Speaker 1: The Craig Ferguson Pants on Fire Tour is on sale now.
Speaker 1: It's a new show, it's new material, but I'm afraid
Speaker 1: it's still only me, Craig Ferguson on my own, standing
Speaker 1: on a stage telling comedy words. Come and see me,
Speaker 1: buy tickets, bring your loved ones, or don't come and
Speaker 1: see me. Don't buy tickets and don't bring your loved ones.
Speaker 1: I'm not your dad. You come or don't come, but
Speaker 1: you should at least know what's happening, and it is.
Speaker 1: The tour kicks off late September and goes through the
Speaker 1: end of the year and beyond. Tickets are available at
Speaker 1: the Craig Ferguson Show dot Com slash tour. They are
Speaker 1: available at the Craig Ferguson Show dot com slash tour
Speaker 1: or at your local outlet in your region. My name
Speaker 1: is Craig Ferguson. The name of this podcast is Joy.
Speaker 1: I talk to interest in people about what brings them happiness.
Speaker 1: On the podcast today we have a show business slash
Speaker 1: science member of the royal family. Now that's not fair
Speaker 1: because he's much smarter than any member of the royal family.
Speaker 1: It's a very old friend of mine. He used to
Speaker 1: be a ginger, but he's all right now. Please welcome
Speaker 1: the fantastic Adam Savage. Adam Savage, look at you. You
Speaker 1: look exactly the same, if anything, a little younger.
Speaker 2: The guy said, you look.
Speaker 1: Have you been moisturizing?
Speaker 2: What's happening?
Speaker 3: It's all turned gray? But yeah, no, the clean living
Speaker 3: is the secret to my face.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, here's the thing.
Speaker 1: Though you wear a ginger, at one point, gingers do
Speaker 1: go gray.
Speaker 3: We go white, we go like sheet white.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, it's kind of impressive.
Speaker 1: It's I think it's the compensation for having been a
Speaker 1: ginger that you then go completely white. I've seemed to
Speaker 1: be developing some kind of weird, kind of fluffy thing
Speaker 1: that's going on. It's very bad. I've noticed that my
Speaker 1: hair has dried out completely. If you're just joining us,
Speaker 1: by the way, this is the Haircare Podcast with Adam
Speaker 1: Savage and Craig ferguson what what isn't? It?
Speaker 2: Isn't French? Your name is it somebody that was French?
Speaker 3: I was just going to say that's the correct pronunciation.
Speaker 4: But we came over to Scotland around the fourteenth century,
Speaker 4: right and from what I understand the savages or the
Speaker 4: savages were mercenaries settling near the Antwerm peninsula.
Speaker 1: Around the fourth that's been near Ireland then right, I.
Speaker 3: Think there are a bunch of savages in Ireland as well.
Speaker 2: There certainly are.
Speaker 1: I I wonder if if it was your family that
Speaker 1: brought the ginger to Scotland, or if the ginger was
Speaker 1: already there's It is a good question, and I know
Speaker 1: no one.
Speaker 2: I think you know it would be an excellent.
Speaker 1: MythBusters Red Hair was bought to Scotland or it was
Speaker 1: already there?
Speaker 2: What's going on with that franchise?
Speaker 1: Now? Are you guys making MythBusters Junior or.
Speaker 3: No, dude, I haven't made television in years. I'm a
Speaker 3: YouTuber guy.
Speaker 1: It's it's definitely the way to go. Yeah, are you
Speaker 1: back at building? Are you back in your your your
Speaker 1: day job? No?
Speaker 3: I over covid. I we leaned in one hundred percent
Speaker 3: of my YouTube channel. We have almost seven million subscribers, now.
Speaker 2: Shut the fuck up. Seven million.
Speaker 3: We put up a video almost every day. We put
Speaker 3: up a video.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, do you you must be an influencer?
Speaker 1: Are you going to fight Mike Tyson or something that's happened.
Speaker 4: You know, the secret to having a YouTube channel is
Speaker 4: that you basically have to be your own ad agency, and.
Speaker 2: That is what we do know, right, That's that's a
Speaker 2: lot though. I like, I think I've got a YouTube channel.
Speaker 1: I know that Tomas messes around with something, and I
Speaker 1: know these podcasts go up, but I think I've got
Speaker 1: like one.
Speaker 2: Hundred subscribers or something.
Speaker 1: It's no, it's not anything that anyone's gonna be excited about,
Speaker 1: but it's definitely the way to go for sure. Is it?
Speaker 1: Does it feel more comfortable being your own kind of executive?
Speaker 3: Can I tell you it's so nice?
Speaker 4: Because you know the TV executives they ride you so
Speaker 4: hard on a pitch.
Speaker 3: They want everything button down into the moment they award
Speaker 3: the show. They don't care about the show at all.
Speaker 4: They just want to know that the last five minutes
Speaker 4: will bring all of the world to watching what you're making.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and also the television executives, God bless them. I
Speaker 1: used to hate them, but now I feel bad for
Speaker 1: them because there's no work for those guys.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 4: Can I tell you When I pitched a book in
Speaker 4: twenty sixteen in New York, I spent a whole day
Speaker 4: pitching all the publishers, and it was remarkable because I
Speaker 4: realized halfway through the day, I'm repeatedly in rooms pitching
Speaker 4: to people who love what I'm pitching. They love the
Speaker 4: industry that they're in, they love books, And that's not
Speaker 4: what I experience in television. I don't experience television executives
Speaker 4: being like, I love television, I'm a television person.
Speaker 1: No, it's a very rare thing. I mean, one or
Speaker 1: two of them, but most of them are are just awful.
Speaker 2: They're just.
Speaker 1: I think for many of them, it's kind of a
Speaker 1: realtor job. You know, it's like, well, let's know what
Speaker 1: I wanted, but you know it's decent money, and you
Speaker 1: know I'll do it for now.
Speaker 3: Well that works nickel and dime them until they have
Speaker 3: no compunction left.
Speaker 1: I know. But it's quite interesting though, because I know
Speaker 1: that I'm hurtling into my dotage.
Speaker 2: Whenever I talk to them, I'm like, what do you want?
Speaker 1: Son?
Speaker 2: That's exactly that, Like, what the fuck you want?
Speaker 1: Like, well, we're very excited about are you really excited?
Speaker 2: Fuck you you're not excited about it? Shut out exactly that.
Speaker 1: But I do people have to pitch you for your
Speaker 1: YouTube channel now that do they have to like say, well,
Speaker 1: we have this idea we'd like to blow up a hat.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: That does happen from time to time.
Speaker 4: I just had a company ask me, could you send
Speaker 4: our product to space experimentally?
Speaker 3: And I came back with a totally different idea.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I am unwilling to do testing on behalf of
Speaker 4: people's products.
