Reply All - #44 Shine On You Crazy Goldman

Episode Date: November 3, 2015

A website for people who are way too high. Plus, could LSD unlock our better selves? Does PJ even have a better self? We investigate. You can find Tripsit here: http://tripsit.me. The floating orb lives here: http://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week's episode is really, really, really, really, really not for anyone who's not an adult. It features adults making questionable choices. If you are a young person or if you're with young people, please do not listen to this one. This is just a programming note that at the end of the show, after the credits roll, we are going to have a preview for the brand new gimlet show. It's called Surprisingly Awesome. It is hosted by Adam Davidson of Planet Money and Adam McKay, the director of Anchorman, among many other fantastic movies.

So when the episode ends and you're listening to the credits and you're like, ah, I can just turn this thing off. What's the point of listening to these guys? Say what Matt Lieber is again. Don't do it because there's a preview for an awesome show. All right. Enjoy the show. From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm PJ Vote.

This week we have a story about changing your mind. And it starts with a 911 call. 911, where is the emergency? Something that happened to my dream and it's actually happening. So this man got too high and he called. called 911, and what he's trying to do is convince the operator of something that his family refuses to believe. Okay, what's happening?

Everything that's happening today is actually my... Okay, so what did you dream about that's happening? It's all on paper. I wrote it down. Okay. We'll get someone out there to you. I think so much. Okay, bye-bye. So the cops come, and they just say, please, please stop calling, or we're going to have to arrest you. They don't want to do it. But because his family,

refuses to admit that they're part of his dream prophecy, he has no choice but to call 911 again. 911, where is your emergency? Oh, I called earlier in Orange City. And what's the emergency? Um, the officer told me not to call back. And he said if I called back, then you'll... Because you want to do something. Because you want to go to jail?

I had to prove something to my family. So you're right. Calls like this happen all the time. I could play you dozens of them off the internet. Calls where someone got too hot. freaked out and called the cops. And as this case shows, that's not always the best idea, because they're cops and so they might charge you.

Fortunately, though, there's actually another place you can go for help. I recently talked to somebody who volunteers there. His mission in life is to calm down people who have gotten too high. Last night, for example, a guy comes in. He's on dissociative, which kind of similar to psychedelics. But not. And he's like, I'm just here because I wanted to confirm that I'm real and everything is real. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're real.

You're still alive. Everything's okay. And that's all he needed. He was like, thanks, guys. Helps a lot. This conversation happened on a website called tripset.me. Trip-sitting is like babysitting, but instead of taking care of babies, trips are just take care of people who have gotten too high on drugs.

Say, you've eaten a bunch of mushrooms and you feel overwhelmed. by paranoia. You're too high to function, but not too high to get on your computer, and so you log on a trip sit where you're greeted by a front page that offers you resources about drug safety and access to the trip sit chat room. In the chat room, you type into a box, and a volunteer trip sitter jumps in to assist you. They'll ask you what drugs you've taken and how much, and if they can establish that you're not in physical danger, then they'll just focus on trying to help you calm down. The person I spoke with is one of these trip-sitters, and he agreed to talk to me so long as I didn't use his real name.

So how should we identify you for the purposes of this interview? I think just go with reality would be good. You know, would be unhelpful if certain people found out that I was involved in this kind of thing. Reality is the name that he uses on Tripset. It's a reference to a David Bowie album that he loves. But in the context of a chat room for the hopelessly stoned, that name, of course, takes on a different meaning. People will come in, they'll be freaking out and they'll be like, you know, is any of this real? is like, I'll say something like, I say, yeah, you're all right, man.

They say, wow, reality just like confirm my existence. Whoever I pictured when I imagined a guy who spent his time talking to high people online, it was not this guy. He's calm and thoughtful. He has a real grown-up job doing work that's smart and complicated and honestly kind of boring. But he lives for his volunteer work on Trip Set. And he's good at it. If somebody's in real trouble, he'll make sure that they seek actual medical attention.

