Let's Find Out - On David Foster Wallace, Stories, and Meaning | ASMR

Episode Date: June 27, 2020

So a lot of my problems right now is I don't really have a brass ring and I'm kind of open to suggestions about what What one chases that the people who most interest me now are the people are people who are older and who have sort of been through a midlife crisis They tend to get weird because the normal incentives for getting out of bed Don't tend to apply anymore. I have not found any satisfactory new ones, but I'm also not getting ready to you know jump off a building or anything Well, that's good news I was just thinking it wasn't a chemical imbalance and it wasn't drugs and alcohol I think it was much more that I lived an incredibly American life.

This idea that if I could just achieve X and Y and Z, that everything would be okay. Feeling as though every axiom of your life turned out to be false and there was actually nothing. And it's all a delusion and you're so much better than everybody because you can see that this is just a delusion and you're so much worse because you can't fucking function. Good night.

I hope everybody is doing all right out there. David Foster Wallace is a cult figure that I've been hearing whose name and whose novel Infinite Jest main novel I've been hearing about for years now Wikipedia real quickly he's the guy that

appearance-wise was known for wearing a bandana around his head and I guess it was because he always sweat profusely his his legacy well I don't know a lot about him so again we're going to tap into the theme of my channel

can I discover on the go so I never want to come across as an authority figure I've been listening to a lot of his interviews and he seems like such a when you listen to him you hear this deep melancholy and a person who

doesn't who was in deep despair and to cut to the chase he ultimately died a tragic death he committed suicide hung himself and after I think in his early 40s after he was already

a very established well well known author and infinite jest I think he was only in his mid 30s when he published it so you know he was writing it in his early 30s maybe late 20 or something. I've never read the book. It's a very long book. It's over a thousand, just over

a thousand pages. I've heard about it. He graduated in the late 80s from college, so he has a very strong theme of post-modernism, at least an influence of postmodernism as far as I know. It's a, it got its name from just being distinguished from its type of writing out of which it emerged. It was the successor to modernism, and which is in itself heavily, I would say heavily influenced by the industrialization of the world, the mechanization of the world. So if we, boy, I get too far into this, just so you guys know a little disclaimer, this is going to be much more of a ramble. We're going to actually be reading his somewhat lengthy for a magazine publication called,

what is it called, shipping out on the parentheses, nearly lethal in parentheses, comforts of a luxury cruise by David Foster Wallace. I think the reason I want to talk about him and learn more about him is because he taps into the on-wee, the sense of, essentially the sense of meaninglessness, felt. a culture and I think it stems from the fact that we're wealthy with a sense of

guilt that we have to pay for being wealthy as a as a culture as a general culture and especially the affluent people within that culture which is where he I'm pretty sure he was the son of a academics at least so there if he wasn't extremely wealthy he was definitely raised in the you know affluent culture within the already generally affluent American culture. We're, you know, I think all Americans. Or I think anybody who earns above $30,000 a year, any household, is considered in the 1% of the entire globe.

So, you know, I read one of the founders of Google, couldn't afford, like a backpack, I think, when his dad sent him over here. Man, was that the right guy? Sergei Bryn and Larry Page Now maybe it wasn't the founder of Google I didn't want to say it right but I read about Someone was sent over here and his dad's salary was only enough to pay for like a backpack

So his dad's monthly salary I think it was an Indian student I read about going to Harvard or something like that But just like We don't We forget the The gross difference between the gap and wealth between civil you know first world countries and uh third world developing countries and there's a huge disparity between countries and when you're wealthy it's like

how can you actually completely enjoy that without a little tinge you know being a little you once you're exposed to the complete desperation and poverty of other countries it's it's hard to really fully enjoy that in a selfish way. I feel like our minds are built to be able to compartmentalize things. That's how a lot of the, you know, travesties, tragedies of any war crime situation, any serious, I only was following orders. Type of situation happens. But anyways, I think David Foster Wallace is, um, he had a deep sense of depression.

obviously he committed suicide and I think it's important to learn from you know the fact that there are so many Robin Williams you know like so many successful or seemingly successful outwardly materialistic materially successful people that don't find enough meaning in life to be able to continue it and the the lessons there I think are invaluable. And I want to know the distinction between... I just opened a random article on Wikipedia is about Myangelo. And, well, not so random.

It's definitely influenced by the current events, I'm sure. But, you know, a woman who grew up in the South during extreme racism and segregation, the most famous poems is, I know why the caged bird, things i want to i want to know the difference between people who go through extraordinary overwhelmingly just prejudiced oppressiveness in their lives and yet they you know they don't come through on skate they they actually are able to sublimate it are able to internalize it

and in control the university and be able to use that energy to make a huge impact to to fuel their activities in the world to communicate to educate to share their story to come up with solutions I guess on a more political level that would be coming up with reforms and and changes to institutions institutional systems infrastructures, on a more personal level, that would be, you know, writing, doing an act of creative expression, whether it's art, poetry, books, songs. But I'd like to know, like, this, I feel like very, a little embarrassed. I'm talking about this guy. I haven't even read its book, but I can't help but cringe at myself.