Speaker 3: I never was willing and I still don't want to
Speaker 3: do it.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, doesn't it that would leave you home
Speaker 1: to some kind of legal ramifications. Wouldn't as well? If
Speaker 1: you test something and then somebody hurts themselves or something completely.
Speaker 4: But also it's like the first time I make a
Speaker 4: test and adjudicate someone's product as being one way or
Speaker 4: the other, no one will trust me.
Speaker 3: Ever. Again, that's the way I feel.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right now.
Speaker 2: So what do you do in your YouTube channel?
Speaker 1: Because of course, obviously I subscribe to it, But for
Speaker 1: the people that don't know about that.
Speaker 3: It is it's a fever dream of making.
Speaker 4: And so I'm in here five days a week, forty
Speaker 4: hours a week in general kind of making whatever I'm
Speaker 4: interested in. Right now, I'm currently working on. This is
Speaker 4: sitting on my bench here. This is part of an
Speaker 4: elevator panel I'm working on because there's a scene in
Speaker 4: the movie Elf where Will Ferrell walks into an elevator
Speaker 4: and he hits a button that's really pretty, and so
Speaker 4: he hits all the buttons at once. So I'm making
Speaker 4: that a Christmas decoration in my house this year.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's a lovely idea. And then as you make that,
Speaker 1: you will film yourself making it. We'll go on the
Speaker 1: YouTube and then hey, Presto Cash, absolutely yeah, and so
Speaker 1: we do that, and then we also like I made
Speaker 1: a raptor costume, a Utah raptor costume sixteen feet long
Speaker 1: a few years ago, and just a few weeks ago,
Speaker 1: I brought in a couple of friends and we spend
Speaker 1: a week painting it and just a magnificent collaboration of
Speaker 1: three dudes walking around this dinosaur for three full days
Speaker 1: just adding and subtracting color and turning it into a
Speaker 1: real character. That's really interesting. So you kind of like
Speaker 1: you freed yourself. You've become like you're doing exactly what
Speaker 1: you want, exactly on your own terms, and becoming a
Speaker 1: petrillionaire at the same.
Speaker 4: Time, A thousand there fit there it is. It's so
Speaker 4: like the team is really small. It's just six of
Speaker 4: us making this YouTube channel. Everyone's having a really good
Speaker 4: time and we don't have to answer it anyone.
Speaker 3: I bought out all my business partners a couple of
Speaker 3: years ago.
Speaker 1: That's really interesting because that's kind of I kind of
Speaker 1: did the same thing when when television started to turn
Speaker 1: into this weird, kind of corporate, homogenized fucking shit show
Speaker 1: where you know, you say one thing wrong and suddenly
Speaker 1: you know, there's lawyers saying we don't encourage Greig Ferguson
Speaker 1: and all that kind of stuff that I thought, No,
Speaker 1: I got to strip this down to analog, right back
Speaker 1: down to me speaking into a microphone in a dark
Speaker 1: room with a bunch of people pointed in my direction.
Speaker 1: That's it, you know, just like doing stand up. And
Speaker 1: it was only recently, like in the last I don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't know how, but long I've been doing this podcast,
Speaker 1: like eighteen months or something, and you know, the iHeart
Speaker 1: people who run. I'm like, God, these guys are just
Speaker 1: the same fucking assholes as everybody else, So so I'll
Speaker 1: probably won't keep doing it, but but maybe I should buy.
Speaker 2: Buy them out.
Speaker 4: And well, you know, one of the things that people
Speaker 4: who watch the channel tell me that they do is
Speaker 4: they take my videos and some of them might be
Speaker 4: eight minutes long, and some of them might be eighty
Speaker 4: minutes of me like wiring something up, and they put
Speaker 4: their laptop on their workbench with me working, and then
Speaker 4: they work alongside.
Speaker 3: They do their own project while I'm working on mine.
Speaker 2: I think that's that's very good.
Speaker 1: And I think that the myth Bursters is quite an
Speaker 1: interesting thing.
Speaker 2: I think MythBusters was kind of like doing it.
Speaker 1: The equivalent is if you do a vampire movie, like,
Speaker 1: no matter what you do in your career, from that
Speaker 1: point on, the vampire crowd will always consider you one
Speaker 1: of their people. And I think myth Bursters has like
Speaker 1: because I'm that, I'm like myth Bursters is such a thing.
Speaker 1: Like I still see Carrie quite often. I haven't seen
Speaker 1: you in ages, but you've been over in Scotland a
Speaker 1: couple of times. And I mean I haven't seen you
Speaker 1: over in a while unless you've been there and you
Speaker 1: haven't told me.
Speaker 4: I have not been there and haven't told you.
Speaker 1: All right, good because during the lockdown. We were stuck
Speaker 1: in Scotland all the time. We moved back to America though,
Speaker 1: we're in New England.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, okay, yeah, East Coast.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, you know that's where Meghan's people are from,
Speaker 1: those icy blue blood Yankees who you know that Meghan
Speaker 1: can trace her ancestry back to the Mayflower.
Speaker 4: Oh so can I Actually we have some relatives that
Speaker 4: were on that boat together.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Because my theory is that only the crazy people made
Speaker 1: it through that first winter. Only the angry crazy that
Speaker 1: genetic code through that first winter. It was like your
Speaker 1: Law and Megan Law. I wonder if you relate it
Speaker 1: to Megan.
Speaker 4: I didn't get COVID for the longest time, for the
Speaker 4: first two and a half almost three years, and there
Speaker 4: was this period of time I thought I was immune
Speaker 4: because my grandmother, who can trate my who was a Monroe,
Speaker 4: who can trace her, who could trace her ancestry back
Speaker 4: to the Mayflower, had survived the nineteen seventeen influenza.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, So I.
Speaker 4: Was thinking, like, I'm an x man, I got that
Speaker 4: in my blood. But then I caught COVID and it's
Speaker 4: still well.
Speaker 1: COVID's kind of I don't know. Look, I'm not a scientist,
Speaker 1: but I feel like it's new. I feel like it's
Speaker 1: a slightly newer thing. And I didn't get it for
Speaker 1: a while. I didn't get it at all. We had
Speaker 1: a party of our house afterwards. Bill didn't get it.
Speaker 1: You were invited to that party? You didn't, I was.
Speaker 1: I couldn't make it outright. Carrie was at Carrie Byron
Speaker 1: was at the party. I think I was so jealous.
