Adam Savage

The Craig Ferguson Pants on Fire Tour is on sale now. It's a new show, it's new material, but I'm afraid it's still only me, Craig Ferguson on my own, standing on a stage telling comedy words. Come and see me, buy tickets, bring your loved ones, or don't come and see me. Don't buy tickets and don't bring your loved ones. I'm not your dad. You come or don't come, but you should at least know what's happening, and it is. The tour kicks off late September and goes through the

The guy said, you look.

Have you been moisturizing?

What's happening?

It's all turned gray? But yeah, no, the clean living is the secret to my face.

Well, you know, here's the thing.

Though you wear a ginger, at one point, gingers do go gray.

We go white, we go like sheet white.

Yeah, I know, it's kind of impressive.

It's I think it's the compensation for having been a ginger that you then go completely white. I've seemed to be developing some kind of weird, kind of fluffy thing that's going on. It's very bad. I've noticed that my hair has dried out completely. If you're just joining us, by the way, this is the Haircare Podcast with Adam Savage and Craig ferguson what what isn't? It?

Isn't French? Your name is it somebody that was French?

I was just going to say that's the correct pronunciation.

But we came over to Scotland around the fourteenth century, right and from what I understand the savages or the savages were mercenaries settling near the Antwerm peninsula.

Around the fourth that's been near Ireland then right, I.

Think there are a bunch of savages in Ireland as well.

There certainly are.

I I wonder if if it was your family that brought the ginger to Scotland, or if the ginger was already there's It is a good question, and I know no one.

I think you know it would be an excellent.

MythBusters Red Hair was bought to Scotland or it was already there?

What's going on with that franchise?

Now? Are you guys making MythBusters Junior or.

No, dude, I haven't made television in years. I'm a YouTuber guy.

It's it's definitely the way to go. Yeah, are you back at building? Are you back in your your your day job? No?

I over covid. I we leaned in one hundred percent of my YouTube channel. We have almost seven million subscribers, now.

Shut the fuck up. Seven million.

We put up a video almost every day. We put up a video.

Oh my god, do you you must be an influencer? Are you going to fight Mike Tyson or something that's happened.

You know, the secret to having a YouTube channel is that you basically have to be your own ad agency, and.

That is what we do know, right, That's that's a lot though. I like, I think I've got a YouTube channel.

I know that Tomas messes around with something, and I know these podcasts go up, but I think I've got like one.

Hundred subscribers or something.

It's no, it's not anything that anyone's gonna be excited about, but it's definitely the way to go for sure. Is it? Does it feel more comfortable being your own kind of executive?

Can I tell you it's so nice?

Because you know the TV executives they ride you so hard on a pitch.

They want everything button down into the moment they award the show. They don't care about the show at all.

They just want to know that the last five minutes will bring all of the world to watching what you're making.

Yeah, and also the television executives, God bless them. I used to hate them, but now I feel bad for them because there's no work for those guys.

No.

Can I tell you When I pitched a book in twenty sixteen in New York, I spent a whole day pitching all the publishers, and it was remarkable because I realized halfway through the day, I'm repeatedly in rooms pitching to people who love what I'm pitching. They love the industry that they're in, they love books, And that's not what I experience in television. I don't experience television executives being like, I love television, I'm a television person.

No, it's a very rare thing. I mean, one or two of them, but most of them are are just awful.

They're just.

I think for many of them, it's kind of a realtor job. You know, it's like, well, let's know what I wanted, but you know it's decent money, and you know I'll do it for now.

Well that works nickel and dime them until they have no compunction left.

I know. But it's quite interesting though, because I know that I'm hurtling into my dotage.

Whenever I talk to them, I'm like, what do you want?

Son?

That's exactly that, Like, what the fuck you want?

Like, well, we're very excited about are you really excited?

Fuck you you're not excited about it? Shut out exactly that.

But I do people have to pitch you for your YouTube channel now that do they have to like say, well, we have this idea we'd like to blow up a hat.

You know.

That does happen from time to time.

I just had a company ask me, could you send our product to space experimentally?