I want to know more about this guy's life and what led him to such despair after such material success. And clearly not, he didn't have personal success in his own self-development and his own ability to grasp his, you know, become who he was and take control of his own person. he didn't find any meaning enough meaning in life to sustain his existence and I don't think coincidentally or I think it's very I don't think it's a coincidence that he didn't have kids either any great work of art at least I'm fascinated by the idea I don't think it I've heard it that art true truly profound enduring art is the expression of someone who's able to tap into a collective unconscious, a collective feeling. And, you know, a collective, whether it's a sense of tragedy or a collective comedy.

But, you know, I think that's why Dave Chappelle is so great. He's able to be an extremely poignant observer. He's just so sharp and very able to, like very, you know, quick-witted. and he's very articulate, able to distill even the most tragic observations like he did in his 846, his most recent special. And let us have a collective catharsis, a collective sigh of relief, a collective, collectively share in the acknowledgement of an extremely tragic occurrence. It's like a weight off our backs because we're able to acknowledge it and we're able to feel a part of a collective thought almost. It's like we're all holding in this anxiety and stress about uncertainty on how to deal with seriously tragic situations.

And Dave Chappelle was able to just be, acknowledge the, what would you call it? the opposite of fragility, just the, you know, our resilience, I guess. And Dave Chappelle just blasts us with some seriously tragic truths. Yet he's able to just the, you know, the tone in his voice and on a dime, he's able to quickly not shy away from the truth, but actually just, veer and lean into it and point out the absurdity of certain situations. And I think just acknowledging reality lets us all this cruise ship article. Because I just browsed through it.

Maybe he did go on the cruise with someone else, but most of it appears to be just him by himself, making observations doing as many activities as his finances allow which i think he got a free trip to basically write a socially like observational piece um you know just a a a raw again that's why i was comparing it to dave chapelle's because he's uh it had me laughing out loud the humor in it It's just, he's so unreserved in his observations that the funny part about it is that he's pointing out the absurdity of some of these almost childlike group activities that you get shuffled into and herded into on a already kind of childlike, very poor replacement supplement for an adventure. You know, a cruise ship, I think, at heart is trying to pander to people who aren't quite adventurous enough to go sailing across the season. And I'm not one of them. I wouldn't do that, even though I have some small amount of experience on a boat.

You know, but it's like, it's this sad. And I'm not getting political. I'm just saying it is a sad, it's like the sad part of capitalism. the decadent, the very selfish and childish and, uh, unadventurous, very uncourageous part of, you know, what you can buy. It's, um, the marketing aspect of it is like, you know there's a part of cruise ship marketing that panders to our sense of, our instinctive sense of, like, um, I've been talking about a lot recently, adventure and exploration.

and curiosity and it's a it's just this very watered down very bland curated manicured version of adventure and then the decadence of endless buffets and you know the superficiality of people showing off their bodies and just slathering themselves in suntan lotion um i mean the whole essay is is i'll just let it speak for itself because it does and uh it's very it's very uh it just sticks with you it's it's a very sharp critique of uh the worst you know not the worst parts but the the most depressing parts of what we do with our money when we're just so compartmentalized that we don't recognize you know we we have to not recognize all the tragedies in the world or we would go crazy if we try to understand all the

cruel things that are happening to animals and people all around the world all the time we got a in a real way we have to only take reality in small manageable doses because that's how we can act stay active and and keep keep moving forward you know uh Like anything, you got to take in small chunks. The largest, you know, a thousand mile journey starts with the first step. And we don't want to, you know, paralyze ourselves with too much information at the start. So there is a huge benefit to compartmentalizing things. But it's like this is delusion at its deepest.

It's like any, anyways. So I want to read this because it's, I think it's a great example of he was able to perceive why it is that cruise ships are so depressing. And of course he, knowing what we now know about his tragic end, obviously brings a lot of bias to that perception. But it's also a famous article that got a lot of, you know, a lot of people were able to sympathize with the. perspective that especially um i think fundamentally cruise ships can be made fun you know i mean or else they wouldn't endure um can't just be all gimmick and in facade there has to be some fun element in the completely hedonistic

over drinking over indulging um you know just everything at your fingertips lifestyle temporary lifestyle that you you pay a lot for um I've been on a cruise ship once. There's something there, but there's also an extremely profound sadness that you feel, I can imagine if you were by yourself, because I did, I went with my family, and I'm sure it wasn't super cheap. It wasn't, you know, an elaborate expensive cruise ship or anything, but I was by myself a lot of the crews because, as one does, when they go on family vacations

with only their brother and sister and parents. And they're in their mid-teens and they want to be rebellious, but they're not of drinking age. So they have to sneak around a lot. You know, especially when you're going to Jamaica, there's a couple hoops you've got to jump through to do interesting things, especially if you're by yourself. It's, it is profoundly sad.

if you take a step back and think about you're paying all this money to go on a cruise and do very interesting, very tame

domesticated activities. But it's like great comedy. It comes out of deep. I think part of the interest in comedy is that the adventurousness of it is the fact

there's a pride in, sugar sugar coating anything there's a sense of meaning in in recognizing like the darker side of reality it's you know it's it's what's something worth being proud about I think what I wanted to say was sorry I had to cut and get up and go to the bathroom real quick what was that when we confront it seems to be a psychological but actual therapeutic technique and that when we confront our fears willingly as opposed to unwillingly which is like a you know

post like a psychological you you grow psychologically more formidable and robust I guess and I'm interested in that theory and I really feel like it plays an integral part I think it's all that you know that's why most comedians Kevin Hart always talks about how Shorty is like he you know Eminem always talked about being white and activity in underground Detroit they call it cyphers freestyle groups and all that and it's like you confront the elephant in the room because then it doesn't control you you have even if it is a vice of yours you at least are able to talk honestly about it And that's where the theory, you know, the idea of truth and shying away from the truth is actually more.

