Episode 226: Unraveling Time Traveling (with Barry Lam and Christina Hoff Sommers)

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad and psychologist Dave Pizarro having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] Please fry, I don't know how to teach. I'm a professor! I'm a very good man, just a very bad wizard. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, today's the last day of Chanukah. Chanukah! Where are all my presents?

[00:01:22] They must have gotten lost in the mail. It was eight days of socks, various socks in different colors, mostly blue. But you'll get them. I mean, I'm hoping because I got a couple from my family about it. I just go to the mailbox every day kind of experience.

[00:01:41] Aren't you one of those Jews who loves Christmas? No, I don't love Christmas really. I mean, I enjoy it because I've always spent it with Jen's family. I get along with everybody. With a goyside? I do, yeah.

[00:01:59] I get along with her sisters, their husbands there and yeah, I have really for so long that that's what I associate Christmas with. You know what my gift is to you? It's allowing the intro segment to be taken up by you talking to your stepmother without me.

[00:02:19] That's the gift. That's a poison pill. Yeah, so we have it's a very bad wizard's guest, Bonanza, coming up in the first segment we have Christina Hoff Sommers, my stepmother recently retired from the American Enterprise Institute.

[00:02:39] So she won't be a part of any new wars that they're trying to start. Yeah, we'll see how much is really intrinsically motivated and how much was just AEI instructions. Yeah, right exactly. I think we've already, I mean, she's been retired for like six months now.

[00:02:58] So we already know it was her. So by the way for that segment, so you know it was drunken Thanksgiving debate as usual she comes in hot. I come in a bit annoyed because I had tried to set up the tech so that you know we both

[00:03:17] had our own microphones and it and I just couldn't figure out how to do it and it took me a long time. So so we're in a little we're in different places when the segment begins.

[00:03:31] In the second segment we have Barry Lamb coming on the podcast to talk about like the main topic will be primer, the movie primer by Shane Coruth. And then we also talk about David Lewis and his new series on his new season of hi-fi

[00:03:48] nation which features a bunch of episodes on David Lewis. So that's what's coming up then let's go to my segment with Christina. All right, welcome to our very special Thanksgiving episode segment where we drink too much get

[00:04:08] into fights but not like debates where we're trying to score points. Not for you like I'm scoring points and he's drunk. I'm sober. Let's go go. See okay one of us is not trying to score points in debates. The other one is trying to destroy me with their.

[00:04:27] I love him but he's misguided and no one more than your listeners understands the problems that I face while being adorable, charming and in every way lovable you are deeply, deeply misguided. So we'll set everything straight but I'm thinking that by now what's the year I can't remember? 2021.

[00:04:46] 2021 you now have seen the light and you acknowledge that I've been right all along on whatever it is we debated about. Okay, well so you can see we're in two different places also my stepmother and I number one

[00:04:59] you know we've all been drinking but I've been trying to set something up tech wise which I wasn't able to do successfully. So now we're sharing one mic and so there's going to be. One hundred person arranges the setup at the last minute if you had only planned

[00:05:13] this before we would have been over by now. But never mind that's it. And so she's a little more hyped up than I am right now but we have a format for this show. We never had that before in the previous ones.

[00:05:26] I think this is going to be, I think they're going to like it. I think it's an improvement I'm not sure. Okay so the format it's not like a fully fleshed out format. We haven't even really fully talked about it but the idea is we're going to bring

[00:05:39] up a couple a bunch of topics that you have to express a certain level of belief in. It'll make more sense when we're actually doing it. That's how we're going to attack this. Oh but before we get to that. Oh shit. Where she's just left now.

[00:05:59] Before she's getting more champagne. Before we get to the really kind of interesting formatted part of the segment I want to just say like. I had nothing to do with the format for my followers and the sympathetics that follow him. I had nothing to do with it. Go.

[00:06:19] We actually had probably for the first time a kind of stereotypical Thanksgiving debate argument. And I took a course on how to cope with difficult relatives during the holiday season. And I was ready and yet we exploded in anger and it didn't go well.

[00:06:40] So there was a lot of kind of casual racism thrown around by Christina. Oh yeah. Racism as he defines it. I will say that. You once had a doubt about preferential policies. You're supporting systemic racism therefore you're written out of the human race. I was cancelled.

[00:06:58] I will say you weren't cancelled because you were like talking them pretty much the whole time with some support from a friend of mine from high school. And a major thinker. We won't say his name because we don't want to ruin his career.

[00:07:13] I don't know if I don't know if he would consider himself a major thinker at all. But the good source for weed and other things. But but really I kind of stayed out of it. Not as much as my brother stayed out of it.

[00:07:29] But I stayed out of it. David David. Yeah. What is your explanation? Because you didn't say a goddamn thing. And I wanted some backup because I took a course. But what are we are you asking me about that or about the my silence during the Black Lives

[00:07:45] Matter debate? Yeah. Well, I'm not young. I'm not as passionate as either of you. Like I'm not no one confuses me for the Stephen A Smith of the family. Right. There's you're the alt right. He's a he's a Bernie bro. And I'm like most of America.

[00:08:01] You know I would have voted for Junkin if I could have. I think the. Oh yeah. The repou he was the Republican. And well of course you would have. Yeah. Because the other guy is a jerk. He's a corporate Democrat.

[00:08:18] In your terminology he supports the no actually he would have been fine but he was just such an unlikable nerd that no one could vote for him. And the Democrats are going to be destroyed if they don't become more likable.

[00:08:29] And you know what I don't want that because I don't wish to have Donald Trump return to the presidency because he will destroy the country. Well if the only thing that will prevent that is Democrats becoming more likable then I think we're definitely having another Donald Trump presidency.

[00:08:46] We're ruined. So who would have thought. So Christina is in that lane for now of being anti-Trump like when you're one of the. Arrino. I kind of stayed out of that for the most part not as much as my brother.

[00:08:59] You know I would just come in every so often and yell about something but then I would leave but it was my wife Jen who was really going toe to toe with you. And so maybe she should. You don't really have control of your wife.

[00:09:13] I mean that's what came out this weekend. I mean just saying like can you like reign her in. You know like I never have been able to do that. So I don't see. Your daughter didn't say a word. That's not true.

[00:09:25] She actually fought the good fight for a bit but you know you were loud and. I wasn't loud. I was quiet. I was reasonable. And I had my outline of how to deal with relative relatives socialist communist sympathizing anti-American Nealists.

[00:09:42] All right so that was the you know what happened before the really well formatted part of the segment and that was and it gives a picture yeah and then actually for for actual Thanksgiving everything was fine.

[00:09:56] You know it's not like we didn't snipe at each other but it wasn't like the previous night where it was really like the first time I've ever had the cliched you know. Are you kidding we had that every time you came to our house with your father.

[00:10:10] Yeah but it wasn't quite on the politics stuff like we. Well it was on more than it was on philosophical positions that you've taken like when you were a radical determinist did you know what you're.

[00:10:21] Well he'd be happy with me now then but let's move on to the. Your politics he would find them absurd he would like absurd and he would say you had no say hole and what's wrong with you I can imagine.

[00:10:35] Yeah probably that's that's that's true moving on we're gonna so we're just gonna throw out a couple of things and you say like how much you believe in them from one to ten like ten being you're certain that it's real or it's true one being you're certain it's

[00:10:51] false Havana syndrome that's the first one. Oh my I just I mean can I give it like a negative number I don't believe it I've read the symptoms and believe me I'm open minded if somebody can come through with some evidence like blood tests but not brain imagery.

[00:11:08] Okay well let me just say what it is it is a an illness that FBI and CIA agents as well as some embassy officials have said they are suffering from which involves fatigue like headaches what else. Ringing in the air. Oh yeah things you can't measure.

[00:11:28] Right and and so the idea is that this is a microwave attack from Russia or Cuba or. I don't know it out I don't know it out but it just seems to have certain affinities with other illnesses I question like chemical sensitivity syndrome or multiple personality syndrome

[00:11:50] or what was that one in the 80s was all these like upper middle. You don't think multiple personality disorder is real. And my stipulate my cousin had it I say no more. Okay so here's the second question the word totally the same side about Havana

[00:12:05] syndrome it sounds just like there has been at very little evidence that it's actually like something of its own category of illness besides just kind of not a contagion and not a contager and then the fact the idea that like Russia

[00:12:21] is like beaming Havana syndrome into agents and like FBI and that's that's there's even less evidence for that. Why why that could happen you think nobody I'm saying there's less evidence than it is happening because they don't know how to do it.

[00:12:36] Yeah and it might not even be possible but in any case there's no evidence that it's been done. Do you think this is some deep state plot to get us to go to war with Russia or invade Cuba?

[00:12:51] Although I'm not buying into your dark view of the world either. I just don't I think people are suggestive and there are as we said contagions of hysteria. We see it all the time. I don't believe also I don't believe that girls lives are being destroyed by Instagram.

[00:13:07] Well that's I don't know like I know your boy Jonathan. Yeah but I he is my boy he's brilliant and everyone should listen to his talks and he's sound on almost every other topic but I think he's

[00:13:20] been drawn in and I only say this because every 10 or 15 years there is another kind of panic around the fragile psychology of girls. Girls are sound they're strong the majority are resilient they're human beings and I think it's actually demeaning to constantly

[00:13:39] claim that we're young ladies are falling apart they're not. Okay Jonathan sorry you don't win this one according to my stepmother I don't know I haven't looked into this evidence. I abstain from I think that's brave of you but just instinctively what do you think?

[00:13:58] Instinctively it wouldn't surprise me if it was bullshit but it also wouldn't surprise me if it was real it's like it's you know like I could see how it's fucking a lot of girls up but would they be fucked up anyway that's the thing I can't figure out.

[00:14:10] Yeah so probably our reasoning behind this is different is different like yeah you're just reflexively trying to defend like the Facebook corporation whereas I actually like I'm just very skeptical of these kinds of earlier I asked him about corporations he couldn't define them he

[00:14:29] couldn't state why he was opposed to them. I said that I was opposed to their political power in this country. Okay long COVID so you're skeptical you've already. I mean I'm skeptical like can we like Ross Douth he had long line. Long line.

