did this weekend, or what you're reading, or the problem you had with your, your, your, your mother. You're there to be a shoulder, or an ear, or a heart. And so those conversations are clear, and our, both of our respective roles, either as the speaker or the listener. Of course, in many conversations, many friendships, we have different roles to play with different friends. So with some friends, I'm the expounder. I'm the, the mansplainer, you know, could be with another man. I'm going to teach something. I'm a teacher. People know that. I like to

• 14:16Speaker 00

  talk about things I'm reading. They might even invite it. They ask. With other people, I'm going to be a jokester, or going to banter, right? I have a whole set of complicated roles to play, and I'm often different in many different conversations. And at other times, I'm the host. And it's not about me at all, even if, if it's, because it's usually more than two of us, there's going to be a group, and I have a different role to play. So I think that's part of what makes, I think, for many people, certainly for me, conversation challenging. It used to drive me crazy when my dad would come to visit from out of town. He would sometimes say to me, "Who do you want me to be among my friends?" And I hated

• 14:56Speaker 00

  that. And I would say, "Dad, just be yourself. Just be you." But he was on to something. I didn't want to decide what he was going to be, but I think he was confessing to me that he wore many hats, and he wanted to know which hat I wanted him to wear when I was, when he was with my friends.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  I don't know if that's the kindest or the rudest thing to ask somewhere, maybe both. Interesting. I have encountered that in America where people ask you like, "Do you need me to listen now? Or do you need advice?" Which I also don't like. First of all, it kind of removes the veil of Maya, of human behavior. You don't want to feel that you're acting. Even if you are to some degree acting, this is not something you want to necessarily name in a real situation. Because what happens is that there are the seams at the beginning and then they disappear and it becomes real. Right? You just choose a format at the beginning as a way to enter the real human situation,

• 15:58Speaker 01

  but you're not going to hold it throughout unless you're, you know, a very strange person with very strange habits. But I think most people don't do that. I never just listen. I have owned up to my person being more of this kind of discursive, "Let's figure out, let's find a solution." So I don't have really friends calling me up just for complaining. I sometimes do.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  And maybe I have a line, like, if you have a big enough problem that really cannot be solved, like someone has passed away, you have a big life problem that is going to take many years to solve, that's a different thing. But, you know, I am not a kind of person who will enjoy something like, "Oh, I want to lose weight. Great, let's talk about it." No, like, "Let's go to the gym." I'm more that kind of person. It's really interesting. I sometimes have this problem that people invite me to dinner and then they expect me to host. And my thought is that they'll pay me, you know, because it's my job. It's not like, "Oh, I happened to be there and now I'm going to work because this is my free time."

• 17:14Speaker 01

  It's interesting. One of my favorite kind of factoids about this whole issue is that the word "tribe" comes from the word "three", so more than two.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  And that's so human, like somehow we feel that two is not enough. Like two is such a tense situation. Something will have to be figured out or people will fall in love or people will fight. Like some, it's, it's, it's an opposition. And in the kind of dialectic of it, some third thing wants to come out of it. Some breakthrough wants, wants to happen. I'm also not a really great fan of two person plays. Um, I know I mentioned Mehmet, but I just feel it's quite unnatural. One of the first things that people teach to acting students is when you're in a situation on the stage, don't just come in and sit down. Nobody does that at home.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Like you never go home, sit down on the couch and then just sit there until a new character walks in. But that's what new acting students usually, usually first do. And it's the same, the two people very rarely spend many hours together in one room just talking.

• 18:30Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  It has to be really a remarkable extreme situation for whatever reason. I once wrote a play like that and two people had to talk through the play because they were kind of stuck somewhere and they didn't have a choice. And I think that's how it happens.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  Let's go back to Inter intellect. So one of the things it is, is uh, just describe some of the different offerings uh, that, that are on, on the platform. And what you do.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Inter intellect is my experiment at having at scale conversations without the traditional culture war polarization uh, kind of toxicity appearing. And we have done tens of thousands of events in the past six and a half years without any toxic events. So I think it, the format does work. Um, it's conversations as entertainment. So people come in, um, they find friends, they find ideas, they are recharged. Um, it's a place to kind of bring together groups that don't necessarily hang out together anymore. May that be, you know, Americans and foreigners or.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  You know, left wing and right wing, or, you know, STEM and the humanities. Religious people and atheists, or sometimes in some political areas, just men and women, or older people and younger people, who seem to be kind of in an artificial standoff these days. And I don't think that we can really figure things out as a society, or even society in the smaller sense, like a local professional community, without somehow at least smoothing out these existing or imaginary divisions. And so, you know, we're just doing it in a very playful way. I long noticed that this kind of third thing is always very important in a conversation.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  You will be more, you will feel more liberated to talk about the great questions of life, spirituality, morality, if it's about Dostoevsky and not about spirituality and morality. So, you know, we just seemingly come together and talk about great books and great ideas, our favorite movies, an interesting scientific discovery, an interesting company. And using that vessel, people relax into these moderated conversations or host them. And we found that, first of all, this is very popular, and a lot of people actually crave it deeply. And very, very deep, beautiful relationships grow out of it. Co-authors, marriages and babies, people moving to the same country together.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a very generative space.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  So how many people would be involved in a typical interaction?

• 21:13Speaker 01

  It really depends. I'm going to an in-person event on, well, tomorrow, actually. That's going to be ten people. It's a dinner. And a conversation about gastronomy and the life of immigrants in America. And the kind of, the, the, the family dinner has a cultural constant. But we have also mega salons, Bloomberg Data are hosting their book talks, which can be three hundred people. Maybe like my most. Typical room sizes, I like maybe twenty, twenty-five people. Because then I can really give everybody a chance to have a go and, and, and. People will be, I think, very, very good.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  Participants in our conversation if they can be sure that they will get the mic and they don't have to. You will actually listen more if you know that you don't have to just focus on your own question for fifty minutes. Because we welcome to you.