And I came back with a totally different idea.

Yeah, I am unwilling to do testing on behalf of people's products.

I never was willing and I still don't want to do it.

Well, I mean, doesn't it that would leave you home to some kind of legal ramifications. Wouldn't as well? If you test something and then somebody hurts themselves or something completely.

But also it's like the first time I make a test and adjudicate someone's product as being one way or the other, no one will trust me.

Ever. Again, that's the way I feel.

That's right, that's right now.

So what do you do in your YouTube channel?

Because of course, obviously I subscribe to it, But for the people that don't know about that.

It is it's a fever dream of making.

And so I'm in here five days a week, forty hours a week in general kind of making whatever I'm interested in. Right now, I'm currently working on. This is sitting on my bench here. This is part of an elevator panel I'm working on because there's a scene in the movie Elf where Will Ferrell walks into an elevator and he hits a button that's really pretty, and so he hits all the buttons at once. So I'm making that a Christmas decoration in my house this year.

Oh, that's a lovely idea. And then as you make that,

Time, A thousand there fit there it is. It's so like the team is really small. It's just six of us making this YouTube channel. Everyone's having a really good time and we don't have to answer it anyone.

I bought out all my business partners a couple of years ago.

That's really interesting because that's kind of I kind of did the same thing when when television started to turn into this weird, kind of corporate, homogenized fucking shit show where you know, you say one thing wrong and suddenly you know, there's lawyers saying we don't encourage Greig Ferguson and all that kind of stuff that I thought, No, I got to strip this down to analog, right back down to me speaking into a microphone in a dark room with a bunch of people pointed in my direction.

Buy them out.

And well, you know, one of the things that people who watch the channel tell me that they do is they take my videos and some of them might be eight minutes long, and some of them might be eighty minutes of me like wiring something up, and they put their laptop on their workbench with me working, and then they work alongside.

They do their own project while I'm working on mine.

I think that's that's very good.

And I think that the myth Bursters is quite an interesting thing.

I think MythBusters was kind of like doing it.

The equivalent is if you do a vampire movie, like, no matter what you do in your career, from that point on, the vampire crowd will always consider you one of their people. And I think myth Bursters has like because I'm that, I'm like myth Bursters is such a thing. Like I still see Carrie quite often. I haven't seen you in ages, but you've been over in Scotland a couple of times. And I mean I haven't seen you over in a while unless you've been there and you haven't told me.

I have not been there and haven't told you.

All right, good because during the lockdown. We were stuck in Scotland all the time. We moved back to America though, we're in New England.

Oh wow, okay, yeah, East Coast.

Yeah, well, you know that's where Meghan's people are from, those icy blue blood Yankees who you know that Meghan can trace her ancestry back to the Mayflower.

Oh so can I Actually we have some relatives that were on that boat together.

Oh my god.

Because my theory is that only the crazy people made it through that first winter. Only the angry crazy that genetic code through that first winter. It was like your Law and Megan Law. I wonder if you relate it to Megan.

I didn't get COVID for the longest time, for the first two and a half almost three years, and there was this period of time I thought I was immune because my grandmother, who can trate my who was a Monroe, who can trace her, who could trace her ancestry back to the Mayflower, had survived the nineteen seventeen influenza.

Oh wow, So I.

Was thinking, like, I'm an x man, I got that in my blood. But then I caught COVID and it's still well.

COVID's kind of I don't know. Look, I'm not a scientist, but I feel like it's new. I feel like it's a slightly newer thing. And I didn't get it for a while. I didn't get it at all. We had a party of our house afterwards. Bill didn't get it. You were invited to that party? You didn't, I was. I couldn't make it outright. Carrie was at Carrie Byron was at the party. I think I was so jealous. I think she got COVID. Had like fifty people got

So listen, talk to me about about.

Your origins, because I haven't really talked to you ever really about that. You're from Sleepy Hollow, right, is that where you're from?

I was born Crane Country, born in Manhattan.

My parents were lovely bohemians in the West Village in the late sixties.

Wow, that sounds like a lot of body hair.