But usually that's not the case. usually he just needs to babysit somebody who's gotten in over their head. Reality says that there are go-to strategies that typically work. The tripper usually has quite a short attention span, so you just ask them to go and grab a glass of water or we give them some music suggestion, something like emancipator or something nice and calm like that. What's emancipator?

Emancipators are bands who do like a really cool, like instrumental music. It's very like orchestral kind of thing. My mom says it sounds like elevator music, but I strongly disagree. There's also this website he'll send people to, which just consists of a 3D rendering of a floating orb suspended in a box of water. You can move the orb. High people find it calming. It models like liquid physics in the browser,

and you can sort of interact with it with your mouse. It's quite cool. Things like this, you know, I mean, it's supremely interesting for people who are on drugs. Most of reality's job really just entails knowing a little bit about drug safety and then being extremely present for scared, vulnerable strangers. The conversations reality ends up having with these strangers are often really intimate. Once people calm down, they just want to talk. And during those talks, they can realize things about themselves that they never had before. People realize that they've done bad things in their lives to people they loved, that they're alcoholics.

that their lives have turned into something that they don't like. Getting reality to tell you his true feelings about drugs is surprisingly sort of like pulling teeth. He's just not a drug evangelist, but he seems to really like talking to people on psychedelics because these kinds of conversations seem to flow from that class of drug. One of the effects of a psychedelic, it's often described as like a sense of childlike wonder.

Like you see everything as if you were a baby or you see it with the same interest. I was really surprised when I learned how much time reality spends doing this. Basically, almost every waking hour that he's not at work, he's on TripSit. He volunteers during his nights and weekends, and when he's not in the chat room helping people, he's doing the back-end development work that keeps Tripset.Me running. I don't know many people who are this generous, but Reality says that he feels like it's a privilege to get to do this work.

I started to wonder how listening to all these strange nighttime confessions affected his real life. When you go out in the real world, does it affect how you see just people in the real world? Um, I, I don't know. I mean, I'm, the two worlds really don't intersect for me much. I don't feel the same sense of generosity elsewhere in my life, I think. Really? Are there people in your life in your real life? in your real life where you're like Jesus Christ if this person would just maybe once try a psychedelic they would be so much easier to deal with yes yes with some people I wonder whether even a psychedelic

could help them you know like but yeah for some people I think if only they could sort of I have conversations with them and I and I think if only they could experience this sort of like sense of universal empathy for a couple of minutes and maybe they they they would sort of be a lot more open. Most people would benefit from a psychedelic experience. And it's not just generosity towards others, but also generosity towards yourself. At this point, I just set aside the rest of my trips at questions. And we just started talking about acid, a drug that I have always thought of as the epitome of a dumb, dangerous drug, but which reality was saying, no, this is actually a really great piece of technology. That caught me completely off guard. Yeah, it's funny. I've never,

I've never tried a psychedelic because I've always felt so scared that I would, it would dismantle my brain in a way that I could not reassemble. Yeah, I mean, there's, there's a lot of a sort of mythos about it, and like, the, the problem is that in times gone past, like in 60s and 70s, I mean, people were taking, you know, ridiculous amounts of psychedelics. and like with no knowledge about what they did or how to act about them. And now there is a lot of knowledge so you can approach your psychedelic in a much more constructive way. And you're not going to have this experience where you just destroy your mind. It's a valuable experience personally.

Though, you know, I mean, we don't condone drug use certainly. But I mean, they're my personal feelings, not off-trips. It's obviously. Huh. Acid. Could this possibly be real? Could acid really turn you into a better person? Kinder, more patient.

So I started poking around. And it turns out there's a lot of research being done on the therapeutic uses of psychedelics. But that research is mostly limited to people who either have serious addiction problems or who are facing terminal illnesses and need to make peace with their own deaths. What reality was describing felt different.

