Talking with Russians | Mikhail Avdeev | EP 217

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Your Bible lectures and your books have a healing effect on people. People write about it in the comments all the time because their lives begin to order, and they find new purpose in life. They find something to strive for. You encourage them, and it seems to be an enduring effect; it's something that lasts for a long time. There are a lot of cases like that, so you can't say that's a random effect. It's a pattern.

People who read "12 Rules," who watch your lectures, and especially those who have read "Maps of Meaning" and the books you recommend experience rapid personal growth. Their emotional state, their health, and their relationships change. I'm shocked and surprised.

Yes, we try to do it; we're doing our best. I can tell you that every day, on our different channels in different countries, people ask, "When will you post the next Bible lecture? When will we hear the 'Maps of Meaning?'" And it's not fake; it's not generated by any kind of advertising. You know, it's not something artificially created. We were just trying to do our best to do the best job we could.

Andrew and Matt did a vast amount of work for the channel; Eric helped us a lot. So I'm not that surprised that our channel took off. We didn't use all those traffic-boosting methods; we just took a very careful approach to translation and the quality of the content.

My team and I spent hours every day talking to publishers from different countries and to your fans from different countries, trying to figure out what kind of translation they wanted, how should we approach the translation, and what kind of voice is the best for the voiceover.

We found a different tone for each lecture, and it worked. In the beginning, we planned to make a single centralized hub for video production, but we realized very quickly it will sooner or later turn into a treadmill. The quality and attention to detail that are important for, say, Korean or Arabic viewers can only be provided by the team that shares the same mindset as those listeners.

And so we almost immediately began to hire and form teams within each country. That's how we created the Korean team; that's how we created the Arabic team. The Russian team is now fully formed, and these are people who know their thing very well. They know your works and lectures, and they are aware of all the things that surround it, aware of the whole range of scientific knowledge they need to possess in order to properly communicate your ideas.

I want to thank you very much for introducing us to Eric Neumann, for example. It was very interesting for us to get acquainted with his work. I have something to say about that.

So I spoke with Professor Camille Paglia a while back, a couple of occasions, and she's one of the West's foremost literary experts and commentators. Paglia told me, independently of my liking for Eric Neumann, that she thought the whole history of universities in the West would have been different if the English departments in particular had read Eric Neumann and understood him instead of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.

And I believe that to be the case, and I was amazed that she said that. That's something I had thought for a very long time. Neumann is an extremely profound thinker. "The Origins and History of Consciousness" is a remarkable book, and so is "The Great Mother."

He, in some sense, provides well, an overview and summary of Jung's thinking, which you couldn't get unless you read like 20 volumes of Jung. It's all packed into those two volumes: "Origins and History of Consciousness" and "The Great Mother."

And so I'm amazed, but also extremely happy that his work has been more recognized because he's very underappreciated in my estimation. I mean, his books have been in print forever, but he hasn't had the impact on literary critics, for example, English departments, etc. People concerned with literature that he should have.

Second-rate thinkers instead, and he's not a second-rate thinker. He's a very deep thinker. He is a very good psychologist, and the fact that you mentioned him in your works has inspired a particular interest in him in Russia.

Viewers of our channel began to buy books by Eric Neumann after hearing about him in your interview with Camille Paglia. That's really good news! And also, the fact that you mentioned him in "Maps of Meaning" has sparked a lot of interest in Eric Neumann.

So the other person we should talk about then probably is Mircea Eliade because his three-volume "History of Religious Ideas" is also a great work in my estimation. I really learned a lot from everything I read that Mircea Eliade published.

And so for people who are interested in Neumann, he's another person to study in depth, and "The History of Religious Ideas" is a three-volume set, and it's very readable. It's easier to read than Jung and easier to read than Neumann, and it provides a great overview of his amazing career as a surveyor of world religions.

It's a phenomenal book, and so if people are interested in "Maps of Meaning," they're interested in Neumann; they're interested in that. It's an anthropological and sociological analysis of religion, but it's also deeply psychological, and it focuses on meaning.

So it's in the same vein of thinking, and that's another book, a set of books, that are very much worth pursuing for anyone that finds this kind of material captivating. We will definitely do an event dedicated to Mircea Eliade; I think it will be met with great interest.

So what do people — how are the Russian viewers responding to my reliance on Alexander Solzhenitsyn and my use of the events in the Soviet Union in the 20th century?

I don't know how Solzhenitsyn is regarded in Russia now. People in Russia have a critical attitude towards him in general. Solzhenitsyn is a unique writer, and this is recognized by everyone. However, what he described in his works is rather his point of view.

It's a cry from his heart; it's a work of fiction. And the problem is that this work of fiction began to be perceived as a documentary. And when the Soviet Union began to fall, those who dealt the final blows to it, they did it in the name of Solzhenitsyn, and it was really hard for the ordinary people because after 1991, more than a hundred thousand enterprises were closed down overnight.

The country plunged into chaos, and for 20 years, all the media kept telling us that all the people in our country were to blame for the Soviet Union and that they had to redeem themselves in the eyes of Alexander Isaiah, in the eyes of the Western world. And it caused people a lot of pain because they weren't doing anything wrong.

They were working in institutes; they were translating books; they were raising children. And then suddenly, all the media started humiliating them, and the sense of guilt they tried to create was so painful that after 1991, in the 90s, there was a huge wave of suicides. People didn't know how to live their lives anymore.

This information kept being shoved in their faces; they kept being told that it was their fault that people were being exterminated in the concentration camps, although they had nothing to do with it. And that is why people have mixed feelings towards Alexander Isaiah.

Everyone understands that it was a terrible time and a very difficult one, and this wound has not healed to this day. Even now, as we're talking, as I get back to those events, everyone, I mean, we see that, I think we see that everywhere in the world.

Now that guilt, in the West, in the United States, in Canada, there's a lesser — it's a lesser phenomenon, I would say, than what you're describing and lesser than what the German people felt after World War II. But there are accusations of colonialism and white supremacy and guilt over the terrors of history that brought all of us to where we are now.

And I think that it's something that we all face in some sense as an existential problem. I mean, there are permanent existential problems: death, suffering, deceit, sin, and all of the catastrophes of history that, for better or worse, put us where we are now.

And the issue of how each of us bear guilt and responsibility for things that were done by the culture that we're part of, say, or by our immediate ancestors, or even by our distant ancestors, that's a very difficult psychological question because we're historical creatures.

The existential psychologists following Heidegger, I believe, talked about that problem as the issue of "throneness" — thrown, as in T-H-R-O-W-N. You're thrown into the world, all of us, and you're thrown into your culture arbitrarily. You're thrown into your family arbitrarily; you're thrown into your body arbitrarily. And we all have to deal with that.

Figuring out how to do that individually is very difficult. I mean, what I was trying to do in "Maps of Meaning" was to bring this down to, and in my other books for that matter, was to bring this problem down to the individual level because each of us in some sense has the capacity to do all the terrible things that anyone has ever done.

And you see that manifest itself on mass very frequently. And that happened in the Soviet Union; it happened in Germany; it happened everywhere, really, if you just have to look hard enough and long enough in some ways.