[00:14:49] No he did have it I guess and I don't want to I don't want to be mean but if you the more you listen to him and his symptoms I it's I don't know it seems a little strange like he may there may be a psychological

[00:15:05] element to some of these things. Okay let's move off him long COVID it's mostly middle class white women that have long COVID many of them have never had COVID but they have long COVID this makes me skeptical and I think it might there are

[00:15:20] some afflictions that I think are typical of Karen's dare I say. So you think that long COVID is like mother's little helper like there's these women fine that would be fine I'm in favor of all

[00:15:34] the helpers we can get this is not a helper this no I mean but it's the same kind of person that like goes running to the shelter. Are you demeaning the middle age women that take drugs.

[00:15:46] No I'm saying it's that kind of woman that in the past would go and just kind of get lost in value back when things were cool but then now they claim to have long COVID. No they were different groups always and I've been there I can tell

[00:16:01] the people that take Val how do you pronounce it Valium Valium the people who take Val Valium. Yes it's absolutely is Valium one of our abiding regrets when you were a child is that we didn't send you to a class for diction

[00:16:18] or actually you did go to a class. Valium Valium well now it sounds weird coming out of my mouth Valium Valium Valium that's what you think it's like Valium it's Valium. I don't know is she right.

[00:16:36] Yeah and his wife backs me up okay but have I been doing that my whole life. No you've said Valium correctly in your life. I but are you sure. All right this is just it's the teachable moment. It's Valium apparently I'm wrong like I'm sure I'll hear

[00:16:57] from your followers about how I got destroyed on the pronunciation. Here's a question like that could maybe get us again common ground but like a year from now are we still going to be like is there still going to be pressure to wear masks is COVID

[00:17:11] still going to be a part of our lives next year at this time at Thanksgiving. It's going to be a measure of the health of the society and I don't mean health and sense of strength in regards to disease but the control of the society by the

[00:17:24] concernocrats and the safety culture and in my neighborhood which are your people. No they're definitely not they're not left as their they're fouchy worshipers. They do have you do have this creepiest thing there's like pictures of him on lawns.

[00:17:43] I like very uncomfortable is weird and I want to have more parks and I want to have multiple to vote against it we can't get anything in this town because of these your people but definitely not my people the point is and I do have one

[00:17:57] what the hell were we talking about. We're talking about COVID and whether this is like this is we're going to fucking agree about this like I think that's that this is a real problem that we don't know how to

[00:18:09] tolerate risk at all with this thing and this thing is going to be around forever. Do simple cost benefit analysis and the cost and the toll that we've taken on children with our school policies but what worries me is it for a certain percentage

[00:18:23] of people mostly liberals but yeah all liberals they are not going to give it up. They love the opportunity to be concerned and worried and and air on the side of caution. I walk at night I walk my dog at 10 o'clock at night and I

[00:18:38] see people with masks alone walking their dogs. But see that's not what concerns me like people do weird shit all the time and if they want to wear a mask outside it's when that becomes like the norm and

[00:18:52] that's becomes the thing that now all of a sudden you know people just have to mask up indoors in definitely going to be a variant. I mean look COVID right now is not doesn't pose a mortal danger to anybody who's been vaccinated and if

[00:19:06] people choose not to be vaccinated. OK fine that's your choice. So you're an anti-va I mean it's not a huge shogger but yes I've never been active. OK that's how you we are now past the risk of and I am in the age group that's most vulnerable.

[00:19:21] I have the identity of an at risk person. But so this is all this all goes back to the bicycle helmet thing which I was on earlier than anybody else. Not yeah like you know to make a sustained philosophical argument against bicycle helmets and I was right and

[00:19:39] this is like the result of it like you know and it's not even like I'm anti like we should mask in like it's just that we have to recognize that there are costs to doing that. They're not factoring like what we've done to children.

[00:19:53] It's inhibited their their their language development. It's well you it's not immediate and obvious and so they can just go by a few figures and then they're frightened but I'm afraid they're not going to give it up. I think they've been they're intoxicated with the

[00:20:06] the power of regulating and and censoring people. And it's we'll see but I but an honest answer I think in a year from I mean I'm already over it. Everybody here in Houston is over it's only in my neighborhood where they're they're never going to be over it.

[00:20:22] It lies as yeah we're actually I think pretty reasonable about it here in Houston so like I don't know why I'm complaining about it so much. Like I came like in the airport in Washington DC everybody had a mask and I'm just mask at this point

[00:20:35] mask averse because why I have been vaccinated everybody other reasonable person has so to hell with you but I come to Houston people aren't wearing masks. All right next topic. We have a lot to come up but we don't know if we'll get to all of these.

[00:20:51] Brett and Eric Weinstein really buy what they're saying about like Ivermectin. I don't know enough about this to have an opinion like so do you have an opinion about this. I don't know why it's even on here. I don't even know why they got into it because

[00:21:06] it's kind of a ridiculous topic. I mean everybody should get the vaccine. Everybody should get the booster and then move on. OK. JFK assassination. Was that Oswald acting alone. I mean like what's your number. Like here's where I want to hear a number.

[00:21:25] We haven't been using numbers but like I want to hear a number one to 10 Oswald acted alone for the JFK assassination. 11 he acted alone. It is they're kidding me. That's insane. I want to say that there was a time and I was a great

[00:21:44] Mort Saul fan and so was my dad and Mort Saul the comedian and some of you are too young to know who he was. So to hell with you but he really got into it with Mark Lane and that was my first conspiracy theory

[00:21:56] and that's what cured me I think because in the end my dad and I went through and we believed that there was a secret bullet a magic bullet. It couldn't possibly have been Oswald. Do you know what it was Oswald.

[00:22:08] It was Lee Harvey Oswald and if there was a conspiracy if he was connected to the mafia or it was a CIA somebody would have told people can't keep secrets. Forget your conspiracy theories human beings aren't good enough for real conspiracies they're not disciplined enough.

[00:22:23] First of all this idea that somebody would have told if people have told like ever like so many people have talked about the grassy no so many of you might know the grassy no name a name and then go Google it

[00:22:36] and you'll just find a charlatan and a fool. Second of all you don't even believe this like I've had conversations with you where you were like yeah I could have been like some CIA. No no no the CIA is not it's first of all they were

[00:22:51] they didn't want him dead. Absolutely wanted him dead. They were a bunch of lefties. The CIA. Gloria Steinem. So she doesn't believe this she's performing right now. I don't know why but like yes. So let me give my answer to that.

[00:23:12] To do you know about Oswald do you know his history. Do you know his story play for Cuba. Do you know he was a he defected to Russia. A lot of people did and then just came back and then it was like oh welcome back like here.

[00:23:28] There's never a screwball who kind of slips through and then he starts working for anti-communist organizations and then he's going to Havana and then he's going now like. All right. He could have been a rogue low level CIA informant that I mean

[00:23:45] there's possibilities but even that doesn't pan out because it's all been investigated. So then you think that Jack Ruby thought about the prospect of a trial the upcoming trial. Jack Ruby who is like importing prostitutes from Mexico. Bad guy.

[00:24:04] It just makes it a little unlikely that he was like I can't see Jackie going through. He loved Jackie. I don't want her going through at a trial and so he breaks in and just decides to kill Oswald.

[00:24:19] He just wanted to kill the motherfucker because he did love Jackie. She was a beautiful woman. What's not this is what I'm saying. No that's human nature. That is human nature. Let's go on. Let's get off politics. I'm going to skip the Jeffrey Epstein suicide because you'll

[00:24:35] probably say it was definitely a suicide and like we don't need to get into that. So. Alien life. There are extra terrestrials that know about us. They don't necessarily have to have come here but they're aware of us in some way and maybe they've come here.

[00:24:56] It's like one to ten. It's sad to think that they've come here and they just shrugged their shoulders and just found us uninteresting. Yeah. But you know wouldn't be that surprising right. Like I mean what if they came down and it just happened to be

[00:25:09] like the pussy march or the women's. They thought oh fuck. This we're getting out of here. I thought this might be fun. And you can't blame them. I mean if you came to a planet they were wearing the hats

[00:25:28] and there was the Karens and then the March of the. Let's get the fuck out of here. But I may just tell you that your dad was your godfather Leslie Orgel. No my godfather was you who the fucking Amit guy. Oh that's even better.

[00:25:42] All right maybe David's godfather was Leslie Orgel one of you kids and his his friend was Francis Crick and they were at the Salk Institute brilliant biologists but they were puzzled by the origins of life and they came up with a

[00:25:56] theory which they introduced and partly as a joke but I think they actually believed it because I was at the table when they talked about it. It was called directed panspermia. Directed panspermia. I thought that's not really what it was called really

[00:26:13] directed panspermia directed panspermia and they seeded they thought that the universe they mean they were reasonable the universe is so vast and so old a lot can go on but everywhere on earth and any form of life we found on

[00:26:30] earth you do find a constant which is the universality of the genetic code and they saw a certain as if it was almost had been coded and they postulated that we had been seeded intelligent life from another planet for whatever

[00:26:48] reason they may have just planted some little seeds and codes and started this whole damn thing. Yeah, I kind of believe it. Yeah, that would explain a lot. But the question is then did they are they keeping track of us? Is it some experiment or again?

[00:27:06] I want to live long enough to find out of this place. And there's so many unanswered questions. Yeah. And you have those kind of Illuminati connections that they would tell you like way before they would tell me.

[00:27:17] I know the I know the upper echelons of the what are those groups that run the Carlisle group where they pick the presidents and prime minister presidents and they're doing it. Yeah, yeah. Ann Applebaum is I think she's a member. That would make sense. That wouldn't surprise me.

[00:27:35] So dissing on Ann. I adore her and she's brilliant. And you know, alien life knows about us is a what? I hate to say this because I'm not sure I believe it but I have to think it's probably a six. Yeah, that sounds right for me.

[00:27:51] Six I go six seven five depending on the day. Yeah. And it's just based on like inferences about the way the world is in the universe is and in sufficient evidence. But I'm not close my mind. Last one, some sort of divinity that is either

[00:28:10] responsible for our creation or you know, concerned in some way, but it doesn't have to be both. Just like, you know, it can be like the sea they seeded us and then they're like, like this is what the Epicurans thought they were.

[00:28:25] Yeah, they created everything and they're like, all right, enough of this. We're going on to the new thing or they are concerned with us. Maybe they didn't create us, but they're concerned with us. I would love to believe that. I am actually envious of religious people.

