Here's a light question for you on a Saturday morning. How do I know you exist? Every time I try to say that line, I laugh and we have to redo it, but it's a fair question. For centuries, philosophers have grappled with the idea that other people's existence is fundamentally not verifiable. If my senses are fallible, then how do I know I'm not just a brain and a vat, or a matrix

simulation, or an actor in my version of the Truman Show? Okay, that may be a slightly heavy way

to kick things off, but as my team was thinking about this episode, our associate producer

Lulu pointed out to me that in 1953, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein attempted to give us an answer.

It's conversation.

Wittgenstein said that there was no such thing as a private language that only one person

understands.

So ultimately, the existence of language proves the existence of other people.

In other words, it's conversation, its connections with others. That's what's proof that we're not alone.

Conversations give us community and meaning. Lulu says darkly that they break us out of the existential

prison that is our mind. We have them often, but we don't examine them often. So today,

we'll try to do justice to the conversation.

This is F.T. Weekend, the podcast.

I'm Lila Raptopoulos.

This weekend, we explore the art of conversation.

An expert in conversations,

the great Ruby Wax, star interviewer of the 90s,

tells us how she got celebrities good and bad,

from the

Spice Girls to Donald Trump, to tell us who they really are.

Okay, tonight shows All About Goldie Hahn. And you might have noticed this year we have a much

higher octane of celebrity. That's because we're paying them a lot more money. And these people

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