librarypunk - 057 - The Man From Earth (2007) feat. LaborKyle

Episode Date: June 23, 2022

We’re watching Justin’s favorite movie and brought on the Internet’s premiere smart thinky man, Kyle! We address the question: what if a Star Trek TOS episode was 97 minutes long?   https://twitter.com/laborkyle https://www.youtube.com/c/laborkyle  https://twitter.com/profaneshow https://twitter.com/agabpod   Media referenced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_logico-epistemology  Community - Abed proves Who's the Boss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasein

Speaking of need for speed, my like 4K Blu-ray at Top Gun got here today. It's going to be a fucking party, my dudes. I hear the new one doesn't have any of the zest and magic of the original. You mean all the homosexuality? Yes, exactly, of course. The gay shit. Yeah, because I've heard it's good, but I'm like, yeah, but. Yeah.

Is there like, you know. Yeah. Is there like shirtless Val Kilmer and like, Tom Cruise, like, making angry eyes at each other in, like, a sweaty locker room. Playing volleyball? I mean, come on. Hanging with the boys. Like, come on.

There's a reason I'm gay. It's because my dad showed me that movie in middle school. That's my rude. If we're doing better, I'm a cheerleader language. I'm Justin. I'm a skull calm library. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie.

I work IT at a public library. My pronouns are they then? I'm Jay. I'm a music library director. And my pronouns are he, him. God, that feels fucking great to say. And we have a guest, would you like to introduce yourself? Hi, my name is Kyle.

I am a historian and writer. And my pronouns are he and him. Return guest. Hanging with the boys today. We are hanging with the boys. So you have been on before, and we talked about video games. And this is kind of like a video game and that it's a movie. and it's entirely about libraries.

As all movies are. All movies are about libraries. A, Mal, all movies are libraries. Yeah. All movies are repositories of contingent epistemology. And if that's not a library, then I don't, I guess, I guess I'm confused then, because that sounds like a library. I mean, I don't know what video games are still. You don't know what libraries are.

It balances out. Yeah. So, Kyle, why don't you do your plugs up front because you've got some more projects on board since the last time we had you? That's true. We've had new things. You can follow me on Twitter at Labor Kyle, of course. And you can listen to my podcast, which is called All Gamers Are Bastards.

And it's about video games. And I host it with my friend Kay. And then also you can mostly find what I've been doing on the Zero Books YouTube channel. on a show called profane illuminations that I host with my good friend, The Litre Cuy, it's a Benyminian, block-in, weirdo-Marxist, utopian podcast slash show about the unveiling of our contemporary moment using the profane illumination, which are thought images and sketches and sort of this, you know, a neo-modernist sort of constellation of thought. image, which is a really pretentious way of saying it's kind of, we kind of do our thing,

do our own thing, follow, follow our bliss on the topic or whatever. I'm very actually, very proud of it. We have a new episode that will be coming out in the next couple weeks on revolution as an idea, which will have my most insurrectionist content so far. And John and I have made an entire video about rioting. And this is still way more. It's about pride, which that, so that, that conversation was really good. And besides that, now I'm writing books, apparently, because people asked me to. And I said, yes. So those will come out next year, probably.

Are they the kind of books where it's academic books and you don't actually get paid to write them? No. They're like real books. One of them is for, one of them is a work on, I'm writing it. I'm under contract with repeater books right now to write. Oh, hell, yeah. Yeah, I'm very grateful and glad to be over there with all of them. Getting to know with them working with working with the new zero or the revamped zero has been really rewarding.

That book is going to be a longer treatment all about the philosophy of history and sort of how we narrativeize history using things like labor, but also personal essays. In the same sense of our show, it's going to be pastiche-esque in the way that it sort of sketches history as an idea. and then I'm also working on a smaller work for Zero that will be a part of a series on Utopia that my editor at Repeater, my editor Carl at Repeater is actually going to be editing for them. And that book is going to be about the utopian language of revivalism and is to be titled, Revival, the Return of Spirit, which I'm still very, yeah, it's a good title. I like, I like that title. So, yeah, those will be good, I think.

I will be buying both of them. They sound great. Oh, thank you. And you did just finish coming off the high of breaking the internet with the boss baby sort of definitive work. Oh, what's that fucking Wagner term, the Gazumsevec? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, because it's work. Yeah.

Yeah, if you're, if you're ever don't get enough of the sound of my own voice, the horror vanguard is a great place to find hour long conversations about the boss baby in which I tried to do as much as I can to purge the film totally from my body. I've been talking about it for over a year and a half since the first time I saw it. Laid eyes on it, really, let's face it. And well, I mean, the conference, the boss baby conference is going for round two next year. I just, and I missed the, I missed the. I missed the training the first time around, so I'll probably have to figure that, you know, revisit this very important text of our contemporary moment.

Yeah, two hours and 15 minutes on that topic over at Horde Vanguard. I listened to it while I was experiencing Boston commuter traffic for the very first time. And it was like a good, like wine pairing, I think. That's good. I'm glad I could be of service there. I didn't look at how long it was. And I was like, man, there must be wrapping up soon. And then I just like, I was like doing work around the house for something.

And I was like, man, when did I start listening to this? John and Ash just kind of let me do things. And I'm so grateful for it because I was a fan of Horror Vanguard before I ever went on it. I was a listener. And now I talk to those guys every day. I just, I did propose that episode. I messaged Ash and John. and I said, there probably should be, I had just, what had I done?

I'd watch the sequel or something. And I messaged them and I said, look, there should probably be a horror vanguard episode on this. And they're like, okay, let's get it on the books. And well, what can I, what can I say? They get me, I guess. They get me. I'm sure there's something juicy in the Boss Baby series about like information and information

transmission and knowledge and then something that we could do. Yeah. I'm not watching a boss baby. In the sequel. Yeah. They go to a whole private school in the sequel. Oh. Yeah.

And it's all about like academic pressure. Oh, shit. Like, there's, there's some. Yeah, there's, there's so much to work with. It's. Yeah. It's shit. I'm like, yeah.

I'm never deleting that one. I was looking at the Fouca mode. And I was like, oh, no, I deleted that one. I added like 10 new drops, though. I have never gotten so many messages at one time is when that clip started moving around Twitter. It was just like about once an hour. It just came to the Agab Twitter account to my personal account. I'm glad, you know what?

That's good. That's fine. That's good. I'm glad to be known for something. Yeah, you got to be known for something, right? Yeah. Well, we have a chance to go for a second part because I was looking for, we're going to talk about the man from Earth, the Drombixby written sci-fi movie, which was produced by his son after Drumbixby's

death. No one has written about this movie, which I find very strange. No one's done like a video essay. No one has written any academic papers about it. So, I mean, this will be the definitive sort of a critical moment for the film, except for like, oh, what was the ending about? I don't get it. Like those kinds of YouTube videos that are just the worst.

Ding. Cinema skins. This is our boss baby moment. Yeah, I think so. Our boss baby era. Yeah. So this movie's like kind of good? Yeah.