Speaker 1: I think she got COVID. Had like fifty people got
Speaker 1: COVID at that party, but I didn't. And then Meghan
Speaker 1: we went to I was doing name that celebrity, named
Speaker 1: that tune in Dublin for some reason, and uh, and
Speaker 1: Megan came with me and she made me go and
Speaker 1: see the Book of Kels, which I was. I couldn't
Speaker 1: give a shit about the Book of Kels. And while
Speaker 1: I was in there, it was all American tourists and
Speaker 1: I got the Irish lepro COVID I got. That's when
Speaker 1: I got it. From the Book of Kels. I got
Speaker 1: the original ancient Irish the OHI Diddley COVID, you get
Speaker 1: a which yeah, yeah, I wish that I hadn't gone
Speaker 1: to see the fucking Book of kels Is when I went.
Speaker 2: So listen, talk to me about about.
Speaker 1: Your origins, because I haven't really talked to you ever
Speaker 1: really about that. You're from Sleepy Hollow, right, is that
Speaker 1: where you're from?
Speaker 3: I was born Crane Country, born in Manhattan.
Speaker 4: My parents were lovely bohemians in the West Village in
Speaker 4: the late sixties.
Speaker 1: Wow, that sounds like a lot of body hair.
Speaker 4: Was They had a two They had a ten room
Speaker 4: duplex on Eighth Street and McDougall Street.
Speaker 1: That'd be worth like a billion dollars now.
Speaker 4: They sold it to the Robert Jeoffrey Foundation in nineteen seventy. Wow,
Speaker 4: to move their family up to Terrytown, to Sleepy Hollow,
Speaker 4: New York, and where I grew up. That's where I
Speaker 4: spent my whole childhood, about a block from the Hudson.
Speaker 2: That's a lovely part of the world. Is gorgeous there.
Speaker 1: But isn't it like there's a lot of ghost stories
Speaker 1: and creepy stuff and all there. And I always think
Speaker 1: of you as being someone who debunks all of that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. That is do you think that's what
Speaker 1: started there? Was it to protect yourself from scary stories.
Speaker 2: No, I I think it was.
Speaker 3: I think I believed you're reminding me that.
Speaker 4: There's this one moment in MythBusters when Guermo Del Toro
Speaker 4: called us up and he was like, why don't we
Speaker 4: go spend three days in the most haunted place in
Speaker 4: the United States, an insane asylum in the Carolinas.
Speaker 3: And Jamie was like, why would we do this?
Speaker 4: And I was like, we would do this because it's Guermo,
Speaker 4: got Giermo cal you gotta go.
Speaker 2: You got it.
Speaker 1: I haven't been in his crazy house of mad things.
Speaker 1: Have you been in it?
Speaker 4: I've been to I've been to Bleak House and now
Speaker 4: apparently there's a second bleak House.
Speaker 1: But yeah, he's good.
Speaker 4: No, it's an amazing collection. It's a pathology kind of.
Speaker 4: I mean, look at what are we if not a
Speaker 4: collection of pathologies.
Speaker 1: I've gone.
Speaker 2: I was going to say, you're kind of you're kind
Speaker 2: of a bit of a hoarder, uh.
Speaker 3: High functioning hoarder.
Speaker 2: But yes, high functioning horder. I think kids did it.
Speaker 1: But it's but the kind of the whole ethos of
Speaker 1: like MythBusters and you personally as well, even right down
Speaker 1: to the I don't know if you're still an atheist,
Speaker 1: but but like you're a you're a kind of you
Speaker 1: really do like to get to the science of just
Speaker 1: about everything, right.
Speaker 3: I do like to get to the science of just
Speaker 3: about everything.
Speaker 4: But it's funny that you say, Uh, I wonder if
Speaker 4: you're still an atheist because I stopped saying that and
Speaker 4: it happened in your kitchen in in Durban.
Speaker 3: Oh really, because we had come.
Speaker 4: Back from a thing back when we were hanging back
Speaker 4: when I was visiting you there, and you said, it's
Speaker 4: it's pretty Uh. You said, it's pretty fundamentalist to say atheist,
Speaker 4: because I still believe that. Yeah, yeah, And I couldn't
Speaker 4: I couldn't disagree with that, and so I now call
Speaker 4: myself a New Testament agnostic. I can't know, I can't
Speaker 4: know who tipped the first domino, but I agree with
Speaker 4: everything Jesus said.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's very interesting because I wrestled with it over
Speaker 1: and over and over again. It's it's like a constant
Speaker 1: refrain from me. I always kind of go back to
Speaker 1: I don't want to not believe things, but I can't
Speaker 1: believe in a kind of angry man on a cloud
Speaker 1: with a thunderbolts and stuff.
Speaker 2: I can't believe in that.
Speaker 1: But then I'm interested in mystics that have become fascinated.
Speaker 2: Recently by Gorvi Dal. Have you read gorfy Daals?
Speaker 4: I have read a bunch of Gorvidale. He's the only
Speaker 4: historical fiction writer who I like to read.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, it's great. So right now I'm in
Speaker 1: the middle of creation.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: When he's got that guy from Persia who meets Buddha
Speaker 1: and confuses and so cars, it's it's I'm like, wow, man,
Speaker 1: this is fucking pot boiler is fabulous.
Speaker 3: I always kneel. I always felt with him.
Speaker 4: The one I read and loved the most was Burr,
Speaker 4: which is a fever dream. And also with Vidal, like,
Speaker 4: I feel like I'm absolutely getting a whole bunch of
Speaker 4: editorializing an opinion, but it's informed by the point of
Speaker 4: view he got in his research, not by a bias.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel it's quite What's quite interesting about Gourvidal
Speaker 1: as well is that I don't really know where he
Speaker 1: stands in in the in the belief system, I really
Speaker 1: and I've read extensively, and I think what it is
Speaker 1: is I think he bounces around, you know, I think
Speaker 1: he but I think.
Speaker 4: It is almost that that is almost a defining feature
Speaker 4: of real faith. Martin Luther King absolutely grappled with it
Speaker 4: in his personal diaries. I mean, John Dunn hell Spells,
Speaker 4: you know, was totally grappling with this the whole time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it.
Speaker 1: I think it is an essential component of faith that
Speaker 1: it has to have doubt. If it doesn't have doubt,
Speaker 1: it's not really faith. It's kind of it's certainty, and
Speaker 1: certainty is a very different thing. But there's a weird
Speaker 1: interview with Carl Young. I don't know if you've ever
Speaker 1: seen it, or somebody asked him if he it's a
Speaker 1: televised thing. I can't remember where it was, but towards
Speaker 1: the end of his life where someone said do you
Speaker 1: do you believe in God? And he said, it's different
Speaker 1: for me now I know, I know there's a God.
Speaker 1: I was like, oh man, Young freaks me out. I
Speaker 1: think he's so amazing. But but I always I think
Speaker 1: of you. It's interesting to hear you say that because
Speaker 1: I didn't know you were into those videal historical novels,
Speaker 1: because they they seem quite mystical to me, and I
Speaker 1: feel that you are aren't that I guess you are.