• 22:11Speaker 00

  So in those sessions, what's the technology? So. You know, if I'm in a, let's say, you're interviewing. Or you have a guest who's a. An author, in my case, I don't remember, but it was a relatively small group, but let's say have a big group, you had three hundred. Then it's more like a lecture, right? It's not a conversation. So. The. The more typical session. Is ten to twenty-five? Is that?

• 22:39Speaker 00

  Really?

• 22:39Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a salon, so it's supposed to be the size of your living room. And it actually started in twenty nineteen in the current format of Interance Act. In living rooms around the world. I started them in London and San Francisco and they started kind of mushrooming around the world. From Mumbai to Atlanta to South Africa. When you list an Interance Salon on the website, you can actually choose both the size of the room. And you can add certain notes like this is going to be a talk, this is going to be a reading group, et cetera, et cetera. I always start hosts, I do a lot of host trainings myself where, you know, it's like an open, free, like lecture, basically by me.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  That anybody can join. I always tell people, you know, just. Inform the audience, like if it's going to be a talk where you have slides and then you take questions via. Video chat, that's fine. If you say it's a salon, people will expect to come and behave like. They would in your living room, where everybody's equal. We don't really care how. Famous the invite is. It's a little bit the opposite of TED Talks. We don't put anybody on the stage. And everybody else is in the dark. At Interance Act Slons, I mean, we just hosted Bukuyama, I have an apple bomb coming up in two days. You know, they are with the attendees and the conversations are. Less status bound and more about just minds at play.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Here's a book, everybody has read it. So here's an author of somebody and everybody is familiar with that. Let's, let's discuss.

• 24:14Speaker 00

  How do you deal with, I'll just call them troublemakers? So if it's my living room and/or my dining room table and someone there dominates the conversation unnecessarily, which could be me, but I usually invite myself back. But if it's somebody else, I might decide, well, this person was kind of difficult. I might not have them back. How do you deal with that, both online and in person in your program?

• 24:41Speaker 01

  It happens surprisingly rarely because it is set up in a way that nothing incentivizes that kind of behavior. So first of all, people pay to come to inter-intellect events, whether through a membership with which they get free tickets, or they have bought a ticket for like $45. It's an intentional space. You can't really just drop into an inter-intellect event. You have to intentionally go there and allocate time. So you get a lot of extremely well-focused and well-behaved attendees.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  You know, unlike, I mean, if it's online, you can actually just keep your audience muted if you think that there is a problem. I tell my hosts at my trainings that it's a little bit like aviate, navigate, communicate for pilots as the priorities. First, keep the plane up. Second, try to go where you have to go. And only third is the communication. I think it's the same or similar for hosting conversations. You have facilitate, moderate, mediate. Facilitate, it's in the word, it has the word easy, right? It's chill. You're just there so the kids know you're there.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  You know, you're just like reading newspaper in the corner. Or the host is really just the listener, just trying to pick up on things that maybe the attendees in the kind of...

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Moment of passion in, in, in the conversation they might have not picked up on and you just kind of tied together, you ensure that everybody has, you know, had a go. Um, moderate is when you notice that there are some more serious disagreements. Or in the very rare case, you have a very domineering person. Um, and, and, and mediate is something that on interance, like at least you don't get to. Like you never get to the kind of post-bellum state of some conflict already, um, having, um, had happened. I advise my host to be a very kind of like strong presence so people can feel your authority. I often find that somebody trying to dominate is a way to take over the hosting role without

• 27:02Speaker 01

  being the host. And it's often a reaction to a kind of power vacuum. The host is not present enough, or maybe has misread the situation a little bit and hasn't started moderating and is still in facilitation mode. Um, I think I had maybe out of the thousand solons, twice situations, so very rarely. Maybe I'm just very scary, um, where somebody would dominate. And I just told the person, like, thank you so much for your point, that was great. And now let's go to Gina. You know, it's just, um, we have had, I think, maybe.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, one, like a couple of bands from interance, like, but they were from the Discord. Um, so we have a community forum and moderating, that is obviously a very different, uh, situation. And people don't behave like in a normal conversation. But I think that's just the statistics of running a company for seven years.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  Uh, have you, do you feel you've gotten better at hosting over time?

• 28:05Speaker 01

  I'm not sure, you know, that's a thing that I keep thinking about. Maybe yes, in the sense that it's hard to surprise me, but it's also much harder to really impression me now, you know? I, uh, I have developed, I'm developing my own routines. And when I was teaching at university, I noticed that as a, as a lecturer, I was having the same issue. I think every performer, whether that's a teacher or an actor, a presenter, will, a dancer, will have this strange arc where with great routine comes great routine.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  And I'm sometimes meditating on how, you know, people constantly ask me like, oh, who's your dream guest? Who would you want on Interintellect? And I think we are having our dream guests. It's not, you know, it's, it's reality. And I always tell my team, we want a company where magic is just a Wednesday.

• 29:08Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  And, but that also means that that magic is just a Wednesday.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  So you have salons online, you have some in person, they're hosted by people you've trained presumably. Are there other things you're doing that listeners might want to know about?

• 29:28Speaker 01

  So Interintellect offlines are almost always members only. So they are much less about this marketplace of ideas, activity that we're doing, or mission. And they're more about the local attendees also having a kind of secondary activity and coming together, spending time. We do sometimes, like I'm just putting on play reading for Matthew Gustaf's new play about Brian Johnson on the 18th of January, that's going to be in New York. We have sometimes bigger festivals where a lot of our guests and intellectuals come together in person and they are like in a space the whole day and have multiple

• 30:09Speaker 01

  conversations. I have also a podcast called The Hope Access, which is my response to the hopelessness discourse in the American public square. And I have a new sub stack called American Innocence, which is my training myself for my book and writing about my new life in America and my strange cultural impressions there.