It's just a good. It's actually good. Yeah. So I've seen this movie in college just because it has this like, you know, it has this quality, it has this sort of like almost, it's not pre-viral. There are things that were going viral on the internet when this movie came out. But it feels like a, a viral early, a medium early viral memory for me, which is just something that got passed around

by people who thought it might be interesting and who were into science fiction and stuff. That's how it ended up in my, you know, that's how I ended up porning it or whatever. And yeah, it's actually kind of good. And it's better than I remembered it actually. And I liked it very much the first time that I saw it. Yeah. I mean, the virality was like essential to the story of this movie, which was. you know, it was filmed in two days. It had sort of a limited release. And then it went really big on Torrent sites. And then I think got picked up by early Netflix. And I think that was where I first saw it. It was like right when it got on Netflix. Yeah, this film got like a second wind from it's one of those torrent success stories where the producer was like, hey, thanks for sharing the movie. Otherwise, people would never have seen it. And it's my father's last work and I wanted to do it right. And that's why it's all.

all filmed in a it's all filmed in one house over the film of the course of an afternoon basically and the original production from what I remember I couldn't I didn't find anything definitive on this but other movie studios wanted to include flashbacks and things like that and he's like no the whole point is you've got people trying to break a story sitting in a room and so it's a very philosophical movie it talks a lot about information history knowledge the self I think this would be like a perfect movie for like introductory philosophy courses if you wanted to give something fun because there's a lot of top up. Or historiography for undergrads.

Like, I think, I think this could spur on an entire, a series of class worth of conversations, which I mean, we'll, we'll get into. But I think it's super useful for instruction. It's very instructive. And it's good. It's well, it's really, really for me, what works about the movie is that it's well written. It has a lot of characters that are not just like, that embodied in their characterization is a series of goals that the writer wanted to accomplish.

They come out very genuine. They change their mind throughout things. And then the performances, just so, you know, if we're talking about, you know, this is, you know, it's just talking about just sort of a base reading of the enjoyment of the film, the performances I thought were so good and sold just about everything that the film was trying to at the very least, even at its weakest point. Even at its weakest points as a text, I thought the performances were like constantly dragging me back into it, which is what I liked. Yeah, because the performances to me, they're not Academy Award performances, but that's not the vibe of this movie.

And I don't think I would want it to be that. Like, the way that the performances are and the way that everything is, is like perfectly suited to what the film is trying to do, if that makes sense. TV cast, TV cast, TV writer. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You could run this as a play at local production. It's very like Twilight Zone episodes. Yeah.

Is it like, wasn't because I don't know things. Jerome Biggsby's Star Trek? Question mark. There's a lot of Star Trek connections. Yeah. Yeah, I was looking at the Wikipedia article and clicked on some of the actors and a bunch of the actors were in Star Trek episodes. So I really like that. to the character's performance and in the fact that it really did feel like you were sitting in a room of people who knew each other.

So, like, yeah, like, I agree with Jay. There's nothing groundbreaking happening there, but it did feel very, like, embodied. It felt very much like I was peering over the shoulder, you know, in a room full of strangers. Like a bottle episode. They do a lot of interesting split shots. Yes. Is it a split diopter, I think is what that technique is called? So he stands off to the side.

and tries not to react. And then you see also the room is in focus where everyone else is talking about him while he's standing right there. It's a very Brian De Palma technique when he's not doing split screens. He does his split diopters, you know. I don't know shit about film, so now I have a new word. Yeah, split diopter. It's very fine. I only am thinking about it because someone brought up like famous split diopter scenes and in films.

And that's the only reason I noticed it and thought about it when I was watching the other night. But I mean, it's really cool. And so the whole point of the movie is there is a history professor named John Oldman who is suddenly resigning from his job, his tenured job. Relatable. And leaving and not telling anyone where he's going. And his friends are like, why did you not show up to the surprise party? The going away party. So we brought it to you.

And then he's like, I just, you know, I got to leave. And then he eventually tells them the story of actually the reason he leaves is people notice he doesn't age. And every 10 years, he moves on. And he's 14,000 years old. And this survives since the Paleolithic era somewhere in France were led to believe. So that's the premise. And the whole thing is you've got two anthropologists. He's a historian, an art historian and Christian fundamentalist, a biologist.

a student who gets all the best lines and his girlfriend, who is the worst written character. But I think she's a music historian. And there's a psychologist. Oh, right. And a psychologist. And the older psychologist. He jumped in the movie and then leaves. Or actually, he's a psychiatrist, I think.

He's a medical doctor. Yeah. Yeah. He's a brain person. From office. And the moving guys. Oh, yeah. And two moving guys too.

We were just there. Yeah, I like them. Yeah. Hard workers. Yeah. I always imagine what they were thinking because they're catching like snippets of the conversation after he's revealed that he's like 14,000 years old. And they're just like, all right. They're like picking up the furniture, the people are sitting on.

They're like, I got to move this and everybody's just still having the conversation. Like, yeah, that would be a fucking wild thing to go through. So, yeah, it's, there's a lot in this movie about how do we know what we know. And Jay brought up a lot of information that I isn't really in my willhouse, which is Buddhist epistemology. It's like this movie is very concerned with Buddhism and history and epistemology. So sort of the first things are just like psychological and scientific approaches to understanding what keeps him alive. Why is he like this? Why won't you go to my lab?

And he goes, I don't want to prove it. I don't need that because this is about myself. This is not like there's not an objective need for me. me to verify it. Well, he, I guess, I was thinking it was more in a way of like he's experiencing it. And he's telling people about it. But he's, he's both the lab and the psychiatrist are filmed as like carcoral threats. Yeah.

So he's wary of dealing with either of them. Yeah. This is the second time I get to go Buddhist on Maine about a movie for a podcast. It's very exciting. Yeah. And then, of course, the part people most tend to talk about, but it's actually kind of the weakest part of the film is where you find out that after he learns, yeah, after he learns from the Buddha, he moves back to the Near East and tries to teach Buddhism, which actually could have happened. There probably could possibly have been Buddhist missionaries in the Near East at that time. There's a group of people we know about.

Their religion is kind of explained, but we can't be sure they're Buddhists, but it's possible. Yeah, because Buddhism, the Shaky Muni Buddha, Siddhartha, when he was teaching Buddhist doctrine, he made it literally just the Four Noble Truth simple enough because it was meant to be syncretic. It was meant to be able to travel and be kind of implanted into any culture it was brought into. So as long as there's like that one thing, then you can do whatever the hell else you want. and it's basically Buddhism. That's why it looks so different, depending on where you are. Like, this part of the movie, like, yeah, I was like, ugh, really.

But it gave my favorite line, which was... Buddhism with a Hebrew accent. Buddhism with a Hebrew accent, I was, like, laughing my ass off when I got to that part. I was like, hell yeah. Because there's actually a lot of Jewish people who convert to Buddhism to the point where there is, like, an actual word for, for like Jewish converts to Buddhism. Yeah.

So it's like a very common thing actually. It has this sort of like, there's a very like, the sort of historiography, if you will, it's like a popular historiography that you can tell that the writer is pulling from when it comes to like, well, you know, Jesus was just like. Hercules and yeah. It's very like, it's very like of its time, funny enough. You can feel the sort of like, content, more contemporary edits that when it's, into the text that I like in this like I was very familiar with all of those discourses because that

was around the time where I was definitively like stepping out of Christianity having not really been what you could what what any mainline Christian would call a devout Christian for a very, very long time rather than just this like kind of weird Marxist detinerate preacher that I am nowadays. But like as I was working through undergrad and stuff like that, you learn that these historiographies, the historiographies of the lack of a historical Jesus in particular, but also the ones that kind of do a very easy one for one. Well, actually, it was Eastern, Eastern influence, or, you know, there's, there's, there's like a, it's uncovering a discursive secret about the origins of Christianity when like, no, it's actually the, it's actually, the historiography is like,

it's actually the more likely thing. It's a something of a creolization between Second Temple Judaism and Greco-Roman influences, the people who wrote, like Paul, Paul was influenced by his Greek and arguably, in my opinion, Greco-Roman education. It's not proof of a universalizing principle and knowledge that people are able to come to the similar conclusions from different places and different experiences, but it does demonstrate that there are certain limitations in the coherency of our narratives and that if we sort of take it at face value, right, that like, okay, this is a, this is a sort of like new atheist Bill Maher discourse kind of that's like worked its way in to sort of disrupt the persistence of a particular discourse.