Was They had a two They had a ten room duplex on Eighth Street and McDougall Street.

That'd be worth like a billion dollars now.

They sold it to the Robert Jeoffrey Foundation in nineteen seventy. Wow, to move their family up to Terrytown, to Sleepy Hollow, New York, and where I grew up. That's where I spent my whole childhood, about a block from the Hudson.

That's a lovely part of the world. Is gorgeous there.

But isn't it like there's a lot of ghost stories and creepy stuff and all there. And I always think of you as being someone who debunks all of that kind of stuff. That is do you think that's what started there? Was it to protect yourself from scary stories.

No, I I think it was.

I think I believed you're reminding me that.

There's this one moment in MythBusters when Guermo Del Toro called us up and he was like, why don't we go spend three days in the most haunted place in the United States, an insane asylum in the Carolinas.

And Jamie was like, why would we do this?

And I was like, we would do this because it's Guermo, got Giermo cal you gotta go.

You got it.

I haven't been in his crazy house of mad things. Have you been in it?

I've been to I've been to Bleak House and now apparently there's a second bleak House.

But yeah, he's good.

No, it's an amazing collection. It's a pathology kind of. I mean, look at what are we if not a collection of pathologies.

I've gone.

I was going to say, you're kind of you're kind of a bit of a hoarder, uh.

High functioning hoarder.

But yes, high functioning horder. I think kids did it.

But it's but the kind of the whole ethos of like MythBusters and you personally as well, even right down to the I don't know if you're still an atheist, but but like you're a you're a kind of you really do like to get to the science of just about everything, right.

I do like to get to the science of just about everything.

But it's funny that you say, Uh, I wonder if you're still an atheist because I stopped saying that and it happened in your kitchen in in Durban.

Oh really, because we had come.

Back from a thing back when we were hanging back when I was visiting you there, and you said, it's it's pretty Uh. You said, it's pretty fundamentalist to say atheist, because I still believe that. Yeah, yeah, And I couldn't I couldn't disagree with that, and so I now call myself a New Testament agnostic. I can't know, I can't know who tipped the first domino, but I agree with everything Jesus said.

Yeah, it's very interesting because I wrestled with it over and over and over again. It's it's like a constant refrain from me. I always kind of go back to I don't want to not believe things, but I can't believe in a kind of angry man on a cloud with a thunderbolts and stuff.

I can't believe in that.

But then I'm interested in mystics that have become fascinated.

Recently by Gorvi Dal. Have you read gorfy Daals?

I have read a bunch of Gorvidale. He's the only historical fiction writer who I like to read.

Oh my god, it's great. So right now I'm in the middle of creation.

Uh.

When he's got that guy from Persia who meets Buddha and confuses and so cars, it's it's I'm like, wow, man, this is fucking pot boiler is fabulous.

I always kneel. I always felt with him.

The one I read and loved the most was Burr, which is a fever dream. And also with Vidal, like, I feel like I'm absolutely getting a whole bunch of editorializing an opinion, but it's informed by the point of view he got in his research, not by a bias.

Yeah, I feel it's quite What's quite interesting about Gourvidal as well is that I don't really know where he stands in in the in the belief system, I really and I've read extensively, and I think what it is is I think he bounces around, you know, I think he but I think.

It is almost that that is almost a defining feature of real faith. Martin Luther King absolutely grappled with it in his personal diaries. I mean, John Dunn hell Spells, you know, was totally grappling with this the whole time.

Yeah, I think it.

I think it is an essential component of faith that it has to have doubt. If it doesn't have doubt, it's not really faith. It's kind of it's certainty, and certainty is a very different thing. But there's a weird interview with Carl Young. I don't know if you've ever seen it, or somebody asked him if he it's a televised thing. I can't remember where it was, but towards the end of his life where someone said do you

I mean the.

Science thing is a search for truth, isn't it. It is a It isn't it in its way a spiritual hunger?

I think science, it's absolutely and we're grappling with the same questions.

I had.