• 30:35Speaker 00

  So let's, let's talk about.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  Tom Stoppard for a minute. People ask me, who are my, who are the guests I'd like to have? And Tom Stoppard was on that list for a while.

• 30:50Speaker 00

  So Ismael Knopfler and Bill Belichick and J.K. Rowling. Those are the four people I'd like to have a conversation with that I've unsuccessfully,

• 31:03Speaker 00

  I haven't been able to do it. And now Tom's gone, which is for better than the saddest thing isn't that he didn't get to be on Econ Talk. I'm just sad he's gone, of course. He's an incredible playwright. And tell us what you're doing with Arcadia. And is it the end of December or is it January?

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's the 27th of December.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  So by the time, by the time this comes out, it will have already happened. So tell us what it is, what it's going to be. And you've already said you're doing other things like this. So tell us what it's going to be.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  So around four years ago, I had this idea that we should do play readings with the hosts online. And I sometimes have these ideas and I just throw them into the community and see what happens and interns and acts. And people loved this idea. So we actually have already done Arcadia once years ago. Then we have done Uncle Vanya. We have done, you know, all the, all our favorites, Much to Do About Nothing. We have done a streetcar named Desire, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? So a number of plays. And we're just having a blast. Actually, a couple of people during these play readings realized that they have acting ambitions and went into acting school.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  For other people, it's, you know, an opportunity to take a break from a completely different career. Because there is absolutely no reason why plays should be restricted. It's the same way as hosting should be restricted just for professors and famous intellectuals to give talks on TV. Anybody can host, that anybody can read up a role. There is, it's kind of the people's theater. And so this is the second time doing Arcadia. And actually, the girl who was reading Thomasina years ago is now reading Lady Crumb. So we're officially, we're officially coming of age.

• 32:57Speaker 00

  Multi-generational, yeah.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Arcadia is also one of my favorite modern plays, maybe among, I don't know, four or five other works. I think there's absolutely nothing like it. And I distinctly remember the first time I read it. I remember what affected that on me. And it's just something that everybody should acquaint themselves with, who's interested in science, who's interested in historical truths, and what historical research means, whether that is into literature and literary figures, or that's, you know, the history of a scientific discovery. It's extremely playful in language. It is actually very easy to understand for

• 33:45Speaker 01

  a lay audience, which is not necessarily the case with other Stoppard plays, like Rosencrantz and the Horse, or Jumpers. It's a delight. It's for everybody.

• 33:56Speaker 00

  So there's, I've got my copies here. And I have to say, I mentioned I've seen it three times. And the, there's, yeah, my daughter has her own copy. And it's got, it's, I think it's, my memory of it is, it's a, it's a rose with a, coming down the stem, it turns into a, an electricity cord. Arcadia is very much about, it's about many, many, many things. It's why it's such an extraordinary play. But what I was gonna say is, I've seen it three times. And, and the first time I saw it, and I won't go into the details on this. But the first time I saw it, the ending was really quite extraordinary. And so when I

• 34:38Speaker 00

  went to see it the second time, I was waiting for that moment in the ending. I can, I'll reveal this. The ending has two couples dancing. The play alternates between, this is, this is not a spoiler. It alternates between modern times in 1809, roughly, early 19th century. It all takes place in the same house. And at the end of the play, there's a couple dancing from modern times and a couple dancing from 1800s. And we're watching them together on the stage, because they've been in these rooms. The scenes have flipped back and forth between present and past, and Stoppard in this very risky.

• 35:23Speaker 00

  Decision and it works puts them on the same stage in the same room at the same time and we are our minds are shaken up by this because we're trying to know which time they're from and and when someone's talking which cast are they the old people or the modern people and in the version I saw in St. Louis the first time I saw it with Stephen Wolf was the director he did this incredible thing he had the couples that were on stage switch partners and so that each couple was now instead of being an old couple to young couple there was two couples one was old and each person was had

• 36:07Speaker 00

  a each couple had a young and an old person not by age but by era that we've been watching as the scenes flip back and forth and it was so overwhelming emotionally because they're tied together they're in the same house some of the people are ancestors of the people from the earlier period some have overlap in their purpose and their personas and I cried like a baby I it was so overwhelming so I had a chance to see it a second time and it's in Washington DC and I'm so excited to see it again and it's fabulous and at the end I'm waiting for this moment where they switch during this closing waltz and

• 36:49Speaker 00

  they don't switch and I called the director back I got a hold of him I called the director back in St. Louis I said Mr. Wolf I just saw the play it wasn't the same as I saw in St. Louis he said yeah I know I said you changed the ending he goes well it's kind of vague I didn't change any dialogue and someone I wrote about this online when Stop or Die somebody said they've seen that in the productions that they've seen as well but my point is

• 37:18Speaker 00

  I've seen it three times. I've never sat down and read it all the way through. I bought it because I wanted to remember some of the good lines and some very moving passages and this incredible wit. As you point out, the wordplay is unbelievable. It's very hard to catch it every allusion or joke when you see it live. But it's different, reading it straight through. And I wanted to, that long introduction, which is just sharing my own emotional connection to the play. I want to hear you talk about three different things. One, Anna Gat sitting in her study, reading the text in your version of the book.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  Number two, 13 people, presumably that's the number of characters in the play, although one I think has very little to say. So let's say 12, 12 and a half. 12 to 13 people, reading it and seeing each other in a salon type setting. And I don't know, are other people watching them read it? Okay. And then the third is you're watching it live on stage in the dark.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  And you can react to anything I said if you want.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  I love this. It's so interesting. First of all, in the play, the switching doesn't happen. I wouldn't necessarily, as a director, choose this because if you switch the Messina with Gus, they are the relatives, so they cannot be a couple.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  It's a little, I know.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Interesting choice. So in another, I mean, a little bit earlier eighties, Christopher Hampton adapted Les Liens en danger, Dangerous Liaisons into a play that was formidably successful in both England and then on Broadway. And then ended up being two movies that were coincidentally shot in parallel. One was Stephen Frears, Dangerous Liaisons with Glenn Close and John Malkovich, one of the number of posters. And then, but also Milos Forman did, the same year, complete coincidence, another movie that was kind of forgotten with Colin Furson and a band called Volmone. And nobody has seen it. Apparently, it's very good. I should actually watch it.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  And, you know, in the Delacroix novel, which is phenomenal, the ending is very kind of soul-shaking, obviously. I mean, Madame de Tour, you know, dies and... And by the way, you can spoil plays. Plays are not like crime TV series. You know how Romeo and Juliet starts and they tell you they will die? We can totally spoil Arcadia. You don't read Arcadia for the plot.