And so I felt that it was necessary — it seemed to me – and so the question is, what do you do about that guilt? That's part and parcel of being a member of any culture that has done things that are reprehensible in the past.

And the answer to that is try not to do it – to understand it and try not to do it in the future. And so we all do have that guilt, and we all do have that responsibility. It's very difficult not for that not to become overwhelming if you look into it deeply. And you have to look into it deeply to some degree to scare yourself badly enough into putting your life together so that maybe the probability of such things will be less in the future.

It's a very tricky thing to manage. So I think maybe partly what you do is you regard it – and this is what the existential psychologists were pointing to — it's part of the nature of being human to bear that historical guilt.

So it's impersonal in some sense; you still have to take it seriously, and you still have to do something about it, but it's not — there's an impersonal and universal element to it, and that makes it somewhat easier to bear.

I can say that a careful study of this issue and your writings helped me to cope with the feelings that arise from the fact that some great guilt, a great burden, is crushing me now when I do not even know if my relatives participated in these events.

I know that they were repressed; that's something I know for sure, and I can't understand — and many other people can't understand — what they are guilty of when their grandparents were the victims.

You gave some very good advice about how studying existential psychology can help you get a broader perspective on this issue. If I may ask a few questions?

Yeah, well part of the problem — so for example, there's this trope in — and this is particularly the case in the United States — that all white people are racist. And that goes along with this claim that American society in particular, but not only America, European society in general, and that would include Russian society, are in some deep sense white supremacist.

And those accusations are variations of political thinking emerging from this sense of universal guilt. The answer — the quest — the answer to the question, "Are all white people racist?" is yes, but it's also no, and here's why. And are all people racist? Well, yes, all of us.

And why would I say that? Well, the anthropological literature is quite clear on this, as far as I understand it — that virtually every society that's ever been discovered, especially when they're isolated, tends to refer to their own group members basically as human beings and all those outside of that group as some other category.

And so, and I think that's a reflection of our in-group preference and our ability to cooperate and form bonds. So it's not trivial, and it's difficult for all of us to extend to — immediately extend that sense of kin, and that's the root word for kindness — that extend that sense of kin beyond our in-group.

And it's also extremely difficult because, well, how many people can you actually attend to and care for? You know, you're limited in your scope. And so the answer to the question, "Are all white people racist?" is yes, but it's still a bad — it's still a bad question because the inclusion of the word white implies that it's unique to say white people, and that's just not the case. It's true of human beings.

It's probably true of our closest biological relatives in a profound and meaningful sense. Chimpanzees go to war; that was discovered by Jane Goodall in the 1970s. It was a great shock. They go on raiding parties, and if they outnumber — if small troops of generally juvenile males go on raiding parties near the border of their territory, and if they find a chimp from another territory and they outnumber them, they'll tear them to pieces.

And so this is a deep problem, and it's a problem for all of us because it's tangled up — it's actually tangled up inside our goodness. That's also what makes it so difficult, because the fact that I really love my family members, let's say, and then my community around that, that in some sense is also why I'm not so positively predisposed to anything I see outside of that that I think might disrupt it.

And so we have to have some sympathy for that proclivity, and we need to understand what we do about it now in the modern world where it's doing more harm than good because maybe we don't need to be parochial in that sense like we were in the past, and perhaps we can't afford to be because we're so technologically powerful now that that tendency to demonize the out-group member will destroy all of us if we don't figure out how to get it under control.

And so I felt that the best — because "Maps of Meaning," the reason I wrote "Maps of Meaning," essentially was to figure out how you get that under control as an individual. And that took me deep into religious work and religious morality, I would say.

And I think the answer to that problem is that we have to become better people. We have to become more conscious. We have to become more conscious of our ethical obligations; we have to become more conscious of the nature of good and evil, to put it bluntly. And we have to bear the responsibility, the ethical responsibility that our powerful technology demands.

That's also something I learned, I would say, most explicitly from Carl Jung, and he made the case — it's a very interesting argument — that he believed the scientific endeavor emerged out of the alchemical endeavor. And he has his reasons for believing that, and I think it's a reasonable proposition historically.

There are many roots of the scientific endeavor, but Newton was an alchemist. So, you know, there's one staggeringly important example. Alchemy was a fantasy about the value that might be lurking in the material world, and Jung believed that we needed to fantasize about what value might be held in study of the material world for thousands of years before we could organize ourselves psychologically to do something as technically sophisticated as science.

So alchemy was still, you know, one-tenth science and ninety imagination and religion in some sense. And then the scientific part of it blew up massively over the last 400 years, and it's put us where we are technologically. But the ethical part, the religious part didn't blow up and expand in the same way, but it has to. We have to be as ethical as we are powerful or we won't manage, and we'll destroy ourselves with — and maybe we'll do it because we want to.

So we have to grow up in some sense, and that means we have to become conscious of things that we have not yet become conscious of. And I think that means becoming more conscious of what that means, that there are religious values, what that means ontologically — so what that means for the nature of being itself and what it means in terms of how each of us perceive and act and what our obligations are and what the costs are of not doing that.

We have to become very serious about such things in a way that we are not serious yet. Most of the discussion I see about the relationship between science and religion is the sort of discussion that takes place between the viewpoint that's put forth most eloquently and powerfully likely by the atheist materialists like Dawkins and Harris and Daniel Dennett.

And as far as I'm concerned, they're just not contending with the problem. What they do is there's a sleight of hand — there's an intellectual sleight of hand that's unnoticed by those that they're arguing against.

And the sleight of hand is they implicitly and explicitly presume that the enemy they're fighting, which would be religious belief as such, is fundamentally a set of propositions about the explicit propositions about the structure of the material world in some sense.

So it's akin to a scientific theory, and then having made that presumption and having that presumption not be questioned, they can take relatively straightforward steps to demolish it. But the problem with that is — well, there's a variety of problems. But problem number one is that first move is not kosher because that's wrong.

What part of what religious is, is what happens to you when you look at the night sky in the pitch black and you can't confront infinity. And there's an embodied set of experiences that manifest themselves independent of your will, and part of that is fear and trembling in the presence of the infinite; that's the awe.

But there's also a call in that; there's an intrinsic call in that to greater being on your part to be better than you are. That's part of that experience; there's an ennobling aspect to it. And none of that is rational and propositional. It's deep; it's instinctive; it's part of the instinct to imitate.

And serious scientists would contend with that, and serious people would as well. There's a set of experiences that ensnare all of us. Dancing to music is another. What are we doing when we're dancing to music? Well, we don't know.

But it's easy to think of it as mere entertainment or something trivial, but it's not. I had one of Canada's national treasures here yesterday, Rex Murphy, a very astute and profound person, and he said — this wasn't his words, but he read them and remembered them — "All art aspires to the condition of music."

Yes, well, what does that mean? Well, it's something outside rationality, greater than rationality, and virtually everyone loves music. Well, what does it mean that they love music? Why does that feed the soul?