This seems Germaine to this. I had this epiphany about four years ago. I was researching measuring things. I was research which is the field of metrology, and within the field of metrology, actually I happened to I did not plan this prop but I have this right here. Within the field of metrology. If you want to measure something, you pass a certain point, you don't measure it, You actually compare it to something. And this is called a gauge block. And this is the most accurate comparison system

That's how accurate this block is.

And I was showing my I was doing a video about how to measure gauge blocks and how accurate they are, and then I had this idea, and I put the gauge block in my hand and held it for twelve seconds and put it back under my measuring device, and I was able to show that in twelve seconds, the heat from my body had man the gauge block one micron.

Thicker because of heat expansion.

And when I realized that, and I was looking at the spec sat for these, which is every one of these has been measured and certified, I realized that at the bottom of the certification it says this is only

That's how it works.

Yeah, it's it's funny.

I had a similar experience when I was getting my pilot's license, when I was learning to fly, because I kept asking people about air speeds and altitudes, and air speeds and altitudes, which are extremely important if your flying a freaking airplane. Well, altitude there's kind of like five different types because there's there's altitude above the ground, but there's also sea level altitude, which we all kind.

Of agree on.

Then there's density altitude because that's how the plane's going to perform at certain temperatures and uh, moisture in the atmosphere. So it's like like radar altitude as well, I mean it.

So it's like, no, we need to have one altitude.

But there's not the same thing about the speed of sound, Like how fast the sound, Well, it depends on the temperature and it depends on the thickness of the air. And it's so fascinating to me, and I think you're right. I think I think that it is. It is very very confusing to try and agree on one thing to make things black and white. That's why I'm I'm against fundamentalism of all kinds.

And that's that's where you turn me around in your kitchen table.

Was I realized, Yeah, no, I can't know, So all I can do is keep gathering data. And I feel like performers like because we both spend a lot of time in front of audiences.

We know that audiences can take on.

A character that is different than the people that compose that audience.

Unbelievable, unbelievable. I mean right to the extent of the one night. And you'll know this because you did those live shows, and you've done so many live shows. You can go out in front of an audience and roughly the same sized theater, at the same room temperature, at the same time of day, in a town that's a similar demographic makeup, and do exactly the same thing and have a wildly different experience. And that's people's collective personalities.

I'm like, what is it.

It's it's that Youngian thing, isn't it. The collective, the collective unconscious? Right, the collective unconscious?

I do you know.

I once had interviewed with Stephen King on the Late Night Show and I said, have you He was talking about bringing stories down. He said, I bring the stories down from somewhere. I was like, oh, that's fascinating. And I said to him, so about the it's kind of like the young the collective unconscious.

And he said, what is that?

And he didn't know what I was talking about.

Oh so great?

I was like, what I mean, you might.

Have been working with me, Stephen King, but it was still listening.

But there is also that Arlott Guthrie. I saw him perform once and he said, I don't write songs. I stand at the side of a river and I wait for one to come by and I.

Scoop it out. Yeah.

And then he said, he said, I don't think anyone downstream of Bob Dylan has ever even seen a song.

But I think that was kind of interesting, as though that that's a kind of that's a kind of weird, unmeasurable thing.

But you've been in front of an audience where something came out of the ether into your head, yes, and dropped like a bomb in the room.

Yes, And it happened last night.

I actually I was doing a show last night and oh Chicago, and that's why I'm in the hotel in Chicago now. And about halfway through the show, I had this idea and I went with it, and I was making myself laugh at the audience seemed to be enjoyed too, but I was having a great time with it.

I view that as that's that's the other to me, right, that creative thing that happens late when you do all the practice and you do all the rigor that you do to get yourself to this point, and then you open yourself up and some creative thing comes in. You don't know where it came from, but it informs the whole thing you're building.

Yeah, it's it's very interesting because it it leads me as I you know, again, as I get older, I start thinking about the inevitability of the you know, corporeal decline and you know, and immortality and all that. And I can't get my head to a place where I can endorse the idea of the continuation of consciousness. I'm quite happy to remain open to the idea of a god, a primover, or an unexplainable deity, but I can't get my head around the idea that it keeps going.