When you take it at that face value, it actually, I think it's not great for the film. It kind of makes it get rocky a bit, but it allows it to become relevant again, I think, as a, for what the film is trying to say. You know, Sadie, I think they had a point. Just to be explicit, because I'm not sure if anybody's actually said it. he is Jesus. The Crow Magnet Man is Jesus. He like hung out with Buddha in India, even though he's from France, he's gone back and forth a bit. And then he goes in whoopsie, he was going to teach some Buddhism. So he accidentally becomes, he's the basis for historical Jesus. Like that feel when you accidentally become Jesus. Yeah. Like that was one of the major reveals of the movie. Which like that was my least favorite part. But. the way that they did the progression of the fundamentalist and her reactions to it, especially when he goes,

JK, like, at a bit. And like, it looks like, yeah, like, because I really, her character was getting on my nerves until that, where you can just see her starting to, like, have this crisis. And that it's even more of a crisis when he says he's kidding. And I thought that was. Skeptical relief. Yeah. There's no vacuum in your.

experience of this information because like there we don't have an idea of what past in itself is that does that's not a thing an object that exists right and so we have to attempt to narrativeize and cohere it's this very sort of like hayden white point this very sort of meta metahistory postmodern historiographic kind of point but I think what lies within it is the is the sort of the genealogical critique of history as a series of improbable possibilities that happen to cohere into particular via their contingencies adhere into particularity. Because the point of history isn't necessarily to discover truth, but it's about emergent knowledge. And that all histories are in some way, shape, or form the history of our present because they exist are bound wholly to the present.

It's a whole paradoxical mode of thought, and it's why history is so interesting. because on the one hand, it is the sort of like the, the rendered object of humanity. But by the same token, it seeks to create a very easily disruptable primordial thinking in originality, which in and of itself doesn't stand up to the scrutiny of history, the rendered object of its own creation. It's interesting. And I think, like, I like how the film, like, explicitly plays with that idea. And I think the obvious one is when he talks about with, I believe with the student, but it may have been another character about like describe your home when you were like seven,

like exactly where you lived, but also like did your mom take you to market with her? Okay, what direction was it and all that? Okay, you can't remember all the exact, exact details. That place doesn't exist anymore then. You can't go home because that home doesn't exist anymore because it's not something you can remember in the present. And so that's been lost, like, this sort of, like, just because it's something that theoretically existed in the past, because you can't perfectly recall it now, it's never something you can return back to. It is this, like, fundamental, like, saying no to nostalgia, kind of. It's, like,

not ever something you can return back to. The hedromonic nostalgia. Yeah. And then, like, the thing with the pin where they were like, well, seriously, you kept something from, when you were a caveman person. And he's like, would you fucking keep this pin for like thousands of years? No, because it's just like a tool and you don't, like the importance of it that it will have in a a bazillion years when someone finds it because it's left over from the past is not the importance it has now. Like where like meaning is very much time based kind of.

Like it doesn't have meeting at a certain point, but then it will in another point. The thing Kyle was saying about. about how we construct history. The film is very explicit about the distinctions between personal knowledge and historical knowledge. So he's always saying, I can't tell you about my past because, one, I had to learn about my past from modern sources, modern reconstructions of the past. I just wandered around an endless flat space one person at a time. I can't have knowledgeable recall if I don't have knowledge. And that's, you know, until other people did research about the past,

I couldn't describe these things. You know, when science described the crow magdine, I had a name for myself. But like, I didn't give myself that name. So that was the point he was making with the student, which was your individual knowledge doesn't really matter because you need to construct history from a past that's rapidly decaying and it's gone now. So the only thing you can do is your best guess and anyone can do it. And that's why they can never break his story on historical terms. I can't even make, I don't know. I can't know if I made you believe me.

I can't know if in a month even says the line, I know I have it. Even if I could make you believe me in a month you wouldn't. This sort of like guaranteed negation is this very sort of like Nietzsche and Foucawian sort of point that we've been kind of, you know, working with here. And I brought a passage from an essay on Nietzsche genealogy and history by Foucault. where he talks about, he's talking about Nietzsche's different. Nizier has three different words that he uses for the idea of heritage, but that there's a,

that there are sort of like associative metaphysics, if you will. I'm probably using the wrong terminology. I'm not a Niche expert, but he said, Foucault starts here. He says, we should not be deceived into thinking that this heritage is an acquisition, a possession that grows and solidifies. Rather, it is an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile interior from within or from underneath. And he's quoting from Nietzsche here, injustice or instability in the minds of certain men. Their disorder and lack of decorum are the final consequences of their ancestors, numberless,

logical inaccuracy, hasty conclusions, and superficiality. Which is, that's, Actually, Foucault has some of his most biting, funny enough, he uses very, like, he's very direct and very intense in his critique. But that language right there is sort of the, it's the legacy of the knee chain point, which is that like primordialism is this creation of implotment that goes in the Fukoian sense goes all the way to the body. And it creates these in narrative, it creates and narrativizes and in plots via the systems of discipline and systems of control and institutionalization, which I think is what's so interesting about this film, how the writer made sure to mention there was like threats of the sort of incarceration discourses of like, well, that's a quick way to an asylum is basically what they say at one point in the film, which is, I think it's important to. to sort of like, if you're going to disrupt the origins of quote unquote originality in like historical life, in this case the natural birth and death cycle of people, well then the critique needs to sort of boil over to the like tropic gestures of institutions that lock people up and they'd never see the outside of the world again.

And it's all because of this supposed the in the historiographic implotment of a teleology. You know, it restricts our imagination by not letting experience have its, be balanced out by its own negativity and its inability to capture. Just as you all were saying, being present at that moment in time didn't mean that he understood the entirety of that time. He was still one person, you know? Yeah, and like, I found, especially because it explicitly names Buddhism, like, in the film, it's not just me going like, oh, the beginning of this movie is in Bhutan, and there's some meditating posture, so Buddhist philosophy time now, like I did with the I'm too bad. This film explicitly names it, and so when I was watching it, the way that, like, a lot of the things that it says about how we know things and why that matters are very similar to very early Buddhist, epistemologies like Justin mentioned in that like, you know, so like Shacki Muni Buddha, you know, he taught his stuff in India, yada, yada, yada, yada, four noble truths, don't be a dick, you know, whatever. And then like the Arhots and some other

people who like heard his teachings, then went off and like did their own teachings. And early Buddhist practice is largely epistemological. It's like trying to figure out what makes something. It's actually getting into atomic theory. If you read into it, it's really cool. Like in monasteries in Tibet, like one of the main things you do as you're learning the Dharma is you do logic debates with each other. And it has like cool like hand gestures and stuff. I took a Buddhist philosophy course in college and we actually got to learn how to do the monastic debate. And that was like, yeah, no, it fucking ruled. And so early Buddhist like teachings and practice was like largely like not faith based.