What exactly is going on there? Well, something profound is going on there; it's something that's calling us to align ourselves harmoniously with the patterns of being. And none of this is optional.

The other issue is, well, if the religious enterprise has failed, and anyone with any reasonable intellect can see that, then from whence do we derive our values exactly?

Because the science I know has convinced me — and these are the most serious psychologists that I've read, people like... An ecological approach to perception — is that the book? I can't quite remember the title. It always escapes me. Gibson? Nope, Gibson, nope, Gibson. A visual approach; I can't remember the book.

Eric, maybe you can just look that up briefly. It's gibson perception. Anyways, Gibson was quite convinced that we perceive meaning, not objective reality. And he didn't mean that he wasn't a religious thinker; that was his conclusion from studying the visual system in depth.

And it is the case; we see the world through the lens of value. Where do we derive from? Where do we derive our values? And maybe even more importantly, from where should we derive our values?

And you can say science — yeah, but that's a facile answer, and it's a dangerous answer too because it risks the politicization of science. And science strives, at least in some sense, to be value-free. And perhaps for the better, and perhaps that's a necessary part of the scientific enterprise. But we need values; they're not optional.

The necessity for value is built into us at an unbelievably deep level, biologically, not conceptually, not as a secondary consequence of our rationality — none of that. It's a precondition for perception itself, and we haven't wrestled with the significance of that discovery.

Now you see the earth-shattering significance of that discovery manifest itself in part in the realization of AI, artificial intelligence engineers, that it was virtually impossible to build an intelligent machine that could perceive the world unless it was embodied.

And the reason for that was that the problem of perceiving the world was way more difficult than we thought because we thought we just saw the objects that were there, the material objects that were there, but that isn't how it is. It really is not the case.

It's so much the case that if you try to build a machine that perceives the world that's just looking at the objects that are there, so to speak, you can't; it doesn't work. And so people like Rodney Brooks, a MIT robotics engineer and a genius, he started figuring this out in like 1992, that in all probability a machine would have to be embodied to perceive; because perception is so tightly associated with action.

And action and perception are also so tightly associated with value. You can't perceive without a framework of values. Where do we derive our values? From nowhere? And are they real or not? Well, what do you mean by real exactly? You can't see without them, so they're a precondition for the perception of material reality itself.

And then we also know, we all know, we all know this: some values are more important than others; some things are deeper than other things. We all have that sense; we know the difference between a shallow story and a deep story, and but we don't know what we mean by deep, and we don't know what we mean by shallow.

But we mean something. And so then I would say, well, the deepest values are religious; that's a definition; it's an observation. And so when I could say we should scrap the entire religious enterprise as intelligent 21st-century rational intellectuals, but, well, what about all these other problems? They don't — they're not going away, and they're not the — they're not problems that are imagined by some coterie of superstitious religious scholars.

These are profoundly difficult scientific questions, at least in part, the problem of perception. And then the problem of depth: well, are some values deeper than others? Are some values more basic than others? That means there's a hierarchy of values, and that means there's something at the top that unites it all, or everything is fragmented. Those are the alternatives.

And then one of my propositions is that, well, what Christianity is, psychologically speaking, at least in part, is the attempt to specify the nature of the highest value. And part of that's an abstraction. And that's what God is in the Old Testament: an abstract representation of the highest value.

And then there's another problem: once you abstractly represent the highest value, how do you bring it down to earth so that it can guide your actions? And the notion of the incarnation is the answer; it's, at minimum, it's the answer provided by the collective imagination of Western civilization to the problem of the embodiment of the highest value.

And are we gonna — what are we gonna do? Are we gonna be children in the face of that, or are we going to think about it? Because it's a problem. But one of the things Eliade pointed out was he was commenting at least in part on Nietzsche's observation of the death of God.

Eliade said, "Well, God — God has died time and time again," because one psychological problem with abstract ethical religious thinking is that the highest value can become so abstract that no one can have any relationship with it anymore. You don't know how — you don't know what it means for you; you don't know how to act it out; you don't know how to embody it, and so it's meaningless.

It disappears; it floats away. But then when that happens to a culture, there's no central unifying value, and then the culture fragments. That's in a manner that's analogous to the Tower of Babel in some sense.

And so something has to serve as a uniting value, and it is the highest value. And I do not believe that the rationalist types, the rationalist atheists, I don't believe they contend with these problems at all.

And it's not because it's because they don't understand them; they don't know these problems exist. They exist; these are fundamental problems. And when I say that Christianity is the attempt to answer the question of how the highest abstract value should be embodied, I mean that most seriously.

And then you ask yourself as well, you know, you said to me earlier that the people who've been translating the biblical lectures have experienced some transformation in their own life. That's because they started to embody the ethic.

I can tell you: are you going to strive to embody the ultimate ideal or not? Because I could ask you, do you have anything better to do? How could you possibly have anything better to do? And if you don't want to do that, why don't you want to do it?

Well, I don't believe in that. It's like, what do you mean by that exactly? Do you not believe there are any values? Do you believe you can just pick and choose? Do you believe that there's no uniting values? And if there are uniting values, do you believe that you have an ethical obligation to act in accordance with them or not?

And then what do you think will happen if you don't? Because I know what will happen if you don't: you'll fall into a pit, and you'll drag the people around you into the pit with you. And as you suffer because you're in the pit, you'll delight in the fact that you're there and that you've dragged all those other people in there with you.

Yes, you reminded me now, it's the ecological approach to visual perception, and Gibson — none of that book is religious in nature, in fact. Quite the contrary. But it doesn't matter because what it shows is that a value structure is a precondition for perception itself.

And I should say that over and over and over: a value system is the precondition for perception itself. You were talking about people dragging each other into a pit, and it reminded me of Peter Bruegel's painting, "The Blind Leading the Blind." But they all fall into a pit.

It really resembles people who don't want to see these values and don't want to aim for them. Well, look what happens. How could failure to bring values under a unifying principle lead to anything other than fragmentation and confusion?

And I studied Geoffrey Gray's book, "The Neuropsychology of Anxiety," which is the best book ever written about the biology of anxiety, hands down. And it's a hard book; it took psychologists — I read that book in 1985, which wasn't very long after it was published, and I really read it.

It took me six months to read that book; it was hard. And it took the general run of psychologists 30 years to really notice Geoffrey Gray's book. There wasn't a lot of serious discussion about it among personality psychologists and social psychologists, people who were far removed from biology and animal experimentation.

It took 30 years for them to start to digest that book, and that process certainly hasn't finished yet. And so when I say that fragmentation of the value structure necessarily leads to a predominance of negative emotion, pain, anxiety, suffering in general, I believe that to be true biologically.

And I think I understand, obviously not completely, but I understand the outlines of the neurobiological reasons why that's the case. I wrote a paper with my students a while back trying to tie the phenomenon of anxiety to the thermodynamic principle of entropy, and I think we were quite successful to put physics underneath the science of anxiety.

And I think we were successful in that. I mean the paper was published in a very good journal, Psychological Review, and as far as I know no one's, you know, come up with a thorough-going and serious refutation of the proposition: if you fragment your value structure, then you're overwhelmed; you become overwhelmed by anxiety, and that's the price you pay for not being integrated.