So it's just interesting to me. The whole concept of things being hilariously funny yet really tragic, that bitter sweetness of it all at the same time. And that's why I want to read this article. And I might do this in two videos because I don't know if I can sit and read. It's probably going to take me like two hours to read. But, yeah, Infinite Jest, to give you an idea of, like, what his types of writing are, if you haven't read or heard of David Foster Wallace. Infinite Jest, again, it's a thousand pages, but the main plot is that there's four interwoven narratives,

and I don't want to give it all the way. So these narratives are, they're connected via a film called, within the novel, called Infinite Jest. also referred to as the entertainment or the samistat which is a like an eastern european word for like works of art films books so forth and by the government the film so entertaining to its viewers that they lose all repeatedly viewing it and thus eventually die and this was the creator of the film in the novel the guy's name was the uh the the character's name was James Incandezza Incondensus Incondensus I'm sure

Some sort of play on incandescent light bulbs That was his final work And of course You know in the big picture If a film No matter how funny Is fatal to its viewers

And what does that tell you about It's the The you know Culture and Society in which something like that would happen. A film being so funny and such a release of joy that people would rather re-watch it and risk. It's not specific.

I haven't read the book, but maybe starvation, maybe laughter, death by laughter, or something like that, a heart attack aneurism. You know what? What does that say about a culture that would pay so little mind to values of aesthetics and art and beauty and music that

a film comes along and fuses the lives of the viewers with so much meaning that they don't want to do anything else anymore so that tells you that's a very industrial mechanistic individualist society you know and all this communist

anti-communist rhetoric and it's again not a coincidence that this book was written in the early 90s coming right out of the Cold War. And so James, David Foster Wallace was definitely a Gen X or a child of the Cold War. I was born in 89,

and I'd actually like to look into that more. Just how crazy it is. I mean, an example of how we compartmentalize things, but we, you know, we still have nukes, but it's not an active actively tense situation between Russia and the U.S. anymore. It's turned in more of like an economic war zone, I guess. But probably just mentalization of it. I haven't done enough research to actually know what the likelihood of, you know,

nukes going off would be. But either way, I think there's... A lot of merit in investigating and finding out about the actual value of truly great art, and whether that's books or music or whatever, because the stories in general, and this is where I'll probably end this, the stories in general, I think I'm convinced that enduring stories, like, you know, Gilgamesh, great biblical stories, Eastern myths, from the most ancient myths to the most popular modern art

that we actually think might be enduring. Architectives, the hero, their nature, father time, the gesture, the prodigal son, the, the deepest, stories that involve the the reoccurring themes using um you know it's like each story like george uh Lucas when he wrote Star Wars that's that's an enduring movie up until the last three i really didn't like the the Disney five uh the last three episode seven through nine um let's see George Lucas's renditions of the first three Star Wars that he did in episodes four through six he's admitted that he you know was an English major I think for the most part in college and so he was

very conscious of Joseph Campbell who was a a you know respected and a devoted student of Carl Young who himself was a proponent of the idea of psychological archetypes that are you know he arrived at these through the study of the comparative study of religions across the world young acknowledged the his conceptualization of the archetype is influenced by Plato's aidos which he described as the formulated meaning of a primordial image by which it was represented symbolically according to young the term archetypes is an explanatory paraphrase of the platonicados also believed to represent the word form

so get some clarification on what young's archetypes meant in particular but the innocent orphan the hero the caregiver those are ego types soul types the explorer the rebel the lover creator self types are the jester the magician sage ruler it goes on and on and on the Liberator, rescuer. On the deepest level, Young's four major archetypes were the animus, which are the, um, kind of the opposite sex version, roughly speaking, within each individual.

So males have female animas. Females have male animuses. And they, they represent a, um, you know, because we, even aside from biology i won't get into all this you know gender theory or anything but you know in general we can all recognize that there are in fact um very long traditions of cultural distinctions between males and females as far as their actual activities and roles with respect to societal things like raising children and work in

I guess one of the other big things household duties external duties just all the relations interrelations that happen within families so as a male in other words you you get lopsided you get biased to act more masculine females tend to act more feminine generally especially in regards as to how thoroughly it's culturally enforced, like reinforced, you know, like whether your parents, you know, your mom teaches you to cook or, you know, play soccer. And so you have this whole other side of the human experience that is the opposite sex, that all these actions and perceptions even, ways of viewing the world,

that you wouldn't necessarily have developed to embody and act out. And so it's Young thought that, you know, for a male, he has a female anima within him that represents all the kind of perceptions of the world. That, you know, if he's more stoic, the anima might be more sympathetic and empathetic, understanding and if he's more umstrious too proficient you know not not very yeah non-creative way the animal might be more um might think in more abstract terms so it's kind of like a balance in other words so the more masculine you are apparently i think young thought the masculine you are the more unconsciously repressed your animal might be