Speaker 2: I mean the.
Speaker 1: Science thing is a search for truth, isn't it. It
Speaker 1: is a It isn't it in its way a spiritual hunger?
Speaker 4: I think science, it's absolutely and we're grappling with the
Speaker 4: same questions.
Speaker 3: I had.
Speaker 4: This seems Germaine to this. I had this epiphany about
Speaker 4: four years ago. I was researching measuring things. I was
Speaker 4: research which is the field of metrology, and within the
Speaker 4: field of metrology, actually I happened to I did not
Speaker 4: plan this prop but I have this right here. Within
Speaker 4: the field of metrology. If you want to measure something,
Speaker 4: you pass a certain point, you don't measure it, You
Speaker 4: actually compare it to something. And this is called a
Speaker 4: gauge block. And this is the most accurate comparison system
Speaker 4: there is. This is a one inch block, and I
Speaker 4: can tell you that this block is one inch to
Speaker 4: within you know, a few nanometers.
Speaker 3: That's how accurate this block is.
Speaker 4: And I was showing my I was doing a video
Speaker 4: about how to measure gauge blocks and how accurate they are,
Speaker 4: and then I had this idea, and I put the
Speaker 4: gauge block in my hand and held it for twelve
Speaker 4: seconds and put it back under my measuring device, and
Speaker 4: I was able to show that in twelve seconds, the
Speaker 4: heat from my body had man the gauge block one micron.
Speaker 3: Thicker because of heat expansion.
Speaker 4: And when I realized that, and I was looking at
Speaker 4: the spec sat for these, which is every one of
Speaker 4: these has been measured and certified, I realized that at
Speaker 4: the bottom of the certification it says this is only
Speaker 4: accurate at sixty eight degrees fahrenheit. That's amazing, which told
Speaker 4: me that measurement is the faith I get in numbers
Speaker 4: is misplaced because they aren't real that the measurement of
Speaker 4: these blocks only exists under circumstances that we agree upon,
Speaker 4: which means just like politics, just like culture, just like society,
Speaker 4: it's all based on us being polite and trying to
Speaker 4: work together.
Speaker 3: That's how it works.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's funny.
Speaker 1: I had a similar experience when I was getting my
Speaker 1: pilot's license, when I was learning to fly, because I
Speaker 1: kept asking people about air speeds and altitudes, and air
Speaker 1: speeds and altitudes, which are extremely important if your flying
Speaker 1: a freaking airplane. Well, altitude there's kind of like five
Speaker 1: different types because there's there's altitude above the ground, but
Speaker 1: there's also sea level altitude, which we all kind.
Speaker 2: Of agree on.
Speaker 1: Then there's density altitude because that's how the plane's going
Speaker 1: to perform at certain temperatures and uh, moisture in the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: So it's like like radar altitude as well, I mean it.
Speaker 2: So it's like, no, we need to have one altitude.
Speaker 1: But there's not the same thing about the speed of sound,
Speaker 1: Like how fast the sound, Well, it depends on the
Speaker 1: temperature and it depends on the thickness of the air.
Speaker 1: And it's so fascinating to me, and I think you're right.
Speaker 1: I think I think that it is. It is very
Speaker 1: very confusing to try and agree on one thing to
Speaker 1: make things black and white. That's why I'm I'm against
Speaker 1: fundamentalism of all kinds.
Speaker 3: And that's that's where you turn me around in your
Speaker 3: kitchen table.
Speaker 4: Was I realized, Yeah, no, I can't know, So all
Speaker 4: I can do is keep gathering data. And I feel
Speaker 4: like performers like because we both spend a lot of
Speaker 4: time in front of audiences.
Speaker 3: We know that audiences can take on.
Speaker 4: A character that is different than the people that compose
Speaker 4: that audience.
Speaker 1: Unbelievable, unbelievable. I mean right to the extent of the
Speaker 1: one night. And you'll know this because you did those
Speaker 1: live shows, and you've done so many live shows. You
Speaker 1: can go out in front of an audience and roughly
Speaker 1: the same sized theater, at the same room temperature, at
Speaker 1: the same time of day, in a town that's a
Speaker 1: similar demographic makeup, and do exactly the same thing and
Speaker 1: have a wildly different experience. And that's people's collective personalities.
Speaker 2: I'm like, what is it.
Speaker 1: It's it's that Youngian thing, isn't it. The collective, the
Speaker 1: collective unconscious? Right, the collective unconscious?
Speaker 2: I do you know.
Speaker 1: I once had interviewed with Stephen King on the Late
Speaker 1: Night Show and I said, have you He was talking
Speaker 1: about bringing stories down. He said, I bring the stories
Speaker 1: down from somewhere. I was like, oh, that's fascinating. And
Speaker 1: I said to him, so about the it's kind of
Speaker 1: like the young the collective unconscious.
Speaker 2: And he said, what is that?
Speaker 1: And he didn't know what I was talking about.
Speaker 3: Oh so great?
Speaker 2: I was like, what I mean, you might.
Speaker 1: Have been working with me, Stephen King, but it was
Speaker 1: still listening.
Speaker 4: But there is also that Arlott Guthrie. I saw him
Speaker 4: perform once and he said, I don't write songs. I
Speaker 4: stand at the side of a river and I wait
Speaker 4: for one to come by and I.
Speaker 3: Scoop it out. Yeah.
Speaker 4: And then he said, he said, I don't think anyone
Speaker 4: downstream of Bob Dylan has ever even seen a song.
Speaker 1: But I think that was kind of interesting, as though
Speaker 1: that that's a kind of that's a kind of weird,
Speaker 1: unmeasurable thing.
Speaker 4: But you've been in front of an audience where something
Speaker 4: came out of the ether into your head, yes, and
Speaker 4: dropped like a bomb in the room.
Speaker 2: Yes, And it happened last night.
Speaker 1: I actually I was doing a show last night and
Speaker 1: oh Chicago, and that's why I'm in the hotel in
Speaker 1: Chicago now. And about halfway through the show, I had
Speaker 1: this idea and I went with it, and I was
Speaker 1: making myself laugh at the audience seemed to be enjoyed too,
Speaker 1: but I was having a great time with it.
Speaker 4: I view that as that's that's the other to me, right,
Speaker 4: that creative thing that happens late when you do all
Speaker 4: the practice and you do all the rigor that you
Speaker 4: do to get yourself to this point, and then you
Speaker 4: open yourself up and some creative thing comes in. You
Speaker 4: don't know where it came from, but it informs the
Speaker 4: whole thing you're building.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's very interesting because it it leads me
Speaker 1: as I you know, again, as I get older, I
Speaker 1: start thinking about the inevitability of the you know, corporeal
Speaker 1: decline and you know, and immortality and all that. And
Speaker 1: I can't get my head to a place where I
Speaker 1: can endorse the idea of the continuation of consciousness. I'm
Speaker 1: quite happy to remain open to the idea of a god,
Speaker 1: a primover, or an unexplainable deity, but I can't get
Speaker 1: my head around the idea that it keeps going.