So fine, you don't have to pursue value intensely and seriously; you don't have to devote yourself to it; you don't have to worship the highest ideal. But the price you'll pay for that is fragmentation, nihilism, existential angst, doubt, terror, stress, more rapid aging — all of that.

So fine, that's the alternative, and that's only on the personal level. It says nothing of the sociological level. Your books help readers become more integrated with themselves. In "The Great Mother," Neumann says that only the individual with integrated consciousness can help society become healthy.

Only through individuals with integrated consciousness can society properly form and become healthy. What tendencies in modern society do you think contribute to the — and that's no different, by the way. That is no different than the statement that "the imitation of Christ" is the highest ethical demand placed on every individual in Western society.

It's the same idea; it's exactly the same idea. The first idea, the Christian idea, is the dream that preceded the psychology. And that's, I'm — and that's what it is minimally; that's what it is. Psychologically, I'm not speaking as a religious thinker when I make that claim; I'm not trying in some sense to tread into religious territory, not as a theologian.

I'm trying to explain something and to make it real. And you know, to make it real. What tendencies in modern society do you think contribute to the integrity of consciousness, and what tendencies interfere with it?

Some of that guilt that you were talking about, that can be extremely corrosive. You know, one of the things that I was extremely affected by when I went on my tour — I think this is part of what made me ill, although it wasn't all of it, but it was definitely part of it — was I saw I was offering people words of encouragement.

And it seemed that the people who were benefiting most from that in some sense were young men, and I think maybe that's because they have been formally criticized so much in the last 30 or 40 years. So they had the deepest hunger, and I saw how much hunger, how much thirst there was for words of encouragement in the face of that accusation and guilt.

Like we all stagger forward under our burden of sin; that's the archaic language. And modern people, well, they don't really understand what that means, and yet they're discouraged and guilty about the conditions of their own existence, and that's the same thing.

And so then, because I was offering words of encouragement — because I would rather that people did well than do badly — and I mean that most sincerely, it was stunning how much impact that had on people and how grateful they were for it. And that was very painful to me to observe because I had no idea that the hunger was so deep and that people were so hopeless because they had been crucified by their own guilt and by their accusations of their insufficiency.

And the malevolence of their ambition, let's say. I mean, I experienced that very, very personally. A friend of mine, who was a very intelligent man, someone I knew from the time I was about 13 — he killed himself, and he did that at least in part because he believed that masculine ambition was fundamentally malevolent.

And so he didn't trust his own forward striving and he couldn't distinguish, let's say, greed from valid ambition. And I mean, he wrote a story that really affected me; he was quite a good short story writer, as it turned out.

He only had one story published, but I have his unfinished novel. He wrote a story about a memory he had when he was about 10 years old, 11 years old, something like that. He lived in this northern town, High Prairie; there was a large Indigenous population there.

It's a town very much like the one I grew up in, and he got beat up by a group of Indigenous kids, or one or two — I don't remember exactly the details of the story, but he didn't fight back. He wouldn't fight back because even at that age, he regarded himself, his very presence there, as morally untenable.

And you know, fair enough, there's a real ethical conflict there. Europeans did come to North America and South America, and 95% of the Indigenous people died from plague — you know, measles, mumps, smallpox. And so that was an absolute catastrophe.

And then, well, the relationships between the Europeans who have come to the Western Hemisphere and the Indigenous people have been fraught with conflict to say the least. And no one's exactly sure how to rectify that.

But he viewed any sign of masculine ambition, let's say, as fundamentally immoral because of its association with colonial domination and the technological nightmare and the despoiling of the planet and all of that struck him to the heart. You know, it killed him.

I mean, there was more going on, but that was a big part of it. And so we bear this terrible guilt, all of us, and it interferes with our ability to rise up. And all of that has to be sorted out.

You know, we have to distinguish between valid ethical striving to make the world a better place and immoral ambition. And we have to be very careful that we don't look at those who have put themselves together perhaps better than we have and have been successful because of it and warp our morality because we want to tear them down because, as examples, they're examples that we fall short of.

It's very easy for this sort of thing to become warped by resentment and hatred. You know, you see this. I think I saw an example of that in the United States: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I'm probably pronouncing her — AOC. I'm pronouncing her name wrong. She wore a dress to a Met Gala, a big fancy artistic affair, a white dress, like a bride's dress in some sense.

And on it painted in red was "Tax the Rich". And I'm like, that's an example of that political twisting. It puts itself forward as an ethical statement that's aimed at the betterment of the lives of the poor, but lurking underneath that is a hatred for those who have been successful and an insistence that anyone successful has only become successful because they've exploited and hurt others.

And sometimes that's the case in some situations, probably for all of us. But sometimes and always are very different. And I've studied deeply the political consequences — the consequences of that attitude going too far. What happened to the kulaks in the Soviet Union? It's a perfect, perfect example of that.

Kill all the successful farmers because all they did was exploit, despite the fact that all those people were serfs like 50 years previously. Kill them all; take what they earned. What happened? Six million people die.

It is a very difficult thing with the kulaks. This is still a very painful subject for millions of people in our country, I can tell you that. My family suffered from it; my relatives were dispossessed like that; everything they had was taken away from them. They worked hard for decades.

And that being said, the story is actually more complicated than that. There really were such people in the villages who were actually called kulaks, who lent to other peasants and then forced them to give back much more than they gave in the beginning.

I mean, they demanded from debtors so much that people could not pay back the debt. That's why kulaks were hated in the villages, because they were basically usurers, and they could hurt or kill those who delayed or didn't pay their debts.

The authorities turned a blind eye to this and sided with the kulaks; they could do anything they wanted to the poor. So when it started — there's no doubt; there's no doubt that economic exploitation occurs, and there's no doubt that economic exploitation occurs.

There's no doubt that not all material wealth is gained in an ethical manner. All of that; that's why those discussions about oppression and exploitation always continue; there's always some truth in it.

The thing is now, it is perceived as a sort of collective pain and drama. I think someday the pain will pass. Unfortunately, this whole phenomenon — the dispossession of kulaks — is now perceived and interpreted rather superficially, I would say. It was much more complicated than that.

And the fact that there was a fratricidal war, the civil war that occurred before it makes it even more complicated. There was no right and wrong; there were victims; everyone suffered.

You know, I wanted to ask you about "Beyond Order." We have already translated it into Russian, and I think there's a very important point in the eighth chapter. The translators and the editors especially liked it. It's about beauty. Dostoevsky said through one of his characters that beauty will save the world.

Why do you think beauty is so important? I think — I think I'm so glad that that's the case. I think that was the chapter that I liked the best of both books. So I'm very pleased to hear that that's been the response.

And part of that was motivated by my contemplation regarding Dostoevsky's statement and Solzhenitsyn's comments about it. What does that mean? Well, it means it's a variant of the idea we discussed earlier, that all art aspires to the condition of music.