And so that's, anyways, anima, animus. The other three are the self. I'm out of order if you're talking about layers of depth. There's obviously open to interpretation, but it's the persona. You're outside what you show to the world. And then I forget whether it's the shadow or the anima and animus or if you are trying to structure them in like a hierarchy of influence,

influence on your psyche but then you get the shadow the persona anima animus the shadow which is you know a less gendered version of everything that you repress and you don't confront you know typically the more violent instinctive animal repressed emotions and ways of and then finally the self the self I'd love to and I'm gonna definitely

do an episode on on Young's on these four main archetypes that Young formulated and expounded propagated but anyways these

basis of the more you know these are like the roots out of which the foundation upon which archetypes are built the ones I just mentioned you know the wise king to the tyrant those are balances

of each other to nurturing mother nature to cruel indifferent mother nature and and so on so the hero is the one that Joseph Campbell chose to focus on most importantly

and they he was that's what influenced George Lucas to you know invent the character of Darth Vader Anakin Skywalker and I believe initially the

that's why he ended up making episodes one through six because I think he actually wrote the entire thing if he didn't write the all six as one story he definitely wrote the first you know episodes four through six

as one story initially and then he realized that would be way too much information for one movie, so he broke it up into a trilogy. And Luke Skywalker was just a secondary character being the... I actually don't know enough to elaborate more than that, but I know that Anakin, Darth Vader, was in fact the main character who, you know, although Luke did need to be coaxed into, you know, he did go through the hero hero hero's journey,

the reluctant adventurer and then confronting his demons in the form of Darth Vader and then you know assimilating his identity as a Jedi knight showing his courage was Darth Vader who was the fundamental character of that and so the point is that all these stories they're retold using specifics from from within the context of the age in which they're written and the you know the current dilemmas and so you know ever since the industrialization modernization modernism I've been obsessed with the idea of a you know the machine in the mechanisms and you know being cogs and a wheel is a very deep deep one not super deep, but it's a very contemporary symbol of slavery to us.

And so that's why we have movies like The Matrix and, you know, symbolism created in 1980, novel 1984, back in 1948, which was written right after the atomic bomb was dropped. So it's, you know, the last 100 years of history is very, driven by the fear of just becoming robots essentially things of robots or artificial intelligence as we

as we get never nearer to a less mechanical and more electronic and the widespread culture modernism is that's a philosophical and artistic movement that arose from the broad transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

So in the late 1800s, early 1900s, the rise of these massive businesses like, you know, steel companies, these huge magnates, Carnegie, Rockefeller, these oil, steel, all these other industrial companies, these railroads, you know, the mass, mass laying of railroads, the, just everything became very industrialized, like, and our fear was hyper-industrialization. We felt, you know, people were ever increasingly becoming the playthings or the, I want to say, sorry for the traffic rose colored glasses but because we were always the we were the cannon fodder we meaning non-wealthy people in any era we were either the slaves or the labor class and up until the last king was on the front lines in battle in what the definitely the middle ages i don't think it was beyond that because you know no western leader in the last

couple hundred years has definitely not been on the front lines maybe napoleon maybe that's why he's so revered he uh had boots on the ground so to speak but um anyways that was a collective fear that we're going to be uh sucked in and in the any creativity or or meaning that we could find in our lives would have been absorbed by the necessity of all our intelligence is being directed towards a bigger government, socialist, monopolistic, political machine. You know, something we didn't, any individual didn't have any power in. And that's why the death of the individual is a huge fear in, in, post-modernism. I think that's what has its roots in modernism in general. And that's what David Foster Wallace was, you know, that on we, which is a sense of dread,

which, um, does he talk about that in there? Maybe he does. Anyways, this, he was just like his whole character and, and anybody who's familiar with him or is just an English major in general, you know, it was more than I do, is probably, really well probably tuned tuned off tuned out a long time ago clicked away from this video but um my understanding of it again is just that he's a very upset deep way not upset in a superficial didn't get his ice cream kind of way but like can't find story that he can't collectively take part in that he truly believes in you know That's part of the bigger picture of the West.

Facing the destruction of religion, which was a very coherent. It aligned everyone in society with a common origin story and a common conception of what's good and what's bad. There's heaven and hell. You want to avoid this and move towards this. we're all subservient to God not any one individual which can take power and become a tyrant

you know there's these deep philosophical concepts these religious concepts that for thousands of years held you know western civilization and even further back held Egypt Sumerians together with the concept of

you know these deeply symbolic concepts like dying and being reborn again with the help of the person who has a vision to be able to stay current with current affairs to be able to recognize when a you know to recognize shifts in technologies and cultures and in art art and and and and adjust bigger machine so that it doesn't get stagnant and stay stuck in the past and it's like these ideas are fundamental and i think that's why the archetype of the hero is so it's so um so potent is because we all whether we realize it or not recognize that regardless of how big anyone anyone movement

regardless of how big anyone movement is or how justified it might be a physical movement in the actual world always has the possibility a physical institution that you know

a single or group of people can occupy always has the possibility of being occupied eventually by a group of corrupt people and therefore you know

the political aims or the just the aims in general of the institution always has the possibility of going corrupt which is why founders the writers of the U.S. Constitution were pretty smart in saying we only want a temporary

limited number of terms for the president and George Washington was a very going to be made king of America and turned it down because it would have exposed it would have opened up the entire thing that he had just fought for the nation of the US to be

possibly corrupted and tyrannized over if the wrong person got into that position at some point so you know we we have to recognize that a system is bigger than anyone individual and therefore, you know, ideas, like something about each individual makes them, privileges them with the right to exist, to, you know, get a fair trial, to not be treated like less than humans, regardless of how they look, and individual, no matter how many material possessions he has, and how many people are on his payroll to physically harm or create genocide on any group of people, you know, for any reason.