it was like you logic that shit out and like even like how do you know something and I still have my Buddhist philosophy textbooks and one thing that says is that like for the Buddha the route to liberating knowledge is a path that invites empirical investigation

and leads to a personal realization of the truth of the Dharma. So Dharma is Sanskrit, Dharma is or no, Dharma is Pali and Dharma is Sanskrit because actually the the original text were in Polly before Sanskrit. For liberation, the crucial things to attain knowledge of based on direct, quote, knowing and seeing are such matters as how things arise

from conditions, how conditioned things are impermanent, pain-inducing, and not self, and the four noble truths. And so knowledge is based on four factors. First, the sense perception, that's one word, in a very like, Salman Rushdie kind of way, on the basis of a mind, purified of disording elements. So that's why you have to meditate. It's not just your sense. but like, oh, you got a key in. So, like, you don't have the distorting elements of, like, greed or hatred or delusion. Second, there's extrasensury perception. There are inferences drawn from the experiences of these perceptions,

but remaining close to them so as to not use them as a springboard for speculations that go beyond them. And then finally, knowledge must be characterized by coherence and consistency. So it's all, like, logic-based and very like, if this, then that, therefore, like literally in the Dharma, it's like if you can't logic through something, then you throw it out because it's not important to your enlightenment. The Dalai Lama is not

the Pope of Buddhism, but he has said that if science can prove that rebirth isn't real, then fucking throw it out. It's not useful to us anymore because then it's not true. And so often people ask, like, oh, if there's rebirth in Buddhism, like, do people remember their past lives? No, because that's

not important. Because that's a thing in the past. You can't directly know it. And trying to figure out doesn't actually help you towards liberation. It's like the present moment is what matters in Buddhism and how you know things. And also if once you start getting more into like Indo-Tibetan, like more esoteric and tantric Buddhist epistemologies, there's this sort of like a way more focus on visualization of deity and like a visual and mental transformation. And the question often arises there of, okay, is this real? Are we believing all of this stuff? Or is this more like pedagogical mental exercises? Like, is it helping me to be a compassionate person to imagine

that I become Vajrasatfa who embodies this? Or am I actually becoming this on some sense realm that I can't imagine because I'm in samsara, right? And from my own teachers and just from my own, you know, philosophy knowledge, the answer is, is there a difference if the outcome is the same? If it, if both get you to the same place, is there a meaningful distinction between the two? Are they actually contradictory? And so, like, does figuring that out help you in any way or you just go forward with your vibes and what helps? So in this film is like talking about, like, there was literally a point where it said, if you believe me or if you don't believe me, what's the difference there?

Does it actually matter if I'm telling the truth or not if you believe me? And if you don't believe me, does it matter if I'm telling the truth or not? There's this tension between authenticity of what's the actual reality when he points out that the outcome is the same either way, depending on what their reactions are. Then I was just like, ooh! And immediately wanted to put this film in conversation with F for Fake, where it talks about art forgery.

And if the artist's forgery of Picasso is the exact same as is as good as Picasso's and is like tricked people and has been in like art galleries and stuff, then what's the difference if the outcome is the same of looking at a beautiful painting? Right. And so just like through this film of it like interrogating this like, okay, let's go logic based, whatever. Like let's get to the root of this thing. Let's get to the atomicity of what makes this truth and what isn't. But then also him acknowledging whether or not I'm telling the truth doesn't matter. It's based on what you believe. Otherwise, it's going to get you to the same place either way.

So, like, very basic, like, Buddhist epistemologies, at least from an Indo-Tibetan perspective, because I know jack shit about, like, Chan and Zen and Pure Land in any meaningful way. But and so then when he goes and be like, oh, yeah, and then I'm Jesus because I learned Buddhism. I'm like, Christianity's not that similar to Buddhism. Actually, if you look at it. So I was like, eh, okay, movie. Just because their tenants are like, don't be a dick. Doesn't mean that they're similar. I mean, there are a lot of things where the tenant is don't be a dick. So like most religions, it's don't be a dick. Right. It's just defining what the dick is. Yeah, and how you don't be a dick. But yeah. I don't know. I found this movie's way of grappling with trying to figure things out. And then if they do figure it out, what's the actual outcome of that figuring it out? I found that really interesting. And then when it was like Jesus Buddhism time, I was like, okay. Yeah. I appreciated the anthropologist character, Dan, because he's like the whole time, he's like, yeah. Candyman. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, the whole time he's like, yeah, let's just, let's just see where it goes, you know, like whether, yeah, he kind of does the same thing where it's like whether or not he's lying or not, why does it matter? Let's just see how this conversation goes and what threat it is. But then at the end of the film, he has, I wouldn't say disproportionate, but he has like a very emotional reaction when, you know, John claims that it was all a trick. he's Fox Mulder he wants to believe yeah yeah and so it's kind of like I don't know I don't know how this connects to what you were saying Jay but that's just how that character kind of intrigued me in the

sense that he was doing that sort of philosophical thing and then in the end it turned out to be very emotional for him instead so he developed attachment to it yeah he he doesn't he doesn't he's not actually following a logical path in what he's trying to he starts out that way yeah I think Because it's not, it's just non-consequentialism, right? He doesn't like, he's allowing ethical assumptions to be what they are and instead seeking to use the, use what he's been given to get at the heart of intent of the matter, which I think is a really useful way of thinking. And it's a useful way of working against sort of your instincts to co-hear and normalize. that which you and here's it reminds me of a couple of things it reminds me of a friend of mine

who when I worked for I used to work for a homeless nonprofit in Florida where I have so I have a lot of friends who live in tents and who are colorful let's just let's just call them colorful they have varying diagnoses and mental health problems or whatever a lot of them are very very kind very gentle people who have a different sense of interpretation of the world. A friend of mine, his name is Brady, who he is, he still lives in that area. He's from that area, actually. He went to church. I met him through, I got him into the shelter that we were in that I was working with

after having met him because he went to church with my parents. And Brady taught, it's less, the content of what he says is difficult to, to piece out because he has a tendency to string sentences together, which is relatable. But he talks in paragraphs. And so you have to sort of like, you really have to just kind of like dig out and interpret. Like, it really is sort of like a philosophical exercise of digging out rot. Not to say that like the excess in his speech is negative, but that the it's sort of core meanings are more bound to correlations, right?

he's not actually talking about, like when he, when he's talking about, there's a private airport close to where he has his tent and that planes pass over and over again and whatever, he talks about conspiratorial thinking stuff like sonic booms and that kind of a thing. He uses language like that to describe and represent his legitimate experiences. There's an element of like the intertwining between imminence and transcendence in the way that he talks and the way that he thinks in his speech.

that always makes me think of great interlocutors throughout history. He doesn't do it by actually being direct in sort of having you question the way he, the way that you question how you see the world is embodied in Brady's experiences, not necessarily what he says, how he says it in any one particular way, but all of it all at once. All of that particularity in those contingencies actually act as critique of the dominant discourses that would say, Brady was diagnosed with bipolar when he was young and he's not medicated.

This is why he is the way that he is. He lost his family. He had a break when he lost his father died. And that's all, you know, God bless the man. I hate to air all of his laundry out here, but he doesn't listen to podcasts. But like, and all of this, like, the sort of narrative implotment that's given to my friend here explains some of the ways that he got to where that he is, but it does not. fully encapsulate the language of his experiences. Noir does it account for his. And what it actually

does, it has a tendency to sort of press against his agency in the expression of his agency. He's someone who needs to be helped, but can't be helped is something that I've heard people who are literally related to him say. They've made very little attempts to like, let's see this for what it is. And let's try and like, he needs to go fishing. Let's just try and go fishing and talk for an hour and do our best to sort of like remove the particular expectation of, you know, social discipline and individual control and try and instead find, you know, it's not a, not a universal sense of being, but a universal disruption in the particular impotment of our sense of being. Then let's go find something more and try and move beyond.