I just don't see that.

Here's one that I'm always thinking about when this conversation comes around is in Africa, they took some termite mounds and poured concrete into them and then excavated to see the shape of a termite city.

And when they do this, the cities.

Are fifteen feet tall and twenty feet wide, and they include waste management, and they include air conditioning and convection breatheable air. They include temperature control. And I couple that with the fact that ninety nine percent of the cells in my body right now are non human in origin, right, I'm mostly a colony of other bacterium and other types

That's fascinating the idea. I think also, if you get the idea of infinity, of infinite time, infinite space, then it would seem to me that anything that can happen will happen, and so anything that you can think of can If I'm days going on, I wonder if that's even plausible, But it's it's this is one of the reasons why I don't take marijuana. I feel like I feel like it would be bad. Do you take recreational drugs? I wonder if that's the thing for you.

I did do a lot of psychedelics back in my twenties, really, yeah, absolutely, and it was a couple of mushroom It was a couple of mushroom trips during which I really absolutely connected and still firmly believe that our consciousness is eternal and that we don't that this is not a deterministic universe. That is, we have free will here, but I'm not

Oh, that's a lovely idea. I think you might be on the edge of a new religion as there could be. I think I could get behind that as an idea. That that's fascinating. I think the the idea though for me that the struggle I have with spiritual hunger or spiritual searching is it's so littered with organized religion, which is not for me. You know, I kind of make it work. You have you got any organizational structure for that for yourself?

Only that it seems to me that the that the Buddhists have been right.

All along, maybe maybe.

That consciousnes Look, you know, at this age too, what turns out to be most important to me is the collaborations I get to do with people that I love. Yeah, it's that taking a couple of minds and intersecting them on the same problem and enjoying doing that and learning from other point people's point of view. The more curious I get about other people and their process, the more I get a reward from that that interaction that's interesting.

So you become fascinated by the way other people approach a problem which either you have looked at yourself or are trying to or invest the gain.

Yeah, one of the primary things we do on the channels we go to movie sets, and on movie sets the main thing that we do at a level that most people don't do it is we'll talk to all of the artisans about how we look.

A movie crew is nothing but an army of storytellers all the way down.

And when you're talking to the pain or painting the problem, he's thinking that, she's thinking about the narrative of that piece. And I love talking about that problem. You get this thing, how do you make it fit within that narrative? Go And that's one of the great challenges of my creative life is making things to do that, and I love talking to other people about how they do it.

It's funny, as you mentioned that that when we were in Scotland, we wanted to paint an old part of the house, and we didn't know how to do it. And we didn't know how to do it. And then I thought, you know what, let's call I had a buddy who was a set painter on movies. Yes, I said, let's have him come and look at it. And he looked at it, and I said, I wanted to look like it was painted three hundred years ago. But it's got damp. But then it got dry again and it's okay.

Right, because he's a Sunday Yeah.

Right, He's like, I got I know what you're doing. Yeah.

I probably bought a bunch of Hudson sprayers to add some dirt coming down the walls.

Right.

It was amazing though, I mean the idea of it.

I'm fascinated by the idea that that. And you're right, everybody is a storyteller, and like I was always interested. I haven't made a movie in forever, but the wardrobe people always fascinated me because the investigation that they do and the work that they do is amazing.

And the stuff they don't even tell you, Like I was talking to Danny Glicker, who's Jason Rightman's costumer, and he was like, the thing you don't realize is all old clothes have shoulder burned because they've been sitting on a hangar for decades. They're always a little lighter right here on this line. And if you don't do that, you'll know that it's not quite old. That's amazing, amazing.

It's a big detective thing almost you ever drawn to that you ever drun to, like forensics or police work.

Absolutely, I love knowing how things work, so I love peeling behind the curtain and having you know, MythBusters is just put me in contact with tons and tons of cops all over the world.

And I mean, I could not do that job.

It is a view on humanity that is really intense and difficult and a and look, I have huge problems with the with the American police, but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm just talking about the general job of being a police person and sounds both completely intriguing and I could never do it.