It felt broader. And then I found this guy who's been studying psychedelics the 1960s, even during the 40-something year period where that research was banned. His name's Jim Fatiman. Good morning. Hi, this is PJ calling. So you sort of know generally what we're up to this week? When Jim first started researching psychedelics, psychedelic researcher was actually a job you could have.

It was a completely legal calling. And Jim performed all sorts of experiments. One of my favorites is a little number he calls psychedelic agents in creating. problem-solving experiment. Basically, he took a bunch of geniuses who had been stuck on some creative problem that they'd been wrestling with for months, and he stuck them in a room. We gave them 100 mic on their problems. And we had...

The geniuses had a ton of breakthroughs. They built a new conceptual model of the photon. They found an engineering improvement to the magnetic tape recorder. They designed a new linear electron accelerator beam steering device, whatever that is. That pilot experiment would have been followed by larger ones. but later that year, the government made psychedelics illegal. The pronouncement was made and the sixth drug in the world. It's probably important to mention that Jim is not just an unbiased researcher here.

He went through his own conversion. This was back in 1961. I was a first-year graduate student in psychology, and I was not deeply interested. It was being drafted to Vietnam. He was just sort of surviving. And then one day in Paris, he met up with his favorite professor, and that professor got him very high on psychology.

psychedelics, and Jim began a period of psychedelic experimentation that led to this epiphany that changed his life. When I asked him to describe it to me, he said it felt kind of like dying, but it wasn't. You have expanded outside of the box of your prior conditioning. It's as if your ego is saying, don't, don't, don't do that. You'll die. You'll get really sick. You'll feel bad.

Because what really happens is on the other side of that experience is you say, oh, my ego is actually not as important as I thought it was. And your ego says, darn, I hope you wouldn't find that out. And it's a little tricky to tell you in a short span. That's why I had to write a book and why they're... Because it's a little bit as if... I hear there's some unbelievably wonderful sexual positions. But I don't...

But I've never had sex. And I'd say, well, it's going to be a little tricky to kind of give you a description. It's going to be very helpful. Oh, man. I feel like such a virgin. Well, you know, it's a wonderful feeling for a while. Hearing Jim talk about this feeling of getting to abandon himself, I felt jealous. Jim is patient and warm and just a thoroughly lovely man.

Whereas me, I worry all the time that I'm too self-absorbed. I'm a missor of birthdays. I'm a non-returner of emails. There's a running joke in my family that people will take long trips to other countries, trips that they tell me about and plan for. and then once they've sailed off to Guatemala or Ireland or whatever, I'll call them and leave a message asking why they aren't picking up their phone. If I could take a magic pill and change one thing about myself, it'd be that

to make sure that I was kinder and more aware of the people around me, less stuck in my own head and in my own worries. That said, acid is scary. I know that there are a lot of people who've done acid and they don't find it scary, but I don't care because there are also people who took acid and got so messed up that they couldn't even hold down their job of playing in Pink Floyd. And Jim says my fear that I could take acid and see something terrifying in my own brain, that's real. It happens.

But he doesn't like to call those trips bad. He prefers another word. Challenging. It gets really difficult. He says it's just like mountain climbing. Mountain climbing is really hard. But you know that you're up and you're okay with it. I'm not okay with it.

I would never climb a mountain. In third grade, somebody told me a story about this guy who took too much acid and convinced himself he was an orange. and then that guy got locked away in an insane asylum because when people went near him, he starts screaming because he was convinced that they were going to try to peel him. That's not for me. But Jim said there might be a shortcut, something he's developed,

a kind of LSD experience that doesn't get you high, but still unlocks those good parts of you. A what's called a micro dose. A micro dose. Which is below what's called a perceptual threshold, which is people do not have any of the excitement that I can probably say to someone like you, not to you. Of course.