It's akin to our discussion about the night sky. Beauty is something that calls you to that higher unifying ideal; it calls you, and it pulls you. And part of that is a manifestation technically speaking of the imitation — of the instinct to imitate; human beings are unbelievably imitative, unbelievably imitative.

It's our main cognitive transformation, I would say. I mean, every word we speak is the word that everybody else uses; that's an example of the depth of this imitative spirit. We were so good at imitation.

And I'll give you a quick example of that. So if you watch a child who's three or four years old playing house, male or female, the females will usually act out mother, and the males will act out father. And if you casually observe that, you'll say, "Well, they're imitating."

But that isn't imitation; if I imitated you, I would sit like this; that's imitation because I'm precisely mimicking you. But if I'm, what, if I'm four years old and I'm watching my father for four years and I'm watching Disney movies that feature kings and so forth, so I'm getting an image of the father as such, I'm abstracting from each particular example of the father the commonality of behavior and perception that characterize the father across all those instances.

And I, when I'm pretending to be the father, I'm attempting to take that abstraction and embody it. And that a four-year-old is doing that, it's unbelievably sophisticated. And so the four-year-old is called to manifest the spirit of the father.

And it doesn't take much imagination to see that transformed into a religious statement — to be called to manifest the spirit of the father — it sounds like a religious statement. But that's what four-year-olds are doing when they play house; they're very sophisticated.

Now that imitative instinct, imitation, that instinct to imitate is so deep in us that we're called to imitate things that aren't even animate. So when you walk into — when you see a cathedral and then you walk into the cathedral, the cathedral is calling you to imitate it.

And beauty — beauty is part of that call, and it grips you; it's pointing to this higher unifying ideal. And that's why and the fact that that higher unifying ideal is so vital is what accounts for the fact that beauty compels, and it's pre-rational just like music.

You can't argue with it. I mean, you could say, I suppose, that all opinions about beauty are arbitrary, it's just subjective, something like that. You could brush it off intellectually, but it just means you're shallow, and you're not paying attention.

Beauty is mysterious, and it's not completely subjective because there's wide agreement, at least in some instances, on what is spectacularly beautiful. I mean, you can see that with the pilgrims that flood into Europe.

And you think, well, they're not pilgrims. Well, what do you think the tourists are that go to Europe if they're not pilgrims? What do they go look at? They go look at beautiful things, and they've fallen out of the religious landscape to such a degree that they don't even know that they're on a pilgrimage.

And they don't even know that they're called to worship beauty. And they don't have any idea that that's a call to a higher form of being because we've — because we've shallowly criticized our religious propositions, we don't even understand when they start to manifest themselves in an embodied manner and pull us here and there.

It's happening politically all the time. So beauty is — the reason that Dostoevsky — you see it; it's interesting to consider the difference between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche in this regard because their ideas are very similar in many, many ways. They're like — one is more rational and explicit, and one is more narrative and literary, but they're like the same spirit.

But Dostoevsky is, in some sense, deeper, and I think Nietzsche would have agreed with this, and I know that Nietzsche knew more about Dostoevsky than people thought. There's been recent scholarly work on that account.

Dostoevsky, in some ways, was closer to beauty; his work was closer to beauty than Nietzsche's because Dostoevsky's work was literary and artistic, and so he dealt in that aesthetic realm. And "The Idiot," for example, is a very interesting book, because — and you see this in another bits of Dostoevsky's work as well — his most ethical characters can lose every argument with rationalists and still be better men, and you see that in the book.

Because the book allows them to be embodied rather than mere carriers of propositional arguments. And beauty is non-propositional, and so it goes under our narcissistic and blind rational intellect that overvalues its ability.

That's the spirit of Lucifer that Milton warned everyone about. It goes under that and grabs you. And if you pay attention to that, then it's a pointer to what is beyond your understanding. And so it's vital; it's vital, and Dostoevsky knew that, and Solzhenitsyn read that, and he thought, "I see; I see what he means. I understand what he means."

And you know, one of the characteristics of our modern culture, especially in the architectural realm, is that it's replete with ugliness. I mean, I've gone to medieval villages in Europe, especially in East Germany, that were so beautiful they just made me cry.

When I was in the downtown, I thought, "My God, this is so unbelievably beautiful. How did people manage this?" And to think about all the effort that was poured into those cathedrals: monuments to divine beauty. What imagination those people had! And what commitment! And we — we can't do that. Modern people can't do that.

And so it's a terrible loss, and it's partly because we just don't take such things seriously. And that's — that's a big mistake because they are more serious than anything else. Beauty is more serious than anything, except perhaps truth. But it's a pointer, you know?

In these religious thinkers, philosophically speaking, Christian thinkers, they thought of God as the sum bonum, the sum of all good things. Well, truth is something, and beauty is something, and courage is something. These virtues that we all recognize as virtues or are tormented by our conscience if we don't.

You sum those all together, that's the ideal that binds us all, and that's God for all intents and purposes. You might say, "Well, is that real?" It's like, "Well, it depends on what you mean by real." And people laugh at me because I say that sort of thing fairly frequently, you know?

"It depends on what you mean by real." And you think, "Well, that's an evasion." It's like, "No, I'm just not accepting your presuppositions as a precondition for this discussion. You can't use that sleight of hand."

So beauty — it's like that. Beauty tells you to be more than you are. Beauty tells you to aspire to that which is beyond you. Beauty says there is something beyond you, all of that. And it does that in an enticing manner, right? It invites you to come along.

It's the opposite of authoritarianism; it's an invitation. It's like the most beautiful woman you can possibly imagine waiting there for you on the dance floor, inviting you. That's beauty, and that's an invitation to be the sort of man who could dance with that person.

You think you don't take that seriously? Like you get rejected by some woman you admire. Her beauty has captivated you, and you're rejected because you're less than you could be. You think you don't take that seriously? It's a miracle you don't cut your throat.

You take it seriously; you just don't know it. You don't know what she's angry about. Why is she rejecting you? Because you're not all you could be. And some of that's laid at your feet.

And men are angry with women all the time because that's what women do. That's what they tell them all the time, and it's a terrible thing. But can you blame them? What else would they do?

You know, in your shallow thoughts, you'd think, "Well, I wish that I was always accepted; every advance was accepted uncritically." Well, that world would be hell very rapidly if it was actually the case.

I wanted to ask you about your work on "Beyond Order." Our translators and editors have pointed out that it has a very distinctive language and many levels of complexity to explore and comprehend. The peculiarity of this language is that it somehow helps the reader set his perception, set his mind on the book's narrative.

It flows very easily and deeply into the reader's mind. Is there a special technique you use when you build up a sentence? Because we were comparing this book with your other works, and we noticed that your wording has changed a bit. It became even more accurate, even though it seemed like it couldn't be any more accurate, but it became even more vivid, and we all enjoyed working on the book.

Well, that's remarkable that you said "deep" in a light way. When I was teaching at Harvard, I was really concentrating on my "Maps of Meaning" course, although I paid plenty of attention to the personality course as well, and they fed into each other quite nicely.

I was struck by this idea one day, and "Maps of Meaning" was such a serious course because it dealt with atrocity. It dealt with the worst evils that I could extract out from the last hundred years of history, and that's pretty dark.