Honestly, not, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's really basic, but who, like, what is the figure of diogenes, if not this, and both active interlocutor in the minds and texts from antiquity, and also this weirdo who lived in the pot and talked to dogs and, you know, did other colorful, less appropriate things in public and all, you know, that sort of a thing. Diogenes was that, exactly, exactly. Diogenes, like, when you attempt to sort of like bring the experience of, and historic interlocutor in his way of living, the way you live your life and being incredibly important, like these tropes and modes and plotments and arguments and ideologies or whatever

do little to actually capture the possibility of those experiences and rather than seek to reduce them in some measurable sense of what that could be. And that's usually the driver of history, right? Are these like, what's the measurable metaphysical quantity of this topic? How can I reduce that and place it within its particular discursiveness or any, you know, and all that's good, all that's good. That's just, that's just historical research. Like, I, even I do that. But what you, we also have to do in like sort of our field, in historians need to, like, you have to live and die against the grain. You can't just read it. You have to live and die against the grain. You can't just read it. You have. to bring yourself back to life in it, and not just an implied sense, but in an actual sense. And that's probably crazy. But, you know. Yeah, like, in the, like, with what you're saying and in the film and with the epistemologies that we're talking about and everything, like, you know, the whole movie is an interrogation.

And he seems to just be slipping through every question. Like, it's very slippery. There's nothing they can hold on to because they all have an expectation of what they want the answer to be or what they don't want it to be. Like, there is a specific expectation there. They're not just existing and asking for the sake of asking and seeing what the answer is. They're not meeting it where it's at. They have a specific shape in mind already, like, it's already this predefined history in their head that then this isn't meeting. And in Buddhist philosophy, so you start out and it's very like, Shepathias,

atom atomic theory, and then you start moving into discourses of emptiness. And emptiness often gets a bad rep of being like nealism, right? This is where you get no self. This is where you get all this stuff. And people think like, oh, no self. That's nihilism. What emptiness is, is it's approaching things without attachment or expectation and realizing that like what's there isn't like, it's not this,

shape idea that you had of it. There's no core essential thing there. The language my llama lama used for at one time was it's a womb of potentiality. It is not a negative space. It is a space that is open to be anything. And so when you approach things where they're at and don't have a fixed thing that you want it to be in mind when you are approaching history or approaching reality or approaching anything, then it just like opens up this beautiful space that can be what it wants to be, right? Yeah, I was probably butchering that too.

I'm not like, I myself am not a fancy history boy or philosophy boy or anything. I just took a class one time. Well, so like you're saying Jay And like thinking about like the characters, because that's always what I go to in like films and stuff. The person in the room who really did that was the student. Yes. She like.

She fucking got it. She got it. She had fun with it. She let it go as soon as it was like. It was playful. Yeah. And she didn't, she was pretty much the only one who didn't have an emotional reaction when it was revealed as a hoax.

She was just like, oh, okay, that's a thing. I'm still curious about it. And then the asshole archaeologist is like, come on. But I think that those sort of, that sort of juxtaposition between those two characters was really interesting. Because the archaeologist right off the bat is an asshole. He's like, we got to get you committed, my dude. Yeah, we got to get you committed. He walks in off of a motorcycle with a younger student, hands like his parting gift is a copy of his own book.

You know, like, they really took that trope and we're like, we're going to do everything with it. We're going to make sure it's clear. Someone had a dick professor. Somebody had a dick professor. The hilarious thing is that character really reminded me of my father, which I won't go into. But then the fact that the person who in throughout all of it is actually embodying the true core of like this is this is an exploratory thing is just is the student. It's not any of the, you know, credential professors or anything. It's it's a student who goes, oh yeah, I was in.

your undergrad this class. I was in your undergrad this class. She has beginners mind. I'm clearly along for the ride because I literally wrote up on the back of a motorcycle. So I really appreciated that about her. That was like transcendental, Sadie. Thank you. I mean, what they're, what they're constantly trying to do is force him to prove the historical facts of the case. And then they immediately go, actually, that's not possible because there's no There's no authorities on prehistory. There's no authorities on the childhood of Jesus. And even if you did, it would require multiple attestation, which he's the only person

who is 14,000 years old as far as he knows. Maybe one other person he met one time, but that person could have been lying to him. He doesn't know. As far as he knows, he's probably alone. Yes. So there's no multiple attestation. But the whole, the really Christian parts of this movie are really interesting because they're doing a lot of like historical Jesus stuff.

And so the way the Jesus seminar works is they try and find out like what are the most likely historical Jesus phrases. And then they kind of rank them. And this is the same way that Hadith are ranked saying to the Prophet Muhammad, which are how many independent attestations are there? And that's sort of our standard for proof. But that never works with oral histories. That doesn't work with any other type of non-written thing because it needs to be written four times. That's why New Testament scholars, particularly because most New Testament scholars are just Christians, they create more hypothetical documents to then point to and say, look, we have more attestations of this because there's not only Matthew, Mark, and Luke, there's also Q, there's also Q, there's also M, there's also L.

They make dozens of these things and then point to them as if they're real. So Barterman does this and it's very annoying. Whereas, like, the easiest answer is they copied from each other because, yeah, it's the simplest answer. And also just like that's our way of knowing, knowing it, knowing knowledge that's a bad word. It's 9.30 p.m. is like based on written at a station. And like, why is that a better mode of knowledge transmission and verification? It's arbitrary. Yeah, exactly. Well, the thing, the thing that I just thought about. Cat! Oh, my God. He's really hanging on there.

Scar save me Aw Long live the king We got Arthur right here King Arthur But how like They were asking You know they're interrogating him

They're asking him all these historical questions And then when he answers them Especially the archaeologist was like Well that's just straight out of a textbook And it's like well I mean he's a history For one he's a historian You're an archaeologist Like if he's telling the truth

then wouldn't you want it to be straight out of a textbook? Because wouldn't that mean that you're right? You know, like that sort of contradiction. Like, it's... Oh, you just looked that up. Oh, you just look that up. Like, how the fuck else am I supposed to do it then? Like, if history is as you've claimed and as your, you know,

specialty or field or whatever says it is... By your own logic. Yeah, by your own logic. That should be his answer. So why are you using it to cast doubt on his story? Like, you're showing your ass there, basically. In monastic debate, they would go, finished, finished, finished, and do like a fun little snap at him.