Of course, the only way to know would be to try it. We'll be back after this word from our sponsors. Welcome back to the show. So, it turns out, if you live in a city or know anybody who's in college, acid is actually pretty easy to find. I met a friend of a friend of a friend outside a coffee shop, and she immediately handed me a pack of gum, which I opened because I thought that she was telling me that I had bad breath.

But... Inside was a small plastic bag with two tiny squares of white paper. No charge. When I got home, I examined what she'd given me more closely. Each hit looked like a little piece of confetti. It was crazy to think that something so small could be so powerful. And it was even crazier to think that, according to gym at least, there was a way to take this drug and then go to your day job and be normal.

Not just normal, better. So, I decided I wanted to microdose on acid for one week of my job. And this is where Reply All producer Fia Bennon enters the story. Hey, Pha. Hey, Fia. So I was with you during your interview with Jim Fadaman. And I, like you, was charmed and fascinated by the idea of microdosing. And so much so that I found myself wishing that I could do it with you.

Okay, so listener, here's something you should know about Fia. She's an extremely practical and sensible person. She's not the kind of person you would expect to do LSD, especially at work. But if you were going to do LSD at work, you'd want to do it with someone as conscientious as her. Right at the beginning of this, Fia and I sat down in the studio and we talked about our concerns. I'm a ball of anxiety about this. I've talked to like every single person I know about whether I should do it or not. No, I totally understand.

I think we're both people that like to have control over ourselves. And that's a lot of what makes this scary. Yeah. Yeah. We were afraid that we'd hate it. We were afraid that we'd love it. We were afraid we'd have some revelation and then want to abandon our lives. I was also worried about my mom's reaction.

I called her and she gave me a list of her concerns. How does it work? How safe is it? So we called up the person who'd originally given us the acid. And we asked a lot of questions about what might possibly go wrong and other questions like just like, where's this stuff from? And we also exchanged more emails with Fatimann. And somehow in the end, Fia got the go ahead from her mom. And we decided we're doing this.

So these were the instructions. We needed to take one piece of confetti paper, soak it overnight in a bottle of water, and then drink one-tenth of the bottle, or less, before 10 a.m. Okay, so now what are you doing? I'm preparing a dropper for me. We should take the microdose on day one. Day two, it would still be in our system. Day three would be a recovery day.

And day four, we'd take another microdose. Okay. Okay. Now we just see what happens. And now we just have a great day. So we did our first dose this bright, beautiful October morning. It was Columbus Day. It was a day off work at the end of a long holiday weekend.

And after about 20 minutes, we took a walk-down Lincoln Place in Brooklyn. The whole time I was like, wow, it is a really sunny day. Was it the sunny before? Here's what I'll tell you. This is the block that I live on. I've never noticed that tree before, and I really have noticing it. It's a beautiful tree. it looks like like a ginko or something.

But I definitely wasn't tripping. I just generally felt really happy. The next day, Tuesday, we went into the office, and things felt normal, like slightly different, but different for the better. Our senior producer Tim said that I seemed like I was in a great mood. I decided that for this whole week, I wasn't going to tell my co-host, Alex,

what Fia and I were up to. Alex, more than anybody, gets the brunt of my impatience and jerkiness, and so I wanted to see if he'd noticed me behaving differently without being prompted. At one point, I looked over at him, sitting in a hoodie, staring at his laptop, and I had this unusual feeling towards them. I thought, this guy's a great guy, and it's important that I communicate that greatness to him. So I said something like, hey, Alex Goldman, comma, king among men, I have a question for you. King among men. I never call him or anyone that, but it did the job. He perked up, and he said it was the nicest thing I'd ever

said to him. A few hours later, Fia and I checked it. There are some work-related phone calls that I need to make that generally make me feel really anxious, and those aren't making me feel anxious right now. I feel like able to freak out a little bit less and be a little bit more emotionally open and a little bit less, like, snappy. I think there's a good chance that if we had full scientific knowledge of the universe, you'd be like, this isn't really affecting us yet, but that being told that you've taken a powerful drug that's going to make you a little more empathetic and calm has a real measurable placebo effect.