It's funny. I got I got a tattoo once in New Orleans and it was late at night, as often tattoos are and the guy was doing it. You know, you get to talk and he's working away and we were talking and he told me that he had been a cop.

He had been a homicide cop.

And then during Katrina he was looking at three unsolved you know, deaths a day, and he said, I couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't do it anymore. It was I had to go and do what I really wanted to do. I couldn't. I couldn't do that. I always wanted to do, you know, to be a tattoo artist. And now I'm going to do that. And he's good and I've got some good ink from him, and it was it's a fascinating story. He said that weird thing. He said, civilization and it was a quote from some

That's beautiful. Wow, that's completely true.

Yeah, I think so. I mean it's like I always think, as well, you know, when when people are saying, you know, they're there, there might be riots, and now, well, what's the weather like? Because people never riot in the snow. It's temperature based. It's effect. It affects the amount of rioting, you're going to get totally right.

And I was thinking, whoever said that quote?

I feel like they had to be French, because the French Revolution is where you learned that lesson.

Yeah, I think it probably was.

It was probably with some you know, somebody that was up to no good during all that. Do you know what apparently during the French Revolution as well, that the revolutionary pamphlets were all hidden inside pornography because because the fancy pant aristocracy wouldn't look at the the pornography because

That's why he was so involved in all He was writing.

These crazy pornographic stories, but also he was in revolutionary as well.

There's a Doris Lessing has a group of books that are field reports on planets around the universe and science fiction, and the first one is a field report on Earth from about twenty thousand BC to three hundred years in the future, when the world holds the White Man on trial for crimes against humanity, okay, And in this arc, at one point, one of the benevolent aliens that sort

Oh man, I mean, it's kind of an interesting thing.

I mean, you're still in San Francisco, right, yeah.

San Francisco is I've always found a very complicated rhetorical environment because on the one hand, there's this very liberal idea, but we are very didactic and very hardline liberal idea of life, which is hard to navigate. I find it hard to navigate if I'm talking a law there, do you know what I mean?

Yea, I feel like it's.

Quite easy to annoy people and audiences.

I mean, you know, San Francisco exists in this tension between that very open open end in philosophy that everyone should try what they want and let their freak flag fly, and we're all cool with it.

But it's also one of the most beautiful physical places on Earth, which means there's a tremendous amount of money here, and the tension between the money and that hippie philosophy is I think one of the things that defines se Francisco well.

And also then you get into that weird hypocrisy of Silicon Valley where they pretend to be flying her freak flag, but they are like Andrew Carnegie or.

The Trump one.

Yeah, the the I always think that it fascinates me.

Did you read the Vidal book?

I think it was Hollywood the maybe Hollywood, or it may be the one before that. It's a historical novel, but he talks about the the feud between William Randolph Hurst and Teddy Roosevelt, and and Hurst comes off like proto Elon Muskets. It's very interesting. I was like, wow, that's a fascinating idea. And you know, Teddy Roosevelt doesn't come out but too great either slashes everybody trashes them all.

I mean, at that level, it's all life among the narcissists, right.

Yeah, Right.

When's the first time you went did that tour of Washington?

Have you done that? Like you go to the Senate and somebody takes you around the Capitol building.

I have never done that.

Oh man.

They used to what I was doing late night.

I thought it was a thing that everybody on TV did at some point, that they would take you around.

And I got.

Introduced to all these different people at the Senate, the Senate and Congress and all these different offices. And it was a whole day of just like you know, shaking hands and schmoozing people. And at the end of the day, I was with Megan and I we were sitting at the end to day, I thought, Jesus Christ, you know what really surprised me. It's fucking stupid. Most of these people are there. They're they're like, not that smart, they're just like they just kind of honk. They're like geese.

Believable. But it's it's annoying thing.

But they've got a very nice museum there, well, a couple of nice museums there, but that year in space Museum, the Smithsonian in it.

Oh God, I sit on the board. Actually stop, of course you do. And right now, actually over at the airport at the Udvar Hazy Center, John Glenn's Friendship seven capsule, the first American in space, Yes, is sitting about thirty feet from a space shuttle.