And that's how you know you just got poned. It's your, like, you're drawing, I know, right? You're drawing particular conclusions that are, it's what's really, I think, neat about the dialogue, the dialogic style. This really, this plural dialogic style, which is very like, I mean, you know, someone got their BA. Someone read play, someone had to read a bunch of play, though, like, possibly, or someone's like me who didn't get their BN philosophy, but who came to philosophy through an interdisciplinary means. But, like, I think, I think as like people who have, you know, been involved in near,

inside around next to academia, we can all understand how, like, how, like, the, the, the, the crisis of confidence that comes when someone, realizes that they weren't completely, that they weren't completely totally wedded to the epistemological premises of their study, of their field. Some scholars have nervous breakdowns because they realized that they didn't believe themselves this whole time, that this whole time that they're sort of like, like name of the fathering, their mode of discipline, their field, their, their, their wedding to a particular subject. It's the episode of community. It's the episode of community where

Abed takes the class on who's the boss and Abed, he takes a class on a scholar who specializes in the study of the show who's the boss. And he takes the class under the premise and the professor says in the beginning of the class, this is a question with no answer. You can't actually say who is the boss. Abed says, Angela. And the professor says, oh, you know, I'm not, he's the, I can't remember the exact

quote, but at one point he says, Mr. Abed, I'm not a fan. I'm not some outside observer. I'm an academic. And this question has no answer. I literally wrote the book on it. And then at the end of the episode, he proves it to him somehow. You don't really see how, right? And it's the usual sort of like, community is my favorite show, but, you know, I see where Dan Harmon and does his kind of like, you know, through the character of a bed, I think he's a very interesting character on that show, uses him as this kind of like, there's a standard bearer of knowledge

in the disruption of particular knowledge. In this case, he did it sort of the opposite of the film that we watched. We watched a film that disrupts the modes of thinking by calling into question, by using the particular scholarship, the mode, a communicative mode, as well as an epistemological mode, to confirm a way of thinking and thus introduce doubt

into that way of thinking because he is an impossible. He's the rendered object of history and thus an impossibility. There is no rendered coherent object of history. But rather, as a very lucky man, as they say in there, he is the result of a series of improbable possibilities. What if a man could live for 14,000 years and not die? And so, and what, what this episode of Community does is uses the accepted doubt of an unanswerable question, an academic gets an answer to that question that seems reasonable to him and thus makes his whole field not really matter anymore. Because well, shit, maybe there is an answer to this question. I was banking on teaching this class until I retire. Like, maybe there's an answer to it.

And so it has this like, like, we are. supposed to be approaching this entire episode as a creative, playful, thoughtful problem, which is why the realm of science fiction, which is where all of this really was born, created as a script for Star Trek or whatever, really, I think that's the textural quality of the film that's so special, is that it treats these thought problems as things worthy of 120 minutes, 90 minutes, or whatever. of like, you know, like, not to be pretentious, but like, my dinner with Andre as a whole, that's, oh, God, community reference that too.

I can't get away from that show. That, it's a whole entire conversation that by its own premises accepts that the mundane can be mighty because nothing is everything. And that if there's anything that I've learned about history is that it overwhelms me in an in an addictive, almost abusive way. But like, I, like, I'm, I'm addicted. to the premise of knowledge in history, that history doesn't exactly cohere into a particular, but it is only represented in part objects, but subjectivity is only represented in part objects.

And so we're flinging all this crap at each other, trying to figure out who we are. And if that premise can actually be extended to history as rendered in some kind of coherent object. Well, then that's the, like, it's the premise of a whole new way of living. We start to disrupt our mode of being as well. And it, it breathes life into metaphysics and uses history to do so. And historians, I love you all, but we are, we are, we can be very boring. We can still be really good lecturers, but still, we're rehashing the same methods of writing. We communicate our ideas the same way that we have for so unbelievable. believeably long.

When why aren't we writing movies like this? Why is this not being, why are, like us as an academic communities, why are we not create the people who are creating things like this? We don't just have to comment on it. I think we could make it too. So there's a big long,

I always like, I make everyone sign a contract that says I get one big long accidental rant per appearance on every show. And I'm going to cash in my card on that one. The Christianity part of this, as you mentioned, was a little cringe, a little of its time. It was also, it came out also around the same time where I was leaving fundamentalism. So it was, uh, when did this come out?

You know, uh, 2007. Same. So my freshman year of college. I was, uh, going into high school. I forget how young you are sometimes. I'm 29. Yeah, you said something about like this show came out when I was like eight and I was like, what are you talking about?

I don't remember what we were talking about. You said you like you were eight when it came out. What the fuck? Yeah, no, maybe. I'm on tea, though. So it's like I'm on T. So it's hard to know how old I am because going on like doing HRT like turns you into like an ageless like angel.

And no one can tell how old you are forever. Existing beyond history. Our desire are our captured desire. We we cannot. We want to, but we can't. You're almost an unaging crow mac in a man. Oh, I'm that one Neil Gaiman's short story where they find out how to cure cancer, but it's like a pill, and then it changes your gender. And so then people start using it as like a party drug and all this stuff.

And then people just do it all the time. And this person like has like a fit on a beach and collapses and just like staring at everyone's like they're angels and like freaks out. And I'm like, hell yeah, I am. That's great. Yeah. That's really strange. Yeah, it's one on Neil Game is like cool weird short stories. Yeah, like the one.

I mean, that's something I would expect from, like, Clive Barker. That's a very Clive Barker sounding story. Yeah, no, his early shit before he married a man to Palmer is actually pretty good. I can't remember if this is before they bring up that he's Jesus. But Dan makes a point because they're like, why would he lie about this? And he uses the CS, he references the CS Lewis apologetic, which he says, our friend is if they're a caveman, a liar, or a nut. I thought that was a really interesting approach to epistemology because, one, Lewis's

Trilemma is like a weird. It's like, well, if Jesus was going around saying he was God, but actually wasn't, that would make him a bad person. It's like, well, or, you know, he didn't say that. And also people can believe something and it still be untrue. Yeah, exactly. So that's kind of the apologetic they're playing with a little bit. But he uses that to say, like, look, we just have to listen to him.

We're just grading his homework, I think, is something he says at that point. Yeah. Yeah, I liked that line. That was a good line. A lot, yeah. Where he was just, like, kind of like, along for the thought experiment. A story that goes around the room is he used that to describe it negatively. But I'm like, that's, that's just, that's everything, maybe.

I mean, right, like, is it not, right? It's not like, it's, it's whether or not we can capture some sense of, I'm not like an old school, I'm not like an old school EP Thompson humanist necessarily. I have complicated views around that stuff. But at the same time, I do just come from a, I come from a background that's like, the, like, sometimes you are in a room and some guys like I'm 14,000 years old. And then everyone in some sense, in their own way from a different place for different reasons, decides, I want to talk about this.

Let's talk about this. Let's not, rather than hand weight, like, because he started, he kind of slips into start he he he kind of brings it up as a premise people kind of laugh it off he then he starts responding to like they start asking inquiry like almost like in a like it's a game like an improv game or something like that uh like just to sort of like spur on like storytelling so okay so you're 14,000 years old where were you born do you remember your father do you like and then when he's responding in first person it takes on at some point everyone's like are we doing this? And I'm like, that is underrated. That idea. Their performances of that sort of journey, incredible. I was like, yep, I know exactly like you were conveying the correct emotion. Yeah, what you're going. I know what your character's going through. Exactly. Who hasn't had that friend who's like said some shit? And you're like, oh, okay. Let's, yeah, let's talk about it. Let's do it. Who hasn't had that friend or been that friend, right? I'm not the most recent.

episode of Agam before that, I put this out in the promo, but I talked about, I'm realizing, I talked about this guy I knew in college who, I don't remember his name, but it's a guy that he's always there and everyone kind of knows him, but I didn't, like, he's one guy's close friend. He's like one guy's roommate or whatever. I remember two things about him. He was really into the band's Silverchair and also that he had the funniest bit of all time that I've ever heard in my entire life. I don't know why still I find this so funny, but I do. But he used to, in all earnest tell everyone that he knew that Jonathan Taylor Thomas died in 9-11. In all, in all earnest, which is just like, it's so random.