I think it's totally possible. But I am feeling that way. Then it was Wednesday. It was my birthday. It felt really similar to Tuesday, except for one thing. When anybody would make a self-deprecating joke, it deeply disturbed me. It was like watching somebody slap themselves in the face really hard.

which is weird. Also, I'd start to make unusually sloppy mistakes, like ceasing people who I meant to BCC. And when I talked to my editor, Peter, he said that I'd written something that had made, quote, zero sense. That seems like an indication that maybe the LSD was affecting me, but not in a real alarming way.

And so the experiment continued. I'm shaking it. That can make a difference. And then Thursday. Thursday is when we stopped wondering if what was happening was a placebo. It became clear that something was operating on us. That morning, we met early at work, took our microdose in the studio,

and then our days went in totally different emotional directions. I felt great. Ideas were coming to be in droves. The sun somehow seemed even brighter than before. At one point, I know as my boss, Matt Lieber, was sort of looking at me funny. He asked me if something was going on, so I pulled him aside for a quick interview. So Matt Lieber, we're doing an experiment where I've been taking small amounts of Ellis D before work.

And so I was at work. Don't tell. I don't want to know this. Why are you talking to? Why are you telling me that? Like, what do you want? Nothing. I don't want anything from you.

I'm sorry that you feel that way. Well, I'll tell you what. I actually have thought you've been kind of distanced. You've been a little distance this week. Really? Yeah, you just, like, I came to talk to you yesterday and wish you a happy birthday. And you talked to me for like a minute and then you turned back to your screen and kept working.

And normally I would have talked to, like, a longer. But I figured you were just busy or something. This was a mild thing for Matt to say, but I cannot tell you how deeply it affected me. To me, it felt like he was crying out with some deep, psychic pain. As our conversation progressed, I got goopier and more earnest in this way that looking back is frankly really embarrassing. Maybe it's making you, like, less political. I don't talk to you for political reasons. Maybe it's like, I don't feel I need to, like, you're like living,

your own self. You don't need to like, kow to your, to the president of the company you work for. But I don't want to, I don't want to count out. I want to talk to the people I work with. Of course, that's how I feel about you. That's why I can even talk about you. I'm just kidding. I don't believe that. I'm sorry that I didn't make

more time for you. So while you were obsessing over Matt Lieber, I was feeling worse and worse. I hated keeping this secret from Alex. I felt really guilty. We had an editorial meeting and PJ, you sounded so hyper to me that I just wanted to burst into a giggle.

It felt horrible. She was like, there's no way to make me $5,000 a week. And one guy was like, my rate's $2,40 an hour. The other guy was like, I would charge him $500 an hour. And they were like, yeah. So at the end of Friday, we checked in in the studio. And I was completely blindsided when Fia had told me how bad she was feeling. How come you feel sad?

Um, like, it's hard for me to sort out. I feel like doing it on the weekend with you felt fine and fun and good. and bringing it into the workplace felt like, I think it felt like bad to feel like I was like trying to hide something from everybody around me. Yeah. Like that's the difference between Monday when we were just like having a nice day together. And like I told my community and everybody was like checking on me and being supportive. And instead this was like trying to have like a little secret inside myself.

Yeah. In retrospect, this seems obvious, but if you're going to take a drug because of the promise that it'll connect you to everybody and everything, you probably shouldn't build a wall of secrecy right through the middle of your experiment. I'm sure that's not how Jim would have done it. Do you feel like we have had hubris? Yes. I do. I do. I feel like I at least had a point where I was like, PJ, just do it. It'll be fun. And I think that that's like an irisproseph. responsible approach to a really strong drug. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to stop. Definitely.