Speaker 2: I just don't see that.
Speaker 4: Here's one that I'm always thinking about when this conversation
Speaker 4: comes around is in Africa, they took some termite mounds
Speaker 4: and poured concrete into them and then excavated to see
Speaker 4: the shape of a termite city.
Speaker 3: And when they do this, the cities.
Speaker 4: Are fifteen feet tall and twenty feet wide, and they
Speaker 4: include waste management, and they include air conditioning and convection
Speaker 4: breatheable air. They include temperature control. And I couple that
Speaker 4: with the fact that ninety nine percent of the cells
Speaker 4: in my body right now are non human in origin, right,
Speaker 4: I'm mostly a colony of other bacterium and other types
Speaker 4: of organisms. So I find myself wondering if consciousness isn't
Speaker 4: just a level set for different groups of organisms, and
Speaker 4: that maybe it's not that our consciousness continues, but we're
Speaker 4: just brought back into the continuum.
Speaker 1: That's fascinating the idea. I think also, if you get
Speaker 1: the idea of infinity, of infinite time, infinite space, then
Speaker 1: it would seem to me that anything that can happen
Speaker 1: will happen, and so anything that you can think of
Speaker 1: can If I'm days going on, I wonder if that's
Speaker 1: even plausible, But it's it's this is one of the
Speaker 1: reasons why I don't take marijuana. I feel like I
Speaker 1: feel like it would be bad. Do you take recreational drugs?
Speaker 1: I wonder if that's the thing for you.
Speaker 4: I did do a lot of psychedelics back in my twenties, really, yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 4: and it was a couple of mushroom It was a
Speaker 4: couple of mushroom trips during which I really absolutely connected
Speaker 4: and still firmly believe that our consciousness is eternal and
Speaker 4: that we don't that this is not a deterministic universe.
Speaker 4: That is, we have free will here, but I'm not
Speaker 4: sure where we come from that we do. And so
Speaker 4: I make this leap that we come here onto this
Speaker 4: corporal plane because eternity is exhausting, and we come here
Speaker 4: to enjoy some beginnings and endings, beginnings and endings, beginnings
Speaker 4: and ends.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's a lovely idea. I think you might be
Speaker 1: on the edge of a new religion as there could be.
Speaker 1: I think I could get behind that as an idea.
Speaker 1: That that's fascinating. I think the the idea though for
Speaker 1: me that the struggle I have with spiritual hunger or
Speaker 1: spiritual searching is it's so littered with organized religion, which
Speaker 1: is not for me. You know, I kind of make
Speaker 1: it work. You have you got any organizational structure for
Speaker 1: that for yourself?
Speaker 3: Only that it seems to me that the that the
Speaker 3: Buddhists have been right.
Speaker 1: All along, maybe maybe.
Speaker 4: That consciousnes Look, you know, at this age too, what
Speaker 4: turns out to be most important to me is the
Speaker 4: collaborations I get to do with people that I love. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's that taking a couple of minds and intersecting them
Speaker 4: on the same problem and enjoying doing that and learning
Speaker 4: from other point people's point of view. The more curious
Speaker 4: I get about other people and their process, the more
Speaker 4: I get a reward from that that interaction that's interesting.
Speaker 1: So you become fascinated by the way other people approach
Speaker 1: a problem which either you have looked at yourself or
Speaker 1: are trying to or invest the gain.
Speaker 4: Yeah, one of the primary things we do on the
Speaker 4: channels we go to movie sets, and on movie sets
Speaker 4: the main thing that we do at a level that
Speaker 4: most people don't do it is we'll talk to all
Speaker 4: of the artisans about how we look.
Speaker 3: A movie crew is nothing but an army of storytellers
Speaker 3: all the way down.
Speaker 4: And when you're talking to the pain or painting the problem,
Speaker 4: he's thinking that, she's thinking about the narrative of that piece.
Speaker 4: And I love talking about that problem. You get this thing,
Speaker 4: how do you make it fit within that narrative? Go
Speaker 4: And that's one of the great challenges of my creative
Speaker 4: life is making things to do that, and I love
Speaker 4: talking to other people about how they do it.
Speaker 1: It's funny, as you mentioned that that when we were
Speaker 1: in Scotland, we wanted to paint an old part of
Speaker 1: the house, and we didn't know how to do it.
Speaker 1: And we didn't know how to do it. And then
Speaker 1: I thought, you know what, let's call I had a
Speaker 1: buddy who was a set painter on movies. Yes, I said,
Speaker 1: let's have him come and look at it. And he
Speaker 1: looked at it, and I said, I wanted to look
Speaker 1: like it was painted three hundred years ago. But it's
Speaker 1: got damp. But then it got dry again and it's okay.
Speaker 1: Now it had woodworm, but it doesn't have woodworm anymore.
Speaker 1: He's like, got it. And he did it in two days.
Speaker 3: Right, because he's a Sunday Yeah.
Speaker 2: Right, He's like, I got I know what you're doing. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I probably bought a bunch of Hudson sprayers to add
Speaker 4: some dirt coming down the walls.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: It was amazing though, I mean the idea of it.
Speaker 1: I'm fascinated by the idea that that. And you're right,
Speaker 1: everybody is a storyteller, and like I was always interested.
Speaker 1: I haven't made a movie in forever, but the wardrobe
Speaker 1: people always fascinated me because the investigation that they do
Speaker 1: and the work that they do is amazing.
Speaker 4: And the stuff they don't even tell you, Like I
Speaker 4: was talking to Danny Glicker, who's Jason Rightman's costumer, and
Speaker 4: he was like, the thing you don't realize is all
Speaker 4: old clothes have shoulder burned because they've been sitting on
Speaker 4: a hangar for decades. They're always a little lighter right
Speaker 4: here on this line. And if you don't do that,
Speaker 4: you'll know that it's not quite old. That's amazing, amazing.
Speaker 1: It's a big detective thing almost you ever drawn to
Speaker 1: that you ever drun to, like forensics or police work.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, I love knowing how things work, so I love
Speaker 4: peeling behind the curtain and having you know, MythBusters is
Speaker 4: just put me in contact with tons and tons of
Speaker 4: cops all over the world.
Speaker 3: And I mean, I could not do that job.