• 39:55Speaker 00

  Fair enough, fair enough.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  We can talk about it. And in the end, in the Christopher Hampton's stage directions at the end, as the two women, like in the movie, when Glenn Close's character is shamed publicly in the opera in Paris, there was this incredible, very theatrical, very breaking the fourth wall moment, where she washes off this extremely deep white makeup from her face. And just the red remains in a very, like, candlelit boudoir at the end. And, but in the play, two women are playing, I think it's the volange mother with somebody, and behind them on the stage, Christopher Hampton writes in the stage direction in the play, the text, a shadow, a silhouette of the guillotine shows up.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Which I, most directors don't include. This is not stuff you have to explain to people that, I mean, you've just spent many hours explaining to people that the aristocracy is rotten to the core, and people understand that all of these people will be decapitated within a pretty short period of time. So I, and actually, you mentioned the number of characters. One of the most important readers for Arcadia is called stage directions. Because it's not just with the dancing of the characters at the end, where you have multiple people. The whole, the second half of the second act, people are literally talking over each other. It's phenomenal.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  Hamilton tried to do something like this, right? So Hamilton, when they have this turnstile situation happening on stage on Broadway and the different...

• 41:39Speaker 01

  They jump times of how like Eliza meets Hamilton and then the sister sings. And then they turn back the time, which is very interesting. It's the same period. Um, I was obsessed in college with possession, like all, you know, depressed twenty year old liberal arts students who are female and left wing must be. So I went through this mandatory period. And that that is where for me, the first time I would encounter this huge problem that was probably already familiar to everybody who has read or had read Pale Fire. That we have no idea how poets worked. Letters get lost, things get like things burn.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  And whatever you're reading in literary history, somebody can always come by tomorrow and find something else. And everything that has been written about, the genesis of this work can be thrown out the window, including careers, tenures, whatever, you name it. And there's very interesting that there is an equivalency here in the play where the Valentine character says, oh, this is just like science. If you are a scientist, and Dusha Dawkins writes about this very beautifully. You know, your finding is only valid until somebody else proves it wrong. Your goal may basically is to grow old and die before that happens and win a bunch of awards.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  So you have a very interesting game of truth and perception. There is a character. So, so yeah, as you mentioned, the play takes place on two different timelines or in two different timelines. One is the Regency period of the early eighteen hundreds. So we are in the Jane Austen era of gorgeous country high houses. Um, and there is a young mathematical genius girl, um, and her, her tutor. Um, very kind of Goethe-esque. And uh, there's a lot of passionate piano playing in the separate, in a separate room. And servants who know everything about everybody and for half a Guinea, they will tell you. Um, there are, you know, candles and wine for breakfast, um, and people shooting hair.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  For for for lunch. Um. And then we are also in contemporary times, which at the time was the early nineties, where the early computer um work enables people to analyze texts differently, to understand complexity differently. And in a household of literary researchers, um the landed gentry and some Oxford students studying the grounds. Uh. You have an interesting kind of exploration of how how chaos works. Actually, one of the interesting things to me um about the the Arcadia is James Gleick's role in this whole thing. Right. So James Gleick in nineteen eighty eight publishes Chaos,

• 44:33Speaker 01

  um his book explaining chaos theory to a general audience. And today, of course, my generation knows James Gleick primarily from The Information, which is his um much newer book, I think twenty two thousand and eleven or two thousand and ten, um which explains information theory to a audience fantastically. But for stopper's generation, the big kind of cataclysmatic event intellectually was getting to understand chaos. And so Gleick publishes this book. And I noticed, and actually I wrote James Gleick. I was like, oh, my God, look at what I noticed. Um. And he was like, nobody ever noticed that. I was like, I did.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  So he writes this book and it leads to two extraordinary works of of literature, basically. One is Arcadia. So clearly, Stopart sat down after a period of working on completely different things, sat down to read Chaos and then wrote his first play in eight years, inspired by it. Um. And Mi- Mike Lee also reads it, and it leads to the movie Naked with David Thewlis. Um. And the character actually is reading the book Chaos in the in film, which is another take on early nineties. So we're in like post Thatcherite London,

• 45:54Speaker 01

  trying to, or or or at least the British kind of educated classes, trying to find a footing. And so it seems like Chaos could be seen as one of the most important science books to inspire.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Dramatic writing, you know, since maybe Dar Darwin. Um, I mean, if you look at the direct, fast, immediate effect of people dropping whatever they were doing and just, and just going into that. So yeah, you should absolutely have James Gleick on the podcast and ask him how he, um, how his work inadvertently led to all these incredible pieces written.