[00:28:41] But since age nine or 10, I have not been able to believe it. It doesn't add up. It doesn't make sense. I there's too much counter evidence, but I'm open to I'm open to persuasion. Yeah, I don't know about the counter evidence.

[00:28:55] It's just that there's not enough evidence of it. Like, I mean, there's evidence to my position. Yeah. That's bourbon, which you can have, but I don't want to date Rick drug at this point. That's weird. We're the one that had us all in the hot tub.

[00:29:12] So the point is, what do you think about the conspiracy theory about critical race theory? It's definitely like one of the least believable conspiracy theories. Like it's like just completely made up by your people. But it's like obviously not. I mean, we've talked about this. I don't know.

[00:29:29] We don't need to believe her. My opinion of the podcast that I can state categorically. Oh, I forgot what I was going to say. And I had a statement. I had my notes. Let's see. No, it's not coming up. Um, what were we talking about before?

[00:29:44] No, we were talking about the divinity. No, we're not past that. I haven't said what I think about it. Well, what do you think about it? I don't know. Nobody wants to hear it. Oh, yeah. We people want to hear your thoughts. Yeah, I don't know.

[00:30:05] I mean, I'm a little more open to it than I used to be. But you know, I don't fully feel it. But you know, your dad was an atheist. He couldn't help it from a very young age. And he had to leave rabbinical school and study philosophy.

[00:30:19] It was the only place that would take credits from a God divinity school. But anyway, he went there, but he always. He didn't like atheists. They annoyed him because they hadn't he and he earned it because he went into the depths of absolute conviction.

[00:30:33] These atheists these days, these young atheists, they just they think they can come up. OK, I do think, though, that this all this meditation stuff has made me think that like we there is something possibly interconnected about everything in a way that I didn't think before.

[00:30:54] Not just interconnected, like, but we can get glimpses into it. And when you get glimpses into like this other kind of reality, this different layer or dimension of reality, it's it's it is something that we can't explain with our science and that I

[00:31:13] like I could see thinking of those kinds of experiences as Godlike or related to God. Well, I don't know. I have had those experiences on. I don't say when I took it, LSD, DMT, and you have these spiritual experiences and you see a different domain.

[00:31:33] But, you know, it wasn't as fascinating as a great Oscar Wilde play. It was. I mean, it was I'm I don't respect it as much as spiritualists do. And I'm not being sexist here, but it's mostly men, some women,

[00:31:46] but mostly men that have these spiritual experiences and they they run away to meditation centers and meditate for 11 hours. I think it's depression in men and they're just not attuned to the lively. I mean, I do not wish to meditate.

[00:32:00] And in fact, if you if you tango, you get more of a high than meditating. That's all. All I'm saying is that you get glimpses and maybe and through and maybe in a similar variety, you know, having taken some hallucinogenics myself, like I get that there is some

[00:32:21] overlap here. But my point is it doesn't matter like how it gets there and whether you through meditation or anything, I get why people will associate those kinds of experiences with God or something deeply spiritual that is not explainable by our current scientific paradigms.

[00:32:42] Yeah, but that doesn't mean that we understand it or know what it is. And as your father once said he was at actually a debate in Israel and someone was denying that we had enough evidence to support the existence of God.

[00:32:57] And then someone said, but what about on the other side of the cosmos? We have no idea. And then the speaker said, what business is yours? What's on the other side of the cosmos? You have no idea. There's no basis for an opinion.

[00:33:10] We have no we have no basis for an opinion. And why isn't it just fantasy and even like chaotic brain chemistry, which is what I suspect by these men that get into meditation and do journal as well. No, that's my brother. The alleged consensual sons have her.

[00:33:36] All right. I think on that note, beware of men that keep journals. We should wrap this up. This was a narcissist and also meditators. I mean, okay, a little meditation. It's fine. I'm not against it. And I have nothing against people with with with what is that

[00:33:53] disorder that everybody has now? Celiac disease, but gluten free people. Some people genuinely have it, but most are faking. Okay. Like on that note, we will bring this segment to a close. Thank you so much for being here.

[00:34:10] We have a lot of people who are kind of just looking at us like it was a train wreck. I have no idea why, but it was fun as always and we'll be back and we'll be right back. Gen 1, 1 hands of kitten and we'll be

[00:34:29] we'll be right back to talk about primer with special guest, Barry Land. Today's episode is sponsored by BetterHelp Online Therapy. Check out betterhelp.com slash VBW. Life is full of stressors. It doesn't matter who you are or what you have. Your life is probably stressful.

[00:34:49] And now that the holiday season is approaching, there's a whole new set of things to weigh down on us traveling difficult family members. I mean, look, you heard in the opening segment, I know all about difficult family members and you may not be feeling down and out

[00:35:03] and depressed or like you're at a total loss. But if your stress is high and your temper is shorter than usual, or even if you're just starting to feel that strain and anxiety about your relationships, you could probably use it the chance to unload.

[00:35:17] So unload the stress and get it out. Talk to someone who's completely unbiased about your life. Someone who isn't going to judge you or take sides on anything. They can give you a fresh perspective on the difficulties that you're facing.

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[00:37:43] Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. This is the time of the episode, the predictable time that we like to thank all of our listeners and our community for just your wonderful feedback, your interaction with us, your willingness to engage with us and with each other.

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[00:41:44] for better or for worse, for better or for worse. So far for better. Those episodes have all been really good, I think. And then we end up getting like seven or eight topics out of it to do anyway.

[00:41:56] And then for our $10.00, oh, you also get at the $5.00 level your lectures and our brothers, Karamazov mini series, five episodes on the brothers, Karamazov that we recorded now about a year and a half ago, right? Hell, I should.

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[00:42:27] No, I haven't seen anything. Yeah, there's some good questions there. So thank you so much to everybody who supports us. It means the world to us and we really, really appreciate it. All right, now we're going to be joined by Professor Barry Lamb. Barry is an associate professor

[00:42:44] and he's actually chair of the Philosophy Department. Did you know that? I don't know what you told us. Story, it didn't, it's not in the episode, but he told kind of a crazy story about that. Yeah, I don't know why anybody would be chair of anything.

[00:42:57] But I can't imagine. He is originally from California, which means I like him. We bonded over that. He went to UC Irvine and got his PhD in philosophy at Princeton. And now he does, you probably know him best,

[00:43:10] if you know him at all, as the host of the High Finanation podcast, a wonderful podcast on philosophy. That's at highfinanation.org. We'll talk a little bit more about the podcast when we bring him on, but check it out. We'll put links to it.

[00:43:24] So yeah, let's bring Barry on. All right, well, we're happy to welcome to the podcast for the first time, at least on the main feed and also me getting to talk to him, Barry Lamb. Welcome to Very Bad Wizard. Yeah, welcome. Hey guys, big fan of the show.

[00:43:41] I listen every two weeks. Oh, well thank you. That's great. Barry has his own podcast that we've often referred to as exactly the sort of podcasts that were completely and utterly incapable of every doing. It's a different format. I can't do what you're doing, right?

[00:43:57] Well produced High Finanation amazing podcast on I guess the Slate Network. That's right, that's right. I'm on Slate. The Breakthrough Philosophy podcast. No. It's not a breakthrough. It's so many people, all of you who got into podcasting earlier have larger audiences than me because you guys hit

[00:44:20] when people wanted to listen. And what I wanted to do was just to create like a documentary type show rather than a discussion based show. So really the way to describe it is, okay, it's a documentary type show about philosophy.

[00:44:32] Yeah, it's this American life but on philosophical issues and topics like... Philosophical issues and philosophical stories so things that happen in the world like news magazine type stuff. And incredibly well produced. So highly recommended, check out High Finanation. But also I just want to point out

[00:44:50] like one man shop, obviously you have people come on and do interviews but you chop that thing up all by yourself. Like how long does it take you to do one episode? Oh my God, like two to three months really.

[00:45:01] So when it actually comes down to making a 40 minute episode it's two weeks full time, right? So about 80 hours to make 40 minutes of actual cutting tape and like writing narration and soundtracking. That's about how much we take. Do you? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and the interviews itself,

[00:45:19] yeah the interviews itself it's like, you know you book people, takes about an hour or two hours to read their stuff and about an hour to interview them, that kind of stuff. And that's just to get tape. So combined I would say like maybe

[00:45:32] about a hundred hours per episode. And you do all of that? You don't have an editor or a producer? No I do all of it. The only thing that I farm out is for most but not all of the interviews I have them transcribed by a research assistant

[00:45:48] but that's after software. So the software you know gives you like the thing and then they chop it up and put timestamps in it for me. Because I cut on paper and on tape combined. Oh yeah. So I have all of the interviews in front of me

[00:46:00] and then I try to figure out how to put it together because if it's not just an open discussion with people you gotta like, like I just did one on like altruistic kidney donation. So like how do you incorporate the person who got their kidney,

[00:46:11] you know taken out with like the people who are arguing about altruism and that kind of stuff. And so most of the time is taken just thinking about how to put that together. And you do the music too or you decide on the music?

[00:46:24] I decide, I do the soundtracking. I don't make, I mean I tried making it for a bit but I'm not as good as Dave. And like if I had Dave's skills I would just like put all my beats underneath. But I don't,

[00:46:36] I look for music that I think fits the theme of an episode. So I kind of have to listen to the theme of the episode and the voices to figure out what kind of sound I want. So why David Lewis?

[00:46:47] That's the theme for this year, right this season. How many episodes on David Lewis for so far? Yeah we just, I did four. It's gonna be a four total. So it's a four part series on the life and work of David Lewis. So it's not a special story.

[00:47:00] Like so for instance, like every episode I'd want to have a story paired with philosophy, right? But with David Lewis it's like time travel. Oh, am I gonna find some guy who time traveled and then like do a story? Do David Lewis on time travel? No, it wasn't.

[00:47:12] So with the David Lewis series the way it just got started was I found myself in Australia on a production trip. I was invited to the ANU there by Seth Lazar and I was down there and I was just getting taped for various other things that turned out

[00:47:27] to be season three of the show. And I remembered in graduate school that David Lewis just spent all of his, I guess summers but it's winter there in Australia, in Australia and he had deep roots in Australia. So there I said there must be people

[00:47:42] who remember David Lewis and this, they're all getting up there. They're all like 70, 80 years old. So I'll start by collecting footage of their memories of David Lewis and that's all I'm gonna do. I don't know what I'm gonna do with that.