And so it was very serious, heavy, and "Maps of Meaning" is a heavy book. There's not much humor in "Maps of Meaning," and I kept having this idea that if I had really mastered this material, I could present it in a manner that was light.

And I thought, "Well, how in the world could you possibly present such things in a manner that was light?" It's not like I don't appreciate the necessity for humor; I love talking to comedians. The most enjoyable interviews I've had, and I think probably the most successful ones in some ways, have been with comedians, and the people I grew up with.

I had a group of close friends from, say, grade 8 to... I was about 13 until I was about 20. There were five or six of them, and all we ever did was try to make each other laugh. All of our interactions were wit competitions essentially, and some of them were much funnier than me.

One friend of mine in particular, Randy Carlstad, he was so insanely funny. I saw him again on my 50th birthday, and he made me laugh so hard that I could literally... I could hardly breathe; he was so funny. And so I love the humor. And most of what I watch on television is stand-up comedy or idiot humor, like "The Trailer Park Boys" or some lowbrow horrible lowbrow show like that, which I really enjoy.

So there's something to this lightness that's crucially important, and I don't — I haven't quite puzzled it all out. I know when I'm on top of things that I can maintain my sense of humor, and I haven't always been able to do that, especially in interviews, you know, over the last five years because they — well, for a variety of reasons, for a variety of reasons; sometimes it was the vitriolic nature of the interactions and so forth.

But I know when I'm at my best that, you know, I have a sense of humor, and I can keep things light even if they're deadly serious. And I'm very happy to hear that the translators have seen that combination of lightness but depth in improve as I continued to write.

I wasn't sure about that. I wrote "Beyond Order" under very trying conditions. I was unbelievably ill while I wrote that book. It was terrible, so I'm glad that that worked because I didn't — I had no idea if it would, but I'm very happy to hear that that's been the experience of the translators because they're obviously interacting with this text in a very serious way.

And I'm thrilled that it was chapter eight in particular that was most affecting because that was a particular favorite of mine. That issue of beauty is so unbelievably crucially important to what's happening in the world today because of what it implies.

So you know, when people wonder what the purpose of such things as classical music — what's the purpose of classical music, let's say? You say this about any musical form, and I like a very wide variety of music. Well, you know, and you see this with psychologists — even psychologists I admire, they tend to just wave their hands about the entire cultural capability of human beings as if all of this entertainment, music, drama, art, literature — that some — it's just entertainment.

You know, that's all it is; it's not in the central part of our function as human beings or the central part of our culture; it's completely backwards; it's absolutely backwards. It's crucial and vital. So the lightness — well, that's good.

You know, and as I've become more healthy recently, in the last month, I've recovered a lot, thank God. I can think again a bit, and my sense of humor — I'm hoping will come back. And I hope I can maintain it. I'm going on tour again, I think next year, perhaps for the whole year, and it would be nice to have a hell of a sense of humor while that's happening.

And that would be wonderful; I would love to see you in Russia if you are willing to do it. That would be wonderful! People here like you very much; they like you, and they would love to meet you.

I would love to do a lecture in St. Petersburg, and so when we plan the European tour — and that's not the only place, but I would particularly love to do a lecture in St. Petersburg.

When we plan the European tour, we will definitely do everything to make that happen, definitely. It would be such a striking honor and privilege to be able to do that. I can't believe that that's a possibility.

I would love to do it, and the fact that I can speak with Russian people and speak with people all over the world — this is a miracle, really. It's amazing that you all are doing so much work to make this happen and that you're trying to be so careful with your words.

I'm so happy about that; it's so great. You know, and that part of that transformation that you were talking about, perhaps part of that is a consequence of everybody trying to be very careful with their words.

It's not for nothing that our entire culture decided that the essential hallmark of the highest uniting ideal was the word. We should take that seriously. The word is divine; your word is divine if it's true.

Think about that: what if that was true? What if that was actually how reality was constituted? You think you have no relationship with reality, with the infinite? Where are you going to find that other than in truth? And where are you going to approach truth more particularly than with your words? Or evade the truth with your words?

And so insofar as you have a relationship with reality and with the infinite and with truth, how could that not manifest itself in the word? So it's crucially important to pay attention to what you say. And that's part of what we've all been trying to figure out for thousands and thousands of years, trying to understand what that meant, trying to make what's most important the word, the truthful word.

That's the most important thing, really. Well, that's what we've concluded, this immense religious exercise, and I'm speaking as a psychologist. And it's amazing because the approach we took, it worked the same way in different languages.

Lectures in Chinese were received just as well by the viewers as they were in other languages. And it's amazing. All the kind words people write to us, they say that it's an amazing translation and that they've discovered a whole new world and new meanings in life.

We were all very impressed by that. And all we did was we were just trying to be accurate, trying to avoid adding something unnecessary, something of our own invention during the translation process.

We strive to convey the author's vision and ideas, and it works. I can tell you that every time the translation deviated from your precise sequence of phrases, the book made a completely different impression, and it somehow became harder to relate it to the next piece of your work.

That's how neatly it is structured. We noticed it when we were working on the Bible series and on "Beyond Order." We realized we cannot change your wordings and your choice of words; otherwise, the book loses its depth and energy. It's like we had to follow some kind of star.

Everyone felt that it was something elusive; it's hard to put into words. It's like music, like some sort of magic. And when we did it right, the text began to flow. And it is so pleasant; it is as if everything connects with each other.

And it is impossible to turn away from it. Some lectures that we have translated and dubbed — we listen to again and again. You want to get back to them to take a deeper look into them, you know?

And that's the way we translated "Beyond Order." It's a book that you want to read all over again to get back to it. I think we'll make sure that every library in Russia has this book, that people have the opportunity to read it, because by maintaining the sequence that you have laid out, it's like we're giving people the opportunity to enter another world, to get a deep insight into it.

So my son and I and a team have been developing software to help people write. So it's a word processing program, but it's a tool to write more effectively, and it has technology that enables dragging and dropping of sentences and paragraphs and modules that help you reshuffle.

And so — and it's based on — I spent a lot of time developing an explicit theory of writing and also of, say, text criticism because I had to grade so many essays. I wanted to decompose the grading process and understand what I was doing and formalize it.

And so then I started to understand that a text is a multi-level phenomenon: a book, a word, a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, a sequence of paragraphs, chapters, sequence of chapters, totality. It exists at all those levels simultaneously.

And although you walk through it like you walk through life from beginning to end as the author, you have a God's eye view, and you can see all of those structures simultaneously. You can see the end, even though once you've written the book, even though it has a beginning.

And what that means is that you can make the beginning refer to the end. You can make the end refer to the beginning. You can make all the parts of the text refer to each other, and one of the things that's absolutely remarkable about the Bible is that it's hyperlinked like that.

There's a map, an image online that shows — it's beautiful imagery; it looks like a rainbow in some sense. It shows how many references to each verse are made throughout the text; and so the Bible is the world's first hyperlink text, a thoroughly hyperlinked text.