Speaker 4: It is a view on humanity that is really intense
Speaker 4: and difficult and a and look, I have huge problems
Speaker 4: with the with the American police, but that's not what
Speaker 4: I'm talking about here. I'm just talking about the general
Speaker 4: job of being a police person and sounds both completely
Speaker 4: intriguing and I could never do it.
Speaker 1: It's funny. I got I got a tattoo once in
Speaker 1: New Orleans and it was late at night, as often
Speaker 1: tattoos are and the guy was doing it. You know,
Speaker 1: you get to talk and he's working away and we
Speaker 1: were talking and he told me that he had been
Speaker 1: a cop.
Speaker 2: He had been a homicide cop.
Speaker 1: And then during Katrina he was looking at three unsolved
Speaker 1: you know, deaths a day, and he said, I couldn't
Speaker 1: do it anymore. I couldn't do it anymore. It was
Speaker 1: I had to go and do what I really wanted
Speaker 1: to do. I couldn't. I couldn't do that. I always
Speaker 1: wanted to do, you know, to be a tattoo artist.
Speaker 1: And now I'm going to do that. And he's good
Speaker 1: and I've got some good ink from him, and it
Speaker 1: was it's a fascinating story. He said that weird thing.
Speaker 1: He said, civilization and it was a quote from some
Speaker 1: fancy French writer. I don't know. It was civilization is
Speaker 1: three meals away from chaos.
Speaker 3: That's beautiful. Wow, that's completely true.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so. I mean it's like I always think,
Speaker 1: as well, you know, when when people are saying, you know,
Speaker 1: they're there, there might be riots, and now, well, what's
Speaker 1: the weather like? Because people never riot in the snow.
Speaker 1: It's temperature based. It's effect. It affects the amount of rioting,
Speaker 1: you're going to get totally right.
Speaker 3: And I was thinking, whoever said that quote?
Speaker 4: I feel like they had to be French, because the
Speaker 4: French Revolution is where you learned that lesson.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it probably was.
Speaker 1: It was probably with some you know, somebody that was
Speaker 1: up to no good during all that. Do you know
Speaker 1: what apparently during the French Revolution as well, that the
Speaker 1: revolutionary pamphlets were all hidden inside pornography because because the
Speaker 1: fancy pant aristocracy wouldn't look at the the pornography because
Speaker 1: it was for poor people. Yeah, and all the people
Speaker 1: would look at the And I'm like, oh yeah, and
Speaker 1: apparently that I feel like I might be making this up,
Speaker 1: but I think there's some truth in it that the
Speaker 1: marquis decide.
Speaker 2: That's why he was so involved in all He was writing.
Speaker 1: These crazy pornographic stories, but also he was in revolutionary
Speaker 1: as well.
Speaker 4: There's a Doris Lessing has a group of books that
Speaker 4: are field reports on planets around the universe and science fiction,
Speaker 4: and the first one is a field report on Earth
Speaker 4: from about twenty thousand BC to three hundred years in
Speaker 4: the future, when the world holds the White Man on
Speaker 4: trial for crimes against humanity, okay, And in this arc,
Speaker 4: at one point, one of the benevolent aliens that sort
Speaker 4: of oversees the universe falls. He falls into the sickness
Speaker 4: of rhetoric, all right, and to cure him of his
Speaker 4: addiction to rhetoric, they send him to live a short,
Speaker 4: brutal life as a peasant during the French Revolution.
Speaker 1: Oh man, I mean, it's kind of an interesting thing.
Speaker 2: I mean, you're still in San Francisco, right, yeah.
Speaker 1: San Francisco is I've always found a very complicated rhetorical
Speaker 1: environment because on the one hand, there's this very liberal idea,
Speaker 1: but we are very didactic and very hardline liberal idea
Speaker 1: of life, which is hard to navigate. I find it
Speaker 1: hard to navigate if I'm talking a law there, do
Speaker 1: you know what I mean?
Speaker 2: Yea, I feel like it's.
Speaker 1: Quite easy to annoy people and audiences.
Speaker 6: I mean, you know, San Francisco exists in this tension
Speaker 6: between that very open open end in philosophy that everyone
Speaker 6: should try what they want and let their freak flag fly,
Speaker 6: and we're all cool with it.
Speaker 4: But it's also one of the most beautiful physical places
Speaker 4: on Earth, which means there's a tremendous amount of money here,
Speaker 4: and the tension between the money and that hippie philosophy
Speaker 4: is I think one of the things that defines se
Speaker 4: Francisco well.
Speaker 1: And also then you get into that weird hypocrisy of
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley where they pretend to be flying her freak flag,
Speaker 1: but they are like Andrew Carnegie or.
Speaker 3: The Trump one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the the I always think that it fascinates me.
Speaker 2: Did you read the Vidal book?
Speaker 1: I think it was Hollywood the maybe Hollywood, or it
Speaker 1: may be the one before that. It's a historical novel,
Speaker 1: but he talks about the the feud between William Randolph
Speaker 1: Hurst and Teddy Roosevelt, and and Hurst comes off like
Speaker 1: proto Elon Muskets. It's very interesting. I was like, wow,
Speaker 1: that's a fascinating idea. And you know, Teddy Roosevelt doesn't
Speaker 1: come out but too great either slashes everybody trashes them all.
Speaker 4: I mean, at that level, it's all life among the narcissists, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Right.
Speaker 2: When's the first time you went did that tour of Washington?
Speaker 1: Have you done that? Like you go to the Senate
Speaker 1: and somebody takes you around the Capitol building.
Speaker 3: I have never done that.
Speaker 1: Oh man.
Speaker 2: They used to what I was doing late night.
Speaker 1: I thought it was a thing that everybody on TV
Speaker 1: did at some point, that they would take you around.
Speaker 2: And I got.
Speaker 1: Introduced to all these different people at the Senate, the
Speaker 1: Senate and Congress and all these different offices. And it
Speaker 1: was a whole day of just like you know, shaking
Speaker 1: hands and schmoozing people. And at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: I was with Megan and I we were sitting at
Speaker 1: the end to day, I thought, Jesus Christ, you know
Speaker 1: what really surprised me. It's fucking stupid. Most of these
Speaker 1: people are there. They're they're like, not that smart, they're
Speaker 1: just like they just kind of honk. They're like geese.
Speaker 2: Believable. But it's it's annoying thing.
Speaker 1: But they've got a very nice museum there, well, a
Speaker 1: couple of nice museums there, but that year in space Museum,
Speaker 1: the Smithsonian in it.
Speaker 4: Oh God, I sit on the board. Actually stop, of
Speaker 4: course you do. And right now, actually over at the
Speaker 4: airport at the Udvar Hazy Center, John Glenn's Friendship seven capsule,
Speaker 4: the first American in space, Yes, is sitting about thirty
Speaker 4: feet from a space shuttle.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: To see these two things this like one.