[00:47:56] And then the pandemic hit and I just had all this tape and I need to make a new season. So I'm like, let me pursue this because instead of trying to go out there and get more tape. And it just so happened that it's the 20th anniversary

[00:48:09] of his death and also his 80th birthday cause he died when he was 60. And I remember it very clearly cause it was my first year of graduate school. I went to Princeton. I didn't take a class with David Lewis cause he passed away one month after my orientation.

[00:48:23] It was just after 9-11. Right, so this is where it comes from, right? So he was this giant figure who in the first month I started graduate school died. There was a very, I guess kind of compelling story about how he died,

[00:48:38] which is the opening story of the entire series. I listened to that opening episode to prepare for this and also just cause it's great. And that is a terrible story. Yeah. I didn't get a chance to get through the episode but I listened to that part.

[00:48:54] Like I listened to that story and yeah, it was sad man. Yeah, so that's how he died. And so I thought, yeah, no better way. Like I'll make a three-part series or four-part series. I'll go through what episodes of his life that are interesting.

[00:49:10] He wasn't a particularly flashy guy. It wasn't like he was having parties or whatever. Like it comes across just the kind of person that he was. As opposed to all the other philosophers. He was doing coke and like... Well, I think there's a segment

[00:49:27] of the philosophical community that was, I don't know, not swingers and partyers, but they were normal people. But then there was this other contingent and I think he was one of them and the most beloved member of this contingent. Like not quite as weird as Saul Kripke

[00:49:42] and as hygienic. And he was just this philosopher's philosopher. They just loved him. I mean, like every when I went to grad school with my professors and their professors all just worshiped David Lewis. He was like a paradigm. Yeah, every...

[00:50:01] I mean, the thing is nobody says they believe his most prominent views, but everybody, everybody without exception would admire him. And that's not true of his advisor, Kwein. Like I can't stand reading Kwein and I'll say that. But nobody actually says they can't stand David Lewis.

[00:50:22] They're like, okay, if David Lewis wrote a paper on something that you're thinking about, you better go damn read the paper. Yeah, I don't know if I could go that far. Well, that Tamler doesn't read any philosophy. It's not gonna resonate.

[00:50:38] So David Lewis has always been for me, someone who's not a philosopher, not trained in, I didn't go to grad school in philosophy. My entry into the world of philosophy was later and not professional. David Lewis is like worshiped by philosophers

[00:50:55] but weirdly, like I think just random people like Nagel are more well known by non-philosophers. He seems like especially not well known given the amount that he's respected, the degree to which he's respected. So what is it about Lewis that causes this sort of paradox though?

[00:51:15] Like the asymmetry between- I don't know because it's one of those things where I even say in the series, at the beginning of the series, here's somebody who was a giant figure of 20th century philosophy that most of you haven't heard of. And then my slate editor says,

[00:51:29] yeah, I never heard of this guy. Who is this guy? And I couldn't tell you why. I mean, you can hypothesize. You can say well, he worked in technical areas. You can say that, right? And he worked in the areas in which people know him best

[00:51:43] in the academy outside of philosophy. He is in theoretical linguistics and semantics. So if you work in a department like that, you would know papers, his most cited papers are in the philosophy of language. It's just surprising because in philosophy

[00:51:57] he's most known for what he seemed to care most about, which is in metaphysics. But he did a lot of the work that eventually became like pragmatics or formal semantics or rules of conversation. His dissertation was on convention, which was the application of game theory

[00:52:13] to various things, social conventions to which he included linguistic conventions. I'm told by reputable sources that those are the things that are most long lasting about Lewis in areas in academia outside. But those are things that are particularly popular outside of academia, right?

[00:52:32] He wasn't a figure who had views about social political issues. He never spoke to an audience outside of philosophy really. And he was, if people go through the entire series, he was weird. He was the kind of person where you have a conversation with him,

[00:52:52] he would stop, this is bad radio, but it would be like 20 seconds of silence and then he would say something like this. I have 14 objections. Number one, number two, there are six things you can say in response to the third objection, four of which are decisive.

[00:53:15] That's the kind of guy he was, right? And that's why philosopher is admired. I didn't know he sounded exactly like Josh Noe. Josh, you know, I have a... So much faster than Lewis would. I have a theory that his name just isn't memorable.

[00:53:34] And this might be, because I'll tell you what, I knew about the Mad Pain and Martian Pain article. Like I could tell, but for a long time of knowing that article, I wouldn't remember who had written it. Wow. And even though like at that point

[00:53:51] I'd probably heard people say David Lewis's name quite a bit, maybe it's something as boring. Well, that's actually a good transition maybe to his views on time travel, since we're gonna talk about primer at some length. You know, he had that,

[00:54:03] and I know this from listening to your episode, the site of the future is just essentially in the past and everything is just stamped down all at once. That's right. And everything that happens on it is already happened, going to happen. It's all fixed.

[00:54:18] It's all a fact already. So from what's happened, so am I understanding right that he was the sort of person who believed that everything was fixed such that paradoxes in time travel just were impossible? Right, not all paradoxes just depending on what he wanted to say.

[00:54:34] So his view about time travel is the, so a movie like 12 Monkeys is like a perfect example. So there are quintessentially Louisian time travel movies. 12 Monkeys is one, you might say like Lost of the series is like a Louisian one, right? So, a Louisian time travel movie

[00:54:54] I'm trying to think of other ones, so the movie Predestination, have you seen it? No, I haven't. Okay, yeah. That's like a, it's one, it's a snake eating its tails. It's nothing can happen to change. Right. Sorry, spoiler. That's exactly the Louis view.

[00:55:10] If you're in the same world and you're time traveling within the same world, the fact that you, it's in your past now, if you traveled to, you know, 1979 in your past now means that you, it already happened in your past.

[00:55:23] So when you move forward and travel back in time, right? There's nothing that you could do by time traveling that's any different from what has already happened in the past before you time traveled. And that, so any movie or any TV show

[00:55:36] that depicts that is a quintessentially Louisian movie. And I'm, so wait, let me just make sure I understand. So you had Megan Sullivan on your, from Notre Dame on the podcast. And she was saying, if she, you know, lived till 2020, went back, wanted to meet her parents.

[00:55:53] In the 80s and hang out with them, she could do that. And then just decided not to get back in any time travel machine, but just live her life from then on. Would there be then, and this was always true, two Megan Sullivan's from 1988 to 2022?

[00:56:13] So this is another part of Louis's view. There would be two stages of Megan Sullivan, right? But Megan Sullivan is the sum total of all of their temporal stages. So this is how he solved the problem of personal identity with respect to time travel, right?

[00:56:29] Could there be one in the same person, one who's standing and one who's sitting and that's a contradiction. And the response to that is, well, there are two person stages and every single person you meet in time is a person stage, not a person.

[00:56:44] To be a person is just the entire space time thing. Yeah. I guess just to get the practical details down from that, could that Megan have gone to Boston while the other one stayed in wherever she would her parents were and just grew up like that.

[00:57:02] And even if they are ultimately the same Megan, there are now, in this world, there would just be two of them existing at the same time, one as a younger version, one as an older version. Yeah, absolutely that's possible. Yeah, that's possible in Louis's view.

[00:57:16] And the thing that Louis would add is that this older Megan who time traveled, it had always been true in her past even before she time traveled that there was this other Megan while she was young. But she can't kill infant Megan. That's right, that's right. Yeah.

[00:57:34] She can't like the bullet would jam or just something would happen that made it not the case. I would say it's even more than that. The bullet would jam and it was always true that the bullet jammed because it was in that Megan's past.

[00:57:46] That's a future version tried to shoot her and the bullet jammed. Okay, so I guess my question was, so this is a substantive view on time travel. I like it, it seems as plausible as any to me but it seemed like the way he got there

[00:57:59] based on what you said was just the possibility of time travel meant that you have to have this kind of four dimensional view of personhood and of the universe. So is it just the conceptual possibility of time travel that made him endorse this substantive view

[00:58:20] about how everything works and how the world works and how people are? It may not have been only the conceptual possibility of time travel but it plays a major part in how he thinks about, say the self, right? The self has to be this four dimensional thing

[00:58:35] and each one of us at this moment are stages. David Lewis always argued holistically. So he would argue for every metaphysical view holistically, not on the basis of one thing, he would say. And then this temporal stage thing helps you solve this other problem

[00:58:50] and that's a check in its favor. That's another distinctively Lewisian way of doing philosophy which some people hate and some people absolutely love. I mean, I actually think his legacy is as much methodological as it is substantive which is, this is how you argue.

[00:59:04] You don't say this is decisive reason in favor of your view or this is a decisive reason against. Like you just like do a check mark in its favor that the stage theory of person solves the problem of contradicting selves given the conceptual possibility of time travel.

[00:59:21] And then if there are problems with that somewhere else, you put it a minus and then if there's good things happen here then you could put it a plus. And yeah. Assemble the best world view you can. That's right. That's super interesting.

[00:59:34] And am I right in that his view of possible worlds was quite literal? It is. It is. It's as literal as it gets. Right, so he actually believed. He wasn't just saying like conceptually imagine there's another world with this one mutation from our world.

[00:59:55] He was saying no, it exists. Famously that's what distinguished Lewis from just about everybody else in philosophy. Talk about like biting the bullet. Well, I mean like he said that the only objection to that is that I typically get is the incredulous stare which you're doing right now.

[01:00:13] Right, well I mean most of the time when I talk to you. Most of the time. In the series I try to motivate it for people because it's one of those things where I'm trying to make the show for people who are more than just philosophy geeks.

[01:00:26] I'm trying to motivate and I think that the view was easy to understand. Everybody can get it. Everybody's watched sci-fi so they can get quantum leap going from one possible universe to another. What they might not get is how on earth can someone come to believe that

[01:00:40] on the basis of thinking about something else? Right, right, right. Yeah usually it's usually in like comic books it's just motivated by like the physicists need to understand probabilistic superposition or whatever where you're just like okay the way that this resolves is one universe

[01:00:58] that the photon goes left in one universe it goes right and that's perfectly fine. But Louis got there sitting down. No, that's right. Thinking about counterfactuals right? Right, like the official line is that that's how he came to think about it. He thought about counterfactuals,

[01:01:14] he thought about causation and he thought about all of the metaphysical things that will just hang together if you just assume this is true. So what's an inference to the best explanation? It's just if you assume this is true lots of things will be nice for you

[01:01:28] and so there's more check marks in its favor than not. What's that Wilford Sellers quote like philosophy is trying to see how things hang together in the loosest possible sense or hang in the loosest possible sense together in the loosest possible sense or something like that?