There's these ideas like at the Geneva Convention that of, regardless of the violence and the ultimate character of death that plagues actual wars, there, it's greed upon among nations after World War was it one, that there are certain actions that you can't do, you know, still sometimes done, but attention of powers that allows for the murder, the mass murder, in the form of war, there's certain types of murder, certain ways to murder that are banned. So it's, you know, it's part of this ongoing process to figure out exactly what the most

harmonious way to for humans to coexist on a mass scale given the fact that we're all we're on the order of billions seven I think seven billion people in the world now so man where

was I trying to go is the real question I guess I think my jumping off point was that stories in general, it was to try to just comment briefly on the value of stories

in terms of their relationship with values of easier to agree upon facts like science yields. On Musk, NASA, a couple other institutions are able to

able to build an extremely almost, well, for me, incomprehensibly complex rocket a bullet-shaped thing with explosive very combustible materials but design within a manifold that allows that allows the control the precise control of the direction and mostly output of these bombs essentially so it's like there's rockets strapped at bombs but the math the physics the careful measurement and distillation of um these eternal

characteristics of space and time have been formulated into equations and formulas and uh as far as we know those formulas are very precise and they're irrefutable Now, interestingly, Newton, so something we ought to be skeptical of, is how accurate Einstein's version of reality is, which is our most contemporary version of reality, roughly speaking of how, essentially how gravity works. Because Einstein was an alteration of Newton for 300,000, years we we thought

Newton had essentially figured out reality he discovered that things field like I don't know if Newton did Newton conceive it as a field or was that more of like an Einsteinian thing but he was able to calculate he was able to come up with equations

that allowed the calculation the very very very precise calculation of trajectories of objects like we've done once or twice on this channel, given the fact that he recognized through very careful observation, objects in whether thrown directly up, dropped, thrown in parabolic arcs,

they reacted as though they were under the control of a force. And that force always remained constant. And it, in a vacuum it's why a feather and a bowling ball can be dropped in a vacuum with no air in a chamber that has no air

in it. On the moon they demonstrated it with a feather and a hammer I believe. So there's no resistance, no air resistance keeping the feather from just falling straight. When there's air particles the reason the feather

exists in the shape that it does is precisely because it does capture has the widest surface area for the amount of mass that goes into making for the number of atoms

I guess you might say in the feather so it's designed in a way if you will to capture and resist gravity's fall but when you take away the air that it's designed to float aerodynamically upon

it falls just as fast as the bowling ball so there's these truths like that and then Einstein came and um that Newton discovered these and uh a lot of other things too and for 300 years we thought that was the end-all be-all and then Einstein came and was investigating electricity and atomic movement and acceleration and decided that it's weird that gravity acts as though You're in being accelerated. I can't riff off the top of my head exactly what Einstein's train of thought was to arrive at E equals MC squared.

But obviously we all know relativity was the fundamental perception, conceptual breakthrough, I guess. And Einstein's thought ultimately led to a much. much more just a larger, more encompassing picture of how space reacts with, how objects react with other objects, particularly massive objects like stars and planets in space and how he was able to conceive that, you know, when objects are massive enough, their effects, their effects on the trajectories of objects become apparent enough that they actually slow down what we think of as time and that's what's crazy it's like both movement and gravity affect the concept of time so time changes like an interstellar that's why it was such a cool

movie in part because time changes around a black hole which is a singularity it's where so much mass is packed into such a tiny volume space that remains separate and they collapse into by the same point in space everything we know which goes against everything we know because nothing we know of exists um that we here on earth at least where to atoms occupy the exact same position in space they're always next to each other they always have their own distinct area of space and so Einstein's conception of relativity and equals mc squared and space time ended up being a larger more real truth in which newton's conception of physics fit as a It's just a, what do you call it, a, um, just a particular type of case that exists in a particular

set of, uh, circumstances. What were the gravity when objects aren't that massive? Our sun's a relatively average sized star. And I realize I'm, I'm just rambling hopelessly at this point. But, um, because Earth isn't that big. the sun isn't all that big and so they don't produce all that much gravity relative to larger things like super massive black holes and you know beetle juice massive massive stars our little corner of the neighborhood doesn't really experience that much relativistic alteration of effects and so newton's conception was based on our local solar system in which we didn't see any exceptionally radical

changes in the behavior of radically distorted by massive gravitational fields and we didn't see relativistic effects that much it turns out that mercury because it's so close to the sun and is thus much

much more in control by the sun's gravitational field did have an unexplained pattern. The orbit of Mercury was not able to be completely explained unlike the other planets by Newton's predictions. And it turns out

that Einstein, that was one of the defining that's one of the things that confirmed Einstein's equations accurately predicted. Well, Einstein's equations accurately represented reality.