All of it refers to all of it explicitly and implicitly, and the reason for that is because it's been reworked and reworked and reworked and reworked to be made somewhat coherent, to be made into an actual narrative by, you know, an untold number of people working over an untold amount of time.

The old stories in the Bible, like the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Noah — God only knows how those — how old those are. I know that historians, literary historians perhaps — that's the discipline — have traced back some fairy tales ten thousand years, more than that.

And one — if a story is ten thousand years old, it's probably a hundred thousand years old because things didn't change much ten thousand years ago. Rights not changing was how things were. Not changing. And so, God only knows how old those stories are.

And how long they were told for. And so when you write, if you think about what you're writing deeply, you start to make everything refer to everything else. And that's part of what makes you experience a text as deep because it refers — there's all these references within the text if the writer has done his or her job properly and edited at every one of those levels of analysis.

Which you have to do: is the word precise? Is the phrase right? Are the phrases sequenced properly in the sentence? Is the paragraph made of properly sequenced sentences, etc.? And I edited all those levels explicitly over and over, over and over.

And with "Maps of Meaning," I think I probably wrote every sentence 50 times. Like, I literally — I mean that literally. I'd write a sentence out, and then I'd write another version of it, then I'd write another version of it, continually until I couldn't — until I started generating variance, and I couldn't make any qualitative distinction between them.

So I'd write down three, and I'd say, "I can't tell which of those is better, so I guess I'm done because I can't make a finer value distinction." Now, I think I probably overworked "Maps of Meaning" to some degree because I did that so continually; some of the sentences are very long.

They work, but because they're so long, they're hard on the reader. And I, you know, with that book, I was trying to figure something out. I mean, I wanted to write a book, obviously, and I want to communicate with people, but fundamentally, I was trying to figure something out.

With "12 Rules" and "Beyond Order," I was taking what I had figured out and trying to investigate it further, but I was also trying to make it much more accessible. It was much more a communicative attempt rather than an investigative attempt.

And I'm so happy — I think part of the reason your translations have worked is because of this emphasis on precision. You said you're not playing any tricks; you're not trying to get false attention, and thank God for that.

You definitely don't want — you do not want unearned attention. Believe me, that is not something anyone with any sense would ever wish for because if it's unearned, all the people who are devoting that attention, they will figure that out, and they will not be happy with you.

And so the catastrophe will be exactly proportional to the degree of attention and the degree that it's unearned, and that's not a good idea. And but you also, from what you told me, he also realized that you had to really meet your audience halfway. You had to understand locally the vernacular of the community, and you had enough humility to notice that that was necessary.

You know, I was just talking to somebody, a couple economists the other day, about the failure of foreign aid — the constant failure of foreign aid. And part of the reason it fails is because it's like, “Well, here is what we know, and you, you ignorant people can just do it.”

Whereas for it to work, there has to be a real deep study of the local environment and some attention paid to how these things could be integrated with that environment in an inviting way.

And so the fact that you paid attention to those local particularities and that you said you only tried to be precise here and now — well, that was how the translation came through. Well, that's not only — that's — man, if you can do that all the time, you're attending to the moment, you know accurately.

You're trying to establish a relationship with truth accurately every moment. So that's not only — that’s a — that's an act of worship. That only trying to be precise here and now.

And we could talk a little bit about that too because what worship means is imitate. And you think, "Well, you don't worship. I don't worship anything because I don't believe in anything." It's like, "Oh yeah? You think that's true? You don't think you're imitating? Who are you imitating? No one? Oh, you're a completely singular person, are you? You know? There's nothing you're imitating."

It's like, "Think again, sunshine; you're imitating. You just don't know who you're imitating, and maybe you should figure it out because you might be imitating something you do not want to imitate."

I also want to ask you about the period you were working on the book. Your daughter, Michaela, was a great help to you. She always is; she hosts a very interesting podcast. She always chooses relevant topics. We watch her podcasts and see that she is constantly growing.

What helps us stay so strong and keep people interested and engaged, in your opinion? First, yes, she's been unbelievably helpful to me, and she's saved my life. But I could say that of many people; I'm not trying to devalue what she did at all; I'm, in fact, I thanked her profoundly last night for saving my life, literally, and her husband as well, Andre, who went far beyond the call of duty caring for me, amazingly, remarkably, inexplicably even.

But I've had many, many, many people have been of great aid to me — my wife, a variety of close friends, all sorts of people have really gone out of their way. And so Michaela had to overcome a tremendous amount of obstacles in her short, relatively short life so far.

I mean, she was unbelievably ill as a child and she had 38 affected joints by rheumatoid arthritis, and she was in pain all the time. And like she basically walked around on two broken legs for like a year when she was a teenager for a variety of reasons.

Joints had deteriorated both in her hip and her ankle to the point where they were non-functional almost, and the waiting times for surgery were very, very long, and it wasn't even clear that they could be fixed.

And her prognosis, when we found out what she had — I think we discovered that when she was about six or seven — was multiple early joint replacements, and she was put on an anti-arthritis medication, a new biologic. She was the first kid in Canada who got that medication, as it turned out, and it really worked.

And so she had a reprieve for about five years, but then her hip disintegrated, and then her ankle disintegrated, and she also has suffered from very serious depression, which runs in my family on my paternal side particularly — extremely serious severe depression, and it affected my father and his father and a variety of my relatives and me.

And my daughter, not my son, thank God. So she's had to overcome a lot, and she has overcome a lot, and she's trying hard, and so more power to her as far as I'm concerned. And I'm thrilled to see what's happening with her podcast.

She seems to be — have enough humility, despite her confidence, to not presume most of the time that she knows more than she does and to ask, you know, genuine questions and not to play tricks. And I hope that that's working well for her.

And yeah, she's been extremely helpful to me. And Mason made some very wise decisions over the last few years under very, very difficult circumstances.

For example, I was written into a comic book in April — Captain America, which is part of the underlying mythology in our West now, the Marvel movies have become so popular, and they are presenting mythology essentially to a whole new generation.

I was written into Captain America as Red Skull, you know, king of the evil superNazis. It was quite the shock to me. And she helped me weave my way through that quite successfully. You know, we put out — we put out a line of Red Skull merchandise and devoted all the profits we made to charity, and that was a good — that was good; it was a nice kind of judo move in some sense.

You know, we didn't go on the attack because why? That's not helpful. It's not like I don't wish Ta-Nehisi Coates the best because I do; he's the person who wrote the comic. It's like, I don't want bad things to happen to him. I hope that he straightens up and flies right, you know, because that would be better for everyone.

And so it was a tricky thing to manage, and she was very helpful in doing that. And so she's written a book about her experiences, and she's going to — hopefully, I haven't read it yet; I don't know if I can read it; I don't know if I'm healthy enough to read it yet.

But she's investigating all the possibilities that lie ahead of us in this video frontier too, and this is so exciting because look at what we can do. It's crazy what we can do!

You know, one of the things we're talking about right now — I talked to her about this last night — is I was — and I talked to a couple educators about this; you know, right now we could put our collective resources together for a relatively small capital outlay, and we could produce a curriculum from kindergarten through grade 12 of the highest quality educational material possible right?