Speaker 5: Millimeter thick aluminum container, I know, versus this, you know,
Speaker 5: one hundred and twenty foot long thing, and that that compression.
Speaker 4: Of human ingenuity is a really beautiful thing to stand
Speaker 4: in the middle of.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it's fair. I mean, that was the thing
Speaker 1: that first fascinated me about America when I was I
Speaker 1: think I was seven years old, yeah, seven when the
Speaker 1: moon landing happened, and I remember seeing it. I was
Speaker 1: allowed to stay up more on television and that's when I, like,
Speaker 1: you start seeing all that American stuff and I was like, well,
Speaker 1: I'd like to hang out with those guys.
Speaker 2: What did they do?
Speaker 1: I want to go there because there wasn't any I
Speaker 1: didn't see any Scottish people doing it, But I thought,
Speaker 1: what's going on here? What are these people love to
Speaker 1: I find out later it's ald Scottish people coming over
Speaker 1: to America. And you know, but it's a fascinating thing
Speaker 1: because I think the science is part of America's not
Speaker 1: only just the rise of America as as as this
Speaker 1: global so omnipresent superpower, but the kind of spiritual soul
Speaker 1: of America is that technology and that strive and that
Speaker 1: you know, it's It's kind of like when I hear
Speaker 1: people talk about global warming, which is kind of like
Speaker 1: it is the number one issue, I guess, or climate change,
Speaker 1: And I tend to think I would be interested to
Speaker 1: hear your take on it, because I tend to think
Speaker 1: at this point, we've gone so far it's no longer
Speaker 1: an emotive problem. It's an engineering problem. We got to
Speaker 1: we've got to fix a different way. It can't be
Speaker 1: we have to stop Grandma putting her you know, hot
Speaker 1: pocket thing in the correct ben that's not going to
Speaker 1: do anything anymore. It has to be and have you
Speaker 1: been keeping track of anything with that stuff?
Speaker 5: Are you?
Speaker 1: Are you?
Speaker 3: It's that I agree with you.
Speaker 4: It's it's clear now that it's not a behavioral solution.
Speaker 3: There's not a behavioral solution to this problem.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: Humans have been given the chance, we have the knowledge,
Speaker 4: we have the data, uh, and we aren't willing to
Speaker 4: make the sacrifices, and so the response is will have
Speaker 4: to be reactionary. It'll be, you know, at each stage
Speaker 4: that things get more difficult, what do we do to
Speaker 4: deal with that difficulty? And it's not a great plan.
Speaker 4: It's a terrible way to attack a problem.
Speaker 1: Yeah, But I mean, I feel like it's the only one.
Speaker 1: I mean that the idea of you know, you know
Speaker 1: this is I live in hope that someone develops a
Speaker 1: bacteria that eats plastic in the ocean and shits out
Speaker 1: tiny little you know, sea creatures or you know, these
Speaker 1: seed the clouds that bring the temperature down or even
Speaker 1: or and there is talk about all of these different things, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I feel like philosophically, to me, the problem is
Speaker 4: around the framing, weirdly of late stage capitalism, which is
Speaker 4: which is that like late stage capitalism posits that life
Speaker 4: is a zero sum game that my my, if I gain,
Speaker 4: if you gain, it's because I lose. And I think
Speaker 4: that's why global warming or behavioral solutions to climate change
Speaker 4: aren't going to work, because everyone has this frame of like, well,
Speaker 4: if I'm going to suffer, who's benefiting?
Speaker 3: Right, instead of what can we do to benefit all
Speaker 3: of us?
Speaker 1: Right? Yeah? That sounds that does no sense politically attractive
Speaker 1: to a lot of people right now.
Speaker 4: Yes, I know, And honestly, the most amazing things that
Speaker 4: have ever happened to me in my life are because
Speaker 4: of collective action of me and a group of people.
Speaker 1: Well, I think that also that I mean, we are
Speaker 1: the sum of the people that came before us. We
Speaker 1: all are. And it's funny. I'm in Chicago right now,
Speaker 1: and Chicago always makes me feel like this because it's
Speaker 1: a time that I always associate I don't know why,
Speaker 1: with the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. I guess
Speaker 1: like Prohibition and al Capone and you know, and the World's.
Speaker 4: Fair eighteen ninety seven or the Column ex Position in
Speaker 4: eight ninety five.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, And so I think of all of that
Speaker 1: when I would walk down on the lake today and
Speaker 1: I look at it and just looking at the buildings,
Speaker 1: and you know, I'm sixty two am you know, and
Speaker 1: I'm thinking it's you're a fucking may fly, man, You're
Speaker 1: a fucking mayfly.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And but all of these buildings, all of this stuff,
Speaker 1: all of this this temple of mammon that is Chicago,
Speaker 1: and it's all built by people who have gone.
Speaker 3: Yeah, have you? Chicago has this one. I love Chicago.
Speaker 2: It's one of my favorite grit city.
Speaker 4: And Chicago has an architectural boat tour up the river
Speaker 4: that is one of the great three hour tourist trips.
Speaker 7: To do a three hour tour a three hour tour
Speaker 7: on a bound of Chicago's architecture, everything from why there's
Speaker 7: little buildings on the sides of every bridge to talking
Speaker 7: about the Sears Tower.
Speaker 3: It's a really, really fun that.
Speaker 2: Sounds like I've got the day off today. Actually I
Speaker 2: might try to figure that out.
Speaker 3: Oh, it's a good one. That's a really good one.
Speaker 1: I don't have a three hours to spare, but maybe,
Speaker 1: but maybe I do. Maybe I do have three hours
Speaker 1: to spare. I noticed that I don't know if.
Speaker 2: You have this?
Speaker 1: Are you How are you with your phone addiction? Everyone's
Speaker 1: addicted to their phone. I think, do you have a
Speaker 1: Are you okay with it?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Are you strict with yourself?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 3: I go easy on myself about it.
Speaker 1: Oh. I have a funny.
Speaker 4: Thing here in the shop, which is that I can't
Speaker 4: I can't pick up my phone and look at web
Speaker 4: pages while I'm standing in my shop.
Speaker 3: Okay, the ethos of this place. That doesn't feel good.
Speaker 4: I have to sit in my shop chair, which is
Speaker 4: in the corner if I want to pause and serve
Speaker 4: a couple of websites. So I almost never look at
Speaker 4: my phone while I'm working here in the cave. But
Speaker 4: at home, Yeah, it's it's it's fucked up my reading.
Speaker 4: My reading is terrible. I used to read all the time,
Speaker 4: and now I have to really push my self to
Speaker 4: put books through my brain because I am a better
Speaker 4: person when I am reading.