was because he succeeded, his equations, his view of reality in terms of physics and mathematics, succeeded where Newton's view and equations had failed. So Einstein was able to radically shift our paradigm of what we thought of as reality, using intuition, interestingly enough, which is a whole other topic I want to get into. Ramanujan and just the idea that many of the scientific breakthroughs we think we know, like the structure of DNA,

the atomic periodic table of elements, there's actually a lot, like a kind of unsettling number of, we think of as the pinnacle of rational reasoning and thought that actually arose out of dreams and intuitions and visions and many of which were religious overtones or undertones actually just looked at I don't know the difference between those two words but they were religiously infused if not specifically

a particular religion they had elements of a spiritual communication to them something divine about them so I guess this has just been one

off the cuff way for me to make a point about the mysteriousness of what we consider truth ultimately because science has given us a lot of facts about the world and interestingly facts that have a lot to do with how we move through the world as far as you know helping us get

through the world faster and control things electromagnetically like cars and computers and airplanes and telecommunications so there's a ton of areas of the world we haven't chosen to study just because they don't have any relevance to our human lives so there's that aspect and I guess I want to say this is my really amateur attempt to make a case like I'm always kind of subtly trying to figure out not against science i'm actually a huge proponent of the scientific method i just think that

the human experience and consciousness in particular is yet to be properly accounted for by science alone so stories that's where stories come in and that's where david foster wallace for is interesting because he's he found I think the most meaning in his life by telling stories and making observations that he yeah I'm definitely not going to read this today

my voice is kind of going out if you hadn't figured that out by now but like in this example of the cruise ship what the hell is it called shipping out article he makes observations that are funny and

he almost doesn't even know why they're funny he just has and I know this because I've been listening to a ton of his interviews and in the interviews he often is asked like what are your you know

thoughts about your writing or this this and that aspects of how you write or what you wrote or your technique and he often says like in the way of someone who to me it seems just as read and absorbed and so much writing and then himself written so much he he often responds in a way that it seems he just thinks it's more of uh intuition that he uses in other words you're not just born with an intuition of how to write a great novel a thousand page novel infinite jest you you internalize it

and you make the most important features of telling a good story a lot of which are the archetypal things that are re elements of stories that reoccur and occur and occur um by just absorbing be exposing yourself to and reading the best works as many works as you can and then of course writing because the act of writing solidifies certain ideas

and dismisses other ideas especially when you write bad things and you go back and re-edit them or just reread them you recognize immediately what to keep and what is trash and you know there there's operations conscious operations

on levels that go beyond well there's mental operations I should say that on levels that go beyond consciousness so yes he's conscious of the subjects and the actions

of those subjects and the broader narrative arc that his character undergo but at the same time he infusing a lot of his own experience and the symbols and imagery and situations of things he hasn't personally experienced things he's read about or been told or you know even more deeper mythological ideas that he studied um in the hero's journey there's always the you know i find when i'm watching movies

movies, reading books. If characters don't... That's kind of why it's like Larry David's curb your enthusiasm is... I can only take that in small doses because it's funny because it does confront a, like a sad, tragic reality. Again, a good element of comedy is just being brutally honest about a cringy, you know... If it's not deep, it's... just cringy but if it's really deep i guess humor it's it's more tragic um in a deep way but his is like

it's a little too meaningless the the realities he's confronting which are just the reality the observations of a very wealthy particularly jewish um because he does um emphasize his jewish a lot. All his main friends are all Jewish. Reality, like, this very affluent kind of elite. I mean, the guy's probably almost worth a billion dollars now based on Seinfeld, his writer career on Seinfeld and his acting writing career on Curb Your Enthusiasm. And it's like too trivial and too, uh, it's kind of cowardly you know that's what he leans into is his own failure to confront

preemptively awkward situations he he lets the situation get awkward and avoids confronting it kicking and screaming you know and um or i guess until he's dragged kicking and screaming into having to deal with oftentimes the situation that he himself caused, you know, whether it's a, you know, a very selfish move, you know, stealing a parking spot. I don't know, there's, that's, that's what the nature of curb your enthusiasm is. So it's, it's very, it's a series of, like, very uninteresting, very unadventurous, very, very unadventurous, very, very, very small and petty struggles with other people in the larger backdrop of a very wealthy neighborhood you know in Hollywood California-ish area it's like his struggles aren't the deep battles

between good and evil that are going to determine the the ultimate fate of humanity in other words so there are there are levels of you know things there are reasons things endure in stories like Gilgamesh and and uh you know again deal all the deep mythological stories the reasons they endure are because they speak about truths that are perennial to the human condition they're always there there always things that every human being um confronts within themselves oftentimes so it's not only informative about how to interact with other people you know you have the ten commandments which is very explicit but you also have you know a story of genesis which is like the bitter sweetness of acknowledging your mortality by biting into the apple

and having the the power of foresight that you know you're going to so that in a way infuses your life with meaning because now you recognize and you have the knowledge the very valuable knowledge that you are mortal and you have a finite time so you reality something that is inevitable you know that's one definition of reality something that is definition of reality something that is unavoidable and so therefore you have the upper hand in the sense of someone relative to someone who did not have knowledge of that or did not have intimate knowledge of it enough to take it seriously and do something to um you know establish a legacy you know do something that maybe might help their generations down the line

make their life more meaningful make so a little less suffering for some people and I think I'm just interested in David Foster Wallace because He obviously in the end lost the battle against his own dread of his own battle with the meaninglessness of a wide variety of aspects of the contemporary American life He didn't find enough hope didn't find enough value in what America was in relation to the world It seems this is a lot of projection here but It's seen I I bet you know he got married like twice I one of his Wives he like was very