Because who cares if we spent a million dollars per hour? I think that maybe, you know, tens of millions of kids could use it for God only knows how long. It wouldn't cost anything, and it would be basically free. And there's absolutely nothing stopping us from doing that.

And so we're starting to think through how well we could maybe initiate that program, you know? And that's what faculties of education — if they had any sense at all, which they don't generally speaking — and I don't say that lightly.

They'd be all over themselves right now thinking, "Look at what we can do! We've got this free video technology that enables us to produce material that everyone can access for nothing, and we could— we could scientifically determine how to propel students through learning at the fastest possible rate to cover the deepest possible material over the course of their educational career and to be completely engrossed while they're doing it."

We could do that! And that technology, that's only been technologically possible for the last five years, let's say. There's nothing stopping people from doing that. So, you know, hopefully — I'm hoping I'll be healthy enough to engage in some of these projects.

This is a very important issue and I wonder how we can teach our children to learn and help them develop passion to learn new things. It's not something done in a snap. Do you have any idea how to achieve this?

I don't think I can tell you how it's possible to do that. You know, I can only speak at the level of the family in some sense. Well, and I guess it's slightly broader; I mean the maternal role, that's—in some sense, that's fundamentally protective. It's security and physical well-being; it's more than that, but that's part of its core.

And the core of paternal care, I think, is encouragement, as far as I can tell. It's more than that, and of course, the paternal and the maternal overlap; I'm not trying to segregate them completely. And so you love and protect your children, and you encourage them to go out into the world.

And that ethos should permeate our educational material, although it isn't obvious to me that it should be taught explicitly. If the material isn't saturated with those intents, then that message won't be transmittable anyways.

You know, you already said when you're doing these translations you're trying for precision. Well, there's an ethos then that permeates the translations, insofar as you're able to embody that, and we want to do that with the educational material that we produce.

And I think probably the way to do that is to make it beautiful, compelling, engaging, deep, rich, accurate, and to have the notion of what's being served firmly in the background surrounding all the attempts to make the material.

And love, encouragement, love, encouragement, and truth, let's say—that's not a bad triumvirate to meditate upon when contemplating educating children. You know, what would you teach them if you truly loved them and you wanted to encourage them, and you wanted to tell them the truth?

So what would you— how would you teach someone in grade one? What would you teach them? Obviously, it would rely to some degree on stories.

I think the first thing we're going to try to do is to produce video material to teach four-year-olds how to read because if you can really teach kids how to read, they're going to educate themselves a lot. So, and I've seen material produced by behavioral cognitive psychologists who are effective that enables a four-year-old who's ready to be taught how to read and write in three months with 10-minute lessons per day.

And it works! It's a really good program; it's brilliantly designed; it's a phonics program, and it's completely scripted, and I think it would work; it might work on video. And then everyone could have it, and so that would be a good place to start.

You know, because everyone should be able to read; I don't think we're going to get a lot of disagreement about that.

You brought up the topic of higher education and establishing proper higher education programs. Do you think modern academic education continues to yield the same great results that it used to, or does it require some changes?

When I went to university, I had good professors and bad professors, and I had — the best professors I had were at a little college I went to to begin with; it was called Grand Prairie Regional College, and it was in a town of 25,000 in northern Alberta, and only had about 500 students. The professors really loved to teach, and I had great professors. The two years of education I got there were the best two years of education I got in my life, I think, although I learned a lot in graduate school, but that's a whole different story.

So when students go to university now, when I went to a larger university, I had good professors and terrible professors, and it was sort of incumbent on me to shop and find the professors who could really teach, as far as I was concerned, or who were teaching what I wanted to learn, and to differentiate between them.

And I think that hasn't changed in any profound sense. What I've seen happen over the last 30 years in higher education in North America, at least, is that it's got much more expensive, especially at the high end, and much more politicized, and much more laden with bureaucracy.

But I still believe that, you know, just a discriminating and serious student can go to a good university and get educated if that's what they're aiming at. A lot of that's up to the student themselves.

Having said that, I would also — I would say, however, this tech — the technology that we're using right now is absolutely revolutionary because what it means is that the best lectures, teaching the deepest material can now go direct to everyone. And so that will have a revolutionary effect; it can't not.

And I, you know, the response to my channel, to my video efforts, is a reflection of that because I was an early adopter in the educational realm of this technology. You know, and I did it partly as an exploratory foray.

I had these 13 programs that had been made by a small Ontario television station, TV Ontario, about "Maps of Meaning," and they were professionally edited and came out quite nicely as reasonably digestible summaries of the "Maps of Meaning" lectures.

And I thought, "Well, I'll put them on YouTube and see what happens." And, you know, back then, that was like 2013, I think. YouTube — no one knew what YouTube was; it was a place for cat videos; no one took it seriously.

But you know, I kept an eye on it; I thought, "Well, this is interesting; this is permanent; this is everywhere; this is new; this is not just cute cat videos." Not that there's anything wrong with those, but — and then I watched my, you know, the viewership rise and rise and rise, and I thought, "Well, there's something to this."

And then I started having my courses filmed for that reason; it’s like I thought, "Well, I might as well teach everybody if they're interested." And that's another thing that's lovely about YouTube is the only people that watch are people who are interested.

It's like perfect students. You don't want to watch? Don't watch. If you want to, great! You know, and that's available for everyone.

And again, I hope this is dependent on my health, but we're hoping to talk to great lectures everywhere and to invite them and say, "Look, you know, what would you really like to teach if you could teach anything you wanted? What would you really love to teach?"

Because you should teach what you love. The fact that you love it is an indication that you should teach it and maybe even that you could teach it because you can invite people say, "Look, I love this, and this is why;" it's like, "Maybe you'll love it too; maybe you won't."

Because not everyone doesn't love everything; that's for sure. But so what I see — the future of education: it's like the best lectures possible about every topic conceivable, produced in the best manner possible for everyone for nothing, because we can do that too.

And it's going to happen; it's going to happen, assuming we have any sense. Why wouldn't it happen? Why wouldn't we do that? What a deal that is!

And then, you know, there's the problem of accreditation, but that's a solvable problem. You know, one way of solving that is to get a panel of experts, like real experts in any domain, and say, "Well, look, produce 5,000 multiple-choice questions that you think cover the entire territory or sample it at least."

You know, because you don't have to ask every expert about everything; you just have to randomly sample their knowledge. Well, then you build a system that randomly takes those questions and aggregates them into exams, and if someone wants to be accredited, they take the exam.

Or maybe they take three of them, and then their score is number correct. It's absolutely accurate; it's absolutely reliable. You know, you have a sample of their knowledge. And maybe then 20 tests like that or 50 tests like that gives you the equivalent of a bachelor's degree, something like that.

The accreditation problem is solvable, and without that much expense. Now you might say, "Well, multiple-choice tests don't test everything." It's like, "That's true." But they can sample pretty well, and there are other — the problem of how to teach people to write is a more complex one because it's really hard to grade an essay.

Because you don't just write B-minus