• 46:34Speaker 00

  So you sent me, which I'd also seen that after Stopper's death, somebody wrote, uh, a scientist wrote, a medical researcher that it helped him understand, uh, a therapy for breast cancer because of what he had seen in the play. Uh, I'm going to tell one other anecdote, then I'm going to come back to, we'll come back to chaos theory and Stopper, because I don't want to forget this. In the aftermath of Stopper's passing, there are a lot of essays written about him, obviously from people he'd worked with, people who loved him, read his book, loved his plays. He, um, but my favorite anecdote, he's such a witty man, and we haven't mentioned Shakespeare in love, which he co-wrote the screenplay, and it's an extraordinarily witty and Stow

• 47:19Speaker 00

  Party and, uh, movie screenplay. But when he was a young man, evidently he applied to be a journalist. He wanted to be a journalist and he went, he applied for a journalism job. And the editor interviewed him and said, so, uh, what are you interested in? He said, well, I'm interested in foreign affairs. He said, well, okay, who, who's the, um, who's the foreign minister of England? And he said, I don't, I don't know. He said, well, I thought you were interested in foreign affairs. He said, well, I am, I'm just, I'm not obsessed. I just thought that was really genius and funny, very, very much like Tom Stoppard. But anyway, um, the book has a lot of, the play has a lot of very, very poetic, beautiful

• 48:03Speaker 00

  and pretty serious attempts to explain the essence of chaos theory and the role of iteration and the.

• 48:14Speaker 00

  of an algorithm. And you can't understand chaos theory by reading the play. But if you understand chaos theory, you'll get more out of it. So which is just sort of kind of cool. But you didn't answer my question, which is fine, because that's OK. But my question was about the different kind of readings, the sitting in the in your the nook of your study versus reading it as in an inner intellect performance versus seeing it on stage. Do you want to say something about that? You don't have to.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  I completely forgot. I got so excited.

• 48:47Speaker 00

  That's OK.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  I completely forgot about the original question, even though I did write it down. It's in front of me. And by the way, all so far it's play have some kind of mathematical game. I mean, Rosenkrantz and Gildanster are dead. It's starting with the coin toss, the independent coin tosses. Head, head, head, head. They are throwing the coin. And the first sentence in Rosenkrantz and Gildanster are dead is the character looking the audience right in the face and says, there is an art to the building up of suspense. And then they go back to throwing it. I think it's genius. So I lived in London for six and a half years. And I had three reading experiences

• 49:29Speaker 01

  that caused kind of a public disturbance. So this included Robert Sapolsky's A Primat's Memoir, where I was laughing so hard on the subway that people asked me what I was reading. It also included Ferran Smolnar's A Play at the Castle, where I was laughing so hard that I think I dropped the book. And also Arcadia, which I first read on the upper deck of a bus in London. And I was laughing so hard that I remember crying tears on the book that was soaking wet. And I could not believe how anything can be this funny. I was completely out of it.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  And then, because I had the privilege of living in London or the bad luck, depending on, you know, where you look at it from, I went to the National Theatre Archives, because Arcadia was not on at the time. And also, I felt that this play is too good to be performed. Like, I had this sudden, you know, reverence to the printed page and the text.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  I was like, okay, I'm going to, if I, if I ever see it, I want to see the original nineteen ninety three production with Rufus Sewell, et cetera, et cetera. And I go to National Theater, and if anybody listening, anybody's listening uh uh from London, do yourself a favor and go there, because they have videos of most recent plays, and anybody can watch it, you just have to sign up for it. And so I walk in, um sadly, they don't have the first season, they have nineteen ninety three later in the year, so it's a little bit of a different um casting. Um, and you know, it's like a church, you're in a crypt. It's good, that silence, everybody's sitting there with the headphones, it's very serious people watching these plays. Um, and they bring out this giant

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Bible of the stage production from nineteen ninety three and just leave you alone with it. It has all the actors and the script and the the costume designs and the, the rider for the lights, it's fantastic. And you know, I'm very, and I'm a very respectful person, obviously, so I put on my little headphones in this marble room, and I think I could take around twenty minutes being quiet of the three hours, and then I just completely let go and was just like roaring with laughter. I thought, I don't care. If they kick me out, this was worth it. If they, if I can never come back to the National Theater Archives in London, it was still, this was worth it. This is how to do it. I think if you can watch Arcadia without laughing your head off,

• 52:03Speaker 01

  there is something wrong with you and you need to seek professional help. This is my, uh, this is my assessment. And so I expect um the reading to also be quite fun. Um, I think internet hosts are, you know, I mean, I don't even know all of them, right? I mean, some people come to my training, some people go to other people's training, other hosts post-training, some people just use the site, and so there will be some new people. Um, I expect it to be pretty fun. We did also, we also did importance of being earnest, and that was hilarious. So, um, I think it's, I think we're just going to laugh our, our heads off. By the way, Shakespeare in Love, I think Stoppard didn't like Shakespeare.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Shakespeare in Love. And if I'm not mistaken, Shakespeare in Love went through a very long crazy rewrite process where Joan Logan also gave it a go, who later wrote The Aviator. And I think Spielberg just threw it out, like, oh, sorry, oops, it didn't work. My ideas were wrong. And they just throw it out. I think they paid him, so that's good. And I think they dragged in Stoppard later, who added some very interesting scenes, like the one that I love when he's in the cab. Shakespeare, another cab driver. I mean, he's like rowing on the Thames, but he's like, I know you from somewhere. You're an actor. Like, that's clearly somebody who was an actor at some point in New York City and has done that.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  It's great, but I think, like, Stoppard is so much better than Shakespeare in Love, but don't start there.

• 53:32Speaker 00

  Fair enough, fair enough. I want to just make a comment on this issue about reading. And I will say, I once made the mistake of reading a heartbreaking work of staggering genius by Dave Eggers in a hotel lobby. I was there for some conference and I'm laughing so hard, and I'm trying not to laugh out loud, but I'm laughing so hard. And at the same time, I'm really nervous because I'm afraid someone's gonna say, oh, what are you reading? And I say this, and they say, oh, what's it about? Well, it's about a guy who loses both of his parents within a very short period of time and has to raise his kid brother. So on the surface, it's not supposed to, well, excuse me, it is supposed to be funny, but it's tragicomic.