[01:01:43] That's right, there's a quote like that. I remember that quote, yeah. I have to admit that as we get into discussing this movie I have to admit that my favorite time travel movies independent of knowing who David Lewis was are always ones in which nothing can change

[01:02:00] because I love Back to the Future, it's one of my favorite movies of all time but not because of its time problem. It's a great movie but you have these examples of terrible, terrible movies that try to deal somehow with the paradoxes that arise

[01:02:16] and they do so in such a miserable fashion and Looper is one of them where it's like you injure him in some future, I mean in some past and then in sort of real time the scars started up. That's right. Or the arms just start like falling off.

[01:02:34] Falling off or disappearing, yeah. No that's right, that's right. Yeah it's an interesting contrast Looper and Primer we can maybe talk about it. I think one is definitely a more mainstream, he's not, I guess he is a Hollywood director at this point, Ryan Johnson. Ryan Johnson.

[01:02:51] And the other is an engineer like, scrounging up together $7,000 but he came to play when it comes to the actual like mechanics of how all this works. Right, so Barry have you had watched, I assume Primer before? No, no you haven't.

[01:03:11] This is the first time I've seen Primer. Oh wow. What did you think? I was so confused by the end of it. I actually had to look up an explainer and though explainers help a little bit, but not enough. Did you watch it again?

[01:03:28] I haven't, I've watched it once but I've been thinking about it. That seems hard because I was like, even though I had seen it before, I watched it last night and then I was like, I gotta watch it again. Now that I know. And then read explainers.

[01:03:41] I mean, I think you're like 99% of people who see this movie, like the first thing they do is go to Google and start saying like Primer explained or Primer analysis or whatever. There is absolutely no way, I don't think you can, anybody who says they understood this movie

[01:03:57] after watching it the first time, just foolish it. And it came out in 2004 when it, that just wasn't, there wasn't that much stuff up about it properly. So you really had to search it out then but now you don't, there's tons of stuff on it

[01:04:09] and listeners should definitely, we're gonna spoil it. Listeners to the extent that you can spoil something you don't fully understand. And listeners should definitely watch this either once or twice before coming back and listening to the discussion. Cause I'm excited to talk about it. Yeah, me too.

[01:04:27] All right. I'm glad we popped your Primer cherry. Did you like it? Yes, I did. I did. I look, the confusion is always gonna be there but I did feel that this movie behind the confusion, there's something factual. Like there actually is a way

[01:04:44] that this movie is coherent and like what we're seeing is an, there's an order of explanation there in a way that's kind of different from like other more artistically done movies like, I don't know, Lost Highway or like something like David Lynch or something where you're just like.

[01:04:59] Whoa. Right, yeah. We're gonna have to bring this episode to a close. Thanks for joining us, Barry. I love David Lynch and I love Lost Highway and when I watched that, I just, I think to myself, maybe there isn't anything for me to piece together here.

[01:05:16] I just need to enjoy just how this is done and how it's blowing my mind. And Primer wasn't just like, oh, this is blowing my mind. I didn't feel that way. I felt like there's something going on. They are trying to tell a consistent time travel story.

[01:05:30] I just need to think about it more. Yeah, and I think, you know, it is. I think Primer, it's as about as coherent as I would think it would be possible to be. I think there are some paradoxes in there that, but it's unclear.

[01:05:44] Just the attitude towards paradoxes, there's a line about it in the movie which is like he says, I don't believe that shit. I figure it all works itself out. The universe works itself out. And I think, like I was wondering if that's a Lewisian kind of sentiment

[01:06:00] because what he's saying is look, it's whatever happens, the universe can have it happen. Although I know there are elements that are not Lewisian, but just that idea that, look, this is not something that's gonna make everything collapse.

[01:06:15] It'll make maybe the father of what's her name, Rachel, collapse. But it won't like the universe isn't going anywhere because of this. That is a Lewisian sentiment. It absolutely is. I am wondering about when I think about this film, there are particular lines that happen in this film,

[01:06:35] particular scenes which are thoroughly Lewisian and its view about time travel and then other ones that are not. That's really interesting because usually if you have a film that's trying to be, we're changing the past kind of film. That we're clearly non-Lewisian. That's consistent throughout.

[01:06:51] Even if that makes no sense at the end of the day, they're consistently like, we're changing the past kind of film. Or if you're a Lewisian film, it's like a thoroughly Lewisian film. And this one was a little bit of both and that's interesting. Well, cause they're like,

[01:07:03] that's the one thing I like about it. They're trying to figure it out just like we are. So they don't know like if you can change, like they have to run an experiment to see whether they like anything they do can actually affect the future.

[01:07:15] It's only when they realize, it's only when one of the guys messes up and brings a cell phone into the hotel where they're hiding out by mistake that they realize, oh shit, we can actually do something that will affect the future. But they didn't know at that point.

[01:07:29] And again, like we're talking about this abstractly but maybe as we get into the details, we can see whether we even agree about what's happening. So is one of you gonna give the spoiler like the summary of the movie? Well, yeah, let's give the broad.

[01:07:44] Why don't you give the broad sort of? Well, there are four engineers, but clearly, but our protagonists are two of them, Aaron and Abe, who I assume have both biblical and alphabetical significance. They're right, AB. Yeah, and they're all just these kind of broke engineers

[01:08:02] is kind of brilliant way of doing a low budget movie is have your characters also broke. And they're trying to find like venture capital, money, VC attention, as they say. And it's like the script is really good. Like I don't understand that stuff,

[01:08:16] but like I believe that this is how they would talk in this kind of situation. Yeah. So he was a math major and then worked in software and this is just like an engineer wrote, like wrote the dialogue. It sounds even the interruptions

[01:08:33] and the lack of explaining any, there's no exposition. There's no clumsy exposition. There's no clumsy exposition. There's no hand holding. If you didn't get it, you didn't get it. And in fact, if you didn't hear it, you probably didn't get it. Like I'm glad that I have subtitles

[01:08:47] because the sound production wasn't the best on the. I did that for the first time in my whole life, turned on the subtitles for the second, my second viewing of the movie. Anyway, so they are working on a bunch of things.

[01:09:01] And I guess one of the friends comes up with project and then Aaron and Abe take that in a direction that was not anticipated by anybody. And they kind of keep it within themselves. And I'm not going to go into any detail about how,

[01:09:16] but they figure out that it forms the basis for some sort of time travel machine, but a time travel machine that will only let you go back in time from the moment you turn it on. Like you can't go back previously in the past.

[01:09:30] You also can't go into the future. All you can do is go into that machine and for however long you stay in the machine, right? That's when you come out. Is that how it works? Yeah, that's how many hours into the past you will have gone.

[01:09:42] That's how many hours of the past that you will have gone. So if I turn on the machine at nine in the morning and I let it run until five, I then get in the machine for all of those hours

[01:09:55] and I will emerge at nine in the morning when I turn the machine on. Right. And then one of the things that I missed out on the explainers explained to me is when they actually go to the hotel room. So the first watching I was like,

[01:10:09] when are they going after they time travel? They go to a hotel room after they turn the machine on. That's right. Right? Because they're hiding from their future selves who will be emerging from the time machine at the time they turned it on. That's right.

[01:10:26] So they set a timer so that the time machine will turn on automatically. They can scurry away, hide in a hotel room for six hours. And when the machine turns on, their future selves emerge and can interact with the world with knowledge from the future.

[01:10:45] Because what they do then is they spend six hours in the hotel just fucking around except right at the end, they see what stocks have gone up significantly that day. Then they go get back in the machine and then come out as the other people.

[01:11:00] No, no, no, no, sorry, that's wrong. I think that's right. They come out of the machine at 9 a.m. Oh, right. Yes. At 9 a.m., they come out of the machine and then now can go make those trades. That's right.

[01:11:12] And they are the ones who persist in the timeline because the ones who are in the hotel room then go... Are sitting around waiting to get into the machine. They go into the machine. That's right. That's right. So that closes the loop. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:11:27] I think it's something really interesting that I will... Maybe it'll come up organically, but this machine is so much about the mechanics of time travel when you watch it and the mystery of what's going on. That it's easy to miss the sort of commentary

[01:11:43] that it's making on just these guys and their relationship. Maybe it was just for me, but that fact that they at first are talking about like all of the interesting things they might do with this machine, whatever it turns out to be, it could have so many applications,

[01:11:57] but then they just go play the stock market. That's what they do. They're like, that's what they do. Yeah. I mean, I think they're sort of trying to figure it out and it's just the first week. Like they don't have... They can't... Because of the time limitations,

[01:12:10] there's only so much that they can do. And so they figure they're going to make a ton of money at first, not even wait for the lottery because that's six days from now. And so... But yeah, you're right. They don't seem like good people.

[01:12:22] They each have their interesting qualities. One of them, Aaron is a family man. He has a wife and two kids that he barely seems to pay attention to or care about. The other one has a girlfriend named Rachel, right? Yeah, that's a major plot driver right there.

[01:12:39] Which is a major plot driver. And... But it seems like you learn that he envies Aaron's kind of family life and is not... I think he only has one daughter. Maybe one daughter. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. This episode of Very Bad Wizards is brought to you

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[01:15:13] The major plot drivers are the stock trading and then this party. There's this party that happens and it's Rachel's ex-boyfriend and they have to confront Rachel's ex-boyfriend. Those are two very, very simple, not particularly dramatic plot drivers. And you can understand why you have a low budget film.

[01:15:32] But one of the things that's great about the film is that it makes you realize that time travel movies are all epics. They're all about wars and like the destruction of the United States like in the case of Looper or like your parents. All that stuff. Or 12 monkeys.