And I'm like, that's so funny. And whenever you hear about the bit, if you like the bit, you have to then do it. At some point, you're sitting there at a party and you're there with another friend of yours who knows who's in on the bit. And you look at each other and you just like, you know, we're about to. we're about to spread misinformation at this party and get at least one person to convince that this is true. Because it's before Wikipedia and all that stuff.

So you could like have this. I think about spontaneity in human action and in the formation of historical subjectivity a lot. And I think this goofy-ass thing, just like telling people that the kid from home improvement died in a big, big, bad terrorist event. Like the most formative event in the Western world in the past 20 years, that the voice of Simba from the Lion King was there. People are like, no, uh, and it's like, what was the last time you've seen him in anything? Well, I don't know, but that doesn't mean he died in 9-11.

It's like, doesn't mean that he didn't. Uh-huh. And all of a sudden, you have this dumb premise that's completely false, completely untrue. It's like the Avril Levine, like, died and now she's got like a, of someone pretending to be her. Oh, they do. Like, Paul is dead. Like Paul McCarton.

Yeah. Like all that kind of stuff. I didn't know there was an Avril version of that. Yeah, I know that she's dead and that there's an impersonator for like years and years and years. Yeah. I just knew the Andrew WK one. I saw him. Oh, me too.

Yeah. I saw him. It's a fucking blast. Yeah. It's something like he looks different because he's, because he's been performing for like 20 years. And that's like the basis of the conspiracy. that he was created by a record label basically, and so different people have been him.

Yeah, like, framing this film in our current moment, as I was so of misinformation and disinformation. Like, is this just like, when does something stop being a fun thought experiment? And when, you know, when does something go, you know, stop from being like, okay, let's sit here. Let's talk about it. Let's meet this. and move into what we call misinformation and disinformation.

Like, is there a line there? Is it intention? Like, huh? So there is a sequel to this movie, which is not as good. Does this answer my question? But basically what happens is Art, the asshole anthropologist, writes a book about this event, and it ruins his life. He's, like, laughed out of the academy, and he becomes, like, a recluse. and he like hates John after this for like basically forcing him to ruin his own life,

I guess. Men do crazy shit. Yeah, that's the plot of the second movie is like he lives alone with this pet pig and like plays chess on the internet all day. This is the prequel of pig. It's pig, yeah. A pig's best movie ever made. It's really weird because it's basically like if you ever seen those weird low budget

Christian movies, like God's Not Dead. It's basically an atheist version. dead. It's an atheist version of God's not dead. That's what the sequel is. It's awful. I need to see it immediately. It's so funny. That's such a bummer. I'm definitely going to watch that, and it's also such a bummer because it sort of doesn't allow the film to, I just, no, no, I don't know. It's fine. It's fine. It's actually probably better that the sequel exists because it, like, if this film is trying to demystify ways of thinking or introduce new ways of thinking, then my, my desire to

have it be this sort of the absolute capital H rendered object of history is not is a, it's a fantasy. It's not like, and to the knowledge question, I think like,

I think we already, you know, sort of passed over it in that the sort of the dominant discourses of first the academy then the medical gaze steps in. It has this like, structure is willing to intervene in the discursive exchange. So on the one hand, you have, you have something that feels very wild because it is, something that should

not exist and should not exist in the form that it is, which is an existing prehistoric man, a transcendent, an object of transcending history, living, breathing, and communicating with you. But on the other hand, you see the intervention, the, you know, the intervention, the threats of intervention. I don't know where I was going with that. The, I kind of want to talk about the ending a little bit because this whole movie spends all this time playing with false information. And what Will does at one point is he threatens everyone with a gun. And the first time he does it, it's a pipe in his pocket. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So the first time, it's in his pocket, but it's actually his pipe. Then the second time, he pulls up an actual gun. And then once John said, like, because his wife has just died, he's like unstable. And so John runs after him and says, you've got to give me the gun. I can't trust you to keep it. And then it goes straight to the camera to show you it's not loaded.

So like there was. That's a good shot, by the way. Yeah, it's a really good shot. And in doing that, it's sort of. like shows that, you know, people can be lying. It's kind of up in the air, which is why the ending is so weird because at the end, we find out that Will is actually John's son, who he obviously had to abandon the family. After 10 years, he had to move on. But he overhears him talking about his old pun names. So like John Paley, John Thomas Partee, and it's like, that's his father's

name. And of course, this is after everyone else is left. So the only person who really knows that it's true is Will and the girlfriend character whose name I always forget because she barely talks in the movie. Sandy. Sandy, yeah. Yeah, I, Darth Vader ending. I did not dig it. Like, I feel like it- Would he have realized? Like, wouldn't John have realized that was his fucking, like, did they learn the names? Yeah, when he's like having the conversation with Will, he repeats Will's last name back to him and is like, she remarried, meaning Will's mother. Oh, okay.

So he doesn't have the same last name. But like, for one, it felt like it was like the last five minutes of the film. It just like comes out of nowhere. It comes out of nowhere. And at first, I didn't actually understand what was going on. I had to rewatch it to be like, wait, this is really what's happening. but I hate how the whole film sets up this whole philosophical do you know or do you not know and then fucking rips it right out from underneath you at the end in like the cheesiest way possible, right?

I wanted to say, like, Schrodinger's like Caveman Jesus. Yeah, no, I wanted, I wanted him and his girlfriend who clearly believed him from the beginning of the film for whatever that speaks about her character or how the writer views women, you know, right off into the sunset and have her, you know, she's along for the ride, but she never, we never know whether or not she's also right in having taken this bet, right? That was the ending I wanted. And I got a dead psychiatrist and a confirmation I did not want. It's a very strange ending. I feel like they must have felt they had to end it like that. They must have felt like structurally. They must have felt compelled like they have to end it this

way for whatever production reason. They had to have some sort of closure. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. Or, you know, Jerome Vicksby was dying when he wrote this. So, I mean, he could have just, like, forgot to, like, clean up the ending and it just never got reworked into a way that kind of stuck with the themes of the film. We will never know. Uh-huh.

We'll never know. Getting mad about it. Yeah. The second movie is kind of still has this obsession. So I think I can see where it's where that intention. comes from. But in the second movie, he's like starting to age, which is really interesting. So like, is he actually crazy the whole time? And he doesn't heal the way he used to. So it's like, what if he was actually wrong? It's like the vampires and the hunger. But of course, we had a

confirmation at the end of this movie that he actually is at least a couple hundred years old. So we're a very quick liar. The other bone I have to pick with this is when Dan says that clocks reference other clocks. And that's just blatantly not true. There's an atomic clock that measures things by like physics. Like it has a physical basis that's not another clock. How do we define a clock? Well, okay.

Yeah, but you have to measure the decay of the atom with another clock. And so you're just using it the same way that you're using a gear to make a clock. So it's, I mean, you probably could come up with like a quantum account. of time. I think there is something like that. Like time has to move at certain paces, I think. It's been a while since I've read any physics about this, but...

I just didn't like how definitive it was. It was like, no, we can talk. Let's talk about that. It's going a tangent within the movie and talk about how we, you know, the whole thing is about time and how we like to see and measure it. But like, it seemed like such a weird definitive statement for a movie of its topic.

I don't know. I think it made sense. He was saying that there's not this authority. There's not a, you can't ask God about these things, right? There's no external validation. There's no central, like, platonic, like, center origin point of time. It's everything is talking around time. Whoa.