It didn't seem like he was very He was it's crazy because he was a A piercing observationalist observer of reality and that's why his writings are so good and is because he he's able to point out truths about reality and social experiences in a way that not only does he see him but he's able to write about them in a very interesting way and make them easy to read and which is a whole another art in itself but it's like

he didn't know how to navigate a relationship properly it doesn't seem which isn't an easy thing to do it's just you know he ended up I don't think he had kids I bet that would have given his life a lot more meaning because he when you have kids

you it seems to me I'm not there yet but I would like to you have more skin in the game so to speak you have a life that you're entirely responsible for and you therefore have just put all your cards on the table as far as what to do with your life you no longer have the option at least in any noble sense of just bowing out of the game and and letting humanity other humans do to the broad culture of humanity or civilization as we know it you know what they will you are once you have

kids you've established a it's kind of like you've established some psychic territory and physical territory on the broad stage as it were again another interesting thing is that we we look at the world the world's a stage as shakespeare said often and we think of wars the most you know the most serious full things as far as oftentimes or at least up until now as far as impacting the trajectory of human history we think of those we historians write volumes on the theaters of war in world war two the european theater or the pacific theater and we think in terms of stories and narratives and once you have children you it's like you're writing a new chapter in your book preventing your story from closing decisively when you die

you now have at least have the hope or the potential that your story even if it's only the spirit of your story and the you know even if in you know a hundred years nobody living actually remembers you physically they don't have any active memories of you they might have memories of your son or daughter and the things they remember about them will be the characteristics and the traits and the mannerisms and the behaviors that you passed on to them and who knows how far back some of us some of our behaviors actually are traceable you know we're not traceable but um if we were to have the knowledge how far back we might be able to say this particular set of you know cultural values or behaviors actually goes into history and um it's just yeah that's why i'm fascinated by

psychology and by history because just as important as the physical bodies that you know become political figures and great artists and you know the people

who were integral in shaping the industrial age and inventors and tradesmen who were integral in building cathedrals and

uh... Coliseums and all that are the ideas that these people broad groups of people inhabit or the people

the broad groups of people that these ideas inhabit maybe maybe might be the better way of talking about it so I just want to I guess I just value stories as a way

to mind for truth and this story in particular just had it just resonated with me it made me laugh in like a real guttural way like i i was reading it i was practicing reading it earlier and i couldn't help myself like couldn't help it stop reading because i had to laugh i couldn't keep a straight face and uh it's just comical the the fact that this is real and the fact that this guy some of the characters he encounters on this on board this cruise ship are so just not real you know it's interesting like they're it's so relatable because so it's sad but there's so many people in reality that

are so unaware of how you know superficial they come across as or just so blatantly selfish and absorbed with them with their own appearances that uh you gotta you gotta laugh at it yeah i guess i just want to uh pay my respects to the value of good comedy writing or speech you know stand up um i don't want to get into anything political but you know i do appreciate dave's dave chappelle's stand up um because we can't if we can't laugh about things well if we can't talk about things we can't laugh about things we can't laugh about things and we can't confront the realities the sad and harsh truths that are necessary to have communicated in order to be able to take action because we can't effectively

change laws and change how certain types of people behave unless we're dealing with the reality and the facts at hand. And I say effectively because we can change how people behave, but they're going to be ultimately ineffective, corrupt, or just extremely negative for the life, the quality of life for people and civilizations in general, if the ways we're making people change their behavior is based on lies or,

or half-truths. And if we can't, at the sadness, the depression beneath the waves upon which these luxury cruises often sail, you know, we can't give the next generation something to look forward to. We can't alter history so that it's a little bit. better for the next generation instead of worse because it can certainly always get worse but it can always get better too so that's the eternal battle so I guess that's the that's the eternal battle between good and evil I was talking about earlier referencing at least yeah you know as much as we can learn from people who failed we can also learn

a lot from people who have succeeded and this guy did both i think he failed to overcome his profound dissatisfaction with he failed to be emotionally satisfied with his actions in life enough to sustain his existence really you know i want to know why like where he went wrong he's such an interesting guy and his thoughts were his thoughts and he was just so perceptive he was very very intelligent and uh it seemed like he was emotionally very very vulnerable i guess and i think as the internet i'm maybe i'm particularly sensitive to that because i appreciate the vulnerability i guess that's why i kind of use you guys as my shrink. It seems like that's something we all desperately need.

And it does seem like it's a trajectory. The culture is generally trending towards. People want less filtered. They want more raw. They want reality, you know. And we're never going to get anywhere unless we confront reality willingly with open eyes

and with a clear sense of what is good and what is bad and I think something as hilariously depressing as this story to me is very educational

in terms of figuring out what to avoid what types of people are just are just what types of lifestyles rather and the people who these lifestyles cater to

are just clearly not the right way to go about living your life especially if you have the amount of money that the people in the story have you know so I think

there is recognizing like the big movement of recognizing our privilege is to broaden that conception and recognize our national privilege on the world stage, as it were, and recognize that once we're able to take care of our own, we need to, and we do, it's not like we don't do humanitarian efforts, and it's not like there's plenty of very, very, it seems altruistic billionaires

out there, maybe not plenty, but there's not a... a complete anyways are I think it's interesting I think it's intrinsically interesting and I think the mark of a good storyteller is one who is able to make us laugh fronted in the midst of confronting and showing us despair in the who is able to make us cackle with laughter while showing the most bleak realities. And this guy seems like one of them. So I'd like to absorb his, what he left. And this story seems like one of them.