[01:15:48] Yeah, saving the world of pandemics. And what this film shows is that even if you have the most minor of things that you're using to drive the plot, you can do something with it. With time travel. And we mentioned this before but it's made for $7,000 in 2004

[01:16:07] which is just incredible shot on film. Yeah, no absolutely and it looks good. Looks very good. They're cool shots. And he knew nothing about filmmaking. It's like both an inspiration and a condemnation. Like all people like me. Like what, like he made that from absolutely nothing.

[01:16:26] And you know, with just actors he cobbled together and himself because he stars in the film as Aaron. And it is just, it's a mind fuck but it does have a kind of bite to it. It has an edge to it in terms of the characters.

[01:16:38] And you get invested in their stories for the 70 minute running time or whatever it is. It's also very tail heavy. I remember looking at the running time and we were maybe an hour in which meant only about 20 minutes left. Most of the action happens in the last 15 minutes.

[01:16:56] Like the things that are, that when it all starts to come together or fall apart depending on how you describe it. So, and that's where most of the paradoxical stuff happens too. Super interestingly, that the last part of the movie

[01:17:12] is alerting you to the fact that a lot of action is going on in the first part of the movie. You just didn't know. That's totally Louisian by the way. And what you thought you were seeing, you weren't seeing. So the big example,

[01:17:25] the first big I think plot point is when, and they do this brilliantly like they each kind of make big steps in progress. So first Aaron figures out something about this enzyme and I won't go into the details but then he explains that to Abe.

[01:17:42] And then in the scene I'm about to talk about Abe comes, sees Aaron on the park bench. He says listening to March Madness, like a tournament game and just says, look I have to show you everything that like I've just learned and everything I just discovered

[01:17:58] and walks him through explaining to him exactly what happened. At the end of this scene where he hasn't said anything about time travel, he says, look I'm gonna show you something right now like you're my friend.

[01:18:11] I'm not like I wouldn't lie to you if this is not a prank. I wouldn't do that. And you see the other Abe coming out of the storeroom area where the time machine is. And then he just walks Aaron through the first time that they're gonna do that

[01:18:26] which is so if that's Monday, Tuesday is the first day, allegedly that Aaron goes through it. We later learned that that's not true. Right. So in that first plot point you think Aaron is just getting introduced to the machine

[01:18:41] and there's no way for you not to think this to the machine, to how it works for the first time. But actually what's going on is he's already been through all of that and he's there now to record everything that happens to him for the next few days

[01:18:58] because this is already like a third generation Aaron. Right. At that time. Yeah, he's audio recording every conversation. Right. And then later iterations of him is listening. Right. Using it as a guide. I love too that there's a couple things.

[01:19:16] One, if you watch the movie twice in a row like Taylor and I did, let's prepare for this. You'll notice that Aaron, there's in the performance Aaron betrays that at certain points he already knew. You can see it on his face. He's sort of bored with it.

[01:19:36] He's going through the motions of listening to the explanation. And he's showing some surprise or whatever. He's showing, yeah, he's acting. Yeah, he's acting. Like you can kind of tell that he's acting it. Which for a low budget amateur movie, their performances are really good. They were convincing.

[01:19:53] And the second thing is that you notice that this whole thing is built on Artifice. Like there's deception from the beginning and these two guys who are presumably best friends or at least good enough friends like Tamler and I that they have like a joint business venture

[01:20:10] and they have to put up with each other. And, but from the beginning of the movie there's already been one betrayal of deception and then that will just continue. I think Aaron more than Abe though. I think Abe's reactionary. He's a much more sympathetic character in that sense.

[01:20:29] Like I think he's more of a loyal friend. He might cut it. He's a bit of a pushover. Yeah, a little bit of a pushover. And Aaron's a little bit of the kind of the bully in the relationship, in the friendship. But also like they seem like peers

[01:20:44] and they hang out at each other's house. That's right. So, so yeah. And they both clearly are smart and have contributed to the building of this machine. So do, are we agreed on that that when Abe comes to tell Aaron that Aaron already knows what he's gonna hear

[01:21:04] and is just now recording what they're saying. I guess we don't know that for sure, but we have every reason to suspect that that's the case based on subsequent. We're led to believe that's an important part of the plot. It's a big reveal in it. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[01:21:19] Which is a thoroughly Louisian way of thinking about this film. There are many points on this film. So the way that you would depict a Louis time travel movie is that every scene that you watch, the only things, something's hidden from you.

[01:21:40] So you don't present a different version of the scene. You just present something else that's happening in the scene. But the things that you saw before are also still happening. So like that's a Louis way of thinking about time travel where these things all happened,

[01:21:56] but what you didn't notice was in the background there were these other things happening also. And that's consistent with only one history. There's only one possible history. So that the scene involving Kim with the earphones, the talk about the attic is a thoroughly Louisian thing.

[01:22:13] So one scene they're talking about, oh, she thinks there's rats in the attic, but I think that they're birds, but it's really Aaron who was drugged by the later Aaron was always up there the whole time. And in all these other iterations, they're just talking about the Aaron

[01:22:29] that's up in the attic. That's a Louisian thing because we later realized that that's what was happening the whole time, that some Aaron drugged an earlier Aaron and placed them in the attic. Right, right, right exactly. So that seems right. Here's my question though.

[01:22:46] Aren't we to assume that at one point, Abe told a fresh virgin Aaron that about the time travel machine and the only reason this Aaron knows about it is because he's literally a different Aaron. He's the, I think this is the third Aaron.

[01:23:04] The second Aaron has already gone to Paris or France or wherever he ends up. So there was an original Aaron who did, I don't know if he had his earpiece in or not. This is a part that I find so hard to wrap my head around

[01:23:19] because there has to have been an original walkthrough of the events with an unwitting Aaron. Or else how could Aaron have found out what was going on? Right, but we are only ever presented. We never see the fresh Aaron. We're only ever presented with Aaron who knows.

[01:23:38] And it, we're left to sort of infer how this works. And I suppose you could make an argument that no, this is a closed system such that like he always knew. If it were a closed system, the way that the original Aaron would have known

[01:23:55] is by a later Aaron recording and calling his own cell phone and leaving the message so that the original Aaron knew by way of the later Aaron telling him. That is kind of what happened. That is what happened. That's what happened then it's thoroughly closed system. That's Louisian.

[01:24:12] This is another. So he's already like recording the day because he's gotten that phone call from him, from one of his other later selves, which we didn't mention, but that's the narrator. He's a cell phone message from Aaron time X to Aaron time zero or time one.

[01:24:28] That's right. He's listening to the call of his later self telling him this is exactly what's about to happen. So that's that closed causal loop is thoroughly internally consisted at Louisian. What isn't though? What isn't though? And this is crystal clear in the film

[01:24:47] is that Abe collapses in one of those scenes and he doesn't collapse into another scene. When he comes out and he talks to Aaron on the bench, that cannot happen in a Louisian closed loop system. You cannot have the same moment in time. Two different things happen.

[01:25:03] And also there's one of the Mondays where Abe goes to the party where they're gonna try to put the boyfriend in prison and there's one where he never goes to the party. Those are the two. There's at least two and probably three.

[01:25:15] There's probably the one where Aaron didn't do anything when the boyfriend came in. And then there's one where Aaron was like, wait, I wanna be the hero here. And because there's something his wife says which makes it seem like that's not how she thinks of him.

[01:25:29] Like when he says he wants to punch his boss in the face and she's like, oh, look at you. My, you know, that's a nice surprise. Kind of like my hero. So he clearly like, so I get the sense that probably he didn't step to the guy

[01:25:43] the first time around either. To the ex-boyfriend who ironically is menacing, not his wife, but Abe's girlfriend and Abe doesn't really care. Is it clear that that's his girlfriend and not just a woman that he's really into? There's an implication because they say that the father,

[01:26:02] it's her father that they're hoping to get money from who's only there because of Rachel and Rachel is only there because she loves Abe. That's right, that's right. Now there is, I don't know if we're jumping the gun, but the party where I agree, Tamler,

[01:26:21] there must have been one time where he did nothing and then there was it seems multiple times in which he was the hero. But one time in the original run through that they kind of mentioned it to him, right?

[01:26:34] And it seems like what he did was just kind of stand up to the guy, but didn't get him arrested. Yeah. Didn't get him arrested. But I think that the plot makes the most sense if we infer that the very last run through

[01:26:50] he did nothing and Rachel got killed. The one right before the one that we eventually see. No, the actual one, you know, he says something in- Oh, right, right, right. Yeah, in the narration he says, unfortunately it's only the last revision that anybody will remember.

[01:27:07] And this comes from just reading, Tamler and I both watched a very informative YouTube explainer about this that we'll leave a link to. I was reading the comments and somebody said, so there is the character Granger, Rachel's father who exists in the movie as someone

[01:27:27] who can potentially be a source of funding. They're desperately in need of funding. He ends up showing up, he plays a role. He ends up showing up like scraggly three days of beard growth. He shows up in the middle. The night he's planning to go punch his boss.

[01:27:46] Yeah, and we don't know why. It's sort of, I feel like it's under specified, but one plausible interpretation is that they, some version of them approached Granger in the future. In the future and said, we can build a machine that will prevent your daughter

[01:28:05] from ever getting shot and killed. And that this is how they hook Granger in. And that Granger finds out about it and gets a little suspicious and starts following them around. And goes, seems like he was driven a little bit. No, well he goes through the time machine.

[01:28:22] So first he goes through the time machine. Yeah, and then starts following them around. Let me understand. And so you're saying that they intentionally tried to get Rachel killed in the last run through? I think that the last run through, they just didn't do anything.

[01:28:37] I think that's, you know. Oh, I don't think so. I think I disagree about that. I think they, because he says in the narration, I'm sure you got it perfect. Or I'm sure the third me got, or this, you know, the hooded Aaron got it perfectly

[01:28:52] and all the adulation and all the, you know, like so. And I thought when he was referring to the last revision is the one that people remember that he was referring to the successful. What we see is the last one. So they, but I don't know.

[01:29:06] Cause we see them take a gun. They never show us. Yeah, they never show us. We see him pull out the gun and they cut. Okay. So if they pull out. But you see him disarm the gun. They disarmed the gun. I don't think so.

[01:29:17] I think that there's one guy but it's not Aaron who's trying to. No, no, no. They go to his car and take the like, they disarmed one of the iterations. Is that the last one? That's the last. We only see one party scene.