Wow.

To see these two things this like one.

Millimeter thick aluminum container, I know, versus this, you know, one hundred and twenty foot long thing, and that that compression.

Of human ingenuity is a really beautiful thing to stand in the middle of.

Yeah, but it's fair. I mean, that was the thing that first fascinated me about America when I was I think I was seven years old, yeah, seven when the moon landing happened, and I remember seeing it. I was allowed to stay up more on television and that's when I, like, you start seeing all that American stuff and I was like, well, I'd like to hang out with those guys.

What did they do?

I want to go there because there wasn't any I didn't see any Scottish people doing it, But I thought, what's going on here? What are these people love to I find out later it's ald Scottish people coming over

Are you?

Are you?

It's that I agree with you.

It's it's clear now that it's not a behavioral solution.

There's not a behavioral solution to this problem.

Right.

Humans have been given the chance, we have the knowledge, we have the data, uh, and we aren't willing to make the sacrifices, and so the response is will have to be reactionary. It'll be, you know, at each stage that things get more difficult, what do we do to deal with that difficulty? And it's not a great plan. It's a terrible way to attack a problem.

Yeah, But I mean, I feel like it's the only one. I mean that the idea of you know, you know this is I live in hope that someone develops a bacteria that eats plastic in the ocean and shits out tiny little you know, sea creatures or you know, these seed the clouds that bring the temperature down or even or and there is talk about all of these different things, right.

Yeah, I feel like philosophically, to me, the problem is around the framing, weirdly of late stage capitalism, which is which is that like late stage capitalism posits that life is a zero sum game that my my, if I gain, if you gain, it's because I lose. And I think that's why global warming or behavioral solutions to climate change aren't going to work, because everyone has this frame of like, well, if I'm going to suffer, who's benefiting?

Right, instead of what can we do to benefit all of us?

Right? Yeah? That sounds that does no sense politically attractive to a lot of people right now.

Yes, I know, And honestly, the most amazing things that have ever happened to me in my life are because of collective action of me and a group of people.

Well, I think that also that I mean, we are the sum of the people that came before us. We all are. And it's funny. I'm in Chicago right now, and Chicago always makes me feel like this because it's a time that I always associate I don't know why, with the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. I guess like Prohibition and al Capone and you know, and the World's.

Fair eighteen ninety seven or the Column ex Position in eight ninety five.

Yeah, right, And so I think of all of that when I would walk down on the lake today and I look at it and just looking at the buildings, and you know, I'm sixty two am you know, and I'm thinking it's you're a fucking may fly, man, You're a fucking mayfly.

Yeah.

And but all of these buildings, all of this stuff, all of this this temple of mammon that is Chicago, and it's all built by people who have gone.

Yeah, have you? Chicago has this one. I love Chicago.

It's one of my favorite grit city.

And Chicago has an architectural boat tour up the river that is one of the great three hour tourist trips.

To do a three hour tour a three hour tour on a bound of Chicago's architecture, everything from why there's little buildings on the sides of every bridge to talking about the Sears Tower.

It's a really, really fun that.

Sounds like I've got the day off today. Actually I might try to figure that out.

Oh, it's a good one. That's a really good one.

I don't have a three hours to spare, but maybe, but maybe I do. Maybe I do have three hours to spare. I noticed that I don't know if.

You have this?

Are you How are you with your phone addiction? Everyone's addicted to their phone. I think, do you have a Are you okay with it?

Yeah?

Are you strict with yourself?

No?

I go easy on myself about it.

Oh. I have a funny.

Thing here in the shop, which is that I can't I can't pick up my phone and look at web pages while I'm standing in my shop.

Okay, the ethos of this place. That doesn't feel good.

I have to sit in my shop chair, which is in the corner if I want to pause and serve a couple of websites. So I almost never look at my phone while I'm working here in the cave. But at home, Yeah, it's it's it's fucked up my reading. My reading is terrible. I used to read all the time, and now I have to really push my self to put books through my brain because I am a better person when I am reading.