• 54:16Speaker 00

  Arcadia is laugh out loud funny. I probably don't think it's, I probably don't laugh as loud as you did, but

• 54:25Speaker 00

  I also find it heartbreaking beyond words and not just the personal tragedy that is captured in the play, but also the poignancy of human effort, because a lot of what the play is about under the surface and occasionally explicitly is, what are we doing here? And we're trying to understand it and it's really complicated. And a lot of the play is about How easy it is to misinterpret data or the past as a historian or as a literary critic or as a literature professor.

• 55:03Speaker 00

  And he clearly, it really skewers academics who are trying to play the game you mentioned a little while ago, you know, trying to get a publishable article that'll draw attention to them themselves. And what's fun about the play, of course, is that the people in the modern time are trying to figure out what happened in 1809. And we know because we've seen it. And we see how they misinterpret it occasionally, sometimes they get it right, and how they preen and, oh, it's just, it's so delicious. But, but a lot of it is about this, the sadness, the incredible bittersweetness of our pitiful

• 55:44Speaker 00

  attempts to understand the world and how extraordinarily beautiful that is, even though we're flawed and we struggle to get it right. And we do get overruled by the people who come after us. But he, he creates a very, you know, beautiful picture every once in a while of this great journey that we're on as a human species. And it's magnificent.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  And the kind of mercilessness of innovation. I mean, one of the best lines is, I think Valentine talks about how some of the young genius in the early 1800s could not have innovated mathematically the way the literary researcher woman in the 90s thinks and says she can't have known, you cannot open a door till there is a house.

• 56:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a great line.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Well, in my world, always asked like, why didn't this or that got invented earlier? And I always think about this, both the mental framing of it. Of course, the play is also about talent and about...

• 56:55Speaker 01

  The ubiquitous mass of talent. And that, I mean, this is where maybe this is coming very close to my worldview, where, you know, it's much less about going out and hunting for talent and more around looking around your own dinner table. Like, who are the people that you are so used to or who come from a background or who don't look the part? You have no idea what this person is working on in private or what they are thinking about, what, you know, Wikipedia rabbit hole they spent their lives in. And, you know, the fact that you have Lady Croom, who doesn't recognize her own daughter's genius

• 57:39Speaker 01

  beyond the fact that she is getting quote-unquote "educated beyond marriageability", and that's worrying to her as the mother. There is a lot of... I think there's more talent missed by people standing right next to them in this play than how much talent gets destroyed or misunderstood. And to me, that's a bigger tragedy.

• 58:01Speaker 00

  The other thing I want to add is that, and again, this is such, such ambitious, ninety-seven pages of play. It's hard to believe how short it is when you see it in a book form. There's a character who represents the hubris of science and the triumph of science in modern times. And there's a character who represents soul, the heart, the intangible, the ineffable, the poetry of life. And that latter character is a pretty despicable person. He's a buffoon. And in the original nineteen ninety-three premiere, he was played by Bill Nighy.

• 58:45Speaker 00

  And I don't know if he's in that version you saw, but I would love to see Bill Nighy in this role. But Stoppard gives both of them great lines. He doesn't cheat. He's a poet, Stoppard, but he respects the science, obviously. And he gives... He displays both worldviews. The so-called left and right brain, it's not correct, but the worldview of the poet versus the scientist. He gives them both their due. And he doesn't... It's not... It's a fair contest, to my ear, anyway.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  It's actually quite interesting that you point this out, because we never see the poet. So Byron is at some point in the house, in the Coverley Estates in the park, but he's off stage throughout. And so is the wife who meddles with the Newtonian system and would upturn it very shortly, as they point out frequently in the play. Because one thing science has no resistance to is attraction between people, which just messes up all the models and all the systems and all the... and complicates everything, which I think is great. We only see Ezra Chater, who is a terrible poet and finally becomes a botanist,

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  kind of in the worst possible way of how you can be a botanist, and dies being bitten by a monkey, which is either hilarious or a very suspicious way of perishing in the jungle by the man who wants your wife. Probably by his hands. And so you see the scientists and that weird creature, who is a scientist but studies literature? Because is Bernard really a scientist? Like, if you went to a quantum physicist that all this guy researches Byron and Oxford, would really this physicist think of this researcher as a "scientist"? You know, like, there are a lot of questions there. But we never see the poet. Byron is there.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  His name is in the gamebook. We later find out that he didn't even shoot that hare. He just claimed the young lord's hare. And then, you know, gets into a scandal in five minutes, obviously, and then is promptly kicked out. At 4:00 a.m., 4:00 a.m., his horse was brought about by the stable boy.

• 1:01:09Speaker 00

  Well, so he's never on stage. By the way, for those of you listening at home, the monkey's not on stage either. That bites. That's... We find out about that. Everything in this play...

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  We wish, we wish!

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. Everything in the play takes place and basically that we see is in one room, this one great room. But I want to read two quotes.

• 1:01:29Speaker 00

  And you could just react to them. One of them I've read a number of times on the program. And I have to say that because Econ Talk is a G rated program, some of the funnier and some of the more insightful lines can't be read because they are not appropriate for a G rated program. But so the first quote comes from Septimus, and this is after, he's the tutor, and Thomasina, the young genius girl prodigy, who we meet at both, I think at 13 and then at 16, almost 17, her two scenes in the early 1800s. So

• 1:02:08Speaker 00

  she's upset because we've lost so many plays of the Athenians, and that we lost the Library of Alexandria. We lost, she says, 200 at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, thousands of poems, Aristotle's own library brought to Egypt. How can we sleep for grief? Meaning it's so sad. And Septimus has this quote that I've read before, but I'll give you the first part, which I usually haven't read. So she says, how can we deal with how this is two, it's unbearably sad. He says, by counting our stock, seven plays from Aeschylus,

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  seven from Sophocles, 19 from Euripides, my lady, you should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book, which will be lost when you're old. We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long, and life is very short. We die on the march, but there is nothing outside the march, so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language, ancient cures for diseases

• 1:03:34Speaker 00

  who reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost of view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great Library of Alexandria, we would be at loss for a corkscrew? End of quote, he goes on, but and there's a line in there about her lesson book, which is heartbreaking, because her lesson book plays an important role in the play. And the first time you hear that quote, you go, yeah, but then you hear it later and it resonates differently. Want to say anything about that before I read the second quote?