One of the great nuggets of insights, even if it's not distilled into a pithy aphorism that we can, the general story of this. is uh it's worth it's a good uh criticism of of uh you know the decadence and the what not to do when you have wealth or at least we generally want to avoid as um as a trap we might fall into when considering what fun really is again the subtitle is on nearly the subtitle is on nearly lethal on the nearly lethal comforts of a luxury cruise. The subtext, I think the subtext of that being the, uh, the lethality, ultimately for him. It's not very, um, it's not unique for artists to predict their own deaths and to often

like, you know, cry for help in a serious way. The leads, I mean, you know, famous artists did that all the time. Sublime in general has a song called Pool Shire. in which he writes about one day losing the war to heroin, which he did. And on the nearly lethal comforts of a luxury cruise, I think he's, I think he wrote that subtitle, Shipping Out. I think he wrote the whole title, I mean the whole thing with a very conscious eye at the broader culture that this particular trip on a cruise ship is just a part of,

just one facet of. And we, uh, if we stay on our comfortable comforts is a, is a key word there. If we stay on the comforts that, you know, our privilege provides without recognizing immensely, you know,

We're wealthy we are and in elements and grateful we should be without recognizing the losses and sacrifices throughout centuries that have allowed the current affluence of, you know, particularly in America. This guy was an American in the ship is right out of Key West, Florida, my own state. he recognizes, you know, in the title, the nearly lethal comforts of a luxury cruise is very indicative of what

meaningless, meaninglessness can arise out of avoiding true adventure in lieu of a, or going on a cruise, going on a sad facade of an adventure in lieu of a real adventure, in lieu of a real adventure going out and, you know, learning some history, educating yourself as much as possible, just using every avenue of education and self-education,

whether in books or on the streets or in institutions, whether it's politics or local businesses or, you know, local. politics national politics um learning about the environment learning about astronomy our larger environment there's so many facets of life to yet to explore in a real meaningful way and there's so much that goes uncommunicated back even once people do learn there's so much interesting useful perspective altering information that that needs to be relayed and injected back into the community that going on a decadent hedonistic comfortable not knocking it if it if we're literally talking about a cruise and you've earned it and you want to just chill out and get hammered

and eat a bunch of food and watch comedy shows and lounge on the deck for a week that's fine but if you if you act like that throughout your whole life if you make that the goal of life his point is there's no meaning to be found that's going to prevent it from being perhaps more than nearly

lethal lethal in the end so David Foster Wallace shipping out on the nearly lethal I can't say that word on the nearly lethal comforts of a luxury cruise is what will be reading.

Hope I do it now. Talk to a big game. I want to put this out probably as a podcast, maybe as a video, because it's probably going to be a pretty boring video, but definitely a podcast. Hopefully you guys like it. We'll be back to the regularly

astronomy-based, more historical material episodes soon. So until then, I'll see you guys next time, but until then have a good, have a good day, good night, stay well, stay healthy, but great if I told you to do anything more than that, or listening.

I mean, I hear a brain at work there, sort of where do you want it to go? What is it? I think not exploding would be a start. That kind of stuff, I dissociate very well, and it's a useful talent. Part of you is a nerd, and you want to sit in libraries, you don't want to be bothered, and you're very shy, and another part of you is the worst ham of all time. Look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me. And you have fantasies about writing something that makes everybody drop to one knee, you know.

There. Feminists are always saying this, so feminists are saying white males have, okay, I'm going to sit down and write this enormous book and impose my fallace on the consciousness of the world. And you say? If that was going on, it was going on at a level of awareness, I do not want to have access to. What the really great artists do, and it sounds very trite to say it out by.

Well, what the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, their own way of fracturing reality, and that if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings. And this is what Blue Velvet did for me. If you wanted something like really exciting or sexy, there really isn't much. I just got really... But were you, I mean, it was drugs and you were suicidal and the whole nine yards, yes?

Yeah, here's why I'm embarrassed talking about it. Not because I'm personally ashamed of it, but because everybody talks about it. I mean, I did some recreational drugs. I didn't have the stomach to drink very much, and I didn't have the nervous system to do anything very hard. That wasn't the problem. The problem was I started out, I think, wanting to be a writer and wanting to get some attention, and I got it really quick.

About writing. And realized it didn't make me happy at all, in which case, hmm, why am I writing? You know, what's the purpose of this? And I don't think it's substantively different from the sort of thing, you know, somebody who wants to be a really successful cost accountant, right? And be a partner of his accounting firm

and achieves that at 50 and goes into something like a depression. The brass ring I've been chasing does not make everything okay. So that's why I'm embarrassed to talk about. It's just not particularly interesting. What it is is very, very average. And it wasn't a whole lot of attention, but it seemed like a whole lot to, you know, a library weeny from the lower level of Frost Library in Amherst College. And I had a hard time with it.

And I was lucky enough to have a really hard time with it at an age early enough so that there was something left in my life when it was over.