I think if you were to rework some of the script, you should really go in on, like, indigenous knowledge systems. God, please. Because they throw. They throw a line right before he says clocks measure themselves. He says the hope he sees time as a landscape that's before and behind us and we move through it. It's like a psychogeography kind of thing. Yeah.

And John is a man who might live outside of time because he doesn't experience time in anywhere near the same way that we do. Although his mental experience is just what he says, I remember the high points and the low points. My memories are selective just like yours. But what he says is living that long doesn't make me a genius. I've just had time to study. It's like Groundhog Day. Yeah, it's revealed that he has all their degrees except psychiatry. Something just occurred to me, and this is off topic of that.

But is the one that is the one who asks him, do you remember your father, the psychiatrist? Because he shoots back with, do you remember yours? I think so. I think it is. I just connected that foreshadowing. Sorry, I'm just tiny little blown mind moment. They also. Lansing a payoff, baby.

The Chekhov's gunned. Yeah, he brings in, he says usually is the mother, isn't doing you usually ask about the mother. That's right. No, it's interesting, it's interesting how the film is trying to like, I haven't thought about, like, how, how, what's the sort of zero, zeroing in on what it means to, like, be, be a person in the film. And it has this almost Heidi Garian kind of sense of that, like, our sense of authenticity, emerges from the, I don't want to say production even, sort of, like, are sort of like, our capturing of the essence of the sign. So, whatever that means for him, that's, you know, 600 pages about hammers and anxiety. But like, what, what, in a lot of ways, I think,

alternative sort of knowledge systems help define here as, as we've alluded to, is that, like, if someone didn't experience time in the same way that others did, should they be able to transcend time in some way, would they have the means to impart? That implotment is in the way we communicate with one another in language. The only way that you get beyond that is by experiencing time differently. He still has to reduce that to the particular sort of the subjective experience, the conversation between sort of subjects, their rendered objects, and the way that they, the interplay of subjectivity. But if you can transcend that subjectivity by passing through time differently than others, then, well, if you're going to talk to subjects, regular old human subjects,

you got to talk to us like we're babies because it's hard for us to understand what exactly it is you mean. And so we're going to have all these varying sort of like reactions to it. If you can convince a roomful of people to engage with that genuinely, for most of them, pretty earnestly, you can come up with some very interesting reactions. And so, yeah, if we want to reduce it to the subject, that's a good subject study, I guess. Yeah, and is it the psychiatrist or someone else who brings up the sort of idea that, like, as you get older, your perception of time is, like, shorter? So, like, what was a year to you when you were, like, five versus what a year to you is when you're 50?

Because you've experienced more time, time feels shorter. And so he brings up, like, what does a year feel, like, how does time, like, a day or year feel to you now, like, versus, like, then I think that's something is brought up at one point. So even if he's moving through time the same way, just be. Because of the amount of time, his perception of time is, is, like, different. Like, if you've been on earth for a bazillion days, what does a day feel like when you have so many behind you? They're just going to feel shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter. Which part of what intrigued me was the 10 year. I move every 10 years. And I can see that because in an average human life span, that's about the time that you would see, you know,

you'd be able to compare two photographs about 10 years apart and tell that somebody has, like, really aged. But like in the scope of the time that he has lived, 10 years has to feel like right over, like a weekend, you know, away or something like that. Like, so he's lived these 10-year lives for probably a couple hundred years now. And that just, like, at that point, why would you even engage in relationships with other people, which is something that sort of kind of got to explore with his, with like Sandy? And I wish I had gone more into that.

But yeah, I think that was an interesting choice to make. Yeah, he's the world's biggest serial monogamist. I mean, at that point, if you've had so many fake identities, is it even legal? Yeah. I mean, in Utah, probably. Probably, yeah. That's always the really fun part is, like, he's, He can't do this forever.

Like, surveillance is so much. Yeah. So much of an issue for him. Especially in a post-9-11 worlds, right? There's cameras everywhere. Yeah, Jonathan Taylor Thomas didn't have to deal with this. Yeah. Post-Johnith and Taylor Thomas, excuse you.

Yeah. It's a part of my life that doesn't come up much. And so the fact that that's made a comeback has been good to be. That was at Bible College. that I met that person. I was a... And that person was Jesus. And that stupid was Albert Einstein.

Yeah. I guess a little more common, modern discourse, they do talk about going to Mars in the future. And he's like, oh, that'd be cool. I'd like to do that. It's like, no, don't do that. You can't live in space, dude. You still breathe there.

Yeah. Like, don't, don't. go to Mars, it's a bad idea. I had a guy in the local DSA tell me that colonizing Mars is different from regular colonization because it's literally Teranellus. I'm like, you do remember that they brought people here, right? Like, that can still happen with Mars. Like, you would just enslave people and take them.

And also not to get like eco-feminist about it, but also like what you do to the land also matters. Yeah, I mean, like every single colony in the early 17th century. that got created, like immediately turned into a slave colony, like, no matter what they tried to do initially. Yeah, but now we just won't call it that. We'll call us something cool and fun, like, like, uh... Prison. Yeah. Like, like your, you're getting your...

It'd be like the Derg-Cloin fun house. Yeah, exactly. Like, eat your, in your, you know, your little musk dome, you're the, the, the, the, the, the, 10 foot by 10 foot cell you live in when you're like a bucky a bucky ball but like slavery yeah exactly you all know what bucky goals are yeah it's so the thing they sell at buckies no it's um buckminster fuller he was really big into like geodesic domes and like living in them he was in like southern illinois so there's like quite a few down there but yeah they're called bucky balls they're big geodesic domes you can live in there's a pretty baller okay I think

we've covered it. Go watch this movie folks and buy it, but also like pirate it, too. I think you can pirate. I think if you go to like their website, they still have like a full download of it. You can just watch this movie on YouTube. Yeah. Yeah, it was pretty good.

It was like a fun like, what if like a new atheist who was like almost there, like did a Sartre play? Yeah. It's pretty good. We'd watch again to see what I missed. Because I'm sure there's some more there there that I just didn't get on an initial viewing. It's very juicy.

Yeah, I want to come back to it after watching a bunch of Twilight Zone. He was really into the Twilight Zone for a long time. I can tell. Yeah, I turned out like this. So, you know, I was like he, like the author, like the writer, like I can tell. No, no, that was, that was me throwing some shade at you, Kyle. He wrote an episode, he wrote a short, story that ended up in the Twilight Zone. Yeah. The cornfield one. Yeah.

The one where the kid controls the world. Is that the one that they used, they used that one in the Simpsons? I know he ended up in a treehouse of horror too. I can't remember which one. Nice. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I think an early one, yeah. But yeah, Drummond Spooksby, go watch Star Trek and go listen to.

Science fiction is good. Yeah, go listen to Prophane Show, go listen to Agab. Go watch cow's videos. Go listen to the two-hour boss baby. the Criterion Collection Edition. I'm pretty sure I attained enlightenment while I was listening to it. I was like going through Tsamara. Like suffering was happening to me.

And that was, that was the pathway out of samsara. I'm glad. I'm glad we had a lot of fun. I always have fun with those guys. It's just like a, it's just a party every time we get to hang out. But that,

yeah, it was like the disgusting of rhizomes and then like goo. And I was just like, this, this is all of human knowledge that I need right here. It's a good show. They're so good. Yeah. Well, thank you for having me here.

As always, it's nice to be with friends. Come back whenever you want. It's so good. Yeah, of course. Good night.