Okay. Fia was out, but I wanted to keep going. I couldn't really tell what the ass was doing, but I definitely felt good. So Saturday, I get up, I have breakfast with my roommate Drew. I take my dose, which he thinks is ridiculous. And then we get in the car and he drives us up to Rhode Island. We're going to stay on this for 100 miles. Can we just get like a little bit of air?

Oh, yeah. Do you want an AC or window? So I'm in the car. Drew's talking about a Drew thing. It's a nice day. Looking forward to lunch. There's lots of cars on the road. Roads.

I started thinking about roads. People design these things, and it's such a boring job, but also it's so important. Like, people are constantly dying car accidents, and it's your job to minimize these deaths, but, like, you can never win. And then I noticed my breathing. I'd inhale. I'd exhale. And I felt like if I could just do this. Just breathe, I'd be fine.

This is my one job in life. Just keep breathing. It's not to worry about a work deadline or a breakup or my overdue parking tickets. I told Drew all of this. I explained to him that traffic was deadly and that breathing was important. And soon after that, I started shivering and shaking very hard. We stopped at a rest stop at a rest stop and I called Fia and left her voicemail. Hey, Fia, it's PJ.

Something just happened and, yeah, like my brain feels like it's on LSP. Fia later pointed out to me that I was not supposed to dose on Saturday. It was supposed to be a rest day. Plus, I had somehow taken my dose and Fia's dose. I told Drew I wanted him to keep driving, so he did. We crossed a very ordinary bridge, and I felt like I was passing through this grand doorway, leaving one world and going into another.

The trees look beautiful. This is not a hallucination, but they look like they're on fire. Yeah. Another reason possibly that I'd wanted to keep microdosing is that I'd just come off a rough week. I'd broken up with somebody I loved and it hurt. It felt like I was just one step ahead of this herd of stampeding feelings that I really, really did not want to catch me. And the microdose had seemed like maybe it would help me outrun those feelings. But then my brain did something weird.

We were stuck in traffic on I-95 and I saw all the cars. And I thought about how many people there were in the world. And I felt tiny, like just a speck. And I realized that if I was so tiny and the world was so vast, then the part of me that was hurting, that was even tinier. Even if that hurt felt very large to me, it was nothing. I tried to say this to Drew. The thing that I feel that I had not felt before right now

is like the world feels really, really, really big and actually really connected. And it feels good to know that I am small. Drew is a kind and generous friend, and so he did not outright say what I know he was thinking, which is that these were boring drug cliches. But the inside of a drug cliche, and I realize this now, it feels like a simple, pure, uncomplicated revelation. And that was a very useful place to get to visit. I also think that this is the end of my condosing for me, by the way.

So that was it. I was glad that I'd gotten a tiny peek at this thing that Jim had told me. about the reassuring feeling that the world was big and connected and that we were tiny parts in it. But this felt like the end. I wasn't really sure what I'd learned. You know, nobody I talked to had said I had been more empathetic. They just said I'd made less eye contact and seemed a little manic and weird. But on the other hand, the next week a lot of things that Jim had said might happen did. I started exercising a lot more for the first time in months and eating healthier. I was drinking water? I felt this halo effect, even though I couldn't say for sure that it had come from

LSD. It didn't feel possible to see outside myself well enough to really say what had happened. But it felt like it might be helpful to check in with the person who most has to deal with me, Alex Goldman, who I still had not told anything about what had happened. So we sat down in the studio the following Tuesday. Do the last week feel okay to you? What do you mean? Like did I, I feel like I was being weird. Was I being weird? Like all week? Yeah. I don't know. Not that I can think of. Why? Well, I was taking acid at work every day. What? Yeah. Every day? Well, I was doing this thing called microdosing, so I was taking a small amount throughout the week. Can I tell you another piece of information? Sure. There's another person who was microdosing at work. She's in the room right now.