[01:29:31] It's alluded to earlier, but we only see one. Yeah. Okay. But it makes a difference because I think whether you think that what they did was successful. I think the goal was the father just by running into Aaron just like collapsed and is in like a coma.

[01:29:49] And the, and this is also reading into it, but the idea might be that he would run into somebody who would make it so that he didn't go back in time. And that just, it doesn't fuck the universe up but it fucks him up.

[01:30:02] And so what they have to do is go and make it so that Rachel doesn't get killed. And then the father won't come back and then he'll be okay. I like at this point, like now I'm getting very confused. Yeah, it's very confusing.

[01:30:17] The part where all of this starts right before they encounter Granger was already a weird confusing thing where he's like, I got woken up by these kids who were setting off car alarms. So what we'll do now is we'll get in the machine now

[01:30:35] and then we'll go back and prevent the kids from... Punch the boss, then prevent the kids. So I won't wake up. So I won't wake up so then we won't go back in time. At that point, they're already in like this puzzle loop thing.

[01:30:50] They're trying to make something happen. Yeah, they're experimenting. Like, yeah, like Tamar was saying earlier, they're trying out what, like trying to figure out the rules of the universe. But by the way, I love this about the film that in a very like, you know, I say realistic,

[01:31:08] I don't believe that a time travel machine could exist. But if it were invented, it's very plausible that it would be from a couple of nerdy engineers soldering motherboards in a garage just like an Apple and HP and all that stuff.

[01:31:20] And they wouldn't know what they were doing and would be forced to sort of be trying this out. It seems like a super plausible way in which... Yeah, totally. Just using like car batteries. Like that car bar did for the palladium.

[01:31:38] I mean, the thing, I was thinking about, you know, months ago when I started this David Lewis series about what the most plausible time travel story would be. And what I came up with, Dave, is something like what you said,

[01:31:48] but you're not, everybody's obsessed with sending things back. But the thing that you would send back, the first thing you would send back in time would be information because that's already traveling at the speed of light. So if you discovered something, right?

[01:31:59] And that you just had to find a way to send like a signal back, that's the first, that's what you would send. It wouldn't be like some, like, you know, an egg or something, right? Yeah, absolutely. This is, that's what we're always trying, you know,

[01:32:14] from the telegraph on, it's how to get the message. Did you watch Dark, the TV series? Oh, I loved it. Do you see the first two seasons of that as Louisian? Yes, Dark was thoroughly Louisian so much so that they had to explicitly say

[01:32:33] that we're now in a possible world story and not just a time travel story because they were trying to be so thoroughly Louisian that they couldn't make anything happen unless they started doing world traveling rather than time traveling. Yes, absolutely. What do you think thematically primer is about?

[01:32:50] Like, so like any good time travel movie is gonna be about time travel and the cool mechanics of it and like building the world building of that but then also just about something that relatable in our world. I think that Abe and Aaron very clearly

[01:33:06] have different moral consciences about this kind of thing and that the climax of the scene is in the airport where they are deciding whether they're gonna go their separate ways in all respects with their relationship in the world and also in time.

[01:33:24] So I think we're led to believe that Aaron is trying to recreate this thing so that he can do more time travel and change the path and then Abe is like done. In fact, one major conflict that this happens after Abe has this fail safe

[01:33:41] and he's gonna try to undo everything but Aaron found it and he uses it for his purposes. So it's about ambition and conscience, I think. But then I think Abe's plan is and now there is an Aaron that's gonna stumble out of the attic at some point.

[01:33:55] So Abe's idea now is to just prevent them from doing this at all in the first place but it may have already been done because there's this other Aaron out there or two other Aaron's actually now. Once he leaves, so all he can do

[01:34:12] is keep his small corner of the world away from this technology. But yeah. So the way it ends is with Aaron as you were referring to earlier, Tamler in some French speaking country building a big, I think it's pretty clear what he's doing

[01:34:29] is building a very big version of the time machine to be used for whatever it is that he wants to use it for. What do you think Aaron makes Aaron fuck with all this? So not wanna go at Abe's pace of just making stock trades

[01:34:44] and why does, because at a certain point he actually takes steps to see if Abe has any other storage units and then that's what leads him to see that there's a fail safe and then that's what leads him to get in the,

[01:35:01] or make his own version of one and get in that and take it with him. And so like what prompts all that for Aaron to go behind Abe's back like that? Yeah, this is why I think that this movie is so,

[01:35:17] one of the reasons that this movie might stand the test of time is because it has this underlying theme of the relationship between the two guys and honesty and deception and maybe a moral arc to Aaron where he seemed to sort of neutral,

[01:35:37] maybe chaotic neutral as the nerd might say at best. Not really, he doesn't really seem to have a moral compass and then the little bit of power and then the lot bit of power that comes from using this time machine.

[01:35:53] I think he thinks he can do world changing things if he builds a bigger version but there is, this is almost too heavy handed if my interpretation is right. But the Aaron that leaves who decides, look I'm gonna let Aaron zero,

[01:36:12] the Aaron that's in the attic live out the life with his wife and daughter. He's wearing a black hoodie like when Luke Skywalker at the beginning of Empire Strikes Back has sort of been tempted by the dark side. And who knows if that's the symbolism

[01:36:30] that he was going for but it does seem that there has been some sort of turn in Aaron that maybe we could say he was corrupted by the power of the time machine but whatever it is, their relationship has been deteriorating throughout the whole movie.

[01:36:47] Yeah, I mean to be clear though on one plot point he actually gets into a fight, the hooded Aaron gets into a fight with the third Aaron that's gone into the failsafe machine with Abe and they get into a fight at his house

[01:37:05] and this is after he's drugged, the second one has drugged originally Aaron and put him in the attic. Well it's not after, well that's a little hard to say whether that's after or not. Yeah, but the point is they're fighting over

[01:37:19] who gets to go to the party that night and then the hooded Aaron who had to this point been running everything and made the original betrayal and went back in the failsafe for the first time. He's like I don't know how to explain it

[01:37:32] but he wanted it more so I just gave it to him and he then goes away to France or wherever he goes and it's that other Aaron that does the thing at night and then I think he also leaves.

[01:37:46] Like I think he must also have to go somewhere, right? Because you see the first Aaron just stumble out of the attic at some point. Just fall out of the crawl space. Are there three Irons existing at the same time at that point? I think so.

[01:38:00] And every subsequent point I think. Does one of them have to get back in the time machine and get swallowed by the timeline or no? Now I'm trying. I guess he could choose to. He could choose to but he wouldn't have to I don't think

[01:38:12] but maybe he then just, if he does could become that first Aaron? I don't know. You know what's very interesting in terms of personal identity? Would you wanna get into the time machine? Your... Oh, yours. I knew it's gonna turn into a transporter thing. Oh, fuck.

[01:38:31] Well you're getting so it's even worse in the transporter because you're getting swallowed up by the other person. The timeline is eating you up. Yeah, what do you think about that, Bray? I'm supposed to think of getting in a time machine like getting in a transporter.

[01:38:46] If it's thoroughly Lewisian it's just a later version of myself, right? So yeah, but you could exist. You could exist in parallel with your other self. So you sort of have this understanding that in order for things to work properly you're supposed to get into the time machine

[01:39:06] and at one point they even say like how could we convince our others to get into the time machine? Once they see me, once they see us. This is why when you start going non-Lewisian with the story it gets hard to talk about

[01:39:19] because if it was thoroughly Lewisian you would say there's no choice for three, but Aaron II to go into the machine to become Aaron III because Aaron III is standing right there. Because if he decides not to then Aaron III

[01:39:31] like the looper thing will just poof disappear, right? Right, right. Or like back to the future, like the picture of him would start. Yeah, the head would start fading. You wouldn't know how to think about it. So and so like for Lewis,

[01:39:45] okay, if there really is this genuine choice then we're talking about counterparts in different worlds now that they're all standing in one world. And that's a very different kind of story, right? Right, right, right. And they don't seem to suggest that.

[01:39:58] They seem to suggest that that's not how this works. One thing I wanted to say about Aaron there was a scene at the gas station where he says and I wrote something down here. This is when they've already kind of floated

[01:40:11] the idea of him punching his boss in the face but then going back and telling himself not to. And then as the narrative says, the idea then is put out there that we could actually like change things. And he says, you know, maybe this whole idea

[01:40:26] that there's only one way to experience a moment and that defines you and that's how your life goes. He's like, I don't see why it has to be like that. And Abe is already like, hey, you know, calm down, slow down.

[01:40:37] We have no idea what kinds of things that would cause. But Aaron clearly has shown his distaste for his present life just like, and maybe that involves his wife and daughter too, which makes it easy for him to abandon them. Or maybe it's like,

[01:40:52] I just feel like my life should be, have gone a different way and now I can actually make that happen. So he wants to like revise and edit his life like we do for the podcast. And that's like, I think we're kind of interesting

[01:41:05] that that's where they differ. Abe is much more cautious about doing anything like that. Maybe he just has hopes for the future. Right. There is also a hint of hubris from Aaron that I think might be a theme where Aaron is so sure that he can control things.

[01:41:23] And the director slash writer slash actor does, I think a really good job of dropping a couple of hints about the uncertainty of events. So even though it seems like if it happened, it's bound to happen, there is some measure of uncertainty. And you see this very clearly

[01:41:44] when the tape recorder, or the tape recording, the recording of the conversation where he's playing basketball with his friend or the guy, the guy says that he's gonna make the basket but he actually misses the basket. There is some error that has been introduced.

[01:42:00] There is some level of uncertainty. And there is, there's an explicit phrase where at the beginning when they're trying to figure out what the machine is doing and they talk about how many cycles it's gone through, they say there's some level of uncertainty here. It's not always-

[01:42:15] It's a probability thing. Yeah, sorry, yeah, they say it's some level of probability. They refer also to Feynman diagrams, which is I think one way of understanding the probabilistic path of a particle. So I think that there is a theme there that like you can't,

[01:42:32] it's not always set in stone. There's something, yeah. Yeah, similarly, like this could have gone a different way and there's no reason I have to accept the way that it ended up going. Because there is some uncertainty. I got also the sense,

[01:42:46] I wanted to see what you guys thought. There seems to be some sort of theme of maturity. These guys are boys and they act very maturely. Like I said, maybe that was unfair, but their first thought is to play the stock market. Aaron doesn't really seem to like

[01:43:03] the responsibilities of being a family man. They talk about trying to be respected by Mr. Granger. They're like, if he thinks of us like six year old kids, if you call him Mr. Granger, he's not gonna respect you, you have to call him by this.

