Hey, everyone's Andrew Claven with this week's interview with Dr. Ian McGilchrist, one of the truly great philosophers living

today. As I've said on my podcast many times, I believe that the history of the last 500

years is essentially the history of the West losing its faith in God and the spiritual realm

and becoming materialist. And because I'm quite certain there is a spiritual realm,

I think the result of our becoming blind to it is that we've become increasingly expert in

understanding the material world as we simultaneously descend into a kind of insanity, which

accounts for our being able to invent airplanes and iPhones. At the same time, we go around saying things like morality is relative and words are meaningless

and gender doesn't exist, things that people believe without believing them.

We're all sort of living in the mad scene from Hamlet.

But there is a great drama that is going on, I think, behind the scenes and sometimes in front of the scenes, which is the drama of a spectacle, an epic spectacle of powerful minds rediscovering a sense of the sacred.

It's one thing for me who is an artist to rediscover a sense of the sacred because artists are allowed to take these great leaps without showing our work because we don't know why we know what we know. So we just kind of

put it forward. But philosophers and scientists are embedded in their moment and they have to

proceed by logical stages from the place where the history of philosophy and science has brought

them. Dr. Ian McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, a philosopher,

a neuroscientist, and as far as I can tell, a literary scholar, an extraordinarily powerful

mind, and he wrote the bestselling 2009 book, The Master and his emissary, the divided brain,

and the making of the Western world, which I have not read, but I have read as Magnum Opus, which is called The Matter of Things, which is just an absolute terrific read at 2,000 pages. And I don't say that. I think it was the Count of Monte Cristo. I said that about last. Dr. Michael, Chris, is so nice to meet you. I'm delighted to meet you. It's nice of you to come on. Oh, so thank you, Andrew. It's lovely to be here. Just to unfrighten your listeners a little, there's actually only 1,200 pages of text in that book.

Oh, is it okay? Because I was reading on Kindle, so I didn't know. Repaginated it.

So let's begin. For those people who aren't familiar with your work,

maybe you could start by explaining your theory about the brain hemispheres and what happened

to them and what it means. Yes. I mean, a lot of people will say one of few things. I've heard

all about this, but I think nobody really believes it any longer.

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