Fia Benin Hi Alex Why would you guys do it at work? That's the worst place to do anything fun I guess now that you pointed out That's totally true That is insane No that was the way it was sold

It was like this is not This isn't something fun What we were told is like LSD is quite similar to serotonin That it's not totally dissimilar to taking an SSRI That you would just feel like you had a good day maybe you'd be a little sharper, maybe you'd get a little more work done, maybe you'd drink a few fewer Diet Cokes. You're just a little sharper, which wasn't what happened.

No. I think that you are being sold a bill of goods by a cuckoo-berry. Really? Yeah, I don't think that that is, I don't. I get it. I get that there are people who are like, I'm going to take this drug because it offers me epiphanies or it offers me some kind of equilibrium

in the same way that there are people who self-medicate with marijuana. I wish I'd had some warning. What do you mean? Because I'm blanking on anything that happened last week. The thing I remember that, I was wondering if you remembered, there was some point where we were on Slack and I was like trying to get your attention and I called you, I think a king among men. Oh, yeah, that was weird. Tell me why that was weird. Because you never say anything nice to me.

I actually said, commented to you. I think that's the nicest thing you've ever said to me. Yeah. Did that feel good? Being called a king among men? Of course. Have I called you that? Wouldn't you feel good?

Yeah. So do you think you want to continue that tradition? Of calling you a king among men or taking LSD before work? I was thinking more along the lines of just being nice. Oh. Right, the third option. And also, you did say over and over again at your birthday party, like, I can't believe you came out to Brooklyn. Like, it's really, I'm so happy that you're here.

Yes, I did. I felt an immense sense of gratitude. It really isn't that hard for me to get there. You know, I'm here every day for work, right? But you came out at night. Did it feel weird to you? To be here at night? No, that I was like thanking you, like, as if...

The first time it didn't. As the night went on, and you did it like three or four times, I was like, this is a little weird. The next day you did it too. You were like, it was so amazing. I can't believe you came out. But I, like, I could still access that feeling. Like, I did, I felt just loved. Huh.

I got to say, I wish you'd just do a real, like a real full non-micro dose. Why? Because once you know you're in it, like, once you know you're in it and like, it's like, okay, I got to buckle in for the next half a day, it's like you can really make an adventure out of it. Like, I think of acid trips that I've been on as adventures. Like, there are trips that I've been on. where insane things have happened. Like what? I feel like they seem...

All right. Okay. What happened? I once saw 2001 once on acid. And I went to see it. I expected that the Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite, the end of the movie with all the trippy colors and stuff, I figured that was the moment I was waiting for.

Yeah. What I didn't realize is that there's about 45 minutes of that movie where there's just no dialogue, basically, just space breathing. You know, like, uh-huh. And I realized halfway through, I was like, oh, my God, I think I'm pretty confident that if this guy stops breathing, I'm going to stop breathing too. I really hope this goes on for a while.

But you weren't scared? No. I was like, this is exciting. Like, what's going to happen? I've seen this movie, but I don't remember when the breathing stopped. And then after the movie, I was sitting with, my friend Alan and we were talking about the philosophical ramifications of 2001 and this drunk this like a drunk like I don't know how to like a drunk homeless guy basically okay wandered by

and he was like 2001 we were like yep he's like you want to know what 2001 is about and we were like yeah yeah we're all ears man and he was like It's about whether man and machine can replace woman and child. That's really insightful. Yeah, that's really insightful. And we're like, you know what? Can't argue with that. Reply all is me, PJ Vote, and Alex Goldman.

We were produced this week by Tim Howard, Shruthy Pinnameney, Fia Bennon, and Catherine Wells. Our editor is Peter Clowny. Production assistance from Kalila Holt. We were mixed by Rick Kwan. Our theme music is by the mysterious breakmaster cylinder, and our ad music is by build buildings. Matt Lieber is a piper at the gates of dawn. You can find more episodes of our show at iTunes.com

slash replyall. Our website is replyall.com. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.