The Matter with Things

He's, he's bridged, you know, those two worlds.

He's the author of The Master and His Emissary and the monumental and massive work, The Matter With Things.

He's a man arguing for depth and metaphor and poetry and, you know, the deeper aspects of reality against the, the, the technocratic, um, you know, reductive, uh, world of the left... you know, merely the left brain without depth, so the map without the territory.

So without further ado, please enjoy this important and revelatory, uh, conversation.

And we're saying in different ways, right, if you were to ask me to characterize, Ian, you put a gun to my head, which would be rude, but you would say, "Okay, Mark, you got one word or I'm gonna blow your brains out.

This is the Ian McGilchrist Clint Eastwood moment.

Make my day." [laughs] "Give me one word to characterize my two books, you know, The Matter With Things." I would say they're post-tragic.

They're post-tragic, right? In other words, they're, they're not going back to pre-tragic.

I've been blown away.

I just finished The Matter With Things, and I'm going over my notes.

Whoa.

Well done.

His name is Ian McGilchrist, and it started out, he wrote...

The first book he wrote was called The Master and His Emissary, and then the second one, the most recent book is sort of a, a continuation of that called The, The Matter With Things, and it's all about our brains and how we process information and make decisions.

And as a person who has observed a lot of, um, meetings and government officials [laughs] over the years, I'm, I'm just fascinated by the, the two things.

And I think what I would bring from, um, McGilchrist's work about how our brain works, like the holistic side of our brain, the Richard Scarry side of our brain, the brain about connection versus the, the engineer brain of the metrics and the data and so forth, is that cities need both.

Yeah.

That was perfect.

Uh, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World.

You'll know, uh, you're the second person to actually recommend that book as a-

He spent decades researching the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and he's wrote two amazing works.

One is called "The Master and His Emissary," which is about the brain, and the second one is called "The Matter With Things," which is about who we are, why we are here.

And he says, "Beauty, wonder, intuition, imagination, creativity all comes from the right side of the brain." Anyway, on the subject of art, he says, "Art is considered as a type of proto-philosophy, representing an effort to articulate what has been inexpressible." And about the artist, he said, "The artist is one who allows art to realize its purposes through him, an experience we may all have of being worked through by something bigger than our conscious intention." What is art to you?

[laughs] Oof.