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  I would, if you if you permit me to be a little bit pedantic here, it's really important to know about dramatic writing, that it's a play, it's never stopart talking to you. If he wants to talk to you, he will write an essay in the London Review of Books or go on TV. This is, you know, a paragraph that is uttered by the character Septimus Hodge to his young pupil, and, you know, it's a character. So he, as Mehmet always warns us in dramatic writing, there are always three things to ask whatever anybody does in a play. Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  So as a playwright myself, I will look at this and ask, why is Septimus saying this? Rather than this being some absolute truth that stopart kind of pronounce it on stage. Why does Septimus say it? Well, first of all, he's talking from an early 1800s perspective. He is himself a kind of lost talent, right? He's constantly in the shadow of Byron, his school friend, that, you know, everybody is falling over. We never see him. He's quote unquote, only the tutor in this house. The best he can do is to write these reviews, taking down even worse poets, right?

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  So I always look at it from a as a kind of manifesto for just how to process this. And I think every student at some point, you know, whether it's because you're reading The Name of the Rose, whether it's because you're studying, you know, the history of these ancient manuscripts, at some point you have to face the library of Alexandria's demise and and what happened to this knowledge. And I think what Septimus says is kind of how we're dealing with this emotionally. So it's less about, it's more descriptive, more like a positive than a normative thing here. This is not how it was, it's just a character sharing a moment with the audience

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  of how to live, knowing how much was lost.

• 1:06:13Speaker 00

  Beautiful. The second quote is Bernard, the British, I think, say Bernard, but Bernard and Valentine,

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  Bernard.

• 1:06:24Speaker 00

  They're having an argument about what's more important, science or art, basically, which is this running theme. And Valentine's the scientist and Bernard's the defender of art. And finally, Valentine says, "Look, you're a loser. Your argument's not worth anything." And Bernard says the following, which is, he says, I'm gonna, two quotes.

• 1:06:50Speaker 00

  "Oh, you're gonna zap me with penicillin and pesticides. Spare me that, and I'll spare you the bomb and aerosols. But don't confuse progress with perfectibility. A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There's no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle's cosmos. Personally, I preferred it." He says more, which I can't read because it's a little bit, it's got some four-letter words in it. But Bernard later says, which I just love, he says, "If knowledge isn't self-knowledge," it's a very bold claim. He says, "If knowledge isn't self-knowledge,

• 1:07:32Speaker 00

  it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing when Father painted the parlor? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. She walks in beauty like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes." And that line is, of course, a quote from Byron, which is where Byron makes his, that's the closest thing he makes to an appearance. But-

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  And he says, and he wrote, "That's coming home from a party."

• 1:08:13Speaker 00

  Correct, correct. There's nothing grand about it. Good job. But it's just a deep argument that is, of course, they're both wonderful, science and art. But I don't think art's ever gotten its due the way that Stoppard did there. I think it's magnificent. You may disagree. You may think that's Bernard's view, but I think it's Stoppard's, too.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  It's, I think it's refreshing for contemporary audiences to understand how far back and way farther back, obviously, than just Arcadia. The science versus the humanities debate goes. That this has been, you know, actually debated since biblical and Socratic times. Um, the ways of knowing.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  It's funny that you have two very imperfect characters, both motivated by petty desires and little insecurities, debating these grand things, but that's what people do. If you wait for perfection in people to allow them to talk about the big things, you will never find it. Like, there is no, there is no, there is no one, you know, technically big enough to talk about these things. And so, oh, we cannot, we all can do it. Um, it's quite interesting to me. I, I would probably, you know, debate, um, with Bernard about philosophy being timeless. I think I see it much more closely intertwined with scientific thinking.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  But I think in academia, you know, these are the eternal divisions. It's like two football teams constantly at each other's throats. Um, both parties are greatly motivated to never settle. Um, people who actually collaborate and create interdisciplinary dialogue and, and, and, and research get a little bit ostracized by both communities. So there is little kind of career upside also to try to go at it in a more synthetic way. But this is why conversation matters. These people are having this argument after probably four glasses of wine because they are in the same space and they have to confront these, these ideas.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  I'm very curious. I mean, to me personally, I don't.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  So I think where Bernard or Benad is correct is that whilst in science and in the scientific research of literature, you are always kind of in a, in a, in an arms race with the other researchers to not have been proven wrong. And, or to not appear to have been proven wrong, because that's also possible that somebody comes up with some very convincing research that debunks yours, and later on they find out to have been wrong, but by then it's too late for you, because you now you're completely traumatized. But there really is nothing to improve on a Byron poem. You know, you listen to Bach, and you don't think that somebody could come and debunk

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  Bach. And so you have, to me, it's more the differentiation between the kind of substantive works that humans can produce, that are kind of entities in themselves and will have lives of their own as a fixed entity throughout history, through inspiring other people, through different interpretations. You know, Hamlet is not improved by many interpretations, it's somehow like a person who goes and puts on a variety of costumes like these characters doing the second half of, then you retreat into yourself. You acquire all these historical memories, and they attach to you in some ways, but

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  they don't alter the substance. I'm being very continental here, versus you have instrumental types of knowledge, where the telos of that knowledge is the truth, it's outside, the telos of Bach is contained in itself. Or maybe it's about God, like something more than human. The, you know, historical research, the research into the biography of a long-gone author, the understanding of the laws of the universe are in some sense instrumental. And so everybody can collaborate on it, and everybody can add their own voices, and, you know, debunking Newton, or, you know, discovering...