[01:43:16] There is a little bit of a, not coming of age, but the sort of maturity that they don't have that you often see in modern 20-something year old men. Yeah, they're your rest of development. Yeah, like the fact that they're gonna travel

[01:43:32] five times or six times just to get the perfect way to get at some douche bag at a party. Like that's the thing, that's the thing you're gonna travel six times for. Yeah, show their masculinity. Yeah, exactly. And they had the same idea as like Biff

[01:43:46] from Back to the Future, like how to make money. Right, right. Yeah, he's the almanac. He's worth almanac. But that's right. They're immaturity and just in the way they deal with, they kind of exclude the other two partners and it's like clicky kind of,

[01:44:03] you get the sense there. And exclude the only man of color. Something about colonialism. The fact that you guys said, oh this is a quintessentially like engineers, this is a statement about the maturity of engineer man, man children, right? Maybe, right? These startup Silicon Valley douche bag.

[01:44:27] This is what your STEM education, STEM obsession gets you is these guys. Congratulations. It gets you time travel though. Yeah, that's true. So there's something good that comes. Yeah, I feel the need to say that there's no way that this discussion can do justice to the plot

[01:44:44] because there is, I have some sense that there will never be a complete explanation of what's going on in the movie. And I like that it's open-ended like that and I don't ever want to know if the director has some closed loop.

[01:45:01] But please don't take this conversation as in any way either definitive or complete. As opposed to all the other episodes. You know. The issue of depicting engineer creators, they're fundamentally kids and the motivations are kids and Abe is trying to grow up. That's pretty clear.

[01:45:24] He's trying to do the grown up thing every single time I think. And with the fail safe too, right? That's the responsible thing to do, to create a fail safe that you turned on much earlier. Yeah, that's right.

[01:45:36] And what a betrayal that your friend found your fail safe and then used it just to like manipulate. It does feel like a betrayal. Yeah, but it was also paternalistic a little bit for him not to tell Aaron about the fail safe method. No, that's right.

[01:45:51] So I think Aaron might claim I was betrayed first but I think that's right. It's Abe wanting to grow up and Aaron not wanting to grow up which is also like connects to him kind of coveting the family

[01:46:03] because that's a grown up thing to do is to have a family. And that's a really common story. Like the one friend is growing up faster than the other friend, you know? And then they just do that but with a time travel movie.

[01:46:16] There was some weirdness there where it seems like Abe, it's a little even more than envy. It's like does Aaron at some point, am I right that I caught that Aaron's like, I know you like my wife. At the end.

[01:46:29] Yeah, it's like the last thing they say to each other. Yeah, like go ahead. Like he's basically like, go ahead. Yeah. Wait, I mean, I'm not gonna be there. Sorry. What time is it supposed to be at the airport? Like what day is that supposed to be?

[01:46:42] I think that's Monday before any of this before the 9 a.m. thing. So they wake up from the fail safe and go to the airport. Oh no, or is it Tuesday? Cause they did the, no, it has to be at least Tuesday cause they did the party

[01:46:56] unless they've already could, they went back in the fail safe. There is something I don't understand about the mechanics that I think there is an answer to, but I feel like I'm not smart enough to have gotten it where you can nest time machines into time machines

[01:47:11] and actually travel further back in time. So the time machines aren't tied to like the clock. What they're tied to is the amount of time. So like if you can get a time machine into a time machine, then you can actually start going back further and further.

[01:47:27] And I think that's what Aaron is trying to build. That's what they've done. That's already what they've done. It has to be that the airport is actually before any of this cause one of the things that Abe says that he wants to do is stop them from preventing,

[01:47:38] from creating the time machine. So it has to be before then. Yeah. And so, but you're right. That's the way you go back further is you take one time machine and put it in the other time machine. And then you go back with that time machine

[01:47:54] and then you can just use that. I suppose you could do that indefinitely. Yeah. And I think that's what he's trying to build maybe. Yeah. What a well thought out fucking scripted. It is, yeah. It is really compared to all of the simplicity

[01:48:11] of other time travel movies where it's either, you know, it's either just a magic box or it's gobbledygook or, you know, like there are very few movies that go to such lengths to describe how things work. Of course, you know, there's gobbledygook there too about how it works.

[01:48:27] But it's a more well fleshed out view of time travel than I think most other movies. And I can't think of a good comparison. A really good labor of love from an individual that doesn't have the Hollywood studio coming here to you with notes

[01:48:44] and trying to cast this, that or the other. Just a really good labor of love coming from one mind is gonna be a piece of shit or it's gonna be brilliant. Right? And it's absolutely true that there's more pieces of shit out there than our brilliant stuff.

[01:48:59] But just unadulterated with notes and production thinking about whether we can make this. Just exactly what he wanted it to be. Like the time machine are just gonna be these plastic boxes in a storage unit. That's what I can afford to do, right?

[01:49:14] And that's what, so I'm gonna create characters that that's all they can afford to do. So that's what's so smart about it. It's incredible. I saw an interview with him where he was asked whether, how much of it all makes sense

[01:49:30] or how much of it is open to interpretation or suffering. He says, as far as I can tell, I didn't wanna tell anybody anything. It's the least hand-holding movie of science fiction that you can imagine. But he says, I did try to sprinkle in details

[01:49:48] for people who wanna go back and see it again where they will be able to piece it together. And he said, the one exception, the one thing that I don't think you can get and you just have to interpret, like a big thing is why did Granger,

[01:50:02] Thomas Granger come back? And you can, he said, if I kinda think that it's because something happened to Rachel but there's nothing in the movie to tell you for sure what that. Because he wanted them to experience this kind of just, oh my God, we have no idea.

[01:50:21] Like we don't know what we've done or what we don't know what we're gonna do that would lead this to happen. We don't even know which one of us it was. And so he liked that. He liked that idea of just this future event

[01:50:33] that is haunting you right now but you have no idea like what you did to bring it about. It is. Or you're going to do to bring it. There is a way in which this is good that almost makes me angry that this guy was able to do

[01:50:47] because he didn't do what, he's a software guy and he was a math guy and you would think the temptation would be to actually explain it all. I don't know engineers to be that keen on leaving sort of like an artsy open-ended mystery

[01:51:05] but he is like an artist also. So he gives us this, I think, very well fleshed out world. The rules seem right but he leaves the mystery not as in like stay tuned for a prime or two but as in you do some work

[01:51:23] and you look at the trail of information that has been left on the internet from people who are trying to understand this movie. It's like what more could you want as an artist? Like he made this thing and people have been talking about it now for over 15 years.

[01:51:41] Like people on that YouTube video were commenting like last week. You know, it's incredible. No and he never really, he made one other movie that he really got to produce upstream color and then every other project just hasn't been able to get funded.

[01:51:57] You know, like I think he's really unhappy with how his career turned out after primer. I think he's very proud of upstream color. I either have or haven't seen it. Yeah, I have a memory. I have a memory of Tamler telling me that he saw the movie

[01:52:14] but Tamler doesn't have that memory. So it's either... I have a memory of maybe saying that but I don't have a great memory of seeing it and I would like it, you know, it's the kind of

[01:52:22] so maybe I just saw it in the wrong frame of mind or something. Does he associate the lack of success with primer? I don't think so. I think he associates it with Hollywood being Hollywood and things getting... This one he was able to get a distributor

[01:52:35] because they won at Sundance and I don't know why he didn't. Maybe you only have one $7,000 movie in you and then it's like I can't work like this in my whole career. Well, he said... I did read that he said that after filming was completed

[01:52:50] it took him two years of post production like editing and doing whatever it is he... Sounds like an action. He even made the music for the fucking thing and he said that he felt like it nearly destroyed him.

[01:53:03] There were times when he was ready to give up on the project and so I can imagine not having another $7,000 movie in you for that reason. I feel that every season of my fucking show I feel like this is gonna kill me. I gotta...

[01:53:15] You are the Shane Caruth of podcasting. It's true. It's true. Except you can get funded. You like the big, by the big slate... They don't give me any money. They just cross promote it or something. Because I'm still... They don't give you any money? No, no.

[01:53:34] It's supposed to be a revenue sharing thing. Like if they sell ads but they don't go out of their way to sell ads for my show because they don't have to. Like they have all these shows that they pay for

[01:53:45] so they need to sell ads for their show. I don't wanna say anything bad. I think it's great to be able to be cross promoted but like it's still all me. I don't pay anybody else to like... So it's your labor of love?

[01:54:00] Yeah, it's your labor of love. But nobody's like it's not like dozens of people talking. I still gotta find my primer moment. Some avant-garde philosophy podcast that has like multiple interpretations of something. Right, they have this whole like map of like season one episode three

[01:54:19] and connections between season two, episode four. I sometimes feel like leaving clues for listeners in a sort of mysterious way. Maybe, maybe I have. Maybe we have. Maybe we have. My opening quotes turn into, like if you string them together with the right equation,

[01:54:36] they turn into a meaningful statement. I think esoteric reading of our podcast is like it's high time that somebody did that. I think somebody needs to take a more Straussian approach to our podcast because yeah, we've been giving these like coded political philosophical messages

[01:54:54] but not for the masses just for the select few. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you for joining us. This was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me in great film. Great to think about. Yeah, check out the latest season of High-Fi Nation.

[01:55:12] I think like even if you're not a fan of David Lewis, it's really interesting and you really get a good sense of what those times were like. So I really enjoyed it. I love just the opening that I was listening to

[01:55:25] where you're telling the story about being in a, you create narratives in a really good way but that story about the talk and the pee. That's the story of how he died. That was the last moments of his life. The beginning of the story.

[01:55:41] That's the kicker right there. Where the fuck is he going with the story? Why is there talking about this weird talk that somebody was giving? But it does come, as someone who didn't know that, like it sounds like a story somebody would tell

[01:55:53] about David Lewis up until that point. And then when that's how it ends, it's, yeah. All right, well thank you Barry, this was really thanks guys. Thanks guys. I'm a brain's in U.S. Anybody can have a brain? You're a very bad man. And a very good man.

[01:56:45] Just a very bad wizard.