Speaker 1: I feel like my my feeling now is that I
Speaker 1: push myself hard into analog experiences. So I don't like
Speaker 1: driving cars that have a lot of tech in them.
Speaker 1: I don't like, you know, I don't like. I like
Speaker 1: to go to a theater and talk to an audience
Speaker 1: who don't have their phones with them. You know, they're
Speaker 1: or they're they're not allowed to use them. And or
Speaker 1: a comedy club or a or a or watch a
Speaker 1: theater show and it.
Speaker 2: But it's hard because those I don't.
Speaker 1: I used to think it was my addictive personality, because
Speaker 1: I clearly have one, but I don't think. I think
Speaker 1: everyone has a fuck I look at everyone seems to
Speaker 1: be kind of drawn into this mess. It's weird.
Speaker 4: Neil Stevenson wrote a book a few years ago called
Speaker 4: Seven Eves and I'm gonna spoil it right now, but
Speaker 4: it's been out for years, so I don't think that's
Speaker 4: go And in it, the moon blows up and starts
Speaker 4: to break into chunks that are going to make Earth uninhabitable,
Speaker 4: and the book spans people leaving the Earth in order
Speaker 4: to survive and then going back to it several thousand
Speaker 4: years later.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 4: And when they go back to it, they have access
Speaker 4: to all the technology that existed on Earth, and one
Speaker 4: of the things they do is, yeah, we're not going
Speaker 4: to do smartphones this time.
Speaker 3: That didn't work out for everybody.
Speaker 2: That's great.
Speaker 3: Isn't that that beautiful? Yeah?
Speaker 2: There's a book by I think I can't remember the
Speaker 2: author's name.
Speaker 1: He is great.
Speaker 2: I've read Evan, he's done Richard Harris.
Speaker 1: Maybe is that a guy who wrote the trilogy about Ciceroule.
Speaker 3: I don't know it.
Speaker 1: Oh, he's great, but he wrote He wrote a book
Speaker 1: called Second Sleep, which is set in.
Speaker 2: Fourteen eighty three.
Speaker 1: After the so the second Middle Ages, after the apocalypse,
Speaker 1: and as a guy starts finding old technology and starts
Speaker 1: to realize what happened, because you know, it's exactly like
Speaker 1: the Middle Ages, where in fact you're you're a couple
Speaker 1: of chapters in the book before you know, he picks
Speaker 1: up something and he sees the little Apple logo on it,
Speaker 1: and you go, what the fuck? It because you think
Speaker 1: you're in the Middle Ages and then suddenly you're not.
Speaker 1: You're in the Middle Ages again. It's a fascinating, fascinating book.
Speaker 4: I was just reading a thought experiment from some researchers
Speaker 4: that were like.
Speaker 3: Okay, if.
Speaker 4: If there, if it's possible that there was an intelligent
Speaker 4: civilization of some kind of creature before human beings on
Speaker 4: Earth that existed, you know, pre Pangaea, because there's actually
Speaker 4: been there's another Pangaea that predates Pangaea. And so all
Speaker 4: of the surfaces of all the land masses on Earth
Speaker 4: have turned over, and you know, sedimentary layers have built up.
Speaker 4: What when you look for to look for a civilization
Speaker 4: that existed that long ago, what sort of non random
Speaker 4: things would give you a hint that intelligence had yielded
Speaker 4: some sort of effect on Earth's.
Speaker 3: Atmosphere, on its land masses, and we would you look for?
Speaker 4: Well, this is the thing they were just opening up
Speaker 4: the thought experiment. But there's a lovely guy, Lee Cronin.
Speaker 4: He's over in Scotland or Ireland, and he's we were
Speaker 4: at a dinner party talking about what is a reasonable
Speaker 4: definition of life? And he said, I got it. I've
Speaker 4: got the simplest definition of life. Life, he said, makes
Speaker 4: non random shit at scale. Yeah, all right, that's pretty good,
Speaker 4: isn't that unimal?
Speaker 1: Yeah? I read something recently about you know, the I
Speaker 1: can't remember the name of it. It's passed the doortage,
Speaker 1: but it was about the idea of the more successful
Speaker 1: forms of life on Earth, and that was postulating the
Speaker 1: idea that wheaked is the most successful form of like
Speaker 1: on Earth because you know, it takes up the most
Speaker 1: grounded everybody needs it. It's you know, it's now I
Speaker 1: was thinking, I also try that with Louis c. K
Speaker 1: had a bet which I loved about humans are the
Speaker 1: most successful because we're not in the food chain anymore
Speaker 1: and tweak most certainly fucking as And I think because
Speaker 1: just it's a different perspective on this, the same thing.
Speaker 4: I once saw biologists give a talk from the frame
Speaker 4: of sheep and cows were really smart when they traded
Speaker 4: sexual selection for protection from humans.
Speaker 3: Oh, but.
Speaker 4: Just I love an alternate frame of Yeah, well, I
Speaker 4: think the mover.
Speaker 1: I think that ultimately, where I come back to, or
Speaker 1: where I am at the moment anyway, is that I
Speaker 1: kind of feel like I'm with the stoics, which is
Speaker 1: the only thing you really can control is your attitude
Speaker 1: to what's happening. Everything else is outside your control. You
Speaker 1: can look at it, you can see it, you can
Speaker 1: absorb it a bit, but so few things can actually
Speaker 1: be altered by anything other than the way you think
Speaker 1: about it.
Speaker 3: Well, this is like, this is one of my favorite
Speaker 3: Buddhist prayers actually, or slogans is and it's actually it's
Speaker 3: important enough that Julia, my wife, wrote this down for
Speaker 3: me and put it in my wallet. And it's germane
Speaker 3: to what you've just said.
Speaker 4: And it's about the fact that you know, we come here,
Speaker 4: and we leave here, and we're not here for very long,
Speaker 4: and we don't have much that we can get done
Speaker 4: in the time we're here. But the last part of
Speaker 4: this is, my actions are my only true belongings. I
Speaker 4: cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are
Speaker 4: the ground on which I stand.
Speaker 1: That seems like a great place to tie it all up.
Speaker 1: Well done, it's lovely, it's lovely to catch up with
Speaker 1: you atam. It's been way too long. I'll be in
Speaker 1: San Francisco. I've got to be there soon. I'm on tour.
Speaker 1: It's got to be in the future, will can you
Speaker 1: and Julian and I please have been please? Yes, it's
Speaker 1: been way too long, She sends her love.
Speaker 3: I told her I was doing this.
Speaker 1: In fact, Megan's saying turns to you, add to her.
Speaker 1: So it's all good. We're back, we're back in the game.
Speaker 1: But I love it.
Speaker 3: I love you, my friend. It's good to see.
Speaker 1: You, all right.
Speaker 2: Think it easy.