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  The laws of the quantum world were not innovations on the ancients. They were, this is the kind of paradigmatic shifts within the instrumental knowledge. And so I think it's less about science versus poetry and more about the intellectual output of humans that are substantive, that are fixed creations, and they live among us like people from then on, like a person being born, versus methodology and instrumentalization of knowledge, where really someone will at some point come and will have a better method and better tools.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  You know, maybe in 20 years, we will not have any of the remaining scientific methods we have today, because AI will have a completely different paradigm. But does it, is it, is it the same loss as losing Aristotle's comedy? No. Because that was as tragic as the loss of a person versus overriding a previous scientific understanding is an improvement, and we're just getting closer to its goal.

• 1:14:01Speaker 00

  Well, we like to think we are. I mean, I think when we think about science, we think of it, we think of it as progress. And I think that's part of what Starbuck's talking about. Poetry doesn't progress, and Bach doesn't progress. Classical music, music generally doesn't progress. It has different voices for different times. But I think part of what he's getting at, that speaks to me anyway, is that we care about the truth. Now, Bernard doesn't so much care about the truth. He says he's happy with Aristotle's universe, and in a certain sense, he's right, right? The fact that Aristotle, or let's just take Newton, which is a little bit easier to defend. Newton was, quote, "wrong."

• 1:14:46Speaker 00

  But is that really, what is, what is the significance of that? Now, it can be significant for your daily life, because we can make discoveries along the way that affect our cell phones, or AI, or all kinds of other things. But we actually care about the knowledge itself, not instrumentally, not in the utilitarian sense. And I think that is extraordinary and interesting about the human condition, right? The whole debate about, say, creationism versus Darwin.

• 1:15:15Speaker 00

  That has run ever since Darwin was alive. It doesn't change your life, but of course it does. It changes your whole inner life. It changes the self-knowledge that Bernard is defending, which is really a paradox, right? It's really crazy.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  Here's, I think, where the difference between Hannah's method of literary research and Bernard's kind of coming to play. And I'm sure for you as an academic, this must remind you of so many people you know as like the two different ways of going at academic research. Because you have Hannah, who at the end, and this is why she actually gets to bond with the scientist pursuing instrumental knowledge. She says that it's about us trying. Like it's about the kind of relentless pursuit of knowledge. You almost can't care about where it's going. It doesn't matter.

• 1:16:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  Whereas Bernard, he's the other type of academic who sees it as a sport. And there are winners and losers. He wants to win. He kind of wants the truth, right? But he wants the truth because if he says something false, then it will be debunked faster. And that would be a fail for him. So I think that's just charming. But I think stoplight, at least how I feel him treating his characters. I feel that he is quite forgiving of all the characters and their crazy idiotic maybe less of Ezra. I think Ezra really just gets bitten by a monkey. He has no redeeming qualities.

• 1:16:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, this is true. One more thing about Bernard. He, and this is a different kind of academic than just, it's true, he does see it as a sport. But it's worse than that. He's gonna squeeze any facts that he has into his theory, no matter how unlikely it is, because he needs to tell a story. So if something contradicts it, he needs to, he'll just change the story a little bit, or he'll ignore it, and hope it's not important, or hope nobody finds it, like you're talking about, hope nobody finds it later. And all that really matters is getting on, you know, on the front page of the New York Times, or whatever the equivalent is in the literary world. But I just

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  I went to the breakfast hour, he says, you know, when they debunk, I was on the morning show on the BBC. Oh, my God.

• 1:17:45Speaker 00

  And he made a fool of himself because he spouted nonsense. At the time, it seemed okay. But then a fact, an uncomfortable fact came up, came to light. Anyway, it's, it's, it's a wonderful play. Will you archive your reading of it so that people can watch it later?

• 1:18:05Speaker 01

  We do archive these. This is a members only event. So when we record them, it's only available for members. But in this case, I might ask the participants if they permit me to actually put it on YouTube. Sometimes we do that. It's, it's all fun. And if people have ideas for what we should read in January, we are now taking suggestions.

• 1:18:30Speaker 00

  Again, it's inter intellect, one word. You can find it online easily. I want to close with a question for you, Anna. And I didn't write this in advance. It came to me as we've been talking about all these themes from Stopperd. It strikes me that you're a little bit of a 19th century person. You're having conversation, you're talking, you're doing the most primitive forms of human interaction. They are timeless, but in our era, they're a little bit, you're swimming a little against the stream, right? We're living in an era of people absorbed in their phones, people not talking, not

• 1:19:14Speaker 00

  interacting. And AI is going to bring other changes to the human experience. I'm not completely optimistic about it, even though I like many of the things about AI.

• 1:19:27Speaker 00

  What's up for you going forward? Is this, is inner intellect your passion for a long time? Do you agree that you're swimming against the cultural tide here? Or am I misunderstanding something?

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  I might be, but I also think that there is always a place for timeless things. In this sense, I am like Bernard. I think, you know, Intransigent, I started altogether 11 years ago. Since then, we had enormous cultural changes. We had, you know, Brexit and Trump and a pandemic, you know, major, major political upheavals, wars happening or having happened. The entire political and geopolitical map has been reshuffled. And this thing never changes. And I just, I take a lot of kind of consolation in that, that, you know, it's like as time

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  goes by in Casablanca, like everything changes, except that one thing, that at the end of the day, humans really do need each other. And they, you need friends of a different generation, men need women, women need men, scientists need poets, poets need scientists. We can't really get much done without each other. You can, you know, AI is going to be an enormous, or it already is being an enormous breakthrough. And I'm very excited about it. We use AI tools in Intransigent. We are building some things in that regard. But at the end of the day, so much of life is a coordination problem. And AI is not going to raise the barn for you.

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  It's not going to raise your children for you. And it's not going to have the kind of conversation for you where you and another person can kind of reach a new level in yourselves because you understood yourselves a little bit better in that moment.

• 1:21:29Speaker 00

  The fundamental things of life apply as time goes by. My guest today has been Anna Gat. Anna, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 1:21:48Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.