I feel like my my feeling now is that I push myself hard into analog experiences. So I don't like driving cars that have a lot of tech in them. I don't like, you know, I don't like. I like to go to a theater and talk to an audience who don't have their phones with them. You know, they're or they're they're not allowed to use them. And or a comedy club or a or a or watch a theater show and it.

But it's hard because those I don't.

I used to think it was my addictive personality, because I clearly have one, but I don't think. I think everyone has a fuck I look at everyone seems to be kind of drawn into this mess. It's weird.

Neil Stevenson wrote a book a few years ago called Seven Eves and I'm gonna spoil it right now, but it's been out for years, so I don't think that's go And in it, the moon blows up and starts to break into chunks that are going to make Earth uninhabitable, and the book spans people leaving the Earth in order to survive and then going back to it several thousand years later.

Wow.

And when they go back to it, they have access to all the technology that existed on Earth, and one of the things they do is, yeah, we're not going to do smartphones this time.

That didn't work out for everybody.

That's great.

Isn't that that beautiful? Yeah?

There's a book by I think I can't remember the author's name.

He is great.

I've read Evan, he's done Richard Harris.

Maybe is that a guy who wrote the trilogy about Ciceroule.

I don't know it.

Oh, he's great, but he wrote He wrote a book called Second Sleep, which is set in.

Fourteen eighty three.

After the so the second Middle Ages, after the apocalypse, and as a guy starts finding old technology and starts to realize what happened, because you know, it's exactly like the Middle Ages, where in fact you're you're a couple of chapters in the book before you know, he picks up something and he sees the little Apple logo on it, and you go, what the fuck? It because you think you're in the Middle Ages and then suddenly you're not.

I was just reading a thought experiment from some researchers that were like.

Okay, if.

If there, if it's possible that there was an intelligent civilization of some kind of creature before human beings on Earth that existed, you know, pre Pangaea, because there's actually been there's another Pangaea that predates Pangaea. And so all of the surfaces of all the land masses on Earth have turned over, and you know, sedimentary layers have built up.

Atmosphere, on its land masses, and we would you look for?

Well, this is the thing they were just opening up the thought experiment. But there's a lovely guy, Lee Cronin. He's over in Scotland or Ireland, and he's we were at a dinner party talking about what is a reasonable definition of life? And he said, I got it. I've got the simplest definition of life. Life, he said, makes non random shit at scale. Yeah, all right, that's pretty good, isn't that unimal?

Yeah? I read something recently about you know, the I can't remember the name of it. It's passed the doortage, but it was about the idea of the more successful forms of life on Earth, and that was postulating the idea that wheaked is the most successful form of like on Earth because you know, it takes up the most

I once saw biologists give a talk from the frame of sheep and cows were really smart when they traded sexual selection for protection from humans.

Oh, but.

Just I love an alternate frame of Yeah, well, I think the mover.

I think that ultimately, where I come back to, or where I am at the moment anyway, is that I kind of feel like I'm with the stoics, which is the only thing you really can control is your attitude to what's happening. Everything else is outside your control. You can look at it, you can see it, you can absorb it a bit, but so few things can actually be altered by anything other than the way you think about it.

Well, this is like, this is one of my favorite Buddhist prayers actually, or slogans is and it's actually it's important enough that Julia, my wife, wrote this down for me and put it in my wallet. And it's germane to what you've just said.

And it's about the fact that you know, we come here, and we leave here, and we're not here for very long, and we don't have much that we can get done in the time we're here. But the last part of this is, my actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground on which I stand.

That seems like a great place to tie it all up. Well done, it's lovely, it's lovely to catch up with you atam. It's been way too long. I'll be in San Francisco. I've got to be there soon. I'm on tour. It's got to be in the future, will can you and Julian and I please have been please? Yes, it's been way too long, She sends her love.

I told her I was doing this.

In fact, Megan's saying turns to you, add to her. So it's all good. We're back, we're back in the game. But I love it.

I love you, my friend. It's good to see.

You, all right